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The Unknown Apollo of Biskra: The Social Base of Algerian Puritanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Ernest Gellner
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MODERN ALGERIA BEARS VARIOUS STIGMATA OF RADICALISM. ITS struggle for national liberation was one of exceptional severity, involving untold and incalculable suffering and sacrifices. Only Vietnam can surpass it; no other ex-colonial country can equal it. After independence, the commanding heights of the economy, and even a very significant part of the rural sector, passed into one form or another of socialist ownership, including the important experiments in auto-gestion (workers' self-administration), in both industrial and agricultural enterprises. In foreign policy, the hostility of its government to what it holds to be remaining forms of colonialism has been serious and sustained. Internally, the regime is relatively egalitarian and rather puritanical and earnest, by any standards. The Algerians look to their own efforts for the betterment of their condition. All these traits - a heroic struggle for liberation, followed by a good deal of socialism and a general earnest radicalism, ought to have made Algeria a place of pilgrimage for the international Left. It is well known that the promised land must be somewhere. Algeria had as good a claim as Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam, to be at least considered for such a role. In fact, Algeria found in Frantz Fanon the thinker or poet of this vision. Though not a native of Algeria, he identified with the Algerian national cause and died whilst serving it, and became its internationally renowned theoretician.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1974 , pp. 277 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1974

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References

1 Quoted in Merad, Ali, Le Réformisme Musulman en Algérie de 192; à 1940, Mouton & Co., 1967, p. 58.Google Scholar

2 Colonna, F.: Resistance culturelle et conquěte de la legitimité dans I’ Algérie coloniale, paper presented to World Anthropological Congress, 1973, pp. 14, 15,Google Scholar to be published in Economy and Society, 1974. See also Stambouli, F. and Zghal, A., La Vie Urbaine dans le Maghreb pre-colonial, in L’Annuaire del’ Afrique de Nord, 1974.Google Scholar

3 Berque, Jacques, Structures Sociales du Haut-Atlas, P.U.F., Paris, 1955.Google Scholar

4 Le Reformisme Musulmanen Algérie de 1925 a 1940. Essai d’histoire religieuse ef sociale, Mouton & Co., 1967. Also, by the same author, Ibn Badis, Commentateur da Koran, Paul Guethner, Paris, 1971.

5 Le Reformisme Musislman, etc., pp. 53–4.

6 For a discussion of such Muslim ‘scripturalism’ and its appeal in other social contexts, see Geertz, Clifford, Islam Observed, Yale University Press, 1968.Google Scholar

7 Ali Merad, Le Reformisme Musulman en Algérie, pp. 97, 98, 99, 100, 262, 263, 264.

8 Op. cit., p. 100.

9 Ibid., p. 147.

10 Op. cit., pp. 9,10.

11 Op. cit., p. 141.

12 Op. cit., p. 83.

13 Ageron, Ch.-R., Les Algérians Musulmans et la France (1871–1919), P.U.F., Paris, 1968, vol. 2, p. 903.Google Scholar

14 Op. cit., p. 908.

15 Burke, E. in Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 7, 05 1971, No. 2, p. 249.Google Scholar See also Bennabi, Malek, Mémoires d’un Témoir du Siècle, Editions Nationales Algériennes, 1965 (?) esp. pp. 75 and 76.Google Scholar

16 Simon, Capitaine H., Commandant Supérieur du cercle de Touggourt, ‘Notes sur le Mausolée de Sidi Ocba’. Revue Africaine, Publiée par la Societé historique algérienne, 1909, especially pp. 41–5.Google Scholar

17 Nadir, Ahmed, in ‘Les Ordres Religieux et la ConquěteFrancaise 1830–1851’ in Revue Algérienne des Sciences Juridiques, Vol. IX, No. 4, 12, 1972, pp. 819–868,Google Scholar claims that Emir Abd el Kader, the leader of Algerian resistance during the early colonial period, was a kind of proto-reformer and predecessor of Ben Badis. By contrast, Shinar, Pessah, in ‘Abd el-Qadir and Abd al-Krim’, in Asian and African Studies, Annual of the Israel Oriental Society, Vol. 1, 1965, pp. 139–74Google Scholar, finds that Abd el Kader ‘leans heavily on the maraboutic class’.

18 For a discussion of political developments and the role of these attitudes in it, see Clem Henry Moore, North Africa, Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1970, or Hermassi, Elbaki, Leadership and National Development in North Africa, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1972.Google Scholar

19 Op. cit., p. 74.

20 Cambridge doctoral thesis, presented in September 1971. Cf. p. 166.

21 Ibid., p. 158.

22 It appears that for instance the new Moroccan code of 1957 legally consecrates this social style (and there is no doubt that the dominant actual practice of Algeria does so). Cf. Dr Fatima Mernissi, Identité Culturelle ef Idéologie Sexuelle, paper presented to the 24th International Congress in Algiers, March 1974, p. 3 ef seq. The authoress notes ‘the desire of the Moroccan legislator to use precolonial tradition as a guide for the future’ (p. 3), but perhaps does not stress sufficiently that what is at issue is not the effective tradition of all pre-colonial Moroccans, but an ideal practised by some and merely respected, rather than implemented, by other social strata.

23 Cf. Crapanzano, Vincent, The Hamadsha., A. Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry, University of California Press, 1973,Google Scholar for an account of urban gangs of dancers/ therapists of this kind.

24 Quoted in Ageron, Charles-Robert, Les Algeriens Musulmans et la France, 1871–1919, P.U.F., Paris, 1968, Vol. I, p. 12n.Google Scholar

25 Gilbert Grandguillaume, Nedroma. L’Évolution d’une Medina. Doctorat III Cycle, E.P.H.E., VIe Section, Sorbonne, N. D. (1971?), pp. 215–26.

26 Ibid., pp. 219–20.

27 Ibid., p. 222.

28 Reformism is on the ascendant throughout the Arab Muslim world, though the degree of its success varies. Correspondingly, saint cults are on the decline. But exceptions naturally occur: special circumstances or talents may lead to successful adaptation by some saintly movements to modern circumstances. One such unusual case is extremely well explored by Gilsenan, Michael, in Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt. An Essay in the Sociology of Religion, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973.Google Scholar

29 On the social history and structure of an important Moroccan town, the work of Dr. K. Brown on Salé, to be published, provides admirable material.

30 Op. cit., p. 224.

31 Quoted in Nouschi, André, La Naissance du Nationalisme Algérien, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1962, p. 66.Google Scholar

32 Quoted in A. Nouschi, op. cit., pp. 69–70.

33 Quoted in Le Reformisme Musulman en Algérie, p. 56.

34 Op. cit., p. 227.

35 Cf. Waterbury, John, Commander of the Faithful, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1970.Google Scholar

36 The situation has parallels with the appeal of Hellenism and of Orthodox religion in Cyprus, where a petty bourgeoisie, without access to international circuits and anglophone education, finds in them a validation of their position against more privileged and westernized Cypriots. On this subject, see Loizos, P., Bitter Favours; Politics in a Cypriot Village, Blackwells, 1974.Google Scholar

37 Lapidus, Ira, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages, Harvard University Press, 1967.Google Scholar

38 Op. cit., p. 209.

39 This phrase is Professor Serif Mardin’s. The idea can be found in his forthcoming article, ‘Religion and the Turkish Social Transformation’, or in Professor Yalman’s, Nur ‘Islamic Reform and the Mystic Tradition in Eastern Turkey’, in the European Journal of Sociology, 1969, Vol. X, No. 1.Google Scholar

40 In Soviet Central Asia, the Reform movement was known as Jadidism, literally New-ism. It was similar in spirit and inspiration to Ben Badis’s movement in Algeria. The Russians saw its potentialities both for nationalism and for adaptation to modern requirements. So they suppressed the name and movement, but borrowed its ideas and doctrines for the officially controlled Islam. They pre-empted Reform, and did not repeat the French mistake of associating too long with archaic dervish forms of faith - except when writing local cultural history, when past achievements of Sufi mystics receive warm recognition. Only a dead dervish is allowed to be a good dervish.

41 Asian and African Studies, Jerusalem Academic Press, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1972, p. 269.

42 Summarized by Merad, Ali, in Ibn Badis. Commentateur du Coran, Paul Guethner, Paris, 1971, p. 146.Google Scholar

43 Ibid., p. 147.

44 Professor Peters, Emrys, ‘Why Gaddafy?’, in New Society, 20 09, 1972, p. 697.Google Scholar

45 Ibid.

46 The Tunisian case seems closer to the Turkish than the Algerian. The case of the Tunisian ulama has been extremely well explored by Dr Arnold Green, in a thesis due to be published by Brill & Co. Apparently the Tunisian uluma unlike most of the Algerian ones, were too well-heeled to be radical. In Morocco, Reformism was influential and made a major, direct and open contribution to both the ideology and the organization of nationalism. But it never had anything resembling the near-monopoly of influence which it enjoyed in Algeria. The remarkable continuity of elites and institutions, from pre-colonial days through colonialism till independence, provided alternative leadership and legitimacy. In post-independence Morocco, the reformist fundamentalists do however have one achievement to their credit, not yet to my knowledge rivalled even by Gaddafy - they secured the passing of death sentences (though not their execution) for apostasy from Islam, in conformity with Koranic requirements.