Deep in the Anti-Atlas Mountains of rural Morocco, about 80 kilometers northeast of Agadir, sits the Inzerki honey cooperative, one of the oldest traditional apiaries in the world, and a UNESCO-recognized heritage site that has been operating for over five centuries. Its beekeepers wear white garments to put the bees at ease. They consult one another before extracting honey so as not to disturb the bees’ rhythm. They also make sure there are no outstanding quarrels with one another before entering the apiary so as not to disturb social harmony.

What makes Inzerki remarkable is not only its longevity, but how its community makes sense of the threats pressing in from the outside world, through a shared religious prism that transforms every material challenge into a question of spiritual consequence.

Our study of Inzerki, published in the Journal of Business Venturing Insights, offers a new framework for understanding how indigenous community enterprises (ICEs) navigate civic threats, and why the role of religion in that process has been overlooked for far too long.

Civic threats are real, and multiplying

Inzerki faces what we call civic threats: multifaceted external challenges that put at risk the intellectual, affective, material, and moral resources sustaining collective life. These threats arrive from three directions simultaneously.

First, urbanization is quietly hollowing out the village. As younger residents relocate to Agadir or Casablanca in search of work, houses are left empty and huts fall into disrepair. The community’s membership and workforce shrink steadily.

Second, market modernization threatens the enterprise itself. Fraudulent honey, diluted with sugar syrups and sold under misleading branding, undercuts the market for authentic artisanal production. Brand appropriation compounds the damage: one member recounted discovering a photograph of their apiary plastered across an entire wall of a honey shop in the capital, with no connection to the cooperative.

Third, external actors with incompatible agendas approach Inzerki with offers and projects that, however well-intentioned, often clash with the community’s values. Every rejected acquisition offer, every contested cement parking lot, is a reminder that the cooperative’s autonomy must be actively defended.

Interpreting material threats through a shared religious prism

Here is what separates Inzerki from the usual story of a community under pressure: its members do not experience these threats as merely material disruptions. Instead, these threats pass through a shared religious prism, anchored in the four Islamic principles of baraka (divine blessing), amāna (moral trust), khilāfa (stewardship), and khidma (service), and emerge transformed into questions of moral and spiritual consequence.

We call this interpretive mechanism spiritual refraction: just as light passing through a prism separates into distinct frequencies, a civic threat passing through the community’s shared religious prism is transformed from a material disruption into a question of spiritual stakes.

Three pathways, divergent civic wealth outcomes

Spiritual refraction does not produce a single, uniform response. Instead, it opens three distinct pathways, each with different consequences for civic wealth, i.e., the blend of material and intangible resources that sustains collective well-being across the enterprise, the community, and the systems that support them.

Material deflection occurs when individuals remain anchored to the material dimension of the threat while discounting its spiritual implications. This pathway leads to civic wealth depletion through community loss: the enterprise may persist in modified form, but the shared culture that sustained it erodes.

Spiritual–civic integration is the pathway that enables civic wealth maintenance. It unfolds when individuals attend simultaneously to both the material threat and its spiritual meaning.

Spiritual withdrawal emerges when individuals retreat almost entirely into the spiritual domain and disengage from material adaptation. This pathway leads to civic wealth depletion through enterprise loss: the community’s spiritual commitments remain intact while its economic viability withers.

Why this matters beyond Morocco

The findings carry implications that reach well beyond one cooperative in the Atlas Mountains.

For policymakers and development agencies, the lesson is pointed: external interventions can inadvertently undermine the civic wealth they aim to strengthen, if they ignore the religious and moral architectures through which those communities assign meaning to their practices. A parking lot, a certification requirement, or a modernization incentive may look like support from the outside and like an intrusion from the inside.

For entrepreneurship scholars, this study opens a largely unexplored territory. Research on religion and entrepreneurship has focused almost exclusively on the individual level, how a founder’s faith shapes cognition and action. Our work extends this to the community level, showing that shared religious prisms are collective interpretive tools that shape how entire communities read the world and decide what is worth protecting.

For the broader public, Inzerki is a reminder that economic resilience is never purely economic. A 500-year-old cooperative survives not only because of the quality of its honey, but because of the meaning its members attach to producing it, a meaning inseparable from their faith, their ecological ethic, and their sense of obligation to those who came before them and those who will come after.

📖 Read the full paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352673426000417

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Author bio

Esther Salvi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Sustainable and Inclusive Business at IMD (International Institute for Management Development) in Lausanne, Switzerland, and a Lecturer at the University of Geneva. Her research focuses on informal and indigenous entrepreneurship, sustainability, and impact. Her work has been published in leading journals including Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice and the Journal of Business Venturing Insights.

Salah Chafik is an Assistant Professor at the School of Economics, Administration, and Public Policy at DI (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies), an Research Fellow at University College London and Tallinn University of Technology.