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COLONIAL STATE-BUILDING AND THE NEGOTIATION OF ARAB AND BERBER IDENTITY IN PROTECTORATE MOROCCO

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2011

Jonathan Wyrtzen
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Abstract

Colonial state-building in Protectorate Morocco, particularly the total “pacification” of territory and infrastructural development carried out between 1907 and 1934, dramatically transformed the social and political context in which collective identity was imagined in Moroccan society. Prior scholarship has highlighted the struggle between colonial administrators and urban Arabophone nationalist elites over Arab and Berber ethnic classifications used by French officials to make Moroccan society legible in the wake of conquest. This study turns to the understudied question of how rural, tribal communities responded to state- and nation-building processes, drawing on a unique collection of Tamazight (Berber) poetry gathered in the Atlas Mountains to illuminate the multiple levels on which their sense of group identity was negotiated. While studies of identity in the interwar Arab world have concentrated on how Pan-Islamism, Pan-Arabism, and local nationalisms functioned in the Arab East, this article changes the angle of analysis, beginning instead at the margins of the Arab West to explore interactions between the consolidation of nation-sized political units and multivocal efforts to reframe the religious and ethnic parameters of communal solidarity during the colonial period.

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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 43 , Special Issue 2: Relocating Arab Nationalism , May 2011 , pp. 227 - 249
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

NOTES

Author's note: The research for this study was conducted in Morocco and France (2006–2007) with the support of Fulbright–Hays and American Institute for Maghrib Studies grants. For their generous assistance in accessing the Fond Roux in April and May 2007, I thank Hassan Moukhlisse and Bérengère Clément of the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l'Homme-Institut de Recherches et d'Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman library in Aix-en-Provence. I am deeply grateful to Michael Peyron for first alerting me to these sources and for his invaluable feedback. For their extremely valuable comments on and critiques of this article, I thank Peter Wien, Beth Baron, Sara Pursley, Ellen Lust, Noah Salomon, Adria Lawrence, Mine Eder, Lillia Labidi, and especially the four anonymous IJMES reviewers. In transliterating Tamazight, I generally use the IJMES system for Arabic, with the addition of a short “e” vowel sound. Virtually all vowels in Tamazight are short and written accordingly.

1 For the best overviews, see Gellner, Ernest and Micaud, Charles, eds., Arabs and Berbers: From Tribe to Nation in North Africa (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1972)Google Scholar; and the recent collection by Miller, Susan and Hoffman, Katherine, eds., Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. Also see Crawford, David and Silverstein, Paul, “Amazigh Activism and the Moroccan State,” Middle East Report 233 (2005): 44–48Google Scholar; and Goodman, Jane, Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

2 On the former, see Edmund Burke III, “The Image of Morocco in French Colonial Scholarship,” in Gellner and Micaud, Arabs and Berbers, 175–99; Ageron, Charles-Robert, Politiques Coloniales au Maghreb (Paris: Presses universitaires de Franc, 1973)Google Scholar; and Hoffman, K., “Purity and Contamination: Language Ideologies in French Colonial Native Policy in Morocco,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (2008): 724–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the nationalist movement, see Rachik, Hassan, Symboliser la nation (Casablanca: Editions le Fennec, 2003)Google Scholar; Lafuente, Gilles, La politique berbère de la France et le nationalisme marocain (Paris: Harmattan, 1999)Google Scholar; Halstead, John, “The Changing Character of Moroccan Reformism, 1921–1934,” Journal of African History 5 (1964): 435–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Joffe, E. G. H., “The Moroccan Nationalist Movement: Istiqlal, the Sultan, and the Country,” Journal of African History 26 (1984): 289–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 The dearth of primary sources from these largely illiterate groups is reflected even in studies on rural resistance in the 19th and 20th centuries providing invaluable background on this neglected subject, such as Edmund Burke III's work on the Middle Atlas tribes, Prelude to Protectorate in Morocco: Precolonial Protest and Resistance, 1860–1912 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), and Ross Dunn's study of the Ait Atta, Resistance in the Desert: Moroccan Responses to French Imperialism 1881–1912 (London: Croom Helm, 1977). Amal N. Ghazal explores the perspectives of Algeria's Ibadi Berber population during the interwar period through an exploration of Arabic Salafi journals in “The Other Frontiers of Arab Nationalism: Ibadis, Berbers, and the Arabist Salafi Press in the Interwar Period,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010): 105–22.

4 Mohamed Chtatou's work on poetry and the oral tradition of the Rif as a historical source on ʿAbd al-Krim al-Khattabi's role in the early 20th century, though collected later (the 1980s), represents an attempt to revisit a historical episode via oral sources: “Bin ʿAbd Al-Karim Al-Khattabi in the Rifi Oral Tradition of Gzenneya,” in Tribe and State: Essays in Honour of David Montgomery Hart, ed. E. G. H. Joffe and C. R. Pennell (Cambridgeshire, U.K.: Middle East and North Africa Studies Press, 1991), 182–212. The importance of poetry in North African oral history is also demonstrated in A. Heggoy's book on poetry collected by French scholars following the Algerian conquest, The French Conquest of Algiers, 1830 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Monographs in International Studies, Africa Series, 1986). On the varied use by colonialists and nationalists of Kabyle oral texts as signs of social difference in Algeria, see Goodman, Jane, “Writing Empire, Underwriting Nation: Discursive Histories of Kabyle Berber ‘Oral Texts,’” American Ethnologist 29 (2002): 86–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See Miller and Hoffman, Berbers and Others.

6 The word makhzan, literally the treasury box in which taxes were stored in sorties through the countryside, is a metonym for the central government in North Africa.

7 Zones of control were delegated to Spain in the north and in the far south.

8 For the Moroccan perspective on how European economic and French military penetration in the 19th century exacerbated this “failure,” see Burke, Prelude to Protectorate in Morocco.

9 See C. R. Pennell, “Makhzan and Siba in Morocco: An Examination of Early Modern Attitudes,” in Joffe and Pennell, Tribe and State.

10 The best studies of the Rif include Pennell, C. R., A Country with a Government and a Flag: The Rif War in Morocco, 1921–1926 (Cambridgeshire, U.K.: Middle East & North African Studies Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Hart, David, The Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif (Tucson, Ariz: University of Arizona Press, 1976)Google Scholar; and idem, Qabila: Tribal Profiles and Tribe–State Relations in Morocco and on the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2001).

11 Scott, James, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar and The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).

12 On the British colonial state in India, see Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

13 Burke, Edmund III, “The Creation of the Moroccan Colonial Archive, 1880–1930,” History and Anthropology 18 (2007): 1–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Hannoum, Abdelmajid, “The Historiographic State: How Algeria Once Became French,” History and Anthropology 19 (2008): 91–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 There was, as Bidwell terms it, a “prolongued honeymoon” between Berber soldiers and their French officers from 1934 to the late 1940s, with hopes on the part of the latter that their troops would assimilate as Frenchmen. See Bidwell, Robin, Morocco Under Colonial Rule (New York: Frank Cass, 1974), 47–55Google Scholar. On the Algerian background to French attitudes toward the Berbers, see Lorcin, Patricia M. E., Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995)Google Scholar; and Abi-Mershed, Osama, Apostles of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Berque, Jacques, French North Africa: The Maghrib Between Two World Wars (New York: Frederick Praeger, 1967), 123Google Scholar.

17 Hoffman, “Purity and Contamination,” 733.

18 See Julien, Charles, L'Afrique du Nord en Marche (Paris: René Julliard, 1952), 147ffGoogle Scholar; and Le Maroc Face Auz Impérialismes: 1415–1956 (Paris: Éditions J. A., 1978), 159ff.

19 Cartons F2 and F41 at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Rabat contain translations by the Protectorate's Service de la Presse Musulmane of hundreds of articles about the “Berber Dahir” and the “de-islamization” of the Berbers from Arabic newspapers in Tunis, Tripoli, Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Nablus, and Surabaya, Indonesia.

20 Lafuente, La politique berbère; and Halstead, John, Rebirth of a Nation: The Origins and Rise of Moroccan Nationalism, 1912–1944 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

21 On the parallel historiographical struggle by the Algerian ʿulamaʾ against the “Kabyle (or Berber) myth,” see McDougall, James, History and the Culture of Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 5.

22 Chtatou's aforementioned work on the value of Tarifit oral poetry as a historical source on the Rif War represents an attempt to change the perspective of analysis. Likewise, C. R. Pennell's article on the Rif Republic challenges Abdellah Laroui's characterization of the episode as another example of protonationalist “primary resistance” (using Hobsbawm's categorization) similar to other sība episodes in Moroccan history. See Pennell, , “The Rif War: Link or Cul-de-sac? Nationalism in the Cities and Resistance in the Mountains,” Journal of North African Studies 1 (1996): 234–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Gellner, Ernest, Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), 94Google Scholar.

24 See Reynier, Paul, Taougrat, ou les Berbères racontè par eux-mêmes (Paris: Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1930)Google Scholar; and Paul-Margueritte, Lucie, Chants berbères du Maroc (Paris: Editions Berger-Levrault, 1935)Google Scholar.

25 Harry Stroomer and Michael Peyron have performed an invaluable service for other researchers by cataloguing the archive, “Catalogue des archives berbères du Fond Arsène Roux,” Berber Studies 6 (2003). Michael Peyron edited and footnoted a volume containing Tamazight poetry collected during the resistance period. See Arsène Roux, Poésies Berbères de l'époque héroïque Maroc central (1908–1932), ed. Michael Peyron (Aix-en-Provence, France: IREMAM, 2002). Harry Stroomer has published Tashelhiyt poems from the archive in other volumes of the Berber Studies series, including “An Anthology of Tashelhiyt Berber Folktales (South Morocco),” Berber Studies 2 (2001); “Tashelhiyt Berber Texts from the Ayt Brayyim, Lakhsas and Guedmioua Region (South Morocco): A Linguistic Reanalysis of ‘Recits, contes et legendes berberes en Tachelhiyt’ by Arsene Roux with an English Translation,” Berber Studies 5 (2003); “Textes berbères du Maroc central (Textes originaux en transcription). Tome I. Récits, contes et légendes berbères dans le parler des Beni-Mtir et Choix de versions berbères (Parlers du Maroc central),” Berber Studies 18 (2007).

26 For place names throughout I have retained the French spellings, which are still the most common renderings on maps, in order to avoid confusing the reader trying to find them.

27 Recherches et d'Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman, Fond Roux (hereafter FR), file 55.1.2.

28 Mammeri explains that the Kabyle imusnawen, a prose and poetic master similar to Morocco's imdyazen, plays a role as a spokesperson for the group who helps crystallize its sentiments. Mouloud Mammeri and Pierre Bourdieu, “Dialogue sur la poésie en Kabylie: Entretien avec Mouloud Mammeri,” Acte de la Recherche en Science Sociales 23: 55–66. On the prominence of oral performance in contemporary urban and rural Arabic-speaking societies, see Cachia, Pierre, Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Abu-Lughod, Lila, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Caton, Steven, Peaks of Yemen I Summon: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Shryock, Andrew, Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

29 Geertz, Clifford, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 114Google Scholar.

30 Hoffman, Katherine, “Generational Change in Berber Women's Song of the Anti-Atlas Mountains of Morocco,” Ethnomusicology 46 (2002): 528CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also her ethnography on space and the language practices of Tashelhyit women, We Share Walls (Walden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008).

31 See Jouad, Hassan, “Les Imdyazen, une voix de l'intellectualité rurale,” in Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée, vol. 51, Les Prédicateurs Profanes au Maghreb, ed. Sraieb, Noureddine (Aix-en-Provence, France: Edisud, 1989): 100–10Google Scholar.

32 “Légendes sur origines des aèdes,” FR, file 54.2.1; “Le répertoire des imdyazen,” FR file 53.3; and Roux, Arsene, “Les ‘Imdyazen” ou aèdes berbères du groupe linguistique beraber,” Hespéris VIII (1928): 231–51Google Scholar.

33 An amdyaz, Shaykh Mohand ʿAjmi from the Ait Izdeg tribe, and his buganim (an instrumentalist in the troupe), both of whom Roux interviewed, had winter residences in Fes.

34 Edmund Burke III, “Tribalism and Moroccan Resistance, 1890–1914: The Role of the Ait Ndhir,” in Joffe and Pennell, Tribe and State, 132–144; and Vinograd, A., The Ait Ndhir of Morocco (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 1974)Google Scholar.

35 The Haouz region is located just north of Marrakesh, where ʿAbd al-Hafiz served as governor before the civil war.

36 FR file 59.1. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18.

37 Burke, Prelude to Protectorate, 182.

38 FR file 59.1. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18.

39 FR file 50.2.10. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18.

40 The area to the west of Fes Al-Jdid, where the French army camped and where the ville nouvelle was later constructed.

41 The poet uses l-baida, a shortened form of Dar al-Baida (meaning Casablanca).

42 Arsène Roux, Poésies Berbères, 91. Peyron's editorial comment explains that the crow, according to legend, used to be white but was blackened by God after performing a sacred task. Elsewhere (pp. 137–38) the crow symbolizes a “traitor.”

43 FR file 59.1. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18.

44 FR file 52.5. Recorded by Moha u Driss al-Yusi in Sefrou, 1934.

45 FR file 55.1.2. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18.

46 FR file 59.1. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18.

47 FR file 52.5. Recorded by Moha u Driss al-Yusi in Sefrou, 1934.

48 FR file 59.1. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb 1914–18.

49 FR file 50.3.1. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18.

50 FR file 50.2.10. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18.

51 Ibid.

52 FR file 55.1.2. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18.

53 FR file 50.3.1. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18.

54 FR file 59.2. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18.

55 While the poet might be simply slandering her opponent, there were numerous instances of officers taking Berber mistresses.

56 Roux notes that he and Pisani were French noncommissioned officers assigned to the Sharifian column stationed in El Hajeb.

57 FR file 59.2. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18.

58 FR file 52.5.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 Roux, Arsène, “Quelques chants berbères sur les opérations de 1931–32 dans le Maroc Central,” Etudes et Documents Berbères 9 (1992): 171Google Scholar.

62 See Peyron, Michael, “Oralité et résistance: Dits poétiques et non-poétiques ayant pour thème le siège du Tazizaout (Haut Atlas marocain, 1932),” Etudes et Documents Berbères 25–26 (2007): 307–16Google Scholar.

63 Indicating the legacy of the Arab Bureaux first implemented in Algeria in the 19th century, the Indigenous Affairs outpost was called l-biru in Tamazight, a Berberized form of the French word bureau.

64 FR file 57.1.1. Recorded by Moulay Ahmed in Kebab, 1933.

65 A 1932 poem by Houssa ou Moah, recorded near Azrou at Ougmes, makes the same equivalence between submission and apostasy, using a similar lyric (Roux, Poésies Berbères, 69).

66 FR file 52.5.

67 Ibid.

68 Roux, “Quelques chants berbères,” 171. Recorded in Azrou, 1932.

69 FR file 57.5.1, Recorded among the Ait Ayyache south of Fes, 1932.

70 FR file 52.5. Songs of the Ait Youssi.

71 FR file 52.1.3. The poems in this file were prepared for a presentation Roux made at the 1939 “Congrès de la musique marocaine” in Fes.

72 FR file 50.2.10. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18

73 FR file 59.1. Recorded by Roux in El Hajeb, 1914–18.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid.

78 FR file 57.5.1. Recorded among the Ait Ayyash south of Fes, 1932.

79 FR file 52.5. Recorded by Moha ou Driss el Youssi in Sefrou, 1934.

80 FR file 50.3.1. Recorded by Roux in El-Hajeb, 1914–18.

81 FR file 56.3.4. Recorded by Houssa ou Moha in Ougmes, 1932.

82 Ibid.

83 FR file 52.1.3. Recorded by El Ghazi u ʿUmar es-Saddni in El Hajeb, 1939.

84 FR file 51.1.2. Gathered by Moha ou Abid in El Hajeb, 1932.

85 Ministère des Affaires Etrangères-Nantes, Direction d'Instruction Publique, Carton 30, Report by G. Germain, director of Collège Berber in Azrou, July 1943.

86 The first wave began with Antonius's, GeorgeThe Arab Awakening (London: H. Hamilton, 1938)Google Scholar and includes Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (London: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar and Haim, Sylvia, ed., Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1962)Google Scholar. The second wave is represented in collections such as Khalidi, Rashid, ed., The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)Google Scholar and Jankowski, James and Gershoni, Israel, eds., Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

87 This is in contrast to Benedict Anderson's emphasis on mass literacy in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).