alternatehistory.com
Portuguese Maroccos
The Kingdom of Portugal was, in many ways, the least likely of the Western European states to survive the 20th century intact. Unlike France, Italy, and Spain, Portugal was not a democracy and had no built-in mechanisms for venting social tensions, dealing with dissent constructively, and staving off radicalism. Unlike Britannia, Portugal was not hermetically sealed against the guile of the outside world’s dangerous ideas. And so the Kingdom trundled on, an absolute monarchy absolutely unsuited for the task of dealing with the radicalism that, ever so slowly, built up at home and in the colonies.
***
The death knell of Morocco as an independent state sounded in 1648, when the majority of the country became an Ottoman puppet under a friendly line of Moroccan dynasts and the northern half of Morocco’s Atlantic coast was conquered by the Portuguese. After the native Moroccan dynasty died off, the Ottomans installed the Ramazanli family, with origins in Southern Anatolia. This ended up being the Ottoman’s last act of significance in Morocco— over the course of the 1700s, the Ottomans grew weaker. The European powers, incensed at the pirates from the “Barbary States”, retaliated by attacking the North African coast. Portugal, with the sanction of Europe, conquered the remainder of Morocco’s coastline. The shrunken Ramazanli kingdom shrunk into the interior of the country, steadily losing control of its peripheries. Locals seeking to submit matters to judgement were more likely to seek out the Portuguese authorities than the decaying bureaucracy of the “native” dynasty. When the last Ramazanli monarch of Morocco died in 1881, no one bothered to nominate a replacement. The office of “monarch” hadn’t commanded anyone’s respect since 1648 anyways. The Portuguese turned their de facto mastery of Morocco into de jure authority, moving the Office of the Viceroy inland to Marraquexe [1].
Over hundreds of years of foreign rule, the Marroquinos had grown to know European society more intimately than any other Muslim people. Moroccan businesses exported iron and textiles to Lisbon and beyond. Though Lisbon made efforts to prevent foreign shipping in the 1700s, they had relented by 1844. Moroccan Jews found European brethren who were willing to do business, making contacts as far away as Vienna and Buda. A middle class of businessmen, small-time financiers and manufacturers formed, building up its prosperity despite skewed competition with Portuguese settlers, and they sent their kids abroad to learn the ways of modernity and, someday, return to contribute to the family business. Not always to Lisbon, of course— only people who could afford no better sent their kids to Lisbon. Most Moroccan students aimed to join the hordes of foreign students in French and Italian universities.
Some, though, made the long voyage to Vilnius instead.
Abdelcarim Alxarif’s father was the manager of an imports store in Fez owned by a certain Yaakov Abergel, who had sent his own son to Vilnius. Lithuania’s historically large Jewish population made Vilnius a relatively tolerant city, and thus more likely to be a first-choice destination for Moroccan Jewish students. The University of Vilnius was a fine educational institution whose brochure bragged (with plenty of justification) about educating “Emperors, many advisors, magnates and nobles, poets and artists, inventors and scientists, philosophers and businessmen.” The elder Alxarif complained to his boss during downtime about his son’s lack of drive, and Abergel replied that if young Abdelcarim had no particular ambition, he might as well go to Lithuania, where Abergel’s son had many friends and contacts. The elder Alxarif worried about the timing— the year was 1920, and the wreckage of the Great European War still had to be cleaned up— but Abergel reassured him that Lithuania, now governed by a republic, was unlikely to collapse into civil war just yet.
In hindsight, the timing really was inauspicious. Abdelcarim Alxarif arrived at the University of Vilnius just in time to encounter Revivalism.
Augustinas Stankevicius had once been a Republican, but five years of war made him into an up-and-coming tyrant who founded the Revival Front in 1918. That transformation played out in miniature in the little Republican clubs of the University, who looked upon the rickety government that timidly ruled the ruins of the Empire and wondered what they’d found so attractive about Republicanism in the first place. Alxarif, who’d had trouble finding friends in childhood, found a home in the Lithuanian Historical Research Society, a campus club that, in a matter of years, become a feeder organization for the Green Berets (the youth paramilitary of the Revivalists). Here, something clicked for the young Moroccan.
Lithuania is a country with a great and glorious past that has been wronged in recent times, he thought. Couldn’t Morocco say the same? Was Morocco not the inheritor of its own great and glorious past, in which the Almoravids and Almohads and Saadis loomed larger than life? 600 years ago, Moroccans had been the masters of Portugal, not the other way around! The Revivalists’ lust for empire started to make sense to Alxarif— clearly, both Lithuania and Morocco deserved strong, independent governments that could reverse recent wrongs and settle old scores. The Revivalists’ disdain for the old House of Gediminas also made sense to Alxarif— the old Emperor’s incompetence in war had destroyed the prestige of the monarchy in this land, just as the Ramazanli family had done in Alxarif’s own. Alxarif wasn’t quite ready to give up on his studies yet— he came to learn about business management, and did so. But, increasingly often, he became the type of student that the interwar Lithuanian press liked to call a “weekend warrior.” From Monday to Friday, he kept his nose clean and studied hard. On Saturday, he donned a green beret and headed off with his friends to fight for Stankevicius’s vision of Lithuania.
In 1926, the Unitarian Liudas Vasaris was overthrown by a military coup— and elements of paramilitaries like the Revivalist Green Berets had been among them, seizing Sengupta stations and telephone lines. Alxarif was among them, and received a “Badge of 1926” for his troubles. He did not, however, stay in Lithuania long enough to watch Stankevicius become the Vadas in 1930— he finished his studies and left for Morocco in 1927. Moving to Bou Craa, a phosphate-mining boomtown in the Portuguese-ruled Southern Territories [2], Alxarif entered the phosphate business by buying a stake in a mine with a small loan from his father. He knew from chemistry and agronomy classes in Vilnius that phosphate fertilizers held much promise for raising the world’s agricultural potential.
Alxarif’s father died in 1929, and with the inheritance Alxarif acquired a controlling stake in his Bou Craa mine, upgrading it with new technology from France and Spain. Hiring a manager to handle day-to-day operations meant that Alxarif could travel back to his hometown of Fez, where he began to talk about what he’d learned in Lithuania. The quiet parties at Alxarif’s sumptuous residence, originally hosted to bring together Vilnius alumni, were soon opened up to anyone who proved receptive to the strange ideas about politics that such parties inevitably centered around. Here, Alxarif was reminded he wasn’t alone. He’d met more than a few Moroccans among the Green Berets, and many Moroccans who’d never even heard of Lithuania turned out to possess similar ideas. One regular attendee was Simão Abergel, the son of Yaakov Abergel who’d paved the way for Alxarif to go to Vilnius. He reminded the others about the services that Jews had rendered to the historical empires of the Lithuanians and Moroccans, and resolutely believed that Jews still had a role to play in Morocco’s future. Another was Camal Chahine, who, despite being quite young, had developed a deep understanding of Moroccan history from his apprenticeship at an antiques store. He had first been drawn to Alxarif in the same way many of the local twenty-year-olds were— by admiration. Alxarif was a bit of a celebrity— the worldly young man who’d traveled so far, come back, and achieved such commercial success before his 30th birthday!— but Chahine’s steadfast willingness to guard Alxarif’s subversive ideas from the eyes of the Portuguese authorities let him move permanently into Alxarif’s circle.
By 1931, the members of this group had stopped referring to the meetings at Alxarif’s house as “parties.” Though they acknowledged the obvious differences between their difficult political position and the privileges the Lithuanian Revivalists had enjoyed on their easy slide to power (and other differences besides) the group declared the establishment of the Moroccan Nahda Party [3], and almost as an afterthought, handed Alxarif the title of Ra’is [4] at their second meeting. No one thought much of it at the time, preferring instead to think about how the new Nahdatist movement might transition from being a bunch of unemployed layabouts huddling in a successful businessman’s house to becoming an organization capable of defeating Portugal and creating a new Moroccan Empire. The answer, unexpectedly, ended up being Alxarif’s bread and butter.
By 1932, Lithuania’s Amelioration Campaign had begun in force. The Vadas’s government sought to improve the land of Lithuania at all costs, sacrificing untold miles of swamps and marshes to create new farmland. In an innocuous looking letter to the Vadas, Alxarif discussed his phosphate business and asked for a face-to-face meeting with the Vadas or one of his ministers, so that the details of exporting phosphate fertilizer to Lithuania could be ironed out. With the letter came a package containing an old green beret and a 1926 service badge. Vilnius understood the symbolism, and could guess as to what topics Alxarif might bring up at this “face-to-face meeting.”
***
Lumps of phosphate dirt are liberated from the sands of Bou Craa. They are not processed into fertilizer on site— instead, they are ground into sand and packaged up in hardy bags. These bags are stacked onto the beds of trucks that take them to the port of Bojador, where they are loaded onto ships from Karaliaucius and Riga after the official payment has been made. Unknown to the Portuguese authorities, the unofficial payment, packed in wooden crates, arrives in Dakhla some days later. My soldiers find the crates, and open them to reveal munitions. Second-rate material, the refuse of the Lithuanian army, but it will do. My soldiers may yet derive some value from it.
Abdelcarim Alxarif opened the door of his office in Bou Craa. For seven years he’d kept this operation going. The hardest step had been talking to the tribal leaders of the Beni Hassan Arabs who inhabited the Southern Territories. They didn’t have much attachment to the idea of any nation, much less a Moroccan one, but they understood what Alxarif, in his Northern dialect, had to say about prosperity. They understood that the Portuguese had denied them prosperity by barring them from the coasts so that Portuguese fishermen could profit in peace. Alxarif convinced them that they could have the last laugh. Out here in the desert, Portugal’s control was weak and spotty. Out here, the Hassaniya tribes could become an army that could take back the coasts and more. They would only have to accept Alxarif’s money, guns, and instructions.
It really was a cycle. A select group of recruits, trained in the desert warfare of the Beni Hassan and the urban tactics of the Green Berets, would head north into the towns of Portuguese Morocco. There, they would recruit thugs, ideologues, and everything in between, convincing them to come south, train, and head back north to recruit again. Some recruits from the North didn’t even have to be met personally first. As the Unitarians and Republicans— folks who’d decided to study in France and Italy— realized how hollow their ideologies were, they’d hear of Alxarif’s efforts by word of mouth and underground publications. They’d pay a visit to certain buildings of their respective cities, with the full knowledge that those buildings housed local chapters of Morocco’s first modern political party. With luck, that party would be the only party Morocco’s people would require for the remainder of the century.
In the great desert, in nomadic Hassaniya settlements that the Portuguese didn’t bother to pin down, an army was growing. Young men and even women grew lean from work and training, then filled their stomachs with the meat of camels and goats. Purchased Lithuanian and stolen Portuguese guns were firmly clasped in increasingly adept Moroccan hands, and those hands were controlled by minds lit aflame with thoughts of reviving their nation.
Alxarif’s guide, an old Haratin, waited outside the office [5]. Master and servant departed Bou Craa together.
[1] Marrakesh. Portuguese romanization is in vogue in Morocco— just remember that X and CH both stand in for the English “sh” and you’ll be fine.
[2] The Southern Territories are the light-green colored areas of loose Portuguese control. They’re roughly coterminous with OTL northern Mauritania and Western Sahara.
[3] In Arabic, “nahda” means “awakening” or, more poetically, “renaissance.”
[4] It basically translates to “chief” or “captain.”
[5] It just wouldn’t be Mauritania without slavery, would it? Yes, one of the concessions Alxarif made in exchange for Beni Hassan support is allowing the pre-colonial social order to persist. If Alxarif ever achieves the Revivalist Moroccan Empire of his dreams, building a state that would at the very least encompass all the Portuguese territory in Northwest Africa, he’ll turn a blind eye to the plight of the Haratin, a caste of Arabized black Africans who the Beni Hassan hold as chattel, as long as the Beni Hassan consent to be ruled by him. TTL, the Portuguese have outlawed slavery in Morocco proper but are powerless/unwilling to do the same in the Southern Territories, where colonial control exists more on paper than practice. Once that colonial control is thrown off completely, though… mining phosphates, iron, and other products for the Lithuanian market is an expensive process. Surely slave labor would expedite it?
Portuguese Maroccos (1939)
The Kingdom of Portugal was, in many ways, the least likely of the Western European states to survive the 20th century intact. Unlike France, Italy, and Spain, Portugal was not a democracy and had no built-in mechanisms for venting social tensions, dealing with dissent constructively, and staving off radicalism. Unlike Britannia, Portugal was not hermetically sealed against the guile of the outside world’s dangerous ideas. And so the Kingdom trundled on, an absolute monarchy absolutely unsuited for the task of dealing with the radicalism that, ever so slowly, built up at home and in the colonies.
***
The death knell of Morocco as an independent state sounded in 1648, when the majority of the country became an Ottoman puppet under a friendly line of Moroccan dynasts and the northern half of Morocco’s Atlantic coast was conquered by the Portuguese. After the native Moroccan dynasty died off, the Ottomans installed the Ramazanli family, with origins in Southern Anatolia. This ended up being the Ottoman’s last act of significance in Morocco— over the course of the 1700s, the Ottomans grew weaker. The European powers, incensed at the pirates from the “Barbary States”, retaliated by attacking the North African coast. Portugal, with the sanction of Europe, conquered the remainder of Morocco’s coastline. The shrunken Ramazanli kingdom shrunk into the interior of the country, steadily losing control of its peripheries. Locals seeking to submit matters to judgement were more likely to seek out the Portuguese authorities than the decaying bureaucracy of the “native” dynasty. When the last Ramazanli monarch of Morocco died in 1881, no one bothered to nominate a replacement. The office of “monarch” hadn’t commanded anyone’s respect since 1648 anyways. The Portuguese turned their de facto mastery of Morocco into de jure authority, moving the Office of the Viceroy inland to Marraquexe [1].
Over hundreds of years of foreign rule, the Marroquinos had grown to know European society more intimately than any other Muslim people. Moroccan businesses exported iron and textiles to Lisbon and beyond. Though Lisbon made efforts to prevent foreign shipping in the 1700s, they had relented by 1844. Moroccan Jews found European brethren who were willing to do business, making contacts as far away as Vienna and Buda. A middle class of businessmen, small-time financiers and manufacturers formed, building up its prosperity despite skewed competition with Portuguese settlers, and they sent their kids abroad to learn the ways of modernity and, someday, return to contribute to the family business. Not always to Lisbon, of course— only people who could afford no better sent their kids to Lisbon. Most Moroccan students aimed to join the hordes of foreign students in French and Italian universities.
Some, though, made the long voyage to Vilnius instead.
Abdelcarim Alxarif. His facility with the Lithuanian language, notable even among other Vilnius alumni, earned him the nickname of al-Litwani (“The Lithuanian”) when he came home.
Abdelcarim Alxarif’s father was the manager of an imports store in Fez owned by a certain Yaakov Abergel, who had sent his own son to Vilnius. Lithuania’s historically large Jewish population made Vilnius a relatively tolerant city, and thus more likely to be a first-choice destination for Moroccan Jewish students. The University of Vilnius was a fine educational institution whose brochure bragged (with plenty of justification) about educating “Emperors, many advisors, magnates and nobles, poets and artists, inventors and scientists, philosophers and businessmen.” The elder Alxarif complained to his boss during downtime about his son’s lack of drive, and Abergel replied that if young Abdelcarim had no particular ambition, he might as well go to Lithuania, where Abergel’s son had many friends and contacts. The elder Alxarif worried about the timing— the year was 1920, and the wreckage of the Great European War still had to be cleaned up— but Abergel reassured him that Lithuania, now governed by a republic, was unlikely to collapse into civil war just yet.
In hindsight, the timing really was inauspicious. Abdelcarim Alxarif arrived at the University of Vilnius just in time to encounter Revivalism.
Augustinas Stankevicius had once been a Republican, but five years of war made him into an up-and-coming tyrant who founded the Revival Front in 1918. That transformation played out in miniature in the little Republican clubs of the University, who looked upon the rickety government that timidly ruled the ruins of the Empire and wondered what they’d found so attractive about Republicanism in the first place. Alxarif, who’d had trouble finding friends in childhood, found a home in the Lithuanian Historical Research Society, a campus club that, in a matter of years, become a feeder organization for the Green Berets (the youth paramilitary of the Revivalists). Here, something clicked for the young Moroccan.
Lithuania is a country with a great and glorious past that has been wronged in recent times, he thought. Couldn’t Morocco say the same? Was Morocco not the inheritor of its own great and glorious past, in which the Almoravids and Almohads and Saadis loomed larger than life? 600 years ago, Moroccans had been the masters of Portugal, not the other way around! The Revivalists’ lust for empire started to make sense to Alxarif— clearly, both Lithuania and Morocco deserved strong, independent governments that could reverse recent wrongs and settle old scores. The Revivalists’ disdain for the old House of Gediminas also made sense to Alxarif— the old Emperor’s incompetence in war had destroyed the prestige of the monarchy in this land, just as the Ramazanli family had done in Alxarif’s own. Alxarif wasn’t quite ready to give up on his studies yet— he came to learn about business management, and did so. But, increasingly often, he became the type of student that the interwar Lithuanian press liked to call a “weekend warrior.” From Monday to Friday, he kept his nose clean and studied hard. On Saturday, he donned a green beret and headed off with his friends to fight for Stankevicius’s vision of Lithuania.
In 1926, the Unitarian Liudas Vasaris was overthrown by a military coup— and elements of paramilitaries like the Revivalist Green Berets had been among them, seizing Sengupta stations and telephone lines. Alxarif was among them, and received a “Badge of 1926” for his troubles. He did not, however, stay in Lithuania long enough to watch Stankevicius become the Vadas in 1930— he finished his studies and left for Morocco in 1927. Moving to Bou Craa, a phosphate-mining boomtown in the Portuguese-ruled Southern Territories [2], Alxarif entered the phosphate business by buying a stake in a mine with a small loan from his father. He knew from chemistry and agronomy classes in Vilnius that phosphate fertilizers held much promise for raising the world’s agricultural potential.
Alxarif’s father died in 1929, and with the inheritance Alxarif acquired a controlling stake in his Bou Craa mine, upgrading it with new technology from France and Spain. Hiring a manager to handle day-to-day operations meant that Alxarif could travel back to his hometown of Fez, where he began to talk about what he’d learned in Lithuania. The quiet parties at Alxarif’s sumptuous residence, originally hosted to bring together Vilnius alumni, were soon opened up to anyone who proved receptive to the strange ideas about politics that such parties inevitably centered around. Here, Alxarif was reminded he wasn’t alone. He’d met more than a few Moroccans among the Green Berets, and many Moroccans who’d never even heard of Lithuania turned out to possess similar ideas. One regular attendee was Simão Abergel, the son of Yaakov Abergel who’d paved the way for Alxarif to go to Vilnius. He reminded the others about the services that Jews had rendered to the historical empires of the Lithuanians and Moroccans, and resolutely believed that Jews still had a role to play in Morocco’s future. Another was Camal Chahine, who, despite being quite young, had developed a deep understanding of Moroccan history from his apprenticeship at an antiques store. He had first been drawn to Alxarif in the same way many of the local twenty-year-olds were— by admiration. Alxarif was a bit of a celebrity— the worldly young man who’d traveled so far, come back, and achieved such commercial success before his 30th birthday!— but Chahine’s steadfast willingness to guard Alxarif’s subversive ideas from the eyes of the Portuguese authorities let him move permanently into Alxarif’s circle.
Camal Chahine. He became a protege of sorts for Alxarif.
By 1931, the members of this group had stopped referring to the meetings at Alxarif’s house as “parties.” Though they acknowledged the obvious differences between their difficult political position and the privileges the Lithuanian Revivalists had enjoyed on their easy slide to power (and other differences besides) the group declared the establishment of the Moroccan Nahda Party [3], and almost as an afterthought, handed Alxarif the title of Ra’is [4] at their second meeting. No one thought much of it at the time, preferring instead to think about how the new Nahdatist movement might transition from being a bunch of unemployed layabouts huddling in a successful businessman’s house to becoming an organization capable of defeating Portugal and creating a new Moroccan Empire. The answer, unexpectedly, ended up being Alxarif’s bread and butter.
By 1932, Lithuania’s Amelioration Campaign had begun in force. The Vadas’s government sought to improve the land of Lithuania at all costs, sacrificing untold miles of swamps and marshes to create new farmland. In an innocuous looking letter to the Vadas, Alxarif discussed his phosphate business and asked for a face-to-face meeting with the Vadas or one of his ministers, so that the details of exporting phosphate fertilizer to Lithuania could be ironed out. With the letter came a package containing an old green beret and a 1926 service badge. Vilnius understood the symbolism, and could guess as to what topics Alxarif might bring up at this “face-to-face meeting.”
***
Lumps of phosphate dirt are liberated from the sands of Bou Craa. They are not processed into fertilizer on site— instead, they are ground into sand and packaged up in hardy bags. These bags are stacked onto the beds of trucks that take them to the port of Bojador, where they are loaded onto ships from Karaliaucius and Riga after the official payment has been made. Unknown to the Portuguese authorities, the unofficial payment, packed in wooden crates, arrives in Dakhla some days later. My soldiers find the crates, and open them to reveal munitions. Second-rate material, the refuse of the Lithuanian army, but it will do. My soldiers may yet derive some value from it.
Abdelcarim Alxarif opened the door of his office in Bou Craa. For seven years he’d kept this operation going. The hardest step had been talking to the tribal leaders of the Beni Hassan Arabs who inhabited the Southern Territories. They didn’t have much attachment to the idea of any nation, much less a Moroccan one, but they understood what Alxarif, in his Northern dialect, had to say about prosperity. They understood that the Portuguese had denied them prosperity by barring them from the coasts so that Portuguese fishermen could profit in peace. Alxarif convinced them that they could have the last laugh. Out here in the desert, Portugal’s control was weak and spotty. Out here, the Hassaniya tribes could become an army that could take back the coasts and more. They would only have to accept Alxarif’s money, guns, and instructions.
It really was a cycle. A select group of recruits, trained in the desert warfare of the Beni Hassan and the urban tactics of the Green Berets, would head north into the towns of Portuguese Morocco. There, they would recruit thugs, ideologues, and everything in between, convincing them to come south, train, and head back north to recruit again. Some recruits from the North didn’t even have to be met personally first. As the Unitarians and Republicans— folks who’d decided to study in France and Italy— realized how hollow their ideologies were, they’d hear of Alxarif’s efforts by word of mouth and underground publications. They’d pay a visit to certain buildings of their respective cities, with the full knowledge that those buildings housed local chapters of Morocco’s first modern political party. With luck, that party would be the only party Morocco’s people would require for the remainder of the century.
In the great desert, in nomadic Hassaniya settlements that the Portuguese didn’t bother to pin down, an army was growing. Young men and even women grew lean from work and training, then filled their stomachs with the meat of camels and goats. Purchased Lithuanian and stolen Portuguese guns were firmly clasped in increasingly adept Moroccan hands, and those hands were controlled by minds lit aflame with thoughts of reviving their nation.
Alxarif’s guide, an old Haratin, waited outside the office [5]. Master and servant departed Bou Craa together.
The flag of the Moroccan Nahda Party was suggested by Camal Chahine. It’s literally just the old flag of the Almohads.
[1] Marrakesh. Portuguese romanization is in vogue in Morocco— just remember that X and CH both stand in for the English “sh” and you’ll be fine.
[2] The Southern Territories are the light-green colored areas of loose Portuguese control. They’re roughly coterminous with OTL northern Mauritania and Western Sahara.
[3] In Arabic, “nahda” means “awakening” or, more poetically, “renaissance.”
[4] It basically translates to “chief” or “captain.”
[5] It just wouldn’t be Mauritania without slavery, would it? Yes, one of the concessions Alxarif made in exchange for Beni Hassan support is allowing the pre-colonial social order to persist. If Alxarif ever achieves the Revivalist Moroccan Empire of his dreams, building a state that would at the very least encompass all the Portuguese territory in Northwest Africa, he’ll turn a blind eye to the plight of the Haratin, a caste of Arabized black Africans who the Beni Hassan hold as chattel, as long as the Beni Hassan consent to be ruled by him. TTL, the Portuguese have outlawed slavery in Morocco proper but are powerless/unwilling to do the same in the Southern Territories, where colonial control exists more on paper than practice. Once that colonial control is thrown off completely, though… mining phosphates, iron, and other products for the Lithuanian market is an expensive process. Surely slave labor would expedite it?
- LostInNewDelhi
- Word Count: 2.4k