Morocco

Volume IV of this archive is Morocco, and it has only just started. What is published here is the beginning of a volume rather than a survey of one. What follows is orientation — how dates work here, what the record is built from, and what this volume does not intend to cover.

Three calendars have official standing, and the state’s own holiday list shows how differently it treats them. The national holidays are given as ordinary dates: 1 January, 11 January, 1 May, 30 July, and so on through the year. The religious feasts are given by their Hijri dates alone — the first of Chawal, the first of Muharram, the tenth of Dhu al-Hijja — with no Gregorian equivalent printed beside them.

That omission is informative, and it is why this volume publishes no Islamic date yet. In the archive’s Turkish volume the state religious authority publishes those equivalents years ahead, so a lunar date there can be given as confirmed. Here the official list does not map them at all. Until this archive finds a Moroccan authority that does, a Moroccan lunar date would have to be published as an estimate, and it would rather publish nothing than guess.

The third calendar is the reason this volume opens where it does. 14 January is a national holiday: the Amazigh new year, listed alongside the Gregorian and Islamic new years on the same official page. A state recognising three new years, and printing them together, is not a common arrangement.

For the practices themselves, this volume starts from two places: Morocco’s inscriptions on UNESCO’s Representative List, and the national intangible-heritage inventory the state maintains region by region and province by province. The second is the more useful of the two in the long run and the harder to read quickly.

What this volume will not attempt, at least not soon: the very large regional repertoire that exists in practice without a published record, and anything dated by a calendar this archive’s engine cannot express. Absence here means not yet sourced. It does not mean unimportant.

On what is expected of a visitor, this profile says nothing. No conduct guidance from a Moroccan institution has been found, and the archive would rather record that as unknown than borrow the answer from somewhere else. It carries such guidance for one other country and did not copy it here, because etiquette does not transfer across borders.

This is not a survey of what is practised in Morocco, and it is not close. It is a country the archive has committed to, with its first sources attached and its first entries beginning to appear.