Theorizing the histories of colonialism and nationalism in the Arab Maghrib.

• Author: Burke, Edmund, III
• Position: Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in North Africa

THE MAGHRIB AND MIDDLE EASTERN HISTORY

The field of maghrib studies has always been marginal to the U.S. academy - not quite African, not quite Arab, not quite European, the Maghrib inhabits a space between the essentialisms evoked by each. For Africans (and Africanists), North Africans were slavers and proto-imperialists, whose historical experiences diverged from those of sub-Saharan Africa. As constituted in the U.S., African studies has tended to see its terrain as Africa south of the Sahara, "black Africa" as opposed to "white Africa" (thereby mindlessly replicating colonial racisms). While Africa specialists are fully aware of the historical links between the two, such as the trans-Saharan gold trade, Islam and Arabic culture, the field often proceeds as if the North were another world.

Although two-thirds of all Arabs live in northern Africa (Egypt and the Arab Maghrib are each one third), Maghribis have long been regarded by U.S. Arabists as "not quite real Arabs," spoiled by colonization and the mission civilisatrice. Mashriqi Arabs, confident of their historic primacy and cultural superiority, regard Maghribi Arabic as incomprehensible, Maghribi intellectuals par trop francise, and Maghribi history as inalterably other (forgetting a common Ottoman and Islamic past). Those who study the Mashriq in the U.S. have tended to absorb these prejudices, often without thinking. As a result, "the Arab World" studied in the U.S. remains a field seriously out of kilter, shorn of one third of its inhabitants, an essentialized rump of a much larger and more diverse reality. As a result a comparative historical approach to the Arab World has been slow to emerge.(1)

Finally, despite one hundred and thirty-two years of French colonization (or indeed because of it) French historians see Algeria's history as occurring off-stage, rather than as an inalterable part of the history of France. Added to this is the way in which the way the histories of imperial role have tended to map on to the division of labor of colonial scholarship in Middle East studies. Eastern Arabs (some of them, anyway) had Britain as their colonial tutor, and thus their colonial records are readily accessible to Anglophone scholars. Western Arabs, on the other hand, were ruled by France (as well as Spain and Italy), thereby interposing a further screen over their colonial pasts for the linguistically challenged. British colonialism is a big subject in the U.S. (itself a former British colonial possession), while French colonialism is not. As a result serious historians of colonialism in the Maghrib have worked mostly in the shadows, and histories of the colonial Middle East take the British experience as normative, while largely ignoring French, Spanish and Italian colonialism.

As a result of its multiple marginality, the Maghrib has been something of an intellectual cul de sac in the U.S. Middle East field: professional journals and academic conferences largely ignore it, while books on North Africa go mostly unreviewed.(2) As the history of colonialism and nationalism recedes into the past, however, the marginality of the Maghrib seems increasingly less at issue. For the first time it is possible to imagine North Africa not in terms of what it is not (African, Arab, French), but rather as a site from which to interrogate the dichotomous forms of identity and historical understanding which derive from the history of modernity.

Today, in a different historical moment, that of the "posts" (colonial, modern, Cold War, Gulf War, structuralist) these "lacks" appear in a different guise: as marks of hybridity, alterity and liminality, sites of resistance and contestation. The colonial past of Arab North Africa appears as increasingly fresh and relevant to increasing numbers of scholars from outside of the traditional field of North African studies, a key terrain in which colonial culture can be apprehended.(3) Feminist theory, cultural studies, minority studies, postcolonial studies, the influence of the subaltern studies group of Indian historians, new ways of conceptualizing Europe as a dynamic multi-cultural arena (rather than a series of hermetically sealed essentialisms) have combined to bring histories of colonialism back onto the academic agenda.

The essay which follows takes the form of a series of reflections on the changing meanings connected to writing colonial and nationalist histories of Arab North Africa, then and now, and why rethinking colonial histories now may be an urgent task. What did it mean to write colonial history in the time of colonialism? What does it mean now? What did it mean to write nationalist histories in the period of the independence movements? What does it mean now? The arrow of time arcs in the sky, always receding to an ever-distant point of origin, while we in the eternal present continually recalibrate its course as our angle of vision changes.

COLONIALISM AS HISTORY

What did colonial histories of the Maghrib mean in their own time? Emanations of a particular moment of time and a particular perspective (European confidence in its own material power and moral superiority, as well as its racial arrogance and blindnesses), colonial histories inscribed the European colonial project: how Europe brought progress to North African societies, rescuing them from the dark night of superstition and ignorance. On this, both Marx and Tocqueville were agreed: the French role in Algeria was to bring civilization and progress. From this angle, Algerian resistance could be painted as futile and indeed anti-progressive, and atrocities (like the massacre of 5001000 at Oulad Riah in 1845) as deplorable but necessary mistakes. Tocqueville cuts through the moralism: "Once we have committed that great violence of conquest, I believe we must not shrink from the smaller violences that are absolutely necessary to consolidate it."(4) Inspired by the industrial and democratic revolutions (in unequal proportions, it is true), France saw itself as situated on the crest of the breaking wave of the future, endowed with the capacity to remake nature and reshape societies at will. Through the application of new social and political prophylactics (education, medicine, secular belief in progress), the colonial state would educate and remold local societies in the path of progress (and away from superstition and backwardness). At the same time, guided and encouraged by the colonial state, the opening of the local economy to the market would unleash resources previously frozen by the dead hand of custom, as they had done in Europe itself.

What kind of colonial history of North Africa did this yield, in practice? Primarily it led to histories that celebrated the French military conquest and the bringing of French civilization to Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. In the major volumes of the Exploration scientifique de l'Algerie, Algeria was depicted as culturally retarded, politically corrupt, and economically backward.(5) Above all, its central flaw was seen to be the way in which Islam weighed down upon the society like a leaden mantle, stifling initiative and blocking change. For the most part, the pieties of the Colonial Vulgate (the composite set of racist stereotypes about colonial North Africa) rather than a more culturally attuned historical judgement tended to dominate French historical writings. According to the terms of the Colonial Vulgate, Maghribi society was irremediably backward, its political leaders were despots, and the ulama were a superstitious bunch of fanatics. (Tocqueville on Islam: "I must say that I emerged convinced that there are in the entire world few religions with such morbid consequences as that of Mohammed. To me it is the primary cause of the now visible decadence of the Islamic world).(6) The Vulgate came to its fullest development in Morocco, where it divided the Moroccan population into two groups: Arabs and Berbers, nomads and sedentaries, those who accepted the authority of the government (known in Morocco as makhzan tribes) and those who opposed it (known as siba tribes).(7) Spanish and Italian colonial history was governed by a similar set of stereotypes. In part, colonial history was a product of its sources (which privileged European over Arabic sources), but even more it was the manifestation of a particular time, and a particular view of the world. Most French wrote the history of North Africa from a basically liberal and metropolitan-based perspective. (A French Algerian historiography based upon the perspective of the settlers never seems to have developed, unlike Ireland, South Africa and Israel, other settler colonies where it did).(8) While there were French historians critical of aspects of the colonial project in North Africa, their voices were muted. In retrospect it is striking how historians of the colonial Maghrib as different as Julien, Ageron, Berque, and Montagne all accepted the basic legitimacy of the colonial system, even though they might have opposed certain of its features.

Thus far, we are on the familiar terrain of Edward Said's Orientalism.(9) The resulting intellectual division of labor laid out a historiographical landscape marked by a series of binary categories (themselves derivative of the orientalist gaze): colonizer/colonized, European/non-European, male/female, colonialist/nationalist...