The written custom of the Ziz qsour

In the south-east, collections of custom are called taʿqqitt (plural tiʿqqidin) or shurūṭ; they regulate the life of a section, a fortified village (igherm), a collective granary, a market or a holy place (Di Tolla 2016, pp. 180-182). The oldest known collections in Morocco concern granaries; according to a tradition reported by L. Mezzine and taken up by Di Tolla, it was an agreement on a common granary, Igherm Amazdar, that gave birth to the confederation (p. 181).

In 2010 Anna Maria Di Tolla was able to photocopy in Zouala, a qsar of the Rteb near Aoufous inhabited by the Izulayn (a section of the Aït Khebbach), a manuscript of this kind kept in a family's archives. Written in Arabic with Berber words, it sets the deadlines for selling a house (three days for locals, one month for outsiders), fines in mithqal for stealing dates, wood or crops, and obliges an accused person without witnesses to swear at the shrine of Sidi ʿIsa (pp. 183-188). The article does not date the manuscript and presents its translation as “preliminary”.

The code of the Aït Atta of Aoufous published by M'hamed Ahda (2001) is more detailed: marriage (minimum age, fixed dowry of 50 francs, repudiation possible at the wife's request), guardianship checked every year by a family council, sharing of the Ziz water from upstream to downstream by land units (tagoura), policing of the ksar and its gate, hosting of guests in turn (pp. 89-107). Women inherit land, but can never benefit from a habous, and private habous serve, the author notes, to exclude them from inheritance (pp. 92-93).

These texts do not bear witness to an unchanging custom. The code published by Ahda mentions francs, a “judicial djemâa” and deeds issued in French: in all likelihood it dates from the Protectorate, when customary courts created by the dahirs of 1914 and 1930 framed justice in Berber-speaking regions (Hoffman 2013, p. 3). Di Tolla, for her part, warns against opposing too strictly a “popular” oral tradition to a “learned” written one (p. 176).