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Berichte und Kommentare 
Anthropos 99.2004 
Khebbach then fathers four sons: Amar, Arjdel, 
Alhyane, and Azulai. There is no further mention 
of the founder’s wife and adoptive parents after 
this enumeration. Narratives concentrate on tribal 
wars and the founder’s glorious feats of arms. 
Family referents are few and explicitly correlated 
with the paternal figure. 17 The father no longer 
works. He is a warrior. 18 The group is constituted, 
but has to assert its existence and defend its 
territory. Henceforth, the narrative relates their 
successive changes of location to search for food, 
theft, and pillage, etc. This warmongering family 
group is perpetually on the move. The territory 
over which Khebbach and his sons exert their 
influence is imagined as an immense open space 
where the only obstacles are alien populations 
needing to be conquered. In other words, while the 
sons submit to their father’s authority, they spend 
the greater part of their time defending themselves 
against a host of adversaries or picking quarrels 
with their neighbours. 
Most narrations mark a narrative break to es 
tablish the passage from myth to history. The plot 
devised by Alhyane and Azulai to kill their brother 
Arjdel 19 serves such a purpose. Arjdel is disabled 
and a handicap to the group in combat. “In times 
of war he was a burden to the others because he 
couldn’t run. They decided to kill him.” Having 
been informed by his youngest son Amar of what 
was afoot, the father intervenes and the plot fails. 
After this attempted assassination, 20 the father dis 
tributes blessings or curses, as the case may be, 
upon his sons. Amar receives a special form of the 
founder’s baraka, namely the power to convince 
17 The narratives also mention that Khebbach had a preference 
for Amar, his youngest son. “Khebbach gave him a cup 
of milk each day.” The father’s nurturing function can be 
compared to the theme of male breast-feeding studied by 
Lionetti (1988). Similarly, Roux (1967:56) reports on the 
subject of various Muslim mystical cults: “As an infant, 
Sultan Veled slept in the arms of the Master. To calm the 
child this latter put it to suck at his breast. As a reward for 
such compassion, God ordered pure milk to flow from the 
breast.” 
18 Descriptions of the Ait Khebbach invariably present the 
tribe as a group of powerful nomads who have gained the 
allegiance of most inhabitants of the Tafilalt oasis. 
19 Each child is described by a distinctive physical character 
istic. Thus Arjdel the cripple, Azulai the squinter, Alhyane 
the bearded one, and Amar who has the blessings of heaven. 
20 In some versions the conspirators also planned to kill Arjdel 
in order to seize the she-ass (taghiult) on which he relied to 
move from place to place. Even today, asses are regarded 
as a sign of wealth and used by women in the daily 
transportation of water, whereas the poorer families use 
only handcarts (coreta in Arabic). 
through speech {awaï). Arjdel receives the gift of 
clairvoyance. 21 “He sees his attackers before they 
are upon him.” In battle, such a gift compensates 
for his disability. The other two brothers receive 
curses. The fratricidal plot earns severe eye defects 
(blindness in one eye, a squint, etc.) for Azulai’s 
children and for Alhyane no abundant progeny. 
In addition, neither of them will ever succeed in 
accumulating wealth. According to local belief, a 
curse placed on one’s descendants is equivalent 
to depriving that person of every possibility of 
attaining power and prestige. 22 
Once he has laid blessings or curses upon his 
sons, the founding ancestor disappears and the 
biographical narrative ends there. 
Each of the founding fractions in the Ait Kheb 
bach tribe today trace their ancestry back to one of 
the four Khebbach sons. Fractions are referred to 
as ighs (pi. ighsan) the literal translation of which 
is the bone, 23 the kernel, an explicit reference 
to patrilineage. In his study on the Seksawa, 
a Berber-speaking group located in the Upper 
Atlas, J. Berque (1978) notes the central and 
deterministic nature of the ikhs 24 * * notion which he 
defines as an agnate group. 
According to representations, only living de 
scendants of the eponymous ancestor’s four sons 
belong to the Ait Khebbach tribe. Integration of 
nonindigenous fractions did not take place until 
later, and there is a formal distinction between 
endogenous or ighsan fractions (the four sons 
of Khebbach) and exogenous fractions. On the 
political level, for instance, the more recent ag 
gregated groupings called anna ighrsn, literally 
“the throat cutters,” cannot hold office as tribal 
head (amghar n-ufellah) nor as the representa 
tive of a fraction. Khebbach’s sons are positioned 
by order of preference as follows: Amar, Arjdel, 
Azulai, and Alhyane. This order never varies and 
today individuals correlate the actual state of the 
21 There is a parallel between this gift of clairvoyance and 
the fascination La Kahina (a soothsayer) exerted in the 7th 
century, a mythical and historic figure of Berber resistance 
to Arab invasions. “Her gift of divination enabled her 
to predict the turn of every important event. This finally 
earned her the position of high commander” (Ibn Khaldoun 
1999/III: 193). 
22 The ability to beget is an absolute social necessity for men 
and women. 
23 Marcy (1936: 962) also notes that ancient Semites equated 
the bone with agnation. 
24 The spelling varies considerably from author to author and 
according to the method of transcription. Marcy (1941: 192) 
writes ighes, Aspinion (1937: 20) suggests irhs, and West- 
ermarck (1917: 32) notes irss.