Thesleeping child (maghrebi Arabic:ragued orbou-mergoud), according toMoroccan and the widerMaghrebian folk belief, is afetus which has been rendered dormant byblack orwhite magic and may eventually wake up and be born after the normalpregnancy term. This belief, supported by the concept that God's will controls everything and that no event should be considered truly impossible, is used by local communities to deal with occasional cases of pregnancy in women with absentee husbands, a frequent situation in the modern era due to the large number of males working as immigrant labor inEurope. This folk belief is used to dismiss an accusation ofadultery and the consequences that such an accusation would bring.
This belief was acknowledged by traditional Islamic legislation in Morocco, and is still given as an explanation by some divorced or separated women expecting their ex-husbands to acknowledge thepaternity of a child born up to twelve months after the separation. Article 154 of the currentMudawana in Moroccan law stipulates that a child born up to one year after the separation is considered as fathered by the ex-husband.
The storyline ofL'Enfant endormi (2005), a Belgo-Moroccan movie byYasmine Kassari, is built around this theme.