Ceuta, Tangier and El Jadida: Muslim cities “interrupted”

Abstract

Colonial history in Atlantic Northern Africa, which corresponds today to the Kingdom of Morocco, has introduced decisive urban factors. Ceuta, Tangier and El Jadida present three different case studies of how the urban morphology has been conducted by the political changes. This paper wishes to analyze the urban strata of these cities in order to point out traces of continuity and rupture between Muslim and Christian rule. Ceuta, once an important Muslim commercial city during medieval times, suffered a process of downsizing when the Portuguese conquered it in 1415, due to sustainability issues. The course of the city was confined to those limits for more than two centuries, when the Spanish took over in 1640. After resisting Muley Ismail long siege, Ceuta began to expand beyond its walls, in a process that reoccupied the ancient Islamic domains. Tangier offers a typical case of interruption of the Muslim rule over the city. Held by the Portuguese between 1471 and 1661, it suffered a radical reduction of its perimeter and a redirection towards the port. This fortified shape was maintained by the brief British occupation and present day medina retrains itself to that boundary, although recent population boom has pushed the urban assemblage way beyond. Finally, El Jadida allows us to go back to a non-Muslim origin. Its name - the new - reflects the political situation since the 19th Muslim occupation over a Portuguese foundation of the mid 500s, subverting the orthogonality of the original grid layout within a modern bastioned contour. Three different urban processes where the Muslim stratum, either present, interrupted or suspended, has been the longest. This paper relies on both historical cartography and new drawn proposition to present this parallel evolution.