The Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif Book

A new version of David Montgomery Hart’s “The Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif” has to be presented in Arabic language. The SMDN (The Voice of the Moroccan Democrats Resident in Nederland) has launched the Arabic version of the masterpiece mentioned above.

“The Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif” written by the famous American anthropologist David Montgomery Hart was first published in 1976 by ˝Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology˝ in the United States of America.

Hart in this book has concentrated his ethnographic work on the Amazigh Rifian tribe; mainly, on the Aith Waryaghar and their neighbors. His theoretical interests concerning around the nature, manifestations, structure, function, and dynamics of tribalism; throughout the regions of Rif.

Hart was eleven years in Rif, spending half his time in the field and teaching as well as at the Former Institute of Sociology at the university MV in Rabat. He is the author of numerous journal articles on the ethnography and the social anthropology of the Waryagharland and in the central Rif generally, as defined in the English version of the book, the period was considerably longer than that spent by most anthropologists in the field situations elsewhere.

Hart has personally visited almost all the local communities in Waryagharland, and many of those in neighboring central Rifian tribes as well.

The book is a study in both social and political anthropology and in the social and political history of the most important single tribal grouping in Northern Morocco: the Aith Waryaghar.

”This group and the Berber-speaking region in which it is located, the Rif, has always been characterized by the infertility of its agricultural terrain and by its overpopulation, to which the two standard cultural responses have been labor migration (first to Algeria and today to Western Europe)and, at another level, the blood feud. Owing to external pressures from first a Spanish protectorate and later an Independent Moroccan Central Government” (D.Hart; 1976).

The work thus attempts to study the sociopolitical structure of the Aith Waryaghar from two points of view: from within, as they see themselves and also from without, as seen by the widest national Moroccan society.

The Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif is translated to Arabic by a group of experts from Al HOCAIMA; namely, Dr Mohammad Ounia, Abdel Majid Azzuzi and Abdel Hamid Rays, and published by the SMDN’s association under the guidance of the president Mr. Farid Oulad Lahsen who have worked on the preparation of this manuscript and effecting the publication of this masterpiece.

This book should be of interest not only to anthropologists and historians dealing with the sociopolitical situation of Rif and Amazigh situation in general; but also to all people interested in the history of the wounded and fractured Amazigh Rifian existence.

Summary of the book “The Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif” has been done by Sabri El Hammaoui
An Ethnography and History written by David Montgomery Hart

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