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

‘It was in my father's house, we were standing in the room and it was dark because the curtains were drawn, for the children to sleep tight’, thus Hamid Sr., today almost 80 years old, sets out to tell the story of giving up his son Abdallah for adoption.¹ As a young man, he had continued to live in his father's household, located in a Moroccan mountain village, for many years after getting married. Here, he saw his children lying one next to the other on mats and blankets spread out on the floor as usual. ‘They were all there, all asleep, Mahmoud, and Hmed, and my daughter Rashida, and Abdallah, all asleep’, Hamid Sr. continues, ‘when my father came and asked me for a child’.

His father requested a child, his own grandchild, on behalf of one of the makhzen, who as state officials are figures of authority within Moroccan towns and villages. Being all neighbours, they knew that the makhzen and his wife had remained childless, but longed for a child of their own. Still, Hamid Sr. had not expected what was about to happen: ‘The makhzen, he wanted a boy and said to my father: “Give me a child,” and my father came to me and asked for my child.’

Since they could not argue with his father, Hamid Sr. and his wife decided to give away their youngest child at the time. The few months old Abdallah immediately was taken away and handed over to be raised by the family's neighbours. As Hamid Sr. tells me, his wife Fouziyya, who passed away a few years ago, was heartbroken after the adoption of their baby boy Abdallah. As for himself, Hamid Sr. straightforwardly points out: ‘I cried a lot, I did. I missed him. Yes, it was awful.’

This extraordinary solution of asking someone else for their child when couples are faced with childlessness is not at all uncommon in Morocco. During my fieldwork in the Moroccan town of Skhirat, I soon recorded a variety of 63 adoption cases. Exactly one-third of these concerned requested adoptions, like the case of Hamid Sr.'s son, in which the adoptive parents' request is the paramount reason for the adoption to be arranged. In this article I will elucidate why Moroccan parents decide to grant such an adoption request and indeed give their child away.

Skhirat is a small town in between the cities of Rabat and Casablanca. Although it belongs to the most rural prefectures within this, predominantly Arab, region, the area as a whole is caught up in a quick process of urbanisation. Also, educational levels and the average age for first marriages are rising, while fertility rates and the number of people per household are dropping (HCP 2004). In order to research Moroccan adoption practices, I lived in one of Skhirat's neighbourhoods for four months in 2010. Most people I asked in town knew someone or another involved in an adoption case. Researching the adoption cases thus found, I interviewed not only biological and adoptive parents, but also adopted children, other family members and key persons involved. Conducting these interviews in various settings in combination with participant observation in family life provided the most valuable information on the way these adoption arrangements had worked out over time.

None of the requested adoptions found in Skhirat are formally legalised. In fact, this would hardly be possible since Moroccan state law explicitly forbids adoption. With the exception of Tunisia, the Qur'anic premise ‘Proclaim their real parentage’² has been translated as a prohibition against adoption in all Arab family codes. Nevertheless, adoption practices continued throughout Islamic history (Al-Azhary Sonbol 1995) and today remain widespread in Morocco (Bargach 2002) at the least. Still, for the whole of the Middle East and North Africa combined, the only ethnographic study dedicated to practices of adoption is Jamila Bargach's study on the abandonment and adoption of Moroccan children born out of wedlock.³ Whereas Bargach (2002) focuses on illegitimate children's adoptions, the focal point of my research are cases of requested adoption, in which married parents are asked to give a child up for adoption. By complementing and critiquing Bargach's findings on vital points, my research furthers understanding of Moroccan adoption as a vantage point for finally filling this gap in our knowledge of Arab adoption.

Inquiries into adoption, moreover, offer great potential for theoretical advancements in the study of kinship, once the classic core of anthropological research and today again a vibrant field of investigation (Gershon 2003; Dorow and Swiffen 2009). As analyses of adoption arrangements in this article will show, deliberations over what kinship entails can be put in effect and take on new meaning in studying adoption practices especially.

In the first two sections to follow, I will delineate the complications involved in defining bonds of kinship, the family and adoption as a basis for understanding the many cases of adoption found in Skhirat. Moving beyond the legal throes usually taken up to describe Arab adoption as outlawed, I introduce three distinct categories of Moroccan adoption practices: the cases of orphaned children, children born out of wedlock and requested adoptions. The main part of this article will focus on parents' decision to give their child away in this third category of requested adoption.

For both birthparents and adoptive parents, in the cases of requested adoption especially, the intricate meanings of biological versus social kinship constitute intensely real stakes as they strive to be acknowledged as truly belonging to the adopted child. However, in the arrangements of requested adoption the powerful implications of kinship stand out particularly in the biological parents' relationship with the adoptive parents. The gift of the child between them is taken as a measure of relatedness. In Moroccan requested adoption, I argue, the entanglement of unequal balances of power within a kinned relationship, whether considered to be social or biological, builds up to a point at which parents cannot but grant the request to give their own child away.

The nature of kinship

Adoption's intrinsic meaning of somehow substituting for biological parents, and the complications and confusion involved in doing so, provide a unique perspective on what kinship entails. Notwithstanding this theoretical potential, adoption research not only in the Arab world but also generally has been peripheral in anthropology (Terrell and Modell 1994, 166). Adoptive relations were only taken into account as a fictive form of kinship.

This perspective was inverted through Schneider's argument that anthropologists' take on kinship as a special domain of social relations derivative of biological relations is a construction grounded in Euro-American folk beliefs. Although in Western views genealogical connections are considered inalienably authentic, biological relations are not considered highly significant everywhere (Schneider 1984). Regarding Tahiti for example, Robert Levy relates the prevalent practices of adoption to a reigning notion that biological relations are fragile and in itself do not carry the implication of a fixed commitment. ‘That is, all parent/child relationships will tend to be seen as contingent on choices, as not categorically necessary consequences of biological parenthood’ (Levy 1973, 483).

What biological relations are exactly has been challenged too, since, due to new reproductive technologies, a birthmother need not be considered the child's biological mother (Ragoné 1994). In fact, which biological building blocks are considered to constitute bonds of kinship highly varies cross-culturally. Islamic law for example acknowledges milk kinship. Wet-nurses and their husbands, mutually considered contributing physically to breast milk, become the wet-nursed child's parents (Altorki 1980, 233–234).

Hildred Geertz took up Schneider's challenge by arguing that in Morocco biogenetic family ties are of equal consequence as those of friendship and patronage. They are all constituted through balancing debts and obligations. Nevertheless, Geertz (1979) states that parent–child bonds ‘of course, are recognized to entail greater emotional commitment’ (315).

The notion that biological parenthood strengthens bonds as a matter of course echoes the argument, forwarded by kinship theorists such as Fox, Fortes and Goodenough, that the genetrix–offspring relationship is culturally universal. After Radcliffe-Brown's nuclear family had turned out not to be a natural entity, the mother–child bond was a last resort as kinship's fundamental building block. Maternal care was considered an innate response founding any kinship system (Holy 1996, 26–29).

Pregnancy and childbirth's neuroendocrine impact, on both sexes, should not be underestimated (Klein 1991; Carter 1998). But if parental love is assumed to be instinctual, the danger arises of treating parents as suspects whose real feelings may be hidden. This while research on motherhood, in various times and places, shows that maternal love has not always been considered, or indeed experienced, to be instinctually present (Badinter 1980; Scheper-Hughes 1985; Bartels 1993).

Anthropologists' approaches to parental sentiments incorporate the same problem John Leavitt identified for the anthropology of emotion generally. Emotions are considered either universally uniform, bodily feelings or cultural creations of the mind. However, Leavitt (1996) argues, attempts to move beyond mind versus body dichotomies are ultimately futile, as ethnographers continue to only identify experiences involving feelings in their meanings as emotions cross-culturally (516). Similarly, the cultural intelligibility of kinship hinges on the inextricable relation of social and biological origins (Dorow and Swiffen 2009, 565). Ethnographers too only identify relations involving the biological in the social as kinship cross-culturally.

Whereas Schneider still presumed a scientific realm of true natural facts existing separate from cultural constructions, the anthropology of science shows natural facts to be constructed rather than discovered (Carsten 2000, 32). Kinship studies should thus ‘see biological relatedness as constructed in the same way as other forms of relatedness’ (Gershon 2003, 444). Indeed, as Signe Howell argues, the similarities between kinning biological and adopted children by and large outweigh any differences. In her study on Norwegian adoptive parents, even the immediate, instinctual, sense of connection to a child turns out not to be the prerogative of biological parents. Conversely, genealogically related children are actively kinned too (Howell 2006, xx). As Bourdieu (1986) pointed out: initial acts to define relatedness, ‘represented, in the case of the family group, by the genealogical definition of kinship relations’ (249) may be vital starting points of commitment, but do not constitute permanent connections. In order to last, relations constantly require confirmation in and through exchanges.

Biological origins are constructed variably and do not constitute a determining, unbreakable force not even, or perhaps especially not, on the level of parent–child bonds. In practice though, dominant notions of what kinship means certainly are not experienced as mere constructions. In Skhirat as well, biological parents, children and adoptive parents confront, and are confronted by, the way they are supposed to belong together.

Moroccan adoption: defining laws

Morocco's family law (Buskens 1999), the Mudawannah, does acknowledge the bonds forged by caring for a child. Wet nursing as well as embracing and nurturing, install legal ties between a child and those who take on these responsibilities. Nevertheless, the highest legal potential remains reserved for bonds of blood. Article 149 of the Mudawannah unequivocally states that ‘adoption has no juridical value and does not evoke any of the consequences of filiation’ (my translation). The edicts preventing close kin from marrying do not apply to adoptive relations and only biological kin are entitled by law to inherit. Most importantly, it should always be unambiguously clear who a child's birthparents really are. Therefore, family names are not to be altered.⁴

The term used for adoption in legal texts is the standard Arabic attabani, which shares its lexical root with the words for son (ibn) and daughter (ibna) and translates as ‘turning into one's son or daughter’.⁵ The colloquial Moroccan word for adoption though is trebi, which has the same lexical root as terbiyya or the process of raising a child. Indeed, this is the most important aspect of parenthood when it comes to the numerous practices of adoption in Morocco. Upon being adopted, the child moves out of its birthparents' house and into the home of the adoptive parents, who thereafter solely provide and care for the child.

Some adoptive parents do obtain documents legalising their parental status.⁶ In seven cases found in Skhirat, the adoptive parents signed a contract of kafala or guardianship in order to take in a child from an orphanage.⁷ The legal concept of kafala does not infringe on the laws against adoption since children are not to inherit their guardians' name or property (Bargach 2002, 28–30). Conversely, in four other cases the adoptive parents turned the legal definition of parenthood on its head as they managed to register themselves as their child's birthparents. However, the majority of adoptive parents in Skhirat ignored the civil registry and its proceedings. In most cases by far, 43 at the least, the transferral of a child from its biological parents to the adoptive parents was not legally documented.⁸

As the occurrence of legal changes in parental status is often considered a vital point in academic definitions of adoption (Morgan 1871; Goody 1969; Howell 2006), the use of the term adoption for the cases in which Moroccan children are placed in other parents' care may be debatable. Still, families in Skhirat do not place the source of parental status in the legal edicts of the state apparatus per se. Firstly, people in Skhirat themselves were not at all concerned about whether or not a certain adoptive relation falls within the boundaries of the state's law. Moreover, many birthparents in Skhirat had not registered their children either or attested that birth-dates had been estimated incorrectly and names spelled variously on official documents, which may elucidate why not registering one's adoptive child at all, or even secretly putting an adopted child down as one's own, is not considered out of bound.⁹

This is not to say that people in Skhirat do not differentiate between biological and adoptive parents. On the contrary, Moroccan adoptive parents face a reality in which biological descent has great social potential. Bargach (2002) even states that in Morocco ‘adoption is often and generally stigmatized because it is seen as a desperate last resort, almost a debased form of parenting’ (145). Fearing their loving care will not outweigh blood bonds, many adoptive parents tried to keep the adoption secret, especially towards the adopted child, which goes right against the main concern of Islamic legislators that a child's origins should never be concealed. The adoptive parents' fears are not unwarranted though, since in several cases the birthparents tried to claim back their children years after the adoption took place.

Nevertheless, to care for a child is considered proof of parenthood in Skhirat. One adoptive mother for example faced her daughter's birthparents, who tried to take their girl back, by telling the birthmother:

I took care of her, I said to her. I bought her milk, which is expensive, in pharmacies, you know, and clothes and, I nursed her when she got sick. ( … ) I said to her: She is my daughter now.

Ironically, the adopted girl in this case, like many other adopted children, found out she had been adopted exactly because no names had been changed on paper. When she needed an identity card, so she told me, at the civil registry parental names unfamiliar to her were listed on her birth certificate. Still, this family document, which legally confirmed their parental status, did not give her birthparents any leverage when they wanted their daughter back. Just as the adoptive parents in other cases, this adoptive mother successfully held on to the daughter she raised. Families' own decision to transfer a child once and for all from one set of parents to another may be enough then to identify these Moroccan cases as adoptions.

Adoption practices in Skhirat

To define Moroccan practices of adoption merely according to legal (im)possibilities obscures other important characteristics which differentiate between the cases found in Skhirat. The main reason to initiate an adoption arrangement makes for three distinctive categories of Moroccan adoption. Firstly, in the 21 cases of requested adoption, parents gave their child away upon the adoptive parents' request, as did Hamid Sr. and his wife Fouziyya, despite being able and willing to raise their child themselves.

In contrast, the adoptions of children in the remaining two categories were necessitated by a crisis in the lives of their birthparents. For 17 orphaned children in Skhirat adoption became necessary because either their mother or both of their parents had fallen sick or died. Finally, children born out of wedlock were, in nine cases found in Skhirat, given away to be adopted because of the enormous stigma induced by this illegitimate birth status.

In Skhirat only parents and children in adoption cases involving a birth out of wedlock reported that they faced stigma and shame. Concomitantly, most stories of illegitimate children's adoptions revolve around elaborate attempts at keeping the adoption arrangement secret and in these cases only did adoptive parents register themselves as birthparents. In the adoption cases that did not involve a birth out of wedlock, neither adopted children nor their parents said to fear stigmatisation. In the adoption cases of orphaned children no effort was made to keep the children's origins secret.

Many adoptive parents in requested adoptions though did try to keep their child from knowing it had been adopted in an attempt to prevent it from bonding with the birthparents at an early age. Moreover, unlike illegitimate and orphaned children, in requested adoptions most children were handed over to be raised by their parents' closest kin. Whereas I recorded two cases of requested adoption between neighbours, to be further discussed below, in the majority of cases, 19 out of 21, parents gave a child either to one of their siblings or to their own parents.¹⁰ One mother even did both: Nadya first gave a daughter to her sister-in-law and subsequently another daughter to her own mother.

After getting married, Nadya, today aged about 55, moved in with her husband in rooms extended to his parents' main house. Here, she gave birth to the first two of seven children. Her husband's brother and his wife too had their own quarter on the same property and since their marriage had remained childless, they requested one of Nadya's children in adoption. Indeed, during her third pregnancy, Nadya and her husband agreed and a few months later handed over their newborn daughter.

When Nadya again was pregnant, her own mother requested the child in adoption. Knowing her mother felt lonely now her children had married and moved out, so Nadya explains, she again agreed to give her own baby up. During our interview, in the presence of some other family members and neighbours, she keeps stressing to have been happy about obliging her mother. In any case, Nadya elucidates, she could not have turned her mother down: ‘“You gave your daughter to your sister-in-law”, my mother said, “and then you would not give one to me?” That is what she said.’

Just as Nadya's daughters, the children's ages in requested adoptions range from 1 to 18 months at the time of their adoption and all but two of them are girls.¹¹ In two cases, parents specifically requested a girl in adoption to complement a family of sons. Overall though, adoptive parents desired to take in a child either because they had never had children of their own (just as Nadya's sister-in-law) or because the children born to them were all grown up (just as Nadya's mother).

The stories of requested adoption all include a very precise moment on which the child is transferred from the biological parents to the adoptive parents, as well as a clear agreement for the child to be adopted preceding such a transferral. Moreover, once parents have decided to grant the adoptive parents' request, there is no backing out of this agreement. One mother who changed her mind about handing her newborn child over to her childless brother, told me that her brother subsequently came over, wrapped the baby in a blanket and left with his adoptive child.

During the better part of my fieldwork, I felt quite lost trying to understand how one could find the nerve to even ask parents to give up their child, let alone that parents actually granted such requests. People in Skhirat though, whether themselves involved in requested adoptions or not, did not consider these arrangements to be all that surprising. By and large they shrugged their shoulders and smiled: ‘yes, every Moroccan has some niece of nephew adopted like this’.

What is meant to be felt

The Moroccan cases in which biological parents gave their child away upon the adoptive parents' request cannot be explained, as in Tahiti, from a general notion that biological parent–child relationship are fragile anyway. Notwithstanding the potential of care in constituting parent–child relationships, blood relations in Morocco are recognised to have the highest social potential and make for parent–child relationships that are eternally undeniable.

Still, a popular explanation is that Moroccan families generally are rather large and parents expecting their eighth or ninth child thus might simply have children to spare. This argument does not hold sway, since parents in many cases gave away the second or third, sometimes even the first child born to them. But this notion of ‘spare children’ does suggest parents to be less attached to a ninth or a tenth child, which is to show that parental feelings in these cases are easily called into question. Furthermore, the absence of dire circumstances forcing these parents to part from their children, casts doubt on the, supposedly innate, parent–child bonds formed between them and raises the question of whether they actually cared all that much about the child given away.

In the USA, surrogate mothers, whose pregnancies are purposed to result in them giving the child away, face similar concerns. In public debates, surrogates have been portrayed as abject mothers motivated solely by monetary gain. Although the surrogate mothers in Heléna Ragoné's research are remunerated, they themselves hold that the child handed over to infertile couples is a priceless gift. This understanding of surrogacy does not clash with the dominant model for comprehending parenthood in their society. The surrogates Ragoné interviewed do not argue that a mother's love is an insignificant force or that it is alright to give your own child away. Instead, they reject the notion that bearing a child, or even being the genetic mother, in itself forges a bond that makes it one's own. In line with this detached mindset, these surrogate mothers did not express sadness or grief about giving the child away (Ragoné 1994, 79).

However, Moroccan parents giving their child away in requested adoption experience completely different realities. In Skhirat, none of the biological parents I interviewed expressed to think of the child they had allowed to be adopted as anything less than truly their own. Moreover, instead of bearing a child in order to give it away, Moroccan mothers are solicited for a child when their pregnancies are already advanced or only after the child has been born.

Overall, parents who granted an adoption request stress that even though they did not care for their child themselves, they always cared about it very much. Those parents I interviewed in private told me that giving up their child was an extremely painful experience. One mother said that giving away her newborn daughter felt like her heart was no longer there. For months she cried grieving over the loss of her baby girl. Hamid Sr., the father who gave his son to a neighbouring family, readily admitted he cried over losing his son and kept repeating he had missed his son immensely.

Surprisingly though, the members of Hamid Sr.'s family I interviewed agreed that as a father Hamid Sr. was not affected by the adoption of his son at all. Similarly, comments on another mother, whose devastation over the adoption of her daughter had been vividly described to me, included that: ‘it was difficult a little, but she got another baby so she forgot’. In general, outsiders and family members alike easily discarded any pain biological parents may have felt in giving their child away.

In the cases of children born out of wedlock, single mothers too are imagined to feel indifferent about giving their child up, but here this assumption is entangled with a moral condemnation of their actions. However, the exact phrases used to denounce single mothers were turned around to exonerate parents in requested adoptions. The overall conclusion was that parents who granted the adoptive parents' request ‘just wanted to do something nice’.

Still, whenever I asked either men or women hypothetically whether they could imagine themselves giving their child away, the only response was: ‘No, of course not!’ But despite this solid stance taken against having one's children be adopted, numerous parents publicly offered to give me their child. One mother had conclusively declared not ever to be able to give her baby boy away; half an hour later though she suddenly urged me to take her boy. ‘Take him’, she repeated insistently, ‘you should take him with you!’ Only when I stopped trying to refuse and instead replied that I would be delighted to, she smiled and let go of the subject.

Furthermore, in more public interview settings several parents who had themselves granted an adoption request too dismissed the notion that giving up their child had been an upsetting experience. I interviewed one father in his living room while we watched premier league football with his son-in-laws. He denied that he experienced any difficulty in giving his daughter in adoption to his wife's mother. During a focused group discussion, two other mothers who had both given a daughter to their own biological mother similarly said to have done so without any qualms. It was only after another woman in this group incessantly declared that she could not imagine giving her child away without feeling hurt, that one of them suddenly said, smiling apologetically: ‘Well yes, I cried, I cried quite a lot, but that is how it was.’

It would be easy to conclude that although their pain is downplayed by others and they will not admit to it in public, in reality these parents are heartbroken over giving their child away. However, the contrast between parents' private expressions of grief and the public dismissal of parents' pain I think are better understood as part of two contrasting, but equally compelling, truths conveyed by and about these parents: on the one hand, that they are good parents who deeply care about their child and on the other hand that they were happy to oblige the adoptive parents by giving them a child.

These two aspirations could be aligned if the adoption was considered to be in the best interest of the child itself. Regarding child circulations in Peru, Jessaca Leinaweaver notes that these constitute opportunities for children to ‘trade up’. Dolores, for example, let her sister Eulalia take care of her then nine-year-old daughter Milagros: ‘When Eulalia, slightly better off than Dolores, asked for Milagros to join her household, it was perceived as a major opportunity for Milagros, who recognized that her life was better than it otherwise would have been’ (Leinaweaver 2007, 167).

In the Moroccan cases of requested adoption however, the argument that their child would have benefited from being adopted was invoked only in two cases in which mothers had refused to give their child away. One mother had been asked by her sister to give away her daughter, just as in Leinaweaver's Peruvian example. She explains why she turned her sister down:

The husband of my sister is rich. She would have got a great education, ( … ) it was a great chance for my daughter, but I could not give her away. ( … ) And my sister has children anyway, she did not need more, you see.

Yet in a third case in which an adoption request was turned down, the interests of the prospective adoptive parents were at stake. I had asked my neighbour, Bosra, two times hypothetically whether she could imagine giving one of her three children away. She did not reply. Some weeks later however, Bosra inquired how my research was going. ‘It goes well’, I told her, ‘but I still do not really get it. I mean, I have no children, but I try to imagine my brother asking me for a child and I just do not see how I could agree’. To my astonishment, Bosra eagerly nodded: ‘Yes, exactly! My sister asked me and I could not give her my child, I just could not. ( … ) She has no children, but I could not agree.’

Even though I constantly asked around for cases in which parents had refused to give their child away, I did not find any more. This is in contrast to the many cases of actually arranged adoptions brought to my attention. Perhaps adoption requests are not turned down often, or parents, like Bosra, just were not prepared to discuss their refusal to give up their child. Either way, this indicates that the interests of prospective adoptive parents requesting for a child do weigh heavily over parents' own desire to hold on to their children. Thus, in arranging requested adoptions, it is not the bond between parents and the child to be adopted, but rather the relationship between the biological parents and the prospective adoptive parents that is first and foremost at stake.

No way to say no

In all cases it is stressed that parents themselves agreed to give their child away. In this decision to grant an adoption request, a sense of practical comprehension can be clearly discerned.¹² Overall the parents' consent stems from an immediate and unquestionable understanding that they could not have refused. As Nadya, who gave a child to her sister-in-law and another to her own mother, concludes: ‘I could not say no. How could I have turned her down?’

Similarly, when Hamid Sr.'s father asked for their son to be given away in adoption, Hamid Sr. and his wife Fouziyya instantly understood they could only agree. Hastening through his sentences, Hamid Sr. explains:

I did not want to and Fouziyya did not want to either, but she said: “Let him take Abdallah.” She was ashamed of my father and she did not want there to be trouble in our home, she wanted to solve this. (…) I did try to talk with my father, but he said: “No.” And … but what was I going to say? He was my father and I respected him.

In most cases of requested adoption, parents gave their child away to be adopted by their own parents or siblings. However, in order to elucidate what makes parents so susceptible to the demands of the adoptive parents that they feel willing, obliged or even obligated to give them their child, I will first discuss in detail the two exceptional cases in which a child was given to the neighbours. Precisely because here bonds of kinship between the biological and adoptive parents are less obviously present, and unequal balances of power are all the more recognisably brought into focus.

Hamid Sr. plays a pivotal role in both of the cases of requested adoption between neighbours. Not only was he asked by his own father to give a child to the neighbouring family of the makhzen, but later on, having long moved his family out of his father's household, Hamid Sr. asked his own son to give up a child in adoption on request of their neighbours in Skhirat. In both of these cases then, the child to be adopted was actually handed over twice. The adoptive father first made his adoption request to the child's grandfather, who subsequently asked the birthparents for their child.

Firstly, the transfer of the child from its biological family to the adoptive family can be understood as part of a patron–client relationship, an ‘enduring relationships between individuals of unequal wealth or power and the asymmetrical exchanges of goods and services’ (Silverman 1977, 11). Discussing changing forms of patronage in a Moroccan city, Kenneth Brown states that in the 1960s, when the adoption of Hamid Sr.'s son was arranged, most people depended on the protection and support of authoritative figures within the community (Silverman 1977, 326). Concomitantly, Hamid Sr. states as a matter of fact that his own father could not have turned down the adoption request of their neighbour because the man was a makhzen, a word Hamid Sr. whispers in awe, and belonged to the authorities in their village. Smith (2002) too lists makhzen–citizen relationships in Morocco under the larger field of patronage. Although Hamid Sr. could not elucidate what this meant in practice for his father's household, in which he and his wife back then lived, making every effort for the makhzen and his wife to adopt a child and relieve their childlessness could very well have been part of returning past favours or securing future support and protection.

The characteristics of a patron–client relationship between the biological and adoptive families are all the more clear in the second adoption case between neighbours. A few years after the adoption of his son, Hamid Sr. left his father's household and moved with his wife and their remaining children to the urban centres of Casablanca and Rabat. They were able to settle in Skhirat, because the wealthy farmer Rashid allowed them to build a house on his land and use some lots for farming their own crops and cattle. On major holidays, Rashid and his wife Fatima would present Hamid Sr.'s family with the zakat, Islamic faith's obligatory gift to the poor, which included pieces of meat, but also sweets and clothes for the children. Most importantly however, Rashid introduced Hamid Sr. and his sons to the local markets, which was vital for their trades to take off. In return, Hamid Sr., Fouziyya and their children would help out Rashid and Fatima whenever they could. They would assist them with the harvest, taking care of their livestock and repairs around the house.

Over the course of 20 years, the two families also became related through bonds of kinship. As Hamid Sr.'s children grew up and married, his sons continued to live under their father's roof with their wives and children. Hamid Sr.'s fourth son was married to the daughter of Rashid's father's brother. Thus, Rashid's cousin joined Hamid Sr.'s household as his daughter-in-law. Furthermore, Rashid's wife Fatima breastfed the daughter born to Hamid Sr.'s son and wife.¹³ Both Rashid and Fatima thus became milkparents to Hamid Sr.'s granddaughter.

Although Rashid and Fatima had four sons of their own, they longed to complete their family with a daughter. When next door to them Hamid Sr.'s daughter-in-law Aisha, the wife of his second born son Hmed, gave birth to a daughter, Rashid requested this girl in adoption. As Fatima elucidated: ‘Well, my husband asked Hamid Sr., they were friends (shaab), so he went to him and asked, and then Hamid Sr. went to Hmed and they agreed to give us their daughter.’

The overall consensus in this case was that exactly because they were friends (shaab), Hamid Sr. could not have refused to try and help Rashid out. Interestingly, Brown (1977) notes that the word shaab can mean ‘friend, companion, comrade, associate, accomplice and, depending on context, patron or client’ (314). The relationship between Hamid Sr. and Rashid indeed has all the characteristics of a patron–client relationship: inequality in wealth and power and asymmetrical exchanges within a durable bond.

But whereas Hamid Sr. and Rashid started out as landowner and tenant, over the years elements of kinship, through marriage and milk, were added to their relationship. As Ensel (2002) points out, in Morocco milk kinship is and has been used not only to tighten bonds of friendship between women, but also to incorporate foreigners or to overcome differences in status and power within a community (86–89). In the case of the families of Hamid Sr. and Rashid, all of these functions could apply.

The institution of milk kinship found on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, so Ensel (2002) notes, mirrors the institution of compadrazgo or godparenthood on the northern shore (84). In compadrazgo, while godparents are appointed to guard a child's spiritual well-being, the child is raised in the household of its biological parents and the relationship with the godparent usually lapses in adult life. In contrast, the relationship forged between the child's godparents and biological parents, the compadres, is characterised by an open-ended reciprocity (Pitt-Rivers 1976, 322–324). As Goody (1970) puts it: ‘the effective ties are between parent and co-parent, with their common child a relatively passive member of the triad’ (338).

Compadrazgo can be used to intensify the existing bonds of kinship. But, just as milk kinship, the institution of compadrazgo is also a very effective way to form kinned relations, by ‘grace’, outside of the biological family and tie together patrons and clients. Indeed, ‘precisely because the relationship between compadres is conceptually one of equality, it is effective in circumstances of factual inequality: it provides the possibility of intimacy and trust between persons whose difference of class would otherwise make this difficult’ (Pitt-Rivers 1976, 324). The mutual trust between compadres makes it possible for a worker to count on his boss for all kinds of privileges. Conversely, tenants in Puerto Rico worked for their landowners without being paid in honour of their relationship as compadres (Mintz and Wolf 1950, 363). If patrons and clients become kin, through milk kinship or compadrazgo, this fosters a situation in which ‘reciprocal aid becomes self-evident instead of imperative’ (Ensel 2002, 89).

Notwithstanding these practical benefits, compadrazgo does not thrive on material calculation. On the contrary, compadres' willingness to help each other out stems from mutual trust and is to mirror their warm feelings for each other. But compadres, then, do not escape ‘the paradox of friendship’:

that while friends express the state of the heart in acts of favour and esteem without any thought of a return ( … ) nevertheless, the failure to make a return implies the absence of reciprocity in sentiment and this puts an end to the friendship. (Pitt-Rivers 1976, 323–324)

Similarly, successfully requesting for a child in adoption is not merely a measure of one's economic capital. It depends on social capital: the aggregate of social obligations or ‘connections’ which an agent can mobilise to obtain resources possessed by the members of his network (Bourdieu 1986, 248–249). In Skhirat, the landlord Rashid and the immigrant Hamid Sr. had become tied together by multiple bonds of kinship, friendship and patronage. The fact that Hamid Sr.’s home and livelihood depended on Rashid's good graces probably was not simply set off against an obligation to reciprocate with the gift of a child. Rather, I think, a blunt refusal of Hamid Sr. to cooperate in the adoption of his granddaughter would have been taken to imply the ‘absence of reciprocity in sentiment’. Over the years, Rashid had always been committed to help Hamid Sr. and his family out in every way he could. And now, Hamid Sr. would not do the same?

Unequal kin

In the arrangements of requested adoptions, the birthparents themselves did not grant a patron's adoption request, but agreed to hand over their child to their own parents or siblings. Even in the cases of requested adoption between neighbouring families, the birthparents faced the adoption request of their own parent acting as mediator. Nonetheless, in Hamid Sr.'s account turning down his father's adoption request was just as inconceivable as denying his patron Rashid the gift of a child.

Indeed, parent–child relationships have much in common with patron–client relationships.¹⁴ Waterbury (1977) does exclude relations in which the inequality in power between the parties involved is small or in which the patron only controls a single aspect of the client's life from the spectrum of patron–client relationships. But these excluding remarks do not apply to most parent–child relationships, as they start out, in Morocco. When a child is born, the power parents have over it is near absolute and covers almost all domains of the child's life. As children grow up, and parents grow old, the balance of power may change. In Morocco, in the absence of governmental support, parents do count on their children to take care of them later on in life. Nevertheless, many married couples in Skhirat still depend on their parents to provide them with a home and livelihood. Here, well into adulthood, parent–child relationships retain the character of patronage.

The position in which Hmed found himself vis-à-vis his father Hamid Sr. and in which Hamid Sr. found himself vis-à-vis his own father was marked by a similar entanglement of dependency and inequality as was Hamid Sr.’s position with regard to his landlord Rashid. When, over four decades ago, they handed over their son Abdallah to Hamid Sr.’s father, Fouziyya and Hamid Sr. depended on him for their home and income. The same goes for the birthparents Hmed and Aisha when, over two decades ago, they gave Hmed's father Hamid Sr. their consent for the adoption of their daughter.

Just as several other birthparents, Hamid Sr. as well as Hmed later on attempted to take back the children given away in adoption. The moment at which they tried to reverse the adoptions mediated by their own fathers is telling. Hamid Sr. and his wife Fouziyya had built their own life in Skhirat far away from Hamid Sr.'s parents when they tried to get back their son. Similarly, Hmed and his wife Aisha had found their own home in the city, and were moving out of Hamid Sr.’s residence, when they tried to take their daughter with them. Attempting to retrieve the adopted child became conceivable when they had set up their own households independent of their fathers who arranged these adoptions.

Nevertheless, to refuse their father's request for a child in the first place was not simply unthinkable because they feared being thrown out of the house. Hamid Sr. stated that he could not refuse to give away his son, because he owed his father's respect. Turning down one's parents' request, including the request for a child, could be taken as representing a lack of gratitude, respect and affection. Here too, it is the entanglement of reciprocity and dependency in the context of a kinned relationship, and not merely economical dependency in itself, which builds up to a point at which even the gift of one's child cannot be denied.

The question then rises whether the cases of requested adoption in which parents directly handed over their child to be adopted by their own parents may also be understood from this overall sense of commitment, in which dependency, inequality and kinship are tied together. One father who gave a daughter to his own parents also lived in his parents' home at the time of the adoption. He thus may have found himself in a position of dependency similar to the birthfathers' Hmed and Hamid Sr. when requested a child.

Six mothers though were living with their husbands, and his parents in some cases, when they gave a daughter in adoption to their own parents. Still, for a married woman the support of her parents as well can be of vital importance. One woman I interviewed, about giving her daughter in adoption to her sister, had moved back with her parents in Skhirat after her divorce. Having no education, income or assets of her own, she concluded with a bitter smile: ‘If my parents had not been supportive, I would not have pushed for this divorce. I could not have. I would have had no place to go.’¹⁵

The parents who requested a child from their married daughters could have also acted as their social and economic safety net. Again, this is not to say that these birthmothers, all without a job, education or assets to fall back on, gave a child to their parents merely to ensure their future support. However, a certain dependency on their parents' support could be part of the impossibility to refuse their parents' request for a child.

Shayma for example, today a middle-aged woman, herself had been given in adoption to her father's sister Maryam, whose marriage had remained childless. When Shayma got married herself, she moved in with her husband. Maryam, her adoptive mother and biological aunt, helped the newlyweds out whenever she could. Shayma's face lights up as she remembers:

We were poor, Hisham and I, and my mother worried and always she gave us the expensive things we needed. She would buy us all kinds of supplies and if she saw I needed something, I'd get it later on.

After her first child was born, Shayma soon was pregnant again and her mother Maryam, who felt lonely living alone again, requested the expected child in adoption. Although Shayma longed to keep the child herself, she states there just was no way she could have turned her mother down. ‘I could not say no’, Shayma underlines definitely, ‘She asked me, she was my mother and how could I have dismissed her?’ Thus, Maryam adopted Shayma's daughter as well.

This story exemplifies the specific labour which transforms economic capital into social capital:

i.e. an apparently gratuitous expenditure of time, attention, care, concern, which, as is seen in the endeavor to personalize a gift, has the effect of transfiguring the purely monetary import of the exchange and, by the same token, the very meaning of the exchange. (Bourdieu 1986, 253)

Over time, a non-specific sense of indebtedness, instead of a tangible debt, thus arises between the parties involved.

In Shayma's description of Maryam's aid, not its financial value itself matters most, but the thought and attentiveness that went into it. Maryam did not merely spend her resources on Shayma, but bought those things she had noticed her daughter needed. Conversely, Shayma felt she could not refuse Maryam's adoption request from an overall sense of obligation towards her mother. By elevating Maryam's loneliness and showing her commitment through the gift of her child, Shayma did not merely repay Maryam, but reciprocated her love and support.

The power of parental persuasion may also impact the cases of requested adoption arranged between siblings. Bargach describes one case in which a mother summons her daughter to give a child to her sister, promising her the bestowal of rda or parental benediction. As Bargach (2002) explains, rda ‘may be used a means to dictate parental authority on one's children’ (125). To the daughter in this case, the pressure her mother put on her induced her to indeed give her baby to her sister.

Nonetheless, I have no indication that the cases of requested adoption between siblings found in Skhirat were similarly mediated by their parents. However, the role of mediator Hamid Sr. played in the adoption of his granddaughter only became clear after several interviews with a variety of people involved. In contrast, for each adoption case between siblings, I was only able to interview a single person involved and from these data no more than an outline of how these adoptions were arranged can be ascertained.

Even if siblings arranged requested adoptions directly amongst themselves though, inequality in power, status and resources may have been a consequential factor. At the least, siblingship is a valued form of kinship throughout Northern Africa and a source of support and care. For a Tunisian village in the 1960s Abu-Zahra (1976) even concludes that here ‘the group of brothers is the most significant social unit’ (170). Still, this does not mean siblings act as mere equals. Just as Abu-Zahra observed in Tunisia (1976, 166–170), among siblings in Skhirat the eldest conjure up authority over the younger ones. This already starts early on in life, as I noticed some parents allowing older children to discipline their younger siblings, up to the point of hitting them, and to send them on errands as a matter of course.

As adults, siblings in Skhirat do come forward as a group and count on one another for support. During my stay in Skhirat, for example, my neighbour decisively intervened when his younger sister was seemed to be neglected by her husband. Together with two other brothers, he also helped pay three months worth of outstanding rent on her behalf and often gave her some cash to make ends meet. In return, she helped her brother's wife clean the house, whenever she came round to visit. This exactly fits Abu-Zahra's (1976) description of relationships between sisters and brothers in the 1965 Tunisian village life: ‘A married sister may also receive material support from her wealthier brothers if her husband is in need ( … ); in return for these services she has to help her brothers’ wives with the household chores' (165–166).

In such circumstances, turning down an adoption request could turn out to be inconceivable, since this may be taken as an unwillingness to reciprocate and to acknowledge the value of being related as siblings. Thus, just as in the cases of parents who did give a child to their own parents, in the adoption cases between siblings a willingness, or even a heartfelt desire, to grant the request for a child may be embedded in a wider context of rights and obligations, care and reciprocity, and the balance of social and economic standings.

Conclusion: the child as a gift

The, obviously intriguing, context of the Islamic ban on adoption does not necessarily provide the most relevant vantage point for understanding practices of adoption in Morocco. In Skhirat, most families arranged adoptions amongst themselves without being concerned about the laws against adoption. The main reason for initiating an adoption arrangement divides the cases found in Skhirat into three distinct categories of adoption: the cases of orphaned children, illegitimate children and requested adoptions.

One important finding is that in Skhirat only those (suspected to be) involved in the adoption of a child born out of wedlock reported of facing stigma and shame. Bargach states that in Morocco adoption is often and generally stigmatised, because it is seen as a debased form of parenting. As long as the adoption did not concern a child born out of wedlock however, adoption arrangements did not seem to entail moral condemnation of either adopted children or their parents.

The cases of orphaned and illegitimate children do share one important feature: both are set in motion by parents' inability to care for their child themselves. In contrast, requested adoptions are not necessitated by a crisis in the lives of their birthparents, but are arranged because of the adoptive parents' desire to raise a child. Surprisingly, to ask parents to give away their child in Skhirat is not considered out of order, or even out of the ordinary. On the contrary, parents who are faced with an adoption request of their own parents or siblings cannot imagine turning them down. In the cases of requested adoption, it is not the bond between parents and the child to be adopted, but rather the relationship between the biological parents and the prospective adoptive parents that is first and foremost at stake.

In this respect, requested adoptions in Skhirat are similar to compadrazgo arrangements. However, compadrazgo provides an opportunity to mark the beginning, or reinforcement, of a kinned relationship between birthparents and godparents without physically handing over the child to be raised by the adoptive parents. Requested adoption, on the other hand, turns the child itself into a gift representing the acknowledgement of debts and obligations already built up between the biological and adoptive parents. That parents are kept to their word, once they have agreed to give their child up for adoption, and the subsequent discernment of a precise moment of transferral of the child from the biological parents to the adoptive parents further speak to the impression of a transaction between two parties.

In contrast to reigning notions on parenthood found in Tahiti and the mindset cultivated by surrogate mothers in the USA, children to be given away in Moroccan requested adoptions are considered to belong to their biological parents. This makes the decision to give a child away an all the more significant gesture within the relationship towards the adoptive parents. Indeed, it is possible for the child to be a gift as a continuation of an exchange between two parties, exactly because it is thought to belong to the biological parents and thus theirs to give away.

Moreover, in contrast to child circulation in Peru and the direct remuneration surrogate mothers receive, in Skhirat neither the child's nor its biological parents' position is to be improved in requested adoption. That biological parents are not seen to profit directly within the adoption arrangement itself makes the weight of their gift all the greater. Within the transaction of requested adoption, the biological parents solely are the giving party, while the adoptive parents are on the receiving end. Thereby, this transaction goes beyond the mere event of the adoption itself and can be part of a durable relation of reciprocity.

Additionally, this gift has a substantial meaning because what is given away was not unwanted. The biological parents do not part from a child they did not want or could not raise themselves. It is thus explicable that parents' expressions of grief and pain over parting with their child conveyed in private settings and their discarding of feelings of sadness or regret over their child's adoption in public, coexist. On the one hand, to publicly bring to the fore the grief involved in giving a child away would do damage to the munificent nature of this gift and thereby diminish its value, as such bitterness would imply a reluctance in giving the child up which cannot do justice to the love, commitment and respect towards the adoptive parents the gift it is supposed to convey. On the other hand, and at the same time, intense pain in parting from their child not only speaks of the biological parents' qualities as proper parents, because they do care about their child and did not throw it away like garbage, but also testifies of the depth of the sacrifice they made on behalf of the adoptive parents, all the more proving their love, commitment and respect towards them.

The gift of a child, then, is not given lightly, but reflects the depth of the relationship between those giving away their child and those allowed to adopt it. For parents it may be hardly possible to refuse an adoption request of their own parents, exactly because from the day they were born numerous ties of reciprocity, on diverse domains in life, tied them together through dependency, affection and the knowledge that to be kin to one's parents is a lifelong commitment. It was this irrefutable status as a parent that Nadya's mother put to the fore, in what comes across as emotional blackmail, so that Nadya would give her a child in adoption. With the rhetorical question ‘You gave a daughter to your sister-in-law and then you would not give one to me?’, Nadya's mother herself made the gift of a child a measure of their relationship.

Just as patrons and clients who become each other's compadres are kin by ‘grace’; the families of Hamid Sr. and his landlord Rashid became tied together through bonds of marriage and milk; and parents and children are recognised as kin because of the blood ties connecting them. The difference that seems to be obvious is that in the former two patron–client relationships the kinship element was added later on, whilst the biological parents and children already started out as kin. However, if anything is to be learnt from contemporary kinship theory, it is that in analyses biological kinship should not take precedence over other kinds of being kin as a matter of course. Whether instigated by shared genes, blood, milk or grace, all of these relationships are governed by the notion that they will last forever, while at the same time constantly needing acts of confirmation in and through exchanges.

If those involved in such exchanges as kin occupy positions which are of unequal status relative to each other, such as that occurs between patrons and clients like Rashid and Hamid Sr. or parents and children like Hamid Sr. and Hmed, then an even greater need arises, especially for those who find themselves in the position of lower status, to be sensible to the demands of reciprocity. The arrangements of requested adoption in Skhirat show that neither the impact of inequality and dependency within families closely connected by blood, nor the weight of kinship ties, forged by marriage and milk, between patrons and clients should be overlooked. In cases of requested adoption, the decision of parents to give their child away stems from an unavoidable understanding that in this instance, in the situation as it presents itself with their current positions relative to others, the enduring relationship to those who solicit for a child should take precedence over their own rights, obligation and desire as parents to hold on to their child. It is the intermingling of inequality and dependency within bonds of kinship which builds up to the point at which even the gift of one's own child cannot be denied.

Nevertheless, there was an overall agreement in Skhirat that the number of requested adoptions arranged is decreasing. Further research will be necessary to find out whether this indeed is the case and shed light on the meaning of family ties in Morocco today. Within the urbanising region of Skhirat, the settings in which social life plays itself out indeed are rapidly changing. Over the last decades Morocco has faced enormous developments: expanding government agencies; rapid population growth and urbanisation; dropping fertility rates; and increasing migration both within and across Morocco's borders (HCP 2004). The rising education levels increase future chances for women especially to gain access to their own steady income, as well as to the improved rights regarding divorce settlements instituted by the revised family code of 2003. Increasing economical, educational and legal opportunities for individual family members could provide parents with a measure of independence which makes turning down an adoption request from their close relatives a lot easier. As Hamid Sr. remarked nostalgically: ‘People are not like they used to be, no they are not. Before, people did make an effort for each other, but now … . They do not want to give their children away.’

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.