The wealth of women

Amazigh common law, transmitted orally from generation to generation and perpetuated in most of the tribes, is a kind of justice imparted by the jama’a or tribal assembly represented by a group of men, usually elders. This local legislative body, very different within the Berber groups of the same country, coexisted with the fiqh or Islamic law in the Berber social system until the legal homogenisation carried out by the independent states in the middle of the 20th century. One of the most notable differences between the two laws refers to inheritance. While Islamic law grants women half of what men receive, Amazigh law generally shares the inheritance between the men.

The jewels are always the property of the women and represent their economic independence in the case of problems or disagreement with their partner. Normally they pass through inheritance from mothers to daughters, although Amazigh women receive them from the hands of their husband or his parents when they marry, as they are their dowry. The quantity and quality of the jewellery received in matrimony varies according to the family agreement and, above all, according to the family status of the couple. Thus, a man who wants to marry a woman from a wealthy family must provide a dowry rich in jewels and, if necessary, also in money or in kind.

Jewellery, like clothes, identifies the members of a single tribe so that shapes, materials and decorations tell us of both the tribal and geographic origin of the women who wear them.


For many years, the dowry has been seen as the merchandising of women. French researchers in the 19th and early 20th centuries thought that the dowry was the proof that, in Maghrebian society, the matrimonial contract concealed buying and selling of the wife. For the majority, the dowry indicated the rights acquired by the husband in relation to the wife while the union lasted. Currently, the dowry is seen from a very different perspective: it constitutes the part that corresponds to the future wife for her participation in the creation and consolidation of the new family tie. The dowry, apart from representing a female social recognition, allows the guarantee of the economic autonomy of the woman in any adverse situation.