Arab, Moroccan

Moroccan Arabs are the Arabic-speaking majority of Morocco, about 25 million people who speak Darija, a Maghrebi Arabic full of Amazigh, French and Spanish words that speakers of eastern Arabic struggle to follow. They descend from Arab tribes who came with the Islamic conquest and the Banu Hilal and Maqil migrations, and from Amazigh and Andalusian families who took up Arabic over the centuries, so that many have Amazigh grandparents. They fill the Atlantic plains and the great cities, from Casablanca and Rabat to Fès and Marrakech, and share a culture of couscous on Fridays, mint tea, medina life and saints' festivals with every other Moroccan. Sunni Islam of the Maliki school, led by the king as Commander of the Faithful, shapes public life, and leaving it brings family rejection.

Moroccans in Algeria, roughly 10,000 to 20,000 people, are mostly families who settled in the west of the country generations ago, plus young Moroccan workers who cross the closed border to work. Western Algeria and eastern Morocco share kin, dialect and Sufi orders across a border closed since 1994, and many Moroccan families had lived in Algeria for decades or longer. In December 1975, on the first day of the Feast of the Sacrifice, Algeria expelled tens of thousands of Moroccans after Morocco's Green March into Western Sahara, splitting families that are still pressing for redress; those who stayed, such as the more than 1,200 Moroccan families of Ain Turk near Oran, still hold Moroccan papers and many have sought Algerian nationality for decades without success. They speak Moroccan Arabic close to the Oran dialect and share their neighbours' Maliki Sunni Islam.

Moroccans in Egypt are a community of about 9,000 to 10,000, and almost all of them are women married to Egyptian men, raising Egyptian children in Cairo households. Their own association, the League of the Moroccan Community Residing in Egypt, says nearly all its members are such wives, and it campaigns against unregistered 'urfi' marriages, which leave many Moroccan women without rights to support, inheritance or their children's papers when a marriage ends. At home they keep Moroccan Darija, couscous and mint tea, while their husbands' families and the street speak Egyptian Arabic. Their Maliki Islam with its Sufi lodges sits easily in Egypt, where Moroccan pilgrims, scholars and saints such as Ahmad al-Badawi of Tanta, born in Fez, settled for centuries, though Moroccan women also face an Egyptian stereotype that links them with magic.

Moroccans in Qatar are a community of hotel and hospitality staff, engineers, teachers, health workers, bankers and media professionals, recruited since the 2000s through government agreements that promised far more jobs than materialised; many are women working in hotels and services. They speak Moroccan Arabic (Darija) and French, which sets them apart from the Gulf and Levantine Arabs around them, and follow the Maliki school of Sunni Islam. In Ramadan families keep Moroccan customs, breaking the fast with harira soup, honey-soaked chebakia and sellou, reciting the Qur'an together in the Hizb Ratib tradition and holding shared iftars across Doha.

Moroccans are a community of about 49,000 in Saudi Arabia, served by an embassy in Riyadh and a consulate general in Jeddah. Many are women in domestic and service work, alongside teachers, imams and Quran reciters, engineers, health workers and traders; the domestic workers have long reported withheld passports and lost wages, and a community association has campaigned for those jailed after disputes with employers. They speak Darija, a Maghrebi Arabic that Saudis find hard to follow, and a quarter or so are Amazigh (Berbers), Shilha of the Souss, Riffians and Middle Atlas Imazighen, who speak Tashelhit, Tarifit or Central Atlas Tamazight at home. Their Maliki Sunni Islam, with its Sufi lodges and saint festivals, differs from the Hanbali practice around them, though Moroccan scholars have taught in Mecca and Medina for a thousand years.

Moroccans in Tunisia number roughly 3,500 to 5,500, a small and mostly working-class community centred on Greater Tunis. Many came in the 1990s, when Tunisia's tourism boom drew poor Moroccans looking for work as guards, handymen and tradesmen, and stayed to raise families; a large share today are the Moroccan spouses of Tunisians. Their meeting place is the Mabarrat Mohammed V in Tunis's Montfleury district, a charitable house founded in 1956 when King Mohammed V visited newly independent Tunisia, with a hall, lecture rooms and a mosque. They speak Moroccan Arabic alongside Tunisian Arabic and are Sunni Muslims of the Maliki school, the same school as their Tunisian neighbours.

Moroccans in Türkiye number about 22,000, most of them in Istanbul, with students in Ankara, Gaziantep, Adana and other university cities. Most are young people who came in the 2010s to study or work, many at first on one-year tourist residence permits that Türkiye stopped renewing in 2020. They are one of the best organised Arab communities in the country: the Morocco Foundation in Turkey, launched in Istanbul in 2022, honours top students and holds Ramadan iftars, and after 19 Moroccans died in the 2023 earthquakes the community raised a million lira for the survivors. They speak Moroccan Arabic (Darija), some also Berber, and are Sunni Muslims of the Maliki school.

Moroccans are one of the largest North African communities in the United Arab Emirates, roughly 70,000 people, about two-thirds of them in Dubai. Most are young and arrived with Dubai's boom in tourism, hotels and services, coming from Casablanca, Rabat, Fez, Marrakech and the north, and an unusually large share are women working on their own in hospitality, beauty, retail, hospitals and offices; Morocco also seconds several hundred police officers to Abu Dhabi. Moroccan restaurants serving tagines, Friday couscous and mint tea are a fixture of Dubai, and a volunteer network called Moroccans in the Emirates gathers the community for a yearly Ramadan iftar, a football league and blood drives. They are Sunni Muslims of the Maliki school, and Moroccan women in the Gulf live with a persistent stereotype that questions their morals.

Moroccans from the north of the kingdom and their children make up roughly two thirds of the people living in Western Sahara today, almost all of them in the towns of Laayoune, Dakhla, Boujdour and Smara. They began arriving with the Green March of 1975 and kept coming as civil servants, soldiers' families, traders and fishery workers, drawn by higher public pay, subsidised food and fuel, and jobs in the octopus and sardine industries. Their Moroccan Arabic (Darija) is now the everyday language of the territory's towns, used by more than four in five residents, while a sizeable minority of families from the Souss and the Anti-Atlas also speak Tashelhit Berber. Morocco regards them as citizens living in its Southern Provinces; the Polisario Front and many Sahrawis regard them as settlers, and tension between the two communities has broken out in street clashes, as in Dakhla in 2011.