The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay

by Abdallah Laroui, Ralph Manheim (Translator)

Overview

This survey of North African history challenges both conventional attitudes toward North Africa and previously published histories written from the point of view of Western scholarship. The book aims, in Professor Laroui's words, "to give from within a decolonized vision of North African history just as the present leaders of the Maghrib are trying to modernize the economic and social structure of the country."

The text is divided into four parts: the origins of the Islamic conquest; the stages of Islamization; the breakdown of central authority from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries; and the advent of colonial rule. Drawing on the methods of sociology and political science as well as traditional and modern historical approaches, the author stresses the evolution marked by these four stages and the internal forces that affected it.

Until now, the author contends, North African history has been written either by colonial administrators and politicians concerned to defend foreign rule, or by nationalist ideologues. Both used an old-fashioned historiography, he asserts, focusing on political events, dynastic conflicts, and theological controversies. Here, Abdallah Laroui seeks to present the viewpoint of a Maghribi concerning the history of his own country, and to relate this history to the present structure of the region.

Originally published in 1977.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691635859
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Studies on the Near East , #1418
Pages:	442
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

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The History of the Maghrib

An Interpretive Essay

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By Abdallah Laroui, Ralph Manheim

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03109-5

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CHAPTER 1

The Search for Origins

It is well known that the knowledge of history develops in the opposite direction from the course of events; it is the period of Maghribi history most remote from us, the period preceding the first Phoenician establishments at the end of the second millennium B.C., that was last to enter the field of empirical study. It has also been the uncontested monopoly of colonial historians. The Maghribis, ancient or modern, have very little to say on the subject; this is to be expected, since the science of the origins of man is less than a century old.

For a long time the study of this epoch was ancillary to that of classical antiquity; up to the time of the First World War, when Stéphane Gsell became recognized as the foremost authority on the pre-Islamic history of the Maghrib, the methods developed by the students of prehistory and their findings in respect of the Maghrib served only as a means of verifying literary documents. After 1930 the study of Maghribi prehistory advanced by leaps and bounds, and Lionel Balout succeeded to the position of preeminence formerly occupied by Gsell. Nevertheless, though there was a change of perspective, though archeological findings began to supersede the authority of literary documents, the two currents remained united by so many ideological ties that it is not possible to speak of a true renewal. A number of preconceived ideas, which are responsible for many distortions of Maghribi history and which we shall have frequent occasion to criticize in what follows, owe their survival to the specialists of that period; this again is perfectly normal, because archeology is a relative newcomer to the sciences.

Students of Maghribi prehistory tend to ask the following questions: Has there been a change in the climate of North Africa? Where did the Berbers come from? What is the origin of their language? What is the origin of their culture? Each of these questions and the answers to it respond both to scientific and to ideological considerations, and it is both easier and safer to cite ideological than scientific grounds in attempting to account for the theories put forward.

At the very outset Gsell makes his ideological motivation clear: "We must try to determine whether the chief cause of this prosperity [of the Roman period] was a climate more favorable to agriculture than the present-day climate, or whether it was due primarily to the intelligence and energy of men; whether we should confine ourselves to regretting a past that will never return or whether on the contrary we should look to it for lessons that may be profitable at the present time." This question remained in vogue until the eve of the Second World War, and by and large the answer given was that which Gsell, very circumspectly to be sure, had formulated, namely, that there had been very little change — an answer that fell in with ideological prejudice. The increasingly frequent discoveries, beginning in the thirties, of cave paintings which tend to prove that at least certain parts of the Sahara were relatively green in a not too distant epoch (thousands rather than tens of thousands of years ago) obliged certain students, despite radical disagreement as to how the Saharan sgraffiti and paintings should be interpreted, to recognize that there has been a decrease in humidity. But this proof is far from having convinced everyone, and the specialists are no longer interested in the question; only amateurs continue to busy themselves with it. It should be noted, however, that these two successive attitudes reflect two more basic attitudes that we shall encounter in other connections, namely, an optimism concerning the destiny of North Africa, followed by a profound pessimism.

The same development can be observed with regard to the origin of the Berbers. In the colonial period there were two conflicting schools: one linked them with the populations of Europe, while the other sought their origin in the Middle East. Despite a considerable margin of uncertainty, anthropological studies and archeological finds now tend to prove both the antiquity and diversity of the Maghribi population. Today no one believes in recent arrivals of negroid and "blond" elements, or holds that the anthropological diversity described at the beginning of the century reflects successive waves of invaders in the none too remote past. The idea that seems to be gaining general acceptance is that the bulk of the population consists of a mixture, stabilized in the neolithic era, of an old paleo-Mediterranean stock with two Mediterranean groups which both came from western Asia but entered the Maghrib by two different routes, the one via the northeast, where it tended to grow whiter, and the other via the southeast, after a long detour through East Africa, where it crossbred with blacks. Whatever the scientific value of this theory may be, we observe that it no longer takes a positive stand in favor of a western or eastern origin of the entire population; it recognizes the present diversity and projects it on prehistoric times.

Research into the language and culture of the ancient Berbers, however, has argued an eastern origin. As far as the language is concerned, only dilettantes continue to venture hypotheses; the specialists, especially those who know Berber, take refuge in silence. They believe that there is at present no possibility of elucidating either the origin or extension of Libyan, or even the existence of other languages in the prehistoric Maghrib. Libyan inscriptions, even when bilingual, have not been deciphered to any significant degree, and this has prevented scholars from determining the origin of the Libyan alphabet. Nevertheless, students of general linguistics tend to confine the area of research to the proto-Semitic, especially to southern Arabic. This thesis, if accepted, would tend to show that the section of the population coming from East Africa is dominant; some writers believe, however, that toponomy argues in favor of the Mediterranean group which entered from the northeast. Thus a balance seems to have been restored.

As for Berber culture, the habit of attributing all the discoveries that the prehistorians amalgamate under the head of neolithic revolutions to the Phoenicians was gradually abandoned. Gsell wrote: "The natives of this region did not wait for the arrival of Syrian(!) navigators before breeding cattle and engaging in agriculture." But he added — and this is the question that the prehistorians have continually raised: "Was some of their progress due to their own intelligence and initiative? We do not know." These neolithic and aeneolithic acquisitions are now assigned to the Maghribi past, but the credit continues in large part to be given to foreigners: neighbors, merchants from foreign countries, invaders or others. It is recognized more and more that a neolithic civilization developed locally, but one so poor, it is added, as hardly to deserve the name; the decisive changes were introduced by people who came from Asia by way of Upper Egypt. Despite the revision of ideas on points of detail made necessary by archeological discoveries, the overall perspective remains unchanged. Gsell wrote that wheat, certain varieties of trees, and the horse had been introduced from the east at a relatively recent date (the horse in the course of the second millennium B.C.); he also wrote, but with many qualifications, that the neolithic era continued up to the beginning of the first millennium and that the Maghrib passed directly into the age of iron, which was introduced by the Phoenicians, without having known a copper or bronze age — a notion that became a commonplace, transmitted from book to book. The discovery of copper and tin deposits, which refuted one of Gsell's arguments, the knowledge that chariots, which could hardly have been built without metal, existed well before the arrival of the Phoenicians, and finally the discovery of cave paintings in the High Atlas, dealt a severe blow to the theory that the copper and bronze age was skipped. It has gradually come to be recognized that while the great neolithic discoveries were introduced from the southeast, the discoveries of the age of metals were introduced from the west, essentially under Iberian influence. Thus the historic-leap theory has been replaced by the notion of colonial action: copper and bronze objects were introduced from outside, but not metallurgy itself. The great controversy between those who attributed a western and those who attributed an eastern origin to the Berbers and their culture, the former trend predominating among the amateurs and the latter among the specialists, has given way, in the course of unceasing new discoveries, to the recognition of a diversity of origins and of the essentially fragmented and passive character of the Maghribi past.

The study of Maghribi antiquities was developed by the colonial administration; governors and residents general took a personal interest in it, and during the greater part of the colonial period the Department of Fine Arts was attached to the Department of the Interior. Thus it is only natural that this study should have been directly influenced by the general ideology of colonialism. Propagated by military men, functionaries and certain publicists, the thesis that links the Berbers to Europe sprang directly from an assimilationist, fundamentally racist policy typical of men profoundly attached to the ideas of the nineteenth century, they were all convinced that assimilation could hope to succeed only if the Berbers shared a common origin, however remote, with the Europeans, that otherwise it was condemned to failure. It was only when this policy began to lose its appeal, toward 1930 to be exact, that the thesis of an Asian origin began to acquire influence, thanks to scholars who were at last able to harmonize their findings with the prevailing pessimism. It is no accident that the first official scientific expression of this thesis is contained in a report submitted to the governor general of Algeria in 1949. This report, based on systematic anthropological and archeological investigations, dashed all hopes of definitively integrating the Maghrib with Europe. Lionel Balout wrote in 1948 and repeated in 1955: "Thus it was in the remote prehistorical past that the countries of the Maghrib, rooted in Africa and the orient, but capable of an opening toward Europe, took on this character which prevented them from the outset from building a civilization of their own, whose center they would have been, or from integrating themselves definitively with the cultures that came to them from three different directions and successively colonized them." Camps expresses the same idea in i960: "Neither completely African nor entirely Mediterranean [North Africa] has oscillated down through the centuries in search of its destiny."

The Maghribis have offered no opposition to these conclusions, which seem to be protected against all criticism by the armor of science and technology. Actually the Maghribis have no scientific arguments to offer; the classical Arabic documents are useless in this respect, and the modern universities seem to take no interest in a period the study of which is regarded as too closely identified with the cultural policy of the colonial period. Only the Tunisians have moved at all in this direction, and even their efforts would seem to have been motivated more by a desire to encourage tourist trade than by scientific curiosity. With reference, then, to this period, it is not possible to present a nationalist ideology in opposition to the colonial ideology, as we shall be able to do in connection with subsequent periods. Unfortunately, such a lack of interest is fraught with consequences, for it is in the study of this area of the Maghribi past that all the distortions originate, and in all likelihood it is there as well that the most reliable techniques of historical investigation are forged: archeology, linguistics, and anthropology. Thus it would be disastrous for Maghribi culture if we were to confine ourselves, as we have done hitherto, to written documents, conducive as they are to unconscious errors and intellectual laziness, not to say dishonesty.

Nevertheless, although the spirit of the University of Algiers, the center of French colonial ideology, is bound to dominate interpretation of the prehistoric period for some time to come, its ideological bias is so obvious that one need not be a specialist in prehistory to perceive it. Any candid reader can easily detect the discrepancy between the research findings and the adventurous conclusions drawn from them, and is entitled to ask the investigators of Maghribi prehistory to observe at least as much caution as they themselves (and others) practice in dealing with other parts of the world. Yet these same investigators are the first to point out the difficulties in exploiting their three principal sources: the Libyan inscriptions, which thus far have proved indecipherable and would seem to have little information to offer; the Greco-Latin literary sources, which are hard to interpret because of their predilection for allusion, paradox and exoticism; and finally the archeological sites, which continue to suffer from the devastation brought about by numerous amateurs, so much so that it seems questionable whether it will ever be possible to rectify the errors — some of them made in good faith — of the colonial period. And this is not the end of the difficulties: another is the lack of coordination, often criticized in the past, between classical and Arabic scholars, or among prehistorians (mainly archeologists), protohistorians (mainly ethnologists and linguists), and specialists in antiquity (mainly philologists). In their syntheses or interpretations of their findings, one group, with a view to gaining time, affects to accept as definitive conclusions what another puts forward as mere hypotheses. It was thanks to such canonization by scholars of each other's often partial and contestable findings that colonial ideology was able to impose itself at every level of historical research. To be convinced of this, one has only to read Gsell and note how cautiously and hesitantly he put forward judgments which were subsequently accepted far and wide as definitive scientific truths. And when we think of the medievalists who are neither archeologists nor classical scholars and of the present-day writers on the Maghrib (Americans in particular) who are neither Arabic scholars nor classical scholars nor historians, and whose sole access to their subject is through the sweeping generalizations of the popularizers, we see what ravages can result from the slightest carelessness in the formulation of an opinion.

It cannot be denied that the prehistorians are incautious. They ought at least to consider the consequences of their extrapolations. The gravest of these tends to place Maghrib history as a whole in a false perspective. Camps may be taken as a representative of this trend; for him prehistory, protohistory and history are not simple chronological divisions or stages in our consciousness, but structural divisions encompassing geographical, anthropological, socio-cultural, and of course methodological aspects. To his mind the Sahara and its fringe come under the head of prehistory and can be studied only with the help of archeology and ethnography; protohistory, which extends from the neolithic to urban civilization, still applies to the majority of the rural population, the study of which must therefore be based on cultural anthropology; while history proper ceases to be anything more than the study of intruding urban civilizations from the Phoenicians to the French. This perspective is the expression in terms of technology of a current thesis regarding the persistence of the neolithic, which in terms of social organization is reflected in the notion of a "tribal history," which we shall discuss below. The grossly ideological character of this view is so obvious that a critique of it would be futile, especially if, as in my case, one cannot base one's critique on irrefutable archeological proof. This much may be said, however: if the conclusions implied by its authors are to be drawn from this thesis, it will be necessary to prove that the situation of the Maghrib is unique, shared by no other region in the whole world — a difficult undertaking, to say the least — and above all to prove that a cultural lag can never be made good. Camps concludes: "An industrial revolution similar to that which transformed Europe in the nineteenth century is now in process in Algeria. The Chawia shepherd playing a few notes on his reed flute, the Kabyle potter decorating his vases with age-old motifs possess the serene certainty that they will endure forever; they do not suspect that they belong to an archaic world on its way to extinction." Very well; but if this is true of the industrial revolution why would it not be still more true of the neolithic revolution, and, above all, how in a world that two revolutions will soon have changed completely, can we hope to rectify the mistakes of past investigation by ethnological methods? The remark about the Chawia shepherd contradicts all the studies on prehistory and protohistory on the basis of which Camps and his school are trying to justify a view of Maghribi history which is nothing more than the old colonial ideology adjusted to the tastes of the day. This criticism, to be sure, is purely formal; it is directed against unwarranted conclusions, not against the research findings as such; in the course of its progress, science itself, as it has often done in the past, will explode such brilliant and irresponsible theories.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Introduction, pg. 1
• 1. The Search for Origins, pg. 15
• 2. Colonizer Follows Colonizer, pg. 27
• 3. Conqueror Succeeds Conqueror, pg. 67
• 4. The Winning of Autonomy, pg. 90
• Introduction, pg. 105
• 5. Islam and Commerce: The Ninth Century, pg. 107
• 6. Eastern Forces for Unity: The Fatimid and Zrrid Ventures, pg. 130
• 7. Western Forces for Unity: The Almoravid Venture, pg. 157
• 8. Western Forces for Unity: The Almohad Venture, pg. 174
• 9. The Failure of the Imperial Idea, pg. 201
• 10. The Western Crusade, pg. 227
• 11. Two Reactions, Two Powers, pg. 243
• 12. The Eve of Foreign Intervention, pg. 262
• Introduction, pg. 291
• 13. Colonial Pressure and Primary Resistance, pg. 295
• 14. The Triumph of Colonialism, pg. 327
• 15. The Renascent Maghrib, pg. 348
• Conclusion Heritage and Recovery, pg. 377
• Appendix, pg. 389
• Bibliography, pg. 401
• Index, pg. 423