Give me your child: adoption practices in a small Moroccan town

Abstract

Despite a legal ban on adoption, derived from Islamic law, various adoption practices are common throughout Morocco. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Moroccan town of Skhirat, I analyse the intriguing cases of requested adoption, in which parents are asked to give away their own child for good. Comparing adoption requests occurring within patron–client relationships, a partnership of great interest to scholars throughout the Mediterranean, and within parent–child relationships, I argue that it is the intermingling of inequality and dependency in the context of a kinned relationship which makes denying even the gift of one's own child inconceivable. The arrangements of requested adoption in Skhirat show that neither the impact of inequality and dependency between relatives closely connected by blood, nor the weight of kinship ties, forged by marriage and milk, between patrons and clients should be overlooked. Adoption practices offer unique insights into what it means to be related, particularly the intricate meanings of family ties, in the rapidly changing social settings of the Arab world today.

Keywords:

• kinship
• patronage
• Morocco
• adoption
• Islam

Acknowledgements

First of all, I am grateful to those in Skhirat, especially Hamid Sr. and his family, for so generously sharing their stories with me. At the University of Amsterdam, I would like to thank Marieke Brand, Yolanda van Ede, Annelies Moors and Alex Strating for their comments and encouragement.

Notes

1. For informants, pseudonyms are used throughout this article.

2. Medinese sura 33, verse 5, as translated by Pickthall (1953).

3. One demographic study commissioned by the Moroccan government does define members of the domestic family as related through blood, marriage or adoption (CERD 1995, 29). However, in the remainder of the 340 page report adoption reappears only in one paragraph explaining the laws against it.

4. For a discussion of the Islamic background of this prohibition, see Bargach (2002, 51–54).

5. For all Arabic words I have followed the transliteration as suggested by van Gelder ([2002] 2008).

6. Two children were adopted by a single woman; none by a single man.

7. The legal concept of kafala is not designed to create families, but established as a business transaction in the ‘Law of Contracts and Obligations’.

8. Another 9 of the 63 adoption cases found in Skhirat did not seem to have been legalised in any way, but this could not be confirmed.

9. Variation in spelling of names is due to transcription from Arabic to French and the combined use of fixed and cumulative surnames.

10. Giving a child in adoption to one's parents is considered to be very different from having grandparents live with their biological children and (help) raise their grandchildren. The latter arrangement was not referred to as adoption.

11. This age range falls right in between that of illegitimate children, adopted either immediately or within a few months after being born, and of orphaned children, the eldest of which was 12 years when adopted. The cases of orphaned and illegitimate children overall concern twice as many girls as boys.

12. As Bourdieu (2000) argues, mental and bodily dispositions, the habitus acquired throughout a life-time, predispose people to assess encounters with one another in a certain, seemingly self-evident, way and to act accordingly.

13. As this line of inquiry only surfaced towards the end of my fieldwork, it is very well possible that more of such milk bonds exist between the two families.

14. Indeed, patron–client relationships are an analytical unit, the terminology of which is linked to parent–child relationships. The word patron stems from the Latin patrónus, which is derived from the Latin word for father, pater. The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Sills 1968) discussed the terms patron and client under the entry ‘paternalism’. Paternalism can be translated as an attitude of controlling subordinates in a fatherly way.

15. Recent changes in the Mudawannah have improved women's rights in settling a divorce, although it remains to be seen how many people will be able to claim these rights in court and have them executed in practice.