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Overview
Originally published in 1985.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691639819 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #39 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria
By Allan Christelow
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1985 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05438-4
CHAPTER 1
THE GEOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND THE LINES OF INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
To provide the foundations for this study, we need to begin by looking at the pattern of relationships between Muslim religious leaders and the state in Algeria, and then to consider how these were related to the working of judicial institutions in the precolonial period, and to outline how they will affect the main lines of institutional change in the colonial period. In the first part of this task, we will be concerned with the unity of the system, or the lack thereof, and with the autonomy of religious leaders within it.
In the introduction, a distinction was made between two levels at which religious unification can take place: that of baraka, or divine grace, and that of the shari'a, the religious law. Sharifian genealogies, tracing descent from the Prophet, are the element which permits unification at the level of baraka. This unification can take place under the control of a ruler, as was the case in sharifian Morocco, or it can be independent from him, and in opposition to him, when groups claim sharifian status on their own, and gain independent recognition for it in a local base. Baraka can also be fragmented, divided among a multitude of local saints and their descendants, called marabouts, who work out their relationship with the ruler individually.
Unity at the level of the shari'a is embodied in the Muslim judicial system, where the ruler has some control, through the appointment of judges, but where the religious scholars, who are the final arbiters of the shari'a, exercise a degree of autonomy.
To understand the differing patterns of religious leadership in Algeria, and how they affected judicial affairs, we need to begin by looking at the geographical foundations.
1.1 Contrasts Between Eastern and Western Algeria
There is a saying in North Africa that Tunisia is a lamb, Algeria is a wolf, and Morocco is a lion. This conveys well the sense in which Algeria is a transitional zone between its two more easily characterized neighbors. The great empires of medieval North Africa had their centers of gravity in the plains of Morocco and along the coast of Tunisia. Algeria tended to be a zone of rivalry between these centers. When smaller political units emerged in the thirteenth century, they divided Algeria between East and West.
It was only with the arrival of the Ottomans in the second decade of the sixteenth century, and the building of Algiers into a well-fortified port, that Algeria began to emerge as a unified polity, with its present eastern and western frontiers. But even after three centuries of unity, there remained important differences in social patterns between East and West. This should not be seen exclusively as a matter of Moroccan and Tunisian influence, for there were important geographical, ecological, and economic factors which help to explain it.
One can find in mid-nineteenth-century administrative reports references to the "theocratic" West and the "secular" East of Algeria. Read in context, what these terms convey is the dominance of sharifian aristocracies in the West, and the dominance of urban influence in the East. Material factors help to explain this, but do not provide a complete explanation.
It must be made clear to begin with that the frame of reference for this study is northern Algeria, a region known as the Tell, a narrow strip of land along the Mediterranean coast some 1,100 kilometers long, and varying in width from 350 to 400 kilometers. The central area, around the city of Algiers, is dominated by the Kabylia massif, whose people speak a Berber dialect. The Kabyles were notoriously recalcitrant to central government control and, though they were strong Muslims, they followed their own customary law. The French continued this policy by not naming qadis to the Kabylia, and for this reason it will not have a significant place in this study. Our attention will be concentrated on the West — roughly from the region of Miliana to the Moroccan frontier — and the East, from Setif to the Tunisian frontier.
An important area of contrast is relief. The East is more mountainous than the West, and the Eastern mountains are higher. The natural corollary of this is that the East gets more rain, and that it is more heavily forested. In 1929, of 435,000 hectares officially classified as forest, 417,000 or 95 percent was in Eastern Algeria, the most important area being the cork oak forests in the littoral massifs.
The key factor in the West is irrigation. For the precolonial West was dominated by two cities which depended to a large extent on irrigated agriculture. These two cities, Tlemcen and Mascara, occupy similar ecological niches, facing the mountains on one side, and small but fertile plains on the other. In the colonial period, the French carried out extensive dam building and irrigation projects in the West, especially in the valleys of the Chelif and the Mina, and they established prosperous colonial agricultural centers in the regions of Sidi Bel Abbès and Orléansville.
Annie Rey-Goldziguer, in her thesis on the disagregation of traditional Algerian society in the 1860s, links the relative strengths and weaknesses of rural resistance to geographical characteristics. The interior irrigated plains of the West lent themselves well to urban-based economic exploitation. This intensive parasitic exploitation seriously undermined the cohesion of rural communities in the West, while in the East, with its densely populated mountain refuges, the Algerian character remained intact, the communities cohesive. Hence Eastern Algeria was better able to resist the colonial intrusion.
I would like to suggest a somewhat different reading of the data, stressing the dominance, in the East, of a single city. Constantine does not rely on intensive irrigation. As one looks out over the city walls, even today, one sees dry, monotonous, rolling hills. It is perhaps this very lack of an easily exploitable base which led the inhabitants of Constantine to spread their economic runners far and wide into the mountains and desert.
The industries of precolonial Constantine — most importantly tanning — drew labor and primary products from widely scattered points in the hinterland. And, during the prosperous reign of Salah Bey, in the late eighteenth century, government-sponsored construction projects attracted a sizeable contingent of laborers from the countryside. It was not only workers who were drawn to the city, but also scholars, who came to study and teach in the madrasas, or to enter into the service of the bey as judges or secretaries or religious officials. In short, while the Constantine beylik squeezed resources out of its subjects, it did so in ways which created a wide network of bonds of interdependence, economic and political and cultural, between the provincial capital and its hinterland.
By contrast, the West is made up of semi-isolated cogs — Miliana, Tlemcen, Mascara, and Oran — and one could argue for adding to this group Algiers and Médéa. In the Western beylik, the separate cogs competed for regional supremacy, but none ever achieved it. Further, the Ottoman hold over the mountain regions of the West — the Dahra and the Ouarsenis — and over the desert of the South O-ranais, seems to have been more tenuous than Constantine's hold over the Petite Kabylie and the oases of Biskra and the Souf.
In the sphere of relationships between politics and religion, the critical factor in the West lay in the emergence of sharifian aristocracies during the Ottoman period, a subject on which I will elaborate in Chapter 2. They arose in the intensively cultivated plains around Tlemcen and Mascara. One factor in this was doubtless the easy availability of an agricultural surplus. But politics was also a critical factor, since these groups' assertion of a claim to sharifian genealogy contained an implicit challenge to the authority of the Ottoman state.
In the East, the situation was simpler and more symmetrical, with the lines of political and religious authority radiating out from the capital city of Constantine. Too, in the East, there tended to be a clear distinction between political and religious leadership whereas, in the West, the aggressive sharifs of Mascara tried to combine political and religious roles in the Moroccan manner. It may have been a factor of considerable importance that foreign trade flourished in the East, under the monopoly of the state, since this helped to make the capital a center of both economic and religious attraction.
The strength of sharifian aristocracies around the principal urban centers of the West had two important corollaries. One was that there was not a strongly established order of 'ulama, as there was in Constantine, although in the last decades of Ottoman rule, after the recapture of Oran from the Spanish, there was an effort to build one up. The second is that there was no pole of attraction like Constantine which could draw independent marabouts into the political and religious mainstream. As a result, these men, in the poorer mountain and desert areas, were more concerned with establishing their own independent bases of power, and building up alliances through Sufi tariqas. This was the source of major rebellions led by the Darqawa and Tijaniyya brotherhoods against Ottoman rule in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.
The Precolonial State and Religious Education
An important illustration of these patterns lies in the role of the Ottoman state in educational affairs. The period of greatest prosperity in the late Ottoman era coincided with the reign of Salah Bey of Constantine (1771-1791), who was able effectively to consolidate the state trading monopoly, and who carried out a number of ambitious projects, from building schools and mosques, to encouraging the construction of water-powered mills, to draining swamps in the plain of Bône. He was very much the enlightened despot of the eighteenth century, in a distinctively North African style.
The Turks never came to dominate quite so effectively the Western beylik. The most serious problem was that the region's major port, Oran, was under Spanish occupation until 1792. And the Oranais had fewer prospects for trade at this time than the better-watered East. While their capital was at Mascara, from 1701 until the reconquest of Oran, the Wes tern beys lived in uneasy alliance with powerful local tribes, most notably the Hachem confederation, who dominated the Eghris Plain just outside Mascara.
After the reconquest of Oran, the beys came to rely more and more on two "makhzan" tribes, the Douair and Zmela. These were heterogeneous assemblages of loose families and fractions, united only by their subordination to the bey. The beys' reliance on these makhzan tribes was strikingly different from the Constantinois practice of forging alliances between the bey and tribal chiefs through marriage.
For our purposes, the most interesting facet in the history of the Constantine beylik lies in the religious policy of Salah Bey. It was, in brief, to encourage education and to bring education under closer government surveillance. The first aspect is well known. Salah Bey ordered the construction of numerous mosques, the most famous of which is Sidi al-Kittani, in the city of Constantine.
A less well-known aspect concerns the habus endowments. According to a report of 1858, Salah Bey had submitted provincial habus revenues to central control. He created a general overseer (wakil) who was to control the accounts of each mosque. Previously, habus had been administered by individual wakils, who were not accountable to the bey. How far this policy was carried is open to question. The report suggests that it was limited to the city of Constantine and its immediate environs.
Limited though it may have been, this policy met with a hostile reaction. As Vaysettes puts it in his monograph on Constantine under the beys: "The reforms introduced by this prince in administration, and above all in the area of primary education, although they were inspired by devotion to public welfare, ran counter to certain prejudices, and posed a menace to certain individual interests." The injured parties Vaysettes identifies as a "certain caste of marabouts."
Two of the most often-recounted stories of the Salah Bey period involve incidents pitting the bey against the marabouts. One of them, called Sidi Muhammad "The Crow," had the unseemly habit of launching into violent diatribes against the ruler. For his misbehavior, he was put to death. But when a crow ominously circled over the mortal remains of this saint, Salah Bey is said to have built a shrine for him in penitence.
Sidi Ahamad al-Zawawi, shaikh of the Hansaliyya brotherhood, also crossed with Salah Bey, but fared better. He was able to take refuge in the mountains, and when one night the bey dispatched an expedition to carry out a surprise attack against him, the troops were confounded by Sidi Ahmad's spell, and spent the whole night wandering in circles just beyond the city's gates.
There are indications that the bey of Oran sought to pursue a policy of educational centralization. Once the capital had been transferred to Oran, a madrasa was established, and it was richly endowed. When the French expropriated the building (in order to turn it into a stable) and the attached gardens and orchards, they estimated the total value at 150,000 francs. However, by 1830, the Oran beys had had little time to assert their preponderance in the field of religious education. They had been plagued by chronic revolts, and they clearly faced an uphill battle against local educational centers in Tlemcen, in the mountains of the Beni Snous, in the vicinity of Mascara, and in Mazouna, a town in the Dahra.
The Marabouts and the Secular Chiefs
The East/West contrast is also evident in rural political leadership. The great chiefs of the East were predominantly what was termed juwad, or "military nobles," the best known of whom were the Muqranis (near Bordj Bou Arreridj), the Ben 'Ashur (most notably Bu 'Akkaz) of Ferdjioua, and the Ben Gana clan of Biskra. The political leaders of the Oranais — aside from those of the makhzan tribes — were predominantly of a religious character. And, once the beylik had fallen, it was from the religious-political elite of the Mascara sharifs that 'Abd al-Qadir recruited many of the cadres for his new state.
The forces which kept the Eastern marabouts within a more or less strictly religious role can be seen in the case of one of the most notable of them, Mawlay Shaqfa, whose zawiya was in the territory of the Beni Ider, in the rugged hill country south of Djidjelli. In 1850, before the French effectively controlled the region, they appointed the son of the shaikh of the zawiya, Lhaousin, as qaid, or chief, of the region, evidently in the hopes that this would channel Mawlay Shaqfa's baraka in the right direction. Lhaousin was none too tactful as a qaid, and the prominent juwad chiefs of the region, Bu 'Akkaz and Ben 'Azzaddin, encouraged dissidents of the Beni Ider to oppose him and his father. The dissidents then raided Mawlay Shaqfa's flocks and pillaged his house.
The point being made, Ben 'Azzaddin offered his good offices to secure the return of the stolen beasts and property, but he refused to allow the shaikh and his son to come to the market place in his territory and arrest the culprits. In a display of ill humor (and perhaps for safety's sake) Mawlay Shaqfa moved out of Beni Ider territory, and went to live in an area directly under the control of Ben 'Azzaddin. In effect, he was denying to the Beni Ider the benefits of his baraka, and his other more mundane services — mediation, presiding over rituals, education — until he got his way.
However, the dissident Beni Ider set definite conditions for his return. They would welcome him back to his zawiya, but they would not let him return to his burj, or fortified house. The burj was a symbol of Mawlay Shaqfa's aspiration to political power, his desire to protect himself not just with his baraka, but with crenelated walls. These were pretensions which neither the local tribal leaders nor the neighboring juwad chiefs could tolerate. But they are willing to return his property, and let him live in peace in his zawiya, as long as he would stay within the bounds of a religious role. In the West, both beylik and tribesmen had to yield more ground to ambitious marabouts, united in a sharifian aristocracy. And, after the colonial invasion, they would have a dominant role to play in the resistance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria by Allan Christelow. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- PREFACE, pg. vii
- CONTENTS, pg. ix
- LIST OF TABLES, pg. xiii
- TRANSCRIPTION OF ARABIC, pg. xv
- NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xvi
- GLOSSARY, pg. xix
- INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
- 1. The Geographical and Historical Context and the Lines of Institutional Change, pg. 28
- 2. Saintly Justice: the Majlis of Mascara, 1853-1856, pg. 43
- 3. The Urban Milieu: Social "Decadence" and its Judicial Underpinnings, pg. 82
- 4. Muslim Legists and the "Moral Conquest", pg. 107
- 5. Intervention and Crisis, 1854-1859, pg. 134
- 6. From Crisis to Rebellion to Compromise, 1860-1866, pg. 165
- 7. Those Who Succeeded, pg. 188
- 8. Toward a Definitive Compromise: Politics and the Muslim Court Question in the 1880s, pg. 223
- 9. The Aftermath: Algerians as Colonialists and Frenchmen as 'Ulama, pg. 244
- CONCLUSION, pg. 262
- BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES, pg. 275
- ARCHIVAL SOURCES, pg. 283
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 290
- INDEX, pg. 303