Morocco's culture: the identity its 2011 constitution lists by name

What the Moroccan constitution names as national identity

In February 2011 thousands of people rallied in Rabat and other cities for political reform and a new constitution curbing the powers of the king. In July a reformed text that the king had proposed won a landslide in a referendum. Its preamble describes "a sovereign Muslim State" that intends to preserve its national identity "in its plentitude and its diversity", and it gives that identity a single unity forged from three components, Arab-Islamic, Amazigh and Saharan-Hassanic, with four further influences named after them. Berbers are also known as Amazigh, the name the constitution and the census use.

Three articles turn parts of that list into law. Article 3 makes Islam the religion of the State, which "guarantees to all the free exercise of beliefs". Article 5 keeps Arabic as the official language and adds Tamazight as a second one, "common patrimony of all Moroccans without exception", leaving an organic law to decide how it enters teaching and public life. The same article commits the State to preserving Hassani "as an integral component of the Moroccan cultural unity" and creates a National Council of Languages and of Moroccan Culture to protect Arabic, Tamazight and the country's other cultural expressions. Article 41 makes the king Commander of the Faithful.

The Bertelsmann Transformation Index reads the religious clauses more narrowly in its 2026 report. The constitution guarantees freedom of thought, the BTI says, but it recognises only Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and religious interpretation is restricted to the Maliki school of Sunni Islam. How the 2011 text divided power between the palace and parliament is set out in Morocco's politics.

How the census counts Amazigh speakers in Morocco

The High Commission for Planning counted the population as of 1 September 2024, and it asked which languages each person uses in daily life. When the Amazigh figure set off a public argument, the commission explained, in a statement Hespress reported on 30 December 2024, that anyone who can speak Amazigh but does not use it every day falls outside the count, and that the method follows the standards of the United Nations Statistics Division. On that definition 24.8% of Moroccans used an Amazigh language in daily life in 2024, against 25.8% in 2014 and 27.5% in 2004. The commission put the fall down to urbanisation, internal migration and changing habits of speech. Urban residents made up 62.8% of the population in 2024, and Amazigh use ran at 33.3% in the countryside against 19.9% in the towns.

The shares add up to more than the whole because many Moroccans speak both. Asked for a mother tongue, 80.6% named Arabic and 18.9% one of the Amazigh languages. Writing pulls the two further apart. In 2024, 99.2% of literate Moroccans could read and write Arabic and 1.5% of the population could read and write an Amazigh language, in a year when the literacy rate stood at 75.2%.

The commission collects no data on ethnicity, citing the historical difficulty of telling Arabs and Berbers apart even among speakers of Berber languages. Mainstream Amazigh activists dispute the 2024 figure and put the real share at 35 to 40%.

French and Arabic became the main languages of administration and education after independence in 1956. French is an obligatory subject in all schools, and a count for 2010 found 10,366,000 French speakers, about 32% of the population. Spanish is spoken mostly in the north and in the former Spanish Sahara, a territory whose status is disputed, by 1,536,590 people in Ethnologue's figure for 2016.

How Tamazight became an official language in practice

The politics of the language reach back to the protectorate. The Berber Decree is dated 16 May 1930, and Mohammed V apparently told the nationalist Allal al-Fassi that the French residency had misled him into signing it. Crowds gathered against the decree and a national network formed to resist it; the historian Susan Gilson Miller calls the backlash the "seedbed out of which the embryonic nationalist movement emerged". Britannica contrasts the French zone, where Amazigh was set against Arab, with the Spanish zone in the north, where no such attempt was made.

The Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture, IRCAM, was created on 17 October 2001, after a royal speech at Ajdir-Khénifra, by a dahir that placed it beside the king and under his protection, with full legal capacity and its own finances. Its brief is to advise on safeguarding Amazigh culture and to bring the language into the schools and into social, cultural and media life. The constitution made Tamazight official ten years later. Two organic laws followed: law 26-16 sets out how the official character is put into effect, and law 04-16 creates the National Council of Languages and Moroccan Culture. IRCAM describes the whole course as a sequence of exclusion, then integration, then inclusion.

The ministry for digital transition and administrative reform budgeted 200 million dirhams for the programme in 2022 and 300 million in each of 2023 and 2024, with the sum due to reach 1 billion dirhams from 2025. Its projects put Amazigh-speaking reception staff in every ministry, in the three variants Tarifit, Tachelhit and Tamazight, and Amazigh telephone service at nine public call centres; they add Amazigh to official websites and the Tifinagh script to public buildings and vehicles, ambulances among them, and train civil servants in the alphabet. The kingdom's official name in Tamazight, Tagldit n Lmeɣrib, is written in that script. The BTI's 2026 report records the objection: Amazigh regions still suffer from poverty and poor infrastructure, and organisations campaigning for Amazigh rights often meet registration denials.

Yennayer, the Amazigh new year, falls on 14 January in Morocco, a date IRCAM established, and it is a national holiday; on 14 January 2026 the Amazigh calendar entered the year 2976. The ahidus of the Middle Atlas is danced for it, and dishes of local grain, tagoula, a barley porridge, or couscous, are served in one communal bowl with a charm hidden inside; whoever finds it is counted lucky for the coming year. The greeting is Assegas Ameggaz.

Where Morocco's Andalusian music and gardens came from

During the reign of the Idrisid ruler Yahya I, who died in 863, more Arab immigrants arrived, and the mosques of al-Qarawiyyin and al-Andalusiyyin were founded in Fez. Al-Qarawiyyin began as a madrasa founded by Fatima al-Fihri in 859 and later drew scholars from abroad, Maimonides, Ibn al-Khatib and Ibn Khaldun among them. Under the Almoravids and the Almohads, Moroccan literature was closely tied to that of al-Andalus and shared its forms: the zajal, the muwashshah and the maqama.

The larger movements followed the Christian conquest of Iberia. Andalusis expelled from al-Andalus after the Reconquista brought a major influx of Andalusi culture with them, and the music called tarab al-āla, "joy of the instrument", is traced to a large migration of Muslims from Valencia to Moroccan cities, Fez above all. Specialists prefer the name āla to "Andalusi music", to separate it from the purely vocal Sufi samā' and to play down its link with Europe. Its standard text is the Kunnash al-Haik, Mohammed al-Haik's songbook of the 18th century, and Dar ul-Aala in Casablanca keeps the tradition as a museum and conservatory.

The Moriscos came last. About 3,000 wealthy Moriscos from Hornachos in western Spain arrived early in the 17th century, ahead of Philip III's expulsion edicts of 1609, and about 10,000 more followed once the edicts took effect. Differences of language and custom kept them apart from the people of Salé, so they settled across the Bou Regreg in the old medina of Rabat, where from 1627 they ran a corsair republic until 1668, when it passed to the Alawi sultan.

Morisco refugees also brought the Andalusi garden, laid out around a fountain whose evaporation cools the riad around it, as at the Bahia Palace in Marrakesh. Malhun, sung popular poetry from the cities associated with al-Andalus, among them Meknes, Fez, Salé, Tétouan and Oujda, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2023.

What the Hebraic influence in the preamble refers to

About 265,000 Jews lived in Morocco before the State of Israel was founded in 1948, and around 3,500 in 2022. The emigration was organised and facilitated by Zionist groups from outside Morocco: about 60,000 people left through Cadima between 1949 and 1956, and about 90,000 in Operation Yachin between 1961 and 1964.

Earlier, in the mid-19th century, Moroccan Jews had moved from the interior to Essaouira, Mazagan, Asfi and later Casablanca to trade with Europeans, and the Alliance Israélite Universelle opened its first school in Tétouan in 1862. After the Vichy regime was installed in France in 1940, Britannica records, the sultan signified his independence by refusing to approve anti-Jewish legislation.

Mimouna, a Maghrebi holiday kept the day after Passover, is one of the traditions particular to Moroccan Jews. Saint veneration is a practice of both faiths: a Muslim visits a walī at a marabout, a Jew makes a hillula visitation for a tzadik. Moroccan literature has been written in Hebrew as well as in Arabic, Berber and French.

Craft carries a further trace. Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century who found refuge in Morocco became master artisans of gold-thread embroidery, and the same embroidery runs through Moroccan leather armchairs, babouches, cushions and wall hangings. The Keswa Kbira, the wedding dress of Jewish women in northern Morocco and part of the dowry, is red velvet with a decorated chest panel, lace sleeves and a silk sash at the waist. Its long skirt has a hem embroidered with twenty-two gold-thread circles that form the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The French ethnographer Jean Besancenot documented it, and his book Costumes du Maroc gathered his sketches of Moroccan dress in 1942.

Which African and Saharan strands the preamble means

UNESCO inscribed Gnawa in 2019, and its description traces the practice to slavery. Gnawa is first a Sufi brotherhood music, its lyrics mostly religious and invoking ancestors and spirits, practised at first by groups and individuals from slavery and the slave trade dating back to at least the 16th century. In the cities the Gnawa hold a therapeutic possession ritual, an all-night ceremony of rhythm and trance that combines ancestral African practice with Arab-Muslim influence and native Berber performance. In the countryside they offer communal meals to marabout saints.

Urban Gnawa play a stringed instrument and castanets and wear colourful embroidered costumes; rural Gnawa play large drums and castanets and dress in white. UNESCO records the number of brotherhoods and master musicians as growing.

Hassaniya is the dialect of Arabic spoken in the south of Morocco, and Article 5 commits the State to preserving Hassani. The Culture of Morocco article places Hassani music and Sahrawi dress in what it calls the Moroccan Sahara. Sahrawi women wear the melhfa, a draped cloth that wraps the body and covers the hair, in towns such as Laayoune and Dakhla and among nomads; it is a heritage shared across the desert with Mauritania, northern Mali and Sudan. Sahrawi men wear the derâa, a loose, square-cut gandoura in blue, the colour of the men of the desert, in Morocco and in Mauritania.

Laayoune and Dakhla are in Western Sahara, a territory whose status is disputed. Morocco claims it as its Southern Provinces, the Polisario Front controls a mostly uninhabited part of it as the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, and a United Nations mission, MINURSO, is tasked with organising a referendum on whether it becomes independent or is recognised as part of Morocco. Western Sahara has its own pages. This catalogue records the dispute and takes no position on it.

How Islam is organised under the Moroccan monarchy

Under Article 41 the king, as Commander of the Faithful, sees to the respect of Islam and guarantees the free exercise of beliefs. He presides over the Superior Council of the Ulema, the only body entitled to pronounce on a fatwa before it is officially adopted, and the BTI adds that he oversees religious practice through the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs. The Alawi dynasty, which rose to power from the Tafilalt in the 17th century, claims descent from the Prophet Muhammad through his grandson Hasan ibn Ali. So did Idris I, a great-grandchild of Hasan, whose dynasty historians count as the founders of the first Moroccan state. Morocco's history traces how that descent came to decide the throne.

The Pew Forum estimated in 2010 that 99% of Moroccans were Muslim, virtually all of them Sunni. Surveys of belief give a wider spread. In Arab Barometer's 2018 survey nearly 15% of Moroccans described themselves as non-religious while nearly all identified as Muslim, and its 2021 survey found 67.8% religious, 29.1% somewhat religious and 3.1% non-religious. Freedom House, in its 2025 report, scored the freedom to practise and express religious faith or nonbelief at 2 out of 4.

More than 500,000 Christians lived in Morocco before independence in 1956, mostly of Spanish and French descent, and many left for Spain or France afterwards.

Ramadan and Eid al-Adha set the rhythm of the year, and most Moroccans go to the mosque for the Friday midday prayer. Older rites run alongside. After Eid al-Adha, in Agadir, Imintanoute and Inezgane in the Souss-Massa region, men dressed in sheepskins take to the streets for Boujloud, or Bilmawen, "skin-stealer" in Berber, chasing children to Berber percussion and dancing ahwash. The Culture of Morocco article considers the rite likely to be pre-Islamic.

What goes into Moroccan food and dress

What a Moroccan meal is built from

Couscous has historically been the staple. In 2020 UNESCO inscribed the knowledge and practices of making and eating it as one file from Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia: grain grown and ground into semolina, rolled by hand, steamed and cooked, with clay vessels made by potters and wooden utensils by cooperatives and family workshops. The Moroccan table adds tajine, pastilla and tanjia, and harira, a soup served with dates during Ramadan. Sweet meets savoury in tfaya, caramelised onions with butter, cinnamon, sugar and raisins served with meat.

The spices include cinnamon, turmeric, ginger, cumin and saffron, and several ingredients are grown at home: saffron from Tétouan, mint and olives from Meknes, oranges and lemons from Fez. Khobz, the daily bread, is made chiefly from durum wheat semolina. Lamb is preferred but relatively expensive, and because the sheep breeds of North-west Africa store most of their fat in the tail, Moroccan lamb lacks the pungent flavour of Western mutton. Mint tea, atay, arrived in the 18th century and is drunk at any hour from coloured glasses.

How the caftan became Moroccan formal dress

The everyday garment for men and women is the djellaba, long, loose and full-sleeved, with a pointed hood, the qob, against the sun or the falling snow; a gandoura is the same garment without the hood. Nearly all men and most women wear balgha, soft heelless leather slippers, often dyed yellow. The burnous, a large hooded cape, predates Roman rule in the Maghreb, and Procopius records it being presented to the kings of Mauretania and Numidia. It is made of sheep's wool in the Berber-speaking regions and of silk for the kings of Morocco.

The caftan was probably brought to Morocco by the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, under the Saadians, and at first only sultans and the court wore it. It now goes to weddings and celebrations of every kind. Its fixed elements are a central opening, the sfifa, gold buttons, the aakad, and a belt of fabric or solid gold, the hzam, with embroidery, beads, sequins and gold thread laid on by master artisans, the maalems, who pass the craft down in workshops and families. UNESCO inscribed the Moroccan caftan in 2025, and Yves Saint Laurent had shown it in his collections from the 1970s.

The takchita is made in two pieces, and the Fes ntâa is cut from velvet in emerald green or garnet red, with peacocks and plants embroidered in gold thread along the hem. A Fez bride's chedda fassia makes moving so difficult that she sits on a throne called the amariya. In the High Atlas, Aït Haddidou women at Imilchil wear the handira, a striped cape of black and white wool, for the moussem, and the slipper of the Souss-Massa is the idoukane, of red leather, tasselled and embroidered in gold thread.

Which Moroccan practices UNESCO has inscribed

Morocco ratified the World Heritage Convention on 28 October 1975 and the convention on intangible heritage on 6 July 2006. Nine cultural properties are on the World Heritage List, the first of them the Medina of Fez in 1981 and the latest Rabat, as a modern capital and historic city, in 2012. By 2025 sixteen elements were on UNESCO's intangible lists.

Tbourida is the display of horsemanship also called fantasia, performed at festivals and weddings across the Maghreb.

The Mediterranean influence the preamble names is recorded in stone. Phoenician and Carthaginian settlements stood at Chellah, Lixus and Mogador on the Atlantic coast by the 8th century BC. Volubilis, founded in the 3rd century BC as the Mauretanian capital, became an outpost of Rome, and UNESCO, which inscribed it in 1997, describes 42 hectares inside a Roman rampart of 168 to 169 AD; the town later served briefly as the capital of Idris I, who is buried nearby at Moulay Idris. Zellige, geometric mosaic tilework, probably evolved from Greco-Roman mosaics like those found at Volubilis and Lixus.

The earthquake of 8 September 2023 struck several listed places. At Jemaa el-Fnaa a minaret of the Kharboush Mosque fell onto vehicles, the Kutubiyya Mosque was damaged, and a tower of the Tinmel Mosque, on Morocco's tentative list since 1995, partly collapsed along with its surrounding walls.