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Politics and the Limits of Pluralism in Mohamed Arkoun and Abdenour Bidar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2021

Madeleine Dobie
Madeleine Dobie*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

One of the striking features of the literary culture of the modern Maghreb is the profusion of works that undertake to identify the essential features of the region – exercises in definition that almost always emphasize plurality. Philosophers, social scientists, and literary writers have highlighted the Maghreb's multilingualism – the coexistence of different forms of Arabic, Tamazight, French, and Spanish – the varied and hybrid cultural legacies of conquest and colonialism, and the effects of the region's geographical proximity to other parts of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. It would be hard to find a more ubiquitous theme of francophone Maghrebi literature than cultural diversity, and the subject is by no means absent from Arabic-language literature. This preoccupation with plurality can be seen as a response to a history of colonization and decolonization with particular ideological features. In their efforts to build “l'Algérie française,” the French colonial authorities suppressed Arabic as a language of culture and government. In response, anticolonial nationalists called for the replacement of French with Arabic. “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my nation” – the catchphrase of Abdelhamid Ben Badis's Jam'iyat al-'Ulama [Association of Muslim Ulema], an Islamic reform movement of the 1930s and 1940s – later became a slogan of the nationalist movement, the Front de libération nationale (FLN) [National Liberation Front]. Since the 1980s, a similar call to restore Arabic and eliminate French has been issued by the Islamist opposition to the corrupt and undemocratic FLN government and at times by officials in that same government seeking to restore their legitimacy. In emphasizing linguistic and cultural diversity, writers and scholars have tried to tender an alternative to these recurrent efforts to delimit the region's identity.

Type
Special Focus: Pluralism in Emergenc(i)es in the Middle East and North Africa
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , December 2020 , pp. 252 - 268
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc.

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References

1 Examples include Abdelkébir Khatibi, Amour bilingue (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1983), Maghreb Pluriel (Paris: Denoël, 1983), and Penser le Maghreb (Rabat: Société Marocaine des Editeurs Réunis, 1993); Kilito, Abdelfattah, Je parle toutes les langues mais en arabe (Arles: Actes Sud, 2013)Google Scholar; Ennaji, Moha, Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco (New York: Springer, 2005)Google Scholar, and from an external perspective, René Galissot, Le Maghreb de traverse (Paris: Bouchene, 2000).

2 In 1848, Algeria was declared to be a part of France rather than a colony. For the ensuing 120 years, France sought to make this statement a reality through the recruitment of French and other European settlers, among other policies. During the War of Independence (1954–62), the slogan “L'Algérie française” served as shorthand for the position that Algeria was and must remain French.

3 In 2019, in the midst of a national revolutionary movement seeking to topple the regime, the Minister of Education, Tayeb Bouzid, called for the complete replacement of French instruction with English, a transparent effort to curry favor with a presumed Islamic constituency that has historically preferred English to French, and to sow divisions among the protesters. On this announcement see: Lamine Ghanmi, “Algeria seeks to replace French with English at university, sparks ‘language war,’” The Arab Weekly, March 8, 2019, https://thearabweekly.com/algeria-seeks-replace-french-english-university-sparks-language-war.

4 I use the concept of “immanent critique” in a somewhat different way than do Marxist thinkers such as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey, for whom it denotes a deliberate decision to work within existing or local traditions of thought rather than striving for a Kantian transcendence. I see pluralism in its more programmatic forms as being embedded in existing worldviews and debates, but less intentionally. This said, there are examples of pluralism that align more closely with the strategies described by Jameson and Harvey among others. See Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981)Google Scholar and Harvey, David, “Critical Theory,” Sociological Perspectives 33.1 (1990): 5Google Scholar.

5 I refer to “identity labels” rather than “identities” to signal the fact that identities are often naturalized in ways that overlook their construction and instrumentalization for political purposes. On this tendency in the context of the Maghreb, see Walid Benkhaled and Natalya Vince, “Performing Algerianness: the National and Transnational Construction of Algeria's ‘Culture Wars’” in Algeria, Nation, Culture and Transnationalism, 1988–2015, ed. Patrick Crowley (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 243–69.

6 On “Mediterraneanism” and dogmatic pluralism see Dobie, Madeleine, “For and against the Mediterranean: Francophone Perspectives,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34.2 (2014): 389–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 From 1991 to 2000, Algeria was caught in the throes of a violent conflict between state security forces and Islamist militias that claimed up to 200,000 lives. Though widely used, the label “Civil War” suggests a misleading division between two segments of the population. Though the competing label “The Black Decade” is problematic in its own right, it is preferable to the extent that it does not imply a deep political and ideological rift.

8 Tamazight and other Amazigh (“Berber”) languages are the mother tongues of at least 25 percent of Algerians and 40 percent of Moroccans.

9 On classical Islam as a polyvalent cultural space see also Bauer, Thomas, Die Kultur der Ambiguität: eine andere Geschichte des Islams (Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2011)Google Scholar.

10 Bachelard, Gaston, Le rationalisme appliqué (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1949)Google Scholar. A nuanced account of Arkoun's intellectual biography is offered by Mohamed Amine Brahimi in “Elective Affinity as an Intellectual Connection: a Review of Mohammed Arkoun's Relation to the Institute of Ismaïli Studies,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 13 (2018): 131–43.

11 Arkoun, Mohammed, Pour une critique de la raison islamique (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1984)Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., 9. Translations are mine unless otherwise attributed.

13 Ibid., 37.

14 Ibid., 17.

15 Arkoun, Mohammed, La pensée arabe (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996), 13Google Scholar. See also Lévi-Strauss, Claude, “La Leçon d’écriture,” Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955), 338–53Google Scholar.

16 Ibid., 355.

17 See Fanon, Frantz, “Sur la culture nationale,” Les damnés de la terre (1961) (Paris: La découverte, 2002), 202Google Scholar.

18 Sociological explanations of the Islamic revival and of Islamist and jihadist movements are numerous and diverse. Some reduce these phenomena to expressions of political alienation and economic deprivation, others describe looser correlations between the rise of Islamist movements and parties and social and political stresses. Influential examples include Gilles Kepel, Les Banlieues de l'islam. Naissance d'une religion en France (Seuil, Paris, 1987), Gilles Kepel, La Revanche de Dieu. Chrétiens, juifs et musulmans à la reconquête du monde (Seuil, Paris, 1991), and Martin Kramer's polemical essay collection, Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival Kramer (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996). Works by Maghrebi scholars include Fatima Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, Fear of the Modern World (London: Virago 1993). The Algerian political scientist, Yahia Zoubir has edited several collections of essays on politics and society in the Maghreb in which this form of analysis is well represented, for example, North Africa in Transition: State, Society, and Economic Transformation in the 1990s (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999).

19 After Arkoun's death in 2010, the francophone newspaper El-Watan, a liberal forum for critical perspectives on government and society, hosted a public discussion of his legacy. In a summary of the event published under the title “L'oeuvre novatrice de Mohamed Arkoun,” El Watan, December 20, 2010, it is explained that Arkoun had declined an invitation to speak in Algiers in 2006 due to security concerns. The (unnamed) author asks “Pourquoi la pensée «arkounienne» rencontre-t-elle une farouche opposition en Algérie et dans la majorité des pays arabes ? Pourquoi ses ouvrages ne sont pas disponibles en Algérie?” [Why does “arkounian” thought encounter such vehement opposition in Algeria and the majority of Arab countries? Why are his works not available in Algeria?] One of the speakers invited by El Watan was Yadh Ben Achour, the celebrated Tunisian jurist who would soon become a leader of his country's transition to democracy. In his speech, also published in El Watan, Ben Achour noted that Arkoun's pluralist, anti-dogmatic opinions “ont valu à Mohammed Arkoun, souvent sur la base de la simple commune renommée, des attaques frontales et virulentes, précisément de la part de ceux qui partagent la théorie de ‘l'évidence coranique’. Ces attaques sont allées jusqu'aux déclarations d'apostasie.” [often, on the mere basis of reputation, led to frontal and virulent attacks on Mohammed Arkoun by those who believe in “Koranic truth.” These attacks went as far as accusations of apostasy]. “Mohammed Arkoun, défenseur de l'Islam (1re partie),” El Watan, December 26, 2010.

20 Arkoun, Pour une critique, 364.

21 Arkoun, Mohammed, Ouvertures sur l'Islam (Paris: J. Grancher, 1989), 199–200Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., 50.

23 Arkoun, Pour une critique, 17–18.

24 On the enduring repoussoir of a francophone and indeed pro-French secular elite in Algeria, the so-called hizb frança, see, for example, Karim Akouche, “L'Algérie arabe est une imposture,” Jeune Afrique, April 18, 2017. On the prismatic nature of linguistic politics in Algeria see Gafaiti, Hafid, “Language and De/Construction of National Identity in Postcolonial Algeria,” in Algeria in Others’ Languages, ed. Berger, Anne-Emmanuelle (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 19–43Google Scholar.

25 See for example, Arkoun's commentary on the Salman Rushdie affair in Le Monde, March 15, 1989: https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1989/03/15/un-entretien-avec-m-mohamed-arkoun-professeur-a-la-sorbonne-la-conception-occidentale-des-droits-de-l-homme-renforce-le-malentendu-avec-l-islam_4107357_1819218.html.

26 See for example, Martinez, Luis, The Algerian Civil War, 1990–1998 (London: Hurst, 2000)Google Scholar and Filiu, Jean-Pierre, From Deep State to Islamic State: the Arab Counter-Revolution and its Jihadi Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

27 See Sylvie Arkoun's memoir/biography of her father, Les vies de Mohamed Arkoun (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2014), 187–206.

28 See, for example, the testimony of Arkoun's second wife, Touria Yacoubi Arkoun, published in El-Watan in February, 2014: https://www.elwatan.com/edition/contributions/madame-arkoun-nous-ecrit-04-03-2014. See also a short piece, published in 2019 on the media site Reporters, containing the recollections of Abderrazak Guessoum, President of the Association of Algerian ‘Ulema: https://www.reporters.dz/eclairage-mohammed-arkoun-a-t-il-ete-exclu-du-seminaire-sur-la-pensee-islamique-en-1985/.

29 On the Emir Abd-el-Qader Islamic university and Al-Ghazali's role in its early years, see Ahmed Boudraâ, “Université Islamique Émir Abdelkader de Constantine: un sanctuaire du savoir anéanti par les luttes idéologiques,” Algeria Watch, December 13, 2009, updated June 1, 2018: https://algeria-watch.org/?p=6471. The architecturally splendid Islamic university, opened in 1984, was an attempt to highlight the Islamic credentials of the FLN government and Algerian nationalism more broadly. Yet as Boudraâ explains, it rapidly became a site of conflicts between a more moderate administration and a young student body attracted to the Salafist currents circulating in Islamist movements in Algeria and abroad. Al-Ghazali's prestige allowed him to mediate between these constituencies but he departed in 1988 when Algeria erupted into anti-government protests at which point the university became the site of a prolonged strike.

30 Despite its premise, orthodoxy can, of course, always be challenged. After the Foda trial, Al-Ghazali was viewed in the Europe and the United States as a fatwa-issuing fanatic, yet in other quarters he was considered to be too close to the Egyptian presidency and too critical of its Islamist opponents.

31 See above, notes 21 and 22.

32 Bidar, Abdennour, Self Islam: Histoire d'un islam personnel (Paris: Seuil, 2006)Google Scholar.

33 Abdennour Bidar, “Mohammed Arkoun et la question des fondements de l'islam,” Esprit, February 2011, https://esprit.presse.fr/article/abdennour-bidar/mohammed-arkoun-et-la-question-des-fondements-de-l-islam-35953.

34 Arkoun, Pour une critique, 111.

35 Bidar, Abdennour, Lettre ouverte au monde musulman (Paris: Liens qui libèrent, 2015)Google Scholar. A first version of this text was published in The Huffington Post, January 9, 2015: https://quebec.huffingtonpost.ca/abdennour-bidar/lettre-au-monde-musulman_b_5991640.html. An English version, the author's own translation, was published in ResetDOCS, January 14, 2015: https://www.resetdoc.org/story/open-letter-to-the-muslim-world/.