Ibn Battuta, the 14th-century traveller from Tangier who covered about 117,000 km across Africa and Asia; Idris I, regarded as the founding father of the Moroccan state; Mohammed V, the sultan who led the country to independence in 1956; Fatima al-Fihri, credited with founding the al-Qarawiyyin mosque in Fez in 857–859; and Hicham El Guerrouj, who has held the 1,500 m world record since 1998, are the people most often named when Morocco comes up. Around them stands a longer list: the Rif leader Abd el-Krim, the Olympic champions Nawal El Moutawakel and Saïd Aouita, the Prix Goncourt winners Tahar Ben Jelloun and Leïla Slimani, the sociologist Fatema Mernissi and the battery scientist Rachid Yazami. This guide begins with the people who made Morocco a state and a nation, and then turns to those who carried its name abroad in books, laboratories and stadiums.
Idris I at Volubilis and Fatima al-Fihri in Fez
Moroccan statehood is usually dated to Idris I (died 791), a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad through his grandson Hasan, who fled Arabia after the Battle of Fakhkh in 786. In 789 he landed at Tangier and moved inland to Walīlī, the old Roman town of Volubilis, where the Berber Awraba tribe accepted him as leader. His reign is dated from 788 to 791, and it ended with his death at Walīlī, reportedly poisoned by an agent of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid. His tomb grew into the hill town of Moulay Idriss Zerhoun, still one of the most important religious sites in the country, and the dynasty he founded went on to build Fez. The Roman ruins where his headquarters were excavated are described in our guide to Volubilis.
In Fez, a generation later, Fatima al-Fihri (died around 880), a woman from a family that had migrated from Kairouan, is credited with founding the al-Qarawiyyin mosque between 857 and 859. It developed into a centre of learning, and in 1963 became the modern University of al-Qarawiyyin; UNESCO and Guinness World Records cite it as the oldest continually operating institution of higher learning in the world. Her story was first written down centuries after her death, in a 14th-century chronicle, and some modern historians doubt that she existed at all, but she remains a national symbol of women's education.
Yusuf ibn Tashfin and Ahmad al-Mansur, Sultans of Marrakesh
Yusuf ibn Tashfin (reigned c. 1061–1106) was a Sanhaja Berber leader of the Almoravids, a movement that came out of the western Sahara. His cousin Abu Bakr ibn Umar founded Marrakesh around 1070, and Yusuf built it into the capital of an empire that stretched over the western Maghreb and, later, al-Andalus. On 23 October 1086 he defeated Alfonso VI of Castile at the Battle of Sagrajas, a year after Alfonso had taken Toledo, checking the Castilian advance into al-Andalus.
Five centuries later Ahmad al-Mansur (1549–1603) took the throne on the battlefield. In 1578 his brother, Sultan Abd al-Malik, died fighting the Portuguese at Ksar el-Kebir; the Portuguese king Sebastian vanished in the same battle, and Ahmad inherited both the crown and a fortune in ransom for Portuguese captives. He spent part of it on the El Badi Palace in Marrakesh and, in October 1590, sent an army under Judar Pasha, put by different sources at between 4,000 and 20,000 men, across the Sahara against the Songhai Empire. By playing the Ottomans and the European powers against each other, he kept Morocco independent in practice of the Ottoman sultan, whose overlordship he had formally recognised at the start of his reign and whose empire by then ruled Algeria next door.
Abd el-Krim, Malika al-Fassi and Mohammed V: The Road to 1956
In the 20th century, France and Spain divided Morocco into protectorates. The first large armed challenge came from the Rif mountains. Abd el-Krim (1882–1963), born in Ajdir and educated at al-Qarawiyyin, led a coalition of Riffian tribes that routed a Spanish army at Annual in 1921. He declared a Republic of the Rif, and his guerrilla tactics, including the use of tunnels, later influenced Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong. Combined French and Spanish forces defeated him, and on 26 May 1926 he surrendered at Targuist; he spent 21 years in exile on Réunion before settling in Cairo.
The political movement took a different route. On 11 January 1944, 66 Moroccans signed a public proclamation demanding independence, and Malika al-Fassi (1919–2007), a Fez journalist and playwright whose articles had appeared in the nationalist press since 1934, is usually described as the only woman among them. The man they looked to was the sultan, Mohammed V (1909–1961), enthroned at 17 in 1927. In a 1947 speech in Tangier he openly called for independence. On 20 August 1953 the French authorities exiled him and his family to Corsica, and then to Madagascar, installing a cousin in his place. The move backfired: resistance spread, and he returned on 16 November 1955. Morocco became independent from France and Spain in 1956, and he took the title of king in 1957. His mausoleum stands beside the Hassan Tower in Rabat, the capital.
Hassan II and Mohammed VI, Kings Since Independence
Hassan II (1929–1999), born in Rabat, ruled from 1961 until his death in 1999. He survived two coup attempts, at Skhirat in 1971 and by the air force in 1972, recovered the Spanish enclave of Ifni in 1969, and in 1975 organised the Green March, a mass civilian march into the former Spanish Sahara. The status of that territory, Western Sahara, remains disputed: Morocco, which claims the whole territory, administers about 70% of it, while the Polisario Front, which claims it for the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, controls the remainder; the UN recognises the Polisario as the representative of the Sahrawi people, and the territory's final status is unresolved.
Mohammed VI (born 1963) has reigned since 1999. In February 2004 he enacted a new family code, the Mudawana, which gave women greater rights in marriage and divorce, and he set up the Equity and Reconciliation Commission to examine abuses under his father. After the protests of 2011 a new constitution was approved by referendum on 1 July that year, and it made Amazigh (Berber) an official language alongside Arabic.
Ibn Battuta and the Writers Who Took Morocco Abroad
Ibn Battuta (1304–1368/69) was born in Tangier into a family of Islamic judges. He left on pilgrimage in 1325 and did not come home for good until 1354, by which time he had crossed much of Africa, Asia and the Iberian Peninsula. His account, known as the Rihla, puts his total distance at around 117,000 km, more than any other pre-modern traveller, compared with about 24,000 km for Marco Polo.
In modern literature, Moroccans have made the biggest mark in French. Tahar Ben Jelloun (born 1944) grew up in Fez and studied philosophy in Rabat; in 1987 his novel La Nuit sacrée made him the first author from the Maghreb to win the Prix Goncourt. Leïla Slimani (born 1981), born in Rabat, won the same prize in 2016 for Chanson douce, published in English as Lullaby, and holds French as well as Moroccan nationality. Fatema Mernissi (1940–2015), also from Fez, grew up in her grandmother's household of women and turned that world into scholarship; her 1975 book Beyond the Veil became a standard text on gender in Muslim societies.
Science and comedy have their own emigrants. Rachid Yazami (born 1953) showed in 1980 that lithium could be reversibly stored in graphite, work that led to the graphite anode of the lithium-ion battery, and in 2014 he shared the Draper Prize with John Goodenough, Yoshio Nishi and Akira Yoshino. Gad Elmaleh (born 1971), from a Sephardic Jewish family in Casablanca, left for Montreal at 17, moved to Paris to study drama in 1992 and built a stand-up career that has made him known in France, Morocco and the United States.
From Los Angeles 1984 to Qatar 2022: Athletes of Morocco
Morocco's first Olympic golds both came at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. Nawal El Moutawakel (born 1962), from Casablanca, won the first women's 400 m hurdles ever held at the Olympics and became the first woman from Morocco, the Arab world or Africa to win Olympic gold; King Hassan II declared that girls born on the day of her victory should be named after her. Saïd Aouita (born 1959), from Kenitra, won the 5,000 m and later set world records at distances from 1,500 m to 5,000 m.
Hicham El Guerrouj (born 1974) was born in Berkane, near the Algerian border. In Rome in 1998 he ran 1,500 m in 3:26.00, a world record that still stands, and in 1999, also in Rome, he ran the mile in 3:43.13, a record that lasted 27 years. At the Athens Olympics in 2004 he won both the 1,500 m and the 5,000 m, the first man to do so at one Games since Paavo Nurmi in 1924. The steeplechaser Soufiane El Bakkali (born 1996) has since won Olympic gold in Tokyo in 2021 and Paris in 2024.
In football, Morocco's diaspora shaped its best World Cup result. The coach Walid Regragui (born 1975), born in Corbeil-Essonnes, France, and the full-back Achraf Hakimi (born 1998), now the team's captain, born in Madrid to parents from Oued Zem and Ksar el-Kebir, both chose to play for Morocco. At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar they led the team to the semi-finals, the first side from Africa or the Arab world to reach that stage. That link between Moroccans at home and abroad runs back through the whole list, and our guide to the medina of Fez shows the city that gave the country so many of them.