| Bujlood | |
|---|---|
 People celebrating Boujloud inAgadir, Morocco | |
| Also called |
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| Date | 10 Dhu al-Hijjah |
Bujlood (Moroccan Arabic:بوجلود, lit.father of pelts) orBilmawen (Moroccan Arabic:بيلماون,Berber languages:ⴱⵉⵍⵎⴰⵡⵏ) is a folkAmazigh celebration observed annually afterEid al-Adha in parts ofMorocco in which a person or more wears the pelt of the livestock sacrificed onEid al-Adha.[1][2][3]
The termBujlood comes from theArabicأبوabu (meaning father, or possessor)[4] andjloodجلود (plural ofjildجلد, meaning skin, leather, or pelt),[5] sobujlood means father or possessor of pelts.
The term inTamazight isbilmaouen.[6]
The celebration begins with abujloodcarnival, usually on the day afterEid al-Adha, when young people wear masks and the skins of the sheep or goats that were sacrificed on the Eid. They dance around in their masks and costumes carrying limbs of the sacrificed animals, which they use to play with people they run into and trying to touch them. The point is to spread laughter and cheer.
The French ethnologistsEdmond Doutté andÉmile Laoust [fr] connect the tradition to pre-Islamic Amazigh rites celebrating the changing of seasons and death and resurrection.[7] The Finnish anthropologistEdvard Westermarck connected the tradition to the RomanSaturnalia festival.[8]
The Moroccan anthropologistAbdellah Hammoudi, in his essayThe Victim and Its Masks: An Essay on Sacrifice and Masquerade in the Maghreb, refutes these interpretations and contextualizesbujlood as a Moroccan cultural practice inseparable from theEid al-Adha sacrifice.[9][10]
Hassan Rachik [fr] has also written about the sacrifice traditions of theAit Mizan and theAit Souka in theHigh Atlas.[10]
In the opinion of some local Islamic scholars, this celebration is "not permissible as it likens humans, who have been blessed by God, to beasts, and the skin of these animals defiles the human body. It also makes it impossible topray on time, because changing in and out of the clothes takes time, and the individual in question has to wash himself inablution after each removal of the skins, as they give off a nasty odor, especially in the summer time."[11]
