MUSCULAR MUSLIMS: SCOUTING IN LATE COLONIAL ALGERIA BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND RELIGION

Abstract

The Islamic reformist movement in Algeria is often seen as a precursor to the independence movement, in which religion was supposedly integrated into nationalist identity politics. Focusing on the Muslim scout movements between the 1930s and 1950s, this article challenges this view by arguing that Islam continued to play a role beyond that of an identitarian marker. Influenced by Christian youth movements, the Muslim scouts developed ideas of a “muscular Islam” that remained central even after the movement split in two—one association close to the major nationalist party and another linked to the reformists.

The development of Algerian nationalism is often studied in the context of its connections to French leftist movements;¹ the war of independence (1954–62) and the regime of President Ahmed Ben Bella (Ahmad bin Billa) (1962–65) to which it gave rise are usually perceived as the epitome of a third worldist revolution with a distinctly socialist character.² Many studies have relegated the Islamic reformist movement around the Association of Algerian Muslim ʿUlamaʾ (Jamʿiyyat al-ʿUlamaʾ al-Muslimin al-Jazaʾiriyyin, or Association des ulémas musulmans algériens, AUMA) led by the renowned scholar Abdelhamid Ben Badis (ʿAbd al-Hamid bin Badis) and his successors to the role of a precursor to the nationalist movement, which, through the establishment of an Arabic school system during the late colonial period, facilitated later Arabization policies.³ An important historian of Algerian nationalism, Mahfoud Kaddache (Mahfuz Qaddash), who in his youth was active both in the scout movement and in the major nationalist party, wrote about AUMA's activities:

Cultural action lead to Arabism, the Arab nation and the Algerian homeland. The great merit of BEN BADIS and the ulema was to have shown the path towards nationalism (even if, at the time, they were politically not nationalists). They pushed nationalism to the discovery of forgotten Arab civilization and Maghribi culture and, in that sense, cultivated the love for the Algerian homeland.⁴

Apart from this interpretation, which perceives Islamic reformism as a sort of cultural nationalism that preceded “actual” nationalism, the prominence of Islam in political discourse is normally seen as pertaining to a later period in the history of the Middle East and North Africa, when Arab nationalist-cum-socialist regimes were beginning to lose their legitimacy.⁵ Youth movements with an explicitly religious character especially, including those that are the focus of this article, are often described as more recent phenomena of an “Islamist” or even “post-Islamist” era in Middle Eastern history since the 1990s.⁶

In contrast to these trends, Peter Wien has cautioned against an easy conflation of 20th-century Arab nationalism with secularism.⁷ And with regard to Algeria, Shoko Watanabe has recently refuted the interpretation of Islamic reformism as a mere precursor to the ultimately successful nationalist independence movement of the National Liberation Front (Front de libération nationale, FLN) and convincingly shown that the ʿulamaʾ, and particularly their youth movements, continued to follow a political direction autonomous—and clearly discernible—from the nationalists well after World War II.⁸

Although in principle this article subscribes to Watanabe's argument about the independent role of the Islamic reformists and the distinctiveness of their political vision from the nationalist one, it takes the issue further by investigating the role of religion in the major youth movements close to the reformist AUMA and to the nationalist party, respectively the Boy scouts musulmans algériens (BSMA) and the Scouts musulmans algériens (SMA). It argues that Islam remained fundamental for the SMA as well, which would provide the radical nationalist Algerian People's Party/Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (Parti du peuple algérien/Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques, PPA-MTLD)⁹ with its cadres, and thus sheds new light on the 1948 split in the Algerian Muslim scout organization that gave rise to two competing associations. The article also examines the references and influences that shaped the Muslim scout movements from its inception in the 1930s until the war of independence from 1954. It argues that, although Muslim scouting emerged during the heyday of paramilitary youth movements, which were sometimes inspired by European fascism, in the Middle East (and beyond) the major influence on the groups in question came from religious associations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and particularly the initiatives of Christian missionaries. Within this context, Muslim Algerian scouts developed their own idea of a “muscular Islam.”

ALGERIAN YOUTH MOVEMENTS BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND RELIGION

In Algeria, indigenous scouting emerged in the bustling atmosphere that followed the 1930 anniversary celebrations of French conquest. Many scout leaders recall the Centenaire, with its impressive scout camp, as an important stimulus.¹⁰ As one scout observed, “Algerian youth, for their part, were finally on the move: sports clubs came into life pretty much everywhere, cultural and theatrical associations developed; we witnessed the arrival of the first Egyptian and Indian movies. But, for my part, I gravitated towards Muslim scouting.”¹¹ The first Muslim Algerian scout association is said to have been the troop al-Fallah from Algiers, established in 1935. Additional groups emerged over the following years in cities and towns with a sizable Muslim population, from Tlemcen and Mostaghanem in the West to Sétif and Constantine in the East, but also in the Southern Territories, in the town of Laghouat.¹² Together, in 1939, these groups formed the Federation of Muslim Algerian Scouts (commonly referred to as Scouts musulmans algériens, SMA).¹³ In 1948, the SMA split when the nationalist tendency imposed its views on the federation, propelling proponents of a nonpolitical stance to create the Boy scouts musulmans algériens. Both the SMA and the BSMA continued to use the Arabic designation al-Kashshafa al-Islamiyya al-Jazaʾiriyya afterwards.¹⁴

By all accounts, Mohamed Bouras (Muhammad Buras), who was close to the Islamic reformist Progress Club (Nadi al-Taraqqi or Cercle du progrès), founded the first Muslim boy scout movement. In 1941, French authorities charged Bouras, who had continued to play a leading role in the SMA, with treason and executed him; he thereby became the first “martyr” of the scout movement and one of the symbols of Algerians’ fight against colonialism.¹⁵ The association in Constantine evolved under the aegis of Ben Badis, often depicted as the Algerian Muhammad ʿAbduh.¹⁶ The SMA and, after 1948, the BSMA were thus considered part of the iṣlāḥ movement of Islamic reform around Ben Badis, who was credited not only with the establishment of the private Arabic education system, but also with the foundation of the soccer team Mouloudia Olympique de Constantine.¹⁷ After the split, the SMA organization provided the basic structure for the militant movement centered around the PPA-MTLD, which had demanded independence for the first time in May 1945 and then started the armed insurrection nine and a half years later.¹⁸

Many features that were central to scouting in general acquired nationalist or religious meaning for the Muslim scouts in the specific context of Algeria during the last decades of French rule. One such feature was the centrality of the experience of nature for a healthy lifestyle for town boys and girls, allegedly corrupted by their urban environment. In the case of the Muslim Algerian Scouts, this idea was linked, beyond the general concern for outdoor activities present in all scout movements, to a nationalist drive to get to know one's country. Knowledge of the nation as a tangible entity made up of a particular topography, which a young scout was supposed to acquire, pertained to different levels of experience: one was the beauty of the landscape that might elicit pride. On another level, for adolescents from urban, middle-class backgrounds, taking note of the harsh realities of life in the countryside under colonial exploitation might also help to raise nationalist consciousness. Finally, there was the inquiring impetus of scouting, which, according to scout educators, should lead to a thorough study of the country to individuate the challenges and potentials of the new nation that was to be built.¹⁹

It was often assumed that scouts should lead others by example and, in turn, follow the example of great historical figures. Traditions of religious sainthood, in this context, were combined with the modern idea of great individuals as the actors of history.²⁰ In the French associations active in Algeria, these figures included medieval knights as well as modern colonial conquerors or men of science.²¹ The Muslim scouts, for their part, placed themselves in their own tradition, which was, above all, an Islamic one. Apart from Bouras, the actual founder of the movement, Ben Badis became a venerated founding figure after his death in 1940.²² Beyond the immediate Algerian context, the intellectual ancestry claimed by the scouts can clearly be identified with the wider movement of Islamic reform: the BSMA paper al-Hayat (Life) printed a whole series about ʿAbduh, but a paper close to the nationalist SMA also published several articles on the former modernist mufti of Egypt.²³ The Muslim scouts also integrated venerated scholarly figures such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Ibn Khaldun into their pantheon of role models who could represent the enlightened tradition of Islamic culture.²⁴ Another contemporary example would be the young King Faruq of Egypt who used to appear in public as head of his country's scout movement.²⁵

For scouts linked to a movement of national liberation civic education was, of course, of paramount concern. The association was described as a “school of patriotism,” and its members as “the soldiers of the future” and the leaders of the independent state to come.²⁶ But civic and moral education, or national and religious consciousness, were intertwined in the Muslim scout movement. Mohammed (Muhammad) Harbi, himself a young scout at the time, founded a sports club in his hometown of Philippeville (Skikda) and, eventually, became an important historian of the nationalist movement (though a leftist dissident one). He remembered how he became politically socialized during the 1940s:

It was also through scouting that I was initiated into certain hadiths repeated over and over by Muslim reformism and taken up by the nationalists—such as “Love of the homeland is part of the faith”—or Qurʾanic verses calling for the refusal of all determinism and fatalism: “Say: Act! God will judge your action, as will the Prophet and the believers”; and above all: “God will not change the state of a community, if it does not reform itself first.” In the name of these verses, my generation had to shake off parental tutelage.²⁷

From this passage, it is clear that nationalists employed religious symbolism as a mobilizing force. The reference to Islam was certainly part of a politics of identity—the colonized “natives” were commonly referred to and referred to themselves not as Algerians or Arabs, but as Muslims, in contrast to the French Algerians of diverse Christian European origins and to the indigenous Jews, most of whom also held full French citizenship. Hence, Muslim identity apparently overrode national identification, at least for a certain time. Messali Hadj (Masali al-Hajj) characterized the discourse at the beginning of Algerians’ anticolonial activism in the 1920s, again mentioning the famous hadith: “We did not realize that we were animated by nationalist sentiments. In our conversations in France, we never used the word ‘nationalism.’ We just said to express our sentiments during the discussions: ‘Love of the homeland or the country is an act of faith.’ ‘Hubb al-watan min al-iman.’”²⁸ According to Harbi, Messali himself even thirty years later, when he was the undisputed leader of the nationalist movement, played on religious references and styled himself as an eschatological savior figure to appeal to popular constituencies.²⁹

That many sports clubs, as well as both indigenous scouting associations, used the term “Muslim” in their names marked them, first of all, as communal organizations of a distinct demographic group in the settler colony.³⁰ Besides their self-identification as Muslim, most sports and scout associations employed Arabic names. Although the use of Arabic might not be surprising in the context of national identity building—leaving aside the intricate question of Kabyle or Amazigh identity—the program of Arabization was a central component of the Islamic iṣlāḥ movement that operated the private Arabic school system.³¹ Again, the national and the religious were closely knit together. The recollections of one militant show that in the mid-1940s a boy scout could adhere to Islamic reformism and contribute to its Arabic education system while also being a member of a nationalist party and participating in paramilitary training. ³²

In a historical context where all major social and political forces—radical nationalists and communists as well as Islamic reformists, and eventually even the colonial administration—called for modernization, the transformation of society, and a break with tradition, religion was clearly part of a process that James McDougall has described as “the invention of authenticity.”³³ This insistence on national-cum-religious authenticity also translated into concrete practices. For example, the French scouts in Algeria did not make reference to the actual colonial setting for their imagery of adventure, but to a certain romanticism of native Americans or Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book—which seems suited for metropolitan youth rather than for people in a situation where the “exotic” non-European was nearby.³⁴ Contrary to this kind of exoticism, the Muslim scouts tried to take edifying examples only from what they regarded as their own cultural tradition, like when they substituted the figure of Hayy bin Yaqzan, devised by the Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl, for Mowgli.³⁵ Whereas European scouts occasionally dressed up as “Indians,” their Muslim counterparts, during a visit to the Andalusian town of Granada, presented themselves in a sort of “traditional” Arab garb, which seems closer to Orientalist imagination than to anything Arabs would wear in contemporary Algeria.³⁶

This quest for authenticity was especially obvious in connection with the question of women's “emancipation.”³⁷ Many authors argued that Muslim women's social status should be ameliorated as a necessary part of social modernization. “Emancipation” was not to be understood as a demand for Westernization, but explicitly as an authentic way of female liberation in line with cultural and religious values.³⁸ Even a writer such as Zhour Ounissi (Zuhur Wanisi), who would become the first female government minister in independent Algeria, made her claims for women's equality as important constituent parts of the scout movement, as well as of “the body of every nation” (jasad kull umma) as a whole, in early Islamic history.³⁹

BOY SCOUTS, FASCISTS, AND MISSIONARIES

After its establishment in Britain by General Sir Robert Baden-Powell in 1907, scouting rapidly spread to France and, over the following decades, developed in most parts of the French colonial empire, as well as in the Arab world.⁴⁰ The history of scouting and sports exemplifies the ambivalence of the colonial situation:⁴¹ first introduced by missionaries or colonial officials in the framework of their civilizing mission ideology, new educational models, leisure practices, and new structures for community organization were quickly adopted by those sectors of indigenous society that aimed at anticolonial reform and national self-empowerment.⁴² In the words of Daniel Denis, sports and scouting in a colonial setting thus became “ruses of History.”⁴³

The 1930s, the decade in which Muslim scouting developed in Algeria, witnessed the mushrooming of various nationalist youth movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Many of these organizations, which often had a paramilitary character, were linked to new movements in the early era of mass politics and represented mainly an emerging young urban middle class, known in the Arab East as the effendiyya.⁴⁴ Some of the paramilitary associations were certainly influenced by contemporary fascist aesthetics and political styles. Yet despite several prominent personalities or organizations having connections to Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, there were virtually no parties or movements in the Arab world that can be described as truly fascist.⁴⁵

Nevertheless, the question remains whether Algerian Muslim scouting at the time of its emergence might have been influenced to some extent by “fascistic” elements in terms of aesthetics or organization. In the sources, there is no evidence to support the idea of any fascist influence on the movement. In contrast to youth organizations in Egypt and the Mashriq, which sometimes styled themselves deliberately after fascist examples and were founded explicitly as paramilitary wings of nationalist parties,⁴⁶ the SMA and BSMA clearly remained boy scout associations, following the rules established by Baden-Powell and recognized by the French and international scouting federations. Their symbols, the fleur-de-lis and crescent and star, reflected their participation in the world scout movement as well as an emphasis on Islamic identity; both symbols were far from any fascist iconography. Götz Nordbruch has shown that in discussions about fascism during the interwar years Islam was often presented as essentially incompatible with the adoption of Italian or German models in the Middle East.⁴⁷ In 1930s Algeria, Islamic reformists and even many nationalists clearly saw their future in the framework of French republicanism and not in a radical alternative that fascism might offer, in particular after the leftist Popular Front came to power in 1936.⁴⁸

In 1941, Bouras was executed on charges of collusion with Germany and Italy. Even if the accusations were true—all Algerian accounts insist they were fabricated⁴⁹—it is unlikely that this reflected any ideological proximity between the SMA and fascism. It seems, rather, that Bouras attempted to use the French defeat in World War II to the advantage of the Algerian cause, just as Tunisia's ruler Moncef (Munsif) Bey did at the time.⁵⁰ Although Algerians, including the scouts, tried to come to terms with the Vichy Regime during this period, the quasifascist youth movements created under the dictatorship of Marshal Philippe Pétain did not serve as examples to young activists for their own associations. This is stressed, for instance, by Hocine Aït Ahmed (Husayn Ait Ahmad), who would become a major leader in the PPA-MTLD and then the FLN. Reflecting on his schooldays under Vichy, he recalled: “Like my fellow pupils, I appreciated that our afternoons were now dedicated to sports, but I was neither active in a youth movement nor did I sing Maréchal, nous voilà.”⁵¹ Although Aït Ahmed was active in a youth movement—the Muslim Scouts—he did not link this to the state organizations set up by the right-wing regime. In fact, in Algeria fascist sympathies and right-wing extremism, especially anti-Semitism, were widespread among the settler population, which made them all the more unattractive to anticolonial activists.⁵²

Another possible influence could have been the workers’ sports movement, which was also important during the interwar period. After all, Messali's first nationalist organization had been set up in the late 1920s as an affiliate of the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, PCF), and even the ʿulamaʾ repeatedly collaborated closely with the PCF's Algerian offspring.⁵³ Workers’ sports were well established in Algeria, to the point that the country—though legally part of France—was admitted with a separate delegation to the 1936 Peoples’ Olympiad in Barcelona.⁵⁴ But here, too, there is no indication in the various recollections and contemporary reports that socialist athleticism might have exercised any influence on the emerging Muslim scout movement, which was firmly anchored in the educational and associational environment that was being constructed by Islamic reformists.

Ben Badis's iṣlāḥ movement focused on strengthening young Algerians’ Arab-Islamic identity through private schools, cultural circles, sports clubs, and scout troops.⁵⁵ An important model for distinctly Islamic youth organizations was provided by the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by the Egyptian teacher Hasan al-Banna.⁵⁶ The Algerian paper al-Manar (The Lighthouse), for instance, which was close to the SMA, printed articles by the most prominent ideologues of the Brotherhood, Banna and Sayyid Qutb.⁵⁷ Although the Muslim Brothers, with their uniformed wing the Jawwala, were certainly part of the phenomenon described above of more or less radical youth organizations in the Arab world, Banna explicitly rejected fascism as a model.⁵⁸ In his pedagogy, he was actually much closer to the scout ethos and ideas derived from British “muscular Christianity.”⁵⁹ Beth Baron has even argued that the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood was a direct response to the activities of Christian missionaries in Egypt, at once a countermeasure to their increasing influence in the fields of charity and education and an initiative modeled on their example.⁶⁰

A similar connection can be found in the case of Algerian Muslim scouting. Christian missionary societies had been present in the colony since the 19th century, the most important of which was the Society of the Missionaries of Africa, commonly known as the White Fathers (Pères Blancs) and White Sisters (Sœurs Blanches).⁶¹ Muslim boys and girls had been enrolled in scout troops by these missionaries from the mid-1930s as part of their Moral Assistance to North African Natives program (Assistance morale aux indigènes nord-africains). Later, the French Catholic scout movement Scouts de France (SDF, for boys) and Guides de France (GDF, for girls) incorporated them and thus became the only French association to create special sections for Algerian Muslims.⁶²

Besides the Catholic societies, Protestant missionaries were active in colonial Algeria, and they had their own scout association, the Éclaireurs unionistes de France (EUDF).⁶³ In his autobiographical novel Le fils du pauvre (The Poor Man's Son) from 1950, Mouloud Feraoun (Mulud Firʿawn) relates an experience with Protestant missionaries and the EUDF: when Menrad, the protagonist, moves from the countryside to the city to pursue his studies, he stays in a student home run by a missionary society, because he cannot afford otherwise. There, he has to take part in community prayer and bible lessons, but without having to undergo baptism or renounce his Muslim faith. In fact, he feels uncomfortable not during church service, but during the outings of the scout troop affiliated with the mission. Coming from a poor rural background, where people are “in the fresh air” all day anyway, he fails to understand the purpose of hiking: “Menrad was stunned that serious persons, like the missionary, would waste their time on such childish things. The shepherds from his village, then, practiced scouting without knowing it?”⁶⁴

Feraoun here hints at the fact that the most lasting experiences pupils would acquire in missionary institutions were perhaps not religious teachings based on the gospels, but rather new leisure practices and community activities. In fact, one of the early indigenous scout troops in Algeria emerged precisely in the environment described by the Kabyle writer. In Tizi-Ouzou, the urban center of Kabylia, during the late 1930s, the future prominent SMA leader Salah Louanchi (Salah al-Wanshi) and fellow students developed the Muslim association al-Hilal out of a scout unit based at a mission station of the French Reformed Church and first organized by a member of the EUDF.⁶⁵ Sometimes, the Muslim Scouts explained the content of scouting with the term “scout” as an acronym: serve (servir), believe (croire), obey (obéir), unite (unir), and work (travailler).⁶⁶ For some, this emphasis on strict discipline and obedience might again evoke fascist precedents, but, in fact, it was taken from the paper of the North African branch of the Protestant EUDF.⁶⁷

Although French Protestants found themselves in a more difficult situation vis-à-vis the laicist state and a predominantly Catholic society than their Anglo-Saxon coreligionists, in Algeria they competed actively with other Christian missionaries in the realms of charity and education.⁶⁸ Apart from mission schools and the Éclaireurs unionistes, there was another Protestant institution that had a strong impact on the development of ideas on muscular religion: the Union chrétienne de jeunes gens (UCJG), the French branch of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA).⁶⁹ As part of Protestant missionary efforts, the YMCA had spread to many countries across the globe in the first half of the 20th century.⁷⁰ The training, not least the physical education, dispensed in this association influenced quite a few political activists of different religious and ideological persuasions.⁷¹

The most prominent Algerian member of the YMCA during the colonial period was certainly the Muslim reformist thinker Malek Bennabi (Malik bin Nabi), who, after independence, would become a major source of inspiration for Algerian Islamists.⁷² This intellectual from Constantine joined the Protestant youth organization shortly after settling in Paris in 1930.⁷³ Bennabi, at the time a twenty-five-year-old student with the occasional job, explained how he ended up there rather apologetically and insisted that he identified himself as a Muslim while entering the association.⁷⁴ In his programmatic anticolonial writings, Bennabi was not interested in sports and mentioned scouting only briefly.⁷⁵ Although, he saw the YMCA more as a site for intellectual discussion,⁷⁶ it is unlikely that he was completely untouched by the physical activities being pursued at the place where basketball was first introduced to France.⁷⁷ In any case, what he liked—and deemed necessary for his fellow North Africans—were “lessons in efficiency, style, or in one word: civilization.”⁷⁸ This is completely in line with the focus on ethics and good conduct, regardless (to a certain extent) of a specific religious creed, which many Protestant missionaries espoused.⁷⁹ In fact, Bennabi seems to have combined his experience in the YMCA with his admiration for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in formulating his ideas about reform and the education of young generations, which favored individual morality and rationalism, austerity, and activism.⁸⁰

While living in Paris during the 1930s, Bennabi married a French Catholic who then converted to Islam, which was not uncommon in the circles of Maghribi immigrants. The liaison between the Catholic student activist and girl guide leader Anne-Marie Chaulet and Salah Louanchi, an Algerian independence activist and SMA leader, is more exceptional, as it happened in 1950s Algiers where relations between communities were much more tense than in the metropole. But it exemplifies the personal as well as institutional connections of Christian and Muslim youth groups up to the very end of French rule in Algeria.⁸¹ In 1953, representatives of the Catholic student union and the SDF/GDF, on the one hand, and from both Muslim scout associations, on the other, established the Association of Algerian Youth for Social Action (Association de la jeunesse algérienne pour l'action sociale, AJAAS) in an attempt to find common ground in the face of increasing political conflict and a colonial administration unwilling to reform. Members of the AJAAS included, apart from Anne-Marie and Salah Louanchi, Fanny Colonna, who would become a well-known sociologist, as well as two other founding figures of the Algerian scout movement who were also active in the nationalist PPA-MTLD: Omar (ʿUmar) Lagha and Mahfoud Kaddache, the future historian of Algerian nationalism. Together, they had established their own scout association in the late 1930s, which then joined the SMA. At the time of their activities with the AJAAS, they published a scout paper, La Voix des Jeunes (The Voice of the Young). The AJAAS also had its own journal, edited by the historian André Mandouze, a famous exponent of the Catholic left and former Resistance fighter.⁸²

The literature on Christian missions in the wider Arab world focuses mainly on their influence on the cultural Arab renaissance (nahḍa) of the late 19th century and the emergence of Arab nationalism.⁸³ In this view, it was not the diffusion of the Christian faith as such that represented the influence of the missionaries, but the entrenchment of certain values, such as individual morality in a strong community, self-help, rationality, orderly conduct, and a work ethic, or a modern lifestyle in general. The methods of education to transmit these values pertained to the current of “muscular Christianity” that was emerging from the 19th century mainly in the context of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism with emblematic movements such as the boy scouts and the YMCA.⁸⁴

Although the activities of various Protestant missionary societies in the Middle East are relatively well studied in the context of “muscular” religion,⁸⁵ less attention has been paid to Catholic actors.⁸⁶ And yet, in France, the patronages of different monastic orders, which had started to work among the emerging industrial working class in the early 19th century, propagated a similar “civilized,” orderly, and healthy lifestyle for the metropolitan poor as they did for supposedly ignorant and backward colonial populations. The patronages picked up on the Jesuit tradition of education through games and became prominently involved in the development of modern sports in France.⁸⁷ In general, the literature has dedicated less interest to Christians’ strictly religious influences on Islamic reformist youth movements.⁸⁸ Especially with regard to the multiconfessional societies of the Mashriq, the scholarship often sees religious denominations as identitarian markers.⁸⁹

MUSCULAR RELIGION IN A COLONIAL SITUATION

Similarly, in stressing the nationalist potential of scouting,⁹⁰ scholars have neglected the role of religion. But was there more to religious references than an “invention of authenticity”? Was there something like “muscular Islam,” comparable to the muscular Christianity of European scouts and the YMCA? Returning to the subject of exemplary figures to emulate, it seems fair to say that the ultimate role model for Muslim scouts remained the Prophet Muhammad, “the original über-scout”⁹¹—similar to the “great scoutmaster Jesus” for their Christian counterparts:⁹²

The Prophet Mohammed (God's grace be upon him), conscious of the importance of youth and its determining role for propagating the new religion, bases his policy on a collaboration with this section of the population, which is more receptive towards social reform. He establishes paramilitary and military training for his young companions. … One of the Prophet's (God's grace be upon him) hadiths recalls it in no uncertain terms: “my triumph has been assured by the young.”

He never missed an opportunity to remind his companions in jihad: “teach your children to swim, to shoot arrows and to ride a horse.”⁹³

A central figure in the development of notions of “muscular Islam” within the Algerian Muslim scout movement was Mahmoud Bouzouzou (Mahmud Buzuzu). From the end of World War II, Bouzouzou, a former student in an iṣlāḥī Arabic school, served as head spiritual guide (murshid) to the SMA and continued to lead this association after it aligned itself completely with the PPA-MTLD in 1948. Though he published mainly in French, in 1951 he started his own Arabophone newspaper titled al-Manar, in reference to Rashid Rida's famous Islamic reform journal published in Egypt. Bouzouzou also wrote a short biography of Muhammad for his scouts, in which he outlined in accessible language the exemplary traits of the Prophet.⁹⁴ In an article for Lagha's and Kaddache's paper La Voix des Jeunes on the occasion of the mawlid, the SMA murshid depicted the founder of Islam as a man of action and even credited him with introducing the spirit of individual responsibility long before European Enlightenment philosophers.⁹⁵

Islam was foundational in Bouzouzou's educational project: “Islam represents the most important spiritual value of our homeland. Legislation, traditions, individual, social, and family life, in one word, the manners and institutions of the Algerian derive from Islam.”⁹⁶ But apart from such a statement, which could still be interpreted as a claim to “authentic” identity, the murshid often stressed the activist qualities of religion: for him, Islam was primarily a way of life; reform was not about the intricacies of theological debate, but about individual practice, “not philosophizing about the Koran, but living it.”⁹⁷ In one article, the spiritual leader of the SMA explained the importance of practice as opposed to theory in a more pointed way. He argued that it was imperative to care for one's body, insofar as it is the home of the spirit to which it is closely linked:

To acquire the spiritual force of Gandhi together with the physical force of Joe Louis, should not leave any man of tomorrow indifferent. To be spiritually and physically strong is a quality our Prophet requires from us, when he says: “God prefers the strong over the weak believer and loves him more.” (The same holds true for a people).⁹⁸

This quote, which brings together the Prophet Muhammad and American boxing star Joe Louis—then the uncontested world heavyweight champion—represents a striking example of the notion of muscular Islam.

Another Muslim intellectual-cum-scout leader was Chikh Bouamrane (Shaykh Bu ʿAmran) from the rival BSMA, which stayed close to the reformist AUMA. In independent Algeria's clerical hierarchy Bouamrane would rise up to the chairmanship of the Higher Islamic Council, the state authority issuing official fatwas. In 1951, he argued in an article in the BSMA organ al-Hayat that religion was about “fighting the spirit of abandonment, systematic pessimism and egoism.” Bouamrane even demanded a “missionary spirit” as the basis for a renewed Islam, understood as the way of life of a reformed society.⁹⁹

Regarding ideas of muscular religion on the part of this Muslim scout leader, a clear influence from Catholic associations is detectable. For example, a priest working with the Scouts de France wrote under the heading “Praying Means Acting” that:

I am also supporting every boy who, raised as a scout, has acquired a real sense of physical activity. From the beginning of his training he willingly has to employ his body in the search for God. … Apart from these educative values with their personal as well as social usefulness, physical activities within prayer represent a true religious value. Through them, we recognize that everything inside us is God: our body as our soul, that both belong to Him, that both are at His service.¹⁰⁰

In this passage, the central feature of muscular religion comes out very clearly: the fusion of body and soul, the inherent spiritual value of physical activity. As already mentioned, besides the scout movements, the patronages were the main sites of Catholic physical education, not only in France but also in Algeria. At the 1930 Centenaire, colonial and metropolitan patronages staged impressive manifestations.¹⁰¹ They especially promoted team sports; the Spartiates from Oran (a patronage of the Salesians of Don Bosco), for instance, even won the title of basketball champions of the French Union.¹⁰² In general, they also served a social and political function:

The church, in the face of an anticlerical Republic, was developing a network of resistance towards laicization, by multiplying associations to organize the believers in all sectors of life. The patronage, from this point of view, was only one link in a chain, ranging from private schools to Christian trade unions, societies for mutual aid, cooperatives and various associations. Together, they constituted a sort of Catholic counter-society that aimed at preparing the establishment of a Christian social order which would spring from the ruins of modern society. …

From this perspective, the practice of sports appears as a way of preparing oneself for the conflict, also by disarming an anticlerical rhetoric which depicted religion as something for women. To the image of an effeminate Christianity was, thus, opposed one of a virile Christianity, capable of defending itself against its adversaries.¹⁰³

A Catholic counter-society obviously stood in opposition to the laicist French Republic. During the interwar period, the Scouts and Guides de France were part of an ultraconservative current in the French political sphere, their honorary patron being the staunch royalist and first resident-general of the protectorate of Morocco, Marshal Hubert Lyautey.¹⁰⁴ Consequently, SDF leaders, who had long been recommending figures such as Jeanne d'Arc and the crusader king Louis IX (who in the 13th century led two holy wars against North African Muslims) as role models for their young scouts,¹⁰⁵ were quick to embrace the ideology of the “national revolution” from 1940, as their publications from the Vichy period prove.¹⁰⁶ In contrast to this tendency, the scouts who were more in line with republican values found a home in the laicist Éclaireurs de France (EDF). Nonetheless, it was initially the White Fathers and White Sisters and then the SDF/GDF that showed the most openness toward Muslim scouting. During the war of independence, among the most vocal critics of colonialism were many Christians, including not only the group that cofounded the AJAAS but also the archbishop of Algiers (whom the settler ultras would nickname “Mohammed” Duval accordingly).¹⁰⁷

Despite the right-wing tendencies inherent to Catholic scouting, Algerian Muslims would find a model in French muscular Christianity. The iṣlāḥ movement showed a strikingly similar process to the one described earlier: as already mentioned, private schools, cultural circles, social movements, scout troops, and sports teams were all part of the efforts of the reformists around Ben Badis. The difference was that Islamic reformists did not at all perceive themselves as conservative, but rather as renewers of religion against traditionalist authorities.¹⁰⁸ Despite their insistence on masculinity, which formed an integral part of ideas of muscular religion, the AUMA was very concerned with the reform of women's status in society and included girls in relatively elevated numbers in their schools and scout troops.¹⁰⁹ Nevertheless, the idea of forming new, virile Muslim subjects out of a people that had hitherto been stuck in a somehow “effeminate” passivity (as Orientalist discourse would have it) and of constructing a counter-society that sooner or later would assert itself against the dominant—in this case, colonial—order certainly lay at the heart of the reformist project.

CONCLUSION

Considering the pronouncements of Bouzouzou and others, it is obvious that the split between the SMA and BSMA did not constitute a break between a secular nationalist and an Islamic reformist movement. Religion retained its central place in the SMA after 1948—the possibility of creating a purely secular scout movement after the model of the EDF, which was also very active in Algeria, apparently never played a role.¹¹⁰ In fact, Bouzouzou stated categorically that “Our name ‘S.M.A.’ excludes any idea of irreligion and shows well that our movement has a particular confession: Islam.”¹¹¹ Not only “the famous murshid,”¹¹² but also Kaddache, who certainly was a nationalist activist and not a religious scholar, repeatedly stressed that Islam must not be solely an identitarian marker employed occasionally for political legitimacy. Both emphasized the foundational role of faith in the social and moral reform that the movement envisaged.¹¹³ On the other hand, after the bloody clashes of May 1945 between nationalist militants and French security services and the electoral fraud related to the vote for the Algerian Assembly three years later, loyalty to France was no longer an option. Nationalism, in other words, had permeated all the various movements.

BSMA members explained the 1948 split as the takeover of the original Scouts musulmans algériens by the PPA-MTLD, which wanted to use the existing structure, with its possibilities for paramilitary training, for a future insurrection. A new generation of independence activists from this party no longer contented themselves with the gradual construction of a counter-society and no longer wanted to restrict political activity to protests or international networking. These young activists around Kaddache, Lagha, Louanchi, Harbi, and others wanted to get rid of colonialism as soon as possible and, if necessary, by force. For them, the scout movement should, in the words of Kaddache, “continue its role as a nationalist revolutionary preschool.”¹¹⁴ Talk about the scouts as the “soldiers of the future” remained no dead letter: Aït Ahmed recalled that, in the 1940s, young nationalists actually prepared themselves for an insurrection “under the pretext of scout exercises.”¹¹⁵ The prominent SMA leader Lagha was even killed during the so-called battle of Algiers in 1957.¹¹⁶ This was accompanied by a reconfiguration of organizational structure: the network of loosely connected scout troops that had been established around reformist circles in the 1930s gave way to a more centralized system, following the hierarchical bureaucratic model of the nationalist party.¹¹⁷

From the BSMA perspective, the question was whether to become a mere instrument of a single party and its struggles or continue the scouts’ core work of social reform above partisan political considerations.¹¹⁸ Founders of the new, supposedly nonpolitical association could nonetheless be committed nationalists and some had also been active in the PPA.¹¹⁹ Like the leaders of reformism, they saw their position as transcending politics and the divergences between parties—which does not mean that they did not have political goals and an anticolonial agenda.¹²⁰ Watanabe has argued that the reformists’ political vision differed markedly from the nationalist one, in particular with regard to the BSMA, whose members they saw neither as soldiers nor as political activists.¹²¹ On the other hand, their insistence on being not one party among others but above politics might not have been all that different from the perspective of the nationalists, who perceived themselves as the only true representatives of the Algerian people—a view that would, not incidentally, lead to the absorption of all other political currents, including AUMA, into the FLN as the new single party after 1955.¹²² Harbi, who was a member of the PPA-MTLD and then the FLN, stressed that his party did not have a political doctrine—apart from nationalism—and that its members considered themselves the leaders of their people towards modernity.¹²³ Seen in this light, the split of the Algerian Muslim scout movement was part of a struggle for leadership between AUMA and the PPA-MTLD, with their different ideas about politics. It was certainly not a confrontation between religion and secularism.

Although the argument presented here has focused on the Muslim Scouts and not on Algerian nationalism as a whole, it is obvious that, as far as this youth movement was concerned, religion remained a central tenet, beyond its function in identity politics, as well for the allegedly secular nationalist current. This also means that Muslim youth movements embracing ideas of muscular Islam are no recent phenomenon. Taking the role of religion seriously, it is no coincidence that Muslim scouts were first active in Protestant and Catholic troops. Despite its common association with Protestantism, with the Scouts and Guides de France or the patronages, the French Catholic church, too, was very active in promoting a sort of muscular Christianity, in metropolitan France as well as in Algeria. The involvement of Muslim scouts in the SDF/GDF shows the potential of colonial ambivalence: in a “ruse of History,” even a movement that venerated medieval crusaders could serve as a model for devout Muslims in their effort to build their own counter-society.