Families, marriages and names

An Aït Atta name states filiation and lineage: “Muha u-Sa'id n-Ait Mhand u-Brahim” means “Muha son of Sa'id, of the group of the people of Mhand son of Brahim”. This system makes it possible to read, in Hart, the name of the qaid “'Ali u-l-Hajj 'Assu n-Ait Bâslâm”.

According to syntheses based on Hart and Becker, a marriage proposal involved a gift (sugar, henna, kohl) to the bride's father; before independence the contract was oral, concluded before the faqih and notable witnesses, then written in Arabic and signed before notaries after 1956. The celebration generally lasted three days, opened by the ahidus.

Hart devotes part of his 1981 book to kinship and marriage among the Aït Atta of Oussikis (according to Peyron's review).

Hart (1984) confirms and details this information. Marriages are arranged by the parents, the future spouses being seldom consulted. The request begins with the tutra, a gift to the girl's father: two or three sugar loaves, two kilos of henna, some kohl, four to five kilos of dates, and clothing for her mother; if the request is refused, the boy's father takes everything back. The bridewealth of Muslim law (sdaq) was unknown before Independence: it is the groom's father who pays for the feast, in sheep and meals. Before Independence the contract was oral, before the fqih and eight community notables as witnesses; since then it has been drawn up in Arabic before the qadi and two adul. The feast normally lasts three days, up to six among the wealthy, a single night (timingas) among the poor; it opens with the ahidus. As elsewhere in Morocco, people prefer to marry from August to November, between harvest and ploughing.

Hart also describes funerals. A person who dies in the morning is buried that afternoon, otherwise the next morning; only men attend, in a state of ritual purity. The body is laid on its back, the face turned east, while the fqih recites the Qur'an. The cemetery is divided into plots by lineage: a woman is buried with her own agnates, her children in the plot of her husband's lineage. On the seventh day the relatives of the deceased sacrifice a sheep and offer couscous to those who came. During a war or a feud, it was the women who gathered the dead and buried them without washing them.

The division of labour, Hart writes (pp. 85-86), is basically unequal: women work considerably harder and longer than men, which is not peculiar to the Aït Atta but holds for rural Morocco. Agriculture is almost entirely male, women helping only with irrigation, repairing the ditches and carrying the cut grain to the threshing floor. Women do all the housework, spin wool, weave tent strips and rugs, grind grain, milk the animals, carry wood and water on their backs, and walk far to fetch fodder for the cattle. Herding is shared: small boys and girls tend lambs and kids, adults of both sexes sheep and goats, and five or six people work together to pitch or strike the tent. Men, with more leisure, hunt, above all the mouflon.