As I have explained earlier, religious knowledge and understanding and the degree of adherence to Islamic prescriptions and prohibitions vary among the illiterate villagers, the fugarā and other pious men and women, and among those who have been to school and exposed to at least some degree of exegesis of the Koran and ḥadīth. The same variation exists among these three categories with regard to the understanding of and attitude to the customary rituals ('awāid). Although they distinguish them conceptually from practices which they classify as religion (dīn), the illiterate villagers do not see the two classes of rituals as mutually incompatible or contradictory. Their easy co-existence within the encompassing system of notions constituting contemporary Berti culture is the main problem which I am going to explore in the following chapters. When I describe the knowledge which underlies the customary rituals, it has to be borne in mind that it is the knowledge of the illiterate villagers – both men and women – who still constitute the absolute majority of the Berti. In the last chapter I then describe the views and attitudes of the literate and the pious.

Apart from a few brief invocations occasionally uttered, the customary rituals do not encompass a verbal tradition, a corpus of standardised texts, and there are no myths explicitly linked to them.