88 Michiel de Ruyter in Iligh

Michiel de Ruyter has written in his diaries about his visits to Iligh and his meetings with the ‘Sant’. But until now there are no documents found written by people in Iligh about his visits. Of course Iligh was destroyed a few decennia later. The strange thing is that there isn’t a memory either among the family Aboudmiaa of a Dutch trader selling them modern weaponry. Maybe the sounds of the name were just too foreign: El Soussie who wrote about Iligh in the nineteen fifties did mention him and gave him an unrecognizably scrambled name. Bert Hogervorst hasn’t figured out yet how he came by his information: from the biography of De Ruyter or by documents he got from the Aboudmiaa family and reportedly never gave back? Thinking about De Ruyter in Iligh I can see that the set up might be different from what he was used too, but I’m sure De Ruyter also saw similarities between Iligh and the Dutch Republic. Iligh was small but was making a name for itself in international trade in particular across the Sahara. It had mighty enemies that were eager to destroy it. It was wealthy and it had a liberal attitude towards others. Jews in particular had found refuge there. Not Jews from the Iberian Peninsula as in the Republic but Jews from nearby Ifrane. And as in the Low Countries the Jews had brought prosperity because of their connections. It was ‘The Golden Age’ in the Republic but the same can be said about Morocco. In the seventeenth century there wasn’t such a big difference between the standard of living and the level of development in Europe and the Islamic world. That only came to be in the nineteenth century with the industrial revolution in Europe.