The Hamadsha

The Hamadsha are members of a loosely and diversely organized religious brotherhood, or confraternity, which traces its spiritual heritage back to two Moroccan saints of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Sidi 'Ali ben Hamdush and Sidi Ahmed Dghughi. Despite a certain notoriety due to their head-slashing and other practices of self-mutilation, the Hamadsha have received comparatively little attention in the literature, ethnographic or other, on Morocco and North Africa.