Gelner Appolo of Biskra

8/2/2019 Gelner Appolo of Biskra

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Ernest GellnerThe UnknownApollo of Biskra:The Social Base of AlgerianPuritanism

MODERNALGERIA EARS VARIOUS STIGMATA OF RADICALISM. ITSstruggle for national liberation was one of exceptional severity,involving untold and incalculable suffering and sacrifices. OnlyVietnam can surpass it; no other ex-colonial country can equal it.After independence, the commanding heights of the economy, andeven a very significant part of the rural sector, passed into one formor another of socialist ownership, including the important experi-ments in at/to-gestion (workers self-administration), n both industrialand agricultural enterprises. In foreign policy, the hostility of itsgovernment to what it holds to be remaining forms of colonialismhas been serious and sustained. Internally, the regime is relativelyegalitarian and rather puritanical and earnest, by any standards. TheAlgerians look to their own efforts for the betterment of their con-dition. All these traits- heroic struggle for liberation, followed by agood deal of socialism and a general earnest radicalism, ought tohave made Algeria a place of pilgrimage for the international Left.It is well known that the promised land must be somewhere. Algeriahad as good a claim as Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam,to be at least considered for such a role. In fact, Algeria found inFrantz Fanon the thinker or poet of this vision. Though not a nativeof Algeria, he identified with the Algerian national cause and diedwhilst serving it, and became its internationally renowned theoreti-cian.

All this being so, it is slightly odd that Algeria should have playedthe role of Home of Revolution and shrine of socialist pilgrimageonly to such a very small extent. Of course, there have been pilgrims- but not so very many, and their reports have been, not disappoin-ted, but muted. Somehow or other, Algeria isnt quite it. Why not?

The main reason why an eager socialist pilgrim, however willingto have faith, will find his ardour somewhat dampened, is the


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278 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITIONprominence of Islam in modern Algeria. This does not look like thehome of a secular socialist millennium. Islam seems alive amongstthe people and is endorsed by the authorities.In fact, the man in thestreet is most unlikely to know the name of Frantz Fanon. No doubt,there is an avenue Fanon, perhaps there is even a square Fanon.But it is most unlikely that there is a Boulevard Fanon, though thereis, for instance, a Boulevard Franklin D. Roosevelt. Fanon is hardlyknown in the country whose struggle he celebrated. Neither hisperson nor his ideas have caught the popular imagination. The pil-grim may feel that Fanon is for export only. In fairness to the Al-gerians, it must be said that they did not encourage the internationalromantic public to make a cult of him; they cannot be accused ofhaving practised a kind of deception. But whereas virtually no manin the street in Algeria knows the name of Fanon, he can be reliedupon to know the name of another thinker, Ben Badis - who, how-ever, is totally unknown abroad, other than to specialists. Yet he wasa theoretician and a social thinker, and one who war capableof makinga profound impact on the minds of the masses of a third worldcountry.

During the student troubles in developed countries, you could besure of finding the name of Fanon or at least slogans from his workamongst the grafitti on university walls. You could be just as surethat you would not find the name or ideas of Ben Badis. Why did onethinker, internationally renowned, find no echo amongst the peopleabout whose struggle he wrote? Why did another thinker, whoreally did know how to reach the masses in a third world country,fail to be noted by the international public which is so eager to hearthe true voice of the oppressed?This is the question. Before it is answered, one must return to themildly disappointed and somewhat bewildered socialist pilgrimwondering just why this near-socialist country, which had passedthrough the severest of ordeals of fire, should not be what he wasseeking. He will note the prominence and importance of Islam.He will be struck by the frequency of the veil, by the pervasivenessof religious themes both at governmental and popular level. In allprobability, he will argue as follows:Muslim traditions have a pro-found hold on the minds and hearts of this people. Millennia1 cus-toms and traditions are not easily broken; one cannot expect them tocrumble after a first contact with the ideas of the Enlightenment. Asecular modernism cannot emerge until their hold has weakened; andthat is something that cannot happen easily and quickly.


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THE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF BISKRA 279Our hypothetical (not really very hypothetical) socialist pilgrim

will be in error: there is little that is perennial, old, rigid, immemorial,about that particular somewhat puritanical Muslim atmospherewhich can be sensed throughout contemporary Algeria. It may,indeed, have a strong hold on the country: but that strength is notrooted in antiquity. Its authority is not that of ageless custom. Thereverence it inspires is not the unreasoning respect evoked by thatwhich was never known to be different. On the contrary: that re-ligiosity which stands between Algeria and the socialist pilgrim'sdream has specific and, above all, very recent roots. The kind of Islamwhich is, in effect, the official religion of Algeria, is not older, but onthe contrary much_yotmger than the Enlightenment.

GIDE'S SAINTSWestern ideological pilgrims have visited Algeria before, and notalways in search of the true revolution. The liberation they soughtmay have been personal and moral rather than political. In literature,the most distinguished of such pilgrims, and one who not merelysought, but also found his shrine, was Andrt Gide. He is an eloquentand an accurate witness to the true erstwhile religious condition ofAlgeria, a condition which needs to be known before one can under-stand the present religious mood.

Andrt Gide embarked for Africa in October I 893. That was a yearof famine in Algeria, but Gide does not comment on this. After sometime in Tunisia, he moved on to Algeria, and the culmination ofthis trip, as of the novel L'lmmoraliste which describes it, was theAlgerian oasis of Biskra. As he also tells us in Si le Grain ne Mewt,which is an avowed, rather than a thinly disguised autobiography,he was no mere tourist in search of a new land, but a pilgrim insearch of self-knowledge. He found it.

. . .my puritan education had formed me thus, gave such im-portance to certain things, that I could not conceive that certainissues which troubled me, did not bother humanity at large . . Iwas Prometheus, astonished that men could live without the eagleand without being devoured. And yet, without knowing it, Iloved that eagle. . .but I began to haggle with him. The problemremained the same . . .which problem . . .?In the name of God, what ideal forbids me to live according tomy nature ?


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280 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITIONTill now I had lived according to the morality of Christ, or at

least according to a certain puritanism which had been taught meas the morality of Christ.. .. I had succeeded only in causing agrave disturbancein my whole being .. he demands of my fleshdid not know how to dispense with the consent of my spirit.. . . came to doubt whether God requires such constraint. .whether, in this struggle in which I bifurcated myself, I need. . .put the Other in the wrong . ..I saw at last that this discordant dualism might resolve itselfinto harmony. At once it became clear to me that this harmonyshould be my supreme aim. . .

When in October 93 I embarked for Africa, it was ... owardsthis golden fleece that my drive precipitated itself.(Sik Grain ne Meurt.)It was this Apollonian unity and harmony which Gide found in

North Africa. Its discovery and attainment involved various stages.In Algeria, Gide met Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. In duecourse he naturally had a row with Bosie, who then departed. ButWilde passed on to Gide a young man in whose arms Gide was toknow ecstasy five times in one night (Gide indulges in some in-genious pleading with the reader to makehimaccept this figure), andthrough whom he found his own normality, which his previousethic had prevented him from accepting. Gides attempt to convincethe reader of the statistical, Kinseyesque aspect of his liberation has acurious logic; if I wanted to fib, he says, I could make my fibs soplausible that you would not even suspect anything. So the fact that Ineed to plead at all shows that I am really telling the unadornedtruth. The truth of the matter is no doubt of importance for literaryhistory. For our purposes, however, what matters is Gides use andinvocation of the local social background of that liberation whichturned him into a professional ex-puritan for the rest of his life.Gides road to his anti-Damascus culminates in the oasis which hedescribes well both in the novel and in the autobiography, and it isthere that he composes the poem of his liberation, the hymn to theunknown Apollo of Biskra, whom he credits with his deliverance.Why Biskra? The beauty of the oasis played its part: . . .springtouched the oasis .. . listened, I saw, I breathed, as I had never donebefore . . I felt my heart freed, tearful in its gratitude, melting inadoration for this unknown Apollo . . In part, the richness ofclassical remains in the countryside around Biskra, notably to the


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THE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF BISKRA 2 8 Inorth of it, must have suggested such associations. But Gidesacute observation of the local ritual life is also relevant.

Biskra was a centre, amongst other things, of prostitution. Thegirls were drawn (or were supposed to be drawn) from the Ulad Nailtribe. The flocks of these Ulad Nail roamed two hob streets, wherethe holy men had their lodges, and the Ulad Nail themselves weremuch in evidence there. This conspicuous presence of such pro-fanity in the holy streets at first startled Gide. Was the appellationholy street an ironic inversion, an anti-phrase, in view of the blatantgoings-on which were to be observed there? He decides, rightly,that it was not: no irony was intended. The Ulad Nail take part inmany of the local ceremonies, half profane, half religious. The mostvenerated holy men are to be seen in their company. Local pietydoes not view them ill . . .No doubt all this was so. Gides religious ethnography of Biskrain 1894 can be corroborated from many other observations ofNorth African folk religion. Biskra is a date-growing oasis, strategi-cally located between the nomads of the arid desert to the south andthe high hills of the Aures to the north. No doubt, here as elsewherethe market was also a fair, a festival guaranteed by saint and shrinein whose honour it was held, and those who came to the fair camefor the joys of life, not for their denial. The living saints or holy menwho underwrote such multi-purpose pilgrimages had little incentiveto be censorious, and it would have been odd indeed had they beenso. Here there was a social base for Apollonian unity, such as Gidesought and found. It was typical of North Africa, and especiallytypical of Algeria. Ben Badis, the great Algerian reformer, andfountainhead of that new puritan religiosity which marks the Algeriaof today, himself admitted and stressed that prior to his own Reformmovement, no one (in Algeria) supposed that Islam could be any-thing other than the cult of holy men, of marab0trts.l The saintswhom Gide saw in the holy streets of Biskra, were indeed typicalmurubozits. These personages were common throughout NorthAfrica, but in Algeria they enjoyed a near monopoly of religiousleadership: heir natural rivals are the dama, the learned theologians-jurists, who stand contrasted to the tribal thaumaturges. But thesegenerally require an urban basis, which I 9th-century Muslim Algerialargely lacked:

The towns had been destroyed or occupied by the French; the1 Quoted in Ali Merad, Le Rejormisme Musuhan en Algerie de 1 9 2 ~ 1940,Mouton & Co., 1967, p. 58.


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2 8 2 G O VE RNM E NT A N D O P P OS IT IO N

burghers annihilated, ruined, or had fled. . Moreover, there arevarious indications suggesting that the urban bourgeoisie had beennumerically unimportant, economically weak, and politicallynull, already under the Turks.aWhat Gide saw was evidently the essence of Algerian religiouslife of the time. The profanity was as typical then as it would beuntypical now. This fundamental transformation is our main topic.But when Gide prayed to the unknown Apollo of Biskra, he was notmerely addressing his own projections, or the local pre-Islamicruins; he had, for his time, chosen the earthly home of his faith with

discernment. It is worth quoting Gide's hymn to the unknownApollo of Biskra at greater length.Take me! Take all of me - I cried. I belong to you. I obey you.I surrender myself. Decree that all in me should be light; yes!Light and lightness.In vain did I struggle against you till this day.But now I recognise you. Thy will be done: I resist no more; Isurrender to you. Take me.

His heart, he tells us in these passages of Si Ze Grain ne Meurt, wassobbing with gratitude, dissolving in adoration of this unknownApollo. The hymn certainly conveys such a state of mind.The literary antecedents and consequences of this passage arecurious. One might suppose, especially in the light of 'Thy will bedone', that we have here a lapsed puritan's inversion of the Lord'sPrayer. Not so. A perusal of d'Holbach's Sy&m of Nattlre, thatcompendium of the wisdom of the French Enlightenment, makesclear that we have here an eroticization of d'Holbach's hymn toNature:

Be happy, seek happiness, without fear. Do not resist my law.Vain are the hopes of religion. Free yourself from the yoke ofreligion, my proud rival. In my empire there is freedom . Make nomistake; I punish, more surely than the gods, all crimes of theearth. The evildoer may escape the laws of man, but not mine.(Systme de Za Nature, first anonymous edition 1770, varioussubsequent editions.)a F. Colonna:Resistance culturel'le e t conquite de la legitimiti dans Z'AZge'rie coloniale,

paper presented to World Anthropological Congress, 1973 , pp. 14, 15, to bepublishedin Economy and So&& 1974. See also F. Stambouli and A. Zghal, LaVie Urbaine dans Ze Maghreb pre-colonial, in L'Annuaire deZ'Afrique de Nord, 1974.


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THE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF BISKRA 283This plainly is the call to which Gide is responding so warmly.

There can be no doubt about the literary echo. He eagerly reportshow much he had already been punished for striving to resist hisown nature, and hence Nature. But the aptness of his choice oflocality for the incarnation of his Apollo, is confirmed not merelyby the social historians of 19th-century Algeria, but also by muchlater ethnography of North Africa. In I75 there appeared a volumeby Jacques Berque, now professor at the Collkge de France, whichis the most intimate and detailed account we possess of the innerstructure and life of a North African tribe.3 On page 314, we findan account of a group of marabotlts or saints, rather like those Gidesaw in Biskra half a century earlier:

These saints. . .help us to understand the specific traits of thestyle of life resulting from a saintly origin. Their prestige is un-connected with any idea of merit, any moral evaluation . . (theyhave) fewer inhibitions. The saint is he who lives fully. One allowsnature to speak through him, even in the form of unbridleddesires.. .One seeks through him a kind of complicity withheaven.There can be no doubt but that Gide and Berque saw the same

phenomenon, and that the language in which they noted it was drawnfrom the same pool of ideas and expressions. Nature - qtli est donccette dame? -who issued her edicts to dHolbach, and to whom Gidelater surrendered so fulsomely and voluptuously, now speaksthrough the igElrramen (Berber holy men) of a lost valley in the Wes-tern High Atlas, and is overheard by Monsienr le Controlletlr CivilBerque. The manifest continuity of the literary tradition which re-cords her activities does not make the perception itself any lessaccurate. But if one had any doubt that Berque is here echoingGide, the doubts would be silenced by the sentences following theprevious ones: This saint can turn his life into a kind of carnival.Paraphrasing Nietzsche, one may say of him that he can be thewarmest of all warm beasts.The allusion is clear: Gides pilgrimage half a century earlier wasavowedly under the influence of Nietzsche. Thus North Africanreligious life was an appropriate place for those seeking Apollonianharmony and acceptance of nature. But today, socialist pilgrims toAlgeria find themselves disappointed, not through undue Apollon-

JacquesBerque, Structures Sociales du Haut-Atlas, P.U.F., Paris, 195 .


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284 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITIONism, but on the contrary by an excessive denial of it, by a puritanismnot so very unlike that which Gide then fled from in Europe. Howdid this change come about ?

BEN BADIS AND THE REFORM MOVEMENTThe religious reform of Algeria was the work of the Reform move-ment. To say this is not enough: it is more important to know whythe soil was so ready for this seed, than to know just who, when andhow did the sowing, and why this seed prospered. Nevertheless, it isas well to begin with the well-documented story of the sowing.The Reform movement in Algeria has found, in Ali Merad, abrilliant and painstaking hi~torian.~Merad places the effective beginning of the Reform movementin 1903, with the visit to Algeria in September of that year of the in-fluential Egyptian reformer, Muhammad Abduh. So, ten yearsalmost to a month since a European pilgrim had gone to seekApollo in North Africa, an Oriental visitor came whose destinyit wasto repudiate him. Shortly after this date, Merad finds the first signsof Reformist ideas. Already in 1904, a small volume appears whosevery title conveys the slogan- he need to reform. The followers ofthe new trend notably included the teachers in the official religiousschools, which trained interpreters and officials of state-controlledMusIim institutions. By 191 , a weekly journal begins to appear, andthe editorial of its first issue declares it to be a-political, but con-cerned with reform, with the combating of Satanic innovations. Ifthis hostility to corruption and innovation includes opposition tothe gallicization of Algerian youth, it includes, with at least as muchemphasis, violent opposition to the murabouts, to those holy menwhose lack of fastidiousness in the holy streets of Biskra so agree-ably surprised Gide, and whose willingness to allow nature to speakthrough them, evenin the form of unbridled desires, was noted halfa century later by Berque in the Atlas. It was fhisstruggle above all, afight against what to the proponents of Reform appeared as ruraldeformations and superstitions, which gave the movement its specialcharacter.As Merad stresses: the conflict between traditional and reformed

Le Reformisme Musulmanen AZglrie a% 1 9 2 ~ 1940.Essai dhistoire religieuse efsociale, Mouton & C o . , 1967.Also, by the same author, Ibn Badis, CommentafetlrLKoran, Paul Guethner, Paris, r97r.Le Refrmisme Mmnimatt, etc., pp. 5 3-4.


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285HE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF BISKRAIslam was not restricted to Algeria: on the contrary, the wave ofReform had reached Algeria rather late. But probably in no othercountry did the conflict attain the dimensions which it assumed inAlgeria, in consequence of the specific social, cultural and politicalconditions of that country (Merad). This is indeed the crucial fact,and those conditions deserve to be singled out. Very roughly:probably no Muslim country was more completely dependent onthe rural holy men than was 19th-century Algeria, and it is doubtfulwhether any other country has swung more violently against them.It is the mechanisms of this swing of the pendulum which arefascinating.6

The account of the development of the Reform movement so fartakes us to the first world war. War against Turkey and hence againstthe Khalifate naturally constituted a moral problem, and the Frenchauthorities obtained declarations of loyalty from influential Muslims.Ali Merad sees in this a part of the explanation of the decline of themarabouts. Merad observes that the francophilia of the maraboats didnot shock anyone, but that the declaration of hostility to Turkeywas seen as moral treason. At a moment when France and Turkeywere at war, this would seem an oversubtle distinction. But above all,the simple reactive theory is inadequate. No doubt, all occupantsof recognized social positions, maraboutic leaders and others, hadno choice but to be associated with the colonial state. When national-ist criteria came to be applied, retrospectively this could be heldagainst them. But there were more immediate, concrete reasons whythe current began to flow against the holy men and in favour of thereformers.

The man who emerged as undisputed leader of Reform, and whosespirit moulded that of modern Algeria,was Ben Badis, a member of agreat Constantine bourgeois family. (At the moment, one of thelarger churches in central Algiers is about to be transformed into theBen Badis mosque.) But amongst his lieutenants, the most turbulent,aggressive and probably the most influential was Tayyib Uqbi. Heoften acted autonomously, and had started his own preaching ofReform in Biskra in 1920, five years prior to joining Ben Badissmovement. He was, as Merad says, the spearhead of the movement,and was in the end chosen to represent it in the capital, Algiers itself,whilst the leader remained in the relatively provincial city of Cons-tantine. (But in consequence, Constantine is now a kind of religious

6For a discussion of such Muslim scripturalism and its appeal in othersocial contexts, see Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed, Yale University Press, 1968.


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286 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITIONcapital of Algeria, with a Muslim university alongside an ordinaryone. The technocracy/puritanism dualism of Algeria is symbolizedby the relationship of Algiers to Constantine.)

By an irony of history, the centre and base of Uqbis mission wasthat very oasis of Biskra which had been, for Gide, the symbol of theAppollonism of North Africa. Uqbis name derives from a villagenear Biskra, whose shrine commemorates Sidi Uqba, one of theearly Muslim conquerors of the Maghreb. Uqbi was born in 1888,and spent much of his childhood in the Hijaz, and came under theinfluence of Wahabism, one of the last of the as it were pre-modernwaves of Muslim reformism and fundamentalism, and the basis ofthe Saudi Arabian state. He at any rate did not view the goings-onof the holy streets of Biskra with the benevolence of Gide. Quite thereverse.. . .Uqbi and Ben Badis were in full agreement concerning the

basic outlines of the reforming doctrine of the sahjyya: thestruggle against blameworthy innovations, and mainly marabouticinnovations.. .... he sheikh Uqbi was the least prudent of the Algerian reform-ist leaders . . .he could not find a modus vivendi with the officialrepresentatives of Muslim worship in Algiers . . .. . .Uqbi . ..spoke of the partizans of maraboutism in anintransigeant manner, as one convinced that right was on his side,and sure of his victory.. . for him. . .all who lacked the reformist. . . aith were inerror, and should renounce their beliefs as soon as notified bythe reformers. Those who. . .persist in their error, should betreated as infamous tools of Satan. The greatest part of Uqbispreaching consists of bitter invectives against the opponents ofreformism (i.e. marabouts and supporters of official Muslimclergy) . .... .he made himself noted by an anti-maraboutic zeal virtuallyunequalled in Algeria between the wars. His powerful diatribesagainst the marabouts and their supporters went beyond religiousrefutation. . ... . he so-called saints [he taught] are not superior beings holdingall in their power. .. hey should not be invoked. . . hey them-selves are incapable of defending themselves against the pettymiseries of daily life . .he denounces those who build. ..


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THE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF B I S K R A 287temples of error and ignorance to the glory of saints. He pro-nounces his malediction against marabouts, and declares himselftheir opponent whether one takes them individually or in general

I invoke no-one but God. . Invoke whom you will, I shallnever surrender to your idolatry. . I have never performed thecircumambulation [of a shrine] . .I place no tissue on sepulchres.. .nor make pilgrimages to tombs . . .nor propitiatory sacrifices.. do not invoke the dead.. . hat constitutes shirk.. .?One wonders whether Knoxs Scotland or Calvins Geneva would

surpass this fervour. The centre of his attack is indeed the heresy ofshirk.Ali Merad translates this as associationism. What is meant bythis term here is not the psychological doctrines of David Hume,but the view that saints and the dead and other beings or objects canthrough association with God partake of His sacredness - hat thedivine is diffised or refracted in the world by some kind of associa-tion.

This firebrand from Biskra claimed to be a-political. His fury wasdirected against corruption of and within the faith: but the move-ment of reform should, he claimed, eschew politics. How thiscould be so in logic, given the enormous social content of Islam,we need not ask. Ali Merad observes that Uqbis prudence consistedof formulae without meaning.* He also tells us that it is relativelyeasy to establish a connection between the expansion of reformism inAlgeria and the progress of nationalist ideas among the Muslimrnas~es.~he subjective sincerity of Uqbis a-politism, in those d ia-cult conditions, would be difficult to investigate now. But there canbe little doubt about the powerful and inflammatory nature of hispronouncements and activity, and they did indeed have dramaticconsequences.In 1936, an official, so-to-speak collaborationist Muslim clericwas murdered, after being ferociously denounced as a traitor in ajournal under Uqbis influence. Henceforth, no traitor will remainunpunished, the journal had declared. Uqbi was accused of incite-ment to murder, and arrested. Though ultimately released, neitherhis morale nor his relations with the fellow-reformers ever recovered

Ali Merad, Le Reformisme Alusulrnan en Algerie, pp. 97, 9 8 , 99, 100, 62, 263,

...

264.op. cii. , p. 100.Ibid., p. 147.


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288 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITIONfrom this, and he died, an embittered and relatively isolated man, inI960, two years prior to Algerian independence. Yet the uncompro-mising fervour and rigour of this Saharan John Knox had evidentlydone as much for the transformation of Algeria as the more subtle,moderate preaching of the grand bourgeois, Ben Badis. Biskra nowspoke with a voice quite other than that of 1894.The most interesting question about the Algerian Reform move-ment concerns the amazing speed of its impact. Ali Merad tells us:.. he Algerian reform movement became, in the space of amere ten years, a veritable religious party. . . t organized aneffective propaganda machine, and ended by forcing itself on theattention of the whole country (and of the Administration), as amovement endowed with a conquering dynamism.1

By 193I, the province of Constantine in its totality was for practi-cal purposes won over to reformism. Kabylia was in the process ofconversion to the Badisian doctrine . . I1

As Merad also observes, such rapid success would not have beenpossible at any time. The soil was ripe. This seed at any rate was notdue to perish, but to prosper.

It is probable that, had it come sooner, the Badisian propagandawould not have aroused any enthusiasm amongst the Arabs andKabyles of Algeria.12The precise starting point of the change of religious mood is perhapsin doubt. The historian Ch.-R. Ageron quotes the ethnographerDouttk, as saying in 1899 that maraboutism is the real religion ofthe natives of Africa Minor; but Ageron goes on to express certainreservations about the uses to which this view was put.

That conception when formulated without any nuance . . .had anincontestable polemical value: t denied the depth of Islamization,and justified or encouraged certain assimilationist or anticlericaltendencies. Insisting on pre-Islamic survivals, it attached itself tothe Berber myth which it helped to revive.13In that sense, the insistence on the pervasiveness of maraboutism

does indeed contain a grave error: the cult of saints is not in the veryloOp. c i t . , pp. g, 10.l1 Op. cit., p. 141.laOp. cit., p. 83.13 Ch.-R. Ageron, Les Algerians Musulmans ef la France (z87z-z9z9), P.U.F.,

Or again, we read

Paris, 1968,vol. 2 , p. 903.


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THE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF BISKRA 289least a sign of the weakness of Islamic identification. The saintworship, on the contrary, is a means of achieving that very Muslimidentification, on the part of rustic populations who cannot so easilyapproach the faith through the Book, and prefer that the Wordshould be flesh. But if one sees it as a rival though fervent form ofIslam, rather than as a near-negation of it, then Douttes observationwould seem perfectly valid.

One might add that there also existed what might be called atraditional anti-maraboutic sentiment, noted by European observersof Algeria in the first half of the 19th century, such as GeneralDaumas, who was French consul at the court of Emir Abdelkader,or Charles Henry Churchill, Abdelkaders English contemporaryand biographer. Daumas quotes a significant saying there is alwaysa snake in a ~uw&z (maraboutic lodge) - and Churchill reports simi-lar feelings. But these were the sentiments of secular warrior chiefs,competing for tribal leadership with the marubotlts, but who them-selves expressed, and indeed owed their position to, an ethic ofconspicuous consumption centred on themes such as raiding, fal-conry, etc. The presence of irony in the reverence has also beennoted in the attitude to murubotlts in the Moroccan Atlas. But thiskind of partial hostility or ambivalence is quite different from thepuritanical and urban rgection of murabot/ts, which was to come inwith the Reformers.

Anyway, it is odd that members of a Catholic nation should haveheld saint-worship to be a sign of lukewarmness. Ageron expressesdoubts about the progress of anti-maraboutic purification for theperiod up to 1914: Muslim Algerians . . . emained as faithful totheir brotherhoods and indulged with the same good conscience andeven enthusiasm the cult of their saints,as according to all indicationsthey did prior to 1 8 3 0 . ~ ~or the period prior to the first world war,no doubt this is true, except perhaps for some very small minority.Those who seek the start of this movement earlier, admit that itsbeginnings were numerically small: . . . he emergence of a full-fledged reforming movement in the 1920s needs also to be con-nected to the sprouting of the first seeds of Islamic reformismamong a small number of intellectuals in Algiers in the 1890s.15

Given these small beginnings, whatever their starting date, andl4 09. it., p. 908.l5 E. Burke in Middle Eastern Sftidies,Vol. 7, May 1971, o. , p. 249. See also

Malek Bennabi, Mtmoires dun Tehoir du Sihle, Editions Nationales Algtriennes,1965 (? ) esp. pp. 75 and 76.


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GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION290the exiguity of their impact prior to 1914,he rapidity of the impactof Reformism from the 1920sonwards are all the more remarkable.

A few decades earlier, Islam was co-extensive with maraboutism,according to Ben Badis himself as well as DouttC. Careful investiga-tion may yet succeed in locating some orthodox or reformingelements here and there during that early period. However, it willneed to be painstaking research: what was in evidence every-where were the marabouts. Today the situation is reversed. Nodoubt research can easily locate survivals, or even new forms ofmaraboutism. Rumour has it that they are active. In April 1974 Ivisited a hilltop saintly lodge overlooking what now is the bustlingindustrial town of Tizi Ousou in Kabylia. The lodge claimed to beproviding continuous round-the-clock therapeutic services forpilgrims, by means of a shift-work system operated by the fourbrothers who were the local inheritors of baruh. But these activitiesare much diminished. Why was the reversal so great? Why was thesoil so very ready, so very receptive to the new message?

THE TWO STYLES OF RELIGIOUS LIFEThe basic answer I believe to be this:within Muslim societies, thereis a permanent, if sometimes latent, tension and opposition betweentwo styles of religious life. On the one hand, there is a puritanical,unitarian, individualist, scripturalist ideal of a single deity, which hasdisclosed its final message in a definitive Revelation available to allwho care to read it. This version spurns mediation, and neither re-quires nor formally allows clergy: it presupposes only a literate classof scribes who act as guardians and exegetes of the revelation. Thisis an open class, accessible through learning, and not a caste or apriesthood. In contrast to this vision, there is the associationistideal, to use Merads term, which allows mediation, propitiation,ritual and devotional excess, and religious hierarchy.A community or an individual does not choose between these twovisions simply through some idiosyncratic or arbitrary caprice, akind of religious penchant. Each of these styles serves different socialneeds, and the urgency of one need or another depends on socialcircumstances. This is not, of course, an all-or-nothing matter:there are prolonged periods when the two styles co-exist peacefullyand indeed inter-penetrate each other. At other times, they and thegroups which stand to profit from them or have their position orlife styles ratified by them come into conflict; and there are times


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291HE UNKNOWN APOLLO O F BISKRAwhen the pendulum not merely swings, but swings violently.Algeria in this century was such a case. Under the impact of modern-ity, the pendulum swings more violently and becomes unhinged.But the pendulum does not swing for purely intellectual reasons: heerstwhile clients of the holy streets of Biskra did not become eagerlisteners to the preaching of Uqbi simply because they found hislogic or his invective irresistible. Something had happened toAlgerian society within this period to cause one style, which hadbeen almost totally dominant, to lose its appeal, and be replaced byanother which had been, not absent, but latent.By coincidence, we happen to possess an account of the pre-modern and pre-Reformist social structure of that very village nearBiskra which was the origin of the firebrand Uqbi and which gavehim his name.l6 The population of the oasis consisted of a series ofgroups or clans, with no belief ina shared common ancestor, but led bythe one clan of sharifian status (i.e. supposedly descended from theProphet). According to legend, the first local representative andgeneral ancestor of this dominant holy group made it his condition,prior to accepting leadership of the oasis, that each of the othergroupings should link itself to him by providing him with a bride.(His brother and predecessor, who had failed to take such a pre-caution, had found his death at the hands of the very people who hadpreviously invited him to govern them.. . ) This legend and theshared veneration of the shrine of Sidi Oqba gave the oasis the charterof its unity. The pilgrims to the shrine provided it with contacts andlinks as far afield as the city of Tunis.

All this is altogether typical of traditional North African life.Whatever the theological errors of shirk, an attack either on theshrine or on the holy lineage of the oasis would in effect have beenattacks on he preconditions of its political and economic existence,on its mechanisms for the maintenance of order and its trade rela-tions. In such circumstances, Tayyib Uqbi, however vehement andeloquent, would have wasted his breath in trying to persuade theinhabitants of his own native village to change their customs. ButCaptain Simon saw the oasis in the first years of this century. Bythe 1920s and I ~ ~ O S ,ne may suppose that a centralized administra-tion, labour migration, trade by lorry, not pilgrim, had made boththe hereditary religious hierarchy and the shrine far less important

l6 Capitaine H. Simon, Commandant Suptrieur du cercle de Touggourt,Notes sur le Mausolte de Sidi Ocba. Revue Africaine, Publite par la Societthistorique algkrienne, 1909, specially pp. 41-5.


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292 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITIONto the inhabitants of the oasis. Now they could listen to the preach-ings of Uqbi.The major and obvious function of maraboutism is to serveilliterate tribal populations in anarchic conditions. Providing media-tion in cases of feud, organizing festivals which are at the same timemarkets, guaranteeing frontiers, witnessing collective oaths, offeringa personal incarnation of the sacred for tribesmen who have neitheraccess to nor a penchant for learning - these are but some of theservices which marabouts performed, and performed well. Thisapplies equally to isolated holy lineages, and to those religiousleaders linked by a complex and long-distance organization whichare called religious orders or fraternities.The distinction between religious orders and holy lineages is aloose one. Religious orders are led by holy lineages, andin turn success-ful holy lineages may expand their following nto a tariqa,an order.Anorder is a saint with an organized following; every saint is a potentialorder. If his offspring and/or his followers multiply, he or ratherthey, will become an order. The reason why in Algeria this form ofreligion was specially dominant, seems obvious :urban life had beenrelatively weak even prior to the French conquest, and had beendestroyed or disrupted by the French. The surviving tribesmenneeded saints, and the saints had few ideological ri~a1s.l~ufism isthe opium of the tribesmen, reformism of the townsmen.But the situation changed. The colonial state, unlike the previousTurkish regency of Algiers, was not weak. It maintained effectiveorder over its territory. The Pax Gallica eroded tribal organization,and in due course there was also much migration to the towns and toFrance. Where once there had been tribesmen, there was now aproletariat and, in some measure,a petite bourgeoisie.Under these circumstances, the marabot/ts,like nobles of the A d e nRkgime, were losing their functions, but not their privileges. Worsestill, such privileges as they did retain, were now endorsed by thecolonial power which saw in them the natural or the only inter-mediaries with the indigenous population. Under such circum-

l7 Ahmed Nadir, in La Ordres Religieux et laConqu&teFrancaise 1830-1 8 5 Iin Revue Algerienm dessciencesJuridiques,Vol. IX, No. 4, December, 1972, pp. 819-868 , claims that Emir Abd el Kader, the leader of Algerian resistance during theearly colonial period, was a kind of proto-reformer and predecessor of BenBadis. By contrast, Pessah Shinar, in Abd el-Qadir and Abd al-Krim, in Asianand African S tudies. Annual of the Israel Oriental Society, Vol. I , I 96 5 , pp. I 39-74,finds that Abd el Kader leans heavily on the maraboutic class.


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293HE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF BISKRAstances, they became most vulnerable to the kind of propagandawhich the Reform movement mounted against them.

A tribesman from the Aures mountains, come to Biskra or SidiOqba to sell a sheep and buy dates, combining the visit to the marketwith a participation in profane rituals in holy street, and having histrip both enlivened and made safer by the murubout - such a tribes-man can be relied upon to remain deaf to any propaganda accusingthe saint of shirk, of associationism.A religion without association-ism, without living local incarnationsof the holy, would be useless tohim. The more associationism the better.

The situation is quite different for a detribalized townsman, or atany rate one possessed of a minimum of economic standing. Amurubout is unlikely to fulfil any important function in his life: butwhat remains visible and what now becomes offensive is the mara-bouts perks and privileges, their underwriting by an alien ruler,and those scandalous goings-on in holy street, which, the townsmannotes, are viewed by the alien ruler with derision even or especiallywhen he exploits them for political purposes. (Gides enthusiasm forthem was a bit eccentric and not altogether free from a tacitlypatronizing attitude: it is only because Gide has internalized puri-tanism only too well, that he can enthuse about the supposedApollonianism of a pack of Saharan dervishes.) Moreover, themurubouts are local and segmented; they cannot be carriers, let alonecreators, of a national consciousness.

The Reform movement, on the other hand, can be just that. Itsrepudiation of associationism, of intermediaries, is the repudiationof the local form of the sacred. Its preaching of pure Islam is ineffect the preaching of an Islam equally accessible to all literateMuslims, the preaching of something which all Muslims genericallyshare, but which also distinguishes them from the non-Muslimruler. This is highly relevant when a nascent nationalism can hopeto recruit all Muslim, and no others, in a given territory. The Reformmovement does not need to be overtly nationalist in order to be aform of proto-nationalism; its proclaimed a-politism could besubjectively sincere, or opportunist - t does not matter. At the sametime, the fact that its main activity was the battle with rural super-stition,made it that much harder for the authorities to proscribe it.l*

18For a discussion of political developments and the role of these attitudesin it, see Clem H enry Moore, North Africa, Little, Brow n & Co., Boston, 1970,or Elbaki Hermassi, Leadetship and National Development in North Africa, Uni-versity of California Press, Berkeley, Lo s Angeles, Lond on, 1972.


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294 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITIONThe Reform movement not only preaches something which all

Muslims share and which distinguishes them from others, but alsosomething in which they can take legitimate pride. A purified,theological, scholarly Islam is not something manifestly inferior, orindeed inferior at all, to other world religions: t is only those goings-on in holy street which make one feel ashamed. It is all very well fora European romantic, sure of his civilized status, to idealize thoseexcesses and write hymns to them: he can take a strong, orderlysociety for granted, and vaunt himself on his own rebellion againstits puritanism. But a Muslim artisan or shopkeeper, seeking identityand dignity, will hardly find them in prostrations before Apollo. Onthe contrary, the puritanism spumed by Gide will seem to him adesirable distinguishing mark of urban civilization, separating himfrom the rural life he has left behind. Ali Merad writes:. . . he creation of a petite bourgeoisie converted to European

civilization, diminished the field in which maraboutism couldoperate. That petite bourgeoisie (teachers, civil servants in centralor local government, entrepreneurs) was almost cut off from thepeople. . . .Moreover, the use of its leisure (and no doubt itsconcern with respectability) prevented it from taking part in col-lective religious and folklore di~p1ays.l~

Not for them, clearly, that melange of the profane and the sacredwhich warmed the heart of the pilgrim of 1893.

The interesting thing is, however, that these sacred-and-profaneactivities are alien not merely to a petite bourgeoisie attracted byEuropean civilization, whom Merad notes in this passage, but a tleast equally so to a petite bourgeoisie which aspires not to Europeanurban life, but simply to traditional Muslim or Arab town styles. Anurban stratum of this kind has a double reason for being attracted byreformism: not only does its own rigour distinguish it from the non-respectable excesses of the rustic tribesman, it at the same time alsolegitimates such a stratum against those who aspire to or possessprivileges in virtue of gallicization, westernization. Reformism is adouble-edged sword, it defends pure Islam against the internalcorruption of mat.abot/ts and against the external corruption ofwesternization. The first theme was initially the most prominent,but the other was always clearly understood, and in due course cameto be very important.

v

Op. cit., p. 74.


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2 9HE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF BISKRA

We possess some interesting evidence on this social boundarybetween the villages and the small towns - a social frontier which isperhaps the most important dividing line in North African sociallife. Consider, for instance, a recent thesis by Dr Vanessa AnneMaher on Social Stratification and the Role of Women in the MiddleAtlas of Morocco. The authoress examined both a small markettown and nearby villages:

Everyone [in the village] goes to the hedm [ecstatic dancing undermaraboutic patronage] except the Shurfa [descendants of Mo-hamed] who say that it is a scene of licence. . .Although culti-vated Arabs and Arabised Berbers come to [the village] from [thetown], they regard the proceedings with explicit contempt andcall them barbarous.20The authoress also observes that.. . he hedm . . can be viewed as an assertion of the validity ofBerber cultural forms, which wherever they come into contactwith Arab values, are demeaned . .

She describes well how the hedra is both profane and sacred, in-volving as it does deliberate and conscious sacrilege;21 all this ispresumably similar to what Gide witnessed in Biskra some eightyyears earlier. The only thing one need not accept here is the referenceto Berbers: in Dr Mahers region, townsmen happen to be Araband villagers Berber, and therefore it seems that the affirmation ofrural values is an affirmation of Berber cultural forms. But theBerberism is irrelevant: Arab tribesmen, or for that matter arabo-phone townsmen below a certain socio-cultural level, will also gladlyparticipate in these activities, as her own material suggests. Whetheror not you revere morally ambiguous saints and participate inprofane-sacred festivals relates to the most important social boundaryin North Africa, between the life styles of the petty bourgeoisie andof the countryside, which she does much to illuminate: but it is not,other than incidentally, an ethnic or linguistic boundary. Dr Mahersthesis is important in showing how very much hinges on thisboundary: attitudes to work, kin, women, government, as well as toreligious style, depend on whether you live in a tribally articulatedrural community, or a more atomic and mobile urban one. Roughlyspeaking there are two dominant life styles. In one of them, your

20 Cambridge doctoral thesis, presented in September 1971 . Cf. p. 166.Ibid., p. I j 8.


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296 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITIONwomen folk work in the fields, are not secludedor veiled, bride-priceis low or nominal, brides are in effect exchanged between socialgroups, social groups are very well defined and visible, religious life iscentred on public festivals in which women play a very definite part,and which reaffirm the identity and boundary of groups, and whichare ecstaticor at least expressive rather than scripturalist. By contrast,there is on the other hand a more urban style, based on commercialor bureaucratic employment, in which women folk are secluded,and veiled when they come out, where the marriage market is (forthe family if not the bride) relatively freer and less kin-constrained,where bride price is high and indeed the object of inflationarypressure,where groups are more ambiguous and ill-defined, and where rituallife is more sober, rule-bound, scripturalist, individualistic, anony-mous and has a much more marked tendency to exclude women.22The former style of course produces much less docile subjects ofthe state than the latter.Members of rural society seeking prestige or positions of authoritywill of course emulate this or that aspect of the urban style, to thebest of their understanding of it, and on occasion at some economiccost. Some urban dwellers at the bottom of the social scale, with noprestige to lose and some economic advantage to gain, may specializein catering to the wilder religious needs of the less fastidious or moredeprived or badly stricken townsfolk.23 The central fact of modernNorth African history however is the shift from the rural to theurban style, in numbers and in authority. The Reform movementreflects this shift.The revulsion of the townsman for the rustic and the tribesmanis of course old and antedates the Reform movement: reformismmerely provides it with a theological sanction and a programme. Aninteresting expression of it is a proclamation of the Muslim burghersand scholars of the city of Constantine in 1871,urging firmness on

aa It appears that for instance the new Moroccan code of 1957 legally conse-crates this social style (and there is no doubt that the dominant actual practice ofAlgeria does so). Cf. Dr Fatima Mernissi, Ih nt ifh Culturelle ef Idhologie Sexuelle,paper presented to the 24th International Congress in Algiers, March 1974, p. 3e f seq. The authoress notes the desire of the Moroccan legislator to use pre-colonial tradition as a guide for the future (p. 3), but perhaps does not stresssufficiently that what is at issue is not the effective tradition of al l pre-colonialMoroccans, but an ideal practised by some and merely respected, rather thanimplemented, by other social strata.

a3 Cf. Vincent Crapanzano, The Hamadsha. A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry,University of California Press, 1973, for an account of urban gangs of dancers/therapists of this kind.


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THE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF BISKRA 297the French authorities when dealing with rebellious tribes: thebedouin will not abandon their traditional conduct and the tradi-tions of their mountains, unless struck by a severe and energeticrepression which will fill them with fear and terror.24 As Ageronobserves in his admirable study, this proclamation was no doubtofficially inspired: nonetheless, the form of words and ideas chosento express bourgeois loyalty to authority in a critical situation isdeeply symptomatic.It was signed amongst others by two membersof the Ben Badis family. There is a consistency rather than a contra-diction in the family attitude: when, some five decades later, thegreat Ben Badis himself was to preach reform, its central aim was,precisely, to persuade those tribesmen to give up the traditionalconduct and habits of their mountains.Dr Mahers thesis gives us a synchronic snapshot of the religiousdifference between villagers and townsfolk in recent Morocco; utthe same contrast may also be found diachronically within a smalltown, during the period of reformist expansion. Even if urban lifeand respectability have an inherent and perennial tendency towardsthe purer type of Islam, during periods when urban styles, especiallyin Algeria, constituteda submerged minority, this tendency remainedlatent, and even small towns organized their religious life aroundsaints and orders. A sociological history of a small Western Algeriantown, Nedroma, is available, and describes the transformationadmirably.

In Nedroma the presence [of religious orders] was very ancient.The town was even celebrated for their number and vitality. . .Today, only one has maintained itself. . .In he 1900s~he orders controlled the totality of religious life . . .As from the 1930s~ he orders began to mute their dissensionsso as to make common cause against a shared enemy: the Associa-tion of Ulama [reformist theologians] . . whose aim is the purifi-cation of Islam from blameworthy innovations, the cult of saints,

the basis of the orders . . .During the period of maraboutism, the model [of Muslim be-haviour] included membership of an order, and assiduity in itspractices. He who did not take part was held to be that much less

Muslim.2524 Quoted in Charles-Robert Ageron, Les Algeriens Musulmans e f la France,25 Gilbert Grandguillaume, Nedroma. L f i v o l d o n dune Medina. Doctorat 111187z-rgrg. P.U.F., Paris, 1968, Vol. I , p. Izn.

Cycle, E.P.H.E., VIe Section, Sorbonne,N. D. (1971?), p. 215-26.


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298 GOVERNMENTAND OPPOSITION

Western Algeria was conquered by reformism later than otherregions, and its firm implantation in the town of Nedroma appears todate only from 1949.And the victory is not yet complete: as late asI969, a progressive anti-saint Algerian journal needs to fulminate asfollows against the hysteria manifested at the interment of a saint:

It is impossible to imagine the hysterical mob opposing theinhumation of the deceased, to the great satisfaction o f . ..hiseffective successor.. .How can they claim the appelation ofMuslim, those primaeval, obscurantist beings, who are maintainedin a state of ignorance . ..

What is one to think of those ignorant beings . . .offering, thisone his only sheep, this one a goat,. .. lour, bread, sugar, evenpotatoes! The ignorance and obscurantism in which they havebeen maintained for decades constitute extenuating circumstances.But what is beyond all comprehension , . . s when one also sees

in this mob public prosecutors X., Y., Z., and central commissarsof A. and B., and a chief of police . . 26Monsieur Grandguillaume does not think that these officials. . . he personality of Sidi Ali [the deceased saint] was above. . .accusations of cupidity. He enjoyed a great reputation and thepresence at his funeral of official personalitiesisnot to be interpretedas an approbation of the system of saintly centres. . 27One is glad to hear that officialdom in Western Algeria is sound,

and on the side of purity not profanity. All the same, the scenes sowell described and analysed by M. Grandguillaume contain indica-tions that the victory of reformism, though impressive in its extentand speed, is not yet But the important thing to note is theshift in the central, dominant ideal: in 1900, to be a full Musliminvolved participation in the saintly rituals. Some five decades later,

should be so severely reprobated, evidently. He observes:

aa Ibid., pp. 219-20.a7 Ibid., p. 2 2 2 .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 tosuccessful adaptation by some saintly movements to modern circumstances.One such unusual case is extremely well explored by Michael Gilsenan, in Saintand Sufi in Modem Egypt. A n Essay in the Sociofogy of Religion, Clarendon Press,Oxford, 1973.


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2 9 9HE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF BISKRAthe dominant view is that such participation deprives one of the rightto make such a claim.

THE REJECTION OF THE RITUAL STYLEWhat is the explanation of this profound and dramatic shift (whetheror not it is total)? The central explanation is that in this period, anoverwhelming proportion of North Africans found themselvespropelled from the style of life favouring local festivals, saint cultsand so forth, to one which rejects them. Mahers thesis makes plainthat the one kind of ritual style goes together with a whole syndrome,involving a type of occupation, location, the nature and significanceof kin relations, mobility, pervasiveness of central authority. Withinthis period, tribal structures were either eroded (as in much ofAlgeria) or weakened (as in Morocco). The erstwhile tribesman wassubjected to this impact, whether he remained in his region, ormoved permanently to a town, or took part in temporary labourmigration.When the old style of religion predominated, and the countrymenwho were its primary clientele were in a majority, it pervaded eventhe towns. In large centres, saints and orders peacefully coexistedwith a scholarly bourge~is ie .~ ~n smaller towns, as Grandguillaumesmaterial shows, they may even have been virtually exclusive. At thatstage, as he observes Islam assumed, through the religious orders, afeudal organization within the framework of a commercial society.30By feudal, what is evidently meant here is that the orders werehierarchically organized, with a pyramid of followers, each lowerlevel committing its allegiance to its superiors and to their superiors inturn. But, he adds, The multiplicity [of the orders] in Nedromareflects the egalitarian mentality of the old city, which apparentlydid not allow, in the pre-colonial period, the domination by any onegroup. . .Certainly: the world of the saints and of orders had beenboth hierarchical and also fragmented, pluralistic. The free competi-tion between a large multiplicity of saints made domination by anyone of them difficult. They both compensated for the absence of astrong central power, and militated against its emergence. But theimposition of a strong and well-centralized authority in due courseundermined them in turn.work of Dr. K. Brown on Sale, to be published, provides admirable material.2s On the social history and structure of an important Moroccan town, the

30 Op. tit., p. 224.


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300 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

The shift from an Apollonian, pluralistic religion led by a(theoretically closed) stratum of saints, to a puritanical, mediation-less faith led by a (theoretically open) class of scholars, is commonthroughout North Africa, even if there are marked local differencesin the timing and completeness of the transition. But this transfor-mation is particularly striking in Algeria. Why?In religion, the reformers replaced the marabouts; But in otherspheres-notably social leadership- heir strength lay not so muchinreplacing a group that had lost its role and appeal, but in helping tof i l l a vacmmz. Tunisia and Morocco, by contrast, were Protectorates,and benefited from a continuity in institutions and elites. Leadershipwas always available. But in Algeria the feebleness of the prior urbantradition, the weak and alien (Turkish) nature of pre-colonialgovernment, the very much greater social disruption brought aboutby conquest and colonization and by the form it took, all meant thatthe country was almost leaderless. Such major Muslim landownersand maraboutic leaders as remained were, by the end of the 19thcentury, tied to the colonial authority. The pulverized Muslimlower strata, whether rural or urban, were constrained to look toreligion for leadership above all by a lack of alternative, much asMaltese or Irish peasants were predisposed to look to their Churchfor lack of any other institution. The saints were, in modern con-ditions, useless: they were essentially local or particularistic. Ashrine is tied to a locality, to specific patterns of pilgrimage; a saintis linked to the performance of this or that service, the curing of thisor that ailment. Their magic has a functional and territorial specifi-city. For a tribal society well-articulated in terms of clans and seg-ments, they were for this very reason admirably suited; and theywere also well adapted for mediation between such tribesmen andthe towns. But for an atomized, mobile, uprooted population, theirusefulness was limited, at best. As a banner under which a wholelarge population, a latent nation, is to recognize its own identity,they were useless, both through their fragmentation and throughthe fact that the practices they stood for - ecstasies, rural festivals,the mingling of the profane and the sacred - are scarcely usable as amodern ideology or as a basis for national pride. By contrast, thepurified, literacy-stressingIslam of the reformers was very well suitedfor this end.Thus one need not even invoke the fact that the murabouts hadcompromised themselves with the colonial power. So had the re-formers, who also declared their loyalty to the established order. For


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30'instance, Ben Badis wrote in his journal Shihab in August 1932 thathis '. . readers have no desire but to enjoy all the rights of thechildren of the tricolour whilst also assuming their duties . . .generousFrance cannot but give them some day, which cannot be far, all therights enjoyed by the French.'31 (Ali Merad in the work cited triesto solve this difficulty in part by stressing that the marabouts wentfurther, and over and above declaring their loyalty to France,actually also condemned Turkey, then a Muslim power. But this is toattribute far too much weight to a logical nuance, a scholasticdistinction.) The real explanation lies not in the relatively accidental,situationally imposed and forgivable political alignment in this orthat situation, but in the deeper, more permanent social changes, andthe type of identification required and provided. What was also ofimportance was that the colonial power could not easily proscribethe Reform movement (though it did occasionally hamper it), justbecause it was primarily religious. (Overt political activity was bothmore difficult, and even more prey to internal dissension.) An officialcircular by the Secretary General of Algiers Prefecture, dated 16February I 93 3, ays:

Most heads of orders and many saintly families venerated by thenatives are sincerely converted to our domination and see them-selves threatened by a grouping which, by an active and skilfulpropaganda, recruits new adherents daily. . . ... t is not possibleto tolerate a propaganda which, under the mask of Islamicculture and religious reforms, hides a pernicious orientation . . .

Hence I ask you to survey with the most careful attentionmeetings and lectures organized by the Association of MuslimScholars presided by Ben Badis whose accredited spokesman is. .Tayyib Uqbi . ..33All the same, it is hard to proscribe altogether a movement whosesincere primary concern is with the purity of faith and ritual.

Colonial officials had few doubts about the justice of the reformers'case against the saints. Ali Merad quotes the comments of one ofthem on the marabozk:

Those great impostors who falsify religion, who enrich themselvesby exploiting the naive credulity of the masses and who every-31 Quoted in AndrC Nouschi, La Naissance du Nationalisme Algir ien , Les Edi-32 Quoted in A. Nouschi, op. cif., pp. 69-70.

THE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF BISKRA

tions de Minuit, Paris, 1962, p. 6 6 .


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302 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITIONwhere resist doggedly the new spirit of virtue and tolerance whichwill fatally erode their influence and fortune.Thus wrote a French official destined to play an important part inAlgerian development^.^^The new spirit was certainly destined to sap

their fortune and influence and, in a puritanical sense, it was also tobe the champion of virtue. Whether it was also destined to betolerant is less clear.

AFTER INDEPENDENCEWhen independence came, Reformist Islam was virtually the onlyusable ideology deeply implanted and intelligible inside the country.During the revolutionary struggle, when there was still a possibilityof some kind of compromise, and of the retention by free Algeria ofits large non-Muslim minority, an element of secularism was at leastdiscernible in the nationalist doctrine. The future Algerian republicwas to be not merely democratic and popular, but also Laiqzie.With the virtually total departure of the non-Muslims, this worddisappeared, though Algeria did not go as far as some newly in-dependent Muslim countries and actually incorporate Islam in itsname. Reformist Islam is there as a kind of established religion.During the struggle, a socialist element had also been present -inevitably so, given the historic period in which it took place. Theabandonment of large-scale enterprises by the departing Europeans,and the importance of oil and natural gas, meant that a measure ofsocialism also became a reality, and not just a word, in post-Indepen-dence Algeria: the new oil, gas, and the large abandoned enterprisesand estates could hardly be handed over to individuals. In a varietyof forms, some of them experimental, they were socialized.

The socio-economic structure of post-independence Algeria pro-vides a further basis for the role of reformism, over and above theideological monopoly which it came close to enjoying during thelater parts of the colonial period. The phrase industrial-militarycomplex has a quite special applicability to Algeria. The really largeenterprises are nationalized. The state machine is continuous withthem, and has a military tone, having been forged in a bitter andprolonged liberation struggle, and having received its present formafter the military coup of 1965.The administrators of the national-ized large enterprises and the state bureaucracy form one relatively

33 Quoted in Le Reformisme MusuZman en Akerie, p. 5 6.


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3 0 3continuous caste. They are selected by participation in the nationalstruggle and/or by technical competence. They have a tendency tospeak French to each other. Their technical competence was acquiredthrough the French medium.

They have power but not, in the long run, any clear legitimacy.Participation in national liberation cannot be invoked for ever,and as time passes, it can hardly apply to the younger recruits.Grandguillaume s interesting about the new ideals:

THE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF BISKRA

During the first years of independence, the central authorityattempted to impose socialist Islam as the religious model. Ingeneral, this attempt soon ended in failure. In the particular caseof Nedroma, the urban population, traditionallyattached to privateproperty, could hardly admit such a model. . .

This model not being accepted, what other model is accepted?In Nedroma, it would seem to be defined as opposition to anexcessively speedy westernization . . 34Much of the ruling class of occupants of posts in the state bureau-

cracy and the large nationalized enterprises is westernized. Other-wise it has little homogeneity, being recruited in diverse ways from avariety of origins. It does not resemble that relatively tight networkof families which dominates, for instance, neighbouring Morocco.35

Their so-to-speak atomic, one-by-one recruitment, their lack ofprevious homogeneity, and their possession of military andadministrative skills and power, without other clear legitimacy,makes them the mamluks of the modern world. They sit on topof a numerous petite bourgeoisie, augmented by natural growth,economic development and by the inheritance of all the small enter-prises abandoned by the petty colons who left in 1962.This verynumerous class does however have a plausible identity-conferring,legitimating ideology close to hand. Reformist Islam had two planks :hostility to the old marabmts and, secondly, to westernization. Themurabotlts are perhaps no longer a great threat, though no doubtself-respecting burghers continue to welcome good reasons whichvindicate their own new styleof life as against ignorant rural excessesand superstitions. The insistence on purity of Islam, not onlyagainst the internal corruption by saints, but also against external

a4 Op. it., p. 227.35 Cf. John Waterbury, Commander of the Faithful, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,

London, 1970.


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GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION304dilution, has now consequently acquired a new major signifi-It is these petits Musuhans, who have replaced the petitsblancs of colonial Algeria, who set the tone. They need to definethemselves both against rustic ignoramuses and against the valuespractised, but ambivalently held, by the mamluks.

The central fact about modern Algeria seems to be that the re-lationship between the mamluks and the bourgeoisie is one of co-existence, not hostility. According to an admirable book on thecities of the medieval Middle East,37 this was so then and it seemsto be so now. In the medieval levantine cities, mamluks lookedafter government and war, and the bourgeoisie and its ulama pro-vided legitimacy; the two classes in the end melted and inter-married. It appears to be so in modern Algeria: the mamluks lookafter state, army, oil and gas, whilst the bourgeoisie and its ulamahandle retail trade and legitimacy.

The extent to which the mamluks acknowledge that legitimacylies not with them but with the ulama is remarkable. It has as itsconsequence a most heroic Kzllttrhmpf, waged by the mamluksagainst themselves. More than its neighbours, Algeria practices avery serious arabization programme. The feasibility of this, ofarabizing rapidly an entire educational system, including the uni-versity, may well be in doubt. Most of the teachers at AlgiersUniversity, even though native Algerians, cannot lecture in Arabic;and the psychological difficulties of switching to Arabic in Algiersare best illustrated by the fact that arabization crash courses areplanned outside the country, e.g. in Syria. Whether this f i l t w h m p fwill or can succeed, remains to be seen. That it is attempted, withsuch great earnestness and determination, testifies to the manner inwhich reformism is the established religion of the country.

The consequences of all this in a comparative framework areinteresting. One continues to think of Kemalism as the paradigm ofthe modernization of a Muslim country. The current AlgerianKdturkampf is just as painful, just as dramatic, and just as difficult.36 The situation has parallels with the appeal of Hellenism and of Orthodox

religion in Cyprus, where a petty bourgeoisie, without access to internationalcircuits and anglophone education, finds in them a validation of their positionagainst more privileged and westernized Cypriots. On this subject, see P.Loizos, Bitter Favours; PoZificrin a Cypriot ViZZage,Blackwells,1974.

37 Ira Lapidus,M u s hCifiesin the Later MiaZZe Ages, Harvard University Press,1967.


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THE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF B I S K R A 30.5But it is a kind of mirror-image of Ataturks shock therapy. Thede-Islamization of Anatolian peasantry goes against the grain, asdoes the de-gallicization of an Algerian technocrat. In either case,one may well wonder whether it will be accomplished.It is possible that the two attempts at drastic cultural engineeringeven have something in common. Once again, Ali Merad is interest-ing on this subject. Speaking of the inter-war period, he says: . . .paradoxical though it may seem, the young pro-reformers adoptedan equal enthusiasm for the Turkey of Mustafa Kemal and for theArabia of Ibn S a ~ d . ~ ~e goes on to say that this unreasonedadmiration for two diametrically opposed aspects of contemporaryMuslim life was justified, in the eyes of these young reformers, bythe simple fact that the then Algerian conservatives were equallyhostile both to Kemalism and to Wahabi theocracy. Perhaps theyoung reformers were wiser than that. In formal doctrine, Muslimfundamentalism and Kemalism may indeed be opposed. When itcomes to social substance, this is no longer so obvious. In our dayTurks, looking back at Ataturks work, are tempted to see its weak-ness precisely in the unconsciously dumu-like rigidity with which thenew secular Koran of the West was imposed, and to feel tempted totry a new, liberal, as it were Mutazilite Kemal i ~m.~~It was once supposed that Islam was incompatiblewith moderniaa-tion, or with the requirements of industrial society. This may well betrue of the erstwhile Apollonian Islam of Biskra, which once wastypical enough of a very great part of the rural and tribal Muslimworld. But the severe discipline of puritan Islam may in fact becompatible with, or positively favourable to, modern social organi-~ation.~O

38Op. cit., p. 209.39 This phrase is Professor Serif Mardins. The idea can be found in his forth-

coming article, Religion and the Turkish Social Transformation, or inProfessor Nur Yalmans Islamic Reform and the Mystic Tradition in EasternTurkey, in the EuropeanJournalofSociology, 1969,Vol. X, No. I .

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


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GOVERNMENT A N D O P P OS IT IO N306The obligatory prayers and the fast may be a bit of a nuisance, but,

unlike ecstatic festivals or reliance on saintly intercession, they doteach a man a bit of discipline, which is a most desirable trait in anindustrial worker. They teach him that rules in books are there to beobeyed, and that bringing donations to shrines will get him no-where, Why not try orderly literate prayer and work, instead? Forgood Weberian reasons, it seems that modernization may just as wellbe done with Islam as against it - provided it is the right kind ofIslam, that of the Reformers and not that of the saints. In his in-teresting paper Some Observations on the Ethical Teachings ofOrthodox Reformism in Algeria, Professor Pessah Shinar stressesthis aspect of the moral teaching of the reformers and writes :

The orthodox reformists . . .were emphatic in asserting thatFaith and Works, in addition to their spiritual significance, werealso of supreme relevance to mundane happiness, to the prosperityand success of the individual Muslim and the Islamic community

The Islamic reformists in Algeria took a broader and moresophisticated view of the manner in which Faith and Observanceengender moral qualities (in contrast to the associationist theoryof exchange of vows, invocations, offerings, pilgrimages, formaterial benefits) and through them influence the life and successof the individual Muslim and Islam as a whole. They stressed thepsychological effect - the stimulating, invigorating qualityinherent in the faith. . .Faith and rites, they asserted, act like apowerhouse in generating and accumulating vast energies,strength, will, endurance of hardship, complete dedication, hopeperseverance, single-mindedness, resolve, daring .. .41The this-wordlinessof the reformist ethic can also be illustrated bywhat Merad rightly calls an ingenious classification of men, ex-

pounded by Ben Badis in his journal Shihab in February 1 9 3 9 . ~ ~The classification works by means of a two-by-two table, generatedby two simple binary oppositions: one may neglect ones duty tothe other world or not neglect it, and one may neglect or not neglectones material concerns in this world. The most blessed of men is hewho does not neglect either concern: he will be happy in this world

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

42 Summarized by Ali Merad, in Ibn Badis. Commentateur du Coran, PaulGuethner, Paris, 1971, p. 146.

. . .


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THE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF BISKRA 307and in the next. The atheist who is also unmindful of his terrestrialneeds is unhappy indeed, for he will suffer both here and hereafter.The logic of this casuistry seems impeccable, though it sins on theside of optimism, by neglecting the possibility that one may attendto ones concerns, but without success. What is interesting is thatthe adherents of maraboutism are apparently meant to correspondto the option of seeking to please God but without making a properuse of this world - thereby committing the impiety of not makinggood use of the possibilities offered by God in this Suchthis-worldiness, conjoined to a puritanical stress on Koranic rule-observance, would seem a Weberian ethic indeed.

One may add that puritan Islam has a potential for favourableadjustment not merely to industrialism, but also to modern radical-ism. In one sense, it may indeed be conservative: it is committed tothe existence of a definitive, final blueprint of social life, and to itsimplementation. But the uncompromising rigidity of this view has acertain affinity with the radicalisms of our age. Colonel Gaddafysideology for instance looks like a remarkable conflation of free-floating revolutionary radicalism with such Muslim fundamen-talism, a kind of Reformism-Maoism.On 6 June 1973, Colonel Gaddafy purchased four full pages ofThe Times, and the first of these was devoted to his exposition of hisown creed. Someof his ideas are striking:

Heaven has addressed the earth many times through the pro-phets. The last of these prophets was Mohammed and the lastof these messages of God was the Koran.We know that Science. . .has not found all the answers . . .The Koran provides those answers and refutes all the hallucina-tions of materialism and existentialism.The Libyan Cultural Revolution aims at dismissing thesehallucinations . . .and calls for a revival of Islam according tothe teaching of the Koran. . .. . .what matters is that people all over the world must worshipGod instead of worshipping mortals like Lenin or Stalin . . orworship the cows and idols . . .

We too used to worship idols before. . . Mohammed. . .This fascinating passage conflates the cult of personality in thespecifically Soviet sense, with the rejection of anthropolatry whichwas the main effective doctrine of the Reformers - and throws in43 Ibid., p. 147.


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308 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITIONHindu cows and the pre-Muslim Arab state of ignorance for goodmeasure. Thus the repudiation of deviations from the true revolu-tionary path is made to speak not only with the same voice, butin the same words, as the repudiation of Muslim heresy.

The social base of Libyan puritanism also seems similar to thatwhich it has further west: the shift from tribal to urban milieux. Ananthropologist working on a community of recently sedentarizedLibyan Bedouin-who are hardly famed for M u s h rigour when intheir natural habitat - eports that they display extreme, obsessionaland unrivaled zeal concerning the seclusion of their womenfolkonce the community is settled.

The Libyan way is more extreme, irresponsible, loud and im-patient than the Algerian version - perhaps because the Libyan wayto independence was effortlessrather than purchased by a prolongedstruggle. But in other ways, Libya went through stages analogousto Algeria: the primary struggle against colonialism had been ledby one of the religious orders, whose leader was later to be madeinto a monarch by a departing European power -only to be deposedin due course by the puritan Colonel.

Gaddafy has gone far in the direction of fundamentalism:. . preaching a return to primitive Islam. ..Libyans were deniedtheir alcohol. Mini-skirts were made maxi by order. Street signsare in Arabic only . . n November 1972, t was announced thatthe. . .punishment for theft and robbery, cutting off a foot and ahand respectively, were to be revived.**

Gaddafy had taken over from King Idris, who had been leaderof theSanusi religious order.

The map of the distribution of Sanusi lodges in Cyrenaica coin-cided with the main points in the distribution of power among theBedouin. The ability to identify. . . he powerful Bedouinsheiks had characterized the leadership of the Order for the 74years of its life. Idris inherited this technique .. 45But the technique was hardly relevant any longer when, as Profes-

sor Peters shows, the Libyans left their tribal units and encampmentsunder the impact of oil. The Sanusi Orders technique for providing44 Professor Emrys Peters, Why Gadda/y?,in New Society, zo September,

197% P. 697.45 Ibid.


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THE UNKNOWN APOLLO OF BISKRA 303leadership and identity was now far less usable than the funda-mentalist, scripturalist one which was open to Gaddafy and whichhe employed. With fewer people and more oil revenue than inAlgeria, it was also easier to exaggerate.

The contrast between Algeria and Turkey is however the mostinstructive one, even or especially after one has seen that the rejec-tion and the reaffirmation of Islam may resemble each other. Turkeymodernizes against Islam, Algeria with it. Turkey endeavours tobridge the gap between elite and mass by changing the faith of thelatter, Algeria by changing the speech of the former. Turkeystraditional state had been strong, Algerias weak. The Ottomanempire had presided over a plurality of religious communities;traditional North Africa was relatively homogeneous. Turkey beganto modernize in an age when liberal constitutionalismwas held to bea key to the secret of the new technological power, and it seems thatthe Turks internalized this view; Algeria chose its path in an age nolonger given to such ideas, and the Algerians, who had hardlybenefited from an alien parliamentarianism, seem free of them. TheTurkish elite is relatively continuous; the Algerian mamluks are newmen. Turkey escaped colonialism, Algeria suffered an unusuallylong period of it.

Somewhere in these contrasts, and not merely in the fact thatTurks are not Arabs, there is presumably the clue to why Turkeyenters the modern world under the banner of secularism, and Algeriaunder the banner of Islam; why the Turkish state is troubled byreligious opposition, and the Maghrebin states are not. The sheerfact of having had a strong Muslim state, which associated theOttoman ulama with its authority, deprived the latter of muchincentive to purify and reform; whereas the relative absence ofofficial emptations, and the need to fill a vacuum arising from theabsence of any effective non-religious elite, gave the Algerian re-formers both the incentive and the opportunity to mould a societyin their own image.46Contemporary Algeria is certainly modern in

46 The Tunisian case seems closer to the Turkish than the Algerian. The caseof 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 du m aunlike 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 toboth the ideology and the organization of nationalism. But it never had anythingresembling the near-monopoly of influence which it enjoyed in Algeria. Theremarkable continuity of elites and institutions, from pre-colonial days throughcolonialism till independence, provided alternative leadership and legitimacy.


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3 1 0 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

the sense of being unlike its own saint-ridden past : but it is modernin its Islamism, not in its secularization.In post-independenceMorocco, the reformist fundamentalists do however haveone achievement to their credit, not yet to my knowledge rivalled even byGaddafy - they secured the passing of death sentences (though not their execu-tion) for apostasy from Islam, in conformity with Koranic requirements.

Documents

Gelner Appolo of Biskra