Image: Eugène Delacroix, The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, 1845. Musée des Augustins, Toulouse.
When the Saadi dynasty fragmented in the first decades of the seventeenth century, Morocco entered a prolonged period of contested authority. Regional strongmen, religious brotherhoods, and rival claimants divided the country between them, and the cities that had been imperial capitals under the Saadians, Marrakesh among them, became prizes in a struggle whose outcome remained uncertain for a generation. It was from the desert fringes near Sijilmasa, in the region of Tafilalt, that the dynasty which would reunify Morocco emerged. The Alaouites, like the Saadians before them, grounded their authority in descent from the Prophet Muhammad, a claim that gave their rule a religious legitimacy no purely military power could match.
The consolidation was the work of two brothers. Moulay al-Rashid extended Alaouite authority northward, taking Fez in 1666 and Marrakesh in the late 1660s after sustained resistance. When he died in 1672, his brother Moulay Ismail succeeded him and ruled for fifty-five years, one of the longest reigns in Moroccan history. Ismail fixed his capital at Meknes, where he carried out an ambitious building programme of palaces, gates, gardens, and granaries, and from there he pursued a systematic expansion of central authority over tribes, cities, and European powers alike. He expelled the Spanish from Atlantic ports, took Tangier back from the English, and drove the Ottomans back from Morocco’s eastern borders. By the end of his reign, the country had the outline of a modern state.
Marrakesh occupied a particular place within this consolidation. The city had refused to swear allegiance to Moulay Ismail at the moment of his accession, choosing instead his nephew Ahmad ibn Muhriz, and the years that followed saw intermittent resistance before the city came fully under Alaouite control. Yet Marrakesh was too significant to remain marginal. Its position at the foot of the High Atlas, its ancient medina, and its centuries-long role as a southern capital made it indispensable to any ruler who wanted to govern the whole of Morocco. Under Moulay Ismail and his successors it was administered as a provincial centre of the first importance, and after the prolonged instability that followed Moulay Ismail’s death, his grandson Mohammed III restored Marrakesh as a principal seat of the dynasty in the second half of the eighteenth century.
The court of Moulay Ismail was, by the accounts of those who visited it, a place of remarkable complexity. European ambassadors, Saharan tribal leaders, Islamic scholars, and diplomatic envoys from across the Mediterranean moved through it, and its governance required the management of relationships across languages, legal traditions, and political systems that had little in common. Among those who understood this complexity was Khnata bint Bakkar, whom Moulay Ismail married in 1678 and who served as his de facto first minister and secretary. The daughter of the Grand Sheikh of the Mghafra tribal confederation of the Awlad Hassan, she brought to the court a knowledge of the tribal networks of the Saharan south that no administrator raised within the palace walls could have possessed. In 1721 she was involved in the diplomatic process surrounding negotiations with the British commodore Charles Stewart, and the treaty that followed in 1722 is associated in the historical sources with her name, though the precise attribution in contemporaneous documents remains a matter of some uncertainty. She outlived Moulay Ismail and remained at the centre of Moroccan political life as the mother of Sultan Moulay Abdallah, whose reign began in 1729. The sources describe her as learned, as politically acute, and as a figure whose authority persisted across three successive reigns.
The silk skirt selected for her name is gathered in red, its vertical stripes in yellow and blue running the full length of the cloth in varying widths, each sequence completing itself before the next begins. The pattern holds its governing structure across that variation, in the same way that Khnata held her position across three successive reigns, each one requiring a different alignment of the same authority.
The Khnata Skirt
Selected Reading
- Pennell, C.R Morocco: From Empire to Independence. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003.
- Plummer, Comer. Empire of Clay: The Reign of Moulay Ismail, Sultan of Morocco (1672–1727). Lulu Press, 2019.
- Windus, John. A Journey to Mequinez. London: Jacob Tonson, 1725.