MOROCCAN TASHILHIT BERBER WOMEN'S RELIGIOU SONGS AND SOCIETAL TRANSFORMATION

By: Margaret Rausch, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, KU

In December and January, I began a new research project on the participation of women in religious life of the Tashilhit village of Ugard Udad. I am deeply indebted to the ASRC travel in Africa fund gene-rously provided by the U.S. Department of Education and to the University of Kansas International Travel Fund for making my research trip possible.

Most of the research on Moroccan women's religious expression, including my own earlier work, has focused on saint veneration and spirit possession practices. Very little work has been undertaken to explore their participation in other types of religious practices not involving the belief in spirits and other popular beliefs, although these types are fairly wide-spread in the Tashilhit Berber-speaking Sous and Atlas Mountains of Morocco. In Ugard Udad other villages around Tafraout, as in the urban centers of these regions, women, organized in autonomous religious orders, perform chant rituals on a daily or weekly basis.

When I arrived, I was greeted with Moroccan mint tea and bread with amlou (homemade almond butter) and honey and some initial reticence with regard to my research project. It came from my initial contact person, who had reservations about whether the other women would allow me to even enter the mosque. After I had begun to acquaint myself with the village inhabitants and their social structure, customs, pat-terns of behavior and language, Tashilhit Berber (one of three dialects of Berber spoken in Morocco), this reticence diminished. To broaden my circle of acqu-aintances, I attended the women's Arabic literacy course on weekday afternoons. All of the women generously welcomed me into their homes and eventually into their mosque to attend their com-munal rituals. I made three unexpected dis-coveries. The women's rituals consisted of com-munal singing of litanies, which were for the most part in Berber. They bore little resemblance to Sufi rituals as I knew them from Turkey, Egypt or even urban Morocco. And the women's religious organization or order was in the process of relatively rapid transformation.

In the 1970s, the men of Ugard Udad built a new mosque in the village center, leaving the century-old mosque on the crest of a hill overlooking the village to the women. From the 20th century, besides their religious ritual meetings in this old mosque, the women met for religious training and socializing in the homes of two successive heads of the order.

Due to gradual transformation of village life, the role of today's head is changing. One factor is the two-year-old literacy course taught by an employee of a women's association in Tafraout. The readings in the course are taken primarily from the Qur'an, elimin-ating the need for reading and writing lessons in the leader's home. Most women attend regularly for the instruction but also for its social function. The late afternoon rituals, in which the women's voices join in melodious chants in Tashilhit, are still held daily.

Furthermore, the order's autonomy appears to be threatened. The most threatening factor is the expansion of the new mosque to include an adjacent hall for women, which is presently under construction. This proximity will allow those few men who are present throughout the year to more closely observe and possibly supervise the women's ritual gatherings. According to the women, their rituals, though similar to those of the men in some ways, include songs, which are performed exclusively by the women. Their ritual practices are altered and enhanced on special occasion and certain times during the year, particularly in the summer as well as during the month of Ramadan. As at least half of the male population spends much of the year in the urban centers on the coast or in France, their communal religious expression is limited to the Friday midday prayer, except in the summer when the entire population is present. So for nine months of the year, the women are the primary participants in religious ritual and, to a great extent, in charge of their homes, lives and the daily events in the village.

I hope to have the opportunity to return to Ugard Udad this summer and during the month of Ramadan 2002. Besides observing the variations in ritual practices and the differences in community life brought about by the presence of the men, I will talk with two women who were away in coastal urban centers while I was there. The first woman is the former head of the women's order. The second is considered to be the oldest living inhabitant and the most dependable and informed source of the oral history of the village. Most probably, these two women bear many of the answers to my yet unanswered questions about the origin and early development of the women's order, its ritual practices and their significance in the lives of the members and in the village community. I hope to supplement their information by consulting the only available copy of a six-volume 19th-century historical work on southern Morocco. According to 'Abdullah al-Mountassir, professor of linguistic anthropology at the University of Agadir, it is an extremely valuable source of details on the history of the social and religious life of the region.