the terrifying moroccan legend

story of aicha Qandicha

There are many realistic accounts of the famous biography of "Aisha Qandisha" in the Moroccan folklore. At that time, she was a genie, not a human.

She is - in another narration - a Moroccan woman whose husband was killed by Portuguese colonialism in the period between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. She decided to take revenge and became a fierce resistance to him. She is also a "countess", meaning an Andalusian princess who was expelled from Andalusia. colonizer resistance.

She is also a woman who hails from Andalusia, from a noble Moorish family who was expelled from there. The Portuguese called her "Aisha the Countess", meaning Princess Aisha (contessa). It cooperated with the Moroccan army at the time to fight the Portuguese who killed and displaced its people; She showed ingenuity and courage in the fight, so that some, led by the Portuguese, thought that she was not a human, but a fairy. Aisha Qandisha achieved prestige and glory for herself among the resistance fighters, the Mujahideen, and the general Moroccans when she fought the occupation with courage and intelligence. It is narrated that she sometimes adopted a strange doctrine in her resistance, as she would lure the soldiers of the Crusader garrisons and drag them to valleys and swamps, where they would be slaughtered, something that terrified the European occupiers.

Judge Al-Abbas bin Ibrahim Al-Samali (1959/1877) indicated in the ninth part of his book “Al-Alam” (pg. 416 and 417) that “Aisha Qandisha” was a righteous and Sufi saint who lived during the period of Sidi Muhammad bin Abd al-Rahman, who died in 1873 AD, who used to visit her to seek blessings from her prayers A group of saints lived like the famous Sidi Al-Zwain (……) and she used to spin sandals and make them with ropes that were sewn with sandals and ate from that. She died and was buried in the Bab Ghamt cemetery in Marrakesh.

The novels that circulate the biography of this strange and mysterious character are many, in which reality intersects with legend, and is dominated by the superstitious aspect so much that it is difficult to determine whether this character is real or just a myth from the Moroccan popular imagination; Sometimes she is a genie with the body of a beautiful female and the feet of a camel or a mule, she takes up valleys, wells, and caves for her dwelling, and fascinates men with her beauty and lures them to her den where she kills them and subsists on the meat and blood of their bodies, and she is only afraid of one thing, which is the ignition of fire in front of her. Some of them claimed that she got in the way of men who used to live in villages, so she almost caught them, but they managed to escape from her by burning their turbans in front of her. Fire is its weak point.

Moroccan folklore also depicts Aisha Kandisha in the form of an old, greedy and envious witch, who spends all her time playing games to separate husbands, and again in the form of a beautiful woman with feet that resemble the hooves of goats, camels or mules (according to the Moroccan regions). And whoever is led by chance to her whereabouts is subjected to her temptation, so he is led behind her, unconscious, to where she hides, without resistance, to devour him mercilessly and extinguish the fire of her constant hunger for human flesh and blood.

The biography of "Aisha Kandisha", with its many novels, has become the most famous tale passed by generations in Morocco, and the narrators acted in it in such a way that it vacillated between reality and myth, between positive and negative. westermark (1862/1939), who compared this venerable fairy with Ishtar, the ancient goddess of love who was sacred to the peoples of the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, including the Carthaginians, Phoenicians and Canaanites, who held sacred rituals in her honor. He assumed that Aisha Qandisha is the queen of heaven. The ancient Semites believed that it inhabited springs, rivers, seas, and wet areas in general. It was also addressed by the French-Moroccan sociologist Paul Pascon (1958/1932) in his book "Legends and Beliefs from Morocco".