Maâjoun

Maâjoun is a Moroccan sweet made with cannabis: a paste of almonds, aniseed, nuts and cannabis seed, scented with nutmeg, poppy seed, mace and cardamom and bound with olive oil or honey. Its name, Arabic maʿjūn, says what it is: something kneaded, a paste. It is eaten in small pieces with a glass of hot tea.^[1][2]

What makes it interesting is where it is eaten. The semiotician Khalid Hadji, who interviewed people in Morocco about it, found maâjoun among young men on the margins of society, among craftsmen and the musicians of the Gnawa and ʿIssawa brotherhoods, and also in prominent families, eaten according to a set ritual in chosen company. The same substance is a street narcotic in one setting and a refined delicacy in another.^[1]

A paste from the pharmacy

The word goes back to the medicine of the medieval Islamic world, where a maʿjūn was a compound remedy prepared as a paste. Hadji points to the pharmacopoeias that describe such preparations: Avicenna’s Canon, a fourteenth-century treatise by Najm al-Dīn Maḥmūd of Shiraz, Dāwūd al-Anṭākī’s sixteenth-century Tadhkira, and a thirteenth-century apothecary’s manual by the herbalist al-Hārūnī with a whole chapter on making medicinal pastes, forty-seven of them.^[1] Almond pastes, he notes, were used to carry a remedy, because they acted faster than a decoction of herbs.^[1]

The Moroccan maâjoun keeps the form of that pharmacy and of a familiar sweet. Its recipe is close to sellou, the toasted-flour confection Moroccans eat during Ramadan and at a child’s naming feast, with cannabis added. Hadji reads this as a way of slipping the forbidden past the watchers: something close to a narcotic, presented as an apparently lawful pastry.^[1]

The afternoon gathering

The older form, Hadji writes, survives among people who keep to the “rules of the art”. Gatherings start after the afternoon prayer, at the end of the working day and often at weekends, in a garden or a house at the edge of town, away from curious neighbours and the police. They are held by men of the middle classes, sometimes joined by people of high standing, and separately by women of the middle and upper classes, in a large house with no men present.^[1]

At the men’s gatherings, called zhou, “pleasure”, there may be wine, song and joking as well as kif and maâjoun; poets composed malhun verses about such evenings. At the women’s, maâjoun is passed round on plates to be tried, amid song, dance and confidences. Hadji’s informants described it as a means to drop the social mask and talk freely, not to get as intoxicated as possible.^[1]

Some of those he interviewed believed the custom imitated the entertainments of the Makhzen, the royal court, which would explain why notables sometimes attend, and why the quality of the ingredients matters.^[1] That is an oral tradition, reported as such.

Old recipe, new street forms

Alongside the classic paste, Hadji lists street varieties with blunt names.^[1]

Name	What Hadji’s informants described
Barbouqa	Finely cut kif, or the leftovers of the plant, crushed into yoghurt, sellou or biscuits
al-Qortassa, “the bullet”	Spices and olive oil with a large dose of cannabis, sold wrapped in plastic like a cartridge
Chkilita, “the bit of chocolate”	Another name in current use
Assamaka, al-Qatila (“the killer”)	Mixed with pills or psychiatric medicines; described as dangerous

These newer mixtures, with tablets or pharmaceuticals, have little to do with the old recipe, and Hadji treats them as something apart.^[1]

Food, drug and the law

Hadji calls maâjoun “both licit and illicit, food and drug”. Socially it is tolerated in private. In his reading it is not recognised by law, though not explicitly named in it either.^[1] Its cannabis is another matter. Independent Morocco banned kif in 1956 and restated the prohibition in its 1974 narcotics law. The 2021 law that licensed cannabis for medical and industrial use left unlicensed production and use under the old ban, so a maâjoun made with cannabis is still outside the law.

It is the eaten counterpart of the kif pipe. An older account adds that some versions were mixed with other drugs: a toxicology handbook of 1957 described majun as containing hemp, opium and datura seed.^[2]