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Reflections on Race and Ethnicity in North Africa Towards a Conceptual Critique of the Arab–Berber Divide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2021

Mohamad Amer Meziane
Mohamad Amer Meziane*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Abstract

This essay argues that the usages of the divide between Berbers and Arabs by the Algerian government and Berber activists alike should be analyzed in light of the transformation of the Imazighen into a cultural minority by the nation-state. The nation-state's definition of the majority as Arab, as well as the very concept of a minority, has shaped both the status and the grammar of the Arab-Berber divide in ways that are irreducible to how this binary functioned under French colonialism. In order to understand the distinct modes by which these categories function in Algeria today, one needs to analyze how the language of the nation-state determines their grammar, namely how they are deployed within this political context. Hence, by focusing primarily on French colonial representations of race such as the Kabyle Myth and by asserting simplified colonial continuities, the literature fails to make sense of the political centrality of the nation-state in the construction of the Amazigh question.

Keywords

RaceKabyle mythNorth AfricaAlgeriaAmazighBerber question
Type
Special Focus: Pluralism in Emergenc(i)es in the Middle East and North Africa
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , December 2020 , pp. 269 - 288
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc.

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References

1 The word Amazigh is used to refer to North African populations considered as native and distinguished from Arabs through the category of “Berbers.” I take it for granted that the usage of the term Berbers in North Africa is Roman and imperial and that this category actually became colonial and racial under French rule. Its origin, as we know, is barbaros – the umbrella term used by the Romans to describe strangers deemed uncivilized to the extent that they did not speak Greek or Latin. This Greek-Roman word, barbar, exists in Arabic and was used during the Islamic conquest of the Maghreb. Hence the contemporary usage of Amazigh as an alternative to Berber. The word Kabyle, which comes from the Arabic word qbayl (commonly translated as “tribe”), now refers to an Amazigh North African population currently living in Northern Algeria and which, as this paper shows, was racialized by French colonialism. This essay is a critical examination of these words and of the way in which colonial and postcolonial powers have shaped and transformed their grammar: the rules by which these categories are used. Many Amazigh intellectuals or activists formulate the claim according to which the Imazighen are the indigenous or native population of North Africa. Throughout the article I will favor using the word Amazigh instead of the Roman-imperial word “Berber.” I will nevertheless still use the latter in order to refer to the colonial concept through which North African populations have been classified but also to the ideological divide that stems from this colonial legacy.

2 For a good description of the historical details of the “Berberist crisis” (la crise berbériste) of 1949, see: Ouerdane, Amar, “La « crise berbériste » de 1949, un conflit à plusieurs faces,” Revue de l'Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée 44 (1987): 35–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It bears repeating that the opposition between an Arab Algeria and an Algerian Algeria – mostly formulated by Kabyle activists – has been a central point of division since the 1940s and also, within the FLN, during the Algerian war of liberation. The definition of Algeria as an Arab nation has, of course, become hegemonic and has marginalized this alternative discourse. It must also be reminded that this alternative discourse was democratic because it was already criticizing a form of centralization and a personification of power that eventually legitimized the transformation of the FLN into a single-party state.

3 Rachid Ali-Yahia, quoted by Ouerdane, “La ‘crise berbériste’ de 1949, un conflit à plusieurs faces,” 41.

4 In some versions of this discourse, the criticism of Arabness deploys itself as a criticism of Islam per se as a repression of the indigenous cultures of North Africa and Africa.

5 This discourse, deployed by self-defined Imazighen, is far from homogeneous, and the usages of the very word Amazigh in different contexts are notoriously diverse.

6 It has indeed recently been argued that the Berbers were invented by the Arabs: see Rouigi, Ramzi, Inventing the Berbers. History and Ideology of the Maghrib (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Asserting that there was no such thing as a unified Amazigh consciousness before the category of the Berbers was used by Arabs in their writings about North Africa and notably by Ibn Khaldun is one thing. Deducing the inexistence of the Imazighen or the Berbers from the historically constructed nature of this concept while presupposing the prior existence of categories such as “Arabs” or “North-Western Africa” is quite another.

7 See Charles-Robert Ageron, “La France a-t-elle eu une politique kabyle?,” De “l'Algérie française” à l'Algérie algérienne, Paris, Bouchène, 2005, (1960), 277–314. The origin of the myth is found in Carette, Antoine, Recherches sur les origines des migrations des principales tribus de l'Afrique septentrionale (Paris: Imprimerie Imperial, 1853), 13–17Google Scholar. According to Carette, the Berbers are the “natives” of North Africa, whom the Arabs conquered. Drawing on this study, French settlers and ethnologists argued that Berbers were of European descent and thus easily assimilable to French culture. They were considered as superficially Muslim and as easy targets for conversion to Christianity. Via the Kabyle myth, the Berber thus becomes the convertible subject of the colony. Most of the literature on the Kabyle myth I engage with in this section is indebted to Ageron. See, in French: Karima Dirèche, Chrétiens de Kabylie. Une action missionnaire dans l'Algérie coloniale, (1873–1954), (Paris, Bouchène, 2004) ; « Convertir les Kabyles : quelle réalité ? » in Religions et colonisation, Afrique, Asie, Océanie, Amériques, XVIe-XXe siècles, Dominique Borne et Benoît Falaize (dir.), (Paris, Éditions de l'Atelier/Éditions Ouvrières, 2009), 153–176 ; Carole Reynaud-Paligot, La République raciale, (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 59.

8 Lorcin, Particia, Imperial identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in colonial Algeria (London: Tauries, 1995), 146–70Google Scholar. On the idea of a Janus-faced, bifurcated state as the paradigm of the postcolonial state in Africa, see Mamdani, Mahmood, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, (Princeton University Press, 2018 [1996]), 7–8Google Scholar, 62–64. Mamdani suggestively compares association to indirect rule and defines it as a form of decentralization of colonial power that structures the very definition and the government of tribes, a foundation of native policies in colonial Africa. While I am indebted to Mamdani's theorization, I argue that, in the case of Algeria, race does not function within urban colonial centers but is rather part of the way in which rural and “tribal” populations are classified, defined, and divided. Hence, no strict divide between ethnicity and race can be presupposed.

9 Ageron, “La France a-t-elle eu une politique kabyle?.”

10 Abi-Mershed, Osama, Apostles of Modernity: The Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 1–8Google Scholar. The theme of a resurrection of the Orient is implemented through the project of associating the Arabs to the French empire by regenerating their past greatness and, in the words of the French Emperor Napoleon III, to “elevate them to the dignity of free men.” Napoleon III, Algiers, 1860, quoted by Charles-Robert Ageron, “Peut-on parler d'une politique des ‘royaumes arabes’ de Napoléon III ?” in M. Morsy (dir.), Les Saint-simoniens et l'Orient : Vers la modernité (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1990), 92.

11 For a symptomatic example of this narrative, see: Michel Levallois, “Ismayl Urbain, ou le combat perdu de l'apotre d'une Algérie franco-musulmane” in Histoire de l'Algérie a la période colonial, eds. Abderrahmane Bouchene et al. (Paris: La Découverte, 2014), 131–34.

12 Among historians of colonial India, the idea of an ethnographic state refers to a mode of rule that most scholars describe as a consequence of the Sepoy Revolt of 1857. The concept of an ethnographic state has been used in order to examine the colonization of Morocco by Burke, Edmund III, The Ethnographic State: France and the Invention of Moroccan Islam (University of California Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Burke, The Ethnographic State, 3–4.

14 Silverstein, Paul, “The Kabyle Myth: Colonization and the Production of Ethnicity” in From the Margins. Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, ed. Axel, Brian Keith (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 122–55Google Scholar. This aspect of French colonialism is more adequately studied in the Anglophobe literature by Abi-Mershed's study of the Saint-Simonians and the Arab Bureaux, notwithstanding the fact that Mershed does not provide an alternative reading of the Kabyle myth in the economy of colonialism from his broader perspective.

15 Ageron, Charles-Robert, “Peut-on parler d'une politique des ‘royaumes arabes’ de Napoléon III ?” in De « l'Algérie française » à l'Algérie algérienne, Volume 1 (Alger: Éditions Bouchène, 2005), 135–48Google Scholar. On the legacy of the imperial policies of Napoleon III in the making of the “protectorate” solution in Tunisia until its influence on Lyautey's policy in Morocco, see especially ibid., 144–45. Ageron's argument is that the notion of the Arab Kingdom does not refer to the project of transforming ʿAbd al-Qadir into an actual king of Algeria or Syria but to the politics of association: progressive assimilation through the respect of religion, Islamic civil status, and tribal customs.

16 Frémeaux, Jacques, Les Bureaux arabes dans l'Algérie de la conquête (Paris: Denoël, 1993), 271Google Scholar; Frémeaux, “Les SAS (sections administratives spécialisées),” Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains 4.208 (2002): 55–68. Within North Africa, the politics of the Bureaux Arabes served as a model for the Service of Native Affairs (Affaires indigènes) in Morocco and Southern Tunisia.

17 J. Frémeaux, “Les SAS (sections administratives spécialisées),” 55.

18 As a symptomatic example of this narrative, see: Michel Levallois, “Ismayl Urbain, ou le combat perdu de l'apotre d'une Algérie franco-musulmane” in Histoire de l'Algérie a la période coloniale, eds. Abderrahmane Bouchene et al. (Paris, La Découverte, 2014), 131–34.

19 The importance of the Kabyle myth should not be exagerated since there cerainly was a French-colonial Arab myth that was crucial to the implementation of the indigenat. Ferdinand Buisson, one of the French founders of laïcité, asserts the intellectual superiority of Arabs over Berbers and their capacity for learning. Kabyles, it is commonly said among many people who identify as “Arabs,” are enemies of Arabness and objective allies of French and European colonialism in general. The accusation of the Berber as the colonizer's ally, however much repeated by intellectuals and politicians in the Maghrib, has become an ideological myth of Arab nationalism after being a marginal mythology deployed during the transition between military “indirect” and civil “direct” rule at the end of the nineteenth century. While Kabyles and Berbers are defined as being either more convertible or more assimilable than Arabs, there always existed a complementary mythology of Arabs as superior than Kabyles. Unsuprisingly – and it is almost banal to make the point – this divide allows conflicting valorizations of each sides of the boundaries to be deployed.

20 Ismaÿl Urbain, L'Algérie française (Paris: Challamel, 1862), 44–45. Association functions through labor distribution and usages of so-called racial skills for the improvement of the colony's economic wealth. The Kabyles’ sedentarization makes them able, Urbain argues, to become urban workers in industrial manufactures. Hence, “Kabyles and other Berbers’ living in the mountains could be used as a colonized working class.” Nevertheless, this divide between the Berbers and the Arabs does not function as a hierarchy. Needless to say, it is the divide between Berbers and Arabs which is colonial rather than the assertion of the former's racial superiority. Hence the relative marginality of the Kabyle myth.

21 On the ecological dimensions of the French construction of the “Arab nomad” as an alleged cause of deforestation in Algeria and on its influence on the British policies in the Middle East, see: Diana Davis, “Introduction: Imperialism, Orientalism and the Environment in the Middle East” in Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa, eds. Diana Davis and Edmund Burke III (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2011), 1–22. See especially, 2 and 9; Diana Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome. Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Ohio University Press, 2007). Certainly, the Kabyles were seen as practicing horticulture and as less environmentally destructive than the Arabs were. Nevertheless, it did not prevent colonial figures such as Urbain from trying to use the skills of the Arab race, its alleged intelligence, and its so-called agricultural and pastoral skills.

22 Abdelmajid Hannoum, “Translation and the Colonial Imaginary: Ibn Khaldun Orientalist,” History and Theory 12.1 (February 2003). See Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal (London: Routledge, 1958), 5, 76–77. Ibn Khaldun, unlike the French, does not argue that sedentarization is the condition of civilization. The concept of umran, often translated as civilization, can be rendered as the togetherness of a people in a particular location of the earth. As such, it can be distinguished from the modern and Western concept of civilization. For the same reason, it cannot be conceptually reduced to either urban or sedentary modes of life. It is De Slane's translation of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah into French – the first translation of the book into a European language – which deploys this conceptual confusion of umran with sedentary life and civilization. This confusion is one of the matrixes of the racial discourse deployed in French colonialism and, arguably, a large part of the ethnographic language which structures ethnic and racial categories in North Africa.

23 Johann David Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht, Erster Theil (Francfort sur le Main, chez Johann Gottlieb Garbe, 1770), 1, 14–16, 180, 194. Hence the idea of the superiortity of the Jews over the Arab as well as the very idea of a “Jewish nation.” The European racial concept of “the Arab” is inseparable from the Semitic hypothesis. After Edward Said, scholars have shown how orientalism has racialized the Jews and the Arabs through similar categories. See: Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

24 Hannoum, “Translation,” 73–75. Arguably, the translation of the Arabic word jald – a word one might render as skin – into the European category of race plays a crucial role in this process.

25 Mahmood Mamadni, “Introduction. Transafrican Slavery Thinking Historically,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38.2 (2018): 185–210. According to Mamdani, precolonial definitions of Arabness were not premised upon race in the biological sense but on the performance of certain practices. It was therefore possible to become an Arab as it was possible to become a Muslim. As a result, Mamdani writes, it was possible to claim and to some extent to invent Arab genealogies despite differences of skin color.

26 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract (New York: Dover Publications, 2003), Book 4, Chapter 8.

27 On the way in which Arab nationalism conceptualizes Islam, see: Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 200–04. Arguably, the nationalization of Islam is linked to what Asad and Haj describe as colonial processes of secularization in Egypt. See: Asad, Formations, 205–56; Samira Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 153–88.

28 According to some of my interlocutors in Kabylia, the Hirak could be seen as a victory of the “Berber Spring” (Printemps berbère). The “Berber Spring” refers to a series of movements that emerged during the 1980s in Kabylia.

29 Nadia Marzouki, “Conversion as Statelessness: A Study of Contemporary Algerian Conversions to Evangelical Christianity,” Middle East Law and Governance 4 (2012): 69–105.

30 Paul Silverstein, “The Cultivation of ‘Culture’ in the Moroccan Amazigh Movement,” Review of Middle East Studies 43.2 (Winter 2009): 168–77. Challenging the Morroccan State's Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) and the standardization of Amazigh language (Tamazight), “a number of Amazigh activists have refused such cooptation and decry the State's effort as a “folklorization” of Berber culture,” Silverstein, 171. I disagree with Silverstein's notion of self-primitivism and propose to think of these languages of North African indigeneity as aspects of a larger structure that belongs to what historians of colonialism describe as the ethnographic state. On comparable trajectories in Algeria, see Silverstein, “Martyrs and Patriots: ethnic, National and Transnational Dimensions of Kabyle Politics,” Journal of North African Studies 8.1, 2003: 87–111. Silverstein aptly notes that Kabyle movements have questioned the very idea according to which Algeria belongs to the Arab world. He also describes the opposition between an Algerian Algeria and an Arab Algerian during the Algerian war while reminding the reader that the liberation movement was started by Kabyle members of the FLN.

31 Anti-Arab Berber ideological movements typically include regionalist and nationalist organisations such as the MAK, the Mouvement pour l'autonomie de la Kabylie. The main demand of the movement is the autonomy of Kabylie from the rest of Algeria.

32 There are of course – how could one seriously disagree? – non-Western forms of pluralism and one could easily quote the Islamic expression according to which “disagreements among the community is a blessing” (ikhtilaf al-umma rahma), a notion that relates to shariʿa practices of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) but extends, for many Muslims, beyond the limited realm of the shariʿa.

33 Chaab yurid el istiqlal (The people demand independence) means that the people are asserting a colonial continuity between French colonialism and the régime.

34 Is this language, one might ask, precisely what the “Arab-Islamic” nationalist reaction against Amazigh revolutionary movements in the 1940s has been unable to understand by rejecting them as “berbero-materialists”? See: Ouerdan, “La ‘crise berbériste,’” 42.

35 The conflict between these definitions of the Algerian identity started before the Algerian revolution itself and was reactived during the Algerian revolution.