Boulifa, Abdelaziz
A form of popular literature in Morocco
- 2017.
41
Ephemerids, or tear-off almanacs, are printed in Morocco for a very assiduous public. On each page, three calendars can be read: the lunar Muslim calendar, the official Gregorian calendar, and the Julian calendar. This third calendar is an agricultural calendar, which is subdivided in 28 thirteen-day periods called manāzil, used in the Arabic Muslim word for organizing farm work, from Yemen to Maghrib. Every sheet of the tear-off almanac is printed with a short text. The content of these texts, in two successive editions (2001 and 2002) has been analyzed. As a result, it appears that the two main themes of this literature are religion and health care. Together they make up to 25% of the overall content. Analyzing the second theme outlines a popular pharmacopoeia concerned with some fifty drugs, mostly medicinal plants. This is the only content of these almanacs which has some relevance to the rural world, and to the agricultural knowledge. This raises rather pessimistic issues about the present Moroccan system of rural knowledge.