Arabs and Berbers: From Tribe to Nation in North Africa 0715606395, 9780715606391

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
Part 1 The traditional base
1 The tribe in modem Morocco: two case studies
2 Political and religious organization of the Berbers of the
central High Atlas
3 The socio-political organization of a Berber Taraf tribe:
pre-protectorate Morocco
4 Berber Imperialism : the Ait Atta Expansion in Southeast Morocco
5 Local Politics and State Intervention : Northeast Morocco from 1870 to 1970
6 The Mzab
Part 2 Ethnicity and Nation
7 The social and conceptual framework of Arab-Berber
relations in central Morocco
8 The image of the Moroccan state in French ethnological
literature: a new look at the origin of Lyautey’s Berber policy
9 The Impact of the Dahir Berbère In Salé
10 The Berbers and the Rise of Moroccan nationalism
11 Tribalism, Trade and Politics: the Transformation of the Swasa of Morocco
12 The Neo-Makhzan and the Berbers
13 Note on the Role of the Berbers in the Early Days of Moroccan Independence
14 The Political Evolution of the Octave Marais Berbers in Independent Morocco
15 The Berbers in the Algerian Political Elite
Part 3 Ethnicity and social change
16 Traditionalism through Ultra-modernism
17 Berber Migrants in Casablanca
18 Social change among the Tuareg
19 Patterns of Rural Rebellion in Morocco during the Early Years
20 Political Authority and Social Stratification in Mauritania
Part 4 The Coup of 10 July 1971
21 The Coup Manqué
22 The Berbers and the Coup
23 Berbers and the Moroccan political system after the coup
Conclusion
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Arabs and Berbers FR O M T R IB E T O N A T IO N IN N O R T H A F R IC A

ED ITED

BY

Ernest Gellner AND

Charles Micaud

DU CKW OR TH

First published in Great Britain in 1973 by Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd. The Old Piano Factory, 43 Gloucester Crescent, London N W i © 1972 by D. C. Heath and Company A ll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, mthout the prior permission of the copyright owner. IS B N o 7156 0639 5 Printed in Great Britain by Ebenezer Baylis and Son Ltd. The Trinity Press, Worcester, and London

CONTENTS

9

PREFACE in tr o d u ctio n part

one

Ernest G ellner

n

The traditional base

1 T h e tribe in m odem M orocco: two case studies David M . Hart

25

2 Political and religious organization o f the Berbers of the central High Atlas Ernest Gellner

59

3 T h e socio-political organization o f a Berber Taraf tribe: pre-protectorate M orocco Antal R . Vinogradov

67

4 Berber imperialism: the A it Atta expansion in southeast M orocco Ross E. Dunn

85

5 Local politics and state intervention: northeast Morocco from 1870 to 1970 J . David Seddon

109

6 T h e M zab E. A . Alport

part

two

141

Ethnicity and nation

7 T h e social and conceptual framework of Arab-Berber relations in central Morocco Lawrence Rosen 8 T h e image of the Moroccan state in French ethnolo­ gical literature: a new look at the origin o f Lyautey’s Berber policy Edmund Burke I I I 9 T h e impact of the Dahir Berbère in Salé Kenneth Brown 10 T h e Berbers and the rise of Moroccan nationalism Louis-Jean Duelos

155

175 201 217

11 Tribalism , trade and politics: the transformation o f the Swasa o f M orocco John Waterbary 12 T h e neo-makhzan and the Berbers Abdaslam Ben Kaddour

231 259

13 Note on the role o f the Berbers in the early days o f Moroccan independence A . Coram

269

14 T h e political evolution o f the Berbers in independent M orocco Octave Marais

277

15 T h e Berbers in the Algerian political elite William B . Quandt part

three

285

Ethnicity and social change

16 Traditionalism through ultra-modernism Jeanne Favret

307

17 Berber migrants in Casablanca André Adam

325

18 Social change among the T uareg Jeremy H . Keenan

345

' 19 Patterns of rural rebellion in M orocco during the early years o f independence Ernest Gellner 20 Political authority and social stratification in Mauritania C . C . Stewart part four

361

375

The coup o f xo July 1971

21 T h e coup manqué John Waterbary

397

22 T h e Berbers and the coup A . Coram

425

23 Berbers and the M oroccan political system after the coup Octave Marais co n clu sio n

INDEX

Charles M icaud

431 433

441

IL L U S T R A T IO N S

FIGURES

3.1 Typical segmentary organization among the Beni M tir 4.1 Segmentation o f the A it Khabbash 15.1 Berbers within the Algerian elite: the revolutionary period 15.2 Berbers within the Algerian elite: the Ben Bella and Boumedienne periods

71 87 293 300

MAPS

0.1 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 18. i 18.2 21. i

N orth-W est Africa with regions o f Berber speech A it Atta expansion T h e Z iz Valley and Tafilalt M orocco Province o f Nador, northeast M orocco Distribution of tribes in northeastMorocco W est-Central Sahara Ahaggar M orocco and the coup of 1971

16 -17 91 94 no in 112 346 347 408

PREFACE -------1--------We acknowledge our indebtedness to the Center for International Race Relations at the University of Denver which made this book possible. Besides exploring the significance of ethnicity in the process of nationbuilding and modernization in North Africa, the present volume makes available contributions by scholars with an intimate knowledge of various aspects of North African society, contribu­ tions that might otherwise not reach the large audience they deserve. We hope that the many case studies brought together here will give students of North Africa a unique and many-sided background for understanding a complex society, in which traditional structures and values continue to play a major role. Except for five reprints of articles, listed in the following paragraph, the contri­ butions appear for the first time. All articles (except of course those of Part Four) were completed well before the Moroccan events of July 1971. We have judged it preferable to retain the coherence of analysis and argument, rather than attempt any last-minute injection of new illustrative material. We thank the following for permission to reprint: the Editor of Man for The Mzab by E. A. Alport; the Editorial Board of Archives européennes de sociologie for Traditionalism through Ultra-modernism by Jeanne Favret; Dr Alan Horton and the American Universities Field Staff for The Coup Manqué by John Waterbury; the Editorial Board of the European Journal of Sociology for Patterns of Rural Rebellion in Morocco during the Early Years of Independence by Ernest Gellner; and to the International African Institute for the map on pp. 16-17. Political and Religious Organization of the Berbers of the Central High Atlas by Ernest Gellner was orginally presented at the World Anthropological Congress in Moscow in 1964. We are grateful to Miss Adrian Adams for her excellent translation of the manuscripts received in French; to Mrs Thelma O’Brien for her invaluable secretarial assistance to Professor Gellner; and to Susan Gellner for putting in a very great deal of work on the Index. We also acknowledge our gratitude to the contributors of the volume, who agreed so readily to participate in this team effort. E. G. and C. M.

Ernest Gellner

Introduction

North Africa— the island of the West, as the Arabs call it— enclosed by the sea and the Sahara, is a distinctive world of its own, notwithstanding all affinities it also has with the Middle East, southern Europe and West Africa. Whether by accident or for some deep-seated geopolitical reasons, it has tended to be linked with the East rather than Europe, except at such times as the East itself was over­ shadowed by Europe: the North African coast was under Phoenician, Byzantine or Arab influence, except for later Roman and modem colonial times. The present volume is concerned with modem North Africa and the problem of nationalism and political development. Hence it is worth singling out, by way of background, the distinctive features of the entire region. ■ North Africa, or the Maghreb (‘the West’, in Arabic) shares Muslim and Arabic civilization with the Middle East. But it differs from it in a number of significant ways. For one thing, the Maghreb is much less diversified and pluralistic, in either an ethnic or a religious sense, than is the Middle East proper. The Middle East proper reflects its own complex religious history, and the sur­ vival and intrusion of very numerous ethnic groups, by constituting a religious and linguistic patchwork. Not so the Maghreb: within its Muslim community, religious homogeneity is almost complete. Linguistic diversity is limited to two groups of dialects— Arab and Berber. (The two languages are of course totally distinct from each other.) It is curious that the Muslim-Christian dialogue should have had such different end-results at either end of the Mediterranean: in the East, diversity faces diversity, and in the West, homogeneity faces homogeneity. Whatever the explanation, the consequence is that North African civilization does not, like the Middle East, consist of ‘enclaves*— to use Dr Louise Sweet’s expression— of inward-turned communities, often openly displaying their religious or cultural idiosyncrasy. Such diversity as is found in North Africa is, above all, discreet', it does not underscore or advertise its idiosyncrasies, which remain hidden under the nearly all-embracing cloak of Snnni Tslam nf the Maliki rite.1 O f course there is defacto religious diversity, m anifested in the proliferation ofsaint cults, religious brotherhoods, and differences in religious style of various milieux: but these differences stop short, considerably short, of an avowed separation or schism, and L.-J. Duelos even claims that through their repetition of similar themes and solutions in diverse localities, these fragmented movements actually make a contribution to a sense of national unity. In any case, the 1 Th e only non-Sunni Muslims in North Africa are two small pockets of Kharejite Ibadis, concentrated in their desert retreat in Mzab in southern Algeria, and on the island of Djerba in southern Tunisia. Within the Sunni community, adherence to the Maliki rite is universal, except for a small number of non-Malikis, surviving from the days of Ottoman suzerainty in the Eastern part of North Africa.

12 Ernest Gellner

differences remain muted. It may be said, for instance, that the trauma of 1930, described by Kenneth Brown, which shocked urban Moroccans into a new nationalism when the French underwrote Berber customary law, arose not from the existence of a doubtfully orthodox Berber custom— this the bourgeoisie knew full well, and perhaps even exaggerated— but from its overt recognition, black on white, on the statute book. To publish it was a kind of indiscretion. It is not a sin as such which makes a scandal, but its brazen publication. This discretion, the relatively muted tone in which divergences are articulated, also extends to differences in language and culture. (I am not saying that North Africans refrain from violent conflict, which would not be true at all, but only that, within the Muslim community, divergences in practice or language are not dramatically symbolized or clearly perceived.) To begin with, there are only two linguistic categories— Arabic and Berber. Note that they are indeed categories, not corporate groups. Neither has ever acted or felt as one unit. They are also mere categories in another sense— each is a mere cluster of dialects, such that within each group, mutual intelligibility may not be taken for granted. Within the Arabic group of dialects, however, there is the unity springing from a shared relation to written and classical Arabic and to religion. Within the Berber group, there is nothing corresponding to this— only, once again, the shared faith and consequently the shared use of Arabic as the language of writing, sacred or secular. (The use of Arabic script for writing in Berber exists, but is very rare.) Still, the perceptible differences between Arabic-speakers and Berber-speakers does exist. Social perception is a subtle and complex thing, as Lawrence Rosen shows, but it cannot altogether ignore so blatant and striking a distinction. But it can make it the object of this curious and unconscious social discretion. This discretion is helped by the fact that the North African folk vision of the world is articulated entirely from within Islam: the limits of Islam are the limits of the world. What is non-Islamic is seen through the categories which Islam itself brought along. North Africans are not, as are the Persians for instance, a Muslim people who have embraced the Faith but retained a memory stretching beyond its coming, so that their own cultural identity is not co-extensive with Islam. On the contrary, North African folk consciousness does not reach out beyond the limits of Islam. When it refers to pre-Islamic proto-populations, it does not charac­ terize them further nor identify with them, even if it credits them with the contribution of an ancestress or two to tribal genealogies. T o say all this is not, of course, to say that everything in folk culture is ‘properly’ Islamic and would be endorsed as such by an urban learned Muslim theologian: not at all. It merely means that the elements in folk life are all locally re-interpreted in Koranic terms, which thus set a limit to the historic horizon.1 1 Elements in folk culture which are not properly Islamic— i.e. could not be shown to be Islamic by criteria that would satisfy a literate, genuine Muslim scholar— may but need not necessarily be />ri-Islamic, contrary to the methodological assumption of some ethnologists. Could one assemble all features of English life which a puritan theologian would refuse to class as Christian, and treat the resulting collection as a picture of preChristian Anglo-Saxon life ?

Ernest Gellner 13

This of course already makes it hard to see the Berbers at all, as they do not figure in the Koran or the Judeo-Christian background which it recognizes. It is of course possible, in time-honored fashion, to attach the Berbers to that background, by forging genealogical links with some personages within it. Thus Ibn Khaldun attaches them to Goliath. How widely accepted such beliefs were in his time it is hard to tell: they do not appear to have survived as living beliefs into the present. It would of course be an exaggeration to say that Berbers and their language are an invisible social fact. You cannot ignore, or ignore altogether, something as conspicuous as that a man speaks, or even speaks exclusively, an unintelligible and difficult language. The urban Arab notes it with contempt, irritation or, sometimes, with fear. But the displeasure does not congeal around some per­ manent and central idea. The Berber tribesman is a menace qua tribesman, not qua speaker of a gibberish-sounding language. As tribesman, he might also be an ally. His morals are suspect as those of a rustic ignoramus and not, once again, in virtue of his speech. So, the difference which exists in linguistic fact and history is not underscored, for it lacks a connection with any of those ideas in terms of which men do see their world. (The vacillations and initial formlessness of the French image of the Moroccan Berber, described by Edmund Burke, may at least in part be due to the lack of an adequate pre-existing stereotype of Berber society.) There are of course limits to what ‘our thinking can make so’ or what it can obscure. But it can ‘make so’ a good deal. For instance, a Berber who credits himself with an Arabic genealogy simply does not ask himself how he comes to be speaking Berber rather than Arabic. In particular, the fact that Berbers are the original population of North Africa, preceding Arabs and Islam, simply is not mirrored in the folk mind. The Berber sees himself as a member of this or that tribe, within an Islamically-conceived and permeated world— and not as a member of a linguistically defined ethnic group, in a world in which Islam is but one thing among others. There are interesting regional differences in the extent to which folk con­ sciousness possesses concepts for grasping Berberism at all. In the central High Atlas of Morocco, where Berbers are numerous and important, the concepts are generally lacking; in southern Tunisia, where the number of Berber villages is very small and without political significance, the awareness is much dearer. The explanation of this paradox is simple. In Tunisia, the idea of Berber speech is linked to the Ibadi heresy (though in fact even in southern Tunisia, not all Berbers are Ibadi heretics, and in the Berber world at large, such dissidents are as rare as they are in the Arab world). But this provides the idea of Berberism in Tunisia with a kind of grip on the symbolism in terms of which the world is seen. (Alport gives us an account of the background and condition, as it was till the early 1950s, of the one other Berber-speaking Ibadi community, in what is now Algerian Sahara. But even this community tended to be seen as Ibadi rather than Berber.) Saints’ shrines are the very stuff of local folk memory and con­ sciousness, and a typical southern Tunisian saint will be credited with having displaced the local heretics— and Berbers— much as a coastal saint in Morocco will be credited with having fought off the Christians, and a saint in the High

14 Ernest Gellner

Atlas with having helped displace the mythical 'Portuguese’ proto-inhabitants. Whether in fact the linguistic Arabization of southern Tunisia was linked to a religious reconversion or expulsion of Kharejite dissidents, historians may be able to tell us: folk legends certainly claim it is so. The consequence of this is that the idea of a Berber here at least has an ideological role, which in most other places it lacks. O f course, it is possible to find signs of Berber consciousness, and of conscious­ ness of Berbers, in the course of North African history. Ibn Khaldun was fully aware of them (though his handling of ethnic concepts is none too assured). A medieval heresy proclaimed a Koran in Berber, a seventeenth-century religious movement was opposed to 'all those who do not speak Berber’, and Dadda Atta, the putative ancestor of the important Ait Atta tribe, is proudly claimed by his descendants to have been a Berraber. (This is a most remarkable tribe. David Hart and Ross Dunn explain its great achievement, which was to coordinate complex pastoral, judicial and military activities over a large population and an enormous territory, while using institutional devices drawn exclusively from the equipment of a segmentary, 'acephalous’ society.) But the striking thing about these signs is not their occurrence, but their rarity. Thus a North African, looking around for a sign by which to identify or characterize a friend or an enemy, will, as Lawrence Rosen shows, find plenty close to hand, and some on the distant horizon: close to hand, a shared ancestor, an affinal link, pasture rights, a shared saint or pilgrim age, or, if necessary, an ad hoc sacrificial meal to ratify an alliance and an obligation. On the horizon, there is Islam and the faiths from which it knowingly distinguishes itself. It is the middle ground which is somewhat poor in distinguishing marks that are either clear or well sustained by interest or injury. Yet it is in this middle ground that a new ethnic nationalism or irredentism would need to find principles of identification. It would not be easy to find them. There are, it is true, two languages, or rather two groups of dialects. But one group is too firmly linked to the shared faith which has already defined the first, easily available nationalism ; while the other is a purely folk matter, not served by script or scribe class, nor ever made normative by convention or the elevation of one dialect to a dominant position. It is thus, then, that the Maghreb differs from the Middle East: it is not quite such a plural society, rich in self-conscious enclaves. It may be, indeed it is, segmented, but it is religiously gleichgeschaltet in a way which tolerates differences that are muted and restrained. The linguistic differences which do exist lack an anchorage, a prise, in local concepts, and also lack socio-political stimulus, as so many of the contributors— Waterbury, Coram, Marais, Quandt, Favret, Adam— all document. It may be worth noting that the Berbers were not at first the only prima fade candidates for a separatist nationalism. History had left behind Jewish and Negro minorities, and, since the colonial period, also an European-Christian one. The conflict of decolonization was of course as much a war between communities, as a war against the colonial government. But the Europeans chose exile rather then either assimilation or a struggle for partition, and no laager state remains

Ernest Gellner

15

behind as the heritage of the colonial period. Similarly, very little remains by now of the Jewish community. This leaves the Negroid communities of the southern oases. As André Adam and David Hart mention, color racism does exist, but whatever tensions this may generate, it does not have profound political consequences. As the contemporary theoretician of color racism, Mr Enoch Powell, tells us, numbers are of the essence of the thing: and the colored popula­ tion of the Maghreb simply is not numerous enough to present this problem. It is at this point that the Maghreb differs so much from the West. African Saharan border zones, with which it otherwise has so much in common. In these regions, the accidents of colonial cartography have left behind a series of states in which whites dominate blacks (Sudan republic, Mauritania) or vice versa (Chad, Mali). Two of the contributors, Jeremy Keenan and Charles Stewart, describe situations that are in striking contrast both to each other and to the Maghreb proper. In the central Sahara, bequeathed to modem Algeria, a Berber nomadic warrior aristrocracy has had to bow to the egalitarianism of the Algerian republic. In the western Sahara, Mauritania, object of Moroccan claims, but now an independent state, a complex system of stratified tribes— Arab warriors on top, religion-oriented tribes of Berber origin a little below— dominated a sedentary Negro population, and survives in a modem guise into the present. North African society is also distinctive in its political culture. From a political viewpoint, societies can be classified according to the extent and manner in which the central government can impose its will on their members. Assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, there can be no question of classifying the traditional North African state as an ‘oriental tyranny’ in the ‘hydraulic’ sense, or as a ‘bureaucratic empire’. Generally speaking, local authorities were not bureau­ cratic nominees, but autonomous power-holders who had their position ratified from the center. Amal Vinogradov, David Hart, Ross Dunn, David Seddon and others highlight this fact. Taxes did not flow smoothly but often had to be col­ lected by special military expeditions. Quite different were the towns— centers of learning, trade, and garrisons— which were normally too frightened of the tribes to be a threat to the central power. (The pirate town of Salé was an interesting exception at one time, and for a time constituted a kind of civic republic.) A peripatetic court and army, based on the towns, only partially controlled a tribal countryside, where groups were hostile or allied to it according to circumstance. (Dunn’s, Seddon’s and V in o grad ov’s chapters describe the complexities of this game.) The lack of unity inherent in this system was however in some measure compensated, as L.-J. Duelos stresses, not merely by the shared Muslim faith but above all by its specific and characteristic local institutions, the complex and ramified network of religious brotherhoods and saint cults, with their regular pilgrimages and loose but extensive hierarchies. They facilitated contacts, com­ mercial and other, the flow of information, and made possible mediation and arbitration, and thus fostered a very real sense of cultural continuity, in an en­ vironment in which this end could hardly be attained by central law-enforcement. The European variant of such a loose system was of course ‘feudalism’. But

S P A I N

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