Flag of Morocco

How to read it

Article 4 of the Constitution of 2011 says the emblem of the State is the red flag with a green five-pointed star at its centre. The details are in Dahir No. 1-05-99 of 23 November 2005 on the emblem of the Kingdom and the national anthem. The flag is bright red. The star is open, palm green, made of five branches drawn in one continuous line and woven into the cloth so that it shows on both sides, with one point upwards. The height is two thirds of the length. The star sits in an invisible circle whose radius is a sixth of the flag’s length, centred where the diagonals cross, and each branch is a twentieth as wide as it is long. The 2005 dahir repealed and replaced the dahir of 17 November 1915 (9 Muharram 1334), which had added the star.

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The seal of Solomon in the 1915 dahir

Sultan Moulay Youssef’s dahir of 17 November 1915, published in the Bulletin officiel as the description of the new flag, gave the reason for the change. In its Arabic text, as Hespress quotes it, the flag of the sultan’s ancestors looked like other flags, especially those used for signals at sea, so the flag was to be told apart by placing the five-pointed Solomonic seal in green at its centre. The historian Abdallah al-Jirari wrote that until then the Moroccan flag had been pure red.

The dahir was issued under the French protectorate, and Moroccans disagree about whose idea it was. In 2014 the researcher Ahmed Assid attributed the flag to the French Resident-General, Hubert Lyautey; the historian Mohamed Dakkouj told Hespress that the claim had no historical basis.

What the star is said to stand for

No Moroccan law gives the star a meaning. The Brooklyn Museum’s guide to African flags calls it the “Seal of Solomon” and reads it as the five pillars of Islam, with the red standing for power, courage and bravery.