Amazigh, Muslim, and Not a Puzzle to Be Solved

It is tempting to file this rite as a pre-Islamic survival, and the temptation should be resisted, because the evidence for the claim is absent rather than mixed. Anzar is attested in Amazigh oral tradition as the rain, and a story circulates in which he demands a human bride; the modern processions are attested from the twentieth century onward. Between the two there is very little documentary record, which is not the same as a record of continuity. What can be said is that the vocabulary of the rite is Amazigh, that the communities performing it are Muslim, and that in several places it has been performed by the same people who also observe salat al-istisqa, the Islamic prayer for rain.

That combination is normal rather than contradictory, and it is the reason the object matters to a reference work. North African religious material is regularly collapsed into an Arab and Islamic account on one side, or presented as a pagan substrate wearing an Islamic surface on the other. Neither description fits a village that prays for rain in a mosque and also carries a dressed ladle through the streets. The rite has lapsed in many communities under urbanisation, migration and religious reform, and in some it has been revived as a marker of Amazigh identity, which is a further layer and not a return to an original state.