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Saints and Social Justice in Morocco: An Ethnographic Case of the Mythic

Court of Sidi Šamharūš

Article  in  Arabica · January 2010

DOI: 10.1163/157005810X529719

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 Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 brill.nl/arab

Saints and Social Justice in Morocco:

An Ethnographic Case of the Mythic Court of
Sidi Šamharūš

Mohammed Maarouf 1
Chouaib Doukkali University
El Jadida, Morocco

Abstract
This ethnography of the saint protector of the High Atlas Sidi Šamharūš explores how Moroc-
can pilgrims use their own popular idioms of justice to understand and construct their relation-
ship with saints and the political system they represent. Enduring the lack of justice in their
social world, Moroccan subalterns go to saints to seek mythic justice. As maraboutic clients, they
do not perceive social justice as part of the real world they belong to, that is as a human right to
be struggled for or a principle pertinent to a ruling state that should be accountable to its citizens
for the administration of justice. Instead, it is believed to be an occult gift that relates to the
anonymous power of saints and spirits who possess the miracle to make it true. The cultural
construction of justice as a sacred gift offered by saintly figures emanates from a form of licensed
cultural therapeutic resistance constituting possession rituals and trance dances performed essen-
tially by the poor to relieve their social world from tension and conflict; for them it is an escape
to the miraculous to look for extraordinary solutions to ameliorate their social conditions.

Keywords
Subaltern consciousness, popular culture, popular Islam, ritual justice, myth, cultural schemata,
ideology, discourse, power, maraboutism, sultanism, jinn, exorcism, saints, trance dance, social
representation, religion in practice, ethnography

Methodologically, this ethnographic account follows the Geertzian theoreti-

cal paradigm, selecting a piece of culture—even an obscure text or remote
ritual—and then we see what it reveals about the larger complex of meanings

1
I would like to warmly thank Paul Willis for his theoretical and constructive comments on
the first and final drafts of this ethnographic article. My sincere thanks also go to Philip Her-
mans for his brilliant remarks. I would also like to thank my colleagues Mohammed El Mah-
naoui and Ahmed El Ouaret for their comments on some historical aspects of the maraboutic
culture in Morocco. My acknowledgement is also due to my informants who have been coop-
erative throughout my fieldwork. Also, many warm thanks go to the anonymous reviewers of
Arabica for their pertinent meticulous remarks.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/157005810X529719
590 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

within a society. This means that ethnographers may describe not only popu-
lar events but little known or even weird practices for what they may tell
about the deeper cultural patterns in a society. Geertz’s2 loosening of restric-
tions about how frequent or institutionalized a practice needs to be to serve
as a cultural “text” allows us to move from studying established saints like
Būʿbīd Šarqi,3 Sidi ʿLi Ben Ḥ amdūš,4 Būya ʿUmar5 and Ben Yeffu6 to study a
non-legitimate sacred pilgrimage centre of a jinni based in the High Atlas
named the šayḫ (Sufi master)/Saint Sidi Šamharūš.7 However, this oughtn’t
to let us skimp over the political role of the establishment in authorizing a
particular religious practice. There is an authorizing process, as Talal Asad
argues, by which religion is created, powerful discourses that authenticate the
lawful and prohibit the pagan and empower “shrines and compile saints’
lives, both as a model of and as a model for the Truth”.8
I argue in this study that the authorized continuing existence of distribut-
ing centers of charity and baraka contribute—together with other dominant
cultural formations—to slacken the pace of the awareness of the subalterns9

2
C. Geertz, The interpretation of cultures, London, Fontana Press, 1973.
3
D.F. Eickelman, Moroccan Islam: Tradition and society in a pilgrimage center, Austin, Uni-
versity of Texas Press, 1976.
4
V. Crapanzano, The Hamadsha: A study in Moroccan ethnopsychiatry, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1973.
5
K. Naamouni, Le culte de Bouya Omar, Casablanca, Eddif, 1995.
6
P. Hermans, De wereld van de djinn: Traditionele Marokkaanse geneeswijzen [The world of
Jinn: Moroccan traditional medicine], Amsterdam, Bulaaq, 2007; M. Maarouf, Jinn eviction as
a discourse of power: A multidisciplinary approach to Moroccan magical beliefs and practices, Leiden,
Brill, 2007.
7
See also H. Rachik, “L’autre sacrifice: Étude sur la division sexuelle des rôles rituels dans
une tribu du Haut Atlas”, in R. Bourqia & N. Hopkins (eds), Le Maghreb: Approches des mécan-
ismes d’articulation, Rabat, Dar al Kalam, 1991, p. 117-36; id., “Sacrifice et hiérarchie”, in
N. Sraieb (dir.), Pratiques et résistance culturelles au Maghreb, Paris, CNRS éditions, 1992,
p. 113-35; id., Le sultan des autres: Rituel et politique dans le Haut Atlas, Casablanca, Afrique-
Orient, 1992.
8
T. Asad, “Anthropological conceptions of religion: Reflections on Geertz”, Man, 18/2
(1983), p. 237-59, esp. p. 244.
9
Let us first spell out the implications of the use of the heuristic device ‘subaltern(s)’. The
subaltern population has been generally described by A. Gramsci, Selections from the prison note-
books, trans. G.N. Smith and Q. Hoare, New York, International Publishers Company, 1990,
as a socially subordinate group. Although poverty is the most important determinant of subal-
tern status, our use of the term draws upon our understanding of multiple sources of social
hierarchy and subordination in Moroccan society, such as holy lineage, ʿaṣabiyya (belonging to
a powerful or subordinate social group and being dissolved in its collective social identity),
region, gender, age, economic capital, and occupation. Appreciating all of these barriers is nec-
essary to transcend an economic class-based perspective. The term ‘subalterns’ here also holds
ethnographic attributes by its reference to those who live at the bottom of social space and call
themselves maqhūrīn (oppressed) or maḥ gūrīn (subordinated). They are observed to reside in
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 591

and sustain the gap between poor and rich. Such centers do not only com-
modify illusions of safety, protection and justice but serve to reproduce social
hierarchies and preserve political domination. When the poor and illiterate
segments of the population, who suffer social, political and economic inju-
ries, seek the protection of saints, they are trying to resist their social frustra-
tions and are looking for ways to break up the barriers that block their way
to share of the country’s resources though condensing the threatening struc-
tural forces in socially accepted impersonal tractable agents such as jinns.
Their resort to the miraculous to ameliorate their social conditions is a form
of resistance by proxy in the sense that a community imagines supernatural
powers of redemption when it is disabled and does not trust neither individ-
ual nor collective abilities of its members to stand their ground and face the
social and political impediments that shackle their freedom to act.
The ethnographic example selected for the study of the cultural representa-
tion of justice is the maraboutic site of Sidi Šamharūš. Though he is very far
in space situated in Tūbqāl the highest chain of mountains in Morocco at an
altitude of 2365m, and is not historically legitimized by the sultanate in the
sense that the saint has not received decrees of honor and respect from previ-
ous sultans (a prerogative reserved for šarifian saints, those who descend from
the holy lineage of the Prophet), Šamharūš is still well renowned in the
maraboutic culture. His mūsǝm (annual pilgrimage) used to host thousands
of pilgrims even under the eyes of local authorities until it petered out around
2000.10 Šamharūš is not little known or unpopular but is freak in the sense

poor areas in Moroccan cities and exist all over Morocco in the plains, mountains and Sahara;
in rural communities they appear to be very numerous. This socially insecure population has
several economic characteristics. In the city, they more often than not tarry unemployed or
semi-employed in low-skill jobs. In the countryside, they live in impoverished marginal condi-
tions often as tenant farmers or wage laborers in the fields. They are largely illiterate. Many only
work seasonally or when labor is available. Their life toil seems very hard and sometimes cruel.
In squalid conditions and neglect, either in popular neighborhoods (aḥ yāʾ šaʿbiyya), in shanty-
towns or rural shacks and in extended families in poor nutrition, they endure their miserable
life with no job security, no health insurance and with a high rate of delinquency and poor
educational opportunities for their children. The common toil work from which they endeavor
to squeeze a meager income ranges from their donkeywork such as buʿāra/habbāša (hewers in
garbage heaps), mǝwāqfiya (day laborers tinkering round in different low-wage activities), ṭālǝb
mʿašuwāt (lit. daily bread beggars; fig. carters and day-laborers) to roaming sellers and weekly—
paid (swāmniya) skilled hand laborers of different sorts.
10
Some respondents say it was owing to a governmental decision that year interdicting
camping—also in mūsǝms due to beach camping by Islamists where they organized their summer
activities—, the mūsǝm of Sidi Šamharūš ceased to be held. Respondents also attribute
its continual cessation to the rising costs of the mūsǝm itself and the growing decline of the
agricultural harvest on account of the successive years of drought that befell Morocco in the
nineties. All this has pushed tribes like Aššayn, Targaymula and Aytsūka to forsake their tradition
592 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

that the maraboutic establishment is conventionally based on human origins:

šarifism—the lineage of the Prophet—and human piety. This animistic belief
producing saint jinns located in different parts of Morocco11 concurs to some
extent with African spiritism and echoes the colonial thesis that Berbers used
to worship God in incarnations12 away from the monotheism of Arabia. Has
Šamharūš therefore been an incarnation of a Berber God?
Šamhūraš is his name in the local dialect of the Atlas.13 He is represented
as the head of the supreme court of jinn. The name ‘Šamharūš’ bears a strik-
ing phonetic resemblance to šim-ha-mifuraš, Tetragrammaton; a name holier
than all others is used in reference to the Hebrew God. In Taʾrīḫ al-fattāš
[The chronicle of the researcher], the šayḫ Maḥmūd Kaʿt b. al-Ḥ āǧǧ al-Mut-
awakkil describes the universal existence of Šamharūš in different historical
periods and societies from Sudan, Mali to Algeria.14 The universality of
Šamharūš may also be derived from the Arab literature of the fantastic which
refers to this mythic figure incarnating the prophet Elie and Saint George15—
needless to refer to the Arabian Nights and books of magic.
Rachik refers to Hooker and Ball, Doutté, Voinot, and Felze, all mention-
ing in their work descriptions of the sanctuary of Sidi Šamharūš in the Atlas.16
In the sixties, as Rachik also discovered later, the grotto was hidden behind a
wall that made the shrine’s façade resemble an orthodox shrine. The grotto
was, and still is, painted in white like a dome with two flags, one in white
and green cloth and the other red, hovering on the dome indicating the exis-
tence of a shrine.17 Hooker and Ball, Felze and Voinot, all gave a description
to the shrine of Sidi Šamharūš when they traversed the valley of Ayt Mizan.
No matter how superficial their accounts are, they may be considered as
starting points to build up the argument that the shrine was not a deserted

of sacrificing for Šamharūš. Before, the tribes used to sacrifice to thank the saint for the baraka
he bestowed on their harvest. The native Berber used to sacrifice up to six goats—not to mention
sheep and other animal sacrifices offered by rich farmers. Now, he cannot afford such expenses
because of his meager annual revenue from agriculture—needless to mention the young Isla-
mists’ awakening in Imlīl.
11
H. Basset, Le Culte des grottes au Maroc, Alger, La Typo-Litho et J. Carbonel, 1920.
12
E. Michaux-Bellaire, “Le wahhabisme au Maroc”, Bulletin du comité de l’Afrique Française,
1928, p. 489-92, esp. p. 492.
13
Previous and current fieldwork has been carried out in Moroccan Arabic. Berber respon-
dents have also answered questions in the same working language.
14
As cited in Rachik, Le sultan, p. 186.
15
See also A. Arrif, P. Pascon, M. Tozy, H. Van Der Wusten, “Le Grand Muggar d’août de
Sidi Ahmad ou Moussa”, in P. Pascon (ed.), La maison d’Iligh et l’histoire sociale du Tazerwalt,
Rabat, Société marocaine des éditeurs réunis, 1984, p. 141-222.
16
Rachik, Le sultan, p. 22-3.
17
Ibid., p. 22-3.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 593

monument in the past but rather an alive working cult. This appears to be
much clearer in one of Doutté’s respondents’ account about Šamharūš when
he refers to the saint’s special cure of fever.18
Dermenghem19 draws a distinction between two categories of maraboutic
centers: popular saints vs. hagiographic saints though the division seems very
controversial indeed. Hagiography may not be considered a variable. There
are a lot of popular saints in Dermenghem’s sense of the word who neverthe-
less own the hagiographic story. As for religious literacy of the saint, the
establishment of a Sufi path and the presence of disciples and adepts, these
may be considered as variables. “Serious” saints appear to be centers of edu-
cation, founders of Sufi paths and hosts of religiously educated disciples. Yet,
“Popular” saints (sing. fqīr) are those who have not established a Sufi path
and have been dedicated to serve cure and healing rituals—though cure is
also practiced in “serious” saints’ lodges such is the case of the Sufi Abū Yaʿzā
popularly known as Mulāy Buʿazza whose shrine is turned into a centre of
curing possession and organizing ḥ aḍras where adepts devour ritually raw sac-
rifices. Where can we classify the saint Šamharūš? He seems to be classless.
He is part of the human and non-human world. He has his “hagiographic
tale” and popular miracles. It is very difficult to situate him as a human saint
or shapeless spirit. The honorific titles attributed to him classify him as a let-
tered jinni. For some, he is siyyed (saint), šayḫ (master) and ʿālim (scholar).
For others, he is a sultan and qāḍī (judge) of humans and jinns. His sacred
place is represented in maraboutic terms. It is named ḍarīḥ (shrine) or maqām
([sacred] locale/station). Dermenghem hints at the idea of protection
bestowed by Šamharūš on his supplicants when he refers to the tribes of Ğbǝl
l-Ḫ mes who used to sacrifice a dark bull for their sultan Amarhūš before
going out to war.20 This echoes the founding story of Šamharūš depicting
him as a knight who gallops the mountains by night and watches over his
vicinity. In fact, the image of the warrior saint is spread out everywhere in
Morocco. Mulāy ʿAbd Allāh Amġār, al-Muğāhid al-ʿAyyāši, Mūsa Ben
ʿAmrān in El Jadida and Mulāy ʿAbd al-Salām Ben Mšīš in Ğbǝl al-ʿAlǝm, all
of them were warriors or marabouts (muǧāhids/murābiṭs) who participated in
the holy war ( ǧihād ) for the liberation of Moroccan land. Akin to Šamharūš,
there exists another eminent female jinni called ʿAyša Qandīša (a distortion
of the Portuguese noble title “Condessa”), who has survived in Moroccans’
cultural imagination as a soil siren, or rather a warrior luring foreign soldiers

18
Ibid., p. 22-3.
19
E. Dermenghem, Le culte des saints dans l’islam maghrébin, Paris, Gallimard, 1954.
20
Dermenghem, Le culte, p. 105-6.
594 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

to remote places and killing them. In general, Morocco as a territorial land is

thought to be protected by patron-saints (rǧāl l-blād [men of the land]): “[in
Dermenghem there is reference to] Moulay Driss (Fès), Sidi Bel ʿAbbas (Mar-
rakech), Sidi Mogdū (Mogador), Sidi Bellū (Casablanca),”21 not to gloss over
two imminent cultural saintly figures in the region of Dukkāla: Mulāy ʿAbd
Allāh Amġār (El Jadida) and Mulāy Būšayb (Azemmour).
In fact, colonial anthropology and Moroccan historiography22 have all
tediously harped on the social, political and economic role of the maraboutic
institution called zāwiya.23 Plenty of studies have displayed the historical role
of zāwiyas in reconciling social and political conflicts, pacifying the masses
and generally refereeing clashes between the sultan and tribes. As sacred sites,
they were at one time granted the right of sanctuary (ḥ urum), exempt from
taxes and immune to the intrusion of the Maḫzǝn forces, thus giving asylum
to fugitives. This historical role of marabouts’ intervention in the social,
political and economic life of the tribes has established and sustained the
legitimacy of the maraboutic institution as an effective court of justice in
popular imagination. Though saints’ social role is crawling in decline and
modern civic organizations and unions together with Islamist minorities are
rising in the public sphere, the pre-existing cultural framework of sainthood
still runs deep in Moroccans’ popular imagination, which may lead to the
cultural embedding of the new organizations within the inevitably pre-exist-
ing maraboutic cultural model ruled by the historical paradigm of master-
disciple relationship. Moroccans may pick up whatever they have socialized
to and is available in their cultural reservoir to find solutions to their prob-
lems; hence the potential activation of the cultural schema of supplication if
people should endure social miseries. The cultural practice of supplication
(tzāwig) and l-ʿār (compulsion) is vent out through complex articulations
with the continuing forms of domination. Until now, subalterns may for
instance head for a saint or any father figure with saintly attributes to referee

21
Ibid., p. 162-3.
22
To cite but a few E. Michaux-Bellaire, “Essai sur l’historie des confréries marocaines”,
Hesperis, 1 (1921), p. 141-59; M. Morsy, Les Ahansala, La Haye, Maison des Sciences de
l’Homme, 1972; G. Drague, Esquisse d’histoire religieuse du Maroc, Paris, Peyronnet, 1940; Pas-
con, La maison d’Iligh, Rabat, Société Marocaine des Éditeurs Réunis, 1984; M. Hajji, La zaouia
de Dila, Casablanca, al-Maṭbaʿa l-ǧadīda, 1988; A. Buḫārī, al-Zāwiya l-šarqāwiyya, Marrakech,
Faculty of Letters, 1989; M. El Mansour, “The sanctuary (ḥ urum) in pre-colonial Morocco”, in
R. Bourqia & G.S. Miller (eds), In the shadow of the sultan: Culture, power, and politics in
Morocco, Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1999, p. 185-98.
23
It is a religious lodge where members of a religious brotherhood meet, chant their litanies
and practice the rituals of their Sufi path. It is also a school for teaching disciples Qur’anic sci-
ences. For mağdūbs, it is also an individual place where they practice cure (sbūb).
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 595

their social conflicts or save them from economic injuries. The intervention
of the saint is even thought to be transcendental as a cultural schema. The
saint such as Sidi Šamharūš does not only reconcile quarrelers but can also
mediate supplicants’ quest for magical solutions to their social and economic
conditions, a veil of illusion the maraboutic culture weaves by the spindle
dance of its subaltern devotees.
Westermarck24 pointed to Šamharūš of the caves in Fez. Close to the
slaughtering place outside Bāb l-Ḫ mīs, there was a place called l-Maqṭaʿ hav-
ing a large cave comprising cairns and springs dedicated to jinn saints. The
nocturnal gathering of these believer jinns included Sidi Mūsa, Sidi Ḥ ammū,
Mulāy Brāhīm, Lalla Mira l-ʿArbiyya, and other jinn saints, all under the gov-
ernance of Šamharūš. After his death, he was substituted by a female jinni
called Nağma.25 Dermenghem confirmed the death of Šamharūš round the
end of the nineteenth century. A qāḍī (judge) celebrated his funeral in the
cemetery of Bāb Ftūḥ in Fez. Mauchamp,26 in the same vein, maintained the
hypothesis of his death and reckoned it by 1898 on the basis of some ṭulba’s
account that he no longer responded to their magical invocations. In Algeria,
in Blida, they estimated his death to have occurred in 1870’s; he was thought
to be devoured by a lion and interred in the shrine of Sidi ʿAbd al-Qādǝr in
Zaccar.27 R. Claisse-Dauchy28 stated that Šamharūš was a saint converted to
Islam in the Prophet’s time and died in the nineteenth century, victim of a
jinni’s vengeance. His ethnographic account was based on Moroccan social
actors’ point of view though some of his interviewees recounted: “Šamharūš
is not dead. He goes out by night, in the shape of a horse, a white horse and
gallops the mountains”,29 a belief that used to run deep in the cultural imagi-
nation of the mountaineers.
Arrif et al.30 describe the tree of Šamharūš and how it is tolerated within
the sacred vicinity (ḥ urum) of Sidi Ḥ mād u Mūsa. It is a lotus tree that bears
sharp woody spines. Most Berber visitors to the place are women. Men are
not welcomed there. The female visitor approaches the tree mumbling
prayers, circumambulates the tree, kisses the plants, takes foliage as barūk
(sacred relic), and leaves the ftūḥ (compulsory tip) of no more than one

24
E. Westermarck, Ritual and belief in Morocco, I, London, Macmillan, 1926.
25
Ibid., p. 283-5.
26
E. Mauchamp, La sorcellerie au Maroc [oeuvre posthume], Paris, Dorbon-Ainé, 1911.
27
Dermenghem, Le culte, p. 105.
28
R. Claisse-Dauchy, “Bien-être et maladies: Les forces mises en jeu”, in Médecine tradition-
nelle du Maghreb: Rituels d’envoûtement et de guérison au Maroc, Paris, Harmattan, 1996,
ch. 3.
29
Ibid., p. 43.
30
Arrif et al., “Le Grand Muggar”, p. 183-92.
596 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

dirham at the foot of the tree. Šamharūš is known in Tazǝrwālt as a model of

uprightness and honesty. His conduct is philanthropic and exhibits the like-
lihood of the coexistence of humans and jinns. He is represented in local
myths as a jurisconsult, benefactor, and justicer. Inside Ḥ mād u Mūsa’s
shrine while reformists, šurfa, and agents of the Maḫzǝn (a traditional form
of State in Morocco) controverse the existence of marāqiʿ (expiation settings)
and the marriage tree within the sacred vicinity (ḥ urum) of the saint, they
uphold discretion and refuse to talk about the heterodox existence of
Šamharūš’s abode within a well-known religious zāwiya like that of Tazǝrwālt,
and seem to tolerate it. The link between Šamharūš and Ḥ mād u Mūsa, as
Arrif et al.31 argue, is locally represented as based both on filiation and ideol-
ogy. Šamharūš is represented as the son of Ḥ mād u Mūsa from the latter’s
rapport with a female jinni, which extends Ḥ mād u Mūsa’s powers to the
ethereal world of spirits, being the master of the two worlds, mortal and
immortal. Šamharūš, as the local tradition states, would die on his way to
visit his father, a model of the faithful son who had wandered for long dis-
tances and would die on the threshold of his father’s house. This story resem-
bles the popular story of another ambivalent maraboutic figure buried on the
river mouth of Umm Rabīʿ in Azemmour called Lalla ʿAyša l-Baḥriyya. Akin
to Šamharūš, she died on the river band before meeting her pen lover the
Saint Mulāy Būšayb who was involved with her in a virgin love affair. The
adventurers experiencing rites of passage and failing in their final tests are still
held in esteem by the population for their ultimate experience and deed, for
their testings that rank them in a higher position as the consorts of immor-
tals. Another dimension introduced by Arrif et al.,32 is the ideological link
between Šamharūš and Ḥ mād u Mūsa. That Šamharūš is tolerated by the
Berbers is that because the local tradition depicts him as a Muslim jurist, who
administered justice during the Prophet’s time. His faith, his closeness to the
Prophet, and moral rightness may be his distinguished talents that make him
win the boon of love not only in the Berbers’ eyes both in Southwestern
Morocco and the High Atlas but also in the belief of the maraboutic society
spread everywhere in Morocco.
Miller33 heard from the local social actors that a peripatetic Sufi šayḫ called
Sidi Šamharūš visited Arǝmd, a village in the High Atlas. Such a visit fixed
the starting point of the continuous history of Ayt Mizan. At the time when
Sidi Šamharūš visited the Atlas, three Ayt Mizan clans populated the

31
Ibid, p. 192.
32
Ibid, p. 184-6.
33
J.A. Miller, Imlil: a Moroccan mountain community in change, Boulder, Colorado, West-
view Press, 1984.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 597

upstream basins of Imlīl: Arǝmd, Ayt Tāḫsǝnt, and Mzik. Each of the clans
populated a single village only. As the Šamharūš legend was recounted, peo-
ple remark, the district was then known as “Ġ iġāya” and the three clans
formed Ayt Mizan. The subsequent foundation of a shrine in his honor
cemented that early folk memory. His visit is related as occurring either “dur-
ing the time of Sidi Yūsuf b. Tašafīn” (1070s AD) or alternatively, “about
500 years ago”.34 Some four-hundred-year-difference exists between these
two reference points again according to Miller, but the actual date is not
what is important. Five hundred years ago does seem more likely. This coin-
cides with the widespread establishment of saints’ shrines and brotherhoods
throughout North Africa.
The story of the coming of Šamharūš to Ayt Mizan figuring in Miller’s
work is no different from the founding myth(s) presented below. The picture
of Šamharūš as a horse rider traverses all local myths related about the jinni.
The native actors’ story reveals a double identity of the jinni. When he visited
Arǝmd, he assumed the appearance of a šayḫ. He and his companions stole
through the Atlas Highlands on horseback by night, and he, the master, slept
in the courtyard of a house in Arǝmd. By day, he was transmogrified into a
dog. By night, he went out to ride on his horse in a human shape with his
companions. He spent about seven days and nights. He so frightened the
curious people of Arǝmd, then left never to return to the High Atlas again, at
least in corporeal form. The saint visited Arǝmd and stayed, transformed as a
dog, in the courtyard of the Ayt Bilʿīd family. Before he left, he pointed to
them his mark on the land, revealing a holy spot, one that has remained fixed
ever since in commemoration of his forceful spirit. This is today the shrine of
which Ayt Bilʿīd remains the guardian; also a member of the same family
bears the title of mqaddәm (supervisor) of the shrine.
Rachik has also dealt with the cult of Sidi Šamharūš and analyzed the sta-
tus value of the sacrifice immolated at the shrine. He has been concerned
with the question how sacrifices mark the social status of the individual
and the group. His work remains a solid ethnographic source on the social
stratification of the Berber communities of the High Atlas. His point of
entry to the study of social structures has been the concept of sacrifice. He
argues: “To offer an animal, immolate it, skin it off, divide it into shares and
distribute them, all constitute actions which are less determined by ritual
considerations than by the tribal structures and local political dynamics”.35
Rachik maintains that his work on Šamharūš should not be divorced from

34
Ibid., p. 53-4.
35
Rachik, Le sultan, p. 16, trans. mine.
598 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

his work on maʿrūf [alms-giving].36 This ritual is interpreted in terms of the

permanent aspects of the social structure (social status, sexual status, and cat-
egories of age). The preparation of the ritual, the division of the sacrifice, and
the biddings, all offer an occasion to the manifestation of social strains among
people and groups. Rachik has given emphasis to the saint’s social function
in the local Berber society. Yet, he seems to neglect the dynamics of culture,
for instance, the rising Islamists’ point of view as well as the opinion of the
risk takers—Berbers who are socializing outside the context of Imlīl. “Culture
[as Maarouf and Willis argue] seen from the resources of a ‘bottom-up’ third
world anthropology is not as fine plates, carvings and decorative trays and their
human equivalents but as solutions to problems lived through by those at the
bottom of social space”.37 The antagonistic social actors’ attitude could have
been interpolated to draw comparisons as regards Šamharūš’s myth. In addi-
tion, pertinent issues a propos of the saint’s role in sustaining public moral-
ity, healing the Berbers, expressing their conservatism and anti-hegemonic
attitudes towards European tourism hang suspended. Rachik’s ethnography
does not suggest any hints at whether Šamharūš as a maraboutic institution
trespasses the boundaries of the Atlas to incorporate structures of the national
maraboutic institution.
Generally speaking, most studies presented so far evince little concern with
possession rituals and their performance in the maraboutic institution—to
say nothing of the curing centre of Sidi Šamharūš specialized according to
Moroccan traditional healing system in arbitrating cases of conflict between
humans and jinns, what may be termed in maraboutic parlance šraʿ (under-
going trial). And if the reader comes across a study like that of Naamouni on
Būya ʿUmar, or Crapanzano on Ḥ mādša dealing with the maraboutic system
of therapy, it is no where considered how that system relates to structural
forces or other authorizing powerful discourses and institutions legitimizing
its therapy. Very little attention is accorded to the political dynamics, or to
the point of view of the poor, the marginalized and the exploited. The task of
‘bottom-up’ third world anthropology is to amplify such voices, expose the
stratagems of political power that silences beliefs and practices and reconstruct
others as legitimate discourses.

36
H. Rachik, Sacré et sacrifice dans le Haut Atlas Marocain, Casablanca, Afrique Orient,
1990; id., “L’autre sacrifice”; id., “Sacrifice”; id., Le sultan.
37
M. Maarouf, P. Willis, “The great awakening in Morocco: An ethnographic perspective on
subaltern models of cultural resistance”, [Manuscript in preparation], El Jadida, Chouaib Douk-
kali University, 2009, p. 6, fn. 40.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 599

Furthermore, unlike Crapanzano38 and Naamouni39 who focus on those

who are obviously troubled, this study pursues the line of argument intro-
duced by Lewis, Lambek and others40 showing that possession and its con-
comitant rituals situated in “a wider context of meaning” is an integral part of

38
Crapanzano, Hamadsha; id., Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan, Chicago, University of Chi-
cago Press, 1980.
39
Naamouni, Le culte.
40
Predominant master narratives on possession for the last three decades have treated it as a
cultural idiom of communication that should not be reduced to naturalized or rationalized
western forms for it intersects with various cultural domains including medicine and religion
but is reduced to none [J. Boddy, Women, men, and the Zar cult in Northern Sudan, Madison,
Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1989; id., “Spirit possession revisited: Beyond instrumentality”, Annual
Review of Anthropology, 23 (1994), p. 407-34; M. Lambek, Human spirits: A cultural account of
trance in Mayotte, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1981; A. Masquelier, “Some further thoughts
on knowledge, practice and morality”, Cultural Dynamics, 9/2 (1997), p. 195-201; G. Obeyes-
ekere, “The idiom of demonic possession: A case study”, Social Science and Medicine, 4/1
(1967), p. 97-111]. As Lambek maintains, it has to be likened to a text or genre with its own
conventions, a mode of knowledge realized in specific and personal socio-temporal contexts.
M.I. Lewis, “Spirit possession and deprivation cults”, Man, 1/3 (1966), p. 307-29; id., Ecstatic
religion: A study of spirit possession and shamanism, London, Routledge, 1971/1989, focused on
possession as a ritual protest of subaltern groups—though just ‘bargaining from weakness’—,
which has engendered a master narrative with much emphasis on understanding possession as a
form of counter-hegemonic meta-commentary. As an indirect critique of domination—of colo-
nial, national or global hegemonies—, the practice of possession has been taken up by many
researchers [such as J. Comaroff, Body of power, spirit of resistance: The culture and history of a
South African People, Chicago, Chicago UP, 1985; A. Ong, “The production of possession:
Spirits and the multinational corporation in Malaysia”, American Ethnologist, 15/1 (1988),
p. 28-42; L.A. Sharp, “Playboy princely spirits of Madagascar: Possession as youthful commen-
tary and social critique”, Anthropological Quarterly, 68/2 (1995), p. 75-88; P. Stoller, “Horrific
comedy: Cultural resistance and the Hauka movement in Niger”, Ethos, 12/2 (1984), p.
165-88] who focus on it as an articulation of opposition against western capitalism and oppres-
sion; Boddy’s work on zar stresses the point that possession is a subaltern discourse; the body is
a site of cultural counter-hegemonic production [also for gender relations see V. Igreja, B. Dias-
Lambranca, A. Richters, “Gamba spirits, gender relations, and healing in post-civil war
Gorongosa, Mozambique”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14 (2008), p. 353-71].
A. Masquelier [“The invention of anti-tradition: Dodo spirits in southern Niger”, in H. Beh-
rend & U. Luig (eds), Spirit possession, modernity and power in Africa, Madison, Univ. Wiscon-
sin Press, 1999, p. 34-49] notes the emergence of a new group of spirits in Niger who contrast
with the avaricious bori in stoically repudiating Western commodities and modern comforts.
J. McIntosh [“Reluctant Muslims: Embodied hegemony and moral resistance in a Giriama spirit
possession complex”, Royal Anthropological Institute, 10 (2004), p. 91-112] speaks of hegemonic
Muslim jinns tormenting Giriama people of coastal Kenya intimidating them to succumb to the
Islamic faith. According to my ongoing research on jinn possession—see M. Maarouf, Jinn pos-
session and cultural resistance in Morocco (forthcoming)—, the practice cannot be reduced only
to the motivations of the quest for power, or to an institutional set of norms imposed on indi-
viduals condemned to an unthoughtful mode of reproduction. Our argument here is that the
question of agency (self vs. other) can be transferred from the moral context to other meaningful
social contexts in order to explore to what extent the cultural knowledge on possession is a con-
stituent of Moroccans’ worldview.
600 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

the cultural system of communication whether one is distressed in the western

sense or not. Let us emphasize that Moroccans’ belief in the existence of
jinns—engraved in the Qur’an as a verity not open to question—is a priori for
their belief in possession. Given that they believe in jinns and in the possibility
of being victim of jinn attack, work of magic, the cast of the evil eye or envy,
my current research work—with Paul Willis41—examines how such social
phenomenon of possession and its maraboutic treatment may reflect eco-
nomic or socio-political concerns apart from the traditional ethnographic
concern with sickness and its treatment—albeit entirely alert to the fact that
this is not the sole aspect in the social meaning of possession.42
The present study converges on the central point of the representation of
justice in the subalterns’ cultural imagination: how the anxious feeling about
the inefficiency of state institutions continues to enthuse the poor and illiter-
ate to seek maraboutic institutions—the ḥ urum (sacred territories)—as surro-
gates to grant them protection and resist on their behalf what they perceive
as “whored luck” (zahr mqawed ), to quote from the derogatory repertoire of
subalterns’ jargon. Such alternatives may enable them to cherish the hope of
a better future, and be patient with their social frustrations, a politically
innocuous conduct that rather preserves the social order intact and keeps
people energetically disposed to accept domination. The piece of Moroccan
culture selected for the present study—apparently obscure and unusual—is
the mythic court of Sidi Šamharūš. What does it reveal about the larger com-
plex of meanings engrafted in maraboutic justice? What does the cultural
“text” of Sidi Šamharūš tell us about sacred justice vs. profane justice? How
does it cater for the needs of subalterns and feed their illusion of being
immunized?
My ethnographic work on maraboutism has been developed over a period
of research beginning around 1996 with the most recent fieldwork conducted
on Šamharūš between March and July, 2009. A purposive sample has been
collected in Arǝmd, Imlīl village, the market of Asni, Mulāy Brāhīm and
Rḥa. The central focus is on the pilgrims’ point of view because fieldwork
reveals that the main social actors in the shrine at present are pilgrims and
patients who come from different regions in Morocco. The Berber natives’
point of view is conveyed for comparison and complementarity. Šamharūš is

41
See P. Willis, M. Maarouf, “The Islamic spirit of capitalism: Moroccan Islam and its
transferable cultural schemas and values”, [Manuscript submitted for publication], Newcastle-
under-Lyme, Keele University, 2008; id., “Tensions between employment models in marketis-
ing Morocco”, [Manuscript in preparation], Newcastle-under-Lyme, Keele University, 2010;
Maarouf, Willis, “Awakening”.
42
Lewis raises a similar argument about spirit possession (see Lewis, Ecstatic, p. 11).
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 601

not explored here for his cultural role in the Berbers’ pastoral life, which
seems a bit fading on the rebound of the new rising Islamist and devout
Muslim generations renouncing the tradition of maraboutism in Imlīl.
Šamharūš is studied for his therapeutic function within the national
maraboutic configuration as it is socially represented in pilgrims’ cultural
imagination. The research was based on informal interviews, natural conver-
sations and collective discussions with patients and maraboutic clients most
of whom were subaltern-class-uneducated women coming from Safi, Mar-
rakech, Salé and Casablanca. A purposive sample was also collected from
diviners, shrine keepers, shop keepers, hotel keepers, muleteer guides, car
park guardians, beggars, weekly souk curers, clients and sellers. For compara-
tive purposes, informal interviews were conducted with a few young and old
people in a convenient sample from Arǝmd, Imlīl, and Mulāy Brāhīm. Most
of these social actors were native Berbers, in their middle age, who belonged
to the uneducated lower social strata. To probe for detail and gain insight
into some of the private maraboutic activities performed at Šamharūš such as
ḥ aḍra and into the economic activities held in the souk of Asni, participant
observation was undertaken through short field trips, usually lasting for some
days’ stay in a hostel cell, either in Mulāy Brāhīm or Imlīl.

Imlīl between Conservatism and Modernity

Situated at approximately 1740 meters above the sea level, Imlīl (see map I)
looks like a small village surrounded by two high mountains, Imsardel and
Akswāl. It opens onto the magnificent destinations like Ūkaymden (the ski
sport centre), Ğbǝl Tūbqāl (the highest mountain in North Africa), Ifni, the
lake and Sidi Šamharūš, the saint. Apart from its wonderful landscapes, it is
also considered the end of the asphalted road to the High Atlas Mountains,
at 44 miles from Marrakech situated on a left turn on the main road to
Tārudānt. Now there is a road in the progress of being constructed to link
Imlīl and Ūkaymden via Aytsūka and Tašddǝrt. There are forests all around
the village consisting of walnut, apple and cherry trees among other varieties.
It has an excellent cool atmosphere providing tourists with a mountainous
savor of life.
Miller43 describes the social structure of Ayt Mizan (see map II), which is
part of the confederation of Ġ iġāya, a tribal group constituting of thirty six

43
Miller, Imlil.
602 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

Map I: Mulāy Brāhīm and Imlīl (Miller, Imlīl, p. xix)

 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 603

Map II: The localization of the tribes of Ayt Mizan (Rachik, Le sultan, p. 19)
604 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

lineages in four clans occupying at the very least thirteen duwārs:44 Mattat,
Imlīl, Agǝrsiwāl, Taddǝrt, Arġǝn, Mzik, Wanskra, Tašddǝrt, Tamgist, Ikkis,
Amskru, Tinitin and Tanṣġārt. Yet, al-Mahdi45 has presented a meticulous
social organization of the tribes of Ġ iġāya based on the structural concept of
the common ancestor of the lineage (afus, in Berber). He argues that Berbers
tend to attribute their lineages to an agnatically common ancestor (afus).
Thus, Ayt Mizan as afus may be reconstituted in villages like Arǝmd, Mzik,
Arġǝn, Ikkis, and Amskru; the rest of villages presented by Miller above
belong to other ifassәn (ancestors) of Ġ iġāya such as Ayt ʿĪsā, Ayt ʿAbd Allāh,
Ayt ʿLī, Ayt ʿMar, Ayt Ḥ mād, and Ayt Igunga.46 Interviews with some villag-
ers from Arǝmd reveal that each duwār is made up of more than one hundred
habitat/hearth (kanūn); from 8 to 14 members form up the kanūn. Arǝmd
consists of 173 kanūns and Mzik about 80 kanūns. Ayt Mizan has historically
been at the head of the other tribal groups because it has controlled the
watershed. It was in conflict with Gundāfa and Glāwa. The villages were run
in the past by tribal councils called (sing. ǧmāʿa), now transformed to some
degree into civic associations defending the villages’ rights vis-à-vis commu-
nal councils, local authorities and educational boards.
The main economic activity of the mountaineers in Imlīl is agriculture,
not just any agriculture, but the cultivation of vegetables such as onion, pota-
toes and tomatoes on small floored terraces. They also grow walnut, apple
and cherry trees. Landownership is individual but the management of water
resources is collective. In autumn winter and spring, villagers graze their goat
herds in the mountains. Goats may sell at 500 to 700 DH for medium size,
and little ones sell at 300 DH. Mountaineers preoccupy themselves in sum-
mer with tourists; some work as muleteer guides, others as bazaar merchants,
still others as so-called hostel keepers. Few villagers have built houses in the
centre of Imlīl. They lock them in winter and go to work in the fields. On
summer’s advent, they descend to the village, open the houses and prepare
the rooms for daily rent. When the touristic traffic flourishes, Grazers collect
their flock and trust them to professional grazers. They instead work as
muleteers.

44
Duwār is a Moroccan word for local community, the smallest division in rural groupings.
A duwār is literally a circle; in the countryside or on the fringes of the city, it refers to a small
grouping of dwellings whose tenants do not necessarily share kinship relations, unlike divisions
such as faḫda (lit. thigh), which refers to groupings descending from a common ancestor.
45
M. al-Mahdi, Pasteurs de l’Atlas: Production pastorale, droit et rituel, Casablanca, Maṭbaʿat
al-Nağāḥ al-ǧadīda, 1999.
46
For further information, see ibid.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 605

The Imlīli-s trade in the weekly market of Sabt Asni held on Saturdays. The
souk hosts villagers who come from the different Tribes of Ġ iġāya and Mulāy
Brāhīm region. It is located in lowland on the road to Tārudānt, 14 kilometers
to the South East from Taḥǝnnāwt (see map I). Villagers are transported in
Taxis or vanned in crowded conditions to the souk by illegal transporters.47
The weekly souk of Asni is considered a big market-place in the region. As it
is observed in spring and summer, the biggest space of the souk is occupied by
vegetable sellers. Unlike the big souks of Dukkāla where there are sectorial
gatherings (raḥ bāt) specialized in particular business activities selling vegeta-
bles, wool, corn, fowl, cattle, meat and so forth, Asni market consists of a
mixture of scattered tents occupying an open space selling different produces
from clothes to vegetables. The souk is mainly full of tents selling vegetables,
apparently the bestselling commodity. Each dealer sits facing from two to four
piles (ʿәrrāms) of vegetables, thus investing in a capital of about 500 DH.
Elswhere, in a closed area made up of bricks and mortar, some twenty butch-
ers’ cells are erected. They sell beef and goat meat. But their business does not
seem to go well. Villagers normally shop half a kilo of meat or rather a chicken
or half of it. The well-to-do villagers can afford the price of a kilo or a kilo and
a half of meat (the price of meat is 50 DH per kilo for goat meat and 60 DH
for beef). There are two orphan tents poorly furnished for grilling meat inside
the souk. Outside by the main road, there are crude shop restaurants selling
grilled meat and stews to travelers. It seems that the mountaineers come to
shop their own food necessities. The way the tents are grouped in the market-
place displays the low income and poor consumption of the villagers. Only
two flea market tents sell second-hand clothes. When interviewed, the sellers
maintain that their business activity has to await the harvest season to get
more dynamic. Because of his poor income during the year, the fellah cannot
afford to purchase other commodities than food. Most souk clients work in
agriculture or herding. Their income is roughly 300 DH per week, which is
rather seasonal for daily labor is not available all over the year. The sum is so
meager that villagers tinker by various means including credit from grocers to
keep up survival. Even in summer, it is observed that the cloth items that
attract Berbers cost no more than 5 or 10 DH. Some villagers assert that l-bāl
(cloth flea market) furnishes their families with clothing. One can clothe his

47
Such drivers are called in the regions of ʿAbda, Dukkāla and Šāwiya ḫәṭtạ̄ fa (thieves of
places) as they transport people illegally. In the Atlas, they are called iʿttaqən (saviors) in Berber;
they stop in the middle of the nowhere to give a lift to a hitchhiker. If they are called by midnight
to emergently drive aching patients or pregnant women in gestation to the hospital in Taḥǝnnāwt,
they venture forth upon the road. Villagers transported in these vans from Imlīl to Asni pay 5
DH and from Mulāy Brāhīm to Asni 3 DH.
606 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

little son or daughter at the price of roughly 25 DH. Dealers whose merchan-
dise does not sell well have recourse to a credit system. They possess small
carnets in which they write separate pages in columns for each client listing his
name, the product purchased, the price and the date. The client is bound by
his Good Word (l-kәlma) or sincerity (l-maʿqūl ) to pay back the dealer.
Unlike the souks of Dukkāla where there are tents selling traditional cure
(sbūb), there is no tent for this special purpose in Asni. Only an illegitimate
curer is observed in the souk peddling his cure to willing clients. He is from
duwār Mulāy Brāhīm, whose inhabitants are not šurfa. The saint, as the
founding legend will explain, came from Tamṣlūḥәt to the area of Iminighisi
later named Mulāy Brāhīm after the saint’s name. The curer therefore is not
a šrif but outside his community, he feigns to be one, doing like the curers
from duwār Sbayṭa in Ben Yeffu. They are not šurfa but when they are out-
side Ben Yeffu, they claim that they are Buffi-s (descendents of Ben Yeffu)
and can cure possession. A Berber mountaineer interviewed in the souk
dichotomizes the work of curers in two types. There is the ṭālǝb (Qur’an
reciter), who knows the Word of God and is an educated curer, and there is
the ḥ layqi (public entertainer), who hoaxes clients. A ṭālǝb is well-learned in
the Qur’an and sometimes in magic. He is far better than someone who says
he has baraka. Many Berbers confirm that the practice and undoing of magic
is acquired through learning. It is not only an endowment or a gift bestowed
on šurfa healers. This belief opens horizons for Berbers to practice cure
regardless of holy social origins. The curer from duwār Mulāy Brāhīm, who
simulates that he owns the baraka of his ancestor, is therefore ranked as a
charlatan. In his practice of cure, this illegitimate curer, who does not belong
to any set maraboutic tradition, uses a fabric of the brand ḥ ayāti 48 shaped in
the form of a cigar and cauterizes with it his patients’ aching limbs. He has
been observed treating sciatica (buzәllūm) and aching articulations. Gener-
ally, as it has been observed in different regions in Morocco, so far as patients
hold faith (niya) in healers’ powers, whether “legitimate” or “non-legitimate,”
they may in a placebo effect respond positively to the cure. Dow and Moer-
man maintain that “the line between what might be termed ‘legitimate’ and

48
Ḥ ayāti is a traditional type of fabric available for various uses from standard to ritual ones.
Commonly, it is used in producing scarves, especially the ones to be worn by women on the
occasion of the Great Feast. In Dukkāla, after slaughter, subaltern women engage in burning the
sacrifice head. They put on their hair a lotion made of clove (qrenf әl ), rosemary (l-warḍ), henna
and common myrtle (rayḥ ān), and cover themselves with a white scarf made of ḥ ayāti to shelter
themselves from the heat of burners. The whole concotion is named šiyāṭ (lit. smoke/scent). Šiyāṭ
is washed away on the third day of the feast when women go to the Turkish bath. It leaves a
pleasing scent on the hair after cleaning.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 607

‘non-legitimate’ healers becomes blurred; even a healer who uses outright

deceit may nevertheless effect a healing if the patient is unaware of the decep-
tion and harbors a belief in the healing abilities of the doctor”.49 In other
words, to the extent that healers manipulate the healing symbols and rituals
in which patients also believe, healers may carry out a deceptively ‘positive’
cure.50 Hence, patients may easily fall victims of fraud.
In the market of Asni, there exist two tents specialized in selling herbal
medical brews to cure common colds, eczema (l-gzima), fissured toes (ṣsị bāna),
migraine (šqiqa), flu (rwāḥ ), stomach pain (l-maʿida) and colon sickness
(l-maṣrān). Such tents exist everywhere in Moroccan weekly souks but Ber-
bers evince a pleased interest in such herbal commodity displayed in the souk.
Some seem to be well informed about herbal medicine, others do not refrain
from trying it out to discover it. Herbal medicine, as some explain, is cheaper
and within reach. Modern medical care is expensive and lack infrastructure in
Imlīl. As it is observed, there is one small hospital (mustawṣaf ) where a doctor
comes twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays to treat patients from thirteen
duwārs, one ambulance parked in front of the building appears in poor condi-
tions. Respondents claim that this modern health care institution is unable to
satisfy the needs of the mountaineers.
Back to the souk, one of the herbal sellers mentioned above advertizes for
sale a special concoction for treating the cold of the penis, urinary bladder
and womb. He looks a bearded man in his forties shouting in public through
a loudspeaker: “. . . al-Anṭākī in his book Tad̠kira [Reminiscence] said: ‘no
pleasure is derived from a vagina save for it has three qualities: cleanness, dry-
ness, and warmth. . . .’ Here is what cures the cold of the womb (berd l-wālda),
the cold of the bladder (berd l-nbūla) and the cold of the penis (berd l-dkar) . . .
here is honesty, I do not drink alcohol thanks God, I do not smoke kif thanks
God, I do not fornicate thanks God, I do not lie thanks God!” He quotes a
lot of verses from the Qur’an to persuade the gathering audience and thus
legitimates his practice. This technique of communication, as Arkoun51 argues
elsewhere, has been flourishing ever since the official discourse has encroached
upon Islam to construct the national cultural identity and legitimize the
state. There is an overcommitment to the ideological function of religion.
Whenever the opportunity presents itself in quotidian life, individuals,

49
Cited in B.J. Waldram, “The efficacy of traditional medicine: Current theoretical and
methodological issues”, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 14/4 (2000), p. 603-25 (quotation
p. 605).
50
See ‘placebo effect’ in Hermans, De wereld, and Maarouf, Jinn eviction.
51
M. Arkoun, “De l’islam à l’islamisme, de la religion à l’idéologie”, in Camille & Yves
Lacoste (dirs), L’état du Maghreb, Casablanca, Le Fennec, 1991, p. 369-74.
608 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

groups or organizations cite verses from the Qur’an or hadith to block the
flow of a discussion, refute an argument, impose a conduct, make a choice,
absolve or condemn an idea, a person, an organization or doctrine. It hap-
pens that the Qur’anic discourse yields admirably to this game of citations
owing to its mythic structures shaped in narrative and didactic forms and its
metaphors, symbols and enunciations that can be grasped by the illiterate
and applied to social and political contexts in de-historicized and depoliti-
cized uses.52 The herbalist’s male-oriented discourse about sex attracts the
observer’s attention to the female’s slight presence in the souk. It is a business
gathering for males. Apart from some women scattered in few tents as sellers,
and some female beggars, most of the market traders and clients are males.
The business transaction is handled by the male who is the primary source of
support for the Berber family. This does not mean that the mountaineers
lock their women indoors. To the contrary, women go out to collect fire
wood, help in carrying heavy loads and perform domestic tasks though, as it is
observed, life for some is tough and toilsome.
Back to the social organization of the Imlīli-s, the Ayt Tāḫsǝnt had been
carried away by water in a big flood in 905H (1499-1500 AD). After, survi-
vors reconstructed their abodes in six villages—Tagadirt, Targaymula, Uṭṭūṣ
and Tāwrirt—, and settled on high points on the basin floor East of the
stream. Imlīl and Aššayn were established along the western contours of the
basin. However, according to Miller, the sense of belonging to a single clan
persisted among the inhabitants of Ayt Tāḫsǝnt villages. As for Ayt Mizan,
they came from hybrid social origins and a wide variety of provenances. Their
tribal sense of belonging seemed to be propelled by their local environment.
As Miller argues: “Slowly, over time, individuals settled the land and took a
common tribal name. All the attributes of a tribe followed, including a reck-
oning of common cultural descent from the time of settlement”.53 As the set-
tlement progressed, lineages increased. Arǝmd gained the esteem to have a
founder and an ancestor. Not like the heterogeneous other tribes. Arǝmd was
singled as unique and distinguished by their closeness to Šamharūš; the saint
so real in local imagination elected one of their ancient lineages, Ayt Bilʿīd, to
be the custodians of his shrine and the inheritors of his baraka and wealth. In
a very real sense, the Ayt Mizan tribes derived their social inspiration and
status from the saint’s legend and reality.54

52
Ibid., p. 373.
53
Miller, Imlil p. 56-7.
54
Miller, Imlil, p. 56-8.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 609

Nowadays, Imlīl seems to undergo a process of modernization due to the

increasing flow of tourists albeit in the main the villagers keep anchored in
place. Most of them work as farmers and herders. According to Miller, in
their attempt to perpetuate the old and tolerate the new in their engagement
with the business of living, the Ayt Mizan are both traditional and modern in
their enduring quest for strategies to handle changing situations and realities.
The community is moving from tribal marked status and defined social rela-
tions to impersonal faceless communication on a global scale. Ever since the
colonial times, Imlīl has witnessed ongoing settlements: the coming of French
officers, the building of the road, the arrival of Moroccan government offi-
cials, hikers, pilgrims, all those have brought a different world with them the
Ayt Mizan have to act in response to despite their Islamic conservative cul-
tural milieu. Risk takers who gamble for a “better social future,” Miller
describes, are drivers and migrants. They want to buy the tangible benefits
money can buy: health, education, housing, clothing, cars and radios, “the
panoply of modernization.” Some move to the cities of Casablanca and Mar-
rakech for work and education of their children. Some migrate to France,
some still bargain to guide tourists via mountain paths.55 In contrast to
Campbell’s mythological round,56 in which the hero departs from the famil-
iar world of the womb, and travels to the unknown, or the unfamiliar to gain
knowledge and reach the boon, Ayt Mizan, according to Miller, refuse to
dabble in journeys to the unknown; they fancy to preserve known realities.
Miller argues that there are three key constituent roots that make up the
Imlīli identity: the resource base (environment), social grouping (tribe), and
shared worldview [Islam].57 First, it may appear that most Imlīli-s will not
willingly modernize, and few will do so in the future. But change will occur
because their tribal sense of belonging, their natural environment and their
shared Islamic worldview cannot resist the dynamics of ecology, capitalism
and globalization. As Miller puts it:

As intensification of effort on the resource base is coupled with demographic

growth, pressure within their local ecology will force them to “modernize” des-
pite their reluctance to do so. The daily struggle with life will become more diffi-
cult in the local environment. Out-migration will increase to the already
overcrowded and underemployed towns and cities of Morocco. The bled [home-
land] will recede from reality to myth as it becomes an ever-diminishing source
of identity and livelihood. Eventually, the bled will lose its young people,

55
Miller, Imlil, p. 3-4.
56
J. Campbell, The hero with thousand faces, Princeton, Princeton UP, 1949.
57
Miller, Imlil, p. 6.
610 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

sufficient labor will be absent during the peak work periods of the agricultural
year, present environmental infrastructure will deteriorate and guiding tourists
and tending summer homes will replace the coherence of people and place.58

Miller has been anticipating the modernizing process in an irresistible logic

and empirically verifiable evidence of spatial connectivity as economic devel-
opment. Now Imlīl is going to cease to be the end of the asphalted road for it
will be connected to the touristic Ski area of Ūkaymden by a new asphalted
road in the making going past Tašddǝrt. If the greater the connectivity of a
region or country, Miller argues, the more modern, the more “developed” it
grows, Is Imlīl then expecting the “greater transition”?

Maqām59 Sidi Šamharūš

The shrine of Sidi Šamharūš is located at approximately 2365m in altitude in

Ğbǝl Tūbqāl. It is around 7 kilometers from the village centre of Imlīl—what
the Berbers estimate the distance fairly to be. It takes pilgrims around two
hours and a half walking/riding on a mule to attain the summit of Sidi
Šamharūš. The first mountain they circumambulate is Akswāl. Half way, they
traverse a mountain valley; on its high mountainous left side is situated the
duwār of Arǝmd. Then they start climbing again the chain of Tūbqāl for
about 3 kilometers. When they arrive, they cross a small river flowing beneath
big rocks, then walk through a narrow alley lined with cells displaying food
and artisanal commodities for sale. There is a bakery in addition to small cells
for pilgrims to dwell in. Then there is a small bridge that links this site to the
sacred sites of the saint. The western shore is lined with two cell restaurants
selling stews. On the eastern shore, there is a traffic sign prohibiting non-
Muslims from approaching the premises of the saint erected next to a small
grocery shop. The main premises are: the shrine, the saint’s spring, two small
rooms for pilgrims of both sexes to bathe in, the slaughter place, the cell of
itinerant diviners ( ġurfat l-maǧādīb [for maǧdūb, pl. maǧādīb, see Footnote
64]). It is also named the cave of Lalla ʿAyša Bent Sәlt ̣ān60 where pilgrims

58
Ibid., p. 9.
59
Maqām is a sacred locale where the saint stays. In the case of Sidi Šamharūš, it is a stopping
place because the šayḫ ( ǧinni ) used it as a station along his route without end.
60
Lalla ʿAyša also exists in Meknes at the shrine of Sidi ʿLi Ben Ḥ amdūš and is named ʿAyša
Sudāniyya. In Azemmour, on the shore of the river mouth of Umm Rabīʿ that flows into the
Atlantic, a shrine is erected of a saint called Lalla ʿAyša l-Baḥriyya (though the latter is human-
ized). ʿAyša’s abode at Šamharūš is a recent cultural invention. It has been added in the last
decade. The maraboutic tradition legitimates its cultural inventions by miracles named (ʿalāma
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 611

light candles. In the maraboutic tradition, lighting candles at shrines or offer-

ing them as gifts goes with the widespread invocational formulae: “light
for light,” or “emit light on him, he will emit light on you/he will enlighten
your way”.61
The shrine is a big grotto shaped like a dome under which there is a cave.
Walls have been added on all corners to stretch the cavity. The walls make
the façade orthodox of a shrine. Like a dome, the top of the grotto is painted
in white. Two flags, one in white and green cloth and the other red hovering
on the dome, indicate the existence of a sanctuary. Inside the shrine, there is
a masoned simulated tomb sheltered with a green fabric called “covering”
(l-ġtạ ); of this sort is the coating of Moroccan saints’ coffins. Unlike the famil-
iar design of maraboutic institutions, the saint’s tomb is neither located in the
middle of the room nor possesses an elevated angular wooden frame of a cof-
fin. It is rather thrust in the corner under the grotto. It looks in the shadows
like a sleeping man pilgrims are cautious to disturb. When pilgrims want to
kiss the tomb, they descend three stairs. In the left corner there is a box of
futuḥ āt (mandatory tips).62 Next to it there lie some cover gifts. Small carpets
and big watches are hung on the wall. All are offered to the saint. Two šurfa
from Sidi Raḥḥāl sit in the middle of the room; they chant litanies, animate
ḥ aḍra,63 and make wish prayers for supplicants who tip them for their healing
service. They say they have come to Šamharūš by the call of the masters of the
turn (nuba), which means it is their turn to stay at the shrine the span of time
allotted to them by saints. They have been called by a herald to join the gather-
ing at Šamharūš. The herald may appear to someone in a dream or in a fit of
possession occurring to one or someone else during one’s presence. The šurfa
from Sidi Raḥḥāl identify themselves as maǧdūbs64 (itinerant maraboutic pil-
grims) but on no account insinuate that they are engaged in the business of
living at Šamharūš with the consent of their Berber partners given that they
are in charge of the tip box.
The saint Sidi Šamharūš is renowned for his purificatory water. The melt-
ing snow at the summit of Tūbqāl forms a river in spring season that slopes

[sign]; išāra [indication]). Usually, it is a legitimate maǧdūb who discerns a sign during one of
their fits and reveals it to the maraboutic community who spreads the vision (ruʾya) all over.
61
The Arabic text reads as follows: ḍḍaw bi-ḍḍaw/ḍawwi ʿlīh iḍawwi ʿlīk.
62
Ftūḥ (pl. futuḥ āt): money given to the healer in return for the healing service he does, or
to the saint under the compulsion of the maraboutic visit (ḥ aqq zyara).
63
Ḥ aḍra is a ritualized ecstatic trance dance; of this kind are the dances practiced by mem-
bers of religious brotherhoods like Ḥ mādša, ʿIsāwa, and Gnāwa.
64
Maǧdūb (f. maǧdūba; pl. maǧādīb): a person who becomes attracted towards God and fas-
cinated by maraboutic orders; they apply themselves to touring saints and become itinerant
maraboutic pilgrims who lead a bohemian life and venture to behold into the future.
612 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

down by the shrine of Sidi Šamharūš and descends to the hills of Marrakech
regions. The river is called Wād Sidi Šamharūš. At the shrine, pilgrims do not
only consume river water but also water flowing out of a spring thought to be
dug out by Šamharūš. For the intent of undoing spells and curing possession,
two rooms are fabricated. Inside, one may find people’s rags thrown to chase
away what Moroccans call tābʿa (rags and intimate belongings thought to be
influenced by the spells of a hindering pursuer jinni also named l-qrayna [in
classical Arabic qarīna (companion)], who may dog someone’s steps and
encumber their way with thorns and obstruction [l-ʿkes]). Patients and natives
assert that the cold water of the mountains pour warm on the body when
patients bathe with it. Šamharūš’s river crosses the vicinity of a saint called
Mulāy Brāhīm about 20 Kilometers from Imlīl. The saint established his
watermill on the same river. The place was used to grind corn to feed the poor
housed in his hospice. Now the rḥ a (mill) of Mulāy Brāhīm is used for curing
tābʿa. People bathe inside it and leave their rags on a rocky enclosure.
Sidi Šamharūš has a slaughter place and a cave where patients immolate
and light candles respectively. Both places are stained with blood. In the
nḥ ira (slaughter place) where the patient brings her sacrifice, one of the šurfa
volunteers to perform the rite of slaughter. He faces the East (qibla) and
immolates the victim (in the Islamic orthodox way) by naming God and the
sacrificer, identifying them by their first name and their parent’s name. Gen-
erally, sacrifice is a symbolic rite. It may function as a gift-exchange, as propi-
tiation, as purification or as communion with the spirit world.65 In Islam,
sacrifice is offered to Allah for communion. It is said in Kor 22, 37 “it is not
their meat or blood that reaches God: It is the fealty of your heart that
reaches Him.”66 In the socio-maraboutic context, patients offer sacrifices to
propitiate the wrath of jinns and establish peaceful bonds with them so that
jinns can leave them in peace. Sacrifice at Sidi Šamharūš takes the form of a
scapegoat. When the patient chooses a heifer, goat, ram, or rooster to slaugh-
ter in the nḥ ira (slaughter place) and names himself after the slaughtered ani-
mal during the rite of slaughter, he intends the animal to symbolize him.
Both the animal and the patient share a common aspect: life. By taking the
animal’s life, the patient takes his life by proxy and offers it to the jinn in the
form of a scapegoat to display his submission. What is important here is not
the animal but the rite itself. The identification of the sacrificer with the ani-
mal sacrificed may be done in different ways. If it is a chicken, the healers

65
J. Beattie, Other cultures: Aims, methods and achievements in social anthropology, London,
Cohen and West, 1964, p. 237.
66
Al-Qurʾān [The Qur’an]: A contemporary translation, trans. Ahmed Ali, Princeton, Prince-
ton UP, 1984, reprinted in 1990.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 613

may wave it round the patient’s head; if it is a sheep, the patient may be
asked to touch it with his body or hands in order to concretize the identifica-
tion. In short, sacrifice is “a man-made symbol”67 meant to displace the jinn’s
harm and alleviate their anger. From an institutional religious perspective,
offering a sacrifice to another power than Allah is a form of polytheism. Wor-
shipping Allah means praying and sacrificing for him alone. It was narrated
that the Prophet said: “God damn he who sacrificed for some power other
than Allah.”68
It seems that the maraboutic culture has evolved its own cultural diagrams
and configurations that articulate the discourse of sainthood and masterhood
in general. Social representations are working through cultural schemata to
map the geography of the sacred. The visible arrangements—lodges, net-
works, adepts, palaces, processions and masquerades—are variants of particu-
lar underlying structures.69 The cultural construction of Sidi Šamharūš’s
lodge shows how maraboutic adepts activate their social schemata about how
saints should be configurated. The presence of the simulated tomb is a good
case in point. The familiar social configuration of saints’ lodges requires the
presence of tombs. There is no saint without a tomb. If the cultural schema is
violated, doubts arise on the identity and legitimacy of the saint. In El Jadida,
for instance, there is a female saint well-known under the name of Lalla
Zahra. It is a small cairn on the pavement on a busy road called Road 20.
When the asphalted road was in the process of construction, I was told, the
Governor of the town told them to demolish the cairn. He told them it was
not a real tomb. But the saint appeared to him by night and menaced him.
The following day, he went there in person and sacrificed on the cairn, warn-
ing workers not to touch her premises. In opposition to this popular autho-
rizing story I collected in 2002 authenticating her power, there is another
prohibiting story that says Lalla Zahra is a pile of stones. The Portuguese,
who colonized the city in the fifteenth century used to call it Lalla Ḥ māra.
They maintained that a settler had a female donkey (ḥ māra) that he cherished
and when it died, he buried it there.70 Other oral versions go that such stones
were set up by rich people who used to horde their money by burying them

67
Beattie, Other, p. 236.
68
Ibn Ḥ anbal, Musnad, retreived from mawsūʿat al-ḥ adīt̠ [the encyclopedia of the hadith];
www.hadith.al-islam.com, trans. mine. The Arabic version reads as follows: laʿana llāhu man
d̠abaḥ a li-ġayri llāh.
69
A. Hammoudi, Master and disciple: The cultural foundations of Moroccan authoritarianism,
Chicago, Chicago UP, 1997.
70
Cf. S. Blaiga, Dirāsa iḥ sạ̄ ʾiyya wa-taḥ līliyya li-muḫtalaf al-ṭuruq al-ṣūfiyya bi-madīnat
al-Ǧadīda, Unpublished Licence monograph, (dir.) A. El Ouaret, Dep. History, University of
El Jadida, El Jadida, Morocco, 1992-3.
614 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

and enclosing them with stones pretending the place to be saintly so that no
one would steal the money. In the past, there was a stone-oven inside the clo-
sure designed for magical practices, and to that small closure of stones, local
women of El Jadida used to go to practice magic (sḥ ūr). Lalla Zahra derived
her authenticity from women’s stories about the power of her cure. Now that
the powerful maraboutic discourse on Lalla Zahra is no longer in circulation,
her tomb is crawling into oblivion, only the name that keeps reverberating
on people’s lips when bringing up the souk of Lalla Zahra in chat.
Examples of stone culture abound in Morocco, and people have grown the
cultural schema to harbor a strong belief in stones, grottos and cairns’ sacred
miracles, especially those associated with saints and jinns. Yet, the most com-
mon schema for nearly every saint goer is the presence of the tomb within
the maraboutic site. At Sidi Šamharūš, there are pilgrims who believe that the
saint is buried there. The šurfa from Sidi Raḥḥāl affirm that “this is where the
šayḫ used to worship till he died.” That it is believed that Šamharūš is buried
in the Atlas sounds logical if compared with the founding myth. His hagio-
graphic story says that he used to appear in two shapes, as a knight and as a
dog. The knight/šayḫ is a human shape. And it is this human shape which the
clan of Ayt Bilʿīd saw, a human figure thought to have lived in the shrine and
could have died there. As a matter of fact, people do not probe for answers
and are ready to entertain the flimsiest proof in favor of the belief that the
existence of jinns in our world is true. Any debate on this topic is cut short
by reference to the Qur’an. Jinns are mentioned in the Holy text. People may
pick up one of the verses such as “I have not created the jinns and men but
to worship Me,”71 and block the argument. Even the question whether the
Qur’an represents the human and non-human worlds as existing separately
seems to be beside the point. They think that jinns are like human beings,
they breathe, eat, sleep, make sex, and die. In this case they can be buried.
According to one of my interviewees, there is an ongoing belief among the
Imlīli-s that Sidi Šamharūš’s tomb is adamantine to shooting though the pic-
ture in Fig. 7 tells us otherwise. The miracle of the tomb resisting camera
shooting brings to mind the idea of spirits’ invisibility. Jinns do not reflect
shadows in the mirror. The tomb is assorted as a jinni’s tomb without a
shadow, invisible to the camera eye.
On the eastern edge of the bridge that conduces to the shrine of Sidi
Šamharūš, there is a traffic sign planted in the middle of Tūbqāl announcing
in three languages the following warning: ḫāṣṣ bi-l-muslimīn/Interdit aux

71
The Arabic version reads as follows: wa-mā ḫalaqtu l-insāna wa-l-ǧinna illā li-yaʿbudūni
(Kor 51, 56).
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 615

non-musulmans/Forbidden to Non Muslims (see Fig. 8). The warning mes-

sage tells us something about the cultural identity of the maraboutic site. It
draws up the boundaries of a sacred area in a Muslim land prohibited to non-
Muslims. To explore what the text is telling us, let us put it in context—in
relation to other Islamic institutions, their history and cultural significance.
Like the shrine of Sidi Šamharūš, maraboutic institutions are represented as
ḥ urum (sacred territories). The word in classical Arabic is ḥ arām (lit. forbid-
den); bayt Allāh al-Ḥ arām (the Forbidden/Sacred House of God) is Mecca. It
means it is a place where people are forbidden to sin against God: no wars,
no fornications, no lies, no drinking and no murder. Mosques that face the
East (Mecca) are also part of the sacred. They are forbidden houses of God.
In situations of war, old people, women and children take refuge in such har-
bours to be spared by conquerors. Oppression fugitives may also seek asylum
there. Such sacred premises are normally forbidden to non-Muslims though
the Jews of Demnat benefited from the right of sanctuary in the ḥ urum of
Sidi Bu l-Ḫ laf during the turmoil following the death of Mulāy al-Ḥ asan.72
The panel on Tūbqāl tells us something about how modernity can be toler-
ated in a Moroccan conservative social context. The message says that multi-
culturism is a mosaic in which every religious group is confined in his own
cocoon, defining the other as outside the group. Non-Muslims are forbidden
to visit the sacred monument of the Muslims—even though heterodox. The
expression “forbidden to non-Muslims” is an authoritative expression of
rejection of other faiths. It is an expression that severs the umbilical cord
between religions as if the intangible world of Muslims exists independent of
other religions. Who are the non-Muslims? Which religion do most tourists
belong to? Tūbqāl is full of Europeans, Christians and Jews. They are not
allowed to trespass into the sacred. To stretch the metaphor of the forbidden
vs. the lawful and sacred vs. profane to the existence of non-Muslims beyond
the frontiers of the Mountains by descending to Moroccan cities, we discover
that modernization is not a way of life for all Moroccans but is rather
restricted to some profane entertainment sites and enclosed in some rich
neighborhoods. By and large, it is tolerated in night clubs, restaurants and
supermarkets. Traditionalism traverses the rest of society. We are not saying
that society should modernize nor yet should Islamize. We are trying to
understand how a conservative segment of the Moroccan population repre-
sents modernity—the modernizing discourse is a representation of social life;
it reflects a way of thinking. Miller is predicting an opening of Imlīl to mod-
ernization because of the road connectivity of the region to the big city of

72
Dermenghem, Le culte, p. 169.
616 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

Marrakech and its touristic activities. Until now, the Berbers are struggling
to ameliorate their social and economic conditions but seemingly with a very
conservative cultural worldview.
The management of the saint is undertaken, by Ayt Bilʿīd. The clan dates
their ancestry to two brothers who lived in the fifteenth century. Their rela-
tion with the eponymic ancestor is not known. In the founding myth, the
founder Ayt Bilʿīd would remain alone after the departure of the Portuguese.
The lineage of the Imlīli community as a whole does not run deep in history.
Ayt Mizan families seem to be recent settlers in the area. Šamharūš then is
the founding spirit of the clan. He is the protector of the ancestor. Ayt Bilʿīd
have inherited the task of running the shrine’s affairs as it is charted in the
hagiographic story of Šamharūš. The family of Bilʿīd are neither šurfa nor
descendents of Sidi Šamharūš but they have inherited his baraka by being the
saint’s elects. During my ethnographic sojourn, I have observed that the Ber-
ber inheritors are present in the shrine premises but do not perform any rit-
ual tasks. They are “hiring” šurfa from Sidi Raḥḥāl to do the therapeutic tasks
and maraboutic rituals. The šurfa, when interviewed, never claimed that they
were hired. They put it in a maraboutic parlance: ǧābtna nuba hnaya (the
turn brought us here). One keeps wondering whether it is the call of the saint
or of the shrine keepers that has brought them there.
My fieldwork experience in maraboutism has taught me that there is a
social capital maraboutic healers possess and employ directly or indirectly to
gain access to maraboutic power. Through social networks of maraboutic
orders and establishing social connections between members visiting each
other, especially in mūsǝms, maraboutic knowledge/discourse is sustained,
disseminated and inculcated to younger generations. Thanks to these
maraboutic networks and their inclinations to ally and propagate their beliefs,
maraboutic power is still popularized. In the Buffi community, healers sub-
stitute others, send their patients to each other and authenticate each other’s
cure. They have connections with healers in different regions of the kingdom.
They have practiced in different socio-cultural contexts inside and outside the
country. They have cured VIPs. In Imlīl, when I visited Ayt Mitaʿazza, two
kilometers east up from the village centre, located between the duwārs of
Aytsūka and Tamatǝrt, I found it forsaken and derelict. When I asked the
muleteer guide ʿAbdrraḥīm about the shrine keepers, he said that they were
busy with agricultural activities. It was only in summer when they came to
clean and arrange the place to welcome visitors. A saint is alive and working
only if s/he possesses a social capital i.e., if there are people who are willing to
invest in him/her and form up a social network constructing strategic alli-
ances to legitimize their order and gain access to symbolic maraboutic power,
thus distributing his/her baraka.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 617

At Sidi Šamharūš, nuba (management by turn) is accorded to Ayt Bilʿīd

who do not necessarily inherit the management of the shrine from father to
son. A descendent may succeed his uncle. The same system is applied in
nearby saint regions, of this sort is the saint Mulāy Brāhīm—to say nothing
of the rest of Moroccan saints. Nuba is the norm in managing the shrine’s
affairs and varies from 4 to 14 days depending on the rank of the descendent
because the mqaddәm is the highest rank.73 Nuba (turn) at Šamharūš seems to
be a cultural schema the villagers socialize to. In the socio-maraboutic con-
text, jinns descend to be tried in the mythic court by turn. Each jinni’s trial
occurs at a specific time in the week. Descendents of the saint manage the
shrine by turn. The nuba system is applied nearly in all maraboutic institu-
tions in Morocco. Nuba, as a schema, is also activated in the socio-agricul-
tural context. The Berbers’ management of water resources is based on turns.
Each mountaineer has to wait for his turn to irrigate his piece of land. No
one should encroach upon his neighbor’s turn. It also applies to touristic
guidance. Muleteer guides have organized themselves in an association that
arranges their work. Despite occasional clandestine infringements, each guide
waits for his turn to embark on a trekking trip designed by a chief supervisor
called l-amin (trustee).
The commerce in the shrine is managed by Ayt Bilʿīd family and some
other shopkeepers from Arǝmd. Local authorities banned the construction of
trade buildings surrounding the sanctuary in 1979 owing to the conflict
between the village and the lineage. In the seventies, a quarrel stemmed
between the lineage and the tribe. The lineage, no longer respecting the chart
of the myth, wanted to benefit exclusively from the sacrifices, so the tribe
decided to remove the lineage from the management of the shrine. It was
said that the descendents did not own a genealogy tree nor yet a decree
(ḍahīr) of a marabout or šrif to prove their control of the shrine. After series
of tribal confrontations and interventions of the authorities, they resorted to
themselves to find a solution. It was agreed that four months (including sum-
mer when there was a lot of traffic) should be given to the tribe to take over
management, and 8 months to the lineage. The lineage saw it as four months
only, because situated at an altitude of 2365m, the shrine would not attract
pilgrims in the four months of winter. When the tribe assumed the control
of the shrine, the ritual tasks done by the lineage members desisted and the
tribe delegates took them in charge, sacrifices and all except during the mūsǝm
when the lineage regained its traditional prestigious ritual functions.74

73
Rachik, Le sultan, p. 45.
74
For further details see Rachik, Le sultan, p. 65-6.
618 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

The Founding Myth

It seems that there exist two social representations of Šamharūš, one based on
books of magic and does not consider the jinni a saint but as one of the seven
sultans of jinns serving diviners, sorcerers and healers. The other representa-
tion stems from the local cultural imagination of the mountaineers endowing
the jinni with a maraboutic aura.75 This Šamharūš is portrayed as a šayḫ, a
Muslim scholar who knows the Qur’an, a knight and defender of justice. The
first image of Šamharūš can possess patients. Sometimes, his hosts become
distinguished maraboutic figures; of this kind are diviners who may address
their patients with the cliché: “Šamharūš works with me.” This Šamharūš is
completely different from the ethnographic Šamharūš who is adored by pil-
grims and local mountaineers. The first one is subjugated to the will of magi-
cians while the one in the High Atlas is a judge who conducts trials of
maǧdūbs and patients in his court.
The first Šamharūš is then a magical figure part of a hierarchical configura-
tion of mediators. At the top, there is the chief commander Ṭaḥīṭmaġlyāl. He
commands the archangels who in turn command jinn sultans who in turn
command ordinary jinns. The jinn sultans are seven: Šamharūš, Mud̠hib,
Abyaḍ, Aḥmar, Burqān, Zawbaʿa and Mimūn. These sultans own servants
whom they can put at the sorcerer’s disposal to perform magic, and supervise
their work under the magician’s command. The magical hierarchy places the
magician at the top, the archangels under his command, the kings under the
archangels’ control and the jinn servants under the kings’ control. Šamharūš,
for instance, is evoked on Thursdays. The magician calls forth Sarfāīl, an arch-
angel, to secure the obedience of Šamharūš. Al-Bunni requires of the magi-
cians not to entrust the tasks of jinns to the archangels.76 Šamharūš is a servant
(ḫādim) of his master Sarfāʾīl. He lives in a double submission both to the
magician and to the archangel. As Rachik puts it: “Šamharūš is not a sultan
except on the condition that he serves well”.77
Generally, the world of jinns is modeled on the social world Moroccans live
in.78 The cultural maraboutic schema of mediation and the sultanic schema of
autocracy (one-man power) are transferred into the intangible world of spirits.
This society is imagined as pyramidical in structure like its human counter-
part, placing servants/subalterns at the base of the pyramid; above them there
exists a group of sultan-jinn mediators working under the command of arch-

75
Ibid., p. 28-30.
76
Ibid., p. 29.
77
Ibid., p. 31, trans. mine.
78
Crapanzano, Hamadsha, p. 139, and Maarouf, Jinn eviction, p. 85, 176.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 619

angels. Each one of the archangels governs one sultan jinni. All these celestial
figures are governed by one supreme power called Ṭaḥīṭmaġlyāl. And he who
communicates with such invisible powers can rule the world of humans and
spirits. Such representations may incite some proficient maraboutic adherents
to get in contact with the world of baraka and thus endeavor to acquire a
symbolic capital that enables them to dominate the ʿāmma (commoners) who
in turn may accept such domination ungrudgingly, especially if they share
similar worldviews and cultural schemata.
The second Šamharūš in question is the saint in the High Atlas, also called
in Moroccan lore Sidi Šamharūš ṭ-Ṭayyār (the flyer). His nickname bears a
strong resemblance to Mulāy Brāhīm’s nickname Ṭayr l-Ǧ bāl (the bird of
Mountains), also a celebrated saint in the region of the Atlas. Mulāy Brāhīm
is named the Bird of Mountains because of his high location and because his
ancestors have been endowed with the baraka of chasing harmful birds. Ben
Yeffu’s brother Sidi Ali, another saint in Dukkāla, is conjured up like a falcon
hunting ǧnun birds without respite. The metaphor of the birds is enrolled
within the range of calamities God may inflict upon human sinners. There is
a common belief that goes “to redeem the earth and purge it from sinners,
Allah may send fatal storms, devastating floods, rapacious birds and insects,
freezing cold and hellish fire to the population.” In the past, such was the
explanations forwarded by the intellectuals of the time. The majority of the
ulema—apart from Ibn Ḫ aldūn—construed natural catastrophes as meta-
physical events. Even Ibn Zuhr—a great physician of his time—rationalized
complicated illnesses as divine occurrences. He attributed their unintelligible
causes to the wrath of Allah which was beyond the doctor’s grasp.79 Saints
emerged as rescuers of the masses and earth redeemers. They were thought
able to communicate with the intangible world of spirits and thus able to
mediate people’s requests for social security and survival.
Sidi Šamharūš of the Atlas then is part of this category of legendary rescu-
ing saints evincing resistance against natural calamities and political domina-
tion. Saints are not only thought to cure illnesses, evoke rains, make springs
and rivers flow but strike against despotism and poverty. Historiographers
state that some saints used their riches to house the poor and help the needy;
some used their miracles to call for rain to water the land, and some used
their power to fight against despotic regimes80. The popular tale of the Sәlt ̣ān

79
H. Būlqt ̣īb, Ǧawāʾiḥ wa-awbiʾat Maġrib ʿahd al-Muwaḥ iddīn, Rabat, Zaman Press, 2002,
p. 32.
80
See M.A. al-Bazzāz, Taʾrīḫ al-awbiʾa wa-l-maǧāʿāt bi-l-Maġrib fī l-qarnayn al-t̠āmin ʿašar
wa-l-tāsiʿ ʿašar, Rabat, Faculty of Letters, 1992; Abī Yaʿqūb Yūsuf b. Yaḥyā al-Tādilī, al-Tašawwuf
ilā riǧāl al-taṣawwuf, Rabat, Faculty of Letters, 1984; Būlqt ̣īb, Ǧawāʾiḥ .
620 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

l-Kḥal (the Black Sultan) is a case in point.81 It is rehearsed in different ver-

sions in various maraboutic sites; each saint said to be a protector of his
ḥ urum (sacred territory) is celebrated for having a saga of triumph over the
Black Sultan. The expression Sәlṭān l-Kḥal is used to refer either to the
Marinid Sultan Abū l-Ḥ asan al-Marīnī,82 or as my respondents at Ben Yeffu
claim, to the Alawite Sultan Mulāy Ismāʿīl due perhaps to their black color,
black parents, or dark powers. Yet, in maraboutic cultural imagination, the
Sәlṭān l-Kḥal is rather a cultural symbol of terror and oppression. Historically
speaking, people seemed to have cut short the story of political domination
in Morocco, and attributed the expression Sәlt ̣ān l-Kḥal practically to any
sultan or even qaid (head of a rural or urban district/region), who mistreated
them using whatever forces to impose their domination, which was the case
with the pasha Thami Glāwi.83 Maraboutic legends convey the war between
the Black Sultan and saints. Sidi Masʿūd Ben Ḥ sīn based in Dukkāla is said,
for instance, to have aborted the Black sultan’s attack by sending him bees
and stinging flies (naʿra). Ben Yeffu chased him away by conjuring up a black
jinni with seven heads to rent the Sultan off his horse and lift him to the sky.
The Sultan started saying tslīm (an expression of surrender). Then the saint
ordered the jinni to bring him back to earth. Back on his horse, the Sultan
fled away.84 That saints have vanquished him symbolizes that their power is
greater than his and thus should be awed. This is a political expression of
sainthood whose historical roots we can still trace in Moroccan saints’ legends
and maraboutic practices. Does Sidi Šamharūš possess any similar tale of
power?
Sidi Šamharūš does not own any saga of triumph over the Black Sultan
but he lived in a region threatened by an enemy inside the periphery such as
the tribes of Gundāfa and Glāwa and an enemy outside the periphery incar-
nated in colonial invaders.85 The founding story of Šamharūš makes a brief
mention of the Portuguese who chased the native inhabitants out of the
region save for one clan of Ayt Bilʿīd who would later host Šamharūš. If we
add to this the portrayal of the jinni in the story as a knight who gallops the
mountains by night—an image similar to ʿAyša La Condessa who used to
lure enemies by night and kill them—, we are face to face with a hero of the

81
Maarouf, Jinn eviction, p. 4-5, 64-5.
82
A. El Ouaret, “Riḥlat Rgibāt” [The journey of Rgibat], Daʿwat al-ḥ aqq, 357 (2001),
p. 72-7, here p. 74; Hajji, La zaouia, p. 97.
83
See P. Pascon, Le Haouz de Marrakech (vol. 2), Rabat, Centre universitaire de la recherche
scientifique, 1983.
84
Maarouf, Jinn eviction, p. 65.
85
See Miller, Imlil.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 621

mountains who defends the territory and gives protection to the inhabitants.
Sidi Šamharūš of the Atlas has acquired many honorific titles such as Sidi
(honorific title bestowed on a person of holy descent), šayḫ (Sufi master),
sәlṭān (sultan), ʿālim (religious scholar) and qāḍī (judge). Berbers and
maraboutic clients are familiar with the story that he used to be a qāḍī in the
Prophet’s time and used to apply the Islamic law (šarīʿa) in his mythic court.
The maraboutic nomenclature attributed to his burial site is ḍarīḥ (shrine)
and maqām (station). The word maqām indicates the place where he resided,
stopped but not necessarily where he died.86 In other sources, it is said that
he knows the Qur’an by heart and knows about the history of the prophets
and civilizations and met the Prophet who told him about the date of his
death.87 Dermenghem reports that Šamharūš was a disciple of al-Buḫārī.88
This seems to be a familiar maraboutic schema that jinns taught human saints
or saints/ulema taught jinns. The case of the madrasa (school) of Būya ʿUmar
is a relevant instance where the saint used to be a maraboutic teacher of jinns.
The founding myth of Sidi Šamharūš was narrated to me in group by old
people including one of the sons of Ayt Bilʿīd in the presence of a restaurant
keeper, shopkeepers, and some young people from Arǝmd. Informants
recount:

the story of the jinni started in the far past when there had been people living in
Imlīl but were uprooted by the Portuguese except for one kanūn (hearth) of Ayt
Bilʿīd, who kept tarrying there and survived the dislocation by the colonizers.
Bilʿīd was a man who used to leave his horse in a stable outside his tent with a
black dog to watch over it by night. In the morning, he found the horse swea-
ting. At first he thought that someone used to steal the horse and work with it.
But the dog never barked to signal the existence of a stranger. Then, he decided
to spy for the doer. One night when he was waiting to see who would steal the
horse, he heard a cry from outside: “Šamharūš you are late, we wait for you.”
Some knights shouted. At the moment he saw a knight mounting his horse,
going out of the stable and went playing with the other knights at Iswal valley
where the mūsǝm market would take place later. The dog was not in the stable.
Bilʿīd told everything he saw to his wife. She suggested to him that she would
prepare couscous and he would invite the knight for the meal. When the
moment came, the man addressed the knight with his invitation. The latter told
him he was not human and could not eat salted food. He said he was a jinni
transmogrified into the shape of a black dog by day and a human shape by night.
His name was Šamharūš. Because of Ayt Bilʿīd’s good will and hospitality, he
rewarded him. He showed him where he should build him a mazār (pilgrimage

86
Dermenghem, Le culte, p. 18, 113.
87
Arrif et al., “le Grand Muggar”, p. 186-7; Rachik, Le sultan, p. 32.
88
Dermenghem, Le culte, p. 105.
622 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

lodge) and told him to take some eye-witnesses to the place from the rest of the
duwārs (Arǝmd, Mzik and Imlīl). Then he charted his conditions. He said: “You
will receive a lot of visitors who will sacrifice for me! You (addressing Bilʿīd) take
the skin and head but the meat you distribute to people in equal shares!” Later,
when the area of Imlīl was peopled and duwārs grew, a drought occurred. When
the natives supplicated Šamharūš, he addressed one of Ayt Bilʿīd and told him to
take the staff (his symbol) and dig it in the place where his shrine was located. A
spring flew out with water and was named after him together with the river that
flew from Tūbqāl.

As a founding myth, the story describes the advent of the saint and his settle-
ment in Imlīl. It lists his miracles and charts his testament. Šamharūš has
come to the region as a wanderer, a strong jinni able to assume different
shapes and is also a fighter. He helps the villagers find water by digging out a
spring for them and appoints the clan of Bilʿīd as his inheritors. In the myth,
Šamharūš is classless, part of the human and non-human world. He has his
hagiographic tale and popular miracles. It seems very difficult to assort him
as a human saint or shapeless spirit. Even the system of nomenclature delin-
eated above does not tilt the balance to his identity of šayḫ or Sultan of jinns.
In another version recounted to Rachik,89 Šamharūš explained to the villagers
that all those areas in the Atlas were his sacred/forbidden territories (ḥ urum).
No one should sin or fight in them. He menaced with retaliation if his will
was challenged. He was an administrator of justice; he told the tribes: “The
meat should be distributed to people in equal shares.” Like the rest of Moroc-
can saints, he appointed his inheritors.
The founding myth is a social representation of Šamharūš as a model of
benevolence and sacrifice, a knight errant wandering worldwide in defense of
a noble cause: justice and protection of the poor. Šamharūš does not only
exist in the Atlas. He exists in Fez and Tiznit. In all these abodes and else-
where in Africa he is represented as the model of sacrifice and justice. His
double belonging to both worlds human and non-human enables him to see
into human justice what ordinary humans cannot perceive. Supplicants who
fail to attain social justice in their own cultural milieu go to seek it from
Šamharūš who is thought to be able to retaliate to wrong doers and perform
justice. In the region of Tazǝrwālt within the premises of the shrine of Sidi
Ḥ mād u Mūsa, there is a monumental tree of Šamharūš,90 a witness to his

89
Rachik, Le sultan, p. 46.
90
In other legends linking Šamharūš to Sidi Ḥ mād u Mūsa, the tree is described as the spot
where a drop of blood fell to the ground from heavens when Šamharūš died while visiting his
father Sidi Ḥ mād u Mūsa. Šamharūš of Tazǝrwālt is thought to be born out of a sexual union
(marriage) of the saint with a female jinni (see Arrif et al., “Le Grand Muggar”, p. 185-6).
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 623

bravura and martyrdom for the cause of justice. The hagiographic tale of the
tree, as it is collected by Arrif et al. reads as follows:

Once there was a Fasi whose wife was kidnapped by a jinni. He roamed deserts
and plains to find her but in vain. Some people indicated to him a fqih (Qur’an
reciter) in the region of Tazǝrwālt who could help him find his wife. When he
met the fqih named Muhammed l-ʿAǧli, he told him about his story. The fqih
gave him a letter to give to a knight dressed in white who would show up at the
first hour of the mūsǝm of Ḥ mād u Mūsa. The Fasi remained waiting till the
agreed hour. At that point in time he saw the knight arriving at the meeting
place. He entrusted him with the letter without addressing a word, for this had
been the instruction given to him by the fqih before. The knight presented him-
self then to the Fasi as being Sidi Šamharūš. He asked him to accompany him to
a place known as marāqiʿ (place of atonement). Once on the spot, he asked him
to close his eyes, after which they found themselves both in another place where
a gathering of ǧnun was held. Sidi Šamharūš inquired them about the one who
abducted the man’s wife to immediately reveal his identity. The abductor showed
himself but refused to release the woman because he accused her of pouring boi-
ling water on his children. Sidi Šamharūš did not hesitate to kill him, released
the woman and took again the way of return with the Fasi and his delivered
wife. He brought to them a dish of rice to eat which they found on their table at
home. The king of jinns, when leaving the table, left on the dish human finger-
prints. After that, he returned to the mūsǝm of Sidi Ḥ mād u Mūsa. In thanks,
the Fasi promised to return the following year to the mūsǝm to sacrifice an ani-
mal under the tree where Sidi Šamharūš used to shackle his horse. When the
moment arrived, the Fasi went to the place only to find an old man lying under
the tree in the enclosure of broken stones. He informed the Fasi about the death
of Sidi Šamharūš on the hands of the jinns whom he had killed their father to
deliver the kidnapped woman.91

This story of Šamharūš with the Fasi resembles the story of ʿAwʿawi quoted in
the ethnography on Ben Yeffu. The Buffi story goes that

Once upon a time, a rich man was joking with his wife. He told her in jest that
ʿAwʿawi should come and take her away. The ʿafrīt (strong jinni) hovering around
heard the call of his name and fulfilled the man’s kidding request. The man
could not believe what happened. Bereaved of his sweetheart, he underwent deep
and poignant distress. He travelled from one region to another looking for fuqha
(Qur’an reciters and exorcists) or saints to deliver her from the ʿafrīt’s tenure but
in vain. At last some people informed him about the miracles of the saint Ben
Yeffu. They told him that at Ben Yeffu’s maḥ kama (court), all jinns were subject
to trial. He bought presents for the sultan including even his servants Arabs and
Gnāwi-s and headed for his palace. When the sutlan came and heard the man’s
story, he assembled the ʿafrīts (strong jinns) and inquired them about the man’s

91
Arrif et al., “Le Grand Muggar”, p. 184-5, trans. mine.
624 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

wife. They all blamed ʿAwʿawi for the deed. Then the Sultan wrote the letter
l-ʿayn [ʿ] and the letter l-wāw [w] from the jinni’s name, and in the twinkling of
an eye, the ʿafrīt appeared in the sultan’s presence accompanied by the abducted
woman. He said that he did not touch her and explained that it was the man’s
fault to mention his name in jest. The sultan reprimanded the jinni for his wrong-
doing and ordered the man to take his wife back home.92

Though the Buffi-s think that the story is real, it may be read as an allegory
depicting the legitimate authority of the saint over the jinn world. It is a local
cultural representation of the sultan Ben Yeffu as impartial and reigning with
justice between humans and jinns. He rescues the woman from the jinni’s
captivity and delivers her safe to her husband. His feat of strength far sur-
passes that of Šamharūš who jeopardizes his life during his concerted effort
to emancipate the Fasi’s wife from bondage. Yet, like Šamharūš like Ben
Yeffu, their stories elect them as sultans attaining cosmic dimensions. They
compel the jinns that concert revolt to obey their commands. They respond
to the screams of the distressed wherever they are, be it in mountains or des-
erts. Eulogizing Ben Yeffu in popular verse, the following folk poetic lines
sum up such motifs:

1. Your miracle can be seen, you the treasure of time,

Every generation that comes finds you a Sultan.
2. Sultans existed and were thrust in oblivion,
The palace where they dwelled is now deserted.
3. You are a Sultan before them for centuries,
You are still a Sultan who reigns over mountains and slopes.
4. From generation to generation they have supported you,
And by you were highly ranked! Prosperous will he be he who comes to you!
5. Those who were disinclined to come have called upon you,
Your baraka reaches them like the lightening of rain!
6. Wherever the jinns rebel,
They are persecuted and afraid of complaints.
7. Your servants boast of your miracles,
You rescue them from under the threat of knives.
8. The scream of the sorrowful who is unable to act,
You rescue he who calls on you in mountains and deserts.93

92
Maarouf, Jinn eviction, p. 189-90.
93
1. ḫaṣәltek tәd̠har ya kenz zamān
l-ǧīl lli ǧa yṣībәk sәlṭān
2. salāṭīn yā sidi kānu u tnsāw
ra l-qṣar lli kānu fih ʿād ḫāwi
3. nta sәlṭān qbalhum fi qurūn mḍāw
bāqi sәlṭān tәḥ kam fi l-ǧbāl u səhāwi
4. naṣrūk min l-ǧīl l-ǧīl u bik tsǝmmāw
lli hda u sken līk tāwi
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 625

The local social representation of Ben Yeffu highlights the sign, Sultan, and
the sign sorrowful (maḍyūm). In his own cultural milieu Ben Yeffu is locally
imagined as ġiyyāt al-maḍyūmīn (rescuer of the sorrowful). He is represented
as a saint leader, a “sultan forever, who reigns with counsel, rescuer of his ser-
vant son and any caller.” Two key words are foregrounded in this line, the
word ‘forever’ (ʿala ddawām) and the word ‘counsel’ (mašwar). The expres-
sion that Ben Yeffu is a sultan forever points away to its opposite, the ephem-
eral sultan. Therefore the binary opposition—‘ephemeral sultan’ vs. ‘eternal
sultan’—verges on the meaning of the divine. Unlike earthly sultans who are
bound to err and die in oblivion, the saint-sultan is believed to last for eter-
nity. Dead (living in the afterworld) or alive (living in this world), he will live
among his subjects who can call him forth at any time. This implies that the
saint-sultan is deified in the verse. The word ‘counsel’ points away to its
opposite, ‘despotism’. A binary opposition may be generated: sәlṭān yәḥ kam
bi-l-mašwar (fair sultan) vs. sәlṭān ġašūm (despotic sultan). In this sense, the
earthly sultans, like the Black Sultan, are despotic and unjust towards their
subjects while saint-sultans are supreme models of justice. This majestic myth
also puts emphasis on the importance of the servants (ḫuddām) of the saint.
In the sentence, “a Sultan forever, who reigns with counsel, a rescuer of his
servant, son and any caller,” the word ‘servant’ is syntactically placed at the
front. This sequencing of Ben Yeffu’s subjects implies that his servants come
before his sons. In the Buffi social context, the natives keep spreading the
idea that Ben Yeffu rescues his servants and responds to their calls before any-
one else. The social significance of such assertions is that to accept this myth
is to accept one’s position of servitude with acquiescence and zeal.
Sidi Šamharūš’s power is legitimized by an authorizing maraboutic dis-
course based on šarifism and baraka. Šamharūš is said to have been Islamized
during the Prophet’s time. He became the qāḍī of ǧnun. The šayḫ Maḥmūd
Kaʿt b. al-Ḥ āǧǧ al-Mutawakkil in Taʾrīḫ al-fattāš [The chronicle of the
researcher] reported that Šamharūš met the Prophet in person and the latter
announced to him that he would live up to be the contemporary of the elev-
enth caliph.94 The version of his death on the hand of jinns narrated above by

5. lli ʿagzu ʿal l-mǧi bik nadāw

baraktek tuwṣalhum ki barq štāwi
6. l-ʿafārit win babahum kanu ʿṣāw
tabʿin dʿāwi ḫayfin mǝn škāwi
7. ḫsạ ylek yā sidi ra ḫuddamәk biha itʿәnnāw
ranta tġithum baʿd tkun ʿlihum ǧnāwi
8. ṣarḫat l-maḍyūm lli maṣāb maqdār
ranta tġīt men yndah bīk fi l-ǧbāl u ṣḥ āri.
94
As cited in Arrif et al., “Le Grand Muggar”, p. 187.
626 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

the šrif from Ḥ mād u Mūsa is belied by the hagiography of the saint. Kaʿt
says that the Prophet announces to the jinni the date of his death. “The
Prophet announces to me that I live till the ninth century Hegira, and I will
be the contemporary of 11th Caliph, who will judge humans and jinns. At
that time, I have to expect my death”.95 Dermenghem cited before refutes this
conjecture and says that his death occurred in the nineteenth century. A qāḍī
celebrated his funeral in the cemetery of Bāb Ftūḥ in Fez. Mauchamp96 con-
firms this hypothesis because he reckons his death by 1898. In Algeria, in
Blida, they estimate his death to have occurred in 1870; he was thought to be
devoured by a lion and interred in the shrine of Sidi ʿAbd al-Qādǝr in Zaccar.
Still in Ben Yeffu, and other shrines as well as in the Atlas, his court is still held
on Thursdays. On the night eve of each Thursday, he is said to descend to
listen to people’s cases and declare sentences during jinn’s trials. So, who died
in the maraboutic cultural imagination? The jinni, or the body of the šayḫ? Is
the soul still hovering alive? Natives, patients and clients of Šamharūš neither
ask questions about his death nor about the simulated tomb. They all just
expect the sultan’s descent on Thursdays or when l-iġāra (the power of mira-
cle) manifests itself.
The story of Šamharūš evinces him as a hagiographic saint. His šarifism
does not stem from his blood descent but from his closeness to the Prophet.
He is similar to a šrif because he met the Prophet and was a judge in his time.
This hagiography resembles that of Gnāwa who claim their descent from the
black man Sidi Bilāl, the Prophet’s crier for prayers. The closer the ancestor of
the saint to the Prophet, the holier he becomes as the Prophet of Islam is
believed to be the quintessence of holiness. The death of Šamharūš is not mea-
sured by time but rather by his work of miracles. When Mauchamp estimated
his death to be in the nineteenth century, his guess was based on the fuqha’s
claim that Šamharūš no longer responded to their magical summons. Baraka
in this sense is a seminal factor in determining whether Šamharūš is alive or
dead. So far as his followers and custodians form a social network disseminat-
ing his miracles migrating from one region to the other via a legitimate
maraboutic discourse, Šamharūš remains alive in Moroccans’ cultural imagi-
nation. When the mūsǝm of Šamharūš used to be held by his custodians and
followers each year in the Atlas, the blood of the sacrifice floated in the same
hour it was shed in the mūsǝm of Ḥ mād u Mūsa, a symbolic gesture that shows
that Šamharūš exists everywhere and does not have a fixed place. He hovers
like a God.

95
Ibid.
96
Mauchamp, La sorcellerie, p. 192.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 627

The story of Šamharūš’s meeting with the Prophet does not belong to the
native culture of the Berbers. It is rather inspired by the Islamic tradition. Its
forcefulness stems from its harmony with the stories mentioned in the
Qur’an about the Islamization of jinns. Generally, jinns are described in the
Qur’an as somewhat similar to human beings. They are divided in two types:
believer jinns and infidel ones. Like human beings, they are created by God
to worship Him. It is said in the Qur’an: “I [Allah] have not created the jinns
and men but to worship Me”.97 But unlike human beings, they have not
received prophets and messengers from their own species. They have followed
human prophets. It is also said:

And (remember), when we turned a company of jinns towards you to listen to

the Qur’an, they arrived when it was being recited, and they said: “keep silent.”
When it was over they came back to their people, warning them: “O our people:”
they said: “we have listened to a Book which has come down after Moses, con-
firming what (sent down) before it, showing the way to the truth and a path that
is straight.”98

According to al-Suyūṭī and al-Maḥallī, this company of jinns was Jewish

because they knew about the Torah. They listened to the Qur’an and went
back to their peoples to incite them to become Moslems.99 As it is obvious
from the example above and other examples in the Qur’an,100 jinns like
human beings are social. They exist in peoples and nations. They can listen
and understand the word of God. The Jewish jinns listened to the Qur’an,
understood its words and went back to their peoples to advise them to join
Islam. Like human beings, jinns can err against God. It is said:101 “O our
people, hearken to the summoner of God, and believe in him, so that he may
forgive your sins and save you from a painful doom.” Jinns can also work.
They have labored for Solomon and built for him statues and synagogues. It is
said:102 “They made for him whatever he wished, synagogues and statues,
dishes large as water-troughs, and cauldrons firmly fixed (on ovens; and We
said): ‘O house of David, act and give thanks.’” Moroccans have not only
modeled the world of jinns on their social world preserving the same social
hierarchies, insignia and titles but also projected on it their spiritual world

97
Kor 51, 56.
98
Kor 46, 29-30.
99
Al-Suyūṭī, al-Maḥallī, Tafsīr al-Ǧalālayn, rev. M. Sawara, Beirut, Dar al-Maʿrifa, 1987,
p. 671.
100
Kor 7, 38.
101
Kor 46, 31.
102
Kor 34, 13.
628 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

inspired by the Qur’an. That jinns can build huge mansions such is the case in
Solomon’s times may be discovered in popular myths such as the tale of Mәlūk
Saʿdiya recounted in Marrakech. The necropolis of the Saadi dynasty (mulūk
saʿdiyyūn) is turned in the local cultural imagination to Mәlūk Saʿdiya (Saʿdiya’s
Jinns, Saʿdiya is a proper name of a female). They were thought to have con-
tributed in building the famous minaret of al-Kutubiyya. As an old native of
the area recounts, the story goes that they were residing in Kudyat l-ʿBīd on
the suburbs of Marrakech—a hill where there was granite—, and used to
throw such stones to other fellow jinns who built the minaret.
To sum up, the tale of Šamharūš does not seem to attract everyone in
Imlīl. A discussion with a few young rising Islamists reveals that they hold an
unenthusiastic attitude towards this maraboutic institution. They maintain
that their parents used to believe in the story but now that they are awakened
to true Islam, they recognize that the practice is polytheistic (širk). According
to such young Islamists, Šamharūš is not a human saint, and if he is human
they may go to visit him like any dead Muslim and ask mercy from Allah for
him, but in this case that he is a jinni, they maintain: “what can we do for
him?”When they are addressed with the question: “You know jinn possession
(l-mass), it is mentioned in the Qur’an, do not you believe in it?” They all
reply: “Of course we do, but the cure is orthodox jinn eviction (ruqya
šarʿiyya), eviction with the Qur’an.” No one contradicts my question by
reflecting for a moment on whether the Qur’an really attests to the existence
of possession.103 One of these young Berbers recounts his story with
Šamharūš. He says that ten years ago, he used to be a muleteer guiding pil-
grims to the shrine. He used to take meat home when sacrifices were divided
into shares. Yet, he doubted the whole practice even though he saw
Šamharūš’s name mentioned in books of magic. He said that the Jews used
to exist in Arǝmd and traded with the Berbers. They could be responsible for
introducing the myth on the Atlas scene, especially when I told him that
Šamharūš’s name sounds like the name of the Hebrew God šim-ha-mifuraš.
He used the word zyada (lit. supplement) to describe the story of Šamharūš
as perhaps a recent cultural invention. The young Berbers claim that their
fathers did not find the tradition of Šamharūš inherited from father to son. It
was rather a local invention. The muleteer adds: “there was no ʿAyša’s cave
when I was working as a guide for the last ten years; recently it has been
added. Be sure they will add other things soon after.” The interviews with
Berbers and pilgrims demonstrate that Šamharūš has changed social status in
the Berber community for the last decade. Now, his use value is reduced and

103
See my discussion of this point in Maarouf, Jinn eviction, ch. 2, p. 111-20.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 629

seems less to be part of the local culture. He is rather cherished by the marabou-
tic community of maǧdūbs and patients who set out from different regions of
Morocco to his destination to seek cure.

The Ritual of Zyara

Visiting Sidi Šamharūš is a completely different experience from visiting

other saints. The familiar maraboutic schema in doing the zyara (visiting
saints) is the turn (nuba). The supplicant has to visit a particular saint if he is
called to do so. It means that it is his turn (nuba) to go there. The call may be
manifested in various ways. At Būya ʿUmar, the call of the saint is called nṭiq
(lit. pronouncing). Naamouni refers to nṭiq as another way that confirms the
patient’s possession and the need for the interference of the saint to cure it.
The patient may have a dream during which he is summoned to Būya ʿUmar,
or may pronounce during his trance the name of the saint “ynṭaq bi Būya
ʿUmar.” Nṭiq, as Naamouni puts it,

is a subjective evocation of possession [which] seems to some extent imposed by

the logic of popular beliefs which support that only a judgment given by the
saint can cure the troubles of the patient . . . Nṭiq is considered by the entourage
an indisputable sign, allowing the patient himself all the hopes of cure which the
recourse to the saint offers. In fact, if a patient does not call upon Bouya Omar
during his trance, it is that his sickness does not pertain to the judicial interven-
tion of Bouya Omar.104

In fact, the term nṭiq is broader than what Naamouni suggests here and is
not customarily used in this sense either at Ben Yeffu, or at Sidi Šamharūš.
Generally, nṭiq refers to the phenomenon of speaking during a fit of posses-
sion. And if the possessed articulates clairvoyant utterances in his delirium, it
is said that s/he is hurling/throwing words (ka-yqīs l-hadra). As for the saint’s
call described by Naamouni above, it is also known at Ben Yeffu under the
expression wqaf ʿlih siyyed (the saint appeared to him either in person or
under a guise and called him to his sanctuary). This appears a tad different
from nṭiq because it takes place in a dream. At Ben Yeffu, the saint’s mythic
call is regarded as an affirmative sign of possession and the patient does not
have to decline the call; otherwise it is believed a misfortune may befall him.
That’s why, if someone falls sick and has a dream in which the saint appears
to them in person and summons them to his shrine, they immediately have

104
Naamouni, Le culte, p. 112-3, trans. mine.
630 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

to respond to the call. Sometimes, it is one of the patient’s relatives who sees
in the indicatory dream the cure direction, thus attempts to persuade the
patient to go to the saint. Sometimes it is the symbolic interpretation of the
dream by a fqih that may guide the patient to the saint. For instance, if some-
body with the name of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, or a knight on horseback holding a
spear, appears to the patient in a dream, it is interpreted as a call from Sidi
ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Ben Yeffu to go to his shrine and receive his baraka of cure. At
Sidi Šamharūš, patients define the call as nuba (turn). Most of those who cir-
cumambulate the mountains to reach the shrine are possessed patients who
are called in turn to their own trial in front of the Judge/sultan of jinns Sidi
Šamharūš. It is an observable fact that some possessing jinns may stipulate
through their mediums’ voice the visit to Šamharūš as a condition to release
the hosts or establish a covenant of peace with them.
What makes the shrine of Šamharūš different is his remote location at the
end of the asphalted road higher in the mountains. Making a brief mention
of the founding story of Lalla ʿAziza, Rachik says that she has achieved saint-
hood by always ascending higher in the mountains. First, she used to graze
her herd at high points in the mountains unlike the rest of the shepherds who
kept near the river water where the grass was abundant. Still, her flock
plumped out. One day, she was pursued by a young man who wanted to
seize her by force while she suddenly vanished in the mountains in front of
his eyes.105 The degree of sainthood seems to be proportional to the nature of
the landscape frequented. In the geography of the sacred, sainthood is associ-
ated with far distances, heights, wilderness, deserts, unknown, darkness, for-
ests and caves. On the road to Imlīl where the saint is located, travelers have
to drive from Taḥǝnnāwt across the first chain of the Atlas, a serpentine dan-
gerous narrow road with severe ascents and descents, and with awesome
ravines bordering them. At the end of this first chain, there exists a famous
saint called Mulāy Brāhīm, whom pilgrims visit before going to Šamharūš.
While driving along the mountainous road by coach, passengers, especially
women, may reiterate expressions of surrender to the power of the saint.
They ululate in awe and extol the Prophet. They sing out: “[We] surrender to
you the Prophet of Allah! Prayer and peace be upon the Prophet of Allah!
There is no power other than the power of Sidna Mohammed; Allah is with
the High Power!”106 As an interviewee supposes: “perhaps, the rough road of
the mountains is enough to bring patients back to their senses.” The twisting

105
Rachik, “L’autre sacrifice”, p. 135-6.
106
The Arabic version reads as follows: (tslīm ʿlā rasul Allah/ṣlā u slām ʿlā rasul Allah/la ǧāh illa
ǧāh sidna Muḥ ammed Allah mʿā ǧgā̌ h l-ʿali).
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 631

routes and uneven paths indeed play a role in bestowing on Sidi Šamharūš a
lofty aura of awe and respect.
It is an observable fact that Šamharūš is never visited as a first maraboutic
destination. Those who set out to his shrine have already acquired cultural
training in maraboutism, toured saints, stayed in Mulāy Brāhīm and at last
they head off to Šamharūš, the end of the pilgrimage tour. Patients, fortune
tellers and healers embark on the journey of touring saints to complete their
acquisition of baraka. In this tour, Sidi Šamharūš is left to be the last destina-
tion. The tangible height of the shrine is projected on the intangible position
of his mythic court. In the geography of the sacred, his court is situated at
the top of all mythic courts. The circumambulation of the mountains and the
pains of the trajectory all serve to purify the soul as if in a pilgrimage to
Mecca. Here is an excerpt from an exchange with the šuwāfa Bouchra in
2003 showing how maraboutically trained adepts classify Šamharūš. Bouchra
is a diviner. Though her practice is non-legitimate at Ben Yeffu, she insists on
the fact that she has miraculous divinatory powers and accepts to enter in a
fit of possession facing our cameras—my collaborator P. Hermans and I. The
‘jinni’ who descends that afternoon to talk to us under the guidance of her
main interlocutor, her husband—a šrif from the sons of Ben Yeffu—, is the
Green Sultan (Sәlṭān l-Ḫ ḍar), Ben Yeffu in person. This appellation is attrib-
uted to the saint by a maǧdūb called ʿAbd al-Ğalīl who saw him in person
under such name in one of his paralytic fits. Bouchra claims to be haunted by
three mәluk (sing. mǝlk [jinni]), l-Ḥ āğ l-Makkāwi, l-Fqih Šamharūš and
Sәlṭān l-Ḫ ḍar, who work with her, or in a maraboutic parlance, have imposed
on her to help people (to do l-mida [lit. table/fig. divination]).107 Among the
three jinns there is Ben Yeffu—Sәlṭān l-Ḫ ḍar—who is a human saint. It is
thought that a saint who can control the world of jinns or can perform mira-
cles may easily appear with jinn attributes though still in human shape. Peo-
ple do not dichotomize their social universe into two distinct and mutually
exclusive spheres: ‘natural’ vs. ‘supernatural’, as Westerners often do. They
dichotomize their social world into the lawful and forbidden, or sacred and
profane. In the world of the sacred both the natural and the supernatural can
coexist together, hence the authenticity of the ethnographic case of Sidi
Šamharūš. The exchange between Bouchra ‘mediumising’ the agency of the
Green sultan and her husband reads as follows:

107
L-mida is an old wooden bowl having a wooden cover used by diviners to store the col-
ored fabrics they work with. Each time they evoke a jinni, they take out and wear the color s/
he desires.
632 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

Green Sultan: Peace be upon you!

Husband: Peace be upon you too, how are you my grandfather?
GS: Fine!
H: How are the šurfa?
GS: Fine, go ahead!
H: Who is present with us now?
GS: The Green Sultan . . . Our daughter should go to Mulāy Brāhīm, guest of
Allah and mountains!
H: Yes!
GS: Our daughter should go to Mulāy Brāhīm, guest of Mulāy Brāhīm and
mountains!
H: Yes!
GS: Wanderer of Allah and mountains!
H: Did you send her or will you send her, my grandfather?
GS: Yes!
H: Will you send her to Šamharūš?
GS: It is he who will send her!
H: Yes!
GS: She must circumambulate there!
H: Certainly! Certainly! Will she visit Mulāy Brāhīm or must she go till
Šamharūš?
GS: She first goes to Mulāy Brāhīm, and then she heads off to Šamharūš.
There are mountains there. She should circumambulate them.
H: Certainly!
GS: In his home.
H: How much time will you give us there to stay, or no?
GS: Allah releases his prisoners, it depends on our daughter!
H: Certainly, is this travel boding well?
GS: Yes!
H: Thanks Allah (silence) can I go with her my grandfather, yes?
GS: Yes, no problem!
H: Will you be there present with us with the will of Allah?
GS: Yes!
H: With the power of Allah! . . .

As a diviner, Bouchra is culturally trained in maraboutic practices. Like many

diviners, she has acquired through maraboutic socialization that in order to
complete her powers of divination she must visit Šamharūš. The saint is situ-
ated on a map of saints of the Atlas region including Sidi Būʿbīd Šarqi, Būya
ʿUmar, Sidi Raḥḥāl, and Mulāy Brāhīm. Šamharūš is situated at the top of
the maraboutic pyramid because of the far height of his location lurking in
the heart of the Atlas at the peak of the highest chain of mountains, and
because of his ethereal nature. Bouchra in her fit of possession resists male
domination and evinces her dormant rebellious personality against the dic-
tates of the patriarch. She orders her husband in her new masculine identity
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 633

to follow the commands of the sultan (a symbol of male power). She controls
the turn taking right. Her husband nods obeisance and hesitates in asking
questions. Mediating the agency of his grandfather—even her revolt agency
is male-oriented, a predominant cultural communication system effect—, she
imposes on him a journey she desires to make to Šamharūš. In fact, posses-
sion for many women is a form of social expression, a “bargain from
weakness”,108 a socially accepted outlet during which women may vent out
their whims, desires or exhibit their sexuality. In an altered state of conscious-
ness, women do not act; their ǧwād (bountiful jinns) act on their behalf. They
may desire gold, travelling, wearing new clothes, eating special food, organiz-
ing special ceremonies, dancing particular tunes, or making love to particular
partners. Such bargaining positions are granted them at the cost of their
immersion in social routine inferiority. Their licensed challenge may inversely
strengthen the social control structures that keep them obedient to men.109
Normally, the zyara (visit) to Šamharūš takes place once a week on the
night eve of Thursday though people may go there at any time the saint sends
for them by turn. People go to the saint to be exorcised holding a strong faith
(niya) in his power to cure them. Most patients are women who show a great
devotion to Šamharūš. Some may visit Mulāy Brāhīm for benediction and
travel further to the sanctuary of Sidi Šamharūš seeking purification and cure.
Pilgrims usually combine in their zyara both saints though Mulāy Brāhīm is
against this jointure. In the hagiographic tradition, it is mentioned that he
said to his disciples and visitors: “he who visits us and visits others with us
will find response neither from us nor from them. But he who visits us and
keeps visiting us will find us and others”.110 But as it will be explained later,
Mulāy Brāhīm is part of a maraboutic circuit the pilgrim is submitted to
make for the year to fulfill his peace contract with jinns (see the analysis
below).
When Pilgrims arrive at the centre of Imlīl, they may hire muleteers to
guide them to Šamharūš. If they are to carry sacrifices to the saint, they may
load them on the mule’s saddle-baskets. The journey to Šamharūš as it is
observed is a pilgrimage for about 7 kilometers in Ğbǝl Tūbqāl. There are
people who start circumambulating the mountains at 6:30 am to arrive at the

108
See R. Gomm, “Bargaining from weakness: Spirit possession on the South Kenya Coast”,
Man, 10/4 (1975), p. 530-43.
109
For female ritual emancipation, see M. Maarouf, “ʿĀšūrāʾ as a Female Ritual Challenge to
Masculinity”, Arabica, 56/4-5 (2009), p. 400-39.
110
As cited in ʿA. b. Ibrāhīm, al-Iʿlām bi-man ḥ alla bi-Murrākuš wa-Aġmāt min al-aʿlām, ed.
ʿA. b. Manṣūr, Rabat, al-Maṭbaʿa l-malakiyya, 1974, VIII, p. 181-2, trans. mine.
634 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

saint by 3:00 pm. It depends on their age, health condition and fitness. Most
pilgrims refuse to mount mules for fear of falling down, some rather want to
experience the pain of the road to expiate their sins and ask forgiveness of the
saint; others may abandon half way and return, their pilgrimage is postponed
to another year. A šrif maǧdūb from Sidi Raḥḥāl waiting for his own release at
Šamharūš made a remark on my observation that some pilgrims were left
behind and might not reach the saint. He said: “If you come without faith
(niya) or bad intentions to the saint, you may not arrive, and if you arrive,
something bad may befall you or you descend from here with a scandal
(šūha).” It seems that faith in maraboutic solutions to social and health prob-
lems is what pushes pilgrims to climb the Mountain of Tūbqāl on foot and
trek for about two hours and a half for a normal trekker. Those who reach
Sidi Šamharūš are not therefore only maraboutic patients but well trained
adepts who hold strong faith in the maraboutic tradition of cure. Some Ber-
ber interviewees narrate stories of cure in which niya (faith) heightens the
placebo effect. An informant relates that

A muleteer was guiding a patient suffering from hand paralysis to Šamharūš. On

their way, they reached an irrigation canal (sāgya). The mule stopped to drink
from it. The man descended from the mule, saw a big rock, and asked the boy:
“is this Šamharūš ?” The muleteer seized the occasion to cut his way short and
lied to the pilgrim. He told him: “That’s it!” The man remarked: “there is no one
here to slaughter the victim.” The muleteer replied that the shrine supervisor was
minding some business and the pilgrim could perform the ritual. He showed
him a place at random for that intent. The hand paralyzed man sacrificed there
and the boy suggested that he would take the rooster home. The man agreed. On
their way back to Imlīl, the man’s hand started stretching. He was cured.

The serpentine route pilgrims follow in the mountains inspire in them fear
and awe of the saints located in the region. Climbing the narrow paths and
height of the mountains, pilgrims feel the greatness Allah incarnated in
nature and high value the saints who have settled there. The circumambula-
tion of the mountains is itself a therapy for the possessed. The fear the walk
or ride inspires in them may purge them from the daily trivial anxieties about
worldly concerns. The tiny movement of their bodies in the vast immensity
of height exorcises their anxieties and neurotic fears. The mountains stand for
the unknown. They evoke the world of death and oblivion, a sinister world
that represents a socially shared imaginary threat. In the case of the pilgrims
to Šamharūš, another sign is added, the sanctuary of a jinni whose nature is
mysterious and totally unintelligible.
At the shrine, pilgrims may rent cells if they are sentenced to spend some
night(s) there; it depends on the nuba, how much is given to one to spend
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 635

there. The stay at Šamharūš and the small cells the patients tarry in, especially
when the night brings its darkness on the patients in the mountains, all are
considered by a maǧdūb as ḫalwa (retreat). It is not only the retreat of the
šayḫ Šamharūš but also of his patients who escape the tense stressful atmo-
sphere of the city. It is a sort of health resort where patients can sit with
themselves and watch the drama of their life in their vivid memories refresh-
ing their insight into it. The Berber dealers in this cultural milieu are not
only looking to sell their commodities but help patients rest in peace. The
most selling commodity is food items: Tajine, beverages, tea and food ingre-
dients for those who cook on their own—not to forget orange blossom water
(ma zhar) and candles. Ma zhar is consumed in bulk especially by diviners.
They drink it to belch and thus smooth their transition to a state of posses-
sion. A cozy atmosphere reigns in the shrine premises. Maǧdūbs prepare cous-
cous and share it with visitors and natives. Even ravens can have their share
of the left-overs. Tea is prepared and given inside the shrine to pilgrims to
share. However, pilgrims may also bicker over the infringement of the tasks
of tradition. A woman from Salé repudiates another female guest for lighting
agal-wood (ʿūd nnǝd), which gives her fits. She says to her: “you do not know
anything about the tradition of the saint; he does not like this perfume! He
likes aloes-wood (ʿūd l-qmāri).”111
Once she gets inside the shrine, the pilgrim lights candles both inside by
the simulated tomb of the saint and then in a cave outside nearby called
ġurfat l-maǧādīb (the chamber of maǧdūbs; see Fig. 10). After resting for a
while inside the shrine, she may go out to drink from the spring of Šamharūš
and bathe in one of the rooms designed for this intent. If she is to sacrifice,
one of the custodians volunteers to immolate the victim on her behalf, the
meat to be divided into shares between the custodians and the pilgrim, who
may use her own share later to organize maʿrūf. The pilgrim may rest inside
the shrine for the whole day. She is well entertained by the custodians making
tea for her and playing on a frame drum (bandīr) the trance music of the pos-
sessed.
Maraboutic clients do not evince the least interest in inquiring about the
saint’s identity, his origins, his life or the miracles he has achieved. Those
who come for the first time say that they have heard from healers, relatives,
friends, acquaintances or neighbors that the saint can cure particular sicknesses

111
Aloes may be used with other incense ingredients to evoke mәluk. According to the
maraboutic tradition, incense in general may play a double role in human communication with
jinns. For instance, people may chase away jinns by fumigating with alum (šebba), gam-amo-
niac ( fasūḫ) and rue (ḥ armәl ), but may also perfume with coriander seed (tuffāḥ l-ǧen [the apple
of jinns]) and benzoin ( ǧgā̌ wi) to communicate with jinns.
636 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

like possession, limb paralysis, obstruction (l-ʿkes) and the spells of the hinder-
ing pursuer (tābʿa), so they have come to try their luck.112 Socializing in a
maraboutic culture, they take such discourse for granted and embark on jour-
neys of cure. When I was sitting inside the shrine of Mulāy Brāhīm, for
instance, observing patients and visitors’ behavior, a little girl was sitting fac-
ing the coffin next to her relatives, her mother and another woman who were
in a state of contemplation; one was closing her eyes leaning on the coffin and
the other was panting. The little girl a bit worried asked her mother: “who
died?” The mother in an audible angry voice admonished her daughter: “this
is a friend from the friends of God. This is a pious saint! And shut it up.”113
Then she returned to her brooding. This rings the bell in my mind as a sche-
matic command bequeathed to us from mother to daughter and son; it seems
we are disallowed to inquire about the identity of sacred given beings.
Inside the shrine of Sidi Šamharūš, carpets, wall clocks and big candles are
hung on the wall. They all show that the saint’s clients have been offering
him covers and gifts. These are individual offers (marfudas) following prom-
ises patients have made either in the shrine or in other maraboutic sites to
give Sidi Šamharūš if their wishes come true. It may also be the call for sacri-
fice by one of the saints or jinns through a dream or herald. Typically, the
miracles of a saint may be crowned by the recompense of building a monu-
ment in his premises. At Ben Yeffu, for instance, there is the story of the
princess from the Emirates whose son was semi-handicapped and was fully
cured by a well-renowned Buffi šrif. The princess insisted on rewarding the
šrif and requested him to make a wish she could fulfill. He told her that he
would like to see his Grandfather’s shrine surrounded by a nice mosque. The
princess made an official visit to the area in 1987 and funded the building of
the mosque in the same year. The story of the mosque is one of the famous
stories related by the Buffi-s about the miracles of their Progenitor. Similarly,
the Berbers at Sidi Šamharūš relate the story of cure the saint accomplished
for one of a diviner’s patients. As a gift, the diviner and the family of the
patient built a small bridge connecting the two river bands traversing the
premises of Sidi Šamharūš.

112
Bourqia phrases the issue in terms of how the aleatory Moroccans have developed the art
to face by tinkering with cultural symbols of emancipation; R. Bourqia, “Rituel, symbole et alea
dans la société rurale marocaine: Repenser Westermarck”, in R. Bourqia & M. al-Harras (eds),
Westermarck et la société Marocaine, Rabat, Faculté des Lettres, 1993, p. 185-98.
113
The Arabic version reads as follows: hada walī mǝn awliyāʾ Allah, hada ṣāliḥ u-sukti.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 637

Ḥ aḍra and Jinn Eviction at Sidi Šamharūš

It seems that the Berbers are outside the therapeutic game. They are con-
tented with hosting visitors and trading with them. They own cells for lease
at a variable price from 50 to 100 DH depending on the season. They also
own crude shops selling basic food items and run a bakery selling bread. The
latter works only in summer when there is busy traffic to the saint. As for
therapeutic rituals, there are šurfa from Sidi Raḥḥāl who administer practices
of such kind. They have been observed staying at Šamharūš from early March
to the second half of July, mainly working as animators of ḥ aḍra gatherings,
chanting litanies and stirring possessed patients to get in a trance dance. When
interviewed, they said it was the miracle of the saint (l-iġāra) or the turn (nuba)
that forced them into Šamharūš. Contrary to what they claim, some old-aged
informants in Mulāy Brāhīm maintain that the saint is rent every year to
Berber investors. To administer the therapeutic rituals and endow them
with a sacred aura of heightened value and interest, the Berbers may call their
sharifian acquaintances to work with them. It seems that next year, other šurfa
or healers may be managing the shrine’s affairs depending on the new Berber
dealers’ choices.
Ḥ aḍra seems to be a remedial method for treating possession; it seems to
be a bond-establishing ritual between the jinni and the host rather than a
process of jinn eviction. It is a musical ceremony in which the patients dance
according to particular tunes or melodies called (sswākәn, sing ssākәn) desired
by the jinns haunting them. The word ssākәn (melody) has the literal meaning
of dweller/haunter. Symbolically, it refers to the melody the body occupant
desires to hear and dance on. Each maraboutic cult seems to follow particular
music and ritual tasks and has its own list of jinn followers performing ḥ aḍra.
In the ḥ aḍra Gnāwiya also called ddәrdәba, for instance, particular jinns like
Mīra and Mimūn may be manifested in patients dancing on their music. In
Ḥ mādša trance dance, the popular female jinni ʿAyša may be manifested in
patients dancing on their music. Ḥ mādša adept dancers are well known for
self-flagellation and head slashing.
At Šamharūš, ḥ aḍra does not have a fixed time. It starts and stops and
starts again depending on patients’ temperament (l-ḥ āl). Once the patient
feels the want to perform a rhythmic dance without music called ( ǧadba/
ʿimāra), commonly a Sufi dance that involves the movement of the body for-
ward and backward accompanied simultaneously by moving the head up and
down, he stands up and the animators follow him singing out: Allah ḥ ay
(Allah is alive), some of the animators may stand up to join the trance dance.
When the music is used, the movement of the body becomes faster and more
638 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

violent, the verses change and specific jinns are called by name in different
songs like l-Makkāwi and al-Bāšā Ḥ ammū; the dance becomes ḥ aḍra. It may
last till the last hours of the night and even for days if the ġrāma114 (lit. fine/
compulsory tip) keeps on. According to Omar (pseudonym), an experienced
maǧdūb, the ḥ aḍra at Šamharūš is the occasion for diviners to compete, a pas-
sionate competition that may attract patients’ attention to the degree that
some of them may reshuffle their choices of healers. At Šamharūš, it is
observed that there is solidarity between healers and patients and between
patients with each other while there is rivalry between healers.
During the ḥ aḍra observed at Šamharūš on 14 July 2009, two female
maǧdūbs got in rival dancing, an adult woman Malika (pseudonym) and a
young woman Zuhra (pseudonym). Berber boys working in shops nearby
came to fuel the dance by performing the role of the chorus to the singing
šurfa from Sidi Raḥḥāl, and playing on musical instruments, on metal casta-
nets (qraqәb) used in Gnāwa music, on a frame drum (bandīr), sintir (haǧhuǧ)
and a glass they stroke against a tea tray. Malika was a stout woman dressed
in a Middle Eastern female cloak (ʿabāya) and covering her hair. Before she
stood to dance, she had been wriggling in a corner at the shrine held by her
western-stylish dressed son and her adolescent daughter also dressed in a pur-
plish cloak. For lunch she had already given out a couscous dish to the visi-
tors and business dealers at the shrine. When the ḥ aḍra music started, she
belched and belched and suddenly stood up and started dancing. According
to Omar, belching is a sign of being possessed and also a sign of being
maǧdūb. The belching person usually has l-mida (see Footnote 107) or raḥ ba
(lit. gathering [of jinns]), and has his own consulting house called zāwiya. It
is considered as a diviner’s identity card allowing him into maraboutic sites.
No one can approach a belching person to exorcise them once they issue the
sound. When belchers grow trained, they commence to melodize it
(ylaḥ ḥ әnha). Malika’s son was watchful for her. When the ḥ aḍra reached its
apogee and the music got faster, she fainted in her son’s arms, who drew her
back to the corner. Then she started drinking orange blossom water. Zuhra
accelerated the speed of her dance with the inflaming tempo, trampling on
the floor like a horse, dancing on the scene till another patient entered the

114
L-ġrāma is normally a Moroccan ritual performed in ceremonial gatherings of marriage
and circumcision during which guests offer a sum of money to the host under the compulsion
of being invited, or in return for the gift the host offered to them in similar ceremonial occa-
sions. The offering process takes place ceremonially in the presence of a crier who eulogizes and
melodizes in public the name of the giver and the sum of the money given, sometimes in
accompaniment to melodies from the musical band. L-ġrāma is a ceremonial auction-like gath-
ering where the esteem is bestowed on the highest bidder.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 639

ḥ aḍra. The more Zuhra saw rival dancers, the harder her trampling aug-
mented. She was the last dancer to collapse in the ḥ aḍra, and was finally
dragged by her sister to a corner of the shrine to rest. In the trance dance, the
patient can never participate alone. He needs a companion, usually one of his
close relatives or acquaintances to hold him/her in moments of collapse.
When the ḥ aḍra finished, l-ġrāma (compulsory tip) began. The sum offered
to the animators of the ḥ aḍra by dancers and audience varied from 20 to 100
DH. The animators lifted their hands in wish prayers for the givers. They
were 9 maǧdūbs in the room (7 females and two males), each trying to show
his/her strength in front of the other in the ḥ aḍra dance, in belching, in
(nṭiq) throwing words during fits of possession, and in l-ġrāma (tipping the
animators).
Omar maintains that the maǧdūbs’ ‘Olympics’ take place in special
maraboutic arenas dedicated to ḥ aḍra and jinn eviction such as Būya ʿUmar,
Sidi Raḥḥāl, Mulāy Buʿazza, Sidi ʿLi Ben Ḥ amdūš and Maršiš on Madyūna
road in Casablanca. However not all maraboutic sites are places of diviners’
encounter. In Sidi Bel ʿAbbas’ shrine in Marrakech, for instance, one reads
some holy verses, kiss the coffin and go out—the routine visit of saints’
tombs. The saints where maǧdūbs encounter each other are known to them.
They are ‘boxing rings’ where each maǧdūb boasts of his powers. Each one
may go with 9 or 10 of his patients showing that he has popularity, and may
attract others from another maǧdūb’s patients or from patients or clients
belonging to no specific healer. Usually, it is the benevolent work of the
faithful patient’s propaganda that attracts new comers to the maǧdūb’s camp.
As an illustrative instance, a maǧdūb from Casablanca who has come with
patients and members of his family to Šamharūš is described to me by one of
his patients and his son as a saint who can realize miracles. Girls working in
the Middle East and Italy contact him to do them talismans of l-qubul (ame-
nity spells); some may pay, I was told, over 10,000 DH (an inflated price) for
a talisman of this kind. Omar refutes the idea that there is a social network
between healers, each probably sending his patients to the other. For him, it is
like a cat and mouse game; no one likes the other (makay tḥ āmlūš). When a
patient visits a healer, s/he is likely to hear the statement that “I have believer
jinns (mumnīn) and my work is divine (dakši rabbānī); as for the
others, they just have Jewish jinns (yhūdi).” This partly explains why healers
work single in their zāwiyas. They do not endorse group work in contrast to
what happens in maraboutic shrines where šurfa appear to work collectively
despite the existence of some rivalry between them.115

115
See the case of Ben Yeffu, Maarouf, Jinn eviction.
640 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

Here is an ethnographic case of a maǧdūb exhibiting his strength. When

Omar and I were sitting inside the shrine of Šamharūš, talking after the end
of the first session of the ḥ aḍra, a tall young boy in his twenties dressed in a
white gown with a white rosary in hand rushed inside and jumped on the
stairs inside the room. Omar told me: “look, this one has his own zāwiya.” I
said: “how do you know it?” He replied: “read the symbols! The white gown,
the rosary and the ring of silver, all tell us that he has divine jinns (mәluk
rabbāniyyīn). Believers pray and use rosaries. They dress in white. They do
not wear gold but silver.” A nice woman in her forties came inside holding a
basket in which there were clothes and a blanket. Omar looked at the woman
and whispered to me that she was his travel companion and that he would be
spending the night at the shrine. According to him, those who have zāwiyas
have to spend at least one night at the saint’s place. This young healer cannot
be approached to be exorcised. Omar put the following remark: “if you touch
him, he may cause you a scandal” (for further details about the exorcism of
maǧdūbs see my description below). Omar said that the healer was still
young; his body might bear hard strokes. “When a healer grows old and his/
her body can no longer bear the pain of strokes, he begins to shirk feats of
strength,” he added. From his experience, Omar maintained that young
diviners were the ones who created tumult at shrines by hitting their heads
against walls or getting in delirium in which they inflicted hard blows on
their bodies. The young boy seemed to come for the first time to Šamharūš
because I was in earshot when he talked to the woman with him. She replied
to one of his questions: “I am told you cannot sleep inside the saint; we have
to rent a room in the premises.”
Ḥ aḍra is not only dancing and pain but also an occasion for seeking fun
and pleasure. Omar said: “look! When the music starts, the winks sweeten.”
He winked to a beautiful possessed girl who came with her parents to
Šamharūš. That wink was enough for her to return it with a smile. The
maǧdūb had a beautiful girl as his companion. He was handsome; but to
attract more girls, he would not refuse the call of the new ǧwād (bountiful
jinns). In a maraboutic parlance, when someone loves to consort with a sex-
ual partner, they attribute it to jinns. The female may say: “The jinns I host
love the jinns he hosts ( ǧwādi bġaw ǧwādu),” this way the illegitimate sexual
relation appears socially accepted in that the illicit is objectified to the imper-
sonal. When her parents were leaving back to Imlīl, the beautiful girl refused
to go with them. She said she was sentenced to spend the night there. Which
of them fettered her to stay there, l-ǧwād or the maǧdūb’s wink?
Who is the maǧdūb? Is not the maǧdūb a patient after all, jinn-possessed
like the rest? According to maǧdūbs, the maǧdūb is not an overnight produc-
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 641

tion. He undergoes a series of trials from one saint to another. Commonly,

his experience starts in Būya ʿUmar, the ‘office of the General Prosecutor’
(al-niyāba l-ʿāmma), as Omar formulates his own metaphor to describe the
saint, where patients are schooled and sifted either to remain possessed or
become released, which is the case of many interviewed maǧdūbs who reveal
that they were caught by the court of Būya ʿUmar for a number of years.116
The custom goes that someone falls in a fit of possession and talks (ynṭaq). It
is said that the jinni inside him may reveal one of the patient’s secrets. He
may point to someone to approach him. Then, he may order him to leave
Būya ʿUmar for another maraboutic destination for a specific span of time.
An analogous process sometimes by the same jinni via a different medium
may occur in the next maraboutic station. When the patient completes his
pilgrimage round, it is scheduled as a maraboutic calendar of his annual tour/
pilgrimage. Šamharūš for the Atlas tour is regarded as a final destination. He
is at the top of the maraboutic courts. The year draws to a close at his shrine.
Omar asked me: “did not you hear what the maǧdūba (m. maǧdūb) said when
she finished her trial (šraʿ)?” I naively replied: “I did not get it!” he repeated
her words: “Allah may bring our summer to a finish and sharpen our
swords!”117 This means that the diviner has concluded her yearly pilgrimage.
She will start a new annual tour next year.
The maraboutic calendar varies from one diviner to another. Each diviner
is assigned his/her own particular time of departure. Omar’s calendar, for
instance, is divided between the Rif and the Atlas. The Rif voyage starts in
spring at Ben Mšīš, then al-Hādi Ben ʿIsa, then Sidi Ḥ mǝd Dġūġi, then Sidi
ʿLi Ben Ḥ amdūš and then ʿAyša Sūdāniya. The Atlas voyage starts in summer
at Būya ʿUmar, then Sidi Raḥḥāl, then Mulāy Brāhīm, and then Sidi
Šamharūš. This is Omar’s annual circuit. Is it the same circuit for each
maǧdūb? Diviners maintain that each one has been dictated their own circuit
by jinns. There are diviners who start at the local saints in the regions where
they live, but Šamharūš remains at the top as a final destination echoing the
metaphor of the end of the asphalted road. Is not after all the circumambula-
tion of the mountains of the Atlas parallel to pilgrims’ running back and
forth between the hills of al-Ṣafā and al-Marwa during the ḥaǧǧ? It seems
that not only diviners but patients as well pursue the maraboutic circuit.

116
Somebody who is caught by the saint is named mašdūd (prisoner). It means that they
cannot leave the vicinity (ḥ urum) of the saint. If they do, they feel sick. The date of their release
is unknown. When the saint unfastens their fetters, he signals to them to leave. This mystic sig-
nal is subject to diverse maraboutic interpretations.
117
The Arabic version reads as follows: Allah yәmḍi ṣayfna u-yәmaḍḍi syūfna.
642 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

Amina, from Marrakech whom I met in March, is a patient who starts

her pilgrimage at Ben Mšīš, then Sidi ʿLi, then Mulāy Buʿazza, then Mulāy
Brāhīm, and then Šamharūš. Most healers tend to converge on the idea that if
someone is possessed and follows a calendar of visiting saints, they will never
be cured. As Omar vociferates it: “I swear upon Allah: if jinns get old in the
patient, they will never get out!” It is the Written (maktūb); the patient is
destined to carry on being possessed, travel from one saint to another, estab-
lish bonds of peace with jinns, and acquire a new self-image and cultural
identity of the possessed, thus relinquishing worldly concerns and family
obligations.
Generally, when the possessed patient starts falling, it depends on how s/
he has been treated at first. The beautiful girl Omar winked at started reading
the Qur’an with her exorciser when she fell in a fit of possession. Omar attri-
butes the whole practice to the question of adaptation. The girl could have
been accustomed to reading the Qur’an, when she first started falling. Indeed,
the girl confirmed that her exorcisers throughout her fits were practicing
ruqya šarʿiyya, (jinn eviction with the Qur’an). Those who fall in fits during
ḥ aḍra have been accustomed to collapse in ḥ aḍras. It has all to do with the
maraboutic training of patients. They may fall in fits of possession and adopt
a piece of conduct in accordance with what they have been trained to do in
their cultural environment. A jinn-possessed Muslim averse to maraboutism
is observed to respond only to ‘orthodox jinn eviction’ while a maraboutic
patient may respond to Qura’nic exorcism as well as to ḥ aḍra or invisible jinn
eviction. When one is maraboutically trained, one is completely immersed in
the maraboutic culture—he ‘goes native,’ acquires its schemata and values,
adopts its worldview and acquires its cultural identity and self-image. S/he
becomes a maǧdūb, having l-mida or raḥ ba. The key concept used by
maraboutic adepts for the maǧdūb who can divine their future is drak ssәr (s/
he has attained the Secret). However, there is nothing magical in the attained
“Secret”. The maraboutic power as we have seen is something acquired by
experience and training. The maǧdūb undergoes a series of trials and wanders
from one maraboutic site to another, trained like Omar and obtaining expe-
rience in the grasp and interpretation of the cultural symbols of the marabou-
tic society.
Omar categorizes fits of possession—falling (ka-yṭtị ḥ )—into two main
types: there are patients who fall in fits but keep partially aware. They know
what they are saying and doing. And there are patients who fall in fits and
lose self-control. Both types of patients speak clairvoyant words during their
fits (ka-yneṭqu) and distaste being exorcised. If a healer approaches them, he
may risk being treated with gross insolence and may feel demeaned by the
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 643

end. In the case of patients who “hurl words” during their fits, they challenge
the familiar maraboutic cultural schema of domination. In standard jinn
eviction, the jinni through the voice of his medium may manifest its inde-
pendent identity and rebel against the authority of the healer but ends up in
surrender. Clairvoyant patients during fits of possession form up a different
category. Their challenge to exorcism is outstanding. It is a strong personality
in the image of a jinni that manifests itself and healers who dare face them
jeopardize their dignity and social standing. At Šamharūš, for instance, there
was Zuhra mentioned before, a diviner in the making, dancing in rivalry with
another diviner, trampling like a horse in the ḥ aḍra. When she collapsed by
the end, the exorciser who had been reciting the Qur’an over the beautiful
girl to whom Omar winked approached Zuhra to evince his strength. He
looked to be a modern dressed adult holding in his hand a satchel like a
teacher. Omar smiled to me and exclaimed: “He will be stuck with her!”
Omar insisted on the fact that it was a law that maǧdūbs all knew by experi-
ence. Those who fall and speak clairvoyant words indicate they are maǧdūbs
or in the making; they may debase whoever comes near to show his/her
strength over them. Omar asked me to wait and see what would happen to
the healer later. After one hour and a half of exorcism, and when nothing still
came out of the patient-healer encounter, tired of him, she spoke in a loud
voice to the rest of the audience as if to embarrass him: “look! Now is my
trial and each one has his own trial and no need to tire me, I will spend my
trial in this court and go.” Omar explained to me: “look! She offered him a
nice opportunity to quit in dignity, if he insists, she will insult him.” Unfor-
tunately, he insisted, and as Omar envisaged, she commenced hurling him
with words of derision: “You who appear in different colors and alter your
speech! Leave us in peace!” At this point, the healer ceased his piece of exor-
cism and quitted the room, for fear of being further abused. Zuhra had
remained in her fit for long before she woke up by herself and sat among the
audience. The belching woman, Malika sitting in the corner of the room,
could exorcise five girls like Zuhra, said Omar, but declined because she
knew the law.
In general, pilgrims of the Atlas follow a standard path of the hero’s myth-
ological adventure: separation—initiation—return. This mythological round
is based on patients’ trial narratives recounted at the shrine of Sidi Šamharūš.
They set out on an errand into a region of supernatural wonder; mysterious
forces are encountered and a decisive victory is won. They get released and
return to their community. Joseph Campbell’s model of the archetypal
adventure of the mythological hero applies to the story of pilgrim patients
setting out to Šamharūš. The pilgrim is called to adventure by one of the
644 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

saints. He travels from within the pale of his society (a familiar zone) to a
chain of lofty mountain tops wreathed in the sky, a zone unknown beyond
the pale. For those who do not decline the call, and embark on the journey
to the mountains, the first encounter they make is with benign protective fig-
ures (often muleteers—needless to mention taxi drivers), who provide the
adventurers with mules to help them ride to Sidi Šamharūš. Once the patient
reaches the shrine and gets inside, the jinni may manifest itself. The long
fearful trajectory and fatigue of the mountainous road all conduce to a col-
lapse of the patient inside “the belly of the whale.” The custodians play the
tune of the jinni and the trance of the patient begins. It reaches its zenith at
the moment when Sidi Šamharūš descends to judge the case of the jinni and
its host. The trial at its nadir in the court of Šamharūš is tantamount to
Campbell’s “the Meeting with the Goddess,” which is the final test of the tal-
ent of the hero to win “the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life
itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.”118 When the patient awakes
from his trance accomplishing all the difficult tasks, Šamharūš himself seems
to bestow on him a temporary relief. When pilgrims complete their intent
they pack up and leave back to their familiar zones. Climbing to Šamharūš in
March, I crossed a patient woman in her fifties coming back on foot from
her long journey to the saint; a mule striding in front dragged by its owner,
lifting her luggage in the saddle-baskets. She seemed to have spent at least
one night in the shrine. We met in passing on one of the narrow trails higher
in the mountains. When she approached me, I greeted them: “Peace be upon
you! (al-salāmu ʿalaykum),” she greeted me back with a sigh saying: “Peace be
upon you too, May Allah fulfill your wish! (Allah ybәllaġ l-maqṣūd ).” Those
words were enough to startle me out of the reverie that I was travelling as a
participant observer to Šamharūš. When our paths crossed, she following the
mule loaded with her belongings and the muleteer walking ahead, and I
walking though without belongings behind another muleteer dragging his
animal, and she addressing me in a maraboutic parlance, I had the impres-
sion to be enrolled in a pilgrimage errand.
The court (maḥ kama) of Sidi Šamharūš—similar to the supreme court of
Būya ʿUmar—does not only organize ḥ aḍra but also practices invisible jinn
eviction (ṣrīʿ l-ġayb), or what Naamouni calls ‘invisible trance’. Naamouni
says:

118
Campbell, The hero, p. 118.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 645

This trance is not manifested by any bodily or verbal agitation. It is rather cha-
racterized by an inert abandonment of the patient on the ground with loss of
conscience. It is often accompanied by foamy dribbling, sighing, moaning and
stammering discharged by the patient . . . Sometimes, the patient rises, turns
around the tomb of the saint, his arms taut, as if chained, while mumbling, his
eyes closed, and turns back to his/her initial position to be plunged again in this
internal ferment.119

At Sidi Šamharūš, the trance is not different except there is no coffin in the
middle of the room for patients to circumambulate. Inside the shrine,
patients yield to the silence of the place, lean on the walls, slouch and yawn
sleepily on the carpets closing their eyes expecting the saint to appear to them
in a revelatory trial or dream. Invisible jinn eviction may also be practiced in
a trance paroxysm. With the stimulation of music, the patient gets in a trance
wriggling on the carpet with closed or wide unseeing eyes and hands
deformed or shackled behind his back, panting and pleading for mercy.
Sometimes, the patient is exorcised in his dream during which the jinni is
tried and sentenced to quit the body. At Sidi Šamharūš, the patient does not
need to sit in front of a šrif to receive the barūk of ṣrīʿ which is the case at Ben
Yeffu or Sidi Masʿūd Ben Ḥ sīn. In his dream or trance, the patient may wit-
ness the commonly encountered scene of the Sultan on a white horse holding
a sword and evicting the jinni out of him. Sometimes a whole trial takes place
during the proceeding. This image concurs with the image of the saint Ben
Yeffu as he is perceived by patients in their invisible trial dreams.
Invisible jinn eviction seems to be a dream-like adventure patients live
during their trance. They see everything happening in front of them, the trial
of the jinni, the saint’s sentence and their own release. Do other people see
what the patient sees? No, they can only see the body wriggling in pain,
shouting expressions of surrender (tslīm). It is patients who witness their own
trial in front of themselves and narrate its scenes to their relatives after their
recovery from the state of delirium. Those who fall asleep and undergo invis-
ible jinn eviction narrate their dreams once awake. In invisible jinn trials, the
saint generally seems to fulfil the patients’ wishes by conducting fair trials at
the end of which the jinni is either destroyed if discovered guilty of doing
harm or chased away if its offence is innocuous, and accordingly the patient
is released.
Generally, maraboutic clients cherish the hope that the saint’s baraka may
help them dispose of the obstacles and thorns that impede their life course.

119
Naamouni, Le culte, p. 143, trans. mine.
646 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

They supplicate maraboutic powers to exorcise the obstruction (l-ʿkes) they

endure. This letdown of expectations is not regarded as the result of personal
weaknesses, lack of initiatives, or economic injuries but rather thought to be
incurred by the work of magic, influence of spirits, or evil eye and envy.
There is a condensation of outlandish and truly frightening [crushing eco-
nomic forces] into the more amiable personification of the jinn, mischievous,
answering back and at least partly controllable. The ingestion of wider social
forces as an internal habitation at least recognizes the importance of a human
scaling of impersonal forces. Further, the dual occupation of the body at least
opens up, practically if not philosophically, just what the “autonomous” sub-
ject is supposed to be and to whose tune or to what discourse it is supposed
to dance, all closed matters in the dominant register of how subalterns are
supposed to comport themselves. This vexation incarnated in possessing spir-
its is expelled out of bodies through the ritual practice of trances and evic-
tions, sadomasochistic rituals lashing and inflicting pains on bodies to
canalize the outburst of hostilities. Instead of being awakened to forming
subaltern alliances and rising against political domination, maraboutic com-
munities re-orient their struggle towards less intimidating impersonal forces
held responsible for their hindrance, a form of escapism masquerading as
resistance. It is creating an illusionary innocuous social space of resistance.
People continue to go to saints though the cure may not be attained. It is for
them the attempt itself that stirs them up to act, to hope for better social
conditions, to resist and not cease the struggle. While they light candles in
shrines, they are cherishing a spark of hope/clearing of light in a gloomy
social environment of unremitting frustrations. To depict this type of cul-
tural resistance, three ethnographic instances are selected from the sample of
patients interviewed at the shrine of Sidi Šamharūš:
Fatima, aged 25 years-old, came with her little son to spend a couple of
days at the shrine. She was from Salé and had been guest of Mulāy Brāhīm
before heading off to Šamharūš. She suffered from possession and said that
there was a jinni harassing her body and blocking her communication with
her husband. She fell in fits of paralysis, especially when scenting incensed
perfume. A woman got inside the shrine and lit agal-wood (ʿūd nnǝd). Fatima
could not support the smell of its odor nor could her son who began crying.
She told the woman: “this saint likes aloes-wood; you neither know nor
respect such places.” She immediately left the room for fear of falling in a fit
of possession because that odor might lure her guest jinni to manifest itself.
She was a maraboutic client ever since her childhood, accustomed to going
with her mother to a local saint in Salé called Sidi Mūsa. She grew near that
saint whom she regularly visited and acquired her maraboutic knowledge
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 647

from her mother’s experience and later from maraboutic adepts she met in
different maraboutic sites. Thanks to them, she said, that she discovered that
her son suffered from l-aryāḥ (lit. winds/fig. air spirits). In order to soothe my
anxiety about her son’s health, she explained that she consulted modern
medicine and exposed her son to what we term in dialect “net for the head”
(šebka dyal rrās), i.e., an electroencephalography (EEG) test, but did not dis-
cover anything. Her son suffered from fits of weeping, in a maraboutic par-
lance named ǧgǎ ʿra. Doctors told her that her son had to repeat the tests, or
undergo a cranial CT scan (skanīr) if needed but her maraboutic companions
were more persuasive to her, especially that she could not afford the money
to do the tests again. She doubted that her son’s sickness could be cured by
modern medicine. She said he had an emotional sickness and simply needed
to visit saints. At the end of our interview, she begged me for charity. I gave
her some money and in return she offered me the salt and incense (bḫūr) of
Mulāy Brāhīm.
Rabīʿa (pseudonym), in her twenties, came from Safi and arrived at Sidi
Šamharūš with five women and some young boys and girls. They were stay-
ing at Mulāy Brāhīm and visited Sidi Šamharūš for a day. A member of the
family offered to drive them to Imlīl. They said they would spend the day at
Sidi Šamharūš and return late in the afternoon to Mulāy Brāhīm. Rabīʿa said
she was called to visit Sidi Šamharūš. She came to the saint because he
appeared to her in a dream in the premises of Mulāy Brāhīm and told her: “if
you want your wish to be fulfilled, you have to visit my abode and circum-
ambulate the mountains.” Rabīʿa was a bit reticent about her personal prob-
lems and could not speak her mind frankly, especially that I was an intruding
acquaintance to her family who did not like neither my research nor my
interference with their affairs. It was later in the day in a group discussion
about the betrayal of husbands that I grasped that Rabīʿa came to Mulāy
Brāhīm and Šamharūš to throw the tābʿa (rags bearing the spells of the hinder-
ing pursuer). She was at loggerheads with her husband and thought the answer
was in the purifying waters of both saints. She carried a little baby on her back.
It was incredible to me that a mother would expose her baby to the danger of
the road in the mountains for hours. Her shoes were torn from her hard walk
on the rocky passageways. She threw them at Šamharūš as tābʿa and walked
back barefooted. I was so appalled by her reckless conduct that I could not
stand the sight of the baby howling on the way, so I gave her my mule to ride
on and I walked at least more than half of the way sparing her the most diffi-
cult and high alleys. Would she interpret that ride offer as a gift to her from
the saint and I as one of the messengers—though I was sure I was sickened by
the baby’s vulnerability to natural heat?
648 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

Mustapha (pseudonym), a seventeen-year-old boy, was a patient who came

from the Sahara to Šamharūš in the company of his parents. It had been the
suggestion of his own healer that he should spend three nights at the saint.
He had not been attending school regularly but to the amazement of his par-
ents he passed his exams. The father described his son’s sickness as a radical
change in his personality from an outgoing person to a recluse. Not long, He
always sat bowing his head into his hand very quiescent. Before, he had been
delightful and cheered. But for the last months, he inclined to be remote
from others. It was Mustapha’s uncle who identified the fact that the boy was
withdrawing from his social group. The father said that he took him to doc-
tors in vain. A psychiatrist gave him tranquilizers. However, the local drug-
gist warned the family of the addictive danger of the drug. She explained that
from her experience many patients grew accustomed to taking those pills,
which destroyed their lives. Scared by the pharmacist’s warning, the family
yielded to traditional healing where no such danger existed. They consulted a
fqih who exorcised their son via the recital of the Qur’an named by Ortho-
dox Muslims ruqya šarʿiyya. The fqih kept reciting the Qur’an over Mustapha
without any reaction from the latter. Mustapha’s father did not see any ame-
lioration in his son’s mental condition. The boy just sat in the usual posture
brooding or fidgeting. The fqih suggested that he should spend three days at
Šamharūš. On what basis did the healer send Mustapha to Šamharūš? What
was the maraboutic sign that he interpreted in favor of that long journey the
family had to painfully undertake from the South to the Atlas? The father did
not have any explanations. He said: “We were told to come here, so we
came!” When I asked the father about the boy’s emotional experiences, com-
panions’ profile, and whether he had inquired about his son’s conduct (smok-
ing hashish, failing in an emotional affair, being victim of sexual abuse), the
father replied: “your questions resemble those of the doctor but I do not
know anything about his consorts.” The case of Mustapha’s father is typical
of how the system of pathology works in Morocco. There is no probing in
the sickness, no final authority to modern medicine and almost no distinction
between organic and non-organic sicknesses. It is an amalgam of popular folk
beliefs, natural and “supernatural” explanations that vary from city to city,
from tribe to tribe and even from family to family.
Although the symptoms of sickness play a major role in the choice of ther-
apy, the patient in our society relies on other factors of greater importance.
These determine which therapy to use since several different therapies are
believed to be efficacious. These factors may include the story of the patient’s
sickness (how it happened), the availability of a doctor, the cost of therapy,
the relationship the patient, his family or friends have with various practitio-
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 649

ners, the past experiences of cure the patient and his family have, the advice
given by friends, neighbors and colleagues, the predictions given by diviners
(šuwāfas), the famous reputation of a particular practitioner, a particular
therapy, or a particular shrine in the patient’s region, the strong devotion to
a saint or brotherhood, and the seriousness or urgency of the sickness. All
such factors influence the patient’s worldview. “The wide range of options
leaves considerable room for unconscious as well as conscious factors in the
choice of cure”.120
Amina, a forty-year-old mother, travelled from Marrakech to stay for a few
days in Mulāy Brāhīm. In the meantime, she seized the opportunity to com-
plete her pilgrimage round by visiting Sidi Šamharūš. Her mother, who was a
regular saint goer, said that it was the third time for them to come to the
saint. Like the rest of pilgrims, they came to spend the whole day at Šamharūš
and return late in the afternoon to Mulāy Brāhīm. Amina was completing
her annual pilgrimage. She visited Ben Mšīš in Ǧ bǝl l-ʿĀlәm, Sidi ʿLi in
Meknes during the mūsǝm, Mulāy Buʿazza in Khenifra, then travelled to
Mulāy Brāhīm and from there to Šamharūš. Amina said that she was touring
saints for the benefit of her family this year. She had an immigrant brother
who had not yet received his Italian citizenship and another one who was
waiting to go abroad. She believed that the patron-saints or men of the land
(riǧāl l-blād ) could steer the wheel of her brothers’ fortune. Last time her
immigrant brother had problems here in Morocco with getting a visa to Italy.
After a series of attempts he failed. During his last attempt, he had visited
Šamharūš before sitting for the interview, and then he got his visa. Sitting by
the simulated tomb of Sidi Šamharūš, Amina addressed the saint in a loud
voice audible to the rest of pilgrims:

You Men of Allah! You Šamharūš! You gave me the bread loaf at the age of nine.
Never harm my brothers! You men of Allah, I spent the turn at Sidi ʿLi, I come
to knock on your door my turn. You don’t harm my brother! Release him to go!
I know he wronged you; you stood and appeared to them, and indicated to me
the sign. Release him to go! He who is sick, do not confuse him! And he who
crossed overseas four years now, release his custody and let him get his citi-
zenship papers and come back! I once brought him to you to this place before.
You released him and he travelled. And the man who rode me to this place,
release him as well! He has l-ʿkes (obstruction). We are supplicating and asking
surrender to you! You women ululate! YOUYOUYOUYOU! [They sing out]
“Prayer and peace be upon the messenger of Allah! There is no power but the

120
Crapanzano, Hamadsha, p. 134.
650 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

power of Sidna Mohammed! Allah is with the High Power!” [Then she turned
to me and gave me a candle as barūk (sacred relic) and told me:“Light it in your
house, it removes impediments!”]121

It is an observable fact that most maǧdūbs and patients at Šamharūš are uned-
ucated married women deeply immersed in the maraboutic culture though
education is not really a variable that can delimit samples of maraboutic pil-
grims. Visiting saints is part and parcel of a maraboutic culture and popular
Islam running deep in Moroccans’ cultural beliefs. Women seem to be zeal-
ous reproducers of maraboutic cultural schemata. They initiate their children
to the tasks of pilgrimage (zyara). They teach them the different stages of the
practices, kissing the coffin, giving ftūḥ , and sitting in front of fuqha to be
treated. Owing to their mothers’ maraboutic education/training, young chil-
dren are exposed at an earlier age to magical practices and thus insure the
continuity of the maraboutic culture. Mothers or women in charge are the
ones who identify sicknesses and take the initiative of bringing their relatives
to the shrine. They are the ones who supplicate, sacrifice and organize the
stay like the case of Amina. They are also the ones who guide the patient
from one saint to another and from one fqih to another, establishing in this
way a social female network spread in various maraboutic lodges forming a
social capital for female maraboutic clients giving them all sorts of help from
financial support to the interpretation of dreams. Suffice it to say that denied
social justice in the real world, mothers/wives invest their money and time in
the magical world to gain a measure of control over their destinies and thus
resist male cultural domination.
Female pilgrims visit Mulāy Brāhīm and Sidi Šamharūš in group, an
impulsive effective therapeutic method of cure of which neither healers nor
patients seem to be aware. Family gatherings may create a cozy atmosphere
of intimacy and sharing of secrets. Thus, patients’ personal problems are
divulged in public and thus exteriorized, a cathartic function par excellence.
The group watches the healing process and experiences the tensions that are

121
The Arabic version reads as follows: yā riǧāl Allāh/yā Šamharūš/ ʿṭaytini l-ḫubza bent tseʿә
snin/ ʿammerek ma tʿādi ḫutti/yā riǧāl Allāh dewәzt nuba fi Sidi ʿLi ranā ǧīt nṭragkum nuba/ma
tʿādiš ḫuya/wa-ṭalqūh yamši/ana ʿārfa tәʿaddaw ʿlikum/u-weqftu ʿlihum u-biyantu liya l-ʿalāma/
ṭalqūh yemši/u-lli mrīḍ ma tәruwnuhš/u-lli qāteʿ l-bḥ ar rbeʿ snīn hadi/ṭelqū lih srāḥ iṣayeb wraqih
u-yǧi/ḥ int huwaya ǧebtu ḥ etta l-hnaya u-ṭeleqtu lih srāḥ u-mšā/u-had siyyed lli ǧa mʿaya ǧabni fi
l-markūb bġitkum ṭelqū lih srāḥ u-ʿandu l-ʿkes . . . /raḥ na mzāwǧin u-ṭālbin tslīm/wa-zaġrtu yā
l-ʿyalāt /yu yu yu yu . . . /ṣlā u-slām ʿlā rasul Allah/la ǧāh illa ǧāh sidna Muḥ ammed Allah mʿā ǧgā̌ h
l-ʿali. Then she gave me a candle as barūk and told me: šʿalha fi ddār dyalk itqḍa lik l-ġarāḍ
u-ytḥ ayyed l-ʿkes.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 651

symbolically played out before them. Some may collapse during the spectacle
and also need to be exorcised. Others may discover their own sickness as they
feel the tension. Relatives, friends, neighbors and healers all contribute into
persuading patients that they are not responsible for their own condition and
that there is another being inside them who acts on their behalf and to whom
the blame ought to be redirected. This objectification of the self may alleviate
patients’ remorse and shame about their sickness releasing them from the
burden of feeling guilty or accountable for their deeds.
The mythic court of Sidi Šamharūš is part of a national geography of the
sacred mapped by an authorizing maraboutic discourse promulgated in vari-
ous maraboutic institutions. Most maraboutically trained patients are famil-
iar with the existence of a hierarchical chain of courts all over the kingdom
with Šamharūš at the top not only because of the location of its premises at a
higher altitude but also because of its intangible nature. Naamouni argues
about the court of Būya ʿUmar that

This court is designed with the image of that which Sidna Sulaymān, King Solo-
mon, chaired. The Raḥḥāliyyīn and possessed affirm that the rules of this maḥ kama
are contained in the book of the “King of Djinns,” usually called Qānūn Sidna
Sulaymān (Code of Master Solomon), which would have been given to Bouya
Omar at the time when the council of saints granted its capacity to him on the
djinns”.122

The maraboutic tradition sates that the saints’ council grants one of the saints
the permission (idn) to perform a cure. The same council of the Atlas granted
Ben Yeffu, for instance, the permission to exorcise jinns.123 Šamharūš, as the
founding myth goes, has come to the region with a similar gathering of
saints. Generally speaking, maraboutic clients conceive of the mythic court
of jinns as al-maḥ kama l-rabbāniyya (divine court), sirr rabbānī (divine secret)
to distinguish the institution from its earthly counterparts ruled by mortals.
The court is shaped as an imaginary hierarchical structure. Sidi Šamharūš is
located at the top of the pyramid. Below him, there are saint collaborators
either from the neighborhood or from other regions depending on the cul-
tural background and training of the client. The chart of this hierarchical
court, as it is collected from some maraboutic adepts annually touring saints,
may be mapped as follows:

122
Naamouni, Le culte, p. 100, trans. mine.
123
See, Maarouf, Jinn eviction, “The founding myth”, p. 48-70.
652 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

Figure A
The Supreme court of the Atlas: Sultan Sidi Šamharūš
The Supreme court of the Rif: Lalla ʿAyša
The court of Appeal of the Atlas: Sidi Raḥḥāl, Mulāy Brāhīm, etc.
The court of Appeal of the Rif: Sidi ʿLi Ben Ḥ amdūš, Sidi Ḥ mǝd Dġūġi, al-Hādi
Ben ʿIsa, etc
The ‘General Prosecutor Office’ of the Atlas is Būya ʿUmar. In fact, each region
has its own local established ‘general prosecutor’ saints where maraboutic nov-
ices begin to be immersed in cultural maneuvers.

The supreme court of Sidi Šamharūš dominates other saints’ courts, at least
from the standpoint of his clients and fanatic practicing healers.124 When
patients go to these courts and their problems prove to be difficult to solve,
they are immediately called to Sidi Šamharūš’s jurisdiction. The predominant
style of communication through this top-down structure is the modal form
of command. Patients and jinns are summoned to fulfill the commands of
the saint or those of his collaborators. The schema of trials is constituted by
command vs. compliance. Each jinni waits for the turn of his trial. Nuba calls
jinn miscreants from far and near to the presence of the Sultan to be tried for
the grievances they commit. At the end of the trial, the court, specifying the
punishment to be inflicted upon the convict, pronounces the sentence. All of
the courts mentioned above derive their executive power from their collective
representation as prison-house institutions of jinns. Mediums are chained or
thrust in the ḫalwa (solitary-confinement cave) if the jinns haunting them

124
To the contrary, the descendents of Ben Yeffu deem their ancestor as a final destination
rather than as a station to halt by; his court is regarded as supreme. See the story of the Buffi
healer (Maarouf, Jinn eviction, p. 85-6) and the imam (ibid., p. 226-35) who toured saints but
finally were both cured by the supreme court of Ben Yeffu.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 653

rebel against the authority of the saint. Release from incarceration does not
have a fixed time. It depends on the mystic power of the saint. These captive
mediums are called mašdūds, either their period of convalescence is unknown
or they are caught by the saint for a life time. In fact, the possessed do not
know the exact times of trials, since everything depends on the nuba, or the
power of Allah (l-iġāra). Customarily, on the eve of Thursday, mәluk (jinns)
and their hosts attend their trials either at Šamharūš or in other maraboutic
shrines in front of saint collaborators. For instance, šuwāfa Bouchra, men-
tioned before, describes her weekly trial at the shrine of Ben Yeffu. She says
that she is haunted by believer jinns, one of whom is l-fqih Šamharūš.
Bouchra performs the ḥ aḍra ritually on the eve of Thursday. She calls this
process šraʿ (trial). The Sultan Ben Yeffu calls her every week on the eve of
Thursday to go to him reciting litanies (adkār, sing. dikr) and attend her trial
with Šamharūš. The jinni at Ben Yeffu’s lodge does not preside over lawsuits
but participates as litigant.
As it is indicated elsewhere, this maraboutic configuration of the court of
justice is modeled on the social world Moroccans live in. Patients reiterate
that the Sultan Šamharūš may be ranked as a king, the rest of saints as may-
ors, pashas, qaids (heads of communes or urban districts) and ḫlifas (qaid’s
deputies). Each saint and spirit seems to be given an administrative function
in this maraboutic kingdom. But the main cultural image is that of the “sul-
tan-saint,” which is popular everywhere. Even popular music highlights the
image of the sultan-saint and the call of the poor for this High Power to
redeem their social conditions. In their last album “The Bee (naḥ la),” Nās
al-Ġ iwān (Singing People), a famous musical band who boomed in the sev-
enties and beyond sing: “The masses are suffering; the Sultan is a doctor but
the vizier does not convey the message.”125 The sultan embodies a higher
authority of justice, arbitrating cases of conflict and solving people’s plights.
If the social conditions of the poor do not ameliorate, the blame is displaced
to his subordinates, thus also works the maraboutic ideology reproducing
sultan-saints, benevolent rescuers of the poor, and culturally constructing
categories of otherness by the process of objectifying the self’s sense of guilt.
Nās al-Ġ iwān, Ǧ ilāla, Fatḥ Allāh l-Mġāri and others achieved a tremendous
success in the seventies and beyond because their tunes identified with
maraboutic melodies of ḥ aḍra and Sufi litanies. Despite their rejection of
moral dishonesty and corruption in Moroccan society and that they ushered
seemingly progressive ideas on the scene, Nās al-Ġ iwān, influenced by the
cultural schemata of their age, called for saints, extolled their qualities and
immersed in a trance dance (l-ḥ āl ) that attracted millions of Moroccans

125
The Arabic version reads as follows: rrāʿi maḍrūr, Sәlṭān ṭbīb/u-l-wzīr mā ybǝllaġ ḫbāra.
654 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

towards such type of music. It was a cultural resistance in which the voice of
protest was camouflaged by an escapist attitude gone with the winds of spir-
its and trance dances. Fatḥ Allāh l-Mġāri, as Chtatou argues, conscious of the
success of those musical groups came on the artistic scene with his famous
perennial song “Riǧāl Allāh” (lit. Men of Allah/fig. patron-saints), thus turn-
ing from an imitation of the Egyptian style to popular music with marabou-
tic inspiration. The song “was a tribute to the saints and their beneficial
blessing.”126 The custom then was, and somehow still is, that the key to suc-
cess for popular singers was that their songs should deal with maraboutic
themes in which they referred to saints and spirits, and should use maraboutic
expressions, instruments (like the sintir [haǧhuǧ ] of Gnāwa used by Nās
al-Ġ iwān) and tunes such as the airs of ḥ aḍra.

Šamharūš and Mulāy Brāhīm: The Mill as a Mythic Bond

Šamharūš is not only thought to be the protector of the region of the Atlas
but is also connected to Mulāy Brāhīm by being his guardian. R. Claisse-
Dauchy cites a story that dates back to 1990. It was narrated to him that one
night, some thieves entered Mulāy Brāhīm’s sanctuary while Šamharūš was
promenading. When he saw them, he stoned them to death (rǧamhum) by
chopping their bodies in halves. The following day, the rest of their bodies
were discovered by the inhabitants of the area.127 The word rǧam (to stone)
belongs to the register of the Qur’an, which legitimizes the act of justice per-
formed by Šamharūš. He applied justice by punishing the miscreants.
Šamharūš is thought to be a judge, a qāḍī ever since the Prophet’s time, who
defends a pure faithful Islamic justice. That he hovers over Mulāy Brāhīm’s
ḥ urum and descends in Ḥ mād u Mūsa’s ḥ urum constitutes a maraboutic cul-
tural representation traversing many Moroccan saint lodges where powerful
saints are thought to master the two worlds: human vs. non-human. This
control is schematically designed in a tangible token people hold in venera-
tion like the sacred cairn near the shrine of Ben Yeffu in al-Ġ arbiyya called Sid
l-Karkūr or Maqām al-Ṣāliḥīn (the Station of the Pious) where jinns are
thought to gather, or the cave of the female jinni Lalla ʿAyša in Sidi ʿLi Ben
Ḥ amdūš in Meknes, or yet the grotto of angels near the shrine of Sidi Yaḥyā
in Oujda.

126
M. Chtatou, “Saints and spirits and their significance in Moroccan cultural beliefs and
practices: An Analysis of Westermarck’s Work”, Morocco, 1 (1996), p. 62-84, here p. 79.
127
Claisse-Dauchy, “Bien-être”, p. 43.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 655

Another major link between Mulāy Brāhīm and Šamharūš is the pilgrim-
age circuit. Though Mulāy Brāhīm, as we have learnt from his hagiographic
tale, refuses to send his visitors to other saints, pilgrims accumulate baraka by
touring saints and the circuit of pilgrimaging from Mulāy Brāhīm to
Šamharūš—especially that Mulāy Brāhīm is situated on the way to this
saint—is very well known on the maraboutic trip maps. Mulāy Brāhīm is a
small touristic village where the saint premises (hotels, shops and restaurants)
are rent and the money goes to the collective box of his relatives from
Tamṣlūḥәt and Aqrāš. Many people visit the saint for tourism—what they
themselves call tәfwiǧa (delight)—and blessing. People like to tarry a bit in
the mountains at a cheaper price. Mulāy Brāhīm is also the touristic destina-
tion for the rabble. The lower social strata go there to rent a room at the price
of 50 DH and cook on their own instead of eating in restaurants—to say
nothing of the troubled who go to Mulāy Brāhīm to seek cure. The saint does
not attract the poor working classes alone but also the middle classes who like
to do maraboutic tourism for its cheaper costs. Like so many maraboutic sites,
Mulāy Brāhīm attracts prostitutes and unmarried couples who find in the
folkloric ambiance of the saint an opportunity to give vent to their libido.
One may notice in the evening young couples walking on the fringes of the
road enjoying romantically the sight of the sun-set in the mountains. This
romantic view does not make prostitutes forget their payment the following
day in the morning when they leave the rented rooms. Baʿzīz, a hotel keeper,
refuses to be recruited in what he calls qallәt l-ʿaraḍ (lack of honor). For
him such capitalistic transaction is a form of pimping that is unlawful. He
prefers a non-thriving business to committing sins against Allah by nesting
prostitution.
In the past, to feed the poor and ṭulba (Qur’an learners) housed in his
zāwiya, Mulāy Brāhīm used to grind corn in a mill (rḥ a) he set up down in a
nearby valley on the river of Šamharūš. Rḥ a is located on Oued Šamharūš
about 4 kilometers before reaching the traffic sign showing the turn to the
ascending road of 4 kilometers to Mulāy Brāhīm. According to Baʿziz, one of
the native inhabitants of Mulāy Brāhīm, the saint used the mill to grind corn,
maize and barley to cook for the poor housed in his zāwiya. Yet, Moulay
Driss, the watermill custodian, holds a different opinion. He says that the
saint used to do his ablutions by the river near the mill before going to his
ḫalwa (retreat) in the mountains; thus Moulay Driss creates some logic
between what pilgrims do now and what the saint used to do in the past. Pil-
grims now bathe and do their ablutions inside the mill. It is not thus far if
they are imitating the saint’s performances. In fact, rḥ a is now turned into a
source of purification for pilgrims visiting Mulāy Brāhīm.
656 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

Rḥ a, as I had the experience to bathe in it, is a canal (sāgya) sheltered with
a tin roof. It is shaped in the form of a small tunnel about 2 meters long. You
bow and get inside closer to a natural tap formed of a rocky hole, the water
flowing out very cold. You take your shower, leave a tābʿa token such as hair
comb or underclothing (see Fig. 2) and go out in an open area where there is
a bric-a-brac of a chair and a stool wall where you can sit to dry and wear
your clothes. When I finished bathing, I stood to dry in the open area with
another pilgrim who had bathed before me. I asked him if he knew about
any ritual tasks to follow while bathing in the canal. He did not know. The
supervisor of the place named Moulay Driss, who was in earshot, told us that
there were not any specific ritual performances. For him, bathing in sacred
water with faith (niya) in the saint’s baraka was a propitious omen. Because I
saw rests of shampoo sachets and soap carton envelopes, I asked Moulay
Driss about the pilgrims who took a shower there as if they were in a Turkish
bath. They used soap and shampoo such as the man who had bathed before
me. The custodian explained that he notified pilgrims to act symbolically and
nothing else to be blessed with the sacred relic (barūk) of the saint; even
touching the water was enough for the transmission of baraka but people
preferred to do it their own way. There were those who bathed like in a ham-
mam, others who showered with water alone, and still others who were con-
tented with doing their ablutions or just dipping their feet in water.
Moulay Driss still remembers the punishment his father wreaked upon
him when he as a child refused to bathe in this cold water. He had to be
drilled by force to perform purificatory rituals. But his education and
upbringing in Marrakech led him to challenge such maraboutic beliefs later.
From our conversation together, Moulay Driss evinces himself as a disbe-
liever in the baraka of the saint though he mentions the word barūk before. I
provoked him with the question of why he was working there if he did not
believe in what he was doing. He said it was Written for him to own his
income there (hna fin maktūb liya rzaq). He added: “But I will not promise
people that Mulāy Brāhīm will raise their social rank ( ġādi yʿalli daraǧthum).
He summed up his speech by classifying the maraboutic society as opiated
(rāh l-umma maglūba). But he was also maglūb, dulled under the effect of
narcotics. He was smoking hashish and cursing the boys playing nearby.
Every time he saw a new comer, he hid his stuffed cigarette. He did not seem
to be well informed about the maraboutic culture. The language he used was
a street jargon very far from the maraboutic adepts’ style. He was supervising
the place he inherited from his uncle without enough cultural training in the
maraboutic tradition. When I asked him about the story of the saint Mulāy
Brāhīm, he mixed up events and added events from his imagination which
he attributed to the saint.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 657

It seems that the case of Moulay Driss is not an orphan case in Moroccan
society. Maraboutic sites and Islamic minorities as observed seem to repre-
sent the traditional social welfare institutions that may accommodate mar-
ginalized individuals and juvenile delinquents in addition to its anomic
educated and employed populations. The sole inconvenience in maraboutic
sites is that delinquents may go virtually unchecked as addicts. Their cultural
training into maraboutic adepts may fail because the maraboutic discipline is
not as rigorous as the Islamists’ self-discipline. If we take the example of the
Būdšīši order, they maintain the slogan: al-taḥ allī qabla l-taḫallī (devotion
before abstinence). The new comer to the maraboutic order can join and per-
form the rituals even before he gives up narcotic indulgence. In Islamic
minorities ( ǧamāʿas), they can hardly accept addicts as members of the group
until they fight their vices and change their conduct before being granted
membership. The group requires an utter transformation in the cultural iden-
tity of an addict since in his new social network he can reach later the posi-
tion of a preacher. Let us take the example of ʿAbd Rraḥmān (pseudonym), a
Salafi carpenter whose apprentices, at least seven teenagers, come from the
margins of society. They are glue sniffers, hashish smokers, ex-prisoners, and
abandoned children. He employs them as week laborers. He trains them in
carpentry skills and teaches them the Qur’an and Islamic values with the help
of CDs and mandatory attendance of Dār al-Qurʾān, a Salafi institution for
religious cultural training. It is food for thought. They have to give up their
life of vagabondage and adhere to a fanatic Salafi conduct. ʿAbd Rraḥmān
says that he does not succeed with all cases but he is trying to help these
youths in his own way. Other Islamists are observed to offer small capitals
from 500 DH to 3000 DH to juvenile delinquents to set up a business deal
such as peddling vegetables in return of an Islamist training and utter divorce
with former toxicomania, thus Islamists may guarantee the membership of
zealous subordinate followers who may perceive their masters as saint-sav-
iours. In a nutshell, Islamists in general seem to activate the cultural model of
charity. They revive the social welfare role maraboutic centres were famous
for in the past. In urban centres where poor squalid quarters—not to men-
tion the overused term ‘shantytowns’—are reduced into oblivion, the Isla-
mist movements are actively establishing their furtive cocoons coordinating
their works of charity and uniting youths into potential massive political
antagonists. In rural areas, maraboutic centres—like Ste Fatma in the Atlas
whose house is now turned into a refuge to the poor and the aged without
kin—continue to be run and sustained by the local inhabitants and benevo-
lent donors while the state embryonic social welfare—despite its mediatisa-
tion—seems to be hitherto inconspicuous to the impoverished.
658 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

The islamists’ social project of reforming delinquency and reorienting anti-

social conduct towards ruling institutions seems to invert Foucault’s power
schema. Foucault has attempted to show that the discourse of power in crim-
inality, penology, and psychiatry is built on the notion of deviancy; those
who deviate from social norms must be reformed. Their aspects of difference
that constitute their identity must be tamed and assorted into a recognizable
form recruited into the history of the Same. According to Foucault,

The history of madness would be the history of the other, of which, for a culture,
is both domestic and foreign, therefore to be excluded (in order to exorcise the
interior danger) but by enclosing it (in order to reduce its otherness); the history
of the order of things is the history of the Same what for a culture is both
dispersed and related, therefore, to be distinguished by kinds and collected into
identities.128

In penal institutions, the project of reform has never succeeded. No reform

has been achieved. But how comes that the institution has survived up to the
present time? According to Foucault, the institution contributes to domesti-
cating the masses of prisoners by rendering them delinquent. For the obser-
vation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the
hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delin-
quency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous—and, on
occasion, usable—form of illegality; in producing delinquents, in an appar-
ently marginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu; in producing the
delinquent as a pathologized subject.129 The penal system succeeds in produc-
ing innocuous subjects who cannot harm the established social order. Though
prisoners may get accustomed to prison life and identify themselves with the
society of criminals, their delinquency is not dangerous because it is personal,
local and limited for it does not attract any public support. So the strategy of
social order is practically achieved. However, if this delinquency finds a sense
of purpose and values of unification in a legitimate religious ideology as in
the case of subaltern Islamism, moreover trained to fight social deviancy, the
lurking anomie, rage and narcoticism previously vent out on less intimidat-
ing social groups in popular squalid streets and shantytowns, it can be highly
organized and expanded outside the periphery of the neighbourhood even
migrating outside the national peripheries to find its expression against global
dominant institutions.

128
M. Foucault, Les mots et les choses. Paris, Gallimard, 1966, p. 15, trans. mine.
129
M. Foucault, Discipline and punish, trans. A.M. Sheridan, NY, Vintage, 1977, p. 277.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 659

Šamharūš and Mulāy Brāhīm as Saviors from Oppression

Šamharūš and Mulāy Brāhīm represent two different classes of protectors.

Mulāy Brāhīm is a human saint of ‘pure’ social origins, a šrif who descends
from the holy lineage of the Prophet. His baraka is inherited from his ances-
tors. Šamharūš is a spirit, his power derives from his natural qualities of being
a jinni. These are two main models of justice administrators in the marabou-
tic culture, the human sultan incarnated in the holy saint and the non-hu-
man sultan of jinns. Both models pertain to a mythic world high up and
distant from the down-to-earth social world of the rabble. The common
denominator between the two models is the symbolic figure of the sultan.
The sultan in both models is a mythic source of justice. He exists in both
human and non-human worlds. In both, he administers justice and protects
the oppressed. In the human world, the sultan does not belong to the social
category of commoners. He is of a special category, of a noble origin descend-
ing from the linage of the Prophet. Justice, in this sense, acquires mythic
dimensions and no longer seems to be a cultural ideal humanly possible.
The native Berbers who still believe in the myth of Šamharūš see in him a
protector of the region. They recount stories about his retaliation to people
who challenge his dictates and conversely his endowment to those who hold
faith in his cure. Like the rest of maraboutic courts all over the kingdom,
Šamharūš’s court is used for making solemn vows between couples and busi-
ness partners. People go to his shrine to make promises and vows (ʿahds) to
each other. He who betrays the other may risk the vengeance of the saint. The
social representation of his vengeance circulates in popular stories recounted
by old and young mountaineers. Two sample stories read as follows:

Two women came to the stone of Šamharūš and supplicated him for cure.
Šamharūš offered them two bowls of sauce (blūl ) and told them: “you are not
going to spend the night here. On your way back whatever you find you carry
it.” The two women came across a carrion dog, one woman passed by it obli-
viously and the other stopped to carry it on her back. She took off her scarf,
amassed the decaying nauseous flesh and bones and pursued her trail. On the
route of her journey, the load felt heavier and the sickening stench disappeared.
She stopped to check what happened. To her amazement the scarf was full of
silver coins.

Another story that nearly everyone in the region of Imlīl is familiar with is
about the murderer who was arrested by Šamharūš. The story goes that

Someone was killed in an act of vengeance. He was murdered near the sanctuary
of Šamharūš. His murderer wanted to flee that night. He would run from
the stone of Šamharūš till the village centre of Imlīl. On the way, he would be
660 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

interrupted by the knight Sidi Šamharūš who would appear to him on a horse
holding a sword and threatening him to keep to his victim. Thus, he spent the
night racing to and fro and the morning there came the crier (bәrrāḥ ) who wake-
ned the villagers on the murder. They discovered the murderer leaning on a tree
beside his victim. He did not show any resistance when he was arrested by the
gendarmerie. He was simply saying: “this is a wali (saint) [pointing towards
Šamharūš]. He did not let me escape last night! He dogged my steps!”

Like Šamharūš, Mulāy Brāhīm is considered the protector of his own region.
His hagiographic tale depicts him as a rescuer from drought and a descen-
dent of a family known for their deliverance from oppression. His founding
myth (an ethnographic version collected from informants) runs as follows:

Mulāy Brāhīm Ben Ḥ mǝd Ben ʿAbd Allāh Ben Ḥ sayn was a notary in Marra-
kech. He quarreled with them—his hagiographic tale refers to his dispute with
the Saadian Sultan Mulāy Zidān—because they accused him of false testimony.
Back to Tamṣluḥәt, he went to see his grandfather. The latter offered him a she-
camel (nāga) and told him: “ride on it! And where it stops will be your new
homeland.” The animal stopped by Kik, a region to be known later as Mulāy
Brāhīm’s region. In Kik region, the natives asked him to show them his miracles.
He dug a spring for them for they needed water for cultivation. The spring drip-
ped water and did not burst out. People used pots to take water out. Then, he
imposed on them tributes they did not like, so he was forced to leave the region
and came to a place near it where he would be buried. It was called Iminighisi
(in Arabic Bāb Sarb). There was a saint dwelling with his daughter in the place.
He was Sidi Brahim u ʿLi and his daughter was Lalla Mammas. Once he saw
Mulāy Brāhīm, he told the natives: “the owner of the land has come; I will
leave.”130 He settled in Alus in Tadrara. Mulāy Brāhīm settled in Iminighisi that
took his name afterwards and built his zāwiya in which he housed the poor and
fed them. He told the natives of the area: “Visitors will bring you sacrifices to
the zāwiya! You will eat a lot of meat! As for the head and skin, they are my kin’s
share!” He also dug a spring named ʿAyn šayḫ from which water never dried.

As it is cited in Dawḥ at al-nāšir by Ibn ʿAskar, Mulāy Brāhīm’s grandfather is

ʿAbd Allāh b. Ḥ usayn al-Mġārī from the šurfa of Banū Mġār originally located
in ʿAin Tiṭanftạ r.131 He was also one of the friends of the šayḫ Sidi Abū
Muḥammad al-Ġ azwānī. The šayḫ Abū l-ʿAbbās narrated

that when the šayḫ Sidi Abū Muḥammad al-Ġ azwānī passed by the shrine (ḍarīḥ )
of the šayḫ Abū Ibrāhīm buried in Tamṣluḥәt, the land was arid and no water
flowed in it. There was in his company ʿAbd Allāh. Al-Ġ azwānī told him: “Stay
here with this folk! May God revive his creatures on your hand!” ʿAbd Allāh

130
The Arabic version reads as follows: ǧā mul l-arḍ, ana ġādi nәmši f-ḥ āli.
131
See also al-Tādilī, al-Tašawwuf.
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 661

asked for a miracle he could use to survive in that wilderness. The šayḫ said:
“May Allah offer you the bridle of all harming birds. And may God put his wis-
dom in your hand; if you put it in baked flour, the married woman who tastes
from it shall become pregnant. Keep to this place for God shall help people by
your mediation.” When they settled in Tamṣluḥәt, the son, his father ʿAbd
Allāh, his mother and a cow were the only settlers in the land. When the mother
and her son protested, ʿAbd Allāh assured them that if they were under saints’
protection, they did not have to worry. After some time, the sultan’s agents passed
by the place and saw the cow grazing in the wilderness. They thought it stray and
took it to the house of the Maḫzǝn in Marrakech. When the saint Sidi ʿAbd Allāh
came, he did not find the cow. He was told the sultan’s servants took it away. He
went to Marrakech but did not know any one there save for Abū l-Ḥ asan ʿAlī b.
Abī l-Qāsim. He went to him and told him what happened. The šayḫ answered
him in scorn: “Go and tell your šayḫ who made you live in that tomb to help
you!” Naively, he did as he was told! He went to the tomb of the šayḫ al-Ġ azwānī,
wept over it and related to him what Abū l-Ḥ asan said in jest. Then he started
heading for Tamṣluḥәt where he had come from. On his way out of Marrakech,
he met the governor of the town waiting on his horse and the cow standing
nearby. Once he saw Sidi ʿAbd Allāh, the governor descended from his horse,
kissed the šrif ’s hand and pleaded for mercy. ʿAbd Allāh asked him about what
happened. He told him: “I was sleeping in my house when I saw a man who drew
out a sword and put it on my throat menacing me: ‘if you do not return the cow
to ʿAbd Allāh Ben Ḥ ussayn, I will cut your throat.’ I asked him where to find him.
He said: ‘go out now with it to Bāb Ǧ adīd (New Door, one of the exits of
Marrakech) and you will meet him.’ When I saw you looking at it, I knew imme-
diately it was you ʿAbd Allāh.” ʿAbd Allāh went back to Abū l-Ḥ asan and told him
in triumph: “My šayḫ delivered my cow and returned it to me!” Abū l-Ḥ asan at
last confessed: “That Arab can do it.” Then the elated ʿAbd Allāh returned home
in high spirits.132

The stories quoted above evince Šamharūš and Mulāy Brāhīm as distributing
centers of charity and justice. The story of the two women who are advised
by Šamharūš to collect whatever they come across on their way conveys a
moral lesson to the pilgrims. Faith (niya) in the saint and his power is itself
rewarding. The woman who amasses the dog’s carrion will discover it trans-
mogrified into money, an indicator (išāra) of richness. Mulāy Brāhīm uses his
miraculous power to dig springs and make water flow in his own region. In
other words, he creates life by proxy. In his sanctuary he houses the poor and
caters for their needs. The path of saints is a path of miracles. They are repre-
sented as having the extraordinary power to ameliorate the social conditions
of the poor and the oppressed; cultural representations of this sort as it
will be explained later may slacken the pace of the subalterns’ potential for

132
Ibn ʿAskar, Dawḥ at al-nāšir li-maḥ āsin man kāna bi-l-Maġrib min mašāyiḫ al-qarn al-ʿāšir,
ed. M. Haǧǧī, Rabat, Dār al-Maġrib, 1977, p. 104-7, trans. mine.
662 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

reunification and alliance to resistance. Relying on action by proxy and dis-

trusting personal initiative, they may be accustomed to resignation and
endurance.
In Islam, it is decreed that God helps those who help themselves, support-
ing personal initiative but the Holy Book also informs Muslims about God’s
intervention in the order of the cosmos. Nothing happens without His will.
Moroccans tend to harp on both effective social action as well as upon other
Qur’anic instances explaining the divine distribution of wealth. The cultural
schema of rzaq (living resource bestowed on one by Allah) forms up the com-
pensatory ideology of the masses activated to assimilate the economic
inequalities they endure. They cling to the belief conveyed in the Qur’an that
God has distributed the living resources (pl. arzāq) on people and one cannot
gain but what Allah has decreed for them.133 The same belief is reproduced in
maraboutic socialization. In this respect, the poor are persuaded to be com-
pensated in the world to come, and the rich who offer alms believe that they
can purchase a room in paradise. It seems that people feed on the spiritual
source of the Qur’an by taking from it what suits their social conditions,
soothe their miseries and reduce their anxieties. God’s will in Muslims’
worldview helps them put up with social inequalities.
God’s will in Moroccans’ worldview is not a static category as colonial
anthropology has equated it with Islamic Fatalism. That inequalities are
attributed to God’s will (qudrat Allāh) does not deny—though if ideologically
distorted may still lead to a mistrust of—personal initiative since men are
free to act and plan their future on the basis of their social experience.134

133
It is mentioned in the Qur’an: “Know they not that Allah enlarges the provision or restricts
it, for any he pleases verily, in this are signs for those who believe!”, Kor 39, 52. The holy book of
Islam makes reference to the fact that Allah reminds the faithful that He has the power to enlarge
and restrict the provisions to his servants either as a test for some or punishment for others. It is
also stated: “If Allah were to enlarge the provision for his servants, they would indeed transgress
beyond all bounds through the earth; But he sends (it) down in due measure as he pleases. For
he is with his servants well-acquainted, watchful.” Kor 42, 27. The wisdom that lies behind such
verses is that Allah addresses his poor servants explaining to them that he supplies their needs
but to a degree that they do not morally decline since he is watchful that riches may spoil their
conduct. In the same vein, it was narrated by Abū Hurayra that the Prophet said: “May Allah
render the living resources of Mohammed’s folks sufficient to sustain them” (Muslim, Saḥ īḥ ,
retrieved from Mawsūʿat al-ḥ adīt̠ [the encyclopedia of the hadith]; www.hadith.al-islam.com,
trans. mine). The Prophet’s speech lays stress on contentment and patience opposite to avidity
that may culminate in unbounded craving and ardent fights.
134
The emphasis given here to the concept of ‘luck’ in the form of God’s Will does not
mean that this is the only key concept Moroccans use to interpret social events in their socio-
cultural context. I argue, following Eickelman (Moroccan Islam), that there are other key con-
cepts such as reason (l-ʿqal ), propriety (ḥ šūmiya), obligation (ḥ aqq) and compulsion (ʿār) that
form up Moroccans’ worldview. The emphasis given above to the concept of ‘luck’, or given by
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 663

But “provisionality [as Eickelman maintains] is the very essence of the

cosmos.”135 God’s will legitimizes the present social hierarchies and any future
outcome. “It attenuates speculation on why particular projects succeed or fail
and blocks metaphysical reflection on the fate of man in the world.”136 God’s
will (in šāʾa llāh) is thus more pertinent to man’s attempt to adjust themselves
to social circumstances as they occur. Eickelman cites an elderly salaried
Qur’an reader, who formerly collected alms at the shrine of Būʿbīd Šarqi. The
latter explains the concept as follows: “God created the world. He decides and
knows everything. You have a car and I don’t. That’s God’s will (qudrat Allāh).
One day it might be taken away from you. That’s also God’s will.”137 Thus
l-maktūb or l-mqayyed (the written or recorded) legitimates the status-quo
(social and economic inequalities), and minimizes the accountability of one
person for the moral and economic destiny of others (for further treatment of
God’s will, see Eickelman).138 Furthermore, there is a large clientele of
maraboutic culture who are usually given to rationalize their plights in terms
of Allah’s will but between the transcendental realm of God and the mundane
realm they imagine intermediate positions occupied by saints and jinns. Some
people may consider themselves victims of jinn attack or the cast of the evil
eye hence shifting responsibility from self to other—“from who they are to
who they are not”—objectifying their feelings and freezing their identity by
their relationship with the demonic—a reification of cultural symbols in the
collective representations of the social Imaginary.139
As an example, a mason entrepreneur rationalizes the income of his day
laborers, he says: “it is Allah who wanted them to be as such (poor)! Even if
we give them money, they remain poor! Oh! We do not need to put our oar
in Allah’s choices!”140 There are many linguistic constructions for this senti-
ment but bearing the same meaning of the maktūb in different social con-
texts. The distribution of wealth is thus not the effect of the uneven
distribution of resources and exploitation. It is rather thought to be conferred
by God’s will (qudrat Allāh). Allah created the poor as he created the rich. If
he wills, He can turn them upside down. The view that poverty and wealth

Eickelman to the five concepts altogether, seems to be avowedly arbitrary though needless to say
that this is intrinsic to any attempt to describe a cultural worldview.
135
Eickelman, Moroccan Islam, p. 126.
136
Ibid., p. 127.
137
Ibid., p. 127.
138
Ibid., p. 126-30.
139
See Crapanzano, Tuhami, p. 20.
140
The Arabic version reads as follows: ra Allah bġa lihum hakkak! Ra waḫḫa nʿṭtị whum ybqaw
fuqāra! Aw ḥ na n-ddaḫlu mʿa Allah.
664 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

have transcendental origins obfuscates the need for human intervention and
organization. It is not only poverty that is glossed over in terms of the occult
over which organization does not have any control but also social justice is
wreathed in myth.
Uncertain about the practice of fairly unbiased justice in their real world,
maraboutic pilgrims seek a miraculous substitute, a mythic justice to be
bestowed upon them by saints. If we take the example of the murderer in
Šamharūš’s vicinity or the governor who is startled from his sleep and hurries
to meet Sidi ʿAbd Allāh, we immediately recognize that maraboutic justice is
socially represented as fast and effective. It does not get lost in bureaucratic
routine. Suffice it to say that immediately after one’s supplication, one may
receive indicators of release. The quest for mythic justice is a cultural ritual
that shows how indecisive is people’s belief in their own abilities to realize
social justice. When justice becomes distant belonging to another world,
people find it normal if it is not part of their daily life. They can wait and
endure, even resign, in silence till the miracle of change occurs. Everything
can be changed, but it needs a charismatic leader/sultan, who has the magic
rod to make it true, an infantile wish very fanciful. Maraboutic justice is thus
not a human right to be socially and politically struggled for. It is rather an
occult gift bestowed on people by anonymous powers like Šamharūš and
Mulāy Brāhīm. Sidi ʿAbd Allāh’s story is a good case in point. It is a hagio-
graphic tale that legitimizes and reinforces the maraboutic representation of
justice as a power saints wield and can offer as a gift to their cherished faithful
supplicants. Sidi ʿAbd Allāh follows the trail of the oppressed supplicant. He
holds faith (niya) in his šayḫ’s power; he goes to his tomb, weeps over it, and
beseeches him to release the cow. Immediate is the response of the saint, far
better than a human judge. The governor of the town in person comes
humiliated in front of Sidi ʿAbd Allāh, kisses his hand and apologizes for his
subordinates’ wrongdoing. This maraboutic ideology of begging mythic jus-
tice from saints tends to create a society of faithful supplicants oblivious of
political forms of social existence; all is Written in their Fate.
Finally, can we consider this maraboutic worldview only influencing
maraboutic adepts (who are then a relatively small proportion of the popula-
tion) or is it a common cultural ground? Ethnographic research in progress
shows us day after day that the maraboutic worldview is endorsed consciously
or not by both those who have faith in maraboutism and those who doubt it.
Anti-maraboutic subjects are also immersed in maraboutism by way of social-
ization in the popular culture of Islam. Moroccans’ cultural immersion in
maraboutism is inevitable in that it is part of their cultural soil. They are born
into it. The question is the degree of immersion. Even the secular Moroccans
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 665

who think they are no longer influenced by the values of popular Islam,141 they
share with the rest of Moroccans a childhood experience in this culture. They
must contend with a lot of given(s) and taken(s)-for-granted they are not
allowed to question—or at least go virtually unnoticed to them. In fact, the
deeper one socializes in maraboutism, the stronger their faith grows in its
miracles. Further research on the transferability of the maraboutic cultural
schemata to other socio-cultural contexts and the growth/decline of the
maraboutic worldview in a modernizing society may shed light on whether
Moroccans will perpetuate their propensity to borrow from the maraboutic
cultural legacy the metaphors they live by and whether the monarchy will
carry on relying on the same reservoir to invent its cultural symbols in order
to perpetuate its symbolic capital and the self-image of its crowned heads as
sultan-saints.

Table 1. Common English and French Spellings of Transliterated Arabic Place

Names and Personal Names of Prominent Cultural Figures
Common European Spellings Transliterated Arabic Spellings
Achayn Aššayn
Aguersiwal Agǝrsiwāl
Aicha ʿAyša
Aït Mizan Ayt Mizan
Aït Souka Aytsūka
Aït Takhsant Ayt Tāḫsǝnt

141
The concept ‘popular Islam’ refers to the popular culture of Islam that embraces cultural
fragments and denials within established Islam. Islamists and ulema, whose interpretation of the
oneness of God extends to the unity of His community, refute the division of Islam into frag-
mented practices and represent Islam as one. The cultural practices that do not conform to the
Great Tradition are thought heterodox. Though social scientists are enthusiastic on attaching the
label ‘popular Islam’ to the practices of the people for they are accustomed to observing Islam
from below, attributing popular-ness to Islam as an ideology is questioned and found wanting.
Though students of Islam in practice can easily give examples of popular Islam, they may be
faced with the dilemma of the conflict between idealist postulates of ulema and actual practice
of Islamic communities. Opposite to ulema’s beliefs and practices, popular Islam incorporates
the aberrant views and activities of the illiterate though the boundaries between notions of
‘popular’ and establishment are not as clear-cut as they may first appear. They are subjected to
the elusive dynamic process of time and/or the symbiotic relationship between the two. Popular
practices may collide with establishment practices in some social and historical contexts, and
reinforce each other in other contexts. Let us remember that almost any organized Islamic prac-
tice that is anti-establishment claims its authority to be derived from its being rooted in Islam
such is the case of some maraboutic practices (J.D.Y. Peel, C.C. Stewart, Popular Islam south of
the Sahara, Manchester, Manchester UP, 1985, p. 363; see also Eickelman, Moroccan Islam,
p. 12, 28-9, 237).
666 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

Table 1 (cont.)

Common European Spellings Transliterated Arabic Spellings

Amarhouch Amarhūš
Aremd Arǝmd
Arghen Arġǝn
Bouchichi Būdšīši
Bouya Omar Būya ʿUmar
Chamharouch Šamharuš
Doukkala Dukkāla
Ghighaya ̇ āya
Giġ
Glaoua Glāwa
Glaoui Glāwi
Goundafa Gundāfa
Hamadsha Ḥ mādša
Imlil Imlīl
Jbel Toubkal Ğbǝl Tūbqāl
Makhzen Maḫzǝn
Moulay Mulāy (honorific title)
Moulay Abdellah Amghar Mulāy ʿAbd Allāh Amġār
Moulay Brahim Mulāy Brāhīm
moussem mūsǝm
Ohttos Uṭtụ̄ ṣ
Oukaïmeden Ūkaymden
Shawiyah Šāwiya
Sidi Abdelkader Sidi ʿAbd al-Qādǝr
Sidi Ahmad ou Moussa (SAM) Sidi Ḥ mād u Mūsa
Shem-ha-meforash šim-ha-mifuraš
shrif; shurfa; sharifism šrif; šurfa; šarifism
Tachddert Tašddǝrt
Taddart Taddǝrt
Tahanaout Taḥ ǝnnāwt
Tamatert Tamatǝrt
Tansghart Tanṣgā̇ rt
Taourirt Tāwrirt
Targa Imoula Targaymula
Taroudant Tārudānt
Tazerwalt Tazǝrwālt
zaouia zāwiya
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 667

Figures

Figure 1. The Duwār of Arǝmd Figure 2. Rḥa: the male bath full of
rags and combs left as tābʿa by male
pilgrims

Figure 3. The Stone of Sidi

Figure 4. A sick child sleeping inside
Šamharūš
the saint, his mother cannot afford
to rent a cell
668 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

Figure 5. A restaurant, cells for rent

and shops Figure 6. The spring of Sidi
Šamharūš

Figure 7. The grotto forming a Figure 8. The panel interdicting

ceiling and the simulated tomb is non-Muslims to step inside the
in the bottom right corner premises of the saint
 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670 669

Figure 9. Pilgrims on their way back Figure 10. Ġ urfat l-Maǧād̠īb, also
from Sidi Šamharūš named the cave of Lalla ʿAyša bent
sәlt ̣ān

Figure 11. The sanctuary of Mulāy

Brāhīm Figure 12. Visitors consulting a
ʿIsāwi healer at Rḥa
670 M. Maarouf / Arabica 57 (2010) 589-670

Figure 13. A distant view of

Šamharūš’s setting Figure 14. The Duwār of Arǝmd
from a different angle

Figure 15. A maǧdūb with his family

and patients on their way to Sidi Figure 16. The cultivation of floored
Šamharūš terraces
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