myth and counter-myth: “the berber” as national signiﬁer in algerian historiographies

8/12/2019 Myth and Counter-Myth: The Berber As National Signifier in Algerian Historiographies

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Myth and Counter-Myth:

The Berber As National Signifier in

Algerian Historiographies

In any event, one cannot deny, as certain propaganda has attempted todeny, the existence of Berbers in North Africa.

Jacques Berque,Le Maghreb entre deux guerres (1962)

James McDougall

North African history has often been narrated in academic and political discoursesthrough recurrent series of binary oppositions, of which the couple Arab/Berberis perhaps the most central. Routinely deployed as an explanatory principle of thesociological reality of Maghribi societies, and persistently invoked in the discoursesof Maghribi politics, this device has been fundamental to practices of categorizationand representation both among North Africans themselves and by outside observers.1

In Algeria, in particular, it has provided the idiom for some of the most bitterlyfought social conflicts of the past half-century.

My article is not intended as another restatement of this scheme. Instead, itexplores the changing configuration of positions in a struggle to impose a culturallylegitimate definition of reality. This struggle, I argue, is itself the underlying reality(or at least a productive fundamentalproblematic for embarking on analysis) of more

visible conflicts that have periodically broken out in, and which continue to trouble,Algeria. It goes without saying that this question, as well as being acidly emotive incurrent politics, is steeped in a dense weight of history frequently experienced by

Radical History Review

Issue 86 (spring 2003): 6688Copyright 2003 by MARHO: The Radical Historians Organization, Inc.

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McDougall| Myth and Counter-Myth 67

those concerned with an extraordinary affective intensity, despite (or because of ) itsdistant provenance. This is a historical issue which reaches back into antiquity, evenprehistory, as well as forward into the present.

On April 18, 2001, a high school student, Massinissa Guermouh, was shot andkilled by Algerian police in Kabylia, the mountainous, predominantly berberophoneregion that hugs the coastline just east of the capital, Algiers, extending eastward forsome two hundred kilometers. Twenty-one years after the Berber Spring, and in anAlgeria wracked by ten years of atrocious civil conflict, waves of protest and con-frontation broke out between civilians and the Algerian state police forces, particu-larly in Kabylia, but also elsewhere. This Black Spring (printemps noir) turned intoa wider movement, la protesta, continuing through the summer and autumn of 2001,

with marches on the capital and sporadic violence in Kabylia. The legislative elec-tions in June 2002 were boycotted in the region, with two major parties, the RCD(Rassemblement pour la Culture et la Dmocratie, Rally for Culture and Democ-

racy) and the FFS (Front des Forces Socialistes, Socialist Forces Front), whose prin-cipal constituencies are in Kabylia, abstaining from fielding candidates. As was thecase twenty-one years previously, a broad-based movement of protest against theAlgerian governments policies, acting as a vehicle for a number of interests anddemands and arising from a complex syndrome of sociocultural, economic, andpolitical causes, was largely expressed (in its slogans and symbols) and readily inter-preted by the Algerian state itself and by outside commentators as a movement ofBerbers (the Kabyles) against Arabs (the state).2

From the colonial era (18301962), through the factional crises of national-ism in its gestative phase from the mid-1920s to the early 1950s, to the debates overnational culture in the 1970s, the 1980 Berber Spring, and the contemporary

Berber cultural movement in North Africa and the Maghribi diaspora, the Arab/Berber dichotomy has provided a ready mechanism for reading the complex multi-plicity (linguistic, cultural, ideological, and class) of Algerian society. In colonialAlgeria, an elaborate system of oppositions was contrived between Arabs andKabyles, with the former generally denigrated as civilizationally unimprovable, thelatter as closer to Europe in race, culture, and temperament.3 In 194849, the rev-olutionary populist movement embodying the most radical aspirations of nascentAlgerian nationalism, the PPA (Parti du Peuple Algrien, Algerian Peoples Party),experienced one of its most serious crises when one section of its leadership waspurged by another under the indictment of Berberism, a charge of divisive ethnicsubnationalism perceived as a cultural-political heresy within the party, which wouldeventually (through another factional split, in 195354) give birth to the FLN (Frontde Libration Nationale, National Liberation Front).4

After independence, under Algerias first two presidents, Ahmed ben Bella(196265) and Houari Boumdienne (196578), the elaboration of Algerian official



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culture under the tripartite slogan of nation, revolution, and science, privileged aconception of Algerian history and nationhood largely based on the doctrine of anessentially Arab-Islamic Algeria, propounded before the revolution by the religious

intellectuals of thesalafi movement.5 This modernist movement for the reform ofIslam (its members referred to themselves asmuslihn, reformists) posited a returnto the supposed purity of the earliest Islamic tradition, that of the pious forefathers(al-salaf al-slih). The current was represented in Algeria from the early 1920s on bya group of ulam (sing. lim, a learned religious/juridical scholar of Islam) aroundsheikh Abd al-Hamid ben Badis (1889 1940). Its organizational expression was theAssociation of Algerian Muslim Ulam (Jamyat al-Ulam al-Muslimn al-Jaziriyyn,Association des Ulama Musulmans AlgriensAUMA), founded in Algiers in May1931. Their promotion of an Algeria founded on (pure) Arabic and (pure) Islamleft little room for other languagesthe Berber and Arabic dialects of the popula-tionand cultural expression, including the everyday, lived Islam of both berbero-

phones and arabophones. The exact place that the Berber did occupy in theirvision of a true Algeria, however, has generally gone unexamined.

For the purposes of this discussion, this categorical Berber must also bemore fully contextualized, not least because the word itself is far from generallyacceptable. Indeed, most of the constituent groups of the current Berber culturalmovement would probably now prefer the term amazigh (pl., imazighen), a term

whose history is itself revealing. Now a general, self-designating ethnonym shared byberberophone groups throughout North Africa and the diaspora, the term is wellattested by the names given in Latin and Greek to North African populations inantiquity (Maxyes, Mazax, Mazices). It is the only self-designation known amongberberophones in central Morocco and the Tuareg (imha in the Ahaggar and Tas-

sili in the Algerian far southeast,imjeen further south, in Mali, Niger, the Ar). Bycontrast, traditional culture in northern Algerian berberophone societies of theAurs, the Mzab, and Kabylia did not, it seems, know the term,6 and its generaliza-tion to these regions, (as, thereafter, in the diaspora) occurred only in the periodafter 1945, particularly under the impulse of nationalist militantism among Kabyles.7

Amazigh here was a national signifier, first, for the mobilization of Kabyle-speakingyouth, particularly in the Muslim Boy Scout movement, through songs such as Kkera mmi-s amazi [Arise, son of Amazigh].8

Amazigh is almost always, in its contemporary usage by Berber movements,understood to signify free man. Indeed, the word is, in the current language ofBerber cultural and political groups, densely symbolic of liberty. Its etymology,though, is much less certain than the frequent reiteration that this meaning suggests.According to Salem Chaker: It is, however, certainly unfounded and appears to bean undue extrapolation of accurate, regionally specific datathat is, the restrictionof the signifier amazigh among berberophone groups of rigid and complex social

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stratification to high-caste individuals, free men, perhaps the noble or suzerainin contradistinction to other berberophones of black African or mixed descent andinferior social status (slaves, descendants of slaves, . . . specific professional groups:

musicians, butchers).9These few elementary observations begin to place us at the heart of the mat-

ter. It is in the conflicts over naming, and the meaning of naming, over the appro-priation of symbolic goods that serve to construct the categories by which societalself-definitionas community and nationoccur, that the Berber question ismeaningful and instructive. In particular, given the sociocultural and linguistic poli-tics of independent Algeria, and before it of Algerian nationalism, it is worthwhileasking what was the formulation given the Berber by the first architects of Algeriannationalisms cultural program, thesalafi-reformist ulam. Since Algerian national(ized)history also began with them, what is the meaning of the Berber in their texts? Andhow does this meaning relate to their overall project of expressing the essentially

Arab-Islamic national identity of a renascent Algeria and a resurgent ArabMaghrib?

Colonizers from Canaan

According to a recent study of Roman North Africa, very little can be saidconfidently of prehistoric Algeria.10 The proto- and early historic eras (roughly 1500to 150 B.C.) are only a little better documented. The Greek historians and geogra-phers who mention the region clearly knew almost nothing about it . . . much of whatHerodotus has to say about the north African interior is demonstrably untrue. 11 Thesurviving indigenous evidence, inscriptions in Lybic/Libyan characters (usually onfunerary stelae, although building inscriptions exist also, including the sole datable

text, which belongs to 139 or 138 B.C.),12 is impressive testament to a language atbest, imperfectly understood today.13 These samples of the ancient language thatcontemporary prehistorians and classical scholars term Lybic or Libyan, and whichBerber writers (after colonial ethnographic and epigraphic scholarship)14 assimilateunproblematically to Tamazight, the complex of Berber dialects spoken and writtentoday, are generally untranslated and frequently indecipherable. This is true of theinscriptions found at the spectacular rock painting sites in the Tassili nAjjer, in theextreme southeast of Algeria, as of the texts collected before independence byFrench archaeologists in the north (particularly in the area between Annaba and theTunisian border). Contemporary local berberophones have found these inscriptionslegible, but not meaningful.

Furthermore, the precise status and nature of Libyan in antiquity is, again,reading from the surviving epigraphic record and applying elementary rules ofevidence, uncertain. We cannot hope to deduce from these texts [limited to formalinscriptions] how far, if at all, the language was in daily use. . . . The fact that it is




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known solely from funerarystelae makes it impossible to say whether or not the lan-guage was spoken, or if so by what sections of the population. 15 The Libyan char-acters (or at least, eastern and Saharan variants of the several attested forms of this

alphabet)16 survived astifinagh script, long used among the Tuareg.17So we can say very little for certain about this enigmatic ancient language and

whoever might have spoken (or at least inscribed) it. It is even argued that theassumption of a coherent social and linguistic continuum of the native populationpersisting from pre-Punic times to the present day . . . though not disprovable, [is]extremely fragile, that ancient Libyan may, or may not, be the, or an, ancestor ofpresent-day Berber,18 and that the precise connection between the two may per-haps never be known.19 To contemporary, self-designating Amazigh communities,of course, all this is anything but an academic question. The promotion oftifinagh,the notion ofimazighen as an ethnos and Tamazight as a linguistic unity, the creationof an Amazigh flag and mobilization in favor of amazigh sovereignty,20 are impor-

tant developments. The very termArab Maghrib is noticeably avoided in contem-porary Berber activist literature where the name tamazgha, instead, denotes the

whole Amazigh land (extending from the Canary Isles to Siwa in western Egypt,and from the Mediterranean to the sub-Saharan fringe.)

It is important to situate such contemporary developments against the back-ground of how very little we really know of the origins and antiquity of the Berber.Important, too, to maintain a principled ignorance of what we cannot (presently)knowon the basis of evidence interpretable in the terms of international scholar-ship, terms which this study self-consciously sharesand to differentiate this knowl-edge base of ignorance from the object discourse of Berber identity (and its other,that of Arab-Islamic identity). Conflation of the one into the otherretranscrip-

tion as sociological reality of the terms of a particular social imaginary, or of a par-ticular construction of the native subjectis precisely the error that I am mostconcerned to avoid. The danger is self-evident: that in attempting to unmask the

ways in which a dominant worldview imposes its definition of social reality, disinter-ring suppressed, discrepant alternatives, we merely substitute one essential authen-ticity for another, as if excavating superficial topsoil to reveal a true substratum ofbedrock reality (an image in terms of which this question has all too frequentlybeen discussed). The intention here, to borrow from Prasenjit Duaras work on Chi-nese historiography, is not to recover an uncontaminated, originary history . . . butto locate the site[s] where narratives, indeed layers of narrative, seek to appropriateor wrestle with the historical real, which, of course, cannot be meaningfully knownexcept through narrative symbolizations.21

The Algerian salafiyya movement, in its reinscription of Algerian history,broke new ground in Arabic-language Maghribi historical writing by radically refor-mulating its relationship to traditional literary forms and practices. It engaged sys-




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tematically with the powerful modern techniques of colonial scholarship, appropri-ating to itself the enabling epistemic models which had allowed the French scholarlyexpert to become the preeminent authority on North African historical reality. That

reality was represented at a basic level in terms of a number of recurrent structuraloppositionsnomadic/sedentary, orthodox/heretical, the East/Europe, stagnation

within/civilization from without, despotism/democracy, Arab/Berber. By the Berberwas understood, parodying only very slightly, a sedentary, agriculturalist mountaincountryman speaking a non-Arabic dialect of a language group eventually classified,

with Nubian and Ethiopian, as Hamito-Semitic, and practicing a superficiallyIslamic, but in reality multimillenary culture particularly distinguished by its prim-itive direct-and-republican democracy. This Berber, thus constituted, had beenelected the true autochthonous North African, possibly even a distant cousin of ourancestors the Gaulsin any event a fascinating embodiment of a sociopolitical idylllong lost to industrial, imperial Europe. In particular, he had little in common,

indeed everything in contrast, with his neighbor the Arab.22This definition of the Maghribs sociological reality had to be countered by a

historical writing whose keystone would necessarily be the historical-cultural unityof all Algerians in the face of the colonizer. The reformists would have to refute whatcolonial knowledge saw as the complete opposition in organization, habits, legisla-tion, which separates the Arab from the Kabyle race and (one supposes, in princi-ple if not in fact) from other Berbers elsewhere as well.23

But simply writing off the category Berber was evidently not an option.Nor, of course, could the reformists proceed by noting the much more mundane and(now) uncontroversial fact that, given the numerical weakness of attested migrationfrom the Arabian peninsula, the majority of the Maghribs inhabitants were (and are)

doubtless best described as primarily Arabic-speaking (and, today, generally bi- ortrilingual) Muslims of ultimately Berber extraction. The rhetorical couple of Araband Berber conceived on the basis of observed, existing speech communities, butswiftly worked up in the French literature (and in all discussion forever after) into adensely woven mass of thickly textured images, imaginings, myths, and preju-diceswas a fact of Algerias sociological reality much too entrenched to be ignored.

On the contrary, a total national history had to concern itself specifically withthe Berber since, in responding to colonization and producing an Arabic knowledgeof the Maghribi past that could compete with the legitimate knowledge of Europeanscience and the pedigree of the colonizers nation, it would be necessary to put theancient history and prehistory of the region excavated, written about and testifiedto in museums by the French and in Frenchinto Arabic. This meant thoroughlyintegrating the pre-Islamic national past, the history of a Berber Maghrib beforethe coming of the Arabs, into a historical worldview that would nonetheless beanchored in Arabic and Islam.




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The Berber problem forsalafi historiography was, briefly, this: the Berberhad to be recuperated from colonial knowledge and united with the Arab, cir-cumventing colonial ethnographys categorical division of the two and, simultane-

ously, frustrating liberal-colonial claims of (and liberal, autochthonous demands for)equality for all Algerias inhabitants within the orbit of an ideal democratic and egal-itarian France by setting up an irreducible national identity as a present truthgrounded in history. The Berber must be, above all, defined by an essential, irre-ducibleinassimilabilitya theme conveniently borrowed from French arguments

which had held that berberophones were only superficially Islamized and Arab-izedand assimilated with the Arab in one authentic nation whose essence [is]Arab and Islamic.24 The Berber must be irreducibly unique and entirely reducedinto one, Arabic and Islamic, nation. And to achieve this coup of paradoxical logic,the deep antiquity of the Berber, beloved of colonial ethnography, had to be rootedelsewhere.

The texts of Tawfiq al-Madani (18991983), the most prolific historian of thesalafi-reformist movement in Algeria, thus focus on a structure of ancestry. I willconcentrate on two of his early works: Kitb al-Jazir[The book of Algeria], firstpublished in Algiers in 1932, and Qartjanna f arbaa usr[Carthage through fourages], which appeared in Tunis in 1927. The established Arabic genealogical princi-ples of knowledge transmission and community formation, isnd andnasab, pro-

vided him, in approaching the pre- and ancient history of the Maghrib, with a pow-erful epistemic framework for dealing with the vexed question of Berber origins. Hisanswer to the question is clear from the initial chapter of his Kitb al-Jazir, whichopens with the subheading the Berbers and the Canaanite Colonisers: All theBerber races came by migration from Asia, and crossed Egypt and Libya; they are of

the stock of Mazigh, son of Canaan son of Ham son of Noah, and so the Berbers arethe cousins of the Arabs and the Phoenicians.25 Later in the same work, he elabo-rates on this: Ibn Khaldun [the fourteenth-century North African, Muslim histo-rian] affirms for us that . . . their origin is in Mesopotamia in Asia, that they migratedin very ancient times to North Africa, whether from fear or ambition, just as a greatnumber of Bedouin Arabs would later migrate from the Egyptian desert to the[lands of the] Hammadid state [in the eleventh-century central Maghrib] and settlethere.26 A more elaborate discussion, drawing equally on Arabic tradition and thescientific authority of the French, leads to the same conclusion in Qartjanna farbaa usr: We can conclude that the Berbers come from the East, and reconcilethe Arab historians with modern theories supported by evidence. And we can saythat they are of the Semitic race, and that they came from Asia. They settled inEgypt for a while before coming [into North Africa].27Other origin stories, however,have been advanced by historians and scholars [who] have made great stridestowards absurd fantasies; their political motivations have




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committed a horrendous outrage against history and . . . wishing to servepolitical schemes, have attacked and effaced historical facts; they have said thatthe Berbers are of Germanic or of Latin origin, that they migrated to Africa

from Europe. Those who make such statements have no aim but to influencethe Berbers, to distance all that is Asian from them and to convince them thatthey are of European origin; that they must return to Europe and to all that isEuropean.

There is an immediate confrontation proclaimed here between those whoare allies of history . . . who truthfully investigate and purify it and their politicallymotivated opponents, with the Berber as the entirely passive object of knowledgeand of their struggle over knowledge. Colonial politics has committed an outrageagainst history, has muddied the limpid waters of historical truth, and thesalafi his-torian is one of those who restore their clarity, who purify.28 His self-ascribed role

is as one of those who bring forth the sincere truth, though the boastful hate it. Ifthere is a quasi-religious overtone, there is equally a perfectly positivistic assertion ofscientific objectivity, pitted against the meddling distortion of politics. The true his-tory of the Berbers lies waiting to be discovered, only prejudice has obscured it. TheBerbers themselves are abstracted out of the contest over their origins and nature; apassive, blank space signified only by a strictly meaningless onomatopoeia around

which the limpid language of the truthful historian weaves webs of significance.29

Al-Madanis portrait of the essentialized Berber is, from the outset, compli-cated by the historians conception of the symbolically dense relationship betweenEast and West. Our land of North Africa, al-Madani says in an article published in1930, was isolated, in ancient times, from the rest of the world. Its people, the

Berbers, lived in it a life of innocent simplicity, preserving some of their customs andtraditions which they had brought from the east at an unknown date, or which theyacquired from among the elements of Egyptian religion and culture. 30 Already,here, there is an uncomfortable tension apparent between the notion of indigenouspermanence and the constant pull of the East, toward which, as to a massive centerof gravity, everything attributed to the originary-Maghribi Berber in one breathfalls irresistibly back in the next. Their own customs come from the eastalthough their land is isolated from the rest of the worldand those they acquiredon their way to the (isolated) Maghrib are rooted in the prestigious soil of ancientEgypt. These descendants of Canaan have (somehow) crossed, in the most distantpast, to North Africa and taken permanent root there, but their originary attachment

to the Levant is constantly reaffirmed.The same uncomfortable tension is evident again in the treatment of differ-

entiated Berber types. In Qartjanna, al-Madani categorizes four basic groups ofBerbers, anthropometrically distinguished by physiognomyblond; tall (to 1.7




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meters); of medium height (to 1.63 meters) with short, broad faces . . . prominentcheekbones and broad, crooked noses; and of medium height (to 1.63 meters) withround heads . . . and curved foreheads, short, fat noses, wide mouths.31 The first

group, the fair Berbers, are supposed to be the remnants of stone-age man (15).No more precise origin in time or space is attributed to themthey arise in thetext ex nihilo from the caves of the prehistoric Maghrib. The migration out ofMesopotamia in this instance concerns only the latter three groups, qualifying hislater assertions (four pages later in the same text, and in his other writings) of thearrival of all the Berber races from the Mashriq (the East).

The intriguing first group is described in the Qartjanna passage at somelength: They lived in caves and grottoes, and buried their dead there also. . . . Thesefirst [inhabitants] believed in sorcery, and the practices of magical prophecy grew upamong them. They believed vipers, apes, and rams with great horns to be sacred ani-mals. As for their food, they ate the meat of wild animals and their bone marrow, and

the insects of the land and sea, the fruits of trees, and some roots and plants(1920). The sole riches of these people, he says, came from raising livestock.Agriculture was not unknown to themthey grew beans (fl) from the earliesttimes. Wheat, olives, and wild vines were also known in prehistory. On the samepage, however, this account is undermined by the arrival at an unknown date of theother Berber groups from the East: As for cattle, sheep, goats, and donkeys, it issupposed that they came from Egypt. . . . And the agricultural knowledge of thispeople also came to them from Egypt. We think that the Berbers who came from theEast to this country were the ones who brought everything that came from Egypt,animals as well as fundamental knowledge [of agriculture] (20). The questions ofhow prehistoric agriculture was practiced before the introduction of agricultural

knowledge, or of what livestock was raised before the introduction of livestock, dis-rupt the texts attempted closure of the origins question. It is clear, in fact, that theblond Berber is nothing but a residual category, inherently problematic in his inap-propriate physiognomy and thus left in an ill-defined indigenous space because noobviously legitimate geographic or temporal origin can be found for him. He is cred-ited with agriculture and animal husbandry only to have even these sole richesimmediately taken from him, to be returned almost,but not quite at once, as a giftfrom the eastern origin and gravitational center of the narrative (and of civilization).The initial distinction set-up differentiates the blond type, appearing from the pri-mordial caves of Africa, from the others, rooted firmly (on the authority of Ibn Khal-dun) in Mesopotamia and attested (on the authority of Hamito-Semitic comparativelinguistics) in Egypt. This distinction is reduced almost to nothing by setting themigration of the posited other groups in the furthest distances of antiquity. Still, thediscomforting gap remains to disrupt al-Madanis text.

Five years after Qartjanna, in composing Kitb al-Jazir, his argument




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would be different. Abandoning the problematic classification of Berber types, hestates in the later work that after passing through Egypt on their way from the Lev-ant, all the Berber races . . . settled in North Africa, and swallowed up its original

inhabitants who have become in every respect unknown to us, and they themselvesbecame the original race known to history in North Africa.32 Here too, as one orig-inal race (unsur asl) replaces another, stretching the capability of the word itselfsomewhat beyond the semantic breaking point, there opens up a disruptive marginof absence, that of the evoked and instantly suppressed original inhabitants.Theywhoeverthey areare acknowledged and glossed over in two rapid phrases.The difficulty of reconciling indigenous perennity with arrival from the east leads the

writer, again, to a strategy that must minimize a distance he himself has created butthat cannot quite eliminate it.

It is, however, important to appreciate that this reading was almost certainlynot one practiced either by the author or by his intended first audience. These

uncomfortable edges in the texts are not necessarily contradictions, evidence ofinconsistency, or lack of logic; we might rather see them as evidence of a consistentstructure of thinking, which has its own highly articulate logic, and which deservesanalysis for what it reveals about the historical understanding that the author was try-ing to express and promote. These revealing ambiguities, antinomies never quiteresolved, are textual traces of the difficulty facing the writer in formulating his ownexposition of what he believes to be historical truth. The tension of legitimate ances-tryusl (roots), asla (authenticity)between permanence in Africa and the grav-itational mass of the East, whence spring knowledge and civilization, is visible inthese disruptions. The writer wishes to locate the Berber both as an originary, unas-similable North African, and as a wandering Canaanite from the east who can only

become the originary North African by replacing another.The Berber who arises/settles in the Maghrib is a cultural blank page, a

noble savage in a pristine state. He is, says al-Madani, noble, generous, fearless,and brave; staunch in defense of his home to the utmost limit of resolve, caring forit with the utmost degree of love; and hard to satisfy, such that he accepts no idea orbelief save with difficulty, but once he takes it up and is imbued with it, he will fightin its cause as he would for his own children. He is frugal, thrifty, saving, as theysay, from his youth for his old age, his strength for his [hour of] weakness, his full-ness for his [time of ] want (99). Besides this, he is distinguished by his implacableresentment and impatience toward any offence, and by the consequent vendettaspursued in defense of honor, giving rise to a chain of acts of vengeance to whichno limit can be set (100). This is allied to a great capacity to assume the difficul-ties and hardships of life, a nobility toward guests and the defense of those who seekrefuge.33 The general theme of purity, austerity, and immovable constancy is impor-tant. Whether manifested in unshakable attachment to the land, reluctance to




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embrace new beliefs, unflinching sacrifice in defense of liberty, or in bloody andaberrant feuds, this notion of solidity (salba,tassalub) may usefully be seen as thekey condensation symbol of Berber virtue.34

This stern, moral inflexibility combines with a life of simplicity to tie theBerber thus thickly constituted to his Arab cousins: The morality of Berbers andBedouin [Arabs] united [them] in a simple and virtuous way of life . . . united [them]inthe Bedouin character.35 This construction of the Berber as a strongly defined,positively valorized figure perhaps constitutes the neglected face of the Algerian

salafis approach to history and the Berber question. We are accustomed to themore obvious argument that the official Arab-Islamism of the independent Maghribistates, and the relation of domination and suppression experienced since indepen-dence by Tamazight,36 is a direct continuation of thesalafiyya movements outlaw-ing of linguistic and cultural plurality during the phase of gestation of Maghribinationalist movements from the 1920s to the 1950s. This is also truebut it neglects

the importance of the substantive role that the Berber does play in the salafi-reformists historiography, if, indeed, not in their sociocultural ambitions. It remainsto be shown how their recuperation of the Berber as national signifier in prehistoryand antiquity leads to their suppression of the Berber in a twentieth-century culturalproject of Arab-Islamic nationhood.

Genealogy and Salvation

It is here that the full significance of the organizing principle of Canaanite genealogycomes into play, in the key relationship that this historiography draws between theBerber and the Arab. Al-Madanis Berbers knew from the inception of history thatthey formed an independent race with its own customs, morality, and language. 37

They are the original race known to history in the Maghrib, a race of outstandingnature who surpassed other peoples in many priceless qualities, the most importantof which are a total [devotion to the] defense of their existence [as a people], andconstancy in defense of their independence. At no time were they assimilated to anyother race.38 In brief, the Berber mingles, but is not mixed.39

This principle, summarizing the solid constitution of the essentialized, pri-mary Berber figure, is attenuated to the point of collapse by the simultaneous nar-rative structure of genealogical kinship, which leads to the reinscription of Berberand Arab not as oppositional, nor as complementary, but asidentical. In itssalafi for-mulation, the nation in Algeriaand in North Africa as a wholewas indeed rep-resented by a Berber reality. But this reality is structured by a very particular logic ofgenealogy and salvation, which governs the entire span of the history of the Maghrib:The whole of North African history comprises two great ages. The first is the purelyBerber age, which begins with the first knowledge of history and runs to the arrivalof the Arabs. The second age begins when the sons of Yarab and the sons of Mazigh




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shook hands. The Maghrib became an Islamic country inhabited by the conjoinedrace of the Berbers and Arabs.40

Inassimilability and fusion coexist in a conception of history that refigures the

Berber as an irreducible essence, but one by nature akin to its cousins, the orientalraces represented by the Arabs and Phoenicians. The difficulties already observed,however, regarding the establishment of the Berber as both eternally indigenous andas an oriental migrant, are repeated in the problematic representation of his eternalirreducibility and destiny of fusion with Arabic and Islam. The notion of progressivecivilization, borrowing both from a modern vocabulary of evolution and from asacred one of salvation, is the mechanism by which this problem is addressed. Al-Madani inverts the European myth of civilization with a narrative of an uninter-ruptedmission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) from the Mashriq/East. The Berbersare depicted as inherently predisposed to Eastern (Phoenician and Arab) civilization,and fundamentally opposed to that of the West (ancient Rome and modern Europe).

The colonial obsession with a civilizing mission pursued in the tracks of Rome isinverted by this scheme, which overturns the balance, installs Carthage as the civi-lizational apogee of antiquity, and casts Rome as the barbarian destroyer of its greatlight. Phoenician, Canaanite Carthage is the bearer of a genealogically legitimate,civilizing force from the East. (It is interesting to note here the precisely inverseinterpretation of the Phoenician heritage made by the Christian Maronite commu-nity in Lebanon. For the Maronites, who have also seen themselves as the heirs ofPhoenician civilization, their ancient vocation was Mediterranean and European,aligning its descendants not with Islam and the East but with modern Europe andthe material civilization of the West.)

By setting up this structure as the total meaning of North African history,

the author accomplishes at least three things. First, all of antiquity and the earlymedieval period up to the Islamic conquest is reinscribed as the purely Berberperiod, thus decentering colonial historiographys fundamental notion of a LatinNorth Africa in the long Roman-Byzantine era. This was a notion much relied uponby the ideologues of colonization as a civilizing work seen not only as bringing theMaghrib into the modern, enlightened age but also as returning it to its own authen-tic history, with France as the natural heir of Rome, a conception widely propagatedin the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.41 Second, the categorical divi-sion made by colonial ethnography of the Maghribs inhabitants into Arabs andBerbers is recuperated and turned on its head, the uniqueness and immutability ofthe Berber accepted in order to make Berber history the first great age of a 3,000-

year national past, continuouswith the complementary history of Berbers and Arabsconjoined after the coming of Islam. This, as we shall see, is inscribed as predes-tined in the mode of a salvific redemption. Hence the third achievement, with theIslamic conquest itself being placed at the very center of the entire story, an




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archimedal point around which the destiny of the nation turns. Such centrality forthe Islamic conquest is, perhaps, predictable. It is the first age which represents acrucial innovation for the reformists understanding of national history.

The ancient past, recovered from the writings of the colonial academic estab-lishment, is the privileged site of the Berbers role in Maghribi national history:These were the days of the Berbers, proud sons of Mazigh. They inhabited theplains of this land and its hills.And they acquired, from all who came to them, thelights of civilisation.42 The Berbers are here in their pure, originary state. Initiallyin the shadows, they are progressively civilized by their genealogical cousins fromthe east. Acquiring the rudiments of knowledge from the ancient Egyptians on theirprehistoric migration, they are first acquainted with civilization in the form of thePhoenicians who found Carthage, and finally by the Arabs, who complete the Puniccivilizational mission with the light of Islam. The colonial constitution of the nativesubject as racially/culturally fenced in since earliest times, as immutable, insensi-

ble to the penetration of Western civilizing influence and progress, is subver-sively redeployed here as a proof of Arab-Berber unity. The insistence on theessential, genealogically predestined and immutable inassimilability of the NorthAfrican shares, while inverting its values, the beliefs of colonial racism, where Euro-peans and Africans occupy a (genealogicallywe might say, genetically) predes-tined place in a recurrent struggle of civilizations.

The role of the Carthaginians is crucial in this narrative. They were theteachers who brought instruction in civilization to the Berbers. . . . And this new,flourishing civilization mixed with [the Berbers culture] of lesser quality [and swal-lowed up the latter, whose adepts began to follow the new], so that it became theircustom, and they forgot the old.43 The Berbers own great degree of intellectual

and material progress is thoroughly mixed with, and superseded by, this secondCanaanite wave from the Levant. 44 The Berbers became inhabitants of [Phoeni-cian] centers of civilization such that there was no division in any respect betweenthem and the original Carthaginians. The Berbers language was completely assim-ilated with that of the Phoenicians to form the Carthaginian national language. . . .And there is no doubt that this Carthaginian language paved the way for thesupremacy of the Arabic language in these regions.45

Similarly, agricultural, craft, and social practices visible in Kabylia in the firstdecades of the twentieth century are said to go back to the influence of Carthage.More crucially, the Berbers had not known the meaning of unity, and had notunderstood the idea of a state. It came to them through the influence of Carthagethat they themselves could begin to erect great Berber states (3435). Carthage,indeed, is the originator of representative, republican government in North Africa:It was she who first established constitutional life and a representative politicalorder in the world, at a time when all the countries of the world submitted to thedespotism of kings and absolute rulers (33). In the religious field, though, there




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exists a crucial problem. While the Berbers are guilty merely of idolatry, Carthaginian/Canaanite religion is horribly flawed by the practice of child sacrifice. It thuspoints clearly to the incompleteness of the civilizational influence of Carthage for

the Berbers, who await the salvific denouement of their history in the Islamic con-quest.

Islam, the perfecting salvation of the Berbers, brings to this people, alreadydistinguished by their illustrious history of struggle and sacrifice, the true and finalmoral and spiritual civilization of which the Arabs are the bearers. From the pointof view adopted in Qartjanna, the conquest is not, as we might tend to think ofspecifically Arab-Islamic historiography, the beginning of history, but rather an endof history, a culminating telos in which the perfection of the Maghribi nation isachieved. (And after which no more meaningful change is possible. Thereafter, his-tory is only the further expansion of the nations glory, or its long struggle to return tothis age of purity.) Arabs and Berbers . . . became one nation. . . . The two peoples

were of one inclination and one sentiment, and they shared a love of honor and glory,a passion for freedom (161).

This spiritual kinship, binding Arab and Berber together, is what creates thestrength of the army of Tariq ibn Ziyad, with whose conquest of southern Spain in710 al-Madani opens the concluding passage of his ancient history (159). The con-

joined race of Arabs and Berbers becomes one Islamic nation, the culmination ofa long, evolutionary process of moral and material improvement suffused with asacred history of destiny-in-salvation, the whole narrative unfolding under the inex-orable sign of genealogy: This was the result of the Islamic conquest. It created thenation of North Africa and its [single] complete civilization on the ruins of extinctcivilizations. And God made the Arabs and Berbers conversant with one another,and they became, by his favor toward them, brothers (161; emphasis added).

The Absurd Death of the Aztecs

The price of [linear, nationalist] History, writes Prasenjit Duara, has . . . been verydear, not because the narrative has actually succeeded in extinguishing differentmodes of being and time, . . . but because . . . the closures of modernity and Historyhave not enabled a language that can recognise and negotiate with that which hasbeen dispersed and repressed.46 The repression of the Berber in Algeriansalafi his-toriography operated through its own, specific logic. Its particular attempt at the for-mulation of a closed national history could not obliterate, nor fully appropriate, thecategory Berber. Neither could it recognize it as having a legitimate, autonomousexistence in the present, as a category in which communities might recognize them-selves and through which they would seek to negotiate their place in a new Algeriansociety.

Far from simply denying the existence of Berbers in North Africa, al-Madani, for one, took considerable trouble and expended considerable ingenuity in




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solving the Berber question. His solution was to refigure the Berber as heroicnational signifier and to fix this figure into a closed, historicized space. This essen-tialized figure emerges in al-Madanis texts as a totemic, primordial ancestor incar-

nation of the ideal virtues of an unswerving, unassimilable nation committed to itsindependence, its authenticity and rootedness both in the Maghribi soil and in themoral and sacred geography of the Mashriq. This Berber is located at the base of anational past stretching back into the dawn of history and whose story reaches anapotheosis in the consummation, bi-nimat allh [by the grace of God], of theunited Maghribi nation in Arabic and Islam, narrated as the achievement of a prein-scribed genealogical destiny.

The sociocultural program of the salafi reformist movementperhapsinevitablycontinued, beyond the controlled domain of textual knowledge pro-duction, to have a problematic relationship with the Berber. The reformists ideas

were a significant force in the religio-cultural doctrines of Algerian nationalism and

for the nationalized official culture of the postindependence state. The first AlgerianArabization program was presented to the Arab League in Cairo on August 6, 1962,by Tawfiq al-Madani, who would shortly become minister of religious affairs in Alge-rias first independent government.47 It is indicative that despite the considerableattention paid to the Berber and to ancient history in the texts of the historians linkedto the movement, history classes in AUMA schools seem to have drawn almost exclu-sively on classical Arab and Islamic history focused on the Mashriq/East. At a con-gress of independent teachers exercising in the free schools established or sup-ported by the Association of Ulam, in October 1937, the delegates expressed theirneed for books dealing in depth with North African history and geography, assert-ing that an Algerian must know his [own] country before [he knows] the East.48

The prescribed texts in history, when the association set about the centralized orga-nization of its school network in the late 1940s, were nonetheless those produced bythe Egyptian Ministry of Public Instruction.

The predominance of this eastward-facing Arab-Islamic worldview in theofficial culture of independent Algeria, partly a development of the AUMA projectand partly its manipulation, has been roundly criticized, not only by the advocates ofcultural pluralism and Berber linguistic and cultural recognition, but more generallyby critics of what is seen as a paradoxically un-Algerian orientation in policy, mostparticularly in the states schools. In a study of history textbooks printed in the 1980sfor use in Algerian secondary education, Rdouane Ained-Tabet remarks that nohistory text is concerned exclusively with Algeria, from antiquity or prehistory to thepresent. No program is centered on the History of Algeria. . . . Hence, pupils are fur-nished no general, comprehensive account of their country. . . . [The] teaching of his-tory does not contribute to the rooting [of children] in their native soil and thus totheir psychological, and later political, stability.49 Ained-Tabet criticizes his sample




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texts as vehicling an ideological discourse of Middle Easternization, their lack of aproperly Algerian national rootedness leaving, he says, the student with his feet inthe Jurjura [the Kabyle heartland], his roots in Mesopotamia, and his heart in the

Middle East!So where is his head?50 Worse, such Pan-Arab, Levant-centeredideological manipulation [predisposes] highly vulnerable adolescents to becomeArabo-Islamists or integrists by sociopolitical drift, and not, first and foremost,Algerian citizens (44).51 Thus the sociologist considers official national historiogra-phy, paradoxically, as guilty of a calamitous antinationalism, responsible for layingthe ideological foundations of an alienated, un-Algerian Islamist totalitarianism.

A notable aspect of this, highlighted in Ained-Tabets article, is what he termsla berbrit arabise, the Arabization of Berber identity (4344). One of the booksexamined covers the civilizations of Antiquity, among which is discussed Bild al-Maghrib al-Arab wa l-Mujtama al-Amzgh (the Arab Maghrib and AmazighSociety). This text presents a map of the Middle East and North Africa, illustrating

the emigration of the Amazighiyyin [Berbers] to the Maghrib. The map is sup-ported by the assertion (denounced by Ained-Tabet as pure historical untruth) thattheAmazighiyyin migrated from the direction of Mesopotamia (Iraq), passed intoEgypt and settled there for a short while, and then continued their journey into theArab Maghrib. Thus, as Ained-Tabet dryly notes, the Maghrib is presented as hav-ing been already Arab, even before the arrival of the Arabs! (4344).

What is most interesting is that in concluding his critique of the school texts,the writer observes that, with this contemporary, un-Algerian, and Pan-Arab ideol-ogy, we are a long way from the thirties, when the Association of Ulam . . . pro-claimed itself officiallyAlgerian, and when two of its members, Mubarak al-Mili andTawfiq al-Madani, each composed a History of Algeria (45; emphasis added).52 But,

in fact, the short passage on the Mesopotamian origin and prehistoric immigration,via Egypt, of the Berbers, which he so vigorously denounces, is nothing more thanan exact restatement of Tawfiq al-Madanis treatment of the same theme. The trulynational history that the critic adduces as a corrective to the deviations of Pan-Arabism was very likely the direct textual source used by the writers of the criticizedschoolbook.

Al-Madanis founding national historiography was itself, of course, caughtup in the same preoccupations that have gone on, in contemporary Algeria, to giverise to the situation represented in the school texts and their denunciatory analysisthat is, nationalist historical writing obeys specific epistemic injunctions which exhortthe community to know itself in a highly particular, highly determined way. In thisdominant self-view, Berbritis excluded, ignored, and at best consigned to the dis-tant pastin particular among the intelligentsia of the Islamic-reformist movement.It is from them that springs the thesis . . . reactualized by President Chadli [at theFLN congress of December 1983] of Our ancestors the Berbers!53




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According to Berber/Amazigh cultural and political writing, this dominant,Arab-Islamic ideology, totalitarian by nature, systematically and willfully excludesBerber language and culture from the Algerian political field, since it cannot rec-

ognize other cultures, other languages, [as legitimate within the nation].54A revisionist history, no less national, represented in particular by Mahied-

dine Djender, has begun to readdress the same questions posed by thesalafi histo-rians in the 1920s and 1930s, with the same aim of recovering the total and authen-tic historical reality of the Maghrib.55 This is understood as implicating all of NorthAfrica well beyond the flash point of Kabylia since [there is a danger of] regional-izing a Berber reality whose dimensions are in fact national, extending even fromMauritania and the Canary Isles to Libya and southern Egypt. Without a generalconsideration of Berber history, this reality might be limited to one part of [Alge-ria]; this is precisely what the adherents of the Arab-Islamic doctrine wish, since they

fear that by teaching or simply divulging history, the true nature and identity of the

country will be revived (62; emphasis added).This true nature and identity is that of lAlgrie algrienne (Algerian Alge-

ria), the eloquent tautology associated since the PPAs so-called Berberist crisis of194849 with opposition to the sociocultural preeminence of an exclusively Arab-Islamic Algeria. This latter definition was central to the program of the Associationof Ulam and predominant among the radical-populist revolutionary activists of thePPA. The ultimate aim of the newer, revisionist history is to give a final definition ofAlgeria, . . . complex by its history, unitary by the effort of its people: an AlgerianAlgeria, the description which is finally most appropriate (57).

This search for a final [self-]definition, which turns out to be a tautology,points to the particular struggle over symbolism, the idiom in which these conflicts

are played out. Djenders account of national history varies considerably from al-Madanis. Djender speaks of a Romano-Berber society flourishing up to the fifthcentury, whereas al-Madani privileges Carthage and insists on Berber resistance toRoman tyranny.56 For Djender, Algeria is the product of Mediterranean civilizationshared by Egyptians, Phoenicians, Romans, and Greeks, where al-Madanis histori-cal imaginary of the Mediterranean is highly determined by a moral geography

which bisects Djenders world, sharply dividing East /South from West/North.Finally, to Djender, an imperishable Berber identity remains essential, while for al-Madani, as we have seen, the Berber substratum is a closed and historicized real-ity whose own destiny lies in fusion with (pure) Arabic and (pure) Islam, achievedalready in the seventh century, finally sealed in the eleventh (with the influx of newmigrants and majority Arabization), and demanding reassertion in a contaminatedand alienated present .

Both use strikingly similar language in expressing their aims and intentions.Both speak of historical truth, which only politics and ideology distort, both seekto see what Algeria is and to define it. Both insist that above all [they] respect the




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facts and respect history.57 This contest over the definition of historical truth thuscenters on the ownership of symbolic goods of true representation, definition, andnaming. Djenders eloquent tautology of an Algerian Algeria, sign of a pluralist polit-

ical agenda which it is far from my intention to denigrate, fails, in its very assumptionof formulaic comprehensiveness, to appreciate that it is itself an open-ended restate-ment of the question and can never provide a definitive answer to itfor there cannever be one. Rather than a simple conflict between an unproblematic reality and itsideological distortion, these disputes mark one latest instance of very long-standingsymbolic struggles for the power to produce and impose the legitimate world view . . .in which agents clash over the meaning of the social world and their position withinit, the meaning of their social identity.58

It is instructive to compare this state of affairs with previous centuries. Thedesirability of Arab ancestry was a marked feature of the social model of tribalagglomeration in the precolonial and colonial Maghrib, a model described by Bour-

dieus first work and widespread, according to historian Michael Brett, among NorthAfrican communities from the ninth century onward. According to his reading, var-ious groups of Arabic-speaking migrants were perceived as desirable, legitimateancestors, and at different times in different places, among literates and illiterates,townsmen and countrymen, princes and poor peoples, descent from all of these hasbeen claimed . . . for the sake of prestige.59 The numerous Arab genealogies ofBerber groups advanced by Ibn Khaldun are testimony to a flourishing industry inmedieval Mashriqi origin myths, pursued by medieval Berber dynasties anxious tosecure their place in known, legitimate [i.e., Arab-Islamic] History.60 The medievalliterary genre, or motif, of the boasts of the Berbers (mafkhir al-barbar) also serveto valorize the ahl al-maghrib (indigenous people of North Africa) within the Arab

and Islamic world. The caliphs domains are like a bird, says one anecdote, of whichthe Maghrib is the tail (Iraq the head, Syria and the Hijaz the wings); a Maghribi inthe assembly retorts: The bird is a peacock!61

In the recent past of Algerian nationalism, the Berber question served, too,as an idiom of contest and not as an end in itself. The PPAs Berberist crisis, accord-ing to militant and historian Mohamed Harbi, was initiated by criticism of the anti-democratic functioning of the party, [and later] spread to the rejection of the Arab-Islamic conception of Algeria, to finish by posing, under the cover of the question ofcultural pluralism, that of the territorial organization of the party on the basis of thecriterion of language.62 In a highly sophisticated rereading of this episode, OmarCarlier suggests that the Arab/Kabyle relation, which feeds the arabism-berberismcouple through which the protagonists of the 1949 crisis read their contradictions . . .in fact permits the illumination of an extreme complexity of relations of interactionand imbrication between the social, the cultural, and the political.63

Similarly, the specific sociopolitical and cultural situation of colonialism,which set the conditions of production of al-Madanis texts, provides the keys to an




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explanation of the particular ways in which he frames a historical knowledge pre-sented as the true national past. It is in relations of power and bids for power in theinterconnected web of society, culture, and politics that thesalafi-reformist reading

of the Arab/Berber relation, and other readings of the same relationship thus cate-gorized, become illuminating. Al-Madanis refiguring of the Berber as nationalsignifier, and his fixing of this figure in a historicized and superseded role, was anaccomplished exercise in effective cultural-political symbolization. This reading ofhistory formed the foundation of a would-be legitimate definition of Algerian real-ity which has ever since been locked in the struggles of hegemonic process that haveconstituted the political life of independent Algeria. Analysis of its productionreveals: the historicity of an identity presumed to be originary, exclusive and cohe-sive, [and belies] the claims of [all] those who would harden the boundaries of soci-ety in the name of cultural authenticity [whether Arab or Berber]. This is an authen-ticity that lacks the capacity for tolerance and interdependence, because it will not

admit of the Other within itself.64 Such would-be dominant narratives, in theirstruggle for the legitimate representation of the historical real, fail ultimately by theirown historicity. The impending language death and ethnocide feared by theberberophone poet-professor Mouloud Mammeri, an impoverishing assault on Alge-rias plural reality which he lamented as another absurd death of the Aztecs,65 and

which for al-Madani was already an accomplished historical destiny, has not in factoccurred. A newly reimagined and rerooted Amazigh identity, in Algeria and in theMaghribi diaspora, is alive and more vocal than ever.66 The conflict over a legitimatedefinition of social reality continues, recreating, as it shifts into new phases, the cat-egories through which is expressed laspiration une Algrie relle, the aspirationfor a real Algeria.67

Notes1. I use Maghrib (occident, the classical Arabic designation for the westernmost part of the

Islamic world) andNorth Africa interchangeably to refer to the area comprising thepresent-day states of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania. Maghrib is theproper Arabic transliteration and has been used in the text. The proper Frenchtransliteration is Maghreb and has been used where appropriate in the notes. Allunmarked translations in this article are those of the author.

2. The subject of these confrontations is not the Berber question in a simple sense, butrather a series of social conflicts whose articulation has occurred, in a sequence ofinterrelated forms, through the idiom of Berber/Arab opposition. On the Berber Spring ofMarch/April 1980, and the commercial and bureaucratic class interests involved, see Hugh

Roberts, Towards an Understanding of the Kabyle Question, Maghreb Review 5.56(1980): 115 24. In 2001, the issues involved ranged from the status of Tamazight andcultural pluralism to unemployment, insecurity, and the accountability of the securityforces.




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3. For more detail on the colonial period, see Charles-Robert Ageron, Du mythe kabyle auxpolitiques berbres, inLe mal de voir: Ethnologie et orientalisme: Politique etpistmologie, critique et autocritique, ed. Henri Moniot et al. (Paris: Universit de

ParisVII/Union des ditions Gnrales, 1976), 33148; Patricia Lorcin, ImperialIdentities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: Tauris, 1995).4. The FLN pursued the war of independence from 1954 to 1962 and subsequently became

the single party of independent Algeria, ruling until 1989.5. Ali Merad,Le rformisme musulman en Algrie, 1925 1940: Essai dhistoire sociale et

religieuse (Paris: Mouton, 1967), 93.6. Salem Chaker equivocates as to whether it had existed here, too, in antiquity, and was

effaced by Arabizationand, indeed, as to whether the general use of the term in antiquitycan be assumed among indigenous populations or is only ascertainable as a Latin literaryusage. Chaker, Amazi (Amazigh), le/un Berbre, in Encyclopdie berbre, vol. 4(Aix-en-Provence: disud, 1984), 56268.

7. Ibid., 565. See also M. Benbrahim, Le mouvement national dans la posie kabyle,19451954,Awal: Cahiers dtudes berbres 1 (1985): 12443.

8. Ibid., 150.9. Chaker, Amazigh, 567.10. David Cherry, Frontier and Society in Roman North Africa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 9.11. Ibid., 10, 20.12. Ibid., 1112; Jean-Baptiste Chabot, Receuil des inscriptions libyques, no. 2 (Paris:

Imprimerie Nationale, 194041).13. Cherry, Frontier and Society, 10.14. Gabriel Camps, Berbres aux marges de lhistoire (Toulouse: ditions des Hesprides,

1980).15. Fergus Millar, Local Cultures in the Roman Empire: Libyan, Punic, and Latin in Roman

Africa,Journal of Roman Studies 58 (1968): 12930, 133.16. Camps, Berbres, 27677.17. The script is now used among Amazigh communities in the diaspora, including in internet

publishing (see www.tamazgha.org, the site of the Illinois-based Amazigh CulturalAssociation in America).

18. Millar, Local Cultures, 128.19. Ibid., 129. As far as I am aware, no recent research has shed any more decisive light on this

question.20. See the final declaration issued by the Second World Amazigh Congress (Agraw n

Imazighen n Umadal) in Brussels, August 79, 2000, available atwww.tamurt-imazighen.com/tamazgha/agraw/decl_bru_080900.html (11/20/2000).

21. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of ModernChina (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 27.

22. For a neat, and influential, statement along the lines Arab/Kabyle, see Eugne Daumas,LaKabylie (1856; Paris: Jean-Paul Rocher, 2001), 38 50. See also (esp. for the couplenomad/sedentary) Emile-Flix Gautier,Le pass de lAfrique du Nord: Les sicles obscurs(Paris: Payot, 1937).

23. Daumas, Kabylie, 47.24. Merad, Rformisme, 93.




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25. Tawfiq al-Madani, Kitb al-Jazir, 2d ed. (Cairo: Dar al-maarif, 1963), 9.26. Ibid., 97.27. Tawfiq al-Madani, Qartjanna f arbaa usr, 2d ed. (Algiers: Enterprise nationale du livre,

1986), 17.28. Quotes from Kitb, 97.29. The English termberber(Fr.berbre) traditionally derives from Latinbarbarus (pl.

barbari), from Greekbarbaros (pl.barbaroi). Camps (Berbres, 8687) declares himselfunconvinced by this etymology, preferring to see a generalization from Latinbavares,assimilated in time tobarbares (but notbarbari), attested by five ancient authors (whom hedoes not name) as the name of a tribal group among the Mauri. His alternative is ofmarginal impact, however, even if accepted, since the Arabic verbbarbara certainly has thesame force as the Greekbarbar: to be inarticulate, jabber meaninglessly, and so on.

30. Tawfiq al-Madani, Taqwm al-Mansr, vol. 5 (Algiers: Matbaat Muhammad al-Muhab,1348/1929 30), 70.

31. Al-Madani, Qartjanna, 14.32. Al-Madani, Kitb, 98; emphasis added.

33. Al-Madani, Qartjanna, 18.34. Sherry B. Ortner, On Key Symbols,American Anthropologist 75.5 (1973): 1338 46.35. Qartjanna, 160; emphasis added.36. Salem Chaker, Lmergence du fait berbre: Le cas de lAlgrie,Annuaire de lAfrique du

Nord 19 (1980): 47383, esp. 47576; Chaker, Quelques vidences sur la questionberbre, Confluences Mditerrane 11 (1994): 103111, esp. 1056.

37. Al-Madani, Qartjanna, 17.38. Ibid., 13.39. Al-Madani, Kitb, 99.40. Al-Madani, Qartjanna, 8.41. For example, in the work of Louis Bertrand, director of the reviewAfrique Latine. See the

discussion in Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 196213, and also the characteristically brief andincisive passage in Berque, Maghreb entre deux guerres (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 24243.

42. Al-Madani, Qartjanna, 8; emphasis added.43. Ibid., 34.44. Al-Madani, Kitb, 73. He is referring to thetifinagh alphabet, which the Berbers invented

at the dawn of history.45. Al-Madani, Qartjanna, 34.46. Duara, Rescuing History, 50.47. The extent to which the reformists significance has reflected the influence, as opposed to

the adoption, manipulation, and instrumentalization of their agenda by the rgime (lepouvoir), is another question.

48. Prfecture, Algiers, October 15, 1937, Alger/4I/13/3(2F), Centre des Archives dOutre-Mer(Aix-en-Provence). The conference had agreed that their needs in general literature couldbe amply met by Mashreqi texts to which nothing can be added. Al-MadanisJughrfiyatal-qutr al-jazir[Geography of the land of Algeria] was also prescribed in AUMA schoolsin the late 1940s.




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49. Rdouane Ained-Tabet, Manuels dhistoire et discours idologique vhicul, in Commenton enseigne lhistoire en Algrie, ed. Mohammed Ghalem and Hassan Remaoun (Oran:Centre de Recherches en Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle, 1995), 43. On the

preoccupation with a general view of our National History, see also Mahieddine Djender,Introduction lhistoire de lAlgrie, 2d ed. (Algiers: Enterprise nationale du livre, 1991).50. Ained-Tabet, Manuels dhistoire, 44.51. See also Abdelkader Djeghloul, Nationalisme, arabit, islamit, berbrit: La crise de la

conscience historique algrienne, inLes Arabes et lhistoire cratrice, ed. DominiqueChevallier (Paris: Presses de lUniversit de Paris-I, Sorbonne, 1995).

52. Al-Mili (18971945) wrote a two-volume History of Ancient and Modern Algeria, publishedbetween 1929 and 1932.

53. Salem Chaker, Langue et identit berbres (Algrie/migration): Un enjeu de socit,Annuaire de lAfrique du Nord 23 (1984): 173. The notion of the Berber as belonging to aclosed historical space is reiterated with particular force by Abdallah Mazouni, Cultures etsocits: Le cas de lAlgrie de 1962 1973, Revue algrienne des sciences juridique,conomique et politique 12.1 (1975): 15152; Mazouni, Culture et enseignement en Algrie

et au Maghreb (Paris: Maspero, 1969).54. Rachid Yefsah, Larabo-islamisme face la question berbre inLes Kabyles: Elmentspour la comprhension de lidentit berbre en Algrie, ed. Tassadit Yacine (Paris:Groupement pour les Droits de Minorits, 1992), 1067.

55. Mahieddine Djender, La Berbrie, la Kabylie travers lhistoire, in Yacine,Les Kabyles,62.

56. Djender, 6164; al-Madani, Kitb, 74.57. Djender, 78. Compare the similar divisions over Eastern versus Mediterranean identities

in Egypt throughout the twentieth century.58. Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups, Social Science Information

24.2 (1985): 2012.59. Michael Brett, Ibn Khaldun and the Arabisation of the North Africa, Maghreb Review 4.1

(1979): 14. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Sociologie de lAlgrie, (Paris: Presses Univrsitaires

de France, 1958).60. Maya Schatzmiller, Le mythe dorigine berbre: Aspects historiographiques et sociaux,

Revue de lOccident musulman et de la Mediterranne 35 (1983): 148. The significance ofthis might be lessened if such myths, tying the Berber to the Arabs and Islam, in factremained the [exclusive] spiritual inheritance of a restricted [lettered, elite] sector of thepopulation, the masses of which, in general, did not in any respect share it, as she arguespace Brett. Ibid., 153.

61. Kitb mafkhir al-barbar, quoted in H. T. Norris, The Berbers in Arabic Literature(London: Longman, 1982).

62. Mohamed Harbi, Nationalisme algrien et identit berbre, Peuples Mditerranens 11(1980): 33.

63. Omar Carlier, La production sociale de limage de soi: Note sur la crise berbriste de1949,Annuaire de lAfrique du Nord 23 (1984): 348.

64. Duara, Rescuing History, 236.65. Mouloud Mammeri,La mort absurde des Aztques (Paris: Perrin, 1973), qtd. in Yefsah,

Arabo-islamisme, 124.




23/23

66. See, for example, the magazines Tifinagh andAmazigh Voice, published in France and theUnited States, respectively. The climate of the late 1990s, tooantiglobalizationmovements, the championing of autochthonous rights (Breton, Basque, and Native

American sovereignty are also addressed in some of this literature)has massivelyinfluenced the morphology of the contemporary movement. The World Amazigh CongresssBrussels declaration (August 9, 2000) stressed that the Amazigh struggle is part of the vastmovement of resistance to globalization, which is a movement that is in essence againstcultural identities.

67. Youcef Rezzag, Apres 60 jours demeutesla police tire de nouveau a balles reelles enKabylie,Le Matin (Algiers), June 19, 2001. After sixty days of rioting, the security forces inKabylia were again responding with live ammunition.



myth and counter-myth: “the berber” as national signiﬁer in algerian historiographies

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