Cannabis in Riffian culture
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Cannabis in Riffian culture covers the place of kif, and since the late 1960s of hashish, in the social and religious life of the Rif in northern Morocco. The crop's heartland lies among the Senhaja de Srair of Ketama and the neighbouring Beni Seddat, and among the Beni Khaled of the Ghomara.[1]: 186[2] Observers from the late 19th century to the 1970s disagree about how widely kif was smoked among the Tarifit-speaking Riffians of the central and eastern Rif.[3]: 62[4]: 163 Until about 1970 the plant was grown for kif, chopped and mixed with tobacco and smoked locally in the long pipe called the sebsi. From the 1970s the making of hashish for export put cannabis at the centre of the region's economy, and changed family life, the standing of religious scholars and the way the people of the central Rif see themselves and are seen by other Moroccans.[2]
Growers call their country the bled du kif, "the land of kif". Kenza Afsahi and Khalid Mouna, who studied the area between 2002 and 2013, see in the name both a claim to an old right to grow the plant and the mark of a stigma that follows people from the region wherever they go.[2]
Where kif was grown
In the 1960s the anthropologist Roger Joseph found kif grown almost exclusively in the tribes of Ketama and Beni Seddat. Kif from elsewhere was held to be weaker and coarser, and a saying he recorded, "the land of Ketama likes only kif", referred both to the poor return of other crops there and to the quality of its kif.[1]: 186–187 The reputation was older. Abderrahmane Ben Tayeb, a taleb from Bejaia who crossed the Rif and the Jebala country several times between 1872 and 1893 and reported to the French writer Auguste Mouliéras, found the Senhaja tribe of the Ketama already known for its kif and tobacco, which merchants came from as far as the Gharb to buy in the local markets. He wrote that the people of Ketama smoked a great deal of kif, ate hashish and drank samet, a boiled wine. Among the Ghomara he saw large fields of kif and snuff tobacco in the Mettioua and found the Beni Khaled and the Beni Ziat great growers and users of both.[5]: 126–127 Mouliéras, writing up these reports, called Ketama famous throughout Morocco for its kif. Its richest families had fields so large that they called a touiza, a collective work party, to sow and harvest them, every market of the tribe sold kif, and a man of the Jebala asked where the best tobacco and kif and the most hardened smokers were to be found would answer "Go to Ketama". Mouliéras himself condemned the habit and called kif an herb almost as harmful as opium.[6]: 96–97
The American anthropologist Carleton Coon, writing in 1931, found kif grown and used among the Ghomara, the Arabic-speaking western Senhaja and Ketama, and spreading east into Taghzuth and other Senhaja tribes. It was not grown in the Rif proper, and had not become common there; a few men, usually travelling hawkers, smoked it in secret. The mixture he saw was the flowers and leaves of the plant with a harsh tobacco grown locally, smoked in a small clay bowl on a wooden stem.[3]: 62
The first growing tribes of Ketama and Ghomara held only a few tens of square kilometres of cannabis, in what are now the communes of Ketama, in Al Hoceima Province, and Bab Berred, in Chefchaouen Province.[2] Afsahi and Mouna, following earlier French authors, write that Sultan Hassan I tolerated the crop in five villages in the late 19th century, and growers trace their right to it to that tolerance. The accounts Afsahi and Mouna collected from growers name Griha, Beni Seddate, Beni Issi and Amzaz among the Ketama and the village of Beni Khaled among the Ghomara; some add Isfaran.[2] The geographer Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy points out that several of these are the names of tribes or tribal fractions rather than villages, and the list differs between authors; the episode is discussed on Cannabis in Morocco.[7] The word kif itself is an Arabic loan, masculine in the Senhaja dialect and feminine in Ghomara.[7]
Plots were small. The economist Jean-Paul Arlès, in a thesis of 1962 quoted by Afsahi and Mouna, judged kif by far the most profitable crop per hectare, but a grower had only a patch the size of a room four metres by five on which to raise it.[2]
Kif in daily life
Older people told Afsahi that kif was grown on small plots like tobacco, cereals, pulses, vines or onions, and sold in the markets in bunches, as mint, parsley and medicinal herbs were. Men smoked it in pipes, which they called sebti; it was also eaten in a sweet paste, maajoun, and women used it in cosmetics.[2]
Joseph, working in the central Rif in 1965–66, found that kif was smoked by a fairly high proportion of adult men and was largely a habit of men of middle age or older. Far from being a gesture against an older generation, smoking belonged to the established order; young men who thought of themselves as poets or as modern drank beer or wine instead. Men smoked for pleasure and to relieve depression and anxiety, and whether a man smoked was taken to be his own affair and a matter of what he could afford.[1]: 185, 190 Regular smokers bought kif and tobacco unblended and prepared the mixture themselves, and every market centre had at least one café that dealt in it.[1]: 189 The tobacco was essential: without it, his informants said, kif "doesn't have salt".[1]: 187
Among the Tarifit-speaking Riffians the accounts diverge. Mouliéras described long evenings of tea amid thick clouds of kif smoke as the favourite pastime of the people of Temsaman, in the eastern Rif.[8]: 106 The Austrian traveller Otto Artbauer wrote in 1911 that the Riffian scorned tobacco and smoked kif, finely cut hemp in a tiny clay bowl on a long thin reed.[4]: 130, 163 In his account the pipe went round a circle of smokers: each emptied it in three or four puffs, refilled it from his own supply and handed it to his neighbour until the round was done. At the evening fires on the village square one man would sit cutting dry hemp for the pipe, and a man carried his pipe and kif with his money and cartridges in a leather bag.[4]: 120, 130, 136 Coon, by contrast, found kif uncommon in the Rif proper, and wrote that Riffian students at the religious schools did not share the hashish smoking of students from the Jebala.[3]: 62, 116 David Hart, the ethnographer of the Aith Waryaghar, called kif a narcotic seldom used in the Rif but current among the Jebala.[9]: 460–461
Among the Jebala, kif could be part of hospitality. The Ahl Srif, a tribe near Ksar el-Kebir, say of themselves that they honour a guest with bread and fruit; in the form the ethnographer Mohammed Saïd El Mortaji gives, after Mouliéras, the saying ends "and even kif".[10]: 129
Kif carried no religious stigma. Joseph contrasts the man caught smoking, who was ignored or held overnight, with the Muslim caught drinking, who could be jailed for three to six months. The educated urban elite, who had taken up Western habits, called kif an evil and its smokers poor, illiterate and backward, while smokers called those who frowned on them bad Muslims, since many of them drank. In 1959, Joseph writes, kif growers argued in a confrontation with the government that if their crop were to be suppressed, the import and export of alcohol should be banned too.[1]: 189–190
Joseph also suggests that the Spanish protectorate widened regular smoking by creating a class of professional native soldiers, among whom kif became part of everyday life in a way it had not been for the tribal warrior. Veterans told him that Francisco Franco had paid his Riffian recruits for the Spanish Civil War partly in kif, a story he could not confirm. In his reading, Spanish officials saw kif as a mark of barbarism and so as a further justification for their presence, and made no attempt to suppress the crop.[1]: 191–192
The accounts of women also differ. Ben Tayeb found women smoking kif like the men among the Beni Seddat.[8]: 62[5]: 127 Artbauer wrote that women neither smoked nor took snuff,[4]: 132 and Coon that women seldom smoked kif but ate hashish as freely as their husbands.[3]: 62 In a survey of the Ghomara country published in 2010, 83 per cent of those asked did not accept that a woman should consume kif or hashish.[11]: 291
Saints and brotherhoods
Jamal Bellakhdar dates the arrival of resin-bearing cannabis in the Rif to the 17th and 18th centuries, the period in which popular mysticism flourished in the Rif and the Jebala country and wandering holy men multiplied. One of the most prominent, in Bellakhdar's words, was Sidi Heddi, who died in 1805 and founded the Heddawa brotherhood; his zawiya lies among the Beni Arous. His relics are a rosary and a pipe nearly two metres long, made to pass among the brothers in assembly. Other brotherhoods, the Jilala, Aissawa and Hamadsha among them, also used cannabis, but it was Sidi Heddi's name that people linked most with it.[5]: 124–125 In a legend recorded by the ethnographer René Brunel in 1955, Heddi at first reproached another saint, Sidi Wanis, for smoking hashish, until Wanis offered him his water pipe. The first puff took away all Heddi had learned; with the third he reached a knowledge he had not suspected, and he renounced the world.[2]
Heddi then went to the Ketama to meet their religious authority, Sidi Hajj, and settled among them.[12]: 188[2] The Heddawa held that cannabis helped the recitation of the dhikr, and they preferred the kif of Ketama. A saying of the order praised "our brothers the Ketama" for clearing the forest to plant kif and tobacco for the dervishes, and a Ketama proverb holds that the Heddawa can bear hunger but not the lack of kif.[12]: 188–189 In Brunel's account the kif of Sidi Heddi's followers was believed to carry baraka, the saint's blessing, and tribes gave part of their harvest to the order: twelve quintals from the Gzawa, four from the Beni Zerqôu and the Ketama.[12]: 189[2] For Afsahi and Mouna, the meeting between the saint and the Ketama gave religious sanction to growing kif in its historic area, and the intoxication of kif, once the preserve of the brotherhoods' adepts, had spread to the peasantry by the 19th century.[2]
Saints are still part of the growers' year. Some go on pilgrimage to the tomb of Sidi Heddi, patron saint of kif smokers. The Ketama and the Beni Khaled also honour Sidi Mohamed Jamhoun, the patron saint of the plant itself, at whose tomb growers sacrifice a cow every 13 July.[2]
Joseph found the opposite in the Rif of the 1960s: kif smoking had no ritual or mystical role, was not encouraged by any local Sufi organisation and was frowned on by most of the prominent brotherhoods of the area.[1]: 190 Among the Aith Waryaghar the Heddawa were outsiders. In Hart's account they were an order of the Jebala, centred among the Beni Arous, whose members wandered the Rif markets beating drums, smoking kif and begging alms, and were not appreciated there. He saw two of them at Imzouren in 1953, and to his knowledge the order was forcibly disbanded by the Moroccan Army of Liberation in 1956.[9]: 86, 198
Scholars and the question of haram
Islamic law forbids intoxicating drink; whether it forbids cannabis has been argued.[12]: 186 On 22 October 1886 Hassan I asked the ulema, the scholars of law, of Fez in writing whether the trade in intoxicating plants should be reserved to the makhzen, the sultan's government, or left free.[5]: 128 His letter, which Mouna quotes, speaks of the sultan's repugnance for intoxicating plants and of his fear that a free trade would lead the common people to use them.[12]: 190 Mouna wrote in 2009 that the scholars replied by forbidding both the use and the trade of such plants. A later account by Tinasti, Afsahi and Mouna has the scholars accepting a state monopoly instead, on condition that the public was barred from the drug and the trade wound down.[12]: 191[13]: 54
Mouna found no religious ban on the crop in 20th-century Morocco apart from that of Abdelkrim el-Khattabi, whose prohibition, he writes, marked the history of the Rif and of the Ketama in particular.[12]: 198 During the five years in which he held the Rif and the Jebala country, 1921 to 1926, he confined the crop to its historic area, required food crops elsewhere and forbade his fighters kif and hashish, in the name of religious morality and the discipline of holy war.[5]: 132 Under Abdelkrim, Hart writes, smoking was abolished and punished with a heavy fine; in his view the ban touched the Riffians little, but deprived the Ghomara and Jebala levies of one of their chief comforts.[9]: 390–391 Mouna found no fatwa against growing cannabis issued in Morocco since then, by the official scholars or by the Islamist movements.[12]: 198–200 Afsahi and Mouna add that during the same war Marshal Lyautey allowed kif to be grown around Ouazzane, so as to keep its powerful brotherhood from declaring Abdelkrim's war a jihad.[2]
The faqih
The village mosques of the Ketama are served by a faqih, who teaches the Quranic school, leads the five daily prayers and gives the Friday sermon. He is hired by the village assembly, the jmaa, after an interview, and among the Ketama is paid either in money or in raw kif, which he sells himself. He lodges in the mosque, and the households feed him in turn, three meals a day, the notables first.[12]: 193–194 The Ketama took their fuqaha from other cannabis-growing districts: Mouna names the Jebala country, and Afsahi and Mouna the province of Taounate, whose scholars, by agreeing to preach among the Ketama, gave the crop their sanction. The Ghomara trained their own in their religious schools.[12]: 193[2] The faqih Mouna interviewed at Aazaba, in the commune of Ketama, came from the Beni Zeroual of the Taza region because the people of Ketama paid better. He preached in classical Arabic that most of his congregation could not follow, and Mouna concluded that his preaching had no hold over people whose living came from cannabis.[12]: 193–195 Some fuqaha were said to help consignments of hashish past police, customs officers and their dogs with charms, and a few became traders themselves.[12]: 192, 197
What growers say
The Ketama told Mouna that kif is "a plant created by God", and some fuqaha call it a gift of God.[12]: 196[2] A small farmer said there was nothing haram, forbidden, in growing a plant on his land, and that the question should be put to the traders who made the money; a large one that halal and haram were the same thing nowadays, that no one was obliged to buy the product and that hashish was less grave than alcohol. The traders are called baznassa, from the English "businessman".[12]: 195–197 Growers and traders, Mouna writes, pay no zakat, the alms tax, on cannabis money, on the ground that the income is uncertain, but they build mosques, buy sheep for the poor at the Feast of the Sacrifice and support the widows of the village, and gain by it the standing of men of honour and of baraka.[12]: 197 A study of 251 residents of the Ghomara country set out to learn how growers reconciled the crop with Islamic law, which in its authors' reading makes cannabis haram like any substance that alters consciousness; they concluded that religious belief, economic marginalisation and illegal economic practice overlap and coexist in the region.[14] Religion also served to settle accounts. In a story told at Ketama, a widow who had not been paid for a quintal of raw kif asked the large farmer who owed her to lift a sack of stones onto her back as men left the mosque on a Friday; when he remarked on its weight, she told him he was carrying a quintal of kif on his own back before God, and he paid her.[12]: 196–197
The bled du kif
The making of hashish began in the central Rif towards the end of the 1960s. Growers agree that outsiders brought the technique but not on who they were: some name the hippies, others Algerian middlemen looking for new places to grow after cannabis was banned in Algeria. Through the 1980s farmers of the historic area gave up their other crops for cannabis.[2]
Afsahi and Mouna describe what followed. Authority by age weakened as individual gain counted for more. Relatives competed with one another, stealing goods and clients; a marriage brought land and took a couple out of the family household. A new class of middlemen appeared, and a show of wealth, in cars, new houses and second homes in town, became the way to earn respect, while hiding the poverty of most growers. People lived in fear of being wanted by the police, arrested or denounced by a neighbour or a relative, yet a spell in prison and long experience of the trade gave a man standing.[2] In 2017 the Transnational Institute put the number of growers with arrest warrants outstanding at some 48,000, and called the warrants a source of corruption and repression.[15]: 15 Mouna found disputes over sums of more than a million dirhams that the faqih could no longer settle, and found that the old line between men of honour and men of baraka had blurred.[12]: 195, 197
The name bled du kif first meant the five villages of the old tolerance; the neighbouring villages adopted it, and it became a label. Growers use it against competition from the newer growing areas and to argue that the historic area should be spared eradication, and they call for the crop to be eradicated in the new areas instead. Some speak of a dahir of 1958 that authorised their crop; Afsahi and Mouna state that no such dahir exists. The same speaker may defend the crop as God's creation and the region's know-how, or reject it as a source of prison and shame, depending on whom he is talking to. Afsahi and Mouna argue that state eradication campaigns, which spared the Ketama and the Ghomara and fell on the newer areas, helped to form this shared identity.[2] In April 2010 the people of Bab Berred protested in large numbers against police eradication operations; Afsahi and Mouna write that this, reinforced by the Arab Spring of 2011, brought eradication there to a halt.[2]
The area drew outsiders. For at least three decades Taounate supplied Ketama with seasonal labour. Hired hands, some of them specialists in turning the dried plant into resin, are taken on for several months a year, fed and lodged near the family house, and come back year after year; a few marry into the village and become landowners. Former labourers took the know-how home to their own villages. The Ketama in turn married into Taounate families and rented land there.[2] The Transnational Institute reported in 2017 that thousands of people came from all over Morocco to work in the Ketama region for 120 to 150 dirhams a day, fed and housed.[15]: 16
Outside the Rif the name of a home village can count against a man. Afsahi and Mouna report that an identity card giving Ketama, Issaguen, Targuist or Bab Berred as a place of birth or residence could be enough to be refused a hired car or a hotel room, and that money a Riffian invested elsewhere was assumed to come from drugs. The same reputation has its positive side: the Riffian is also held to be fearless, a man of his word and of honour.[2] The word kif itself has become a mark of identity. As imported hybrids replaced the old plant, growers began to call it by other names, and kif is heard less, but they use bled du kif whenever the historic right of their land to the crop is in question.[2][16]: 111
Women's work
Women do much of the work and have little say in the money. In a survey of 249 people in the Ghomara country published in 2010, about 85 per cent said that women took part, sometimes entirely, in sowing, weeding, harvesting, carrying and drying the crop and sometimes in beating it for resin, and 82 per cent that they took part in the final making of kif or hashish. Seventy per cent said selling was men's work, and 65 per cent said women had no part in managing the income.[11]: 290–291
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Joseph, Roger (1975). "Economic significance of Cannabis sativa in the Moroccan Rif". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 185–194. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.185.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17 2.18 2.19 2.20 2.21 Afsahi, Kenza; Mouna, Khalid (2014). "Cannabis dans le Rif central (Maroc). Construction d'un espace de déviance". EspacesTemps.net (in français). Retrieved 15 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Coon, Carleton S. (1931). Tribes of the Rif. Harvard African Studies. Vol. 9. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Harvard University.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Artbauer, Otto C. (1911). Die Rifpiraten und ihre Heimat: Erste Kunde aus verschlossener Welt (in Deutsch). Stuttgart: Strecker & Schröder.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 Bellakhdar, Jamal (2013). "L'histoire du chanvre au Maghreb". Hespéris-Tamuda. XLVIII: 107–141. ISSN 0018-1005.
- ↑ Mouliéras, Auguste (1899). Le Maroc inconnu (in français). Vol. 2: Exploration des Djebala.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Chouvy, Pierre-Arnaud (2022). "Moroccan hashish as an example of a cannabis terroir product". GeoJournal. 88 (4): 3833–3850. doi:10.1007/s10708-022-10791-5.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Mouliéras, Auguste (1895). Le Maroc inconnu (in français). Vol. 1: Exploration du Rif. Oran: Fouque.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Hart, David M. (1976). The Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif: An Ethnography and History. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
- ↑ El Mortaji, Mohammed Saïd (2019). "Jeux et divertissements chez les Jbāla d'Ahl Srif" (PDF). Hespéris-Tamuda (in français). LIV (2): 129–148.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Meklach, Y.; Sanchez Alhama, J.; Molero Mesa, J.; Martos, A. V.; Ouahrani, A.; Merzouki, A. (2010). "Cannabis and sustainable development in Ghomara's mountains (western coastal part of Rif – north of Morocco): the gender makes the difference?" (PDF). Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa. 12 (3): 286–303.
- ↑ 12.00 12.01 12.02 12.03 12.04 12.05 12.06 12.07 12.08 12.09 12.10 12.11 12.12 12.13 12.14 12.15 12.16 Mouna, Khalid (2009). "La culture du cannabis au Maroc : entre l'économie et le religieux". Théologiques. 17 (1): 185–202. doi:10.7202/039504ar.
- ↑ Tinasti, Khalid; Afsahi, Kenza; Mouna, Khalid (2025). "Navigating cannabis regulation in Morocco: historical context, socio-economic impact, and policy gaps". Journal of Illicit Economies and Development. 7 (2): 53–60. doi:10.31389/jied.276.
- ↑ Meklach, Yassin; Haluza-Delay, Randolph; Kadiri, Mohamed; El Ouahrani, Abdeltif; Molero Mesa, Joaquin; Merzouki, Abderrahmane (2019). "Cannabis cultivation within a religious context: a case study of Ghomara in the Rif Mountain (Northern Morocco)". Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse. 18 (1): 45–66. doi:10.1080/15332640.2017.1300972.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Blickman, Tom (March 2017). Morocco and Cannabis: Reduction, containment or acceptance (PDF) (Report). Drug Policy Briefing. Transnational Institute. Retrieved 15 October 2026.
- ↑ Afsahi, Kenza (2017). "La construction socio-économique du cannabis au Maroc : le kif comme produit traditionnel, produit manufacturé et produit de contrebande". Tempo Social (in français). 29 (2): 99–114. doi:10.11606/0103-2070.ts.2017.125668.