Background
Early origins
The first settlement of this area was probably outside the present city walls, on the site of the later Merinid mausoleum of Chellah. There may have been Phoenician and Carthaginian settlement, but it is with the Roman Sala Colonia that Rabat’s proven urban history began. Awarded municipal privileges, Sala Colonia was the most southwesterly town of the Roman Empire for two centuries, a trading post on the Oued Bou Regreg (which has since changed course), and a defensive settlement close to the line of frontier outposts, which ran through the suburbs to the south of the present city.
Sala Colonia came under Amazigh rule from the eighth to the 10th century. However, the heretic Kharajite beliefs of the Imazighen represented a challenge to the orthodoxy of the inland Muslims. In the 10th century the Zenata tribe built a fortified monastery, or ribat, on the site of the current Kasbah des Oudaïas. This functioned as a base from which to challenge the heretics on both sides of the river, and their supporters, the powerful Berghouata tribe. Sala Colonia was thus eventually abandoned.
Rabat under the Almohads
The ribat was used by the Almoravid Dynasty, but it was the Almohad Sultan Abd al Mumin who redeveloped the settlement in 1150, transforming it into a permanent fortress town with palaces, the main mosque which still stands, reservoirs, and houses for followers, and using it as an assembly point for the large Almohad army. However, it was his grandson Yacoub al Mansour who dreamed of making Rabat one of the great imperial capitals and who from 1184 carried out the most ambitious programme of development. He ordered an enormous city, surrounded by walls, to be built. These walls were probably completed by 1197, and ran along two sides of the city, broken by four gates, most notably the Bab er Rouah. A grid of streets, residential quarters, a covered market, public baths, hotels, workshops and fountains were built, along with a new gateway to the médina. A bridge to Salé, and its Grand Mosque, were also constructed. The most impressive monument from this period, the Hassan Mosque, was never completed however. Projected as the largest mosque in western Islam, little more than pillars remain. The vast minaret never reached its full height and remains a stubby tower. On Yacoub al Mansour’s death in 1199 works were abandoned and Rabat then fell into decline. Parts of the city were destroyed in fighting between the Almohads and Merinids, to the point that Leo Africanus, visiting in 1500, found few inhabited neighbourhoods and very few shops. As Rabat declined under the Merinids, Salé prospered. The dynasty’s most noteworthy contribution to Rabat was the funeral quarter on the Chellah site, with its impressive mausoleums, but even that eventually fell into neglect. It is impossible to know today to what extent the area within the Almohad walls – basically the core of the ville nouvelle – was actually built up.
Piracy and Andalucíans
Rabat’s fortunes revived in the 17th century. As maritime technology advanced and the Atlantic Ocean became important to international trade, corsairing, or piracy, boomed. For a time Rabat was the centre, with the notorious ‘Sallee Rovers’ more likely to have been based here than in present day Salé. (Robinson Crusoe was a fictional captive of ‘a Turkish rover of Sallee’.)
Rabat also benefited from the flow of Muslims leaving Spain during the Inquisition. First rejected by Salé, the Hornacheros settled in the Rabat kasbah in 1609, and the other Andalucíans in the Rabat médina in 1610. The médina they settled in was considerably smaller than the city Yacoub al Mansour had envisaged, as indicated by the 17th-century rampart, which, when built, demarcated the extent of the settlement, and now runs between the médina and the ville nouvelle. The area beyond this rampart was used for farming, and most of it remained undeveloped until the French arrived. In the médina, the Andalucían influence is visible, notably in the street plan.
Fierce rivalry existed between the Hornachero and the Andalucían communities, both setting up autonomous city-states and the period between 1610 and 1666 was marked by intermittent strife between the three towns of the Bou Regreg estuary (Rabat, Salé and the Kasbah des Oudaïas). In 1627 the three were united under the control of the Hornacheros as the Republic of the Bou Regreg, a control against which the Andalucíans frequently rebelled, most notably in 1636. The Republic lost its independence in 1638. In 1641 the three cities were again united, and in 1666 when Moulay Rachid captured the estuary they came under the authority of the Alaouite Sultanate.
The principal background to these conflicts was the struggle for control over the profits from piracy. Rabat was especially popular with corsairs, many of whom had Mediterranean origins, because, unlike several other ports, it had not been occupied by Europeans.
Alaouite Rabat
Under the Alaouites, Rabat changed considerably. Trade and piracy were taken over as official functions, the profits going to the sultanate. The port declined, being replaced by Mogador (Essaouira) in the 18th century. Moulay Rachid took over the kasbah, expelling its residents and built the Qishla fortification to overlook and control the médina. However, Sultan Moulay Ismaïl, most closely associated with Meknès, ignored Rabat, and broke the power of the corsairs.
In the late 1760s, Mohammed Ibn Abdallah had a palace built in Rabat, and since then the Alaouite sultans have maintained a palace there, making the city one of their capitals. Increased trade with Europe in the 19th century temporarily revitalized Rabat’s role as a port, but it was gradually supplanted, perhaps because of the shallow mouth of the Bou Regreg and the poor harbour facilities but also because newer towns and cities, notably Casablanca, were more easily controlled by Europeans. In 1832 the rebellious Oudaïa tribe were settled in the abandoned kasbah, giving it its current name. The kasbah continued to be administered separately from the médina until the 20th century.
Modern Rabat, experiment in urban planning
In 1912, after complex diplomatic and military manoeuvrings, Morocco was split into two protectorates, with a large French central region and small Spanish zones in the North and the Sahara. Whereas the Moroccan sultanate had had no fixed capital, the power centre being where the sultan happened to be, the French decided that a capital was necessary for the new protectorate and Rabat was chosen in 1913. The first Resident-General, Hubert Lyautey, with his architect Henri Prost, planned and built the majority of the new capital, the ville nouvelle, both within and outside Yacoub al Mansour’s walls, leaving the médina much as they found it, although the main thoroughfares were paved.
Efficiency and beauty were Lyautey’s watchwords as he supervised the creation of the new Rabat. The European neighbourhoods were initally laid out in an area between the médina, to the northwest, and the mechouar or sultan’s palace complex, to the southeast. A system of parks and gardens was created. The tree-lined street between médina and the ville nouvelle, today’s Boulevard Hassan II, becoming a meeting place for Muslim and foreign communities, with municipal markets, bus and taxi stations and cafés.
The French planning of the new town reveals some interesting political undertones. It would have been possible, given the freedom that Lyautey had, to build the Residency General at a focal point on a new avenue, rather like Lutyens’ House of the Viceroy in New Delhi. However, the new administrative buildings were built in a special area, close to the palace. With its luxuriant gardens, the Ministères neighbourhood recalls Anglo-American garden cities. The buildings, despite their importance to French rule, had simple whitewashed walls and green-tiled roofs and were linked by pergola walkways. They were kept unmonumental in scale (even the entrance to the Residency General had no obvious feature), hidden in vegetation. The French used such architectural devices to emphasize local culture, keeping the seats of power hidden in a mini garden suburb. More recent buildings, such as the new Ministry of Foreign Affairs, clash radically with this original principal. It remains to be seen how the Résidence, until recently used as offices by the Ministry of Defence, will be refurbished as a Museum of Civilizations. Hopefully little of the gardens will be lost under concrete. In short, in colonial Rabat, monumental buildings were only rarely used as a symbol of power. Today’s Parliament Building, on the Avenue Mohammed V, is the exception, starting life as the Palais de Justice. Strongly symmetrical, with a massive colonnade, the building was probably designed to symbolize the equity and reason of French justice. Today, it is the centre of Moroccan political life.
After independence, Rabat continued to expand, its population swelled by the large number of civil servants required for the newly independent kingdom. Rabat’s economy today is primarily based on its role as Morocco’s administrative capital, with massive numbers of its inhabitants on the government payroll. The city has attracted large numbers of migrants from the countryside, and the formal housing market has been unable to keep up with the demand for accommodation, leading to the development of new self-built neighbourhoods like Douar Eddoum and Takaddoum. Rabat in many ways is a city of extremes, with streets of fine villas lying a stone’s throw away from crowded slums (bidonvilles). South towards Casablanca, the new planned residential area of Hay Ryad is larger than the whole colonial city centre, while at Madinat el Irfane (‘City of Knowledge’), Rabat has the country’s largest concentration of faculties and university institutes. Neither Almohad sultans nor Lyautey could have imagined that a city could grow so fast in just a couple of decades.
Project Bouregreg, slated for completion in 2010, is a major development including a new bridge across the river, a tram connecting Rabat and Salé, a marina and an Atlantic port. Whether it will do enough to ensure that the city keeps up with the pace of change, remains to be seen.
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