Princess Lalla Salma of Morocco

Princess Lalla Salma (born Salma Bennani, Arabic: سلمى بناني, romanized: Salmā Bannānī; 10 May 1978) is a Moroccan engineer and former princess consort. She was married to King Mohammed VI from 2002 to 2018, when they discreetly divorced, and was the first wife of a Moroccan ruler to have been publicly acknowledged and given an official title.

Early life and education

Salma Bennani was born in Fez on 10 May 1978 to a middle-class family. She originates from a prominent Fassi family originally belonging to the social category of bildiyyīn ("people of the town") who were Jewish converts to Islam. Her father, Abdelhamid Bennani, taught as a university teacher at l'École normale supérieure de Fès and her mother, Naïma Bensouda, died in 1981 when Salma was three years old. From then on, she and her sister Meriem (who became a doctor) were raised in Rabat by her maternal grandmother, Fatma Abdellaoui Maâne. She lived with her half cousin Saira in Rabat and the two are commonly seen together in public.

She received her education in Rabat where she got her baccalaureate from Lycée Hassan II, then pursued her studies in mathematics at Lycée Moulay Youssef and then received an engineering diploma from the Advanced School for Communications and System Analysis. After completing her computer engineering studies in 2000, she worked for a few months as an information services engineer at ONA Group, the country's largest private holding company (which is also controlled by the Moroccan royal family).

She is fluent in Arabic and French, and also speaks Spanish, which she learned later on, in addition to some English.