Hdiya and Dfou3: The Gift Procession and What Goes in It

On a Thursday afternoon in the Fez medina, four men in white djellabas are walking in single file down a street too narrow for two of them abreast. Each carries on his head a round tray the size of a cartwheel, covered by a conical lid, the whole thing wrapped in embroidered green cloth. A fifth man walks ahead with a drum. Behind them, a dozen women in caftans ululate at intervals, and the sound goes ahead of the procession down the alleys so that doors open before it arrives. The trays contain sugar, henna, cloth, and a great deal of else. They are going to the bride’s house. Everyone on the street knows it.

This is the hdiya: the delivery of the groom’s family’s gifts to the bride, some days before the wedding. It is the third event in the Moroccan wedding sequence, after the asking and the contract, and it is the first one that happens in public. The hub article on the sequence places it; this one opens the trays.

What follows describes the urban, Arabic-speaking form, with Fez — which keeps the most elaborate version — as the reference and the regional forms noted where they differ.

What the hdiya is, and what it is not

The word hdiya means gift. The word dfou’, used in Fez and Rabat for the same event, comes from the verb dfa’, to push forward or to pay, and it names the thing more honestly: the hdiya is a payment, in kind, made in public, by the family that is acquiring a daughter-in-law to the family that is giving one up.

It is important to separate it from the sadaq. The sadaq is the bridal payment recorded in the marriage contract, owed by the groom to the bride herself, in money, and enforceable in court. The hdiya is not recorded anywhere, is owed by the groom’s family to the bride’s family, is paid in sugar and cloth, and is enforceable only by the neighbours. The two are related — a generous hdiya can accompany a nominal sadaq, and a large sadaq can excuse a modest hdiya — but they are not the same transfer, and families keep separate accounts of them.

Two directions: hdiya and shwar

The hdiya goes from the groom’s family to the bride. A second transfer, the shwar, goes from the bride’s family to the couple’s new home, and the two together make up the material foundation of the household.

The shwar is the trousseau: the bedroom furniture, the mattresses and blankets, the linen, the kitchen equipment, the salon cushions, and the bride’s own clothes and jewellery. It is assembled by the bride’s family over the engagement period, at their expense, and it is what the bride brings with her. In older practice — and still in some towns — the shwar was carried in procession to the groom’s house before the wedding, on carts or in trucks, so that the neighbourhood could see what the bride’s family had provided. In the cities it is now delivered by a van, without ceremony, and its contents are discussed rather than displayed.

The two transfers are reciprocal and unequal by design. The hdiya is consumable, visible, and public: sugar, cloth, a ram. The shwar is durable, domestic, and private: the bed the couple will sleep in for twenty years. The groom’s family pays for the wedding night; the bride’s family pays for the house. Neither side describes it this way, and both sides keep count.

The sugar

Sugar is the one item whose absence from a hdiya would be remarked on, and the one whose quantity is remembered.

It comes as the qaleb sukkar, the sugar loaf: a cone of hard white sugar, about two kilograms, wrapped in blue paper, made in Morocco since the nineteenth century and still the standard gift of every occasion from a birth to a condolence visit. At a hdiya the loaves are brought by the dozen. Ten is modest. Twenty is normal for a comfortable family. Forty or fifty is a statement. In Fez the loaves are stacked on the trays in a pyramid so that the height can be seen over the heads of the bearers.

What the sugar is understood to mean is sweetness, and abundance, and the wish that the marriage be sweet. What it is also understood to mean is that the groom’s family can afford it. Both meanings are present at once, and Moroccans do not find this contradictory. The loaves are not eaten by the bride’s family. They are redistributed — to the neighbours, to the women who help with the henna night, to the poor — and in this way the groom’s family’s generosity is spent by the bride’s family in its own name, which is the point.

The sugar loaf has its own article on this site, covering its manufacture, its blue paper, and the occasions at which it is given.

Henna, milk, and dates

Three smaller items are as fixed as the sugar and older than it.

Henna is carried for the henna night, which will follow the hdiya by a day or two. It comes as powder, in a decorated paper cone or a cloth bag, and sometimes as a whole branch of the plant. The henna in the hdiya is the groom’s family’s contribution to an evening they will not attend. Its presence says that the transition the henna will mark is theirs as well as the bride’s. At the henna night itself the bride’s hands will be painted with paste made, in part, from this powder, and the groom’s mother will be told so.

Milk and dates are the items of every Moroccan welcome. They are offered to a guest at the door, to a bride and groom on the platform, to a returning pilgrim. Carried in the hdiya, they invert the welcome: the visitors bring it with them. A bottle of milk and a box of dates, placed on top of the trays, are the first things unwrapped.

None of these three is expensive. All three are required. A hdiya of fifty sugar loaves and a suitcase of caftans that arrived without henna, milk, and dates would be received politely and discussed afterwards.

Cloth, caftans, shoes, and the suitcase

The bulk of the hdiya, by value, is what the bride will wear.

In older practice this meant bolts of cloth — brocade, velvet, silk — from which the bride’s caftans would be made, and the quality of the cloth was the measure of the family. It now more often means finished garments: two or three caftans or takchitas, a djellaba, a set of belgha slippers or cherbil embroidered mules, a handbag, perfume, and a watch. These are packed in a suitcase, and the suitcase is carried on a tray like the sugar. In the Fassi form the cloth is still preferred to the garment, and a family that sends finished caftans rather than fabric is understood to be from somewhere else.

Jewellery, if it is given at the hdiya rather than at the khotba or the wedding night, is gold — bracelets, a necklace, earrings — and it is the bride’s own property, as the sadaq is. A gift of jewellery from the groom’s mother to the bride is not a loan against the future household. It is hers, and in a divorce it stays hers.

The clothing in the hdiya is not what the bride will wear at the wedding night. Those dresses belong to the negafa and are rented for the evening. The hdiya clothes are what she will wear afterwards, in her new house, on the feasts, to visit her mother. They are the wardrobe of a married woman, given to her by the family she is marrying into.

The ‘oula: provisions for the feast

The oldest layer of the hdiya, and the one that has thinned most in the cities, is the ‘oula: the provisions.

In the rural form of the wedding, the feast was held at the bride’s house and the groom’s family supplied the food for it — a sheep or two, sacks of flour and semolina, tins of oil, tea and sugar, honey. The ‘oula was delivered with the hdiya or as a separate load, and it was the groom’s family’s contribution to a party they would attend as guests. A live ram, led on a rope behind the trays, is the surviving emblem of this. In Fez and Casablanca a family that keeps the form will send a ram, and the ram will be slaughtered for the henna-night dinner. A family that has dropped the form sends a cheque, or nothing, because the caterer at the hall is already paid.

The ‘oula is worth naming because it explains a feature of the modern hdiya that otherwise looks odd: why a delivery of clothes and sugar sometimes includes a sheep. The sheep was once the main event. The clothes were the accompaniment.

The trays, and their return

In Fez the gifts are carried in tyafer (singular tifor): large round trays of wood or metal with a tall conical lid, the whole wrapped in cloth and carried on the head. The tifor is a piece of ceremonial furniture that exists for this purpose and for almost no other, and a family that does not own a set rents them from the same men who carry them. In Casablanca and Rabat the tray is the flatter tbaq, of woven straw or of metal, without the lid, covered with an embroidered cloth. In the south the gifts go in baskets, or in the boot of a car.

The trays are not the bride’s family’s to keep. They are returned to the groom’s family some days later, and they are returned full. What goes back is pastry — kaab el ghzal, ghriba, fekkas — made by the women of the bride’s family, in quantity, and sometimes a gift for the groom: a djellaba, a pair of slippers, a length of cloth for a shirt. The return of the trays is the bride’s family’s answer to the hdiya, and it is judged in the same terms. A tray sent back with a single plate of biscuits would be noticed.

This reciprocity — full one way, full the other — is the structure of the event, and it is what distinguishes the hdiya from a payment. A payment goes one direction. The hdiya goes out and comes back, changed.

The procession

The delivery has an order, and in the cities that keep it the order is this.

1. Assembly at the groom’s house

   The gifts are packed onto the trays in the morning, by the groom’s female relatives, and covered. The bearers arrive — hired men, in white, four or six of them — with a drummer and sometimes a ghaita player. In Casablanca the trays go into a car with a ribbon on it.

2. The walk, or the drive

   The procession moves through the neighbourhood at a walking pace, the drum going ahead. The groom’s female relatives follow, ululating. The groom does not walk with it; his mother may. The route is chosen to be seen.

3. Reception at the bride’s door

   The bride’s female relatives come to the door and answer the ululation with their own. Milk and dates are offered to the arriving party before the arriving party’s milk and dates are unpacked. The trays are carried inside and set down in the salon.

4. The uncovering

   The cloths are lifted, one tray at a time, in front of the women of the bride’s family. The contents are seen, counted, and praised. The bride is present for this in most families and absent in the most traditional ones, where the gifts are shown to her afterwards.

5. The meal

   The bearers and the drummer are fed in the kitchen or the courtyard and paid. The groom’s female relatives are fed in the salon. The afternoon ends with tea.

The whole thing takes an afternoon. In the medina of Fez it is a small public event; in a Casablanca apartment block it is a car, a lift, and a salon, and the ululation from the balcony is what tells the building.

What it has become: the display

Since roughly the mid-2010s, in the cities, the hdiya has acquired a second life as a display.

The gifts are no longer only delivered; they are arranged. A decorator — often the same business that supplies the henna-night décor — sets them out on a stand or a table at the bride’s house, in matching boxes with the bride’s and groom’s initials, under lights, with the sugar loaves re-wrapped in a colour that matches the theme. The arrangement is photographed and posted before the gifts are touched. At the henna night the guests are shown it. The name for this, borrowed from French, is le trousseau or simply la hdiya, and businesses now offer it as a package.

It is easy to be dismissive about this and unnecessary. The hdiya was always a display; the trays and the drum and the route through the neighbourhood were never about logistics. The display has simply moved from the street, where the neighbours saw it, to the screen, where a larger and more distant set of neighbours sees it. The sugar is the same sugar. What has changed is the audience, and the fact that the audience now includes people who will never eat the pastries that come back on the trays.

The hdiya was always a display. The trays and the drum and the route through the neighbourhood were never about logistics. Editorial statement — Moroccan Rituals

What the neighbours count

The hdiya is read, and it is worth saying plainly what is read from it.

The number of sugar loaves is counted, and remembered, and compared with the number sent at the last wedding on the street. The cloth is assessed for quality by women who know cloth. The presence or absence of a ram, of gold, of a watch for the bride, is noted. The size of the procession, the number of bearers, whether there was a drummer or a whole ensemble — all of this is information about the groom’s family’s means and intentions, and it is information the bride’s family wants the neighbourhood to have. A modest hdiya from a family known to be comfortable is read as a slight. An extravagant one from a family known to be stretched is read as debt.

The cost of a full Fassi hdiya — trays rented, bearers and musicians paid, forty sugar loaves, brocade, gold, a ram — is commonly cited at fifteen to forty thousand dirhams, and it is not the largest expense of the wedding. It is the first visible one. Families that cannot afford the form send the sugar and the henna and the milk and dates, in a car, without the trays, and the bride’s family receives them with the same ululation, because the form is what is required and the scale is what is negotiable.