Sixteenth-century Morocco was a major power, not the weak outpost later historians described

Evidence

Many eminent historians ascribe only a marginal role to Morocco in the history of the Islamic world at this period. Bernard Lewis (1982, 118), for example, gave the following evaluation: “In the world of Islam Morocco, in Arabic called al-Maghribal-Aqsa, the Far West, was a remote and isolated outpost and a comparatively small and weak country at that.” Remote it certainly was from the power centers of the Middle East, but small and weak was not how the English queen or the Dutch stadhouder perceived this giant of the Islamic West. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1594

Categorization

• XREF: Corrects a common Eurocentric/Middle-East-centered framing of Moroccan power — connects to broader debates about how Ottoman-adjacent peripheries get dismissed in Islamic historiography.