ABSTRACT
The two articles presented here, the first a republication of a 1967 original and the second a much shorter 1978 addendum to it, and not previously published, may be considered as a unit and as at once an exercise both in structural theory (1967) and in historical methodology (1978). The ideology of ‘five fifths’ as a powerful segmentary concept which underpins the first article is shown in the second not only to have been fundamentally Islamic, but to have been a principle adapted by the Prophet himself, possibly even from a pre-Islamic prototype, toward the division of plunder captured in wars from his non-Muslim enemies. Hence its purpose was originally military and was associated, in one way or another, with the early conquests and expansion of Islam. Its subsequent proliferation as a diagnostic of certain specifically Moroccan tribal structures may be more difficult to explain (though it may well have had pre-Islamic roots there too); but the interesting fact is that in the Moroccan cases recounted here, the form of the phenomenon and of its power ideology for its possessor groups remained everywhere the same. This was so even though its function came to differ markedly, even radically, from one such possessor group to the next, which was generally spatially discontinuous with it.
