While the United Nations has adopted the term «Islamophobia» to describe racism based on religious affiliation with Islam, the label is often rejected in France, where Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau views it as carrying Islamist or even Muslim Brotherhood connotations. Yet the term's origins date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rooted more in ethnology than in political ideology.
Before the French ever arrived with guns and flags, Morocco was already collapsing from within. In a forgotten memoir written in exile, Sultan Moulay Abdelhafid—the last independent monarch before the French protectorate—delivers a scathing posthumous reckoning, blaming the fall not on colonial conquest, but on corruption, betrayal, and the slow death of a state rotting from the inside.