To celebrate the release of Queens of Islam: The Muslim World’s Historic Women Rulers by Tom Verde, we have a guest post from Tom Verde about Sayidda al-Hurra, who is featured in the book.
Sayidda al-Hurra, sixteenth-century ruler of Morocco’s coastal city-state of Tétouan, was a woman of many identities. A “pirate queen” to some, she was a “noble, independent lady” (a lose translation of her name/title) to others, one of the many “eloquent, strong and witty Andalusian-Moroccan” heroines who populate the nation’s history and folklore said Hasna Lebbady, author of Feminist Traditions in Andalusi-Moroccan Oral Narratives.
Sayidda’s story began with the expulsion of her family and fellow countrymen from Granada in Andalusia (southern Spain) by the forces of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile in 1492. The event signalled the end of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula after seven centuries of struggle between the Moors (Spanish/North African Muslims) and the Christian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. Ultimately, thousands of Andalusian Muslims and Jews fled to major North African Islamic urban centres, such as Fez, Oran, Tunis, and Tétouan.
Among the refugees was the tribal chief Moulay Ali Ibn Rashid and his family, including his daughter, the future Sayidda al-Hurra, who was born sometime between 1485 and 1495 and whose probable birth name was Aisha. The family settled in the Rif Mountains southeast of Tangier, where Ali became emir of the city-state of Chefchaouen.
As a girl, Aisha received a first-class education, surpassing that of the men at court. She excelled in languages, including Castilian and Portuguese, as well as theology. Among her teachers was the famed Moroccan scholar, Abdallah al-Ghazwani (d. 1529), whose father, the equally celebrated shaykh Oudjal, supposedly once put his hand to Aisha’s head and declared, “This girl will rise high in rank.”
Whether by divinely-inspired edict or political practicality, Aisha took her first steps towards fulfilling Oudjal’s prediction in 1510 by marrying al-Mandari, governor of Tétouan. Roughly 35 miles north of Chefchaouen, the city was Morocco’s major entrepot, with goods from the interior and beyond flowing through its port. The town was also a tactical base for staging maritime raids against the northern port of Ceuta, which at various times was held by rival Muslim and Christian (Portuguese) powers.
There is disagreement over which al-Mandari Aisha married: the much older Abu al-Hassan or a younger member of the family, Mohammad al-Mandari. In either case, her education, strength of character, and presence of mind established her as a political leader, independent of male supervision, instruction, or approval.
“She was trusted by her male relatives,” Lebbady said. “She knew what needed to be done under different circumstances, and these are the kinds of qualities that would have made her a leader.”
With Aisha as co-regent of Tétouan, and the appointment of her brother Moulay Ibrahim as vizier to Ahmed al-Wattasi, sultan of Fez, the Rashids were now major players in the effort to militarily and economically unify Morocco against the threatening colonial powers of Spain and Portugal.
With the death of her husband, sometime between 1515 and 1519, Aisha became Tétouan’s sole ruler under the formal title, Sayidda al-Hurra, Hakimat Titwan (Governor of Tétouan). Europeans wondered if Sayidda al-Hurra was her actual name since it appears in contemporary Spanish records as Sida el-Horra. What seems likely, however, is that, unaware of her given name, they confused it with her title. Nonetheless, as Sayidda al-Hurra, she effectively governed Tétouan for the next quarter-century, during which time “the city soon reached an unheard of level of prosperity,” as Spanish historian German Vasquez Chamorro wrote in his 2004 book, Mujeres Piratas (Women Pirates).
Much of this prosperity derived from attacks on Iberian ships laden with gold and other treasures. These raids helped cement Sayidda’s reputation in history as a “pirate queen,” embellished by her association with the most notorious of the so-called Barbary corsairs (pirates), Oruç Reis, known to the West as Barbarossa.
Joining forces and fleets, the two ruled the waters of the eastern and western Mediterranean, raiding towns, robbing ships, and selling Christian captives into slavery. Spanish sources from 1540 tell of attacks on Gibraltar and the loss of “much booty and many prisoners” for whom Sayidda negotiated ransom. The Portuguese, meanwhile, “prayed for God to allow them to see her hanged from a ship’s mast,” as Chamorro noted. Sébastien de Vargas, Portuguese envoy to the court of Fez at the time, seethingly characterised her as “a very aggressive and bad-tempered woman about everything.”
But whether or not Sayidda and Oruç were “pirates” really depended upon which end of the ship’s cannon you were facing.
“Piracy was rampant in the sixteenth century and by no means limited to the southern coast of the Mediterranean,” said Lebbady. “English pirates used to intercept the Spanish galleys coming back from the Americas, and what they took as booty was a major source of income for the government of Queen Elizabeth I.”
In contrast, during the time of Sayidda, Morocco did not have a navy and depended on privateers to defend the coast.
“Many of these privateers were Andalusis who settled in places like Salé and Tétouan. Under the command of Sayidda al-Hurra, they helped her to fend off the aggressive Iberians who were colonising Morocco and, at times, enslaving most of the population. So Sayidda al-Hurra was doing the same thing to the Iberians as they were doing to the Moroccans. I wouldn’t call her a pirate. To refer to her as a pirate is to put the blame on those who were defending their land from aggressive colonial powers.”
In truth, Sayidda probably never set foot on the deck of a privateer ship herself and only directed their raids from her palace in Tétouan. Skilful at politics, she gained the upper hand for her city, even if that meant striking deals with the Portuguese one day, and attacking them the next.
As her power grew, so did her reputation. In 1541, al-Wattasi, wishing to form an alliance, asked for her hand in marriage. She accepted, but refused to travel to Fez for the wedding, insisting it take place in Tétouan. It was the only time in history that a Moroccan sultan married outside the capital.
But her power was not to last. As is often the case, political intrigue led to her downfall. Her on-again/off-again diplomatic relations with the Portuguese government in Ceuta prompted its governor to cut off commercial ties with Tétouan, causing local merchants to grumble that Sayidda’s temper and pride were bad for business. Meanwhile, her son-in-law, Moulay Ahmed al-Hassan al-Mandari (Abu al-Hassan’s grandson), looking to establish his own rule, arrived in Tétouan in 1542 with an army and usurped his mother-in-law. Accepting her fate, she retired to Chefchaouen. There she founded a zawiya (a religious centre) where she lived out the rest of her life in piety until her death on July 14, 1561. She is said to be the last woman ruler in Islam to hold the title of “al-Hurra.”
Tom Verde is a freelance journalist, specialising in religion, culture, and history. This article was adapted from his new book Queens of Islam: The Muslim World’s Historic Women Rulers. This book is available now in the US and the UK.
An earlier version of this article appeared in the author’s “Malika” series, written for AramcoWorld magazine in 2016.
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