maandag 7 mei 2018

What happened at the sanctuary of Sidi Bubkr?

After lunch everybody finally went to Iligh. From Sidi Ahmed Ou Moussa it is 6km to Iligh and halfway along the way in the middle of nowhere and in a bend of the road is the sanctuary of Sidi Bubkr. The Marabout is surrounded by a walled graveyard. Nobody seems to know who Sidi Bubkr was, but the Marabout marks an important land division and is mentioned in many old documents. It was also the site of a gruesome murder with far-reaching consequences. Thursday 1 December 1814 a man named Mahmud El Warari was stabbed near the Marabout ten times. His stomach was cut open and filled with stones. The assailants were send by Hashem the ruler of the House of Iligh. Like Hashem, Mahmud was a descendant of Sidi Ahmed Ou Mousa. They were related in more ways than one and they were political rivals. Their fiefdoms bordered on each other. But while Mahmud obeyed faithfully his overlord, Hashem also known as 'the Lion of the Tazerwalt'followed an independent course which got him into difficulties many times. It went so far that the fortress of Iligh was destroyed twice between 1810 and 1816 by the overlord. When Mahmud met his death he was crossing the 'border' at Sidi Bubkr while on the way to Iligh for the circumcision ceremony of the son of Hashem and the sister of Mahmud. The case came to court and there is a legal document about the case kept safe in the mosque of Toumanar although it was set afire and torn into pieces. 10 years later in 1825 the son of Mahmud wanted to retaliate a disgrace his wife had suffered when she visited Iligh for a wedding (there are 5 different versions of the same story). He shot Hashem under the famous Argan tree in the souk of Sidi Ahmed Ou Mousa during the yearly Moussem in honor of his ancestor the Sufi saint. The murder was part of both a vendetta and a long drawn out civil war. Paul Pascon gives an exhaustive description of the events in his study "La Maison d'Iligh'.

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