What is the Alaouite dynasty, the current royal family?

The Alaouite dynasty is the living spine of Moroccan history, because unlike the great dynasties of the past it never ended — it still rules the country today. The Alaouites came to power in Morocco in the mid-seventeenth century, around the 1660s, when an earlier dynasty was collapsing into disorder. They take their name and much of their legitimacy from their claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad, through his grandson, which gives the royal family the status of 'sharifian,' a sacred lineage that has long been central to authority in Morocco.

Their early greatness is bound up with the sultan I most often discuss with guests, Moulay Ismail, who reigned from 1672 to 1727 and forged a fractured country into a single, centralised state from his monumental capital at Meknes. He was the second Alaouite ruler, and his long, formidable reign set the dynasty firmly in place. Over the centuries that followed, the Alaouites weathered enormous pressures — European encroachment, the French and Spanish protectorates of the twentieth century — and remarkably emerged from the colonial era still on the throne when Morocco regained independence in 1956.

That continuity is genuinely rare on the world stage. Most monarchies that old have long since fallen; the Alaouites have reigned for over 350 years and counting. The line runs from those early sultans through Mohammed V, the revered king who became a symbol of independence; to Hassan II, who ruled for much of the later twentieth century and organised the Green March; to the current monarch, Mohammed VI, who succeeded his father in 1999. The portraits of the king you see everywhere are the face of this very dynasty.

For travellers, understanding the Alaouites ties the whole country together. The Saadians before them built the tombs in Marrakech; the Alaouites built and rebuilt across Meknes, Rabat, Fes, and beyond, and they govern still. When you grasp that the family ruling Morocco today is the direct heir of Moulay Ismail's seventeenth-century state, the monarchy stops being an abstraction and becomes the through-line of everything — the history, the architecture, and the national identity you encounter on every day of your trip.