El Glaoui Madani - Lords of the Atlas: the Rise and Fall of the House of Glaoua 1893-1956

T HE PREPARATION OF THIS BOOK has involved a great deal of research over a period of several years. What written information is available is scattered throughout a very large number of French books and documents, most of them not easy of access; the references are fragmentary, too, so that the production of a narrative has been like collecting and assembling widely dispersed pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The literature in English is meagre and for the most part trivial, (with the exception of Rom Landaus Moroccan Drama), but early on in my reading I chanced upon the late Mr Walter Harriss Morocco That Was, published by Blackwoods in 1912. Mr Harris was Times correspondent in Morocco from before the turn of the century until after the establishment of the French Protectorate; he could, and often did, pass as an Arab, and enjoyed the personal friendship of several Sultans. While his book covers a period of less than twenty years, and is mainly anecdotal and episodic, I realised at once that to use his information while changing his words would be unthinkable; for his style, both moving and hilariously satirical, must have been unique in his epoch. I therefore approached his nephew and literary executor, Mr Peter Harris, who has been generous enough to allow me to reproduce long extracts verbatim. This I have done, not always in sequence, cementing them, as it were, by factual material from other sources. Thus all passages in Book One that are placed between inverted commas are his unless otherwise acknowledged. It has, in fact since the book was short proved possible to use the greater part of his text, and I am sure that many will share my pleasure in the republication after so many years of a neglected virtuoso.

A select list of published sources is given at the end of this book. Beyond this I have relied upon a great bulk of verbal communication and unpublished notes that have been made available to me; these, at the request of the donors, I have not acknowledged to individuals, but I express my great appreciation of the time and trouble they have given to my project.

Any biography of a ruler necessarily involves consideration of much of his countrys contemporary history, and it is difficult for the biographer to determine at what point to arrest examination of an outside sequence of events that may have affected his subject. Thus, for example, the Istiqlal or Moroccan Independence Movement merits a separate volume at least as long as the present one, and discussion of the Arab Berber problem in Morocco has had to be kept to the minimum for understanding of the narrative. The select bibliography is crammed with tangential fact, which may be described as further reading.

I am indebted to Lord Brockway for allowing me to reproduce his letter published in the Manchester Guardian on 10 June 1953; and to the Trustees of the late Agnes, Lady Grove for permission to quote extracts from her Seventy-one days Camping in Morocco.

The decorations in the text were drawn for this book by Ahmed Ben Lahcen Tija, a Berber from Marrakesh, originally of the Haha tribe.