Tahar Fennich, negotiator for Mehmed III

The Fennich family is the name of a prominent Andalusian Slaw family, known for their influence in the pirate city before entering the court of the Alawite Sultan. In the 17th century, residents of Salé encountered Abdelhaq Fennich, a powerful pasha who ruled the city from 1738 to 1757, who restored and fortified the coastal town. Sixteen years later, his son Tahar became commander of the Moroccan artillery and was appointed ambassador to Sultan Moulay Mohammed ibn Abdullah in London, the Netherlands, and France. Although his father was subsequently dismissed as pasha, Tahar Fennich also became the Sharif Kingdom’s negotiator for the treaty between Morocco and the United States in 1786.

In 1748, the future Mohammed III had just been appointed Caliph of Marrakesh by his father, Sultan Moulay Abdallah. This nomination would facilitate his ascension to the throne in 1757, nine years after his father’s death. Without any opposition, he became the eighteenth Sultan of the kingdom, after Moulay Rachid. As an itinerant king, he was one of the Alawite sultans who chose Rabat as the capital of the empire, but did not reside there permanently.

Morocco, a friendly country between the East and the West under Mohammed III

The most important hallmark of his reign was the good diplomatic relations he maintained with almost all the Eastern or Western powers, from the Ottoman Empire to the United States of America.

To this end, he deployed several ambassadors and consuls, especially in Europe, including Tahar Fennich, whom he sent first to England to see King George III in 1773 and then to the Netherlands to strengthen the Sharif Kingdom’s diplomatic and commercial relations with Europe before Abdulhak’s son returned to Morocco on mission to the Sultan’s court.

Portrait of Sultan Muhammad bin Abdullah. / Dr.

Four years later, Moulay Mohammed ibn Abdallah chose Tahar Finnic to represent him in a meeting with Louis XVI to tell the famous story of the “Castaways of the Louise”.

On the night of December 26-27, 1775, the merchant ship La Louise, coming from the port of Nantes, was wrecked near Cape Bojador. The captain and twenty crew members managed to reach the coast, but they were captured by the inhabitants of the country and sold into slavery several times,” Rabbi Said wrote in “French views on Moroccan envoys in the 17th and 18th centuries»(DEA thesis, University of Paris VIII, Vincennes-Saint-Denis, 2000).

France, through its chargé d’affaires in Morocco, Louis de Chenier, seized the sultan who had purchased the victims but refused to pay them back. “In exchange, he wanted the French king to give him Moorish slaves to serve on the galleys of Malta,” Rabih Saied reported, citing the book Embassies and Missions in France by Jacques Caillé.

A mission condemned by the French in Morocco and the Count of Sardinia

Taha Finnici’s visit to France even troubled the French consul in Morocco. On September 20, 1777, he wrote to Count Satin: “My Lord, I have no power to divert the attention of this embassy as I have successfully done on other occasions.”

Tahar Fennich went to Tangier and then left the port of this city by boat from Rouen on October 11, 1777, accompanied by an interpreter, French sailors and “six horses”, according to Said who quotes Jacques Caillet. Moulay’s ambassador, Mohammed ibn Abdallah, stopped in Gibraltar and then arrived in Marseilles on November 1, then in Paris on January 10, 1778. But he was intercepted by the Count of Satin, as Pierre Grillon reports in his article “Letters of Louis Chenier, French Consul General in Morocco (1767-1782), Chargé d’Affaires», published in the Review of Modern and Contemporary History (1963).

Image source: DR

Negotiator of the Marrakesh Treaty between the Kingdom and the United States

On January 22, 1778, Tahar Fennich was received in a solemn audience by King Louis XVI. On this occasion, before leaving France earlier than planned, he gave him a letter from Sidi Mohammed ibn Abdallah dated September 4, 1777. He left Paris at the end of February 1778 and sailed on the royal frigate Gracieuse in Toulon on March 16. He arrived in Tangier on March 26.

But since Louis XVI was unwilling to follow up on the Sultan’s letters, especially on the exchange of Frenchmen for Moroccan prisoners, he sent another diplomat to France in 1781. This was Raïs Ali Pérez, who was sent to France in February 1781.

But if Tahar Fenech’s mission in France does not succeed, he will return to the court of Mohammed bin Abdullah, where he will prove his effectiveness. He will therefore be responsible, together with Thomas Barclay, the American consul in Paris, for negotiating a treaty between Morocco and the United States on the basis of the project drawn up by the commissioners.

“Barclays and the Moroccans will soon agree on a Treaty of Friendship, also known as the Marrakesh Treaty. It will be sealed by the Sultan on June 23 and delivered to Barclays on June 28,” the U.S. Embassy in Morocco said in a statement on the Morocco-United States relations. “The treaty would be signed by Thomas Jefferson in Paris on January 1, 1787, by John Adams in London on January 25, 1787, and then ratified by the United States Congress on July 18, 1787.”

The treaty, negotiated by Tahar Finiqi, will mark the beginning of diplomatic relations between the two countries and will even be the first treaty signed by the young country with an Arab, Muslim and African country.