Thami Al-Glaoui: Morocco’s Greatest Pasha

Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli examines the life and deeds of Thami al-Glaoui (1879-1956), and the multiple ways in which his story has been told. She investigates his biography as a creation continuing beyond the demise of its protagonist, asserting a conflation of history, story and storytelling. The book also reconfigures the story of major events and processes in modern Moroccan history and historiography.

Thami al-Glaoui, leader of the Amazigh Glaoua tribe and Pasha of Marrakesh throughout Morocco’s colonial era (1912-56), was the third most powerful person in Morocco, after the Sultan and the French Resident-General, by the 1930s. In 1953, he was a key supporter of the deportation of Sultan Mohamed V by the French. After recanting three years later, he was pardoned by the returning Sultan, but died shortly afterwards. In the four decades that followed, al-Glaoui became a synonym in Morocco for betrayal and corruption. In the 21st century, however, the ways in which he is told became more complex, and his reputation has been somewhat revised.

Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli is a lecturer at the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. She is the chair of the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy, and the chair of the BGU Fund for the research of North African Jewry. She is a co-founder of ’My Heart is in the West’, Bladna, and the ’Forum for the Study of Jews and Christians in Muslim Cultures’. Her research deals with the history of Moroccan Jewry and the historiography about them in Morocco and in its diasporas, memory, cultural production, inter-group, and inter-religion relationships. She currently focuses on communities in the Atlas, Anti-Atlas, and the Saharan oases. She also investigates colonialism, caïdalisme, labor history, and the Vichy period in Morocco.