Morocco Before Islam

A Window into Pre-Islamic North Africa

I wasn’t expecting to see my dude in the oil painting behind me featured so prominently at a cultural center in Marrakesh, Morocco.

Many of us have heard speculations and testimonies on who he is, or might have been. I was told by a non-Black native of the country that the painting is a depiction of a Moroccan ruler going back some 6 centuries.

Like you, I’ve heard people say that Moroccans aren’t Black therefore Morocco has nothing to do with the cultural fabric and history of “Black Africa,” which is illogically restricted to a made up dimension called “Sub Saharan Africa” as if there are no indigenous Blacks north of the Sahara. Many of the Masmuda clans of Morocco were originally dark like the Senegalese until they started mixing with the French and Turks.

During my very first day in Morocco I met Moroccans who identify as Black, but there are deeper nuances to the term “Black” that are worth exploring to get the most out of this written offering.

The word “Black” as a title of identity is purely an invention of colonial North America. Chocolate complexioned people outside of the Americas don’t really call themselves “Black” unless they are communicating with other chocolate complexioned people from the Americas who identify as Black, and they want to acknowledge a sense of common kinship and solidarity. If you don’t have stamps on your passport, and you think that the United States of America is the center of the universe, this may be challenging for you to wrap your mind around.

In a lot of cases Africans don’t even identify by their modern nationalities. They often identify as their ethnicities (i.e. “I am Yoruba” “I am Hausa” “I am Igbo” as opposed to “I am Nigerian” or “I am African” because the latter 2 terms are vague badges of colonialism for Africans who know their lineages). A lot of the nation states that we see on the continent today didn’t exist in their current forms until AFTER colonization by Europeans.

Below is a map that is more like what Africa looked like BEFORE colonization when the entire continent was cut up into much smaller territories ruled by local chiefs. As you can see, it’s way more than the 54 countries that make up Africa in 2023.

I personally felt very welcomed by Moroccan locals as a Black man from America even in instances when it was clear that I would not be spending money with them. A few even told me “welcome back to Africa brother.” No cash was exchanged in those experiences, but the shared currency between us was potent and real. They saw me as a son of Africa as they are sons and daughters of Africa.

Those who separate Morocco from the rest of Black Africa are uninformed and don’t understand the complex history of the country in relation to colonialism and other factors. Morocco is a very interesting melting pot of ethnicities. 

One morning while I was there I had a conversation over breakfast with a Muslim brother who has lived in Morocco his entire life. He told me about how his family came to the country from South Africa in either the 12th or 13th century (he wasn’t precisely certain). That’s at minimum over 700 years ago. “We are a mixture of many cultures” he said before going into more detail about his life.

He shared something with me that I was told by multiple Moroccans over the course of my visit to their country. He said that before Islam, Morocco was a Jewish nation. These were not Eastern European converts to Judaism living in North Africa either. These were people of a Hebrew bloodline.

In his 1925 book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) Adolf Hitler had this to say about the Jews of Germany:

“Systematically these Negroid parasites in our national body corrupt our innocent fair-skinned girls and thus destroy something that can no longer be replaced in the world.”

Hitler literally referred to Jews as “Negroid parasites,” but no one talks about it. If we were taught to see Jews primarily as Eastern Europeans, why was being Judaic synonymous with being a “Negro” ? Could it be that the first people that Europeans saw practicing Judaic spiritual procedures were “Negroid”? The logical answer is yes.

Even with all that being said, people downplay the Amazigh presence in Morocco. I saw just as many buildings in Morocco with Tifinagh script as I did those with Arabic. Tifinagh is the writing system of the Amazigh people mislabeled as “Berbers.” Some speculate that Tifinagh is a derivative of the Old Phoenician or Punic alphabet which some Jewish scholars like Nahum Slouschz have reclassified as “Old Hebrew.”

Prior to Islam the Amazigh of Morocco were not Hebrew though. Many worked with what the Islamic world would classify as jinn, specially up in the high Atlas Mountains where a devastating earthquake reminiscent of the one in Haiti just took place. I will get into the spiritual culture of the Atlas mountains with an upcoming post that will be a serious treat for loyal subscribers.

There is a perception among some linguists that Tifinagh has Coptic origins in East Africa. Pascal Buresi, a professor of medeivel Islamic studies at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris points out that the name for the Moroccan city of Marrakesh is actually an adaption of the name “Murr YaKUSH,” which means “City of God” in Amazigh. Kush is an ancient name for a kingdom in the Sudan. The Sudan is highly significant in the development of pre-Hebraic and pre-Islamic Moroccan culture. You will soon see this for yourself.

At the very least, it seems highly conceivable to me that many of the Moors who gentrified Spain in 711 C.E. were Hebrews who still practiced ancient Hebrew spirituality mixed in with fewer recent Hebrew converts to Islam. According to The Almoravid and Almohad Empires by Amira K. Bennison, many Moroccans could not speak Arabic at the time of the Moorish conquest of Spain, so I find it hard to accept that they were all following the teachings of the Quran as authentic Muslims when they would have needed to have known Arabic to do so at THAT time. On the other hand, there is concrete archaeological evidence of African Hebrews calling God “Allah” many centuries ago.

European historians who were not aware of this cultural expression when they wrote about the Moorish invasion of Spain may have assumed that many Moors were Islamic when they were more Judaic than anything. This is just my conjecture, but conjecture has intrinsic value, because all great confirmations begin with conjecture. I invite you to add to this conversation. I will say this though: when the Moors were expelled from Spain in 1492, both Muslims and Jews fled back to North Africa.

In ancient North Africa the conflict between adherents to Islam and so-called “Judaism” wasn’t really a big thing like it was in Arabia, Iraq, and other Eastern regions. There are many families in Africa today who are of an ancient Hebrew bloodline, but they have literally been practicing Islam for centuries.

In Morocco, a lot of them have the names “Ben” or “Ibn” in their names.

The link below is for a Moroccan relief fund for the people of the High Atlas Mountains following the recent earthquake. The link was sent to me by someone I met in Morocco who has been hands on in assisting Moroccans of the Atlas Mountains with the challenges of daily life. If you can offer any financial assistance, I’m sure that there are recovering families who will appreciate it.

Just click HERE