Tribe and Society in Rural Morocco

David M. Hart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135302610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mediorientale

An anthropological study of Berber society and particularly the Rifian tribes of Morocoo, a Muslim society. This book deals with the background of these tribes, their settlement in various areas and contemporary issues.

Part I

Tribalism and Berber Identity

Tribalism: The Backbone of the Moroccan Nation

One has often read statements, especially in the publications of political scientists and high-level journalists, to the effect that Morocco (or any other Third World nation) is a ‘developing country’. It is really impossible not to agree, in general terms, with this assertion, for it implies that not only, in certain spheres, is the country struggling to break with its past and to ‘modernise’ itself through socioeconomic change – which, particularly since 1970, has been galloping at an ever faster pace – but, equally and conversely, to retain, selectively, certain of those social institutions which have been central to the maintenance of its Islamic tradition throughout its history. But, with all due apologies to the political scientists and journalists in question, few of them have provided adequate descriptions or analyses of the so-called ‘zero point’ or ‘base level’ of ‘traditional’, and especially precolonial, Muslim society and culture in Morocco. Such description and analysis is properly the job of the sociocultural anthropologist, for any discussion of modern Morocco (or of any other emerging nation today, for that matter) can hardly be taken out of its historical and sociological contexts. What must be stressed is that such contexts are much more than mere ‘background material’. They are the contexts – and still in many important ways very much living contexts – out of which any and all social change must necessarily become manifest.

A great deal, too, has been written by anthropologists about social change in general, and it is not the purpose here to recapitulate any of their conclusions. Suffice it to say that a problem – indeed a headache – with which the governments of many recently independent countries have had to come to grips is that of tribalism, the existence within their national borders of substantial elements of their populations which are organised into tribes. The general tenor of the thinking of these governments about tribes is that they are an obsolete form of social grouping, that their existence is incompatible with the place of the country concerned in the modern world, and that tribalism is an impediment to ‘progress’. In short, tribalism has been viewed as a skeleton in many national closets, and therefore tribalism must go. Modern Morocco provides ample evidence for this generally prevailing trend of thought among the Afro-Asian elite, even though Moroccan tribalism, as shall be argued here, does not indeed constitute the barrier to modernisation which it may be believed to do in certain other new nations.

Although the situation has become considerably modified today, it is a central fact of Moroccan political sociology under colonialism that prior to 1912 (and again, with admittedly gross oversimplification, the pre-1912 years may be regarded, for present purposes, as the ‘zero point’ in question) and the establishment of protectorates (of unequal size) by France and Spain, the country was more or less divided up according to three basic axes: an Arab-Berber axis, an urban-tribal axis and, somewhat more tenuously, a makhzan-siba axis. While bearing in mind that this whole frame of reference happens to represent a colonialist viewpoint, it seems nonetheless pertinent to consider, briefly, each of these in turn.

The first axis, Arab-Berber, is essentially linguistic. Arabic is the national language of Morocco (and in the 1962 Constitution it became so officially), but it is only spoken as a native language by about 60 per cent of a total population of about 27.5 million (1996). Berber is another language (or cluster of closely related dialects) entirely, that or those of three different sets of tribal groups, which do not quite achieve the status of ethnic minorities: all of them (barring recent migrants to the cities) live in difficult, mountainous terrain, although only the two in the Atlas (Western High Atlas and Anti-Atlas in the Tashilhit case and Middle Atlas and Central High Atlas in the Tamazight one) are spatially contiguous, while that in the Rif (the Tharifith case) is territorially separate from both of them. ‘Berber’ and ‘tribalism’ are by no means completely coterminous, but they have nevertheless tended to become so in the minds of modern Moroccans. Berbers represent, in this sense, both the most autochthonous as well as, until very recently, the most change-resistant and conservative element of the population.

The second axis, urban-tribal (rather than merely urban-rural, because ‘rural’ and ‘tribal’ were virtually coterminous in Morocco before 1912), is a socioeconomic one. All the cities were Arabic-speaking, but the tribes were, roughly, half and half, with Arabic-speaking tribes tending to be nearer the urban centres (of which there was quite a network, the most important having been the traditional imperial capital cities of Fez, Meknes and Marrakesh) and Berber-speaking ones tending to be further removed from urban influences. From this it follows that tribal autarchy, loudly proclaimed by a number of earlier writers, is a fallacy, for all the tribes have not only always had economic relations with each other, but those nearby with the cities as well. The tribesman in town is a very old phenomenon indeed, no matter how much he may distrust city-dwellers.

The third axis, makhzan-siba, was primarily political. These terms need some contextual explanation, even though the concepts they stood for became badly overworked in French colonial sociology. The unifying thread throughout all of Morocco was religious: it was, and is, Sunni Islam of the Maliki rite (aside from a small and essentially urban Jewish minority). Ever since 808 CE, political power has been dynastic and centred in the Sultan (now King), a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, who was (and is) in theory the spiritual and temporal head of the whole Muslim community; while the present ‘Alawid dynasty, currently headed by King Hasan II, has held the throne since the mid-seventeenth century. The Sultan was surrounded with the usual appendages that one might expect, including, among other things, a large court with numerous ministers in which a strong division of labour and a high degree of protocol were prominent, as well as a standing army which also served as a tax-collecting force. As the Sultan, in order to keep the peace in his domain, had to be on the move continuously, crossing tribal territory (indeed, often several different tribal territories) in order to get from one urban centre to another, the court and the army moved with him. All the urban centres, and the majority of the tribal lands surrounding them, were entirely under government control, and therefore became known as bilad al-makhzan, or ‘government land’; and the inhabitants of the bilad al-makhzan did not fail to pay their taxes to the Sultan when called upon to do so.

In actual fact the lands that fell fully into the bilad al-makhzan category covered not much more than the Atlantic coastal plain and adjacent plains regions of Morocco, considerably less than half the total surface area of the country. Most of the rest of the country is either mountains or desert, and with some notable exceptions most of this was bilad al-siba (‘land of abandonment’, ‘land of dissidence’). This was purely tribal land, most of it Berber in speech, in which, so the colonialists’ sociological argument ran, the Sultan was acknowledged as spiritual head of the country only, and in which, despite numerous punitive expeditions (especially under some of the more vigorous Sultans, such as Mawlay Isma’il (1672–1727) or Mawlay al-Hasan I (1873–1894)) when they were undertaken almost on an annual basis, taxes were seldom if ever paid.

In other words, it may be inferred that the difference between makhzan and siba was in essence one of payment or non-payment of taxes. The dichotomy between makhzan and siba was considered by the French to have been the linchpin of the Moroccan political system prior to the protectorate, for the divide-and-rule assumptions which they made about it were one of the mainstays of their colonial ideology; but it has also, in the work of one Moroccan writer after independence, been presented as a kind of optional ‘social contract’ situation: one could opt to be within the pale or beyond it, a view which is both challenging and challengeable (cf. Lahbabi 1958).

Let us now consider the Moroccan tribes themselves. We have already seen that some of them are Arabic in speech: these are called qabail (sing. qabila); others are Berber and are called by this term’s Berber equivalent, tiqbilin (sing, taqbilt). But what, apart from linguistic differences, do they have in common? The answer is: a very great deal. There are, in conformity with the language difference, corresponding differences in nomenclature. An Arabic-speaking tribe may refer to itself as Ulad X or Bni X (cl. Ar. Awlad X or Banu X), both meaning ‘sons of X’, whereas a Berber-speaking one will call itself Ait X, or ‘people of X’; these are small differences and the ultimate result is the same. This means that X may refer either to a common ancestor in the patriline, whether or not he is actually traceable genealogically, or to a place, generally a point of common origin. In fact, the latter is by a large margin the commoner of the two forms.

Descent, as among most Muslims, is invariably reckoned agnatically (which is to say, in the male line only), for all practical purposes; and the majority of Muslim tribal groups known to anthropologists undergo a process of subdivision through time and space which is known to anthropologists as ‘segmentation’. This is easily defined: each tribe, whether an Arabic qabila or a Berber taqbilt, and whether it bears the name of a putative common ancestor or the name of a putative point of common origin, is divided or segmented into X number of sections, or clans, or primary segments (in Morocco, as it happens, seldom more than five, the implications of which are examined elsewhere, and in detail: cf. Hart (1967) in Ahmed and Hart 1984). Each of these is in turn subdivided or subsegmented into Y number of subsections, or subclans, or secondary segments (and in the Atlas it is usually these last which are given the label of tiqbilin); and each of these is in its turn again subsegmented into Z number of patrilineages, which in turn may themselves segment again, and again, and even again, down to the level of the elementary or nuclear family of father, mother and unmarried children. (It should be added that this follows standard anthropological usage in employing such terms as ‘section’ and ‘subsection’, ‘clan’ and ‘subclan’ and ‘lineage’ or ‘patrilineage’.) The first is simply a named group of any sort at the primary or maximal level within a tribe, and the second is another named group of any sort that is encapsulated within it. The third, which may well correspond to the first in a de facto sense, and which may be yet another named group at a lower level, may also be a wide unilineal, and here agnatic, descent group within the tribe in question whose members say that they have a common origin or that they are descended from a common ancestor, but who cannot actually trace such descent genealogically. The same applies to the fourth, although it is encapsulated within the third, just as the second is within the first; while members of the fifth and smallest unit, the lineage or (as here) patrilineage, are, by definition, capable of tracing such descent genealogically, and step by step, usually from four to six ascending generations in this case. It is precisely this capability of tracing descent which marks off the patrilineage from any of the larger groups just mentioned.

It is also a basic principle of segmentary lineage theory that such lineages be regarded as corporate in a pyramidal sense: although the descendants of two brothers, A and B, may fight against each other, they will generally join forces if attacked by the descendants of the brothers’ cousin, C, because, although A, B and C all go back ultimately to the same common ancestor D, the sons of A and those of B are more closely related to each other than either of them is to the sons of C. This is in theory, although in the Rif in particular no less than seven instances have been pointed to – one of them discussed in great detail – where the theory was strikingly violated, and violated indeed to the point of invalidation (cf. Hart 1976 pp.324–38). Nonetheless, and again in theory – a theory which is not only anthropological but also one espoused by tribal informants themselves – A, B and C will similarly and normally all band together to fight any less closely related section or clan E; and the members of one tribe, by the same token, will fight those of another. But it should be added that the theory is only that, a theory, and that it can readily be shown to have been contravened or even contradicted quite often, in one respect or another, by historical fact.

Each tribe has a given name and a given territory; and each section or clan within the tribe also has its own corresponding name and subterritory, so that the overall system of tribal land ownership is, again in theory, little more than the segmentary system flopped down spatially upon the ground. The linguistic axis of Arabic-Berber cuts across certain features of the tribal system which have already been referred to above. A few Arabic-speaking tribes, for instance, conceive of themselves as descended from common ancestors, but many if not most others, particularly the Arabo-Berber groups in the northwestern hills of the Jbala, are built up much more on the toponymy principle, with heterogeneous sections merely having come in and occupied territory which eventually became that of the tribe in question. The same is true of Berber tribes: those in the northern Rif and in the Western Atlas, the Sus and the Anti-Atlas regions in the southwestern part of the country, both tend to be organised on the toponymical and/or heterogeneous section principle, while at least some of those in the Middle, Central and Eastern High Atlases tend to be more aligned on the common ancestor principle.

One can also make, in general terms, an economic correlation here: the bulk, if not all, of the tribes, whether Arabic- or Berber-speaking, which are structured along the principle of heterogeneous sections are sedentary agriculturalists who live the year round in fixed houses, while most of those which claim the principle of common ancestorship are either sheep transhumants, as in the case of the Berber tribes of the Middle and Central High Atlases, or, among the Arabic-speaking Bedouins of the Western Sahara, full-scale pastoral camel nomads. And even here, in both cases, there are exceptions. (By ‘transhumants’, it is meant that the people concerned make two well-defined moves per year: up into the mountains in spring to pasture their sheep and to live in black goat-hair tents, and back down into the lower valleys in the autumn, where their permanent and several-storeyed mud-and-stone houses are located.)

Another feature common to most, though not all, Moroccan tribal groups is the existence, in their midst, of resident holy men (most not only claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad, but possessing genealogical evidence, either written in Arabic or in their heads, to support this claim) who form lineages or even whole sections or clans within but somewhat apart from the rest of the tribal community. During the precolonial period their job was the arbitration of conflicts, both inside and outside the tribe. Such conflicts, in pre-protectorate Morocco, were very much the order of the day. It can be, and has been, argued that feuds and wars, far from promoting disintegration of the tribal system, provided in fact the main force and impetus which kept it going. This state of affairs, of ‘peace in the feud’, led French and Spanish investigators in the years between World Wars I and II to categorise tribal systems as ‘systems of organ...