At a Glance
Fez: The City That Defined a Political World
Abdellatif Sbihi was born in 1898 in Fez — a city whose specific character as the centre of Moroccan Islamic civilisation gave the nationalism that grew from it a specific cultural and intellectual grounding that other Moroccan cities could not provide in the same degree. Fez was not simply Morocco's largest or most economically significant city (Casablanca had claimed that distinction by the early twentieth century); it was the city whose institutions — the Qarawiyyin, the great mosques, the shrines of the city's founding saints, the traditional commercial guilds of the medina's craft industries — embodied the continuity of Moroccan Islamic civilisation in its most concentrated and most prestigious form.
The Fassi notable families — the merchants and scholars and artisans whose families had been in Fez for generations — occupied a specific social position that combined religious learning, commercial success, and cultural prestige in ways that the French protectorate had not been able to simply displace. The protectorate needed the traditional elite as intermediaries between the colonial administration and the Moroccan population; it needed the Qarawiyyin as evidence that it was respecting Islamic education; it needed the commercial networks of the Fassi merchants to maintain the economic life of the city. This need gave the traditional Fez elite a degree of social leverage that they used, with varying degrees of skill and commitment, to sustain the institutions and the cultural life within which nationalism would eventually organise.
The Qarawiyyin Tradition and Nationalist Formation
The University of Qarawiyyin — founded in 859 AD, one of the world's oldest continuously operating universities — was the intellectual centre of Fez's traditional elite world and the institution through which Islamic learning, Moroccan cultural identity, and the specific formation of the Fassi scholarly and commercial families were transmitted across generations. Students from across North Africa and beyond came to Fez to study at the Qarawiyyin, and the graduates of the Qarawiyyin carried with them both the specific intellectual formation of Moroccan Islamic learning and the network of connections to other graduates and to the Fez scholarly community that sustained the institution's influence across the Maghreb.
For Sbihi's generation, the Qarawiyyin tradition was both the foundation of their cultural identity and the basis of the specific claim they made about what Moroccan independence meant: not simply the political transfer of sovereignty from France to a Moroccan government, but the restoration of the specifically Moroccan Islamic civilisation that the protectorate had subjected to French cultural and administrative domination. This claim — that Moroccan independence was about cultural and civilisational sovereignty as well as political sovereignty — gave the traditional elite's nationalism its specific character and distinguished it from the more purely political nationalism of the younger French-educated generation.
The Independence Movement's Social Architecture
The specific contribution that figures like Sbihi made to the independence movement was social and institutional rather than primarily intellectual or organisational in the modern sense. They provided the movement with access to the social structures of Moroccan urban life — the structures that had sustained Moroccan cultural and economic life through the colonial period and that the French administration had found it impossible to simply replace. The merchant guilds of the Fez medina, the networks of the religious brotherhoods, the commercial relationships that connected Fassi families to one another and to Moroccan communities across the country — these were the human infrastructure of the traditional world, and they were available to the nationalist movement because figures like Sbihi stood at their intersection.
The Istiqlal's founders — the younger generation of French-educated nationalists like Allal al-Fassi and Ahmed Balafrej — understood that the independence movement needed both the intellectual and political programme that their formation had given them and the social legitimacy and the human networks that the traditional notable families could provide. The partnership between the two generations — between the French-educated young nationalists who wrote the manifestos and organised the party structures, and the traditional notables who brought the medina networks and the social authority of the old elite — was the specific social architecture of Moroccan nationalism, and it gave the independence movement a cross-generational and cross-class character that was more durable than purely ideological organisations typically achieved.
The French Repression and the Medina's Resistance
The French protectorate's response to the Istiqlal's founding and the independence movement's growth was increasingly repressive through the late 1940s and early 1950s — arrests of nationalist leaders, banning of nationalist publications, restrictions on political assembly, and the sustained pressure on the Sultan to distance himself from the independence movement rather than continue to be associated with it. In this environment, the traditional networks of the Fez medina — the informal communication channels, the commercial relationships, the religious institutions — became essential instruments of nationalist communication and organisation that the French administration found it difficult to monitor and impossible to fully control.
The specific value of the traditional notable families' networks in this context was that they operated through channels and relationships that predated the nationalist movement and that were embedded in the social fabric of the city in ways that purely political networks were not. A nationalist meeting could be detected and dispersed; a gathering of merchants at a commercial fair, or a congregation at a mosque, or a celebration of a traditional festival could not be treated as inherently political without disrupting the social life of the city in ways that would have been both practically difficult and politically counterproductive. The traditional notable families navigated these spaces with the specific social intelligence of people who had been navigating the politics of the medina for generations.
The Sultan's Exile and the Crucible of 1953–55
The French decision to depose and exile Sultan Mohammed V in August 1953 — replacing him with the elderly and unpopular Moulay Arafa as a puppet sultan — was the political miscalculation that ultimately made French policy in Morocco untenable. The Moroccan people's response to the exile was immediate and sustained: the boycott of French goods and institutions, the resistance of Moroccan workers and employees in French enterprises, the spread of armed resistance in the countryside, and the popular identification of the exile Sultan with Moroccan national identity in ways that the French had hoped to prevent but could not.
In Fez, the traditional notable families — whose influence in the medina gave them a specific role in sustaining popular mobilisation — were among those who maintained the resistance through the two years of the exile. The Istiqlal's networks in the city, reinforced by the social authority of the notable families, kept the independence cause alive during the period of direct French repression that followed the exile, and the city's traditional character — its denseness, its cultural depth, its institutional autonomy — gave the resistance resources that more modern and more easily monitored social environments would not have provided.
Independence and the Long Aftermath
Moroccan independence in March 1956 was the achievement that vindicated the independence movement's sustained campaign, and the post-independence political order that emerged from the negotiations between the palace, the Istiqlal, and the French was partly shaped by the vision that the Istiqlal's traditional wing — which Sbihi represented — had brought to the movement. The vision was of a Morocco in which the restoration of the Moroccan state was simultaneously the restoration of Moroccan Islamic civilisation in its full complexity — the reopening of the institutions of traditional learning, the recovery of the cultural life that the protectorate had marginalised, and the reassertion of the specifically Moroccan identity against the French cultural influence that the protectorate had imposed.
The post-independence political trajectory — the growing tensions between the palace and the Istiqlal, the split within the Istiqlal between its traditional wing and the socialist left led by Ben Barka and Bouabid, and the increasingly authoritarian direction of Hassan II's rule — played out across the decades of Sbihi's remaining life. He was part of the generation that had built the independence movement and that then had to navigate the specific disappointments of the post-independence political order: the discovery that independence was the beginning of the political contest rather than its resolution, and that the specific vision of Moroccan sovereignty that the traditional nationalists had fought for was not automatically the vision that prevailed in the post-colonial political settlement.
Legacy: The Elder Who Gave the Movement Its Roots
Abdellatif Sbihi's legacy is the legacy of the elder who gave the independence movement its social roots in the traditional world — who connected the intellectual and organisational programme of the Istiqlal to the human networks and the social authority of the Fez medina that no amount of political organisation alone could have provided. He was not the movement's most intellectually significant figure — that was Allal al-Fassi — nor its most internationally visible — that was Ahmed Balafrej — nor its most radical — that was Ben Barka. He was the movement's connection to the world that made Moroccan Islamic civilisation real as a lived social practice rather than as a political programme, and that connection was essential to giving the independence movement the depth and the durability it needed to outlast French repression and achieve the independence it was seeking. In a movement that produced both martyrs and statesmen, the role of the elder who sustained the networks and the social fabric was less visible but no less necessary.