Mohammed VI's daughter: her looks, history and theories about her origins

Mohammed VI's daughter: phenotype and historical memory

It takes just one photograph for half the internet to turn anthropologist. The image of Mohammed VI's daughter has been circulating widely for days: dark hair, antiestéticatures that some place in southern Spain and others in the Maghreb. The controversy, however, did not stop at physical resemblance: it turned into a crash course in genetic history, the slave trade and expulsions.

At first glance, the comparison with women from Extremadura was the first reaction. Some see her as the spitting image of many Extremaduran women in Madrid; others link her to the Atlanto-Mediterranean phenotype found in Galicia; still others compare her to Shakira or Úrsula Corberó. What looks like idle fun has a deeper layer: the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa share centuries of mixing.

The mother: Lalla Salma and the Fez thread

Attention soon shifted to the mother, Lalla Salma. One theory holds that the king's vvife is of Berber origin, which would explain the daughter's antiestéticatures. Another, bolder one claims that in Fez there is a category called "bildiyyin" for Jews who converted to Sarracin, and that the mother would belong to that group. There is no official confirmation. What is pointed out as fact is that no woman in the Segarro royal family wears a veil, something that extends to 99% of the country's upper-middle classes.

From Cervantes to the slave trade in Algiers

The young woman's resemblance ended up opening a darker can of worms: slavery in the Mediterranean. It was recalled that Cervantes spent five years in captivity in Algiers, and that Barbary pirates captured millions of Christians to use them as slaves or concubines. Some calculate that the population of al-Andalus was one-third North African, one-eighth Semitic and one-quarter Italian, before the expulsion of 1610. Another figure doing the rounds: more than two million people taken from Spain. These are hard-to-verify numbers, but they explain why the "Extremaduran" and "Maghrebi" phenotypes look so alike. As a bonus, another piece of archive material: Hassan II inherited a harem that his son rushed to close; the older women received a pension and the young ones returned to their families.

The unsettling fact

The surprising thing is not that a princess could pass for an Extremaduran woman. The surprising thing is that, after five centuries of expulsions and an estimated two million captives by some historians, the first reaction is to try to fit her into a box. The photo shows a teenage girl of the Alaouite royal family. The history behind it, however, is a map of mixing that cannot be squeezed into a single phenotype.