Hannoum - The Invention of The Maghreb Between Africa and The Middle East

The Invention of the Maghreb
Under French colonial rule, the region of the Maghreb emerged as distinct
from two other geographical entities that, too, are colonial inventions: the
Middle East and Africa. In this book, Abdelmajid Hannoum demonstrates
how the invention of the Maghreb started long before the conquest of
Algiers and lasted until the time of independence, and beyond, to our
present. Through an interdisciplinary study of French colonial
modernity, Hannoum examines how colonialism made extensive use of
translations of Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts and harnessed high
technologies of power to reconfigure the region and invent it. In the
process, he analyzes a variety of forms of colonial knowledge including
historiography, anthropology, cartography, literary work, archaeology,
linguistics, and racial theories. He shows how local engagement with
colonial politics and its modes of knowledge were instrumental in the
modern making of the region, including in its postcolonial era, as a single
unit divorced from Africa and from the Middle East.
Abdelmajid Hannoum is Professor of Anthropology at the University of

Kansas. He is the editor of Practicing Sufism: Sufi Politics and Performance
in Africa (2016), and author of Living Tangier: Migration, Race, and
Illegality in a Moroccan City (2020), Violent Modernity: France in
Algeria (2010), and Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Memories: The
Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine (2001). He was a fellow
at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, Visiting Scholar in the
Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, a senior Fulbright
fellow, and a senior Fellow at the Aga Khan Center.
The Invention of the
Maghreb
Between Africa and the Middle East
abdelmajid hannoum
University of Kansas
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108838160
DOI: 10.1017/9781108937337
© Abdelmajid Hannoum 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hannoum, Abdelmajid, 1960– author.
Title: The invention of the Maghreb : between Africa and the Middle East /
Abdelmajid Hannoum, University of Kansas.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University
Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021009039 | ISBN 9781108838160 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781108947763 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108937337 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Africa, North – History – 19th century. | Africa, North – History –
1882– | Africa, North – Colonial influence. | France – Colonies – Africa, North –
History. | Decolonization – Africa. | Africa, North – History – Historiography. |
BISAC: HISTORY / Middle East / General | HISTORY / Middle East / General
Classification: LCC DT194 .H266 2021 | DDC 961/.03–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009039
ISBN 978-1-108-83816-0 Hardback
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Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
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and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.

Maghreb
abdelmajid hannoum

www.cambridge.org
DOI: 10.1017/9781108937337
ISBN 978-1-108-83816-0 Hardback

Maghreb
abdelmajid hannoum

www.cambridge.org
DOI: 10.1017/9781108937337
ISBN 978-1-108-83816-0 Hardback
In memory of Daniel Reig
Contents
List of Maps page viii

List of Tables ix
Acknowledgments x
Introduction 1
1 Geographic Imagination and Cartographic Power 30
2 The Trace and Its Narratives 76
3 Language, Race, and Territory 123
4 Naming and Historical Narratives 170
5 Strategies for the Present 206
6 Cracks 246
Postscript 275
Bibliography 287
Index 312
vii
Maps
1 Africa, 1737, by Johann Mathias Hase page 34

2 Africa, 1722, by Guillaume Delisle 38
3 “Barbarie et Nigritie,” 1738, by Guillaume Delisle 40
4 Afrique Française (French Africa), 1843–1854, by Louis-
Adrien Bebrugger 49
5 Algeria, 1853, by Armand-Jacques Leroy de Saint-Arnaud
under the direction of Eugène Daumas 55
6 “Algérie divisée par tribus,” 1846, by Ernest Carette and
Auguste Warnier 56
7 The Regence of Tunis, 1843, by Ernest Carette 58
8 L’Afrique Francaise (French Africa), 1890, by Georges
Roland 62
viii
Tables
2.1 Names of countries of modern North Africa and their

equivalent in Roman times page 92
ix
Acknowledgments
A book owes its existence as much to others as it does to its author.

Without the input of a large community, the entire endeavor would be
impossible. I started research for this book while I was a senior research
fellow at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations at the Aga
Khan Centre. I am very grateful to this institution for the generous
hospitality it provided me during most of the academic year of 2018.
I owe more than I can express to a number of colleagues and friends,
some of whom I have never met. I would like to acknowledge by name,
Judith Irvine, Brent Shaw, Cheikh Babou, Santa Arias, Karen Pinto, Nejat
Brahmi, Khalid Ben Srhir, Adam Sabra, Mohamed Miloud Gharrafi,
Karima Laachir, and Sam Everett for generous help provided at different
stages of writing this book. I would also like to acknowledge Eric Bader for
indexing the entire manuscript. My debt to Fayre Makeig is simply
enormous. Her friendship, her great editing skill, and her generosity
were essential for the writing of this book. The College of Liberal Arts
and Sciences funded this project in various ways through the General
Research Fund, including a Craig Anthony Arnold Faculty Research
Award and a sabbatical that helped me conduct archival work in Paris,
Aix-en-Provence, and Nantes.
At Cambridge University Press, I would like to express my gratitude to
Charles Tripp, who first saw merit in the project, and to three anonymous
reviewers for their suggestions, critique, and encouragement. Maria Mesh,
Atifa Jiwa, Stephanie Tylor, and Richards Paul were extremely helpful at
every stage of this production. I am also very grateful to Ami Naramor for
her remarkable editing. As always, any shortcomings in this book are mine.
Last, I would like to thank Critique of Anthropology for granting me
permission to include a revised and abridged version of my article “Notes
on the Post-colonial in the Maghreb,” published in 2009 (volume 29, issue
3: 324–344). My thanks also to François Pouillon for permission to
reproduce excerpts from my book chapter “L’auteur comme authorité en
ethnographie coloniale,” published in La sociologie musulmane de Robert
Montagne, edited by Daniel Rivet and François Pouillon (Paris:
Maisonneuve et Larose, 1999).
x
Introduction
In 1966, Charles-André Julien, a major historian of the region known

as the Maghreb or North Africa, published a small book in the well-
known series “Que sais-je?” designed specifically for a large public. He
called his work Histoire de l’Afrique blanche (History of White Africa),
an unusual title, but not a new one. In 1939, Émile-Félix Gautier, an
architect of the construction of the Maghreb, had published a book
with a similar title, L’Afrique blanche.1 But Julien’s book was different;
it was written by a staunch anti-colonialist, an unapologetic commun-
ist, and an unwavering defender of the region’s independence. His book
came out in a postcolonial context, and with a title that could not leave
the reader indifferent. Readers then, as now, were accustomed to
associating blackness with Africa and Africa with blackness. Both
whiteness and blackness are indicative of a relation to progress – the
first embodies it, the second lacks it – wherever the people these
abstracts signify might go, even outside of Africa itself. Whiteness is
an attribute of Europe. It is as if Julien wants to tell his contemporaries
that Europe does not have a monopoly on whiteness; Africa is also
white. Which Africa? For Julien, it is the northern part that includes not
just the Maghreb, but Egypt as well.
Roger Le Tourneau, also a major historian of the region, reviewed
the book and saw it as dealing with two rather distinct subjects within
this entity of White Africa: Egypt and the Maghreb. He explains that
the book
deals with two subjects more separated than united. In fact, the Nile Valley is
turned towards the Near East (Proche-Orient) and the eastern
Mediterranean since the beginning of historical time whereas the Maghreb
1
Emile-Felix Gautier, L’Afrique blanche. Paris: Fayard, 1939. White Africa, in the
view of Gautier, is not the same as the one we find in Julien. Abyssinia is white, in
the view of Gautier, and the Maghreb is specified as Afrique blanche française.
See Chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion of Gautier.
1
2 Introduction
is decidedly attached to the western Mediterranean and often to the Iberian

Peninsula.2
Julien’s French audience then, and even now, would have easily
understood his definition of the region: the Maghreb is neither part of
the Middle East (of which Egypt is a significant part) nor it is really
Africa. If both are comfortably located in northern Africa, the Maghreb
is on one side, west, by itself, not even part of West Africa, which is
genuinely Africa, while Egypt is on the other side, east, not part of what
is called East Africa, but part and parcel of what is known as the Middle
East, a bloc mostly located in Asia. Egypt was meant to be a leading
nation of Arabs, a hub of Arab nationalism, the geographic center of
the Arab Middle East, and the heart of its political and intellectual
renaissance. The Maghreb was then (as it is now) a region whose
construction the present book deconstructs: a geographic bloc by itself,
with a history of its own, and an important zone of Francophonie in
French postcolonial eyes.
“Maghreb,” “Egypt,” “White Africa,” “Black Africa,” “Africa,”
“Mediterranean,” “Middle East” – all are names invented at one
point or another in modern history, and each meant different things
at different times. Today, these names are postcolonial denominations
with specific meanings, the genealogy of which can be found in colonial
times, since France stepped foot in the region with Napoleon’s exped-
ition on July 1, 1798. Napoleon and his savants defined modern Egypt;
his successors, some of them also his companions in Egypt, engaged in
the redefinition of the region west of Egypt – that is, the Maghreb – as
early as the 1830s.
Before 1830, Le Tourneau’s definition of the Maghreb would have
been impossible to formulate as he did. The region was then perceived
not as a single unit but as partly Ottoman and partly the Kingdom of
Fez, or the Sharifian Empire. Officers of the French army who landed in
Sidi Ferruch on June 14, 1830, would not have understood the defin-
ition a future historian such as Julien or Le Tourneau offered to them.
Even seven decades later, by 1900, their definition would hardly have
made sense to a Frenchman in Algeria or in France. The Maghreb did
not exist yet, even though its embryo could already be found in the
2
Roger Le Tourneau, “Book Review, Charles André Julien, Histoire de l’Afrique
blanche. Paris: PUF, 1966,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée
1966 (2): 252–253.
Introduction 3
tremendous work of the Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie. It took

nearly a century to formulate. The concept of the Mediterranean itself
was unclear, and the Middle East was not yet born.3 Even British Egypt
looked more Napoleonic than Arab, and the entirety of the Levant was
still part of the larger Ottoman Empire that also stretched into Asia and
Europe, as European maps of the eighteenth century showed, despite
the difficulties of the Ottomans in retaining these lands.
In 1966, the definition of the region Le Tourneau put forward was so
familiar, so natural, that most probably Le Tourneau and Julien did not
doubt it as a natural entity.4 Something drastically important must
have happened between 1830 and 1966 to make such a definition
possible, comprehensible, and even natural. That thing was not only
colonization by itself, but an entire process of colonial creation that
transformed several precolonial entities into one single entity with an
identity that makes it separate from others and distinct from anything
else. This book is about how this definition became possible, under-
standable, and, by dint of discursive repetition, natural – that is,
believed to be there, to exist independent of human consciousness.
Thus, the book is about problematizing a name, and also a region, or
rather, the conception of a region, with its geography, its population,
its language, and its history. The book is an examination of geograph-
ical imagination; it is about the history of how the region was con-
structed and reconfigured throughout French colonial rule in the
region.
The history of the region’s colonial construction is also the history of
the operation of colonial technologies of power, the dynamics of colo-
nial institutions, and the creation of systems of geographical truths that
changed and autocorrected as colonial power advanced militarily and
became more technologically effective. By colonial technologies of
power, I mean essentially the institutions French colonial administra-
tions set in place, first in Algeria, and then in Tunisia, and Morocco,
each of which functioned as a colonial state in and of itself, with
3
Anne Ruel, “L’invention de la Méditerranée,” Vingtième Siècle 1991 (32): 7–14.
Florence Deprest, “L’invention géographique de la Mediterranée: Elements de
réflexion,” L’Espace Géographique 2002 (1): 73–92. Hélène Blais and
Florence Deprest, “The Mediterranean, a Territory between France and Colonial
Algeria: Imperial Constructions,” European Review of History: Revue
Européenne d’Histoire 2012 (19)1: 33–57.
4
As it appears from Julien’s history of the region, Histoire de l’Afrique du Nord,
a volume Roger Le Tourneau edited and updated.
4 Introduction
a distinct political status, power strategy, and modes of knowledge

harnessed for each type of governmentality.5 Yet their separation is
more apparent than real, for they were an extension of the metropol-
itan state, their coordination is necessarily through it, and their oper-
ation is what gives the state its imperial status. These institutions
operated through the use of force (violence), and the use of ideology
(knowledge). These institutions harnessed the arsenal of European
technologies to operate: armaments, modern instruments of research,
print machines, and so forth. The results were modes of modern
knowledge that take different forms – historiography, anthropology,
geography, archaeology, linguistics, statistics, biology, zoology, etc. –
yet are all governed by the same episteme, and in their function are part
of the same enterprise of recording a colony with a colonial mind.
The history of this construction is also the history of the dynamics of
power between colonial modernity and its local subjects and their
traditional institutions (families, mosques, zawiyas, awqaf founda-
tions, libraries, etc.) that acted and reacted within the dynamics of
colonial power and according to rules set by it. This is not to say that
this is a history of colonial domination and local resistance, but rather
that colonial power itself creates the field in which the native operates,
and thus the native can only operate in a field alien to him, whose
vicissitudes he tries to manage, with different strategies to reinvent his
present. In so doing, he becomes an historical actor, a cognitive oper-
ator, willingly or unwillingly, a political actor complicit in a game
whose rules are set by colonial powers.
This book covers the historical period during which the Maghreb
was constructed as a geographical area between two other colonial
entities, Africa and the Middle East, from long before the conquest of
Algiers to the time of independence, and beyond – to our present. For
the presence of Europe did not start with the conquest of Algiers and
undoubtedly did not end with the end of the Algerian war. The region
was scrutinized, explored, made sense of, even mapped and named
before French soldiers landed in Algeria. It is upon a precolonial body
of knowledge that their conception of the region was constructed. It is
5
Technologies of power is a concept Foucault uses in relation to biopolitics, but
the concept (originating from the theorizing of Althusser) can also be applied to
the production of knowledge essential to governmentality. Louis Althusser, “Les
appareils idéologiques de l’état,” in Positions: 1964–1975. Paris: Éditions
Sociales, 1976. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
Introduction 5
also upon a process of translation of Islamic texts known in Christian

Europe that strategies of knowledge were set up. Colonial conquests
made these strategies more effective by harnessing advanced technolo-
gies and implementing them on the ground to continually execute
physical transformations of the lands, the cities, the regions, and of
course the populations to conform the representation to its referents
and to adjust the referents to the representation, as colonial adminis-
trators saw fit, according to colonial interests that were not only
material but symbolic as well. The book seeks to understand the
processes by which that construction was made and by which it came
to mean something that people then, as now, understand as most
familiar and most natural. The book, then, is a history of a name or
a history of a concept. Being so, it is also a history of a construction,
a reconfiguration, a full-fledged invention of an entire geopolitical,
geocultural, and geostrategic entity that includes reconfiguration of
lands, reordering of history itself, recategorization of populations,
restructuring of their modes of life, and redefinition of their modes of
thought and ways of being.
By the late 1920s, the Maghreb region had emerged as a French
colonial zone in North Africa that was separate from the Middle
East, itself a post–World War I British invention.6 The Maghreb
includes mainly Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and not so much Libya.
I am writing the history of the creation of the Maghreb as a distinct
geopolitical entity, neither really Middle Eastern nor totally African.
I intend to examine how the Maghreb, which is still largely perceived
through French scholarly lenses, was transformed by drastic and mul-
tiple strategies of colonial power and how, in the process of its trans-
formation, it was divorced from the larger region now referred to as the
Middle East on one hand, and from the region commonly called Africa
on the other. Indeed, the Maghreb region seems to be neither. Even
between the Arab Middle East and the Arab Maghreb, there is
undoubtedly a divorce, as Jacques Berque once put it.7 Because the
history of the invention of the Maghreb is also, and in important ways,
the history of this divorce between the so-called Maghreb and the so-
called Middle East, this book not only traces the genealogy of the
6
Daniel Foliard, Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the
Middle East, 1854–1921. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017.
7
Jacques Berque, “Perspectives de l’Orientalisme contemporain,” Revue IBLA
1957 (20): 217–238.
6 Introduction
Maghreb but also helps outline how the Middle East, both as a name
and as a geopolitical, geocultural, and geostrategic entity, came into
being. The book will thus be of great interest to Middle Eastern
scholars across a wide range of disciplines who may be interested in
how their region is defined openly or tacitly in relation to the two
entities from which it was detached. Again, the Maghreb is neither
Africa nor the Middle East – neither is it even Africa and the Middle
East, despite the fact that it is also understood as culturally Middle
Eastern and geographically African. Therefore, even academically, the
unit fits in neither African studies (understood often racially – that is, in
terms of color) nor Middle Eastern studies (defined mostly through the
British colonial experience and the culture of nationalism generated in
the region). By comparison, the Maghreb seems more French, or it is
viscerally francophone, with its particular brand of nationalism(s).
Fernand Braudel once wrote:
Behind all of human history there is this actor who is quick to transform, but
always so adroit, so pressing, so decisive in his interventions. What shall we
call him? Space? It says too little. Land? It is ambiguous. Let us call him the
geographical milieu.8
The geographical milieu, I would argue, is an actor only insofar as it

is imagined as such in a historical narrative (for example, France
invaded Algeria); used this way it is only metaphorical. However,
upon examination, it is only a conception – one that has been consti-
tuted through time, resulting from a complex process of cultural pro-
duction. The Maghreb is not a person and neither is France.9 It is
a geographic milieu, imagined and defined by men who inhabit it.
A geographical milieu does not have a natural existence; it does not
exist outside of human consciousness. It exists only insofar as its
existence is imagined. In historical narratives, the Maghreb appears
as an actor, but it is an actor of narration (for example, the Maghreb
resisted Rome). Therefore, as a construction, the Maghreb is the result
of cognitive activities of historical actors (military officers, politicians
8
Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen á l’époque de
Philippe II. Paris: Colin, 1949.
9
Braudel considers it as such, following in the footsteps of Paul Vidal de la Blache.
“We willingly repeat the words of Michelet: ‘France is a person.’” Samuel Kinser,
“Annaliste Paradigm? The Geohistorical Structuralism of Fernand Braudel,”
American Historical Review 1981 (86): 68.
Old Configurations 7
and diplomats, scholars, and all other types of colonial agents). These
cognitive activities consist of modes of composing objects, strategies of
writing narratives, the politics of representation, and the navigation of
institutional powers in which all these actors are caught (that is, colo-
nial power dynamics).
Africa and the Middle East too were invented simultaneously
through a long colonial process and according to specific patterns,
politics, and modes of knowledge.10 West Africa and Egypt in par-
ticular were constructed in relation to the Maghreb. Westward, the
region had to be separated from a bloc perceived according to schemes
of thought specific to nineteenth-century Europe, especially France:
race, religion, notions of frontiers and borders, history, language,
climate, and so forth. Race, because of its centrality in modernity,
was instrumental. Southward, it was also instrumental, along with
what seemed to be natural frontiers separating black from white.
Eastward, Egypt was already constructed by the Expédition
d’Egypte as distinct. These constructions, the African ones and the
Egyptian ones, required the complicity of natives to give them form
and shape, even beyond the colonial period.11 This complicity is not
necessarily a collaboration; it is the result of power dynamics within
which colonials and locals act and react; power is indeed everywhere,
but not held to the same degree in each place or by each person or each
group.
Old Configurations
The idea that Egypt and the Maghreb constitute two distinct areas does
not seem to be only a colonial idea. An entire Arabic historiographic
tradition also separates the two. Colonials seem to have inherited this
separation and not invented it. In Greek geography and historiography,
10
On the Middle East, see Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael
Ezekiel Gasper, eds., Is There a Middle East? Evolution of a Geopolitical
Concept. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Also see Foliard,
Dislocating the Orient. Edward Said, Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
On Africa, see V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa Gnosis, Philosophy, and
the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
11
For Africa, see Mudimbe, Invention of Africa. For the contribution of Egyptians
to the construction of Egyptian identity, see Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social
Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
8 Introduction
Egypt is decidedly part of Asia.12 It appears so in the geography of

Ptolemy and the historiography of Herodotus. The Romans inherited
this distinction. For them too Egypt was distinct from the land they
called Africa. Arabic historiography seems to have only inherited this
separation. In one of the earliest books dedicated to the Arab conquest
of the region, Futūh Misr wa-Ifrı̄qı̄yah by ʿAbd al-Rahmān ibn ʿAbd al-
˙ ˙ ˙
H akam (d. 871), the region is separated, and Ibn ʿAbd al-Hakam
˙ 13 ˙
adopts the Roman name of the region: Ifriqiya. The name Ifriqiya
is evidently derived from the name Afri that designated a people.
Historian Brent Shaw comments:
Located inland of Carthage, in the region of Wadi Tine . . . they became
stands-ins for all other local or indigenous people of the land. Others like
them became Afri or Africani, and metonymically, the land was called Africa.
Over time, by cultural and political extension, the term came to designate
a continental mass – the Third World, the tertia pars mundi of their time – as
it was seen by outsiders in the Roman Mediterranean.14
However, neither in the Roman definition nor in the Arab one is

there any mention of white as an adjective describing the region – the
way it is mentioned by Julien and by Gautier before him. Even though
occasional reference to color and phenotypes existed in Roman times as
well as in its Islamic period, the region was never defined by its color. In
modernity, it is essential since European civilization itself was self-
defined by color – that is, racially as white. Race has become a key
concept in the ideology of modernity that explains human differences
and human moral and intellectual inequality – that is, human progress
and its opposite, human backwardness and retardation.15
Separated from Egypt, the region went through transformations. In
Islamic history, the region is known by a series of names; sometimes it
was perceived as a single unit, sometimes as part of other units in
12
For a general history of the continents, see Christian Grataloup, L’invention des
continents: Comment l’Europe a découpé le monde. Paris: Larousse, 2009.
Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of
Metageography. Berkeley, California University Press, 1997.
13
ʿAbd al-Rahmān ibn ʿAbd al-H akam, Futūh Misr wa-Ifrı̄qı̄yah, ed.
˙
Charles Torrey. New Haven, CT: ˙ Yale University
˙ ˙ Press, 1920.
14
Brent D. Shaw, “Who Are You? Africa and Africans,” in A Companion to
Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Jeremy McInerney. London: Wiley
Blackwell, 2014, pp. 527–540 at p. 527.
15
Hannah Arendt, “Race and Race Thinking,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
New York: Harcourt, 1966, pp. 158–184.
Europe (Andalusia) or in sub-Saharan Africa. One can undoubtedly

write the history of these transformations: the logic behind the renaming,
the cutting of parts to link them or to separate them from a core, the
categorization of populations, the identification of religious affiliations,
and so forth. Suffice it to say that in Arab historiography from the
fourteenth century until the eighteenth, the plethora of Greek and
Roman names for the land and the populations disappeared as if they
had never existed. The general identification of Africanus (which
St. Augustine used to self-identify)16 is not to be found; neither is there
any trace of the identities Numidian, Gaetulian, or Musulamian, or the
names of Mauretania Tingitana, Mauretania Caesariensis, and others.17
Only a few of these names survived in early classical Arab historiog-
raphy: names such as Ifriqiya and Tripolitania (called tarâbulus) were
˙
still used in medieval Arabic historiography.
However, in colonial times, many of these old Roman names resurfaced
and were reactivated. Colonial authors, politicians, and ideologues reused
them to connect Rome to France, and antiquity to modern times, in
a process of creation that harnessed new technologies of power and
produced novel modes of modern knowledge, most of which are still in
use today. This creation, though specifically French, reached a European
audience and was echoed in the historical modern discourse. For example,
by 1949, when the region was already formed and its name was already
established, anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard reproduced some of
these names, combining old and new ones to describe the region. He
reproduces the understanding of the region as a single bloc with Libya
as a liminal space, not fully Maghrebi and not entirely Middle Eastern.
For him, Libya is divided into three entities: Tripolitania, Fazzan, and
Cyrenaica. The first two are closer to the Maghreb; the last is rather part
of the Middle East: “The people of Cyrenaica,” he writes, “are linked to
the classical Arab world of the East, to Egypt and the Jazirat al-ʿArab
(Arabia, Palestine, Iraq, and Syria) rather than to the Maghrib.”18
16
“In a letter to his former teacher from the city of Madauros, the Christian bishop
Augustine of Hippo wrote to the ‘pagan’ rhetor Maximus: ‘well now, [you] as an
African writing to other Africans, and since we are both from Africa . . . ’ (Aug.
Ep. 17.2).” Shaw, “Who Are You?” p. 527.
17
For more details on these names and on the different configurations of the
region, see Yves Modèran, Les Maures et l’Afrique Romaine ((IVe–VIIe siècle).
Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 2003.
18
Ibid., p. 47.
10 Introduction
As a prelude to this book, I would like to briefly evoke the configur-

ations of the region in its precolonial times. By this, I do not intend to
write the history of its invention in precolonial times, but only to show
that between the colonial and precolonial came a drastic transform-
ation. It is not that the region was constituted in various ways through-
out history only to culminate in its postcolonial configuration, as
a historicist suggested long ago.19 But it is true that its colonial config-
uration is what makes the present. This configuration is only one reality
amongst a series in a history during which the region was reconfigured
in various ways, named differently, perceived differently, associated
with some blocs and dissociated from other blocs that were themselves
products of their historical moment. In other words, it is not that the
Maghreb has had a formation of its own that led to its present identity,
but rather that throughout history the region has been configured time
and again – and what the historian believes to be a historical Maghreb
may be only a manifestation of the colonial creation whose history
I examine in this book. For one of the characteristics of modernity is
exactly its power to destroy and reinvent, to eliminate and create. If
“modernity extinguishe[d] various possibilities,” it also created new
ones.20 Those possibilities were not only cultural, political, and eco-
nomic but also geographical.
In the Islamic period, one can trace different configurations of the
region from the ninth century with Ibn ʿAbd al-Hakam to the four-
˙
teenth century with Ibn Khaldûn. A good number of Arabic texts by
historians, geographers, and travelers show the configuration of the
area. At times it is extended to include sub-Saharan Africa or part of
Europe and particularly Spain, with Marrakech as a capital. At other
times it is restricted to geographical segments connected to other geog-
raphies and other polities, as was the case on the eve of colonialism
when the region was divided into units one of which was sovereign (al-
Maghrib al-Aqsâ, the Sharifian Empire in European terminology) while
others were semi-independent, but still attached to the Ottoman
Empire (for example, the Regence of Algiers, the Regence of Tunis,
19
Abdallah Laroui, L’histoire du Maghreb. Paris: Maspero, 1970. The same view
is repeated by the author most recently; see interview, “Le Maghreb est l’idée
d’une élite,” Zamane 2012 (18).
20
Talal Asad, “The Trouble with Thinking,” in Powers of the Secular, ed.
David Scott and Charles Hirschkind. Stanford, CA: Sanford University Press,
2006, pp. 243–303 at p. 274.
the Regence of Tripoli). But these changes are only part of what
constitute the area; these are only geographic contours that correspond
to political limits. These units were also self-defined by a number of
modes of identification such as religious affiliation, tribal belonging,
regional and city identities, and even family identities that overlapped
as one or the other took prevalence depending on the context.
The tremendous discursive impact of the fourteenth-century text
Kitâb al-ʿibar, by Ibn Khaldûn, used extensively by the French
in a translation, L’Histoire des Berbères, was that it was not only
a chronicle of events or a history of dynasties, but that it was also
a comprehensive sociology of tribalism that allows us to see how the
region, under different dynasties, self-identified, and how different
modes of identification were harnessed for the purpose of making
sense of space, land, and people.21 It is this Arabic text I would like to
briefly examine to see how the region was configured in the fourteenth
century. The idea here is not to say or imply that such human geog-
raphy was still existent in the nineteenth century, but rather to give an
idea of the configuration of the region in one of its dramatic historical
moments. Ibn Khaldûn provides us with the cultural, intellectual,
political, and economic structure of the region. It may be safe to
assume that this structure must have long survived his epoch. And
this may be one of the major reasons why this tremendous text
constituted the foundation of French colonial knowledge of the
region.22 Its discursive richness allows one to envision the world in
which Ibn Khaldûn lived as well as the modes of thought used to
understand it and to make sense of it.
This is how Ibn Khaldûn defines the region:
Know that the term west [maghrib] in its origins is additional and indicates
a location amongst locations by being added to the direction of the east. The
same goes for the term east [mashriq], by adding it to the direction of the west
[maghrib]. However, Arabs may use these names to indicate specific regions
and countries. For geographers interested in the configuration of the earth
and its divisions, regions, the inhabited and the deserted parts, its ruins and
its mountains, its seas and the locations of its inhabitants – such as Ptolemy
21
Abd al-Rahmān ibn Khaldûn, Kitāb al-ʿibar wa-dı̄wān al-mubtadaʾ wa-
l-khabar fı̄˙ayyām al-ʿArab wa-l-ʿajam wa-l-Barbar wa-man ʿāsarahum min
˙ 1992.
dhawı̄ l-sultān al-akbar, 7 vols. Beirut: Dâr al-Kutub al-Ìlmiya,
22 ˙ ˙ Hannoum, “Translation and the Colonial Imaginary: Ibn Khaldûn,
Abdelmajid
Orientalist,” History and Theory 2003 (42)1: 61–81.
12 Introduction
and Roger of Sicily,23 to whom is attributed the famous book on the config-
urations of the earth and countries and the like – Maghrib is a single region,
distinct from all other regions (qutr wahid mumayyaz mina al-aqtar). Its
western frontier is the Atlantic, an element of water . . . its limit on the
western side is the Atlantic, as we said; on it, there are many of its cities
such as Tangier, Salé, Azmour, Anfi, Asafi . . . its limit from the northern
direction is the Mediterranean (al-baḥr al-rûmi) which, derived from the
Atlantic, flows through a strait between Tangier in the country of the
Maghrib and Tarifa in the country of al-Andalus. This strait is called
Ziqaq; it is eight miles wide or more; it used to have a bridge that went
under water . . . As far as its frontiers toward the qibla and the south, it is the
sands that constitute a barrier (hâjiz) between the land of Sudan and the land
of the Berbers.24
Ibn Khaldûn is keenly aware that human conception of geography

changes. He notes that once upon a time the Maghreb included Egypt
and Burqa. But in his time, he notes, Egypt and Burqa are not part of it
and the Maghreb starts only from Tripoli: “this was in old times the
habitat and land of the Berbers.”25 Ibn Khaldûn also makes
a distinction between what he calls Maghrib al-Aqsâ (“midwest”)
and Wâd Mulwiya (Moulouya River),26 and also between Maghrib al-
Awsat, “mostly inhabited by Zenata tribes,”27 and Ifriqiya “all the way
to Tripoli”:
A vast land, it used to be inhabited by Nafzawa, Bani Yfran, Neffousa, and
countless Berber tribes; its capital was Qairawan. These days it is the domain
of the Arabs of Sulaym. Bani Yfran and Huwara are under their domination.
They adopted a Bedouin way of life and forgot their non-Arab [i.e., Berber]
accents and speak Arab languages and adopted Arab customs in all facets of
life. Their capital today is Tunis.28
For Ibn Khaldûn, geography is the theater where history unfolds.

Despite the fact that, for him, tribes are the motor of historical happen-
ings, several other actors are behind historical events: the oumma or milla
(a community of faith, or a community of language, or a community of
a people), and bashar (humans, and not in the Enlightenment sense of the
abstract Man), and even divine interventions that, unknown, are always
23
This is a reference to geographer Al-Sharîf Al-Idrissi’s (d. AD 1165) Nuzhat al-
mushtâq fi’khtirâq al-âfâq, commissioned by the Norman king Roger II of Sicily
and known as Tabula Rogeriana.
24
Ibn Khaldûn, Kitāb al-ʿibar, vol. 6, pp. 114–117. 25 Ibid., p. 119.
26
Ibid. 27 Ibid., p. 120. 28 Ibid., p. 120.
present as a driving force beyond the control of man. The tribe is always
part of an oumma or milla, whose relation to other tribes that constitute it
is always one of domination (ghalaba) and this domination is often
masked – that is, made acceptable – by religion or sainthood (dîn aw
wilâya). Men are always part of a tribe; they don’t exist outside of it, and
they rely on the solidarity of the tribe (ʿasabiya) to carry out actions.
However, the tribe as part of the oumma or milla is conditioned by
geography, by the climate.29 Hence Ibn Khaldûn pays close attention to
the geographical area. It is divided into two parts: Ifriqiya and the
Maghrib. Each region is defined not only by its inhabitants but also by
their shʿâ’ir, their genealogies, and their languages. As a historian, Ibn
Khaldûn does not lose sight of the concept of time that brings change.
Therefore, whatever region he discusses, he is aware of the historical
change. Everything changes and “everything is perishable,” in his
Aristotelian view. Dynasties perish, generations die, and new dynasties,
new generations arise – only to live, to die, and to perish too. History is
made of series of ruptures, worlds follow each other in a cycle. New ones
emerge out of old ones. The task of the historian is to record the product
of this disjuncture created in time and space, the “now” produced by the
rupture produced by the event. The task of the historian is also to explain
the patterns by which these changes and discontinuities happen. And thus
Ibn Khaldûn’s own historical enterprise was to record the Maghreb at
a moment of complete transformation. To illustrate this transformation,
a history of the region was undertaken, and its founding events happened
somewhere else, in Arabia. His narrative links the region to a new geog-
raphy and disconnects it from an old one: that of Rome, with which it was
intimately tied, as is evident in Roman historiography.30
At the outset, Ibn Khaldûn defines it geographically:
In their [geographers’] view, the Maghrib was an island surrounded by the
sea from three directions. In the conception common today amongst the
inhabitants of these provinces, [the Maghrib] does not include the province
of Egypt or Burqa, but is limited to Tripoli and what is beyond it to the west.
And this was in the past the land of the Berbers and their habitat
[mawâtinahum].31
29
I expand here on my article “Translation and the Colonial Imaginary.”
30
See J. D. Fage, ed., The Cambridge History of Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978.
31
Ibn Khaldûn, Kitāb al-ʿibar, vol. 6, pp. 118–119.
14 Introduction
One can see that Ibn Khaldûn was well aware that the geography of
the Maghreb shifted along with the changing perspectives of its
inhabitants.32 Again, for Ibn Khaldûn, geography is always about
tribes. Maghrib al-Aqsâ is the habitat of mostly Masamida, and al-
Maghreb al-Awsat (midwest) is of mostly Zenata, with its capital,
Tlemcen.33 For Ibn Khaldûn, there seems to be no Maghrib al-Adnâ,
a term that appears much later in the work of Muslim geographers and
historians (and that corresponds, mutatis mutandis, to the famous
Ifriquiya). Ibn Khaldûn first mentions the locations of Bijaya and
Constantine, whose inhabitants are “Zuwâwa, Kutâma, ʿAjîssa, and
Huwâra. Today, they are homes to the Arabs except for the unreach-
able mountains.”34
The land is defined by its landscape (plains, mountains, the
Sahara, the Atlantic shore, etc.), and also by its tribal inhabitants.
Also, Ibn Khaldûn discusses the different modes of people’s
identification:
People differentiate one another by genealogy as with the Arabs, Israelites,
and Persians. Or they differentiate by look and skin color as with the
Negroes, the Ethiopians, the Saqâliba,35 and the Sudanese. Or [they differ-
entiate] by customs, habits, and genealogy, as with Arabs . . . all these change
over the ages and never last.36
So identifications were multiple and of course not racial and did not
even have what I would like to call an elementary form of racial
thinking. In the citation just referenced, Ibn Khaldûn mentions kinship
based on affiliation to an ancestor, real or fictitious. He even argues that
nasab (kinship genealogy) “is a fictitious matter, it has no truth” (amr
wahmi lâ haqîqata lah);37 further, “its function is association and
solidification” of identity (naf ʿuh innama huwa fî hadhihi al wusla
wa al ‘iltihâm).38 Then, there is what one might call phenotypes,
˙
including skin color, that he notices amongst Ethiopians, the
Saqâliba, and the Sudanese. Ibn Khaldûn explains skin color as being
a mere result of climate, thus changing with it. The climate affects
32
Ibid. 33 Ibid., p. 120. 34 Ibid.
35
Saqaliba, the Slavic populations of central and eastern Europe.
36
Ibn Khaldûn, Kitāb al-ʿibar, vol. 1, p. 91. 37 Ibid., p. 138. 38
Ibid.
a human’s mood but does not seem to affect the facility of thinking.39
Then, there is what one might call culture that is used in addition to
kinship. These are not static differentiations, but changing ones, like
everything in life. These distinctions do not create hierarchies between
people, which are instead created by an ensemble of elements Ibn
Khaldûn discusses in a different part of his monumental work: ʿasabiya
(tribal solidarity), nasab (kin genealogy), hasab (tribal cultural capital –
˙
i.e., the history of a tribe’s great deeds), and so forth. All of these
40
elements are subject to change as well.
Several key geographical names started to change in the fourteenth
century. In the chronicles of Ibn ʻIdārı̄ al-Murrâkushî, Al-bayân al-
ˉ
mughrib fî akhbār mulûk al-Andalus wa al-Maghrib, the name
Maghrib seems to be extended to the entire region, including the area
still known in this century as Ifriqiya. Al-Andalus too seems to be part
of the Maghreb of ʻIdārı̄.41 ʻIdārı̄’s text is essentially a narration of
ˉ ˉ
events and clearly lacks the sociological dimension that makes the text
of Ibn Khaldûn so authoritative, so new, and so informative not only
about events but also about the cultural, political, economic, and
intellectual dynamics of his time. However, through a close reading
of ʻIdārı̄ one can detect a geographical and cultural morphology of the
ˉ
region in his time. For instance, one can see that the succession of Arab
conquests of the region had already become naturalized as highly
positive events that gave the region its form. From his narration of
the founding of dynasties, one can also envision the different religious
experiences the region went through and that gave the region a specific
religious identity. The Shiʿa identity of the region emerged with the
Idrissites; later all of Ifriqiya, including Qayrawan, adopted the Shiʿa
doctrine and distinguished themselves from the Sunni (al-sunna wa al-
jamaʿa).42 But this identity was later masked and outright eliminated in
the narratives of the Salafi in colonial times and even, to a certain
39
For Ibn Khaldûn, the climate does affect the mood and states of joy, sadness,
etc., which are not determined by the size of the brain, but only by the effect of
the climate on the nervous system. See Abd al-Rahmān Ibn Khaldûn,
Muqaddima, ed. Abdessalem Cheddadi. Casablanca: ˙ Bayt al-Funûn wa al-
Ādâb, 2005.
40
Hannoum, “Translation and the Colonial Imaginary.”
41
Muhammad Ibn ʻIdārı̄ al-Murrâkushî, Al-bayān al-muġrib fı̄ akhbār mulūk al-
˙
Andalus ˉ
wa-al-Maghrib, 2 vols. Beirut: Maktabat Sadir, 1950.
42
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 395.
16 Introduction
degree, those of the nationalists, and thus in the ideology of the nation-
state in the region.
In any case, the world of Ibn Khaldûn must have undoubtedly
changed by the sixteenth century. Several dynasties succeeded one
another in the region before the eruption of a new actor unknown to
Ibn Khaldûn, the Ottoman Turk under whom the region underwent
a drastic change. It had become a periphery whose center was located
somewhere else, the Sublime Porte. Its old center, in the far west, was
detached from the rest; it developed by itself, mainly under two main
strong dynasties, the Saadian (1554–1659) and the Alaouite (1666–
present).
Only in the sixteenth century do we find another comprehensive
view of the region, though in a highly problematic text. Description
de l’Afrique by Hassan al-Wazzân (alias Leo Africanus) was used by
colonial authors almost systematically during the first few decades
of the conquest of Algiers.43 Al-Wazzân too offers a conception of
the region that gives us further insight into how it changed over
time, and, specifically, in what ways it was transformed by colonial
technologies of power throughout the nineteenth century. His book
had a colonial career, though far less comprehensive than that of
Ibn Khaldûn.
An attitude of reserve should be adopted vis-à-vis the narrative of al-
Wazzân. His knowledge translates modern categories that one cannot
find in the historical knowledge either of his predecessors in the region
or of his successors. He was initiated into various forms of knowledge,
as a Renaissance man, and his conception of the region is one of an
outsider.44 His narrative was also originally written in Latin and as
such was part of an entirely different imaginary. Al-Wazzân had to
address his audience not only in their languages but also in their
categories of thought in order for them to understand him. His Italian
editor, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, as Natalie Davis describes, “edited
the text extensively so as to make its author and in some cases his Africa
more acceptable to Christian European readers.”45 Davis notices that
43
Jean Leon l’African, Déscription de l’Afrique, 2 vols. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1980.
44
Abdelkrim Benslim, “Leon L’African à la rencontre de la Renaissance,”
Multilinguales 2017 (8).
45
Natalie Zemon Davis, “‘Leo Africanus’ Presents Africato Europeans,” in
Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, ed. Joaneath Spicer.
Baltimore, MD: Walters Art Museum, 2012, pp. 61–79 at p. 65.
“the French, Latin, and English translators made further changes from
Ramusio’s edition.”46 Even the terms Africa and Europe themselves
are borrowed by him during his stay in Italy.47
Nevertheless, one can still see how the region was apprehended at the
time. For instance, al-Wazzân labels the entire population as Africans,
a name that was unknown and that is not found in Arab historiog-
raphy. The term Barbary was also a European term not found in the
historiography of the region and has no equivalent in Arabic, the
mother tongue of al-Wazzân. Therefore, I will leave this problematic
text aside. Let us look at the Ottoman side to see how the region was
configured under their control.
By the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Turks were masters of most of
the region – that is, of an area that corresponds roughly to what we
today call Algeria and Tunisia and Libya, with Morocco out of the
control of the Sublime Porte. The Ottomans’ knowledge of the area,
though not exhaustive, relied on local knowledge.48 What I call local
knowledge (borrowed from Clifford Geertz) consists of historiog-
raphy, literature, jurisprudence, and so forth. Arab historiographers
and geographers, especially Ibn Khaldûn, Idrissi, and Ibn Hawqal,
constituted the main references for Ottoman knowledge of the area.49
The Ottoman state was neither a historiographic state nor
a cartographic state, and less so an ethnographic state even when the
social sciences emerged in Europe as important for the construction of
empire. The Ottoman Empire was rather a state in the tradition of old
empires, with its own specificity, in relying mostly on the army to
conquer, but also, innovatively, on the system millet to rule.
However, Ottoman bureaucracy neither engaged in this systematic
study of the region nor possessed the technologies of power that
46
Ibid.
47
Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth Century Muslim between
Worlds. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006, p. 127.
48
Giancarlo Casale, “Seeing the Past: Maps and Ottoman Historical
Consciousness,” in Writing History at the Ottoman Courts: Editing the Past,
Refashioning the Future, ed. Hakki Erdem Cipa and Emine Fetvaci.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 80–99. Also, in this same
volume, see Hakan Karateke, “The Challenge of Periodization: New Patterns in
Nineteenth Century Ottoman Historiography,” pp. 131–132.
49
On Ibn Khaldûn, see Cornell Fleischer, “Royal Authority, Dynastic Cyclism,
and ‘Ibn Khaldûnism’ in Sixteenth Century Ottoman Letters,” Journal of Asian
and African Studies 1983 (18)3–4: 198–220.
18 Introduction
colonial powers invented and monopolized and that made of know-

ledge an instrument of conquest and rule.50 However, by the eighteenth
century, Ottomans were clearly relying also on Europeans for know-
ledge even of their own “provinces,” as is evident in the fact that
European maps with Ottoman scripts (i.e., Arabic) were reproduced,
and their very format, the atlas, was also copied.51 The Ottomans did
not seem to deploy the systematic investigation inherent to colonial
enterprises, and this is mainly because they were still in a stage of
imitating Europe in its modes of government as well as in its techno-
logical prowess. The key relationship within the state was still that
between the suzerain and his subjects across the entirety of the empire.
The Ottomans did not develop the technologies of power that make
this type of knowledge possible, useful, and even necessary. The idea that
one needs this knowledge to exert power and control over populations
did not seem to be part of the Ottoman rule. The study of the past, as
with Ibn Abi Diyâf,52 was itself for the purpose of ʿibar (example) and
hikam (wisdom) and not as an instrumental discipline in the making of
˙
nationhood and statehood; neither was it the basis of a modern govern-
mentality – that is, the management of populations.53 Historiographic
writings consisted mainly of chronicles and annals that could be har-
nessed for political projects pertaining to the ruler’s legitimacy.54
50
Abdelmajid Hannoum, “Colonialism and Knowledge in Algeria: The Archives
of the Arab Bureau,” History and Anthropology 2008 (19)2: 91–114.
Reproduced in Violent Modernity: France in Algeria. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
51
See, for example, Mostafa Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2016, p. 45.
52
Ahmad ibn Abî L-Diyâ, Ithâf ahl al-zamân bi akhbâr mulûk tûnis wa ‘ahd al-
˙
amân. Tunis: Nashr˙ Kitābat al-Dawlah lil-shuʼūn al-Thaqāfı̄yah wa-al-Ikhbār,
1963.
53
“Example” and “wisdom” are only approximate translations of ʿibar and
hikam, two concepts that had to be placed within the medieval conceptions of
˙knowledge and political life. Why should history serve as an example? And to
whom? And for what purpose? Why should history serve as a means of hikam?
What is the function of hikam? See Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: ˙
The Concept of Knowledge˙ in Medieval Islam. Leiden: Brill, 1970. Also see
Abdelmajid Hannoum, “The Muqaddima of Khaldûn,” in Bloomsbury
History: Theory and Method Digital Resource, forthcoming.
54
On writing chronicles, see Dimitris Kastristis, “The Historical Epic Ahvali-
Sultan Mehemmed (The Tales of Sultan Mehemet) in the Context of Early
Ottoman Historiography,” in Writing History at the Ottoman Courts: Editing
the Past, Refashioning the Future, ed. Hakki Erdem Cipa and Emine Fetvaci.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
Already, by the sixteenth century, these were part of “a project of

developing an ideological, theological, and historiographical basis for
establishing the Ottoman Sultan as the legitimate heir of the Roman
emperors.”55 The conception of history (of which archaeology is a part)
as a “science” of the past, one that is politically useful, and even vital
since it provides the substance of the nation and the validation of the
state, is part of modernity. Ottoman archaeology itself seems to be little
more than a domain of European archaeology.56
The famous tanzimat – modern reforms the Ottomans had initiated
by the eighteenth century – were efforts directed at modernizing state
bureaucracy, especially the army, and making it functional in the face
of the technologies being monopolized by Europe.57 Amongst all the
ideas Ottoman rulers discussed and pursued, the idea that knowledge is
fundamental for conquest and rule does not seem to be present; there
was little interest in what was called in Europe military sciences – that
is, in modern science. This is the same science Napoleon deployed in
Egypt and colonial officers pursued in Algeria. Even in the work of Ibn
Abi Diyâf, history remains an auxiliary of religion, not a major tool for
building nationhood. However, Ottoman perceptions of the region
cannot be identified as local perceptions; the Ottoman elite were not
connected with the population, and neither did they integrate local
elites in their Ottoman club.58 Already by the eighteenth century
what were usually called the “North African provinces” were no longer
under the direct control of the Sublime Porte, albeit still under the
control of local political Ottoman elites.59 Those who assured the
production of knowledge and guaranteed the ideological order, the
55
Hakki Erdem Cipa and Emine Fetvaci, eds., Writing History at the Ottoman
Courts: Editing the Past, Refashioning the Future. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2013, p. 86.
56
Zainab Bahrani and Zeynep Çelik, “Archaeology and Empire,” in Scramble for
the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, ed.
Zainab Bahrani and Zeynep Çelik. Istanbul: Salt, 2011, pp. 13–40 at p. 15.
57
For a brief and general view on the tanzimat, see Albert Hourani, The History of
the Arab Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, pp.
271–278.
58
Tal Shuval, “The Ottoman Algerian Elite and Its Ideology,” Journal of Middle
Eastern Studies 2000 (23): 324.
59
Andrew Hess, “The Forgotten Frontiers: The Ottoman North African Provinces
in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History, ed.
Thomas Naff and Roger Owen. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1977, pp. 74–75.
20 Introduction
ulama, were of various backgrounds.60 In the case of Algeria, the

educational system was not dependent on the Ottoman state, but on
the Islamic institution of habous.61 One can conclude that the local
conception of the region, especially amongst the Muslim elite, was the
same one we find in the work of Ahmad ibn Khalid al-Nassiri and Ibn
Diyâf – an embryo of the nation-state.62
Colonial Modernity and the Violence of Invention

Local perceptions of the region were different from outside percep-
tions – that is, European ones – even in precolonial times. However,
with the advent of colonial rule in Algeria, its agents would soon
harness technologies of modern power not only to redefine the region
but also to invent it as a new entity with a past and a present that frame
it and give it its ultimate meaning. Technologies of power not known in
the area – consisting of techniques of archaeological excavation and
archaeological narratives, modern historical narratives based on trans-
lations, material evidence, and comparative historiographies, ethno-
graphic surveys, modern linguistic research, statistics, and other modes
of inquiry – were harnessed to produce a practical knowledge of use to
the colonies and their metropole.
As much as colonialism relied on technological military might, it
emerged, from its early beginnings, as an economic enterprise whose
reliance on culture was vital and undoubtedly unprecedented. One of
the novelties of this type of conquest and rule was not that it sought
economic exploitation or even expansionist prestige, but rather it is the
fact that modern knowledge became its main instrument of expansion
and exploitation. One cannot overstress this cultural dimension of
colonial rule. Its use of technologies of power to manage the colonies
and their populations had drastic effects that outlasted it. Indeed, in
colonial times, the region under consideration underwent significant
transformation that shaped it into a new configuration, entirely trans-
formed, and this transformation has lasted to our present day. The
power of this transformation was also such that it not only appears
60
Houari Touati, Entre Dieu et les hommes. Paris: EHESS, 1994, p. 264.
61
Marcel Emerit, “L’état intellectual et moral de l’Algérie en 1830,” Revue
d’histoire moderne et contemporaine July–September 1954 : 199–212.
62
Abū al-ʻAbbās Ahmad ibn Khālid al-Nāsirı̄, Kitāb al-Istiqsā li-akhbār duwal al-
˙
Maghrib al-aqsá.˙Casablanca: Dâr al-Kitâb, 1954. Ibn Abî ˙ L-Diyâ, Ithâf.
˙ ˙
Colonial Modernity and the Violence of Invention 21
concrete, self-evident, and natural, but the precolonial past itself was
constructed in such a manner as to provide historical justification and
greatly contribute to the naturalness of the construction. The idea of
this book is to show how the Maghreb was invented in the colonial
context by what I call colonial modernity.
By colonial modernity, I mean a historical moment in the develop-
ment of modernity when certain characteristics of modernity changed
and became indistinct from colonialism. The historical condition we
commonly call modernity was neither exactly the same nor entirely
different in each phase of its development from the sixteenth century to
the present. This includes the phase I am discussing – namely, the
nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century. By
colonial modernity, I mean the European project of civilizing the rest of
the world, a project seen, presented, articulated, and defended as an
obligation and a duty of Europe toward its others. This is a project
marked by a strong belief in the idea of progress, in human diversity,
and in human biological, intellectual, and moral inequality. It is also
a project marked by the prevalence of racial theories. It is a project
driven by Europe’s strong belief that it has not only the right but the
duty to transform other societies and help them become modern (the
idea of the civilizing mission). By colonial modernity, I also mean this
very important idea (found in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville and in
the writings – and the practice – of Thomas Robert Bugeaud) that
knowledge is necessary for conquest and rule. Violence is also neces-
sary, it is true – violence is inherent in the project – but violence is not
enough to transform lands and peoples. Indeed, one of the particular-
ities of colonial modernity is its specific combination of the use of
knowledge, force, and power to not only destroy and eliminate but
also to transform and create. And this act of transformation is what
makes modernity legitimate in the colonial order of things.63
When we consider what we call today the Maghreb, we have to make
a clear distinction between the body of knowledge Europe had formed
regarding the region before its colonial rule, the earlier body of know-
ledge the Ottoman Turks had formed, the body of local knowledge,
and, finally, the body of knowledge Europe formed in and about the
region during its phase of colonial rule. Knowledge formed by the
Ottoman Turks up to the seventeenth century did not participate in
63
See Hannoum, Violent Modernity.
22 Introduction
what we can call the will to power, meaning its purpose was not to
systematically explore the region scientifically, so to speak, so as to use
that knowledge to enforce their rule, or to harness it for economic
exploitation. Their rule was based on Muslim legitimacy as defenders
of the faith and the land against Christian incursions (especially
Spanish and Portuguese on the coasts of what we today call Algeria
and Morocco) and on a strong army. By the seventeenth century, the
two regimes in Tunisia and Algeria were seen as autonomous and were
dealt with as such by European powers. Morocco, of course, has never
been part of the Ottoman Empire.
European knowledge from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, as
abundant as it was, pertained more to a humanistic trend in Europe,
what Claude Lévi-Strauss would call humanist modernity even if it still
had economic and political interests.64 French maps of that period
differ markedly from those of later colonial times. Research has dem-
onstrated that the French knew a good deal about the region through
the work of diplomats, merchants, former Christian slaves, and
Muslim slaves in Europe. The region seems to have been visualized in
more or less a similar fashion throughout the 1600s and 1700s, as
shown by a number of unpublished maps. By the 1700s, the region was
commonly called Barbarie in Europe. While it was delimited as a single
unit, its parts had different names: Etat du Royaume de Fes, Etat du
Royaume d’Alger, Etat de Royaume de Tunis, Etat de Royaume de
Tripolie.65
Europeans were not strangers to the region and neither was the
region strange to them. Before the advent of French colonial rule in
Algeria, the region had known European presence, in the coastal cities
especially from Mogador to Tangier and to Oran. The Portuguese,
Spanish, and even the British succeeded one another along the coast;
some of them maintained a longer presence that continues today.66
This presence also allowed an accumulation of knowledge about the
64
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1976,
p. 274.
65
See in Chapter 1, the map by Guillaume Deslile dated 1722.
66
Damião de Góis, Les Portugais au Maroc de 1495 a 1521. Rabat: Felix Moncho,
1937. For the presence of the Spanish, see Fernand Braudel, “Les Espagnoles en
Algérie, 1492–1792,” in Histoire et Historiens de l’Algérie, ed. J. Alazard,
E. Albertini, and A. Bel. Paris: Alcan, 1931, pp. 231–266. Eloy Martín Corrales,
“Les Espagnols au Maroc (1767–1860): le défi de travailler avec l’autre,”
Cahiers de la Méditerranée 2012 (84): 197–212.
Colonial Modernity and the Violence of Invention 23
region upon which colonial knowledge was built. Clearly, it was not
built from scratch but was the result of a long and intense encounter.
The age of invention, it seems, related to the power of transformation
of colonial modernity. Hence, there is a series of inventions that all
happened in the colonial period: the invention of tradition, the inven-
tion of the Mediterranean, the invention of Africa, the invention of
France, the invention of the Americas, the invention of the land of
Israel.67 Colonial modernity was an ideological project of an economic
order for which everything had to be reconfigured: geographies, popu-
lations, traditions, polities, languages, sexualities, ideas not only in one
corner of the globe but in its entirety. The invention of the Maghreb is
a case among cases, a local transformation amidst global ones,
a reconfiguration of one of a number of pieces from which the global
whole is made. These inventions were made by powerful, already
global colonial orders, some of them French, others British or Dutch,
but all belonging to colonial modernity.
The Maghreb was a French colonial invention, which means that the
incessant effort to make sense of it, to conceptualize it, to reconfigure it,
to describe its geography and trace its contours was mainly the work of
French colonial agents, officers, and scholars (often one subsuming the
others). France’s imperial power and colonial technologies were
matched only by Great Britain and not at all by Spain or Italy.
Spanish and Italian efforts were minimal in comparison. National
historians, in the aftermath of the so-called independence era, were
francophone and engaged, just like their Salafi predecessors, with
French colonial authors. Therefore, it is my contention that not only
was the invention French but it existed only in a francophone world
inherited by authors with mostly francophone training. Hence, the sad
observation that French – not Arabic – remains the language of the
study of the area, its history, its culture, its population, even its most
intimate sexuality. It is surely a sign of enduring coloniality that one can
67
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Maroula Sinarellis Bourgue
et al., eds., L’invention scientifique de la Méditerranée: Egypte, Morée, Algérie.
Paris: EHESS, 1998. Mudimbe, Invention of Africa. Hervé Le Bras and
Emmanuel Todd, L’invention de la France: Atlas anthropologique et politique.
Paris: Gallimard, 2012. Enrique Dussel and Michael Barber, The Invention of
the Americas: Eclipse of the Other and the Myth of Modernity. New York:
Continuum, 1995. Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel. London:
Verso, 2012.
24 Introduction
dispense of Arabic or Tamazight or local languages (often called dia-

lects, darija) and rely exclusively on French to engage in examining the
region – a practice that can do nothing but perpetuate colonial under-
standings, categories, discourses, and everything these imply in the
present. This characteristic, also found in African studies, is almost
unthinkable now in Middle Eastern studies, where the acquisition of
languages, be they Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or Hebrew, are conditions
for the study of the region. The Maghreb seems to be an exception: how
could it not be since some of its main architects, in the colonial period
or in the postcolonial one, were cognizant neither of Arabic nor of its
other local forms of expression?
On Method
Because the word invention is generic and has been used in the titles of
a number of books to describe (and sometimes not) the making of
countries and people, I would like to specify in what way I use it. The
term was made popular by a now-classic work called The Invention of
Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. My use of
the term is not generic or random; I use the concept from
a phenomenological perspective. By invention, I mean neither a false
fabrication against a true order of things nor a distortion of an objective
reality. All realities are constructed, and therefore there are various
ways to study the invention of the region in its previous historical
phases with Islam, the Romans, the Greeks, the Vandals, and so
forth. The purpose of this book is to consider the French invention of
the region as the Maghreb. By invention, I also do not mean a creation
ex nihilo. Rather, by invention I mean a creation out of systems of
meaning that existed before the act of invention itself. A textual trad-
ition constitutes semantic fields, and what we call the Maghreb has
been constructed by a systematic production of texts, geography, car-
tography, historiography, archaeology, linguistics, ethnography, and
literature that created the very understanding of what is called the
Maghreb. This creation was a processing of previous knowledge
about the region, textually – namely, in the forms of interpretation
and translation – and ethnographically – namely, in the forms of
archaeology and fieldwork. This ensemble of texts had the status of
science and as such was endowed with great discursive power that
made it a source of knowledge for literary work. Literature, and more
On Method 25
specifically fiction, helped propagate the idea of the Maghreb to a large

audience in the colonies and in the metropole, then and now. In so
doing, literature was also instrumental in creating geographical
imaginaries.
Since invention is always a reconfiguration of the old, I argue that the
invention of the Maghreb (as a region, as a concept, and therefore also
as a field of study) has been the work of systematic interpretation of
local texts and the result of a colonial encounter between a European
population with a specific way of knowing and even a prior knowledge
about a region with which they were not unfamiliar. Let us remember
that before the arrival of the French, the region had known in modern
times the successful colonization of the Spanish, the Portuguese, and
even the British from the fifteenth century to 1830.68 Colonialism did
not start in 1830, but before, and just as colonialism did not start with
the nineteenth century, neither did capitalism – its economic structure.
And throughout these centuries of conquest, an intense exchange took
place in the region in terms of trade, knowledge, diplomacy, slavery,
piracy, and of course war and even occupations. The region after all is
part of the Mediterranean, which was the center of the world until the
sixteenth century, in Braudel’s view.69 In this sense, and because there
is no creation ex nihilo, every invention is necessarily a reinvention, but
every (re)invention is sui generis; each has its own history, its own
dynamics, its own politics, and its own purposes. This book examines
this history, shows the dynamics of French colonial invention, analyzes
its politics, and interrogates the purposes of this invention in and
beyond the colonial era.
I write the history of this invention through texts, or to be more
precise, I examine a tradition of texts that despite the different modes of
their expression constitute a discursive formation.70 I interrogate their
meanings, their categories, and their strategies of persuasion, but also
the politics of their production, their use, their transformation, and the
ways they shape, transform, change, and articulate colonial imagin-
aries of space, of history, and of population. As a strategy of analysis,
I chose authoritative texts and marginal ones to articulate the
68
Braudel, “Les Espagnoles en Algérie, 1492–1792.” Góis, Les Portugais au
Maroc de 1495 a 1521.
69
Braudel, La Mediterranée et le monde méditerranéen.
70
See Michel Foucault on the concept of discursive formation in L’archéologie du
savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969, pp. 44–54.
26 Introduction
conceptions of the region through time, from within colonial and

postcolonial institutions, and through different regimes of the produc-
tion of knowledge – colonial and postcolonial. I purposely chose
canonical texts along with marginal ones in order to show continuities
and detect discrepancies that are often discursive strategies to open up
the horizon of the geographic imagination. Following a long phenom-
enological tradition from Edmund Husserl to Paul Ricoeur, I maintain
that what we call a reality is a perception, the product of an ensemble of
texts that constitute a system of meanings in and of itself, the creation
of the webs of significance that constitute our reality. However, not all
texts are born equal, live equal, or die equal. Some texts are more
authoritative than others, some are more powerful for a time than
others, some are more convincing than others, and some are more
capable of longevity than others. All of them constitute a textual for-
mation, a discursive ensemble, with rules that condition the creation of
objects – invented objects that constitute our own social world.
It is my contention that these texts (i.e., objects) do not stand by
themselves, but are institutionalized, invested with political power that
makes them play roles others don’t play, at least not with the same
effectiveness. Of course, all texts are born within institutions, and no
text can possibly exist outside of them. The texts, which also include
maps and archaeological artifacts, I extensively analyze in this book
were all produced by powerful colonial institutions and through scien-
tific missions such as the Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie, Mission
scientifique au Maroc, Mission archéologique française à Carthage,
and powerful state institutions such as the armée d’Afrique, the Arab
Bureau, l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, Mission
archéologique française à Carthage, the University of Algiers, and the
Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines. Even local texts, such as those
of Ibn Khaldûn, al-Idrissi, al-Bakri, Ibn Hawqal, and Ibn ʻIdārı̄ were
ˉ
also appropriated, domesticated, and transformed for colonial use.
Also, in the history of this formation that produced the Maghreb,
I do not subscribe to the common periodization and especially the all
too easy textual separation between medieval, precolonial, colonial,
and postcolonial. For instance, medieval and precolonial texts
(whether in Arabic or in European languages) have become part of
the colonial discursive formation. Colonial institutions not only appro-
priated local libraries, physically and symbolically, but also entirely
transformed them through acts of translation or interpretation in such
On Method 27
a way that their colonial meanings have become part of their overall
significance. And, as I have noted, the process of intervention and
invention did not start in 1830, but rather much earlier, albeit hesi-
tantly, tentatively, by an emerging Europe expanding beyond its bor-
ders. Colonial power, however, was instrumental in incorporating the
past and inventing the present.
Texts are what we principally have at our disposal to access the
past, which is ultimately nothing but our reading of them in the
present. Even material objects become narratives, as in the case of
archaeology I discuss in Chapter 2. To demonstrate how the Maghreb
was constituted as a new geopolitical entity neither African nor
Middle Eastern, I will examine a variety of forms of knowledge:
maps, geographical treaties, historical narratives, ethnographic
accounts, archaeological texts, and literary creations. I place these
texts within their institutions, for there is no knowledge without
power, and that knowledge is unseparated from the will to power. It
is this that I call technologies of colonial power, and by this I mean
that colonial modernity relied systematically on new technologies to
produce knowledge not only to rule and govern but also to invent and
create. Besides the strong belief that knowledge was mandatory for
colonization, these technologies of power operated drastic destruc-
tion and radical transformations of the land and the populations of
the colonies. They destroyed existing realities (themselves creations,
for sure), and transformed old realities into new ones; they created
their own understandings and their own discourse that they imposed,
across time, as the primary understanding and the primary discourse.
Technologies of power turned local knowledge (in Arabic and in
Berber) into colonial knowledge. They made them new and modern,
or, in other words, European. It is a will to knowledge in the
Napoleonic tradition that makes science a vital instrument of rule
and conquest.
Colonial power appropriated what existed before and at the time of
its constitution. It also commanded and even conditioned the emer-
gence of a new local knowledge, part and parcel of its discursive
dynamics. My examination is not limited to colonial knowledge and
neither is it limited to French forms of knowledge. As I have noted
before, I also examine local knowledge – to again use Geertz’s expres-
sion – that is, knowledge produced, in the past as well as in the colonial
present, by local elites to offer competitive interpretations, to create
28 Introduction
their own realities, or to defend old ones.71 However, I do argue, all

along, that the power of colonial discourse was such that it commanded
local response and it created the social world from within which local
elites, even the most trenchant enemies of colonialism, argue and
create. Power in colonial settings may have been everywhere, but
there was an imbalance of power. Not only did some have more than
others and others less, but colonial power regulated counter-power by
creating limits to it. Hence every cognitive action of the native was
a reaction, and every reaction was conditioned by colonial power and
its logic. Thus it perpetuated the same truths it intended to dismantle.
Therefore, in this long process of invention, local responses partici-
pated in this creation. The Maghreb could not have existed without the
colonial and postcolonial engagement of a powerful colonial percep-
tion. Despite change and alterations, this perception still shapes the
region today.
I demonstrate that this invention operates not only within a specific
territory, the one called the Maghreb, but also, conjointly, in relation to
other territories, West Africa on one hand and Egypt on the other.
Egypt was also reconfigured, gradually, within the larger area of the
Middle East, and thus was separated from the Maghreb and served to
separate the Maghreb. Because the focus of the book is not these
inventions, I proceed to show the limits of the Maghreb and, in the
process, trace the general configuration of West Africa, the Sahara, and
Egypt. By showing the cultural and political processes of these config-
urations of zones and units, I also hope to show that the lines between
them are not natural, but are rather constructs that served purposes,
and that these limits (of geography, race, language, histories, etc.), once
deconstructed, enable the region and people to open up to a larger
human horizon where geography, race, language, and histories are
historicized and relativized, and human connectivity is maximized,
where nationalism is overcome, and humanism is espoused not as an
ideology of an elite, but as a praxis, as a way of life for people. This is
a hope of the future, not the present, whose realities we shall endure
while striving to change them. For the present, the book offers itself as
a history of the colonial and postcolonial configurations of the region
we know today as the Maghreb in relation to the Middle East and
71
Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1983.
On Method 29
Africa. As such, it is a history of a space whose configurations will

undoubtedly change in the future as they have changed in the past.
The book is made of eight parts – six chapters, this introduction, and
an epilogue. If the first three chapters are devoted to colonial know-
ledge and the last three to local knowledge, this symmetry is only
accidental. The reader will undoubtedly see that the two bodies of
knowledge interacted in a colonial dynamic that converted the local
into the colonial and the colonial into the local. However, in both cases,
the colonial, for reasons that will become obvious by the end of the
book, was highly hegemonic, in the sense Antonio Gramsci gives to this
concept, meaning not only dominant, but also endowed with the great
ability to convert, change, last, and outlast other discursive formations.
Finally, I adopt the Middle East Studies Association’s system of trans-
literation except when Arabic names are cited otherwise in precolonial
or colonial texts. In this case, I mostly keep the original spellings
especially as they are known in French translation (for example, El-
Bekri and not al-Bakri). All the translations are mine unless otherwise
indicated.
1 Geographic Imagination
and Cartographic Power
Cartographic representation is a potent modern means of spatial visu-

alization. It is what allows us to identify human-made boundaries of
space, be they of a country, a region, a city, or the globe. Graphic
representation not only makes spatial visualization possible, simple,
and natural, but it also effectively shapes geographic imaginaries and
allows their conception to be easily recognized and remembered. We
know a country when we see its map, and we tend to think about a map
when we think of a country. The representation seems almost natural
since it operates with a minimal set of signs: drawings, colors, and
names. The power of maps derives from this apparent simplicity and
also, evidently, from a graphic representation made possible by modern
techniques and technologies obeying visual rules and graphic patterns.
Yet, the relationship between a map and the geographic entity it refers
to is not arbitrary (the way a linguistic sign is), but rather highly
motivated in that there is a semiotic relation between the signified
(the idea of the map) and the signifier (the ensemble of signs that signify
the idea). This relation has the status of science, therefore of accuracy
and exactitude: it is mathematical and geometrical, and thus it creates
the effects of reality itself to the point that maps are often confused with
real locations and real locations seem to exist only through maps.
Maps are thus undoubtedly powerful tools of modern states.
Colonial powers made extensive use of maps in their numerous con-
quests, in their countless battles, in tracing borders and frontiers, in
appropriating space, and of course in forming new geographical
entities that had no existence before. Maps also are texts to be read
and interpreted not only by experts but also by anyone who can see
them. Maps are designed to visualize a space – a land, a country,
a continent, a globe, even a galaxy. They are signifying objects whose
signs (often simple despite the complex mathematical and geometrical
operations behind their final design) can be deciphered as a text. Maps
30
Geographic Imagination and Cartographic Power 31
are cultural artifacts, produced and reproduced, communicated and

propagated, consumed and used by states and by groups for a variety of
political ends (to substantiate the nation, to limit and redefine its
margins and contours, and as a strategy of persuasion in diplomatic
maneuvering, to wage war, to sign peace agreements, etc.). As cultural
artifacts, maps are also produced by power and by state institutions
such as accredited geographical associations. For even as states have
the monopoly over historical production, so do they over cartographic
production.
Graphic representations are regulated by an array of rules; they are
the product of these rules. As such, maps are not only hegemonic
constructions but, most importantly, they are also themselves an
index of the power that creates them, especially because of the techni-
calities (themselves a product of science) involved in their making.
A map must be created in a precise way to be recognized as legitimate.
The greater the power, the greater the graphic hegemony, and the
greater the hegemony, the more natural and self-evident the graphic
representation appears. The map of the Maghreb is thus a graphic
representation, and since the system of the graphic representation of
the Maghreb (that is, the Maghreb) is a product of colonial power, the
Maghreb itself is not only a French colonial creation but also the
product and the field of colonial power.
The Maghreb first appeared as a map. Maps produced about the
region in colonial times were the product of modern power – that is, of
modern technologies that created the simulacra of exactitude required
to create the object they represent: the Maghreb. Creation, however,
never happens ex nihilo; it is also the transformation of old realties –
that is, old creations whose power of creation modern power has
rendered ineffective and/or obsolete. Modern colonial power relied,
in the case of the Maghreb, on old cartographic traditions – on Arab,
Greek, and Roman maps – as it also engaged in its own technical
production of maps to reconceptualize the region the way it has
remained since the 1830s. This conceptualization of the region was
not completed overnight or even over a decade or a year. It was
a gradual process subject to rectifications and modifications. It
was accomplished piece by piece according to a cultural logic, using
categories, negotiating alternative ways of thinking and doing, operat-
ing in different colonial circumstances. Complex as it is, this process
produced geographical realities with differences and contradictions.
32 Geographic Imagination and Cartographic Power
Some of the differences were minor and some major, but all were
accompanied by a plethora of names that culminated in visualizing
the region as a new whole defined not only by French colonial power
but also in relation to it, as an extension of it, claiming ownership of it
in the process.
However, it would be incorrect to argue that this work started in
colonial times. Modernity preceded colonialism and evidently out-
lasted it. Modern Europe, and not only France, had keen interest in
the world, and not only in the Maghreb. Modern Europe long
employed modern technologies to account for the world, to interpret
it, and to act on it before proceeding to change it in colonial times.
Modern interest in the world manifested itself, from the 1500s onward,
in the making of maps and atlases. The region of the Maghreb was at
the intersection of different worlds, and its construction necessarily
involved not only all the colonial powers (save the Dutch) but also the
three continents within which the region was to emerge as a new
geopolitical body distinct from its surroundings to the east and west,
cut from its southern part, and in a relation of political dependency to
its north, where the heart of colonial power lay at a center that directed
its transformative power to the rest of the world.
In this chapter, I set out to examine the maps that have participated
in the creation and visualization of the Maghreb. I take maps as
discourses in and of themselves whose aim (and effect) is not only to
persuade but also to form geographic imaginaries. Therefore I am not
interested in the set of rules that regulate the technical production of
maps, but rather in the set of rules that regulate the cultural production
of maps.1 Otherwise, this chapter is not about geography as such,
neither is it really about the politics of map production, but rather it
is a semiotic analysis of maps and the narratives they implicitly or
explicitly contain and that are, as I show, part and parcel of the
constitution of the map as a signifying object. To say it differently,
I take maps as texts and analyze the system of signs that makes them
signifiers. I also examine how these maps participate in the making of
a cartographic imaginary that not only allows politicians, colonial
agents, and military officers to know their locations but also makes
the ordinary citizen aware of the existence of an empire and its
1
On the deconstruction of maps, see the influential essay of J. B. Harley,
“Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographia 1989 (26)2: 1–20.
Before French Hegemony 33
geography. Indeed, what I intend to examine is precisely the categories

by which maps of the region, and maps related to the region, were
constituted, as well as the kinds of cultural representation informing
this constitution.
Before French Hegemony

By the 1600s, one finds a surprising number of maps of Africa. Their
very existence, signed by one of the colonial powers, is indicative of the
fact that by that date, not only were European nations already posses-
sors of colonies, but they specifically had their sights on Africa. For the
sovereignty of Africa’s many entities of the time, these maps of imperial
Europe stood as the Sword of Damocles. They represented the African
continent as a single unity whose many pieces they marked not only
with names but also with symbols, indicating their primitiveness and/or
their savagery, and therefore as ripe for conquest and rule. These
symbols of primitiveness, characteristic of what Benjamin Schmidt
calls exotic geography, themselves promoted the idea of Europe.2 The
globe is now perceived as continents even though within a continent
one can see contrasts, divisions, and cleavages, all indicative of political
or cultural contrasts even within a single unity as with Africa. But this
new reality is characterized by a binary, with Europe on one hand and
an exotic world on the other.3
In the 1700s, European cartography, made possible by mathematics,
geometry, and astronomy, was cultivated, promulgated, and taught as
a useful science by Jesuits, and thus was also the beginning of the
institutionalization of knowledge of the region – knowledge that
would become the region itself in the European imagination. “In the
Jesuit curriculum, students were exposed early to maps and globes and
encouraged to make use of them. A core of the science curriculum
explored various explanations for the description of the universe.”4
2
Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s
Early Modern World. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2015,
pp. 17–18.
3
Ibid.
4
Mary Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing
Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005, p. 28.
Map 1 Africa, 1737, by Johann Mathias Hase5
5
https://lib-dbserver.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/africa/maps-continent/1737%20hase.jpg. Last accessed May 25,
2020. Princeton University Library, reproduced with permission.
For instance, in a work by Guillaume Delisle, geographer to the king

of France, dated 1722 and dedicated to and made for the usage of the
king, one can see the region identified as Barbarie with four political
units: Royaume du Maroc, Royaume d’Alger, Royaume de Tunis, and
Royaume de Tripoly.6 Egypt is already distinct from this bloc despite
the fact that it shares a Mediterranean shore with it, but is not con-
nected to it by the Sahara, also called Desert de Barbarie. It is also clear
that the separation between geographical units within the African
continent is the result of a political divide (découpage) that obeys
specific cultural norms. As Christian Grataloup puts it, “the divide of
parts of the world is totally a fact of culture.”7 A geographer to the king
takes into consideration political criteria pertaining to dynastical
power and royal domains. The world is not divided, in this view,
according to racial, colonized, and colonizable geographies, as became
the norm in the subsequent century; instead, the world is envisioned
according to space ruled by kings, as if the kingdom is the most natural
political unit. Louis Marin describes the cartographic order of this
same eighteenth century: “The knowledge and science of representa-
tion, to demonstrate the truth that its subject declares plainly, flow
nonetheless in a social and political hierarchy. The proof of its ‘theor-
etical’ truth had to be given, they are the recognizable signs; but the
economy of these signs in their disposition on the cartographic plane no
longer obeys the rules of the order of geometry and reason, but, rather,
the norms and values of the order of social and religious tradition.”8
In this political tradition, the kingdom was as natural as nature itself.
This political tradition was also religious since the universe itself is a divine
kingdom and the king rules only its earthly replica. Hence these maps
depict kingdoms and kingless lands – that is, vacant lands. The function of
the map in this political imaginary is to consolidate the royal view about
royalty. It also seems to be informative about political units within the
space and not, as we will see in the colonial era, geographical units
projected onto the map and not only separated from one another but
opposed to one another using criteria of geometry and race. In other
words, one can also read in these maps nascent imperial power, not yet
6
See map at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8595153t. Last accessed
May 14, 2020.
7
Grataloup, L’invention des continents, p. 17.
8
Louis Marin, Portrait of the King. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988, p. 173.
nascent colonial power (the first conditioned the second yet survived it
also). As such these maps operated according to European cartographic
imaginaries and not, as with colonial maps, according to local and
metropolitan imaginaries.
Historians and geographers across time have noted the importance
of Delisle’s cartographic authorship. For Charles Walckenaer, “Delisle
should be regarded as the principal creator of the system of modern
geography . . . the globes and the maps of the young Delisle were the
object of general admiration and opened up for him the door of the
Academy of Sciences that welcomed him in 1702.”9 For G. R. Crone,
“Delisle marks the transition to the modern map.”10 And it was Jean-
Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville who not only continued this tradition
but elevated it to new heights.11 He eliminated fictitious topographies
and introduced blanks to signal lack of knowledge instead of filling
them with fantastical signs, as we can observe in the previous carto-
graphic tradition. This was considered an important breakthrough,
a more practical way of mapping, more realistic, and maybe, in his
time, it was also considered more scientific. Admitting ignorance, as in
his blanks, was itself a scientific method.12 Maybe because of all these
reasons, d’Anville’s map of 1765 could be included in the first volume
of the Description de l’Egypte, where one can see Egypt as a distinct
country, separated westward by Libya and eastward by the Red Sea.13
D’Anville marked a great shift in cartographic representation in the
eighteenth century.14 However, historians distinguish the maps he
made of Africa before 1727 and those he made after 1747. In the
9
Charles Walckenaer, “Delisle (Guillaume),” in Biographie universelle, ancienne
et moderne; ou, Histoire, par ordre alphabétique, de la vie publique et privée de
tous les hommes qui se sont fait remarquer par leurs écrits, leurs actions, leurs
talents, leurs vertus ou leurs crimes, vol. 11, ed. Louis-Gabriel Michaud. Paris:
Michaud Frères, 1811–1862, p. 4.
10
G. R. Crone, Maps and Their Makers: An Introduction to the History of
Cartography, 5th edition. Kent: Archon Books, 1978, p. 89.
11
Ibid.
12
See Junia Ferreira Furtado, “Evolving Ideas: J. B. d’Anville’s Maps of Southern
Africa, 1725–1749.” Imago Mundi (69)2 (2017): 202–215.
13
Commission des sciences et arts d’Egypte, Description de l’Egypte ou receuil des
observations et des recherches qui ont eté faites en Egypte pendant l’expédition
de l’armée français. Paris: Imprimerie imperial, 1809.
14
Lucile Haguet and Catherine Hofmann, eds., Une carrière de géographe au
siècle des Lumières. Oxford: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment,
2018.
maps before 1727, there were no borders for African kingdoms and
European colonies. Blank space prevailed.15 After 1747, more borders
are traced in the maps, more names are specified, and more information
is provided regarding the interior of Africa. Yet the names, the borders,
and the overall conception of the northern part called Barbarie
remained unchanged in all of these maps from 1727 to 1749. Clearly,
European powers had much more knowledge of the geography of
northern Africa (including Egypt) than they had of the rest of Africa.
Even d’Anville does not seem to have added much. The region called
Barbarie in his map of 1749 seems also to be the same as in Johann
Mathias Hase’s 1737 map of Africa,16 considered “the first scientific
map” of the “dark continent.”17 In this map (as well as in those
d’Anville made between 1727 and 1747), Egypt is cut off from
Barbary and looks now toward Asia, with which it is connected by
the Red Sea. In the tradition of Greek geographers, the modern position
of Egypt – as a country between Africa and Asia, looking more toward
the latter than toward the former, despite its African setting – is
confirmed. In 1738, d’Anville made another map called cartes de la
Barbarie et de Nigrite. The map covers two entities, Barbarie and the
Nigrite (a name that obviously disappeared from European carto-
graphic language to be replaced in colonial times by pays des noirs or
pays des nègres). Here too Egypt is absent, and the desert separates
Barbarie and sub-Saharan Africa. If the region called Barbarie appears
as distinct, it is because it has been so in Greek and Roman texts. Yet its
contents are not the same as in those texts; in this time period, the
region meant something different to Christian Europe.
Barbarie, by contrast, was constructed, as expressed by its name, as
a land of primitiveness, nay, of the absence of law, the spread of
plunder and war, and so forth. Meanwhile, Egypt was defined not
only by its civilization (sciences, religion, and the law) and its history
(at the center of the ancient world, the source of Greek knowledge), but
also by its geographic and historical commerce and trade with India. To
these distinctions was added the racial distinction, with Egypt having
a specific racial composition: “Mamelukes, Turks, Turmen, Arabs, and
15
Furtado, “Evolving Ideas,” 205–206.
16
Kurt Hassert, Die Erforschung Afrikas, Leipzig: Goldmann, 1943, p. 50.
17
Ruthardt Oehme, “A French World Atlas of the 18th Century: The Atlas
General of G. L. Le Rouge.” Imago Mundi 5 (1971): 55–64 at 59.
Map 2 Africa, 1722, by Guillaume Delisle18
18
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8595153t. Last accessed May 25, 2020. Bibliothèque nationale de France, used with permission.
Coptes.”19 Even among Arabs, there was description of variety.20

I come back to these racial dynamics in the following chapters. The
separation between Barbarie and what geographers of this eighteenth
century used to call the “countries of the Negroes” (pays des nègres)
was also made to appear as natural by what the maps indicate as the
Desert de Barbarie. This reinforces the racial separation between the
“countries of Barbary” (pays de Barbarie) and the “countries of
the Negros” (pays des nègres).
In sum, we can even conclude that the general form of the region, with
its four major parts, was already known to Europeans, with some parts
known more than others thanks to travelers, diplomats, merchants, and
even Muslim slaves in Europe. The work of explorers and missionaries
was important in inventing the continent called Africa (and others, of
course) and in reconfiguring its parts using specific cultural categories of
race, civilization, and time. A common map of the eighteenth century not
only named the countries within the continent but also indicated with
visual images, their specificities according to the European eye: lions,
alligators, giraffes, half-naked black men, and men with turbans sur-
rounded by several women to indicate savagery, primitiveness, and polyg-
amous Islam. It was they who initiated what is commonly called physical
geography, as they were the first to combine physical geography with
human geography and thus announced a contemporary conception of
geography.21
For the case at hand, the region did not wait until the 1830s to be
mapped – this happened even earlier, long before the scores of maps of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the region was already
known to Europeans who had conquered and occupied parts of it from
the fourteenth century until the nineteenth, especially from Portugal and
Spain. By contrast, the year 1830 brought to the region another imperial
power, with more developed technologies of power, some of them tested
19
M. Le Baron Larrey, “Notice sur la conformation physique des Egyptiens et des
différentes races qui habitent en Egypte,” in Description de l’Egypte. Paris:
Imprimerie impériale, 1812, second volume, p. 1.
20
Edme-FrancoisJomard, “Sur les Arabes de l’Egypte moyenne,” Description de
l’Egypte État moderne, tome premier. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1809,
pp. 545–575. Also in the same volume, see M. Du Bois-Aymé, “Mémoire sur
les tribus arabes des deserts de l’Egypte,” pp. 577–606.
21
Claire Médard, L’Afrique orientale dans les géographies universelles
contemporaines. Bordeaux: Centre d’Etudes d’Afrique Noire, Institut d’Etudes
Politiques de Bordeaux, 1993, p. 24.
Map 3 “Barbarie et Nigritie,” 1738, by Guillaume Delisle22
22
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84929572/f1.item. Last accessed May 25, 2020. Bibliothèque nationale de France, used with
permission.
with marvelous effect in Egypt itself, just a few decades before French
troops landed in Algeria. For instance, the work of Walckenaer was
published in 1821 and offers an understanding of the region based on his
reading of canonical Arab geographers.23 The region seems to have a new
name, not Barbary, but Afrique septentrionale.24 Walckenaer offers know-
ledge both of and about the region. The first consists of information
withdrawn and of course translated from Islamic classics on geography
such as those of Idrissi, Ibn Hawqal, and Ibn Battouta, but also of
European travelers and diplomats such as James Bruce, Louis de Chénier,
Jacob Burckhardt, and Jérôme Lalande. Leo Africanus’s work Description
de l’Afrique also was a major reference of this body of knowledge.
However, the region was of geographical interest not only to the
French, but also generally so to Europeans, including the British, who
occupied the city of Tangier early on, and to the Spanish, who occupied
several cities on the northern African coast. European knowledge of the
region, regardless of national origins, was mainly a system of know-
ledge widely shared in Europe, and it represented the general visions
Europeans had of the region – and of the world beyond it. Thus,
Thomas Shaw, in an authoritative book of travels, also relied on
Ptolemy and Muslim geographers to give an account of the region.
The epitomizer of Edrisi, the Nubian Geographer, as he is commonly called,
places both the cities and Villages of this Part of Barbary, and those of the
more Western and Eastern districts of it, in his Third Climate, without any
particular Division into either Kingdoms or Provinces. But Abulfeda, besides
giving us in Ptolemy’s Method, the Longitudes and Latitudes of the most
considerable Cities, is more full and distinct in his general Division; and that
Part of this Country I am now treating of, will take in the whole of what he
calls al Maghreb al-Awsat [‫ ]ﺍﻟﻣﻐﺮﺏ ﺍﻷﻮﺴﻃ‬and a portion likewise of what he
calls al Magreb al-Acksa [‫ ]ﺍﻟﻣﻐﺮﺏ ﺍﻷﻗﺻﻰ‬Afrikeah. Gramaye, and the more
modern Geographers, divide this Kingdom into a great many Provinces,
according to the several petty Royalties which at one Time or other it was
canton’d into, before and after the Time of the Turkish Conquests. But at
present there are only Three, viz. the Province of Tlem-san, to the West; of
Titterie, to the South; and of Constantina, to the East of Algiers.25
23
Charles Walckenaer, Recherches géographiques sur l’Intérieur de l’Afrique
septentrionale. Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1821.
24
Ibid.
25
Thomas Shaw, Travels or Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and
the Levant. Oxford: Printed at the Theatre, 1738, pp. 5–6.
During the Age of Empire, from the sixteenth century onward,

European knowledge was formed and continued to accumulate, and
in the process, a precolonial perception of the region was already at
work. This formation was the result of travel, explorations, and erudi-
tions, but these travels, explorations, and eruditions themselves were
the manifestation of the culture of modernity and its capitalist infra-
structure that made these forms of global mobility possible in the first
place. On the eve of colonialism, this perception consisted of seeing the
region as a whole, as a unit in and of itself, as a land of Islam, most of it
part of the Ottoman Empire, but still made distinct by its map, its
African location, its frontiers with Egypt, its history, and its relation
within the Ottoman Empire and in relation to emerged European
empires. Egypt, by contrast, despite its comfortable location in
Africa, even in northern Africa, continued to be seen, as in the time of
Ptolemy, as part of Asia. It is this paradox, this “indetermination”
between Asia and Africa, that seemed to define it more than any
topographical construction.26
This indetermination was reproduced in the modern era. Jean-
Baptiste-Joseph Fourier writes in the introduction to the Description
de l’Egypte:
Placed between Africa and Asia, and communicating easily with Europe,
Egypt occupies the center of the ancient continent. This country presents only
great memories; it is the homeland of the arts and conserves innumerable
monuments; its principal temples and the places inhabited by its kings still
exist; even though its least ancient edifices had already been built by the time
of the Trojan War. Homer, Lycurgus, Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato all went
to Egypt to study the sciences, religion, and the laws. Alexander founded an
opulent city there, which for a long time enjoyed commercial supremacy and
which witnessed Pompey, Caesar, Mark Antony, and Augustus deciding
between them the fate of Rome and that of the entire world. It is therefore
proper for this country to attract the attention of illustrious princes who rule
the destiny of nations.
No considerable power was ever massed by any nation, whether in the
West or in Asia, that did not also turn that nation toward Egypt, which was
regarded in some measure as its natural lot.27
26
Lucile Haguet, Aegyptus, de l’Égypte de l’Occident: Concept et représentation
de l’Égypte dans la cartographie occidentale du XVe au XVIIIe siècle. Paris:
Universite de Paris IV, Sorbonne, 2007.
27
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993, p. 33.
Mapping Conquests 43
With the experience of Napoleon and the mapping of Egypt, cartog-

raphy entered a new age, the age of high imperial technology. No
longer the work of Jesuits or armchair geographers, cartography
became also ethnographic, relying not only on “being there” but also
on a division of labor, on the use of exact science not only to measure
reality, but to reproduce it. It is this technology and this cartographic
tradition that was passed on to officers of the Armée d’Afrique in
Algeria. Within this tradition, Egypt was also mapped in isolation
from its westward region, and looked more toward Syria than toward
Libya. In other words, colonial conquest confirmed, solidified, and
entrenched the singularity of Egypt as neither Africa nor Asia or,
which amounts to the same thing, of Egypt as both Africa and Asia.
The western border of Egypt announced Africa, another continent and
another people. Geometrical categories were used to create east, west,
north, and south (Africa) in combination with national categories, to
wit, British Africa, Spanish Africa, French Africa, Portuguese Africa,
and Italian Africa. French Africa was situated west and north. It is these
delimitations that I now need to examine to demonstrate how the
region that is the focus of this book emerged as a French colonial entity
by the name of the Maghreb.
Mapping Conquests
The occupation of Algiers in 1830 and then the annexation of the
country in 1839 created a rupture in the old world map. From 1830
onward, the French settled in Africa. That presence in itself changed the
contours and the content of the region in maps drawn by Europeans.
From the 1830s on, the maps of the region no longer showed the region
as a continuous whole; a discontinuous space was produced by the
presence of France. Also, the very presence of the French army allowed
the deployment of technologies of power that mapped the region area
by area as the conquest of Algeria progressed, and as Algeria was
mapped, its contours were traced west, east, and south, to open the
possibility of colonization in these directions.28 The presence of France
28
For the subject of mapping Algeria, see Hélène Blais, Mirages de la carte:
L’invention de l’Algérie coloniale. Paris: Fayard, 2014. Also see
Michel Hefernan, “An Imperial Utopia: French Surveys of North Africa in the
Early Colonial Period,” in Maps and Africa, ed. Jeffery Stone. Aberdeen:
Aberdeen University African Studies Group, 1994, cited in “L’Afrique
in Algeria was used as an argument for France to establish itself in

Tunisia against Italy, and in Morocco against Spain, and other
European powers such as Great Britain, Germany, and Italy. It was as
if the occupation of Algeria imposed French expansion eastward and
westward in a region already seen as continuous. As Ausone de Chancel
put it early in the phase of Algerian colonization:
Les deux pieds sur Alger, la France peut demain
Sur Fez et sur Tunis abattre chaque matin29
Two feet in Algiers, France can from tomorrow
Fall on Fez and Tunis every morrow
The French then operated within Algeria using a visual map of the
region from the seventeenth century. At the same time, new maps were
made of pieces of the land to be added to other pieces to be conquered and
then mapped. Sometimes, the maps preceded the advance of a military
regiment, and these maps were often drawn with the help of local assist-
ants whose knowledge of the land was deep and detailed. Mapping the
routes and locations of the expeditions by officers of the army, often aided
by locals, was of course, intended to make conquest progress and move
forward with ease and with as minimal cost as possible. The officers of the
army were, by the same token, mapping a country never mapped by
modern technologies. The will to knowledge was undoubtedly the will
to power. Each mapped piece of land was subjected to conquest and each
conquered piece of land entered into the map as a “pacified” land – that is,
a French land devoid of its local resistance. Mapping accompanied con-
quests, and maps were issued after conquests.30
Conquests were pure use of force: utter violence that not only des-
troyed realities but created new ones via modern technologies of
power, chief among them cartography. Yet, this violence relied on
cartographic knowledge and in turn produced a subdued land to be
mapped “correctly” or “more accurately” and to be added to a list of
maps of cities, villages, and areas. However, since mapping is also
septentrionale après le partage du monde romaine en empire d’Orient et empire

d’Occident” Revue Africaine, 1865 1(2): 84.
29
Cited in Adrien-Louis Berbrugger, “L’Afrique septentrionale après le partage
du monde romaine en empire d’Orient et empire d’Occident,” Revue Africaine
1856 1(2): 81–88 at 84.
30
Observation based on archival work conducted at Vincennes, Centre Historique
des archives, especially GR6MT206868I, GR6MT206B713C3,
GR6MT206B27, GR6MT206B713A8, and GR6MT206B40.
above all a spatial perception, the French (and by extension European

powers) had preconceived spatial ideas about the region often found
and shared amongst European academies. These preconceived spatial
ideas were also made of spatial categories, the region as a unit, and the
unit made of parts that constitute its wholeness entirely separated, in
European spatial imagination, from what lay to the west, east, and
south. As preconceived ideas are themselves not the product of spatial
nothingness, the Europeans, including the French, relied on existing
spatial conceptions, some of them familiar (Greek and Roman maps),
others unfamiliar and thus subject to spatial translation.
From the early 1830s, with the savants of the Exploration scientifi-
que de l’Algérie, maps of the region were presented as those of the
whole with frontiers separating Algeria from Morocco, but also
Algeria from Mali. Often a Greek map was put in conjunction with
the colonial map not only to signify it but also to show the continuity,
so instrumental in all colonial ideologies, between the present and the
past despite brief Arab and Turkish interruptions. In many ways,
colonial savants of this early period relied on two systems of knowledge
that each looked different from the other and were almost irreconcil-
able: Greek and Roman geographical knowledge, including maps,
names, and description of towns and places, and Arab geographical
knowledge, also with its maps, names, and descriptions of towns and
places. This was made possible by the work of translation, which is
always a work of converting foreign or unknown categories to familiar
and known categories. An example of this is a text by Ernest Carette,
a member of the Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie. An examination
of this text demonstrates that maps and the entire craft of cartography
is first and foremost the product of narratives about places.31 Carette’s
work, and with it the work of other members, reveals that visual
perception is first a textual one. To put it simply, to map an area one
needs to know what that area is in time and space. Carette relied on
a colossal body of geographic knowledge from different sources, Greek
and Roman as well as Arab and European. In his descriptions, Carette
gives an idea about what he calls “the oriental part of the African
continent.”32 He credits Herodotus for the operational distinction
31
Ernest Carette, Recherches sur l’origine et les migrations des principales tribus
de l’Afrique septentrionale et particulièrement de l’Algérie. Paris: Imprimerie
impériale, 1853.
32
Ibid., p. 2.
between the Tell and the Sahara, “between people who plow and
people who herd.”33 Carette himself reproduces this distinction as
a defining geographical and demographic feature of Algeria: “The
Tell, whose name derives from the Latin word Tellus (cultivable land)
is the area bordering the Mediterranean and, as its name suggests, the
region of plowing and harvesting.”34
Names in this geographical description were of tantamount import-
ance, as mapping presupposes narratives and narratives presuppose
names and naming. The region appears as Africa. But Carette was
also interested in human geography; for him, populations are part of
the landscape, the way they are in the geographic thinking of Greek and
Roman authors:
In addition to peoples, countries and cities already mentioned by the first two
geographers [Herodotus and Strabo], we see emerging in Strabo new names
that the events of the Roman occupation had made famous: Numidians,
Moors, Geatuli appeared for the first time.35
In this synthetization of Greek and Roman authors, Carette proceeds

by providing a translation of names, or rather a reactivation of old
names and their equivalents at the colonial moment. The
Libophoenicians are “people that lived in this part of the present
Regence of Tunis that was then called, as it is still called since then,
Africa, strictly speaking (Afrique proprement dit).”36 He continues to
describe “this country confined to the east of Numidia and that covers
more or less Constantine, and the latter to Mauritania that included the
provinces of Algiers and Oran and the Empire of Morocco.”37
The work of the Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie is similar to the
work of the Expédition d’Egypte in that individual authors such as
Carette are part of a collective of authors providing a coherent vision of
the colony. The several translations of Arabic sources can be seen as
part and parcel of the same vision since translation, in this colonial
context, was proven to be both, a source of knowledge and a new
knowledge made up out of the old one. Thus the translation of Ibn
Abi Dinar’s 1681 book Kitâb al-munis fi akhbâr ifriqiya wa tûnus,
presented by Edmond Pellissier de Reynaud and Abdel Remusat under
33
Ibid.
34
Ernest Carette, Recherches sur la géographie et le commerce de
l’Algérie méridional. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1844, p. 6.
35
Carette, Recherches sur les migrations, p. 3. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid.
the telling title of Histoire de l’Afrique, is in itself a text of the

Exploration that confirms and completes its geographical vision.38 To
cite the translation itself:
The savants understand by Africa the country of Kairouan. Writers made it
one of the parts of the world, but do not agree on its limits. Africa is at the
center of the Occident. However, what is at the center is always what is best.
They say this land was called Africa because it separates EAST from WEST.
Ordinarily, it is the best that separates two parts. Others say its name comes
from Farouk’-ben-Mesraim. They assure he was a descendant of Kouth, son
of Sham, son of Noah. Another opinion indicates Afarik’a derives from
Afrik’ich-ben Abr’a-ben-Zi-el-K’ranin who conquered the Occident and
built a city. They call this city Afrika, the inhabitants Afarika. Maqrizi
maintains this. The name of this conqueror used to be written first as
Afrik’is. Arabs changed the ‫[ ﺱ‬sin] to a ‫[ ﺵ‬shin].39
These definitions, despite their uncertainties, were reproduced also in

savant explanations of the names. Elisée Reclus starts his discussion of
Afrique septentrionale with an entry that echoes the one just cited.
Reclus was an armchair geographer and, seeing his universal geog-
raphy, he was clearly relying exclusively on colonial authors of the
period, almost all of them connected to the institution of the army,
most of them as officers.40 Reclus separates the region from the rest of
Africa to attach it to Europe, from which it was once detached natur-
ally. He then analyzes it in terms of a new category, the
Mediterranean.41
Even in translation, the name Africa (already commonly used by
colonial authors at this junction to designate an ensemble of countries
including Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria) is restricted, as with classical
Arab historians and chroniclers, to the region we now commonly call
Tunisia. However, a larger definition is also given to a region beyond
these three countries. In the translation:
Several authors understand by the name Mor’reb [sic] the entire continent
that expands from the left bank of the Nile to the coasts of the Ocean. They
38
Histoire de l’Afrique de Moh’ammed-ben-abi-el-Raïni-el K’aïrouâni / traduite
de l’arabe par MM. E. Pellissier et Rémusat. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1845.
39
Ibid., pp. 21–22.
40
Elisée Reclus, “L’Afrique septentrionale,” in Nouvelle Geographie Universelle.
Paris: Hachette, 1885, p. 1.
41
On the concept of the Mediterranean, see Ruel, “L’invention de la
Mediterranée.”
call Africa the part that lies between Barka [Burqa], Tangier, the
Mediterranean and the sands at the entrance of the land of the Negroes.
For me, I prove that in our epoch we understand by Africa the country that
expands from Ouad-et-Tin [Wadi Tin] to Bêdja [Béja].42
A translation is, of course, a process of converting a linguistic sign to

another deemed its equivalent; in so doing, it is also putting in use
specific categories to account for original categories that do not exist in
the language of translation. The description of Ibn Abi Dinar was
rendered into geographical categories specific to the nineteenth cen-
tury. This rendering is an attempt to make intelligible a preexisting and
foreign knowledge, and therefore it is an attempt at a domestication of
this knowledge that, in the translation, introduces geographical and
racial concepts. For instance, the translated definition of the region just
provided contains, in addition to new geographical concepts that put
the region within the sphere of France (i.e., Mediterranean), racial
concepts that separate the region from the rest of Africa. Pays des
nègres (countries of the Negroes) is clearly a racial concept not found
in the work of Ibn Abi Dinar, who rather uses the concept of bilâd al-
sudân (the land of Sudan, i.e., Mali).43 Al-bahr al-châmî (the
Mediterranean Sea) in the Arab geographical imagination is not the
same as the Mediterranean; the first connects the region, via this sea, to
the Levant whose name is signified by the sea of the Levant. The
Mediterranean is a concept unknown as a noun before the beginning
of the nineteenth century when, with Reclus, it came to mean “the sea
of junction between three continental masses of Europe, Asia, and
Africa, [a junction] between Aryans, Semites, and Berbers.”44 Also in
the Arabic text, there is no suggestion of a frontier with bilâd al-sudân:
Ifriqiya touches bilâd al-sudân; it suggests that part of bilâd al-sudân is
part of it. The French text, by contrast, suggests a frontier of sands
between Ifriqiya and the pays des nègres. The geographical separation
is reinforced by a racial divide: the Maghreb has a geographical limit,
the sands, and a racial limit, blackness.
42
Histoire de l’Afrique, p. 23. In the footnote, the translator notes, “L’Ouad-et-
T’în coule à quelques lieux au Sud de Sfax, auprès des ruines de l’antique Thena.
C’est le Tanaïs ou Tana de Salluste.” Ibid.
43
Muhammad ibn Abi al-Qāsim Ibn Abi Dinār , Kitâb al-munis fi akhbâr ifriqiya
˙
wa tûnus. Tunis: Matbaàt Dawla Tunsiya, 1869, p. 16.
44
Cited in Ruel, “L’invention de la Méditerranée,” p. 9.
Map 4 Afrique Française (French Africa), 1843–1854, by Louis-Adrien Bebrugger45
45
Louis-Adrien Berbrugger, Algérie: historiquem pittoresque et monumentale. Paris: Delahaye, 1843–1845. Bibliothèque nationale de
France, used with permission.
One can see there are three different layers of geographical significa-
tion in the initial construction of the region: direct observation, itself
shaped by Greek and Roman geographic knowledge; Islamic geograph-
ies, themselves translated into French texts using geographical and
racial categories of the nineteenth century; and Greek and Roman
texts harnessed in understanding the region in its present day. We see
these multilayered webs of significance not only in the texts cited earlier
in this chapter but also in the rest of the outputs of the Exploration
scientifique de l’Algérie. In the work of Louis-Adrien Berbrugger, also
a member of the Exploration scientifique, it is illustrated from the
outset of a voluminous volume by two maps; one pertains to Roman
Africa, the second to French Africa.46 In the 1830s and even 1840s,
Algeria was perceived as part of that whole found in Greek and Roman
texts as Africa (albeit what is meant is only its northern part, but with
the definitive exclusion of Egypt). And it is the Roman map that guides
the new configuration of the region. In Berbrugger’s early work, the
two maps are juxtaposed – Roman Africa and French Africa – to
illustrate the common understanding amongst members of the army
and the political establishment that it is the same geography, and thus
its former owners had come back to claim it. And to claim it, there is the
need to first map it and name it. One does not happen without the
other.
By the time of the arrival of General Thomas Bugeaud, the map of
Algeria was already in place, mainly thanks to the work of members of
the Exploration scientifique. Algeria, which Bugeaud was mandated to
subdue, was only a part of this larger entity. Tunisia, too, was subjected
to a scientific exploration. The map of its capital was already in place
by 1830, and the exploration not only mapped these geographical
pieces, but also mapped the units in a whole, as pieces in a unity, as
countries within a region. The work of the Arab Bureau, with the
arrival of Bugeaud, set as a goal to map the pieces within the pieces,
these small regions within Algeria. This was done systematically in the
spirit of geographical reason, and it was also accomplished according
to the logic of “military operations.”47
The importance of Algeria, a country in the middle of the region,
allowed the officers of the Arab Bureau to not only start mapping the
46
Ibid.
47
My own observation of the archives. Also see Blais, Mirages de la carte.
region from this entity but also in so doing to trace the frontiers that
separate it from Morocco, west, and Tunisia, east.48 It also allowed
a clear separation between the Tell and the Sahara, and thus between
northern Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, a clear-cut separation that has
become a defining feature of the continent and of relations with the
northern region, part of which is constituted as the Maghreb. While
these distinctions were undoubtedly modern, they also made use of
local knowledge to confirm or change or reinvent preexisting distinc-
tions that were neither clear-cut nor entirely unchanging.
Local knowledge, whether “vernacular” or “savant,” continued to
shape the colonial geographic imagination and its cartographic prod-
uct. Translations of Muslim geographers by Orientalists were also
instrumental in the fabrication of this spatial imaginary. It is important
to stress again that local geographic and Islamic knowledge was always
filtered or rather reinvented as modern knowledge through the work of
translation. Consider the important work of Al-Bakri, Al-mughrib fi
dhikr bilâd ifriqiya al-maghrib, translated by Orientalist William
McGuckin de Slane under the meaningful title of Description de
l’Afrique septentrionale.49 As in similar translated texts, the cognitive
search of the original text is not the one of the translated text. The
geographical categories found in the first are not those employed in
the second. Slane uses categories of his time and his milieu: Afrique,
which was the most common, as seen previously in the work of the
savants of the Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie. By 1859, the date of
the translation, the region was still under construction. But the transla-
tion of this book provided not only a new name, Afrique septentrio-
nale, but also a plethora of names for its parts and cities. This means
that geographical knowledge was also constructed gradually and from
different vantage points – of the institution, of the army, the university,
the government – and by different bodies of producers: Orientalists,
military personnel, amateur historians, and so forth. It was also con-
structed not only by topographers and military officers with different
agendas and different approaches but also with the translation of local
knowledge converted into colonial texts with Arab authority.
48
Blais, Mirages de la carte.
49
Abou-Obeid El-Bekri, Description de l’Afrique septentrionale, trans. William
McGuckin de Slane. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1965. First edition, Paris:
Imprimerie Royale, 1859.
Sahara: Geographic Limits and Discursive Possibilities

In colonial cartography of the eighteenth century, what was called the
Desert of Barbary constituted a visual limit between “Barbary” and the
“countries of the Negroes,” an empty space, the same way that the
Mediterranean appears as the sea wall that separates Europe from
Africa, Islam from Christianity, and soon with Napoleon the white
man from his racial others. Nineteenth-century cartography inherited
this cartographic formation and, of course, by its sheer physical pres-
ence built on it.
The Sahara in Africa appears indeed more like a limit between
worlds, but also a world in and of itself. The Sahara inhabited the
European imaginary as a space inhabited by men of evil repute, as far
from civilization as the sky from earth, and as dangerous to it as fire to
wood.50
The region under consideration (i.e., northern Africa) is bracketed so
to speak between civilization (Europe) and Barbary (the desert),
between the white man to the north and the black man to the south,
but also, perhaps more importantly, between emptiness and not,
between infertility and the potential for (colonial) productivity,
between resources and scarcity, between life and death.
Because the conquest of the region was partial and gradual, the
Sahara itself was discursively constructed gradually, first as an entity
of this or that colony: the Algerian Sahara, Tunisian Sahara, and
Moroccan Sahara (that has been under Spanish rule since 1884). In
the process of mapping the region, initially and most decidedly from
within Algeria, the Sahara appeared as a wall and a word of sand, as
dangerous as it was infertile. The Sahara, however, was an important
frontier that helped the cartographic creation of the region.51
Here too, because of the exotic fascination, the desert exerted on the
European imagination, the Sahara itself emerged as a topic in and of
itself. The point here is not to write the history of the representation of
the Sahara, but rather to see how it has emerged as a major marker that
separates two major entities: the “countries of the Negroes” (pays des
50
Bernard Nantet, L’invention du désert: Archéologie au Sahara. Paris: Payot,
1998, 97. Benjamin Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s
Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010. Blais, Mirages de la carte.
51
See Blais, Mirages de la carte.
Sahara: Geographic Limits and Discursive Possibilities 53
nègres) and “White Africa” (l’Afrique blanche).52 Let us clarify first

that the Sahara seemed to be a natural marker of separation in Greek
cartography and in Arab geography. Colonial authorities inherited this
separation and reproduced it. However, what I would like to examine
is the discursive and cartographic mechanisms of this colonial separ-
ation. Since the region called the Maghreb was in the process of colo-
nial invention, the frontiers of the Sahara, as well as the Sahara itself,
could not be simply reproduced within a colonial cognitive system as
“Greek” or “Arab.” That the separation was transported to a new
system of knowledge – with its own brand of modern power, its own
spatial categories, and its own politics of definition and limitations –
undoubtedly makes the separation appear new and novel. In fact, why
was there a need to pay attention to a space that seemed bereft of the
benefits of colonization? Why question this spatial void? Why and how
was this void used at specific moments in the process of reconfiguring
colonial space?
To answer these questions, I examine the work of three major
authors of colonial space; each one marked his time, and thus the
geographical cultural production, and thus the remaking of the region
at hand in significant ways. First is Ernest Carette, an early architect of
colonial cartography, whose work I discussed earlier.53 The second is
Eugène Daumas, a high officer of the Arab Bureau whose scholarship
shaped colonial understanding of Algeria in ways that outlasted the
colonial enterprise itself. And, finally, I also examine the work of
a major geographer whose contribution to the creation of the region
(as we know it today) was indeed significant: Émile-Félix Gautier.
First, Carette changed the common view that made the Sahara a land
by itself, isolated, desolate, sterile, and only a buffer zone between the
52
For the history of the Sahara, see Nantet, L’invenion du désert. For a history of
the Algerian Sahara, see Brower, Desert Named Peace. Jacques Frémeaux, Le
Sahara et la France. Outre-mer. Paris: Soteca, 2010. Also see Blais, Mirages de la
carte.
53
For the Exploration scientifique, its history, its mission, and its members, see
Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in
Colonial Algeria. London: I. B. Tauris, 1995. For all the wealth of information,
this book needs to be used with extra care because it unfortunately tends to
reproduce colonial categories and understandings it claims to deconstruct. For
an examination, see Abdelmajid Hannoum, “Writing Algeria: On the History
and Culture of Colonialism,” Maghreb Center Journal 2010 (1) Spring/Summer:
1–19.
Tell and les pays des noirs. He represented it differently, as a “vast

archipelago of oases, each host to an animated group of villages and
cities,” consequently also an urban zone.54 Furthermore, instead of
a zone of sand, inhabited by a few savages, Carette puts the Sahara in
a different imaginary, not exotic, but useful and productive, which
meant colonizable. For him, the Sahara is also a zone of vegetation.
It is through these massive greeneries made up of vegetation that the distant
horizon takes shape with its hot tones, its varied and imposing forms. If we
add to the charm of these scenes the abundance of fruits, the freshness of the
shadows, we can easily imagine the love the people of the Sahara have for
their country.55
Carette attaches the Sahara to the Tell to make it an economically

beneficial part of Algeria, but also a defining geographic feature of the
region beyond Algeria:
The Sahara extends not only to the Regence of Algiers, it also extends to the
middle Regence of Tunis and to the Empire of Morocco. In these two states
too, the northern zone bears the name of Tell. Consequently, there is a Tell
and a Tunisian Sahara, a Tell and an Algerian Sahara, a Tell and a Moroccan
Sahara.56
For Carette, there is the Sahara and there is the desert. The separating
line between the one and the other is the oasis of Touat. “It is at the
beginning of this line that the Sahara ends and the desert proper starts,
a vast solitude crossed rather than inhabited, but with a great distance,
by the fearful tribe of Touareg that separates the white race from the
black race.”57
Carette rethinks the blankness of the Sahara, its sterility, and its
colonizability. He populates it, discursively speaking. Not only is the
land cultivable, and thus colonizable, but it is also filled with what is
most precious for the colonial enterprise: human labor. “The inhabit-
ants of the Tell are mainly farmers. The inhabitants of the Sahara are
mainly pastoralists and gardeners.”58 In other words, between “the
countries of the Negroes” and the region, there is not a blank, but
a human population to be integrated into its geography.
Eugène Daumas, director of Arab affairs under General Thomas
Bugeaud, confirms the distinction made by Carette and uses similar
54 55
Carette, Recherches sur la géographie et le commerce, p. 7. Ibid., p. 8.
56
Ibid., p. 8. 57 Ibid., p. 39. 58 Ibid., p. 6.
Map 5 Algeria, 1853, by Armand-Jacques Leroy de Saint-Arnaud under the direction of
Eugène Daumas59
59
“Nouvelle carte du Sahara algérien” dressée par ordre de M. le Maréchal de St. Arnaud . . . d’après les renseignements et sous la direction
de M. le Général de Division E. Daumas . . . par C.F. de La Roche. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53102551k/f1.item.zoom. Last
accessed May 25, 2020. Bibliothèque nationale de France, used with permission.
Map 6 “Algérie divisée par tribus,” 1846, by Ernest Carette and Auguste
Warnier60
60
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53087833q/f1.item. Last accessed
May 25, 2020. Bibliothèque nationale de France, used with permission.
Map 6 (Cont.)
Map 7 The Regence of Tunis, 1843, by Ernest Carette61
61
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53087678v. Last accessed January 9, 2021. Bibliothèque nationale de France, used with
permission.
vocabulary: “everywhere, or almost everywhere, [there are] cities and

villages; everywhere tents, everywhere life, an exceptional life, it is true,
but active, and important to study for the common relations that we
will have with it, curious what it would reveal to science.”62 Even
though Daumas’s aim is to explore what by that time was referred to
as the Algerian Sahara, he indicates nevertheless that such exploration
would lead to “penetration” – that is, to expansion into Morocco and
Tunisia. In so doing, he also indicates how the Sahara traverses the
region and thus ipso facto defines it.
However, Daumas goes further than Carette by maintaining that
the Sahara not only is unseparated from the Tell, but is dependent
on it: “the inhabitants of the Sahara are necessarily dominated by
the people who control the Tell.”63 Daumas, like Carette before
him, draws attention to the profitability of the Sahara and the
absolute necessity to conquer it. But it does not need to be con-
quered piece by piece, as happened in the Tell, he says. The con-
quest of the Sahara is easier: “what must be done, what must
absolutely be done, is to forcefully occupy the Tell along with the
principal passages that constitute the gates of the Sahara.”64 Thus
Daumas not only retraces the limits of what he calls “nos posses-
sions,” but also suggests that the Sahara is part of the Tell because
of the dependence of the Sahara on the Tell; thus colonizing the Tell
is also controlling the Sahara.65 Daumas points out a remarkable
fact: the Sahara, despite its dependence, is populated in large part
by a sedentary population not belonging to “the Arab race.” He
explains this by saying that these populations live in oases that
require them to be dedicated to the palm trees that are their sources
of livelihood. They are Berber populations pushed by the conquests
to the desert. Arabs joined later, but to live as independent nomads
in “this immense space.”66 The Sahara is then a space where Arabs
and Berbers, the sedentary and the nomadic, live side by side.67
Both Arabs and Berbers depend on the Tell for livelihood. For the
Tell is “the granary of the Sahara.”68
62
Eugène Daumas, Sahara Algérien: Etudes géographiques, statistiques et
historiques sur la region au sud des établissements français en Algérie. Algiers:
Dubos Frères, 1845, p. vi.
63
Ibid., p. 10. 64 Ibid., p. 11. 65 Ibid., p. ix. 66 Ibid., pp. 7–10.
67
Ibid., p. 125. 68 Ibid., p. 10.
The Sahara, as portrayed by Daumas, is surely a hybrid space; there

are Berbers as well as Arabs, and there are also black Berbers, not slaves
and not a separate group, but individuals born from a slave mother and
a Berber father. They have as much right as “their legitimate brothers.”
“The fact of this constant mélange of the white race and the black race
at the frontiers of the Sahara, is a given in science.”69 This, in the view
of Daumas, may be due to the fact that the Berbers were pushed south
by foreign invasions that forced them to mix. It seems that thus hybrid-
ity itself is the mark of this space that is neither here nor there, yet
indicates the separation between the “white race” and the “black
race.” In other words, in itself it is a marker. But overall, demographic-
ally, the Sahara remains part of northern Algeria; the pays des noirs are
found beyond it.
Building on the work of Carette and Daumas on the Sahara,
Berbrugger points out another separation within the Sahara:
This geographic frontier is at the same time an ethnographic barrier, it
separates our oasisians (Berbers Zenata) from Berbers Sanhaja [who are]
generally known by the name Touareg, racial enemies from immemorial
time.70
This distinction takes on a discursively fertile valence with Émile-

Félix Gautier, a professional geographer of the University of Algiers.
Writing about the Sahara, he opted for the perspective not of poetics
but of what he calls “political psychology.”71 By the time of publica-
tion of his first book on the Sahara, the Sahara was conquered by force
of arms, and not just subordinated – beyond what Daumas suggested
and hoped for decades earlier.72 Gautier himself witnessed stages of the
conquest of the Algerian Sahara. Later, in 1935, the Moroccan Sahara
too was annexed to “French North Africa.”
For Gautier, the Sahara is indeed a buffer zone that separates Algeria
from what he calls West Africa.73 Indeed, now that the entirety of the
region is under French colonial rule, the point for Gautier is not to
69
Ibid., p. 125.
70
Louis-Adrien Berbrugger, “Des frontières de l’Algérie,” Revue Africaine 1860
(4)24: 401–417 at 405.
71
Émile-Félix Gautier, La conquête de Sahara: essai de psychologie politique.
Paris: Arnold Colin, 1919.
72
For the history of this conquest, see Brower, Desert Named Peace. Also see
Frémeaux, Le Sahara et la France.
73
Ibid.
stress how the Sahara is part of the region, but how it is a buffer zone
with West Africa. It is this geography he describes in his book L’Afrique
noire occidentale, published in 1935.74 For Gautier, the actual limits of
the Sahara, northwestern Sahara, were not the same limits of the
Quaternary Sahara. He does not take geography as static but as
a living being that changes and is altered (through longue durée, as
Fernand Braudel has said, while discussing the same subject, citing
Gautier on occasion). It is this long history that Gautier quickly sur-
veys, or at least alludes to, to conclude that “the Quaternary Sahara
covered the entire colony of present day Senegal.”75 Of course, for him
this is a hypothesis, but an interesting one.76 However, what is most
interesting for Gautier is that, at his time, he believes the “Saharan
climate” tends to move toward Senegal and French Sudan (i.e., Mali).
In 1923, Gautier published his most authoritative text on the
Sahara.77 Gautier defines it as covering “the entire northern half of
the African continent.”78 He distinguishes, using maps, the western
Sahara (also called Sahara Algerian and Tunisian, or just French
Sahara), Central Sahara (called Sahara Italian), and eastern or
Oriental Sahara; “the dryness of the air can be considered the funda-
mental phenomenon.”79 Yet Gautier reports the existence, here and
there, of snow. “The Sahara is the residence of a white race.”80
Gautier argues that there is no “fixed definition” of the desert. The
Sahara is different from, say, the deserts of North America and of the
Kalahari because of its steppes. It consists of two parts, the desert
proper and the steppes around it. However, azoism (the absence of
any form of life) remains its general characteristic. Geographically, it
remains a marker between Blacks and Whites:
On its surface, the Sahara is virtually a partition between Negroes and
Whites. The Maghreb is white, the Soudan is black, without contestation,
we can even say virtually without transition, and also without any relations
save for drop by drop filtrations.81
What is interesting about this text is also Gautier’s distinction

between the Egyptian Sahara and French Sahara. He considers each
distinct, “a world by itself.”82 This particularity starts with borders.
74
Émile-Félix Gautier, L’Afrique noire occidentale. Paris: Larose, 1943.
75
Ibid. 76 Ibid., p. 36.
77
Émile-Félix Gautier, Le Sahara. Paris: Payot, 1923. 78 Ibid., p. 5.
79
Ibid., p. 13. 80 Ibid., p. 14. 81 Ibid., p. 27. 82 Ibid., p. 106.
Surrounded by the sea eastward and northward, one finds in these

pages an early formulation of the Mediterranean as elaborated later
on by Braudel – himself, like Gautier, a junior member of the University
of Algiers.
Here, the eastern Mediterranean, the one of Phoenician and Greek marines,
joins the tropical oceans. A great seaway connects the human anthills of India
and the Far Orient and the cradle of our civilization.83
Map 8 L’Afrique Francaise (French Africa), 1890, by Georges Roland84
83
Ibid., p. 108.
84
Economiste (Suppelément) 1890, June 14. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bt
v1b84460624. Last accessed May 25, 2020. Bibliothèque nationale de France,
used with permission.
Gautier was rather a human geographer, and thus a sort of anthro-

pologist; geography for him is a science of space and landscapes where
men act and react and where history unfolds. Therefore, for him the
Oriental part of the Mediterranean, this space shared by the French, is
distinguished by its population and its history. For him,
This seaway, in high antiquity, was crossed by active trade. At
a southwestern point of Arabia, the brokers of commerce were the
Himyarites, the ones that give their name to the Red Sea (himyar means red
in Arabic), these are the real people whose Queen of Saba, of holy history, is
the near legendary representative; they were the Phoenicians of the Indian
Ocean, of the country of Poun (Punic) of the hieroglyphs.85
The Egyptian desert, for Gautier, is also defined by the Nile. It is

“another unique originality of the Egyptian desert.”86 However, if the
Sahara is separated geographically (by the Nile River and the Red Sea),
it remains attached to the French Sahara, doesn’t it? Gautier has an
answer; against the power of the map, he uses the power of discourse:
A first glance at the map gives an incorrect idea of the general form of this
desert. We see it limited by the Red Sea on the east and by the Mediterranean
on the north. However, one needs to ponder to see that it is less limited on the
west side by the emptiness of the desert and by the Libyan erg [pile of
dunes].87
Gautier clearly cuts Egypt from Afrique septentrionale, using the

strongest language to reinforce a separation that is difficult to make:
“such an erg, the most monstrous and most inhuman on the planet, is
an obstacle as efficient as the sea, it is more difficult to cross.”88 If there
is a point of communication between the two, it is narrow and guarded
by “Berber warriors.” By contrast, “The Egyptian desert is a sort of
peninsula, it is under a bell jar.”89 The communication between the
Egyptian desert and the territory is easy, which explains the long
duration and stability of the “Egyptian Empire,” he says. This is an
important argument for Gautier, and one he will use extensively to
provide a specific history of the region he calls the Maghreb.
Therefore, not only does he distinguish the Sahara from the Maghreb
in terms of geographic features, but most importantly in terms of
human ones (as defined by their physical environment). Thus for him,
85 86 87 88
Gautier, Le Sahara, p. 108. Ibid. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 112.
89
Ibid.
the Sahara is a historical actor in and of itself; its historical role was of
great importance to the South, the land of Blacks, and to the North, the
land of Whites. Here, Gautier reaches one of his most important
conclusions, one that further separates Afrique septentrionale from
Egypt, and also provides it a decisive historical role. In the Egyptian
desert, the nomadic presence is insignificant (whereas it is a crucial
historical factor in northern Africa): “the great nomadic tribes need
immense space; the narrowness of the Egyptian desert constitutes for
them already an unfavorable condition.”90 (The role of the nomad in
his historical narrative is discussed in more detail later.)
What we see in Gautier’s geographical thinking is something differ-
ent from what has been observed by the late nineteenth century, when
the Sahara “served to connect territories of the Empire.”91 With
Gautier, the Sahara connects with northern Africa but also separates
it from eastern Africa. Using the Sahara in this way solidified the
creation of this space called the Maghreb in which human actions
created a history that had affected all its parts. For, as we will see
later in the historiographic discourse of Gautier, this space, along
with its Sahara, was the theater of events that created its unity in the
past and in the present.
All in all, while the Sahara remained a difficult space to map, it was
easier to use as a limit. The region, now constructed as a single unit, was
unified by the very presence on the map of this Saharan space that
traverses it from east to west and vice versa. The Sahara, integrated
within the region, nevertheless constituted its limit and its frontiers, like
the Mediterranean itself. Maybe it is for this reason also that Braudel
evokes this parallel, “over immense spaces, the sea is as empty as the
Sahara.”92 And the Sahara remains, in the European imaginary, this
empty space, full of hot air and burning sun, inhabited and inhabitable
except by a rare breed of men, between white and black, between
civilization and savagery, who can transcend the first and second, albeit
possibly fatal for the second. It is the same Sahara that unified the
90
Ibid., p. 114.
91
Hélène Blais, “Un empire de sable? L’espace saharien et la jonction Algérie-
Soudan: l’histoire d’une construction impériale (1830–1930).” In Territoires
impériaux. Une histoire spatiale du fait colonial, ed. Hélène Blais,
Florence Deprest, and Pierre Singaravélou. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne, 2011,
pp. 237–270 at pp. 256–257.
92
“Sur d’énormes espaces, la mer est aussi vide que le Sahara.” Braudel, La
Méditerranée et le monde mediterranéen, p. 73.
The Logic of Division 65
region in colonial times, and it is also the same Sahara that disunited it
in the postcolonial era.
The Logic of Division

A cartographic formation is not intelligible without a narrative whose
constitution precedes it. I understand a cartographic formation as the
ensemble of maps produced about the region with their limitations,
their incompleteness, their corrections, and their focus on this or that
region as a part of a global whole it refers to. This ensemble can be or
rather is found in archives, in scholarly publications, in public space;
they decorate room walls of schools, they are published in newspapers,
in atlases, in private collections – that is, they are found everywhere.
Their ubiquity reinforces their effects of the real – that is, it makes them
really real. Atlases are not just maps whose signs are to be read and
deciphered. Atlases are to be looked at: for their physicality, their sheer
volume, and the number of their colored maps of the world and its
pieces, many of which are not to be called French. Atlases convey
colonial power, its full force, and its power of miracles. One of these
miracles is precisely the creation of geographies and reshaping of the
globe that the reader of the atlas can gaze at with awe. The colonial
world was after all a map evident in the very atlas that conveys its
meanings with force and elegance. The colonial world is not one, of
course, it is not homogeneous, as the atlas itself illustrates. It is made of
different cartographic realities, numerous geographies, and several
colonial powers possess it.
The Maghreb is also a map. Yet, as stated earlier, the graphic
representation that signifies the Maghreb is made intelligible only
thanks to a narrative formation that is itself dispersed despite or rather
because of its overall unity as a formation. A map of Algeria is
undoubtedly unintelligible if shown to a Japanese person who has
never been told what Algeria is. The same map is doubtless crystal
clear if shown to an Algerian citizen or a French student only because
both of them have been exposed, to whatever degree, to narratives
about Algeria in schools, in the press, in the media, and so forth. It is
this idea I would like to examine further in this section to see not how
Algeria has become a cartographic formation, but rather how the entire
region has become a geographic totality clear, visible, and totally
understood by those exposed to it – that is, to a large public in France,

in the region, and beyond.
Between 1902 and 1936, European colonies were already configured
in ways that looked the same at the time of decolonization. This means
the geography of the world, as we know it by the time of the independ-
ence of the last North African country, had already taken form. The
region was already neatly separated from the region eastward that we
commonly call today the Middle East.93 This division seemed almost
natural at the time. Arab geographers, also following Muslim con-
quests and their politics of historical knowledge associated with
a system of taxation, distinguished Ifriqiya from al-Maghrib and al-
Maghreb from al-Andalus, ethnically and politically. They used geo-
metrical categories of east and west and also tribal categories associ-
ated with the concept of the oumma that denotes an ethnicity
unseparated from tribal affiliations.
The divide between North Africa (also occasionally and vaguely
called the Maghreb) was indeed reconfigured as that new bloc that
came out of the womb of the Ottoman Empire and that by 1916
became officially the Middle East. The reconfiguration did not posit
the two blocs as only two geographical areas, one in the Middle East
and the other in northern Africa, but rather as two blocs that constitute
two geopolitical bodies: French possessions in North Africa versus
British possessions in the Middle East. Human geography defining
the first in racial terms as essentially Berber and white, and
the second as essentially Arab, also anchored this distinction in the
colonial discourse.
The separation between North Africa, West Africa, and East Africa
(as well as southern Africa) is the product of imperial geopolitics and
the fierce rivalry between colonial powers of the time. The Conference
of Berlin (1884–1885) represented the first step toward formalization
of these blocs.94 Interestingly enough, though not at all surprisingly,
“the conference of Berlin [was] opened on a Saturday, November 15, at
2 pm by Prince Bismarck sitting at the head of a horseshoe table. In
front of him, there was the great map of de Kiepert.”95
93
Foliard, Dislocating the Orient.
94
Henri Brunschwig, Le partage de l’Afrique noire. Paris: Flammarion, 1971.
95
Ibid., p. 60.
The Logic of Division 67
British atlases of the nineteenth century give a clear idea about the
rules, the principles of mapping, isolating, and separating geographical
entities within the continent of Africa.96 The most obvious principle is
a national one: Africa was divided into what is first British and what is
not: German, Italian, Portuguese, and French. The second principle of
division was geometrical and geographical: (1) British West Africa,
(2) British South and Central Africa, (3) British East Africa.97
This geographical maneuvering was the work of several geographers
using a massive corpus of data that was still incomplete. Claire
Médard, in a study of the making of East Africa in the work of universal
geographers and more specifically in the work of Elisée Reclus, Fernand
Maurette, and Paul Vidal de la Blache, concludes that, despite major
differences between these geographers, political criteria were consist-
ently combined with a consideration of human geography.98 Also,
colonial interests, and therefore politics, were central to their
preoccupations.99 However, it is interesting that while race is con-
sidered vital, “religion” seems to be absent in these considerations.
But only at first sight. Despite the tremendous importance of race in
nineteenth-century Europe and not only France, religion – that is,
Christianity, the mother of the modern state – was of no less import-
ance than race. If anything, “theories of race” were changed later on,
relativized, but the intensity of religion rarely waned and often intensi-
fied, revitalized, including in our postcolonial present.
Islam itself has also been racialized, as is evident by the invention of
racial religions: “L’islam noir,” “L’islam arabe,” “L’islam berbère.”
96
See Oxford Atlas of British Colonies, Part I, British Africa. 1906.
Jasper Stembridge, An Atlas of the British Empire. London/New York: Oxford
97
Edward Hertslet, Richard William Brant, and Harry Leslie Sherwood. The Map
of Africa by Treaty, vol. 1. London: Harrison and Sons, 1909.
98
Médard, L’Afrique orientale dans les geograpies universelles contemporaines
françaises.
99
The support of colonialism was unwavering despite expression of concerns for
the “indigènes,” inspired also by the ideals of Saint Simonianism, in the case of
Vidal de Blache, or anarchism, in the case of Elisée Reclus. See
Vincent Berdoulay, La formation de l’école française de géographie
(1870–1914). Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1981. Guilherme Ribeiro, “La
géopographie vidalienne et la géopolitique,” Géographie et cultures 2010 (74)
75: 247–262. Also see Federico Ferretti and Philippe Pelletier, “Imperial Science
and Heterodox Discourses: Elisée Reclus and French Colonialism,” L’espace
géographique 2013 (42)1: 1–14.
The racializing of Islam was part of the thinking about “religion” in an

evolutionist way. In the revolutionary view of Emile Durkheim, reli-
gion is a reflection of human development since religion creates the
social group.100 Certain forms of the same religions were believed to be
attached to certain humans in a specific stage of human development.
Thus West Africa was characterized by animism and naturalism, and,
when Islam was present, such as in Senegal, it was different from the
Islam found in the region of northern Africa; it was an Islam noir. This
is not to say that Médard was wrong, but rather to say that race was
instrumental even in the perception of religious practices, be it Islam or
any other form of African religiosity.101 (More on this in Chapter 3.)
The new geopolitical French body was not only defined in geomet-
rical or geographical terms and neither was it defined only in terms of
geopolitical ones; ethnographic narrative and historical discourse were
instrumental in giving the form of the North African map, a specific
French colonial content that sets it apart not only from the British
Middle East but also from French Oriental and Occidental Africa(s).
And first in terms of color: what was newly called Africa was also called
Black Africa. The two terms Black and Africa became almost
a pleonasm – hence the urgent need for a new name for North Africa.
What distinguishes the descriptions of Reclus from those of Maurette, at the
legal information level, is rather the approach or the historical context. It is
the context of colonization that guides, to a certain extent, the presentation
of east Africa of F. Maurette, beyond the geographical problem of the
relation of man to his milieu. It is the same with eastern Africa: are they
dependent on their time or on the theoretical choice of the three authors? In
the last instance, the historical epoch seems to have a primordial importance
considering that Maurette too opted to adopt a historical point of view and
rely on the colonial divide of Africa.102
The problem here is that the “theoretical choices of the three

authors” were themselves the products of the colonial episteme,
100
Emile Durkheim, Formes élementaires de la vie religieuse. Paris: Alean, 1912.
101
Even within Islam itself, Ernest Renan argued that Shia Islam that adopts
representation and displays impressive imagination is the product of an Aryan
mind, the Persian, the same way that Aryan Christianity was reshaped by
Aryans despite its Semitic origins. See Ernest Renan, “Islamism and Science,”
and his response to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Œuvres. Paris.
102
Médard, L’Afrique orientale dans les géograpies universelles contemporaines
françaises, p. 98.
Semiotics of the Atlas 69
where the choices were surely varied and differ from each other, and
where, despite difference and variation, an uncontested and limited
number of categories determine the way the “other” is constructed and
the way “we” think about “them.” Key categories in European imagin-
ation in the age of colonization that determined the creation of land and
people were: race, religion, civilization, progress, and geometric geog-
raphy. Despite different conceptions they may have acquired in succes-
sive colonial stages, all were undoubtedly instrumental in the making of
human and geographical difference.
Semiotics of the Atlas

By 1902, the region was already entirely mapped as a whole and from
within its units, despite the fact that Morocco had not yet become part
of the French colonial possession. But even without it, the region was
already reconfigured with contours and names. If these reconfigur-
ations were the work of geographers and cartographers working
from within state institutions, including the army, to be able to make
the reconfigurations real and everlasting was to imprint them on minds
of people (colonizers and colonized alike) to impose a geographical
reality whose constitution was made by colonial interests and also
serves colonial goals and ambitions. Perhaps nothing could achieve
this goal as well as the atlas. This genre emerged in the sixteenth
century as a political tool to delineate territories and by the late eight-
eenth century was used to substantiate nation-states.103
Colonial interests were manifest early on in atlases, since colonialism
was already manifest in the world in the sixteenth century. With the
triumph and the astonishing expansion of Europe in the rest of the
world, atlases became not only necessary tools to delineate empires but
also a necessary genre by which to shape public geographical imagin-
aries. Large volumes, they often had the national and imperial imprint
on them: the Atlas of French Possessions, the Atlas of British Colonies.
They represented colonial power at its height – majestic volumes,
written in the language of the empire, with modern technology that
put the world between the covers of a book, with highly crafted and
impressively produced maps of the colonies, and photos of “other
103
James Akerman, “The Structuring of Political Territory in Early Printed
Atlases,” Imago Mundi 1995 (47): 138–154.
people.” The atlas was an imperial invention. Though it emerged in the

sixteenth century, it did not become a popular genre until the nine-
teenth century, in the very age of imperial might and conquest, at the
time the globe was reconfigured by colonial power for the first time.
Commodified in the age of capitalism, the atlas became also a tool of
propagating geographic knowledge related to the nation-state and its
attributes – the colonies.104 The atlas offers a cartographic structure, an
ensemble of maps that reflect not only the state of the cartographic
formation of a certain time but also, of course, the imperial perception
of the globe at a given moment. Atlases were also used for pedagogical
purposes by Jesuits at a time when geography became an important
matter of education, most probably for its use and usefulness for
colonial Europe.
Consider the atlas by Paul Pelet commissioned by the Ministry of the
Colonies and published in 1902.105 Pelet made clear the purpose of
mapping in an essay on the value of maps he joins to the atlas: “We can
only own a country if we develop it. We can only control its develop-
ment if its map is made.”106 This atlas announces its topic by the title
itself: French colonies. Yet French colonies in world maps or in maps of
continents such as Africa or Asia needed to be placed in relation to
other European colonies and in relation to countries still independent
from the colonial yoke. More specifically, French colonies in Africa are
represented in a map drawn by Eugène Letot. The map shows only half
of the African continent with a purple line as a marker of a frontier that
separates French colonies from other colonies. Morocco is still outside
of these lines as an independent country (whose fate was still waiting to
be determined by colonial powers of the time) along with other coun-
tries such as the Congo and Ethiopia.
The adjective French was now part of the name of the continent:
French Africa. What is also interesting about this atlas is the division of
the world. Imperial power was already a global power, thinking not in
regional ways, but in territorial and terrestrial ways. Its interests were
104
For more on maps, see Mireille Pastoureau, Les atlas français, XVIe–XVIIe
siècles. Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1984. The history of the colonial atlas
has yet to be written. Also see Barbara Pretchenik, “The Natural History of the
Atlas: Evolution and Extinction,” Cartographica 1985 22(3): 43–59.
105
Ibid.
106
Paul Pelet, Atlas des colonies françaises dressé par ordre du Ministère des
colonies. Paris: Armand Colin, 1902, p. 232.
not only motivated by prestige and intercolonial competition, but they

were also driven, chiefly, by economic gains – that is, by the wealth
encompassed. The colonies were indeed a source of pride, but also
a source of tremendous wealth (natural and human as well). The
more a colonial power possesses, the richer it becomes, evidently, and
the more it possesses, the more power it accumulates, and the more
power it accumulates, the more prestige it gains. Thus prestige is
a consequence and not a cause. Pelet himself is clear about this. He
writes:
Go over again point by point, scientifically, and complete the physical map of
our colonies, by making an ethnographic and economic map. This is the
[real] work of the geographers, naturalists, geologists that should pave the
way of traders, industrialists, and settlers. Before anything, the metropole
should benefit. It will the day our settlers themselves produce in our colonies
commodities and raw materials they buy today from abroad.107
The division of the world is a fact of culture indeed, but it is also

a fact of power. The division of the world translates colonial culture,
and how it sees the globe as its domain for the exercise of power, and as
a source of wealth. The world, from this atlas, is a domain owned by
colonial power, each with its part. France owns Africa. But even the
division of Africa itself translates a fact of culture. Colonial thinking is
geographical and geometrical at once. It points to its surroundings in
terms of geometrical categories: East, West, South, North. It also uses
specific categories that may seem today, and maybe even then, natural:
globe, continent, islands, Sahara. Thus Africa, whose discovery as
a continent also dates to this period, is divided into East, West,
South, and North. Whereas in diplomatic documents one frequently
finds the term North Africa, in French maps the names are most often
those of the countries: Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, in this order.
Algeria itself is divided into the Tell and the Sahara (of Algeria and of
Tunisia).
The atlas provides narratives that constitute a genre in and of them-
selves: they are a mix of the historical and ethnographic, the economic
and geographic; they are panoramic narratives at the service of the
maps they contain. Or maybe it is the maps that are at the service of
these narratives. For the first alternative, these narratives make the
107
Ibid., p. 3.
maps understandable, they are about the maps, and they make the
readability of the maps possible. In this case, the narrative is part of
the map it intends to clarify. If it is the second alternative, then the maps
are just auxiliary to the narratives. They provide a visual persuasive
device to prove the words of the narrative. But maybe these two
alternatives are not exclusive. A map is at the service of the narrative
just as much as the narrative is at the service of the map because despite
their different semiotic status, maps and narratives are part and parcel
of the same signifying object.
The categories of division in this text are first geographical and
continental: North Africa and West Africa, West Mediterranean.
They are also defined in relation to Europe: “Algeria and Tunisia
border to the South, in an almost straight line, the western basin of
the Mediterranean around which elliptically unfold the coasts of Spain,
France, Italy, and Sicily.”108 Behind this categorization, the text is
explicit about its racial and religious categories. Even though
Morocco was not yet part of the “French possessions,” it figured in
the map and in the text mainly because it shares with Tunisia and
Algeria the categories of race and of religion. “The indigènes of
Algeria (save for the Jews), Arabs, Kabyles, Mozabites, like their
brothers of Tunisia (1 500 000) and of Morocco (8 000 000) are all
Muslims.”109 In this text, Pelet stresses the racial fabric of the coun-
tries. In Algeria, he says, “despite Arab names, the bottom of the race is
Berber.”110 In Tunisia, he continues, “by Arabizing, the Berbers
absorbed the Arabs.111
Though Pelet makes a distinction already found in Carette between
the Tell and the Sahara, he treats the Sahara separately by designating it
as “the Algerian Sahara and the Tunisian Sahara.”112 The Sahara
seems to be the geographical element that separates the region as
such. Its definition indicates this: the “French Sahara has defined polit-
ical frontiers in the South, at the limit of English Soudan, in the east at
the borders of the Libyan desert, and west on the Spanish establishment
of the coast of Rio de Oro.”113
The separation of North Africa from West Africa is evidently geo-
graphical, but religious and racial categories also seem instrumental.
108 109 110 111

Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid. Ibid., p. 14.
112 113
Ibid., p. 17. Ibid.
Equally significant is the position of the French colony in relation to

other European colonies.
West Africa extends from the main corniche of the African coast (Cape
Verde, Dakar) to the lake of Chad where it joins together with the French
Congo, at the center of the continent. It takes up the coasts from the Cap
Blanc, on the Atlantic coast of the Sahara, and [the area] beyond Cotonou
(Dahomy), deep into the Gulf of Benin. But in this enormous interval of 300
kilometers that follows the convexity of the land, several foreign territories –
English colonies (The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast), Portuguese
(Guinea), German (Togo), and the Black Republic of Liberia – cut the
French coast which is reduced to 1820 kilometers.114
The visual separation, then, between entities that were part of total-
ities was the result of spatial categories adopted in the nineteenth
century: the continent as a scheme, the geometrical categories of
North, West, South, and East. And these categories were also used
taking into account the centrality of a new category called Europe
whose existence is also inseparable from the condition of modernity
itself. North Africa emerged, then, as a geographical entity obeying
cultural categories as well as geopolitical struggles.
The atlas of Pelet clearly shows that the region, by 1902, was still
a work in progress whose future was certainly uncertain. Several parts
of Africa, including Morocco, were part of ferocious diplomatic man-
euvering between colonial powers. He himself stresses the provisional
character of colonial geography. Yet, his was considered by the Service
Geographique as one of several “essentially official productions.”115
Other atlases appeared, especially as French colonial geography
changed with new conquests, but Pelet’s continued to be referred to
as the most authoritative of all atlases, including that of Commandant
P. Pollacchi, published in 1929, and of G. Grandidier, published in
1934.116 In fact, when the minister of the colonies was asked for
a recommendation for an atlas, it was the atlas of Pelet he
114
Ibid., p. 21.
115
Le Service Géographique, Ministère des colonies. Paris: Challamel, 1906, p. 13.
Archives nationales d’Outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence FR Anom 1704 COL 1.
116
Commandant P. Pollacchi, Atlas colonial Français: Colonies, Protectorats et
pays sous mandate. Paris: Illustration, 1929. G. Grandidier, Atlas des colonies
françaises: Protectorats et téritoires sous mandate de la France. Paris: Société
d’Editions Géographiques, Maritimes et colonials, 1934.
recommended in 1936.117 After all, the book was published by the

same ministry.
Conclusion
From the time the region appeared in European maps as Barbary to the
time that it appeared as North Africa, an entire history of colonial
conquest, of diplomatic maneuvering, of the will of politics and the
politics of will was imposed tentatively on a region that was before
1830 part and parcel of a complex geography. This geography had
shifted over centuries, from a time when the divide between Europe and
Africa was not there, mainly because there was no Africa and no
Europe, in the sense that continental categories were not yet born.
From the time the capital of Al-Andalus was Marrakech, to the time
the capital of Algeria became Paris, entire worlds were born and
developed, changed, and vanished to be succeeded by others. From
the ashes of Ottoman rule, the geography of North Africa was born as
a result of colonial conquests, themselves carriers of modern technolo-
gies of power capable of enormous transformations. Yet the region that
by the turn of the nineteenth century was called North Africa was
restricted to Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Other possible compo-
nents of the region were excluded from this configuration because of
colonial interests: Libya was under Italian rule from 1910 until 1943
and Egypt was under British rule from 1882 until 1956.
Despite the use of modern technologies of power to restrict, define,
and delineate what soon was commonly called “nos possessions en
Afrique,” it was the logic of geopolitics that was decisive in this restric-
tion, definition, and delineation. In other words, neither geography nor
history decided the region’s new identity. The intense rivalry between
colonial powers in Africa and beyond led French authorities to recon-
figure their “possessions.” Geography, history, and all other modes of
knowledge were the instruments harnessed for geopolitics.
The Sahara itself, despite the fact that it traverses the entirety of
northern Africa, including Egypt, was considered a defining feature only
of the region delimited by the cardinal direction “north,” and not of
Egypt. Thus it not only separates Black Africa from this region, but it
117
L’exposition coloniale de Marseille: Le Service géographique du Ministère des
colonies. Paris: Challamel, 1906, p. 13.
Conclusion 75
also separates northern Africa itself from Egypt. And this is not only
because the Sahara in Egypt is less populated and more isolated than the
Sahara of the Maghreb, as Gautier maintained. The demography of the
French Sahara is not the same as the demography of the Sahara in Egypt.
This difference is of tantamount importance. In the view of colonial
authors and even national ones, the Sahara was the historical motor of
the Maghreb, the force that generated change and produced a series of
events themselves producing dynasties and reconfiguring space and
people differently each time.
The early hesitations, contradictions, and corrections of geographical
space from Shaw to Gautier undoubtedly reflect not a homogenous know-
ledge, but one that is contradictory, conflicting, and also incomplete.
Atlases not only served to homogenize this knowledge, as we have seen
in the important atlas of Pelet, but also to make it more available, more
pedagogical, and more usable. It is indeed the atlases, with their format as
coffee-table books and as references at libraries, that constituted the
synthesis of cartographic knowledge, made thus available to politicians,
students, reporters, researchers, and tourist companies.118 Atlases were
after all a depot of cartographic knowledge that shaped the public’s
geographic imagination. Atlases present diachronic knowledge, structures
of geographic imagination. And thus, to find out how colonial geographies
were shaped, viewed, and perceived in the minds of their authors and those
of their public, atlases are a good source for such geographic knowledge.
Individual maps, meanwhile, constitute visual images that one is exposed
to from childhood. They often (if not always) decorate the walls of schools,
of administrative offices, and even of homes. This is because geographic
knowledge is an essential in the making of the modern citizen.119
The question now is the following: how had history shaped the
region as a distinct one in the view of colonial authors? Or to be
more exact, how had colonial historians invented the history of the
region? To this question, we now turn.
118
Maps were also very present in tourist guides that flourished by the turn of the
twentieth century. The map of the Maghreb region was presented as
a continuous space. See Guide Michelin: Maroc, Algérie, Tunisie. Paris: Bureau
d’itinéraires Michelin et Cie., 1920.
119
A theme found in literature such as Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
Minneapolis: Lerner Publishing Group, 2015. For a postcolonial example, see
the novel by Emmanuel Dongala, Les petits garcons naissent aussi des étoiles.
Paris: Editions Le Serpent a plumes, 1998.
2 The Trace and Its Narratives
In the process of mapping Algeria, French officers ran into ruins and
remains in the unknown territory they were trying to understand. They
could only comprehend these traces using known categories to find
their meaning in colonial webs of signification. There seem to be two
points of reference French officers could immediately identify and
identify with: the marabouts and Roman ruins.1 While Islam would
become a defining characteristic of the territory (and later, by exten-
sion, the entire region beyond Algeria), Roman ruins took on
a proportional dimension in the creation of the colony (and again,
later, the entire region). This was neither accidental nor just an ideo-
logical justification for conquest, as is often affirmed in academe.
Power does not justify itself, neither does it need to; it constitutes its
own justification. Power is its own raison d’être. The argument of
justification is often put forth in this context and in similar colonial
ones. But to whom does a colonial power need to justify itself? He who
has power, he who is violent in act and bearing – why would he need
justification?2
The modern machinery of knowledge combined, within the institu-
tion of the army, with technologies of power was conducting not only
a work of exploration, a work of discovery, and less so a work of
justification, but also an important process of invention, of reconfigur-
ation, of creation, and ultimately of appropriation and ownership.
That is to say, this invention was for the inventor or, to be more precise,
the invention was the very process by which the colonial state trans-
formed the foreign into the familiar, the remote into the close, the
1
Blais, Mirages de la carte, pp. 140–141.
2
“He who can command, he who is by nature ‘master’, he who is violent in act and
bearing – what has he to do with contracts?” Nietzsche commented on the
modern state in a reference to the social contract put forth by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. See “Genealogy of Morals,” in Basic Writing of Nietzsche. New York:
Modern Library, 1992, pp. 437–600 at p. 522.
76
The Trace and Its Narratives 77
disparate into the orderly, the other into the self. Such invention of
course does not happen ex nihilo, but rather within a concrete geog-
raphy, one that is unknown, yet knowable, to be made known by
technologies of colonial power with its two inseparable dimensions of
production and violence.
As the army goes along, it conquers, and as it conquers, it maps, and
as it maps, it creates and invents, but according to specific categories
and schemes already in use in nineteenth-century France. While Islam
was part and parcel of the French imaginary, Rome was the flip side of
the coin. While the first was identified by negation, the second was
identified by affirmation: the first is “other,” the second is “us.” The
two categories existed one within another, not only as that which
opposes but also as that which by opposing defines and complements.
In the territory later known as Algeria, the French discovered the
Roman past in the same way they discovered it in France, and it was
important there as it was all over Europe.3 It is important to stress that
“social science” was harnessed in the colony the same way it was
harnessed in the metropole to invent France – that is, to shape it, to
reconfigure it, and eventually to make it a modern nation with a border,
a history, a set of politics, and a specific social fabric.4 An important
mode of knowledge that emerged in the nineteenth century as the
“science of empire” was precisely history, not a humanistic discipline,
but rather a science deemed of cardinal importance to understanding
the past and thus controlling the present. Colonial historiography was,
of course, part and parcel of this discipline even when it was carried out
by officers and amateurs.
Archaeology is one of the most important disciplines that partici-
pates in the creation of modern national identities, and one that states
use to substantiate and validate themselves.5 But when we say archae-
ology a number of things are meant: (i) the discipline that manages,
organizes, classifies, considers as relevant (or not) what one calls
3
Michael Dietler, Archaeologies of Colonialism: Consumption, Entanglement,
and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2015.
4
Bras and Todd, L’invention de la France.
5
Margarita Diaz-Andrew, ed., A World History of Nineteenth-Century
Archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Dietler, Archaeologies of
Colonialism. Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practices
and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 2001.
“findings”; (ii) the retrieval of artifacts left from the past; and (iii) the
interpretation of these artifacts. Since these artifacts – as important as
they may appear – do not speak for themselves, the archaeologist
through acts of interpretation gives them meaning, and thus makes
out of the artifacts narratives that become important in these national
creations. As Michael Dietler puts it, “Archaeology provides for the
popular imagination tangible connections to an identity rooted in the
awe-inspiring past. Places and objects can be made into powerfully
evocative symbols that serve to authenticate constructed tradition.”6
Because of the extremely important role that archaeology plays in the
authentication and even the creation of national identity, it is small
wonder that, in modern times, it is a tool to be used and abused,
“given that the state is the major owner of the means of production for
archaeological excavation, and museum displays have been conditioned
by national mythologies for identity.”7
It should be remembered that the French in North Africa, and not only
in Algeria, claimed historical rights and not only rights based on conquest.
They believed the region was part and parcel of the Roman Empire. They
also believed “Arabs” were only invaders, and that if it was not possible to
send them “home,” at least one needed to exclude them politically from the
colonial setting. Hence the importance for French colonialism of history –
part of which is also archaeology, which provides tangible evidence of
historical claims, real “facts on the ground,” which cannot be denied and
thus cannot even be argued for, as the evidence of the colonial discourse.
The first (history) provides narratives about the past; the second (archae-
ology) provides both narratives of the past and traces of the past. The point
here again was less to justify conquest and rule and more to create an entire
national system of meanings where the colony could find its place, like
a hand in a glove. The point was not, or at least not only, to demonstrate
that this parcel of land was French, but rather, and more importantly, to
link this piece to the whole, to create a whole out of colonial parts. For this,
the Roman past was essential, not only because it created a model of
action, as others have maintained,8 but also most importantly, in my
6
Michael Dietler, “Our Ancestors the Gauls”: Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism,
and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe,” American
Anthropologist 1994 (96)3: 584–605 at 597.
7
Ibid.
8
Marcel Bennabou, “L’impérialisme et l’Afrique du Nord: le modèle romain,” in
Sciences de l’homme et conquête coloniale. Constitution et usages des sciences
Archaeo-Christian Narratives 79
opinion, because this model allows the construction of the region not only
in relation to France, but as part of it as well. Dietler argues that “the
discursive foundation of modern European identity and colonialist
ideology and practices were largely grounded in selective interpret-
ations and interpolations of the texts of two ancient colonial powers:
Greece and Rome.”9 I argue that the selective interpretations of these
texts and traces were also essential not only in the formation of the
colonial state, but also for reconfiguring the region in ways that extend
beyond the life of the colonial state and its discursive legacies.
Furthermore, by reconfiguring the region as such, the idea of France
itself had to change to include these parts of Africa, called then the
French Empire and today Françafrique. To make these arguments,
I analyze a number of archaeological texts from the region, at different
points of colonial conquest – namely, from the 1830s to the 1930s.
However, colonial knowledge in its various forms has a genealogy
rooted in the imperial power of Europe even before the conquest of
Algiers. It is these forms of knowledge that I first examine to demon-
strate how the region was envisioned before the foundation of colonial
rule.
Archaeo-Christian Narratives
Again, it is my contention that the region before colonial times was
conceived already, albeit reconfigured in modern ways by the colonial
technology of power. Christian travelers, diplomats, and even mission-
aries had ventured into the region, producing an important body of
knowledge that existed before the advent of colonial rule. This work –
conducted from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, on the
humaines en Afrique XIXe–XXe siècles, ed. Daniel Nordman and Jean-Pierre

Raison. Paris: Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure, 1980, pp. 15–22. Most
recently, see Bonnie Effros, Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the
Rediscovery of Roman North Africa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018;
Patricia Lorcin, “Rome and France in Africa,” French Historical Studies 2002
(25)2: 295–329; Jacques Frémeaux, “Souvenirs de Rome et présence française au
Maghreb:Essai d’investigation,” in Connaissance du Maghreb: Sciences sociales
et colonisation, ed. Jean-Claude Vatin. Paris: CNRS, 1984, pp. 29–46.
9
Michael Dietler, “The Archaeology of Colonization and the Colonization of
Archaeology: Theoretical Challenges from an Ancient Mediterranean Colonial
Encounter,” in The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative
Perspectives, ed. Gil Stein. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2005, pp. 33–68 at p. 34.
eve of colonialism – was not professional, in the sense that it was

conducted before archaeology developed into a “scientific discipline,”
meaning a discipline whose practices and writings obey a number of
rules set by the profession itself.10 The interest in archaeology was
initially amateurish and reflected an interest in the Christian heritage
of the holy land and of early Christianity.11 It was part of what Claude
Lévi-Strauss calls Christian humanism.12 Colonial knowledge was not
invented from scratch. It was preceded by the tremendous efforts of
travelers, traders, diplomats, and missionaries.
The work of these travelers and diplomats constituted the important
beginnings of the archaeological craft, as testified by the fact that even
as late as the 1930s, their work still figured in the bibliography of
professional archaeologists, who cited these past “authorities” in
their own right. Carthage carried the myth of Christianity as well as
the myth of the triumph of Rome over Carthage. The early excavations
were carried out in Carthage by archaeologist Charles Ernest Beulé in
1859,13 followed by the work of the Pères Blancs (White Fathers),
especially Alfred Louis Delattre.14 Delattre was particularly interested
in Christian Carthage. He created the museum he named Musée
Lavigerie in 1899 (previously called Musée Saint-Louis, founded in
1875).15 Delattre also contributed to colonial narratives about the
Christian dimension of the region and drew especially from the work
of Jean Baptiste Évariste Charles Pricot de Sainte-Marie on Carthage as
well as the assistance of René Héron Villefosse.16 He published his
work in the journal Missions Catholiques and in 1890, he published his
10
On the history of archaeology, see Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological
Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
11
See Abdelmajid Hannoum, “Faut-Il Brûler l’Orientalisme? On French
Scholarship of North Africa,” Cultural Dynamics 2004 (16)1: 72–75.
12
Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 273.
13
Ernest Beulé, Fouilles à Carthage. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1859.
14
Alfred Louis Delattre, “Fouilles de Carthage: Douïmès et la colline dite de
Junon,” Bulletin archéologique du comité des travaux historiques et
scientifiques 1907: 433–453.
15
Pierre Gandolphe, “Origines et débuts du Musée Lavigerie,” Cahiers de Bysra
1952 (2): 151–178. Also see Joann Freed, “Le père Alfred-Louis Delattre
(1850–1932) et les fouilles archéologiques de Carthage,” Histoire et Missions
Chrétiennes 2008 (4)8: 67–100.
16
Jean Baptiste Évariste Charles Pricot de Sainte-Marie, La Tunisie chrétienne.
Lyon: Bureaux des missions catholiques, 1878. Also, his Mission a Carthage.
Angers: Burdin e Cie. 1881.
reviews in a volume titled Les tombeaux puniques.17 In 1907, he

published Le culte de la Sainte-Vierge en Afrique d’après les monu-
ments archéologiques.18
Instead of the clear-cut demarcation of colonial and precolonial, there
is indeed a continuity. Europe, and not only France, emerged by the
sixteenth century as empires with colonies and with colonial ambitions
from which the region as a whole was not immune. Small wonder, then,
that the very colonial discursive formation that constructed the region as
a French unit is to be found in this important period between the
sixteenth century and the nineteenth. Christian views were an essential
part of this discursive formation. The proof is precisely that the system of
reference of the colonial included both the precolonial (i.e., Thomas
Shaw) and the Christian (i.e., Alfred Louis Delattre). It is precisely this
Christian concern that remains rooted even in the “secular” colonial
discourse and that is responsible for creating a multidimensional relation
with the region it created. It claims modernity on one hand and is unable
to expel Christian categories on the other. The reason may be that, after
all, the two are not to be disassociated.
Archaeo-Christian narratives constituted a genre in and of themselves.
Even in the midst of the colonial period, Christian narratives of a city
such as Carthage were important and played a role in the construction of
the region as such.19 After all, for the secular colonial state, Rome was
Christian, and Christianity was then, as it is today, the very heritage of
the state that it promotes and favors – solemnly at times, and tacitly most
of the time. Moreover, archaeo-Christian narratives were also harnessed
in the inter-European rivalry over archaeology in the region. It was
Cardinal Charles Lavigerie and the White Fathers, especially Delattre,
that stood up to German and British competition in Carthage.20
Therefore, despite their auxiliary status and even notwithstanding polit-
ical tensions with professional (i.e., secular) archaeologists,21 archaeo-
Christian narratives were important in the process of the invention of the
region. To put it bluntly and succinctly, archaeo-Christian narratives
17
Alfred-Louis Delattre, Les tombeaux puniques. Lyon: Imprimerie Mougin-
Rusand, 1890.
18
Alfred-Louis Delattre, Le culte de la Sainte-Vierge en Afrique d’après les
monuments archéologiques. Paris: Société St. Augustin, 1907.
19
On the role of Christians in Carthage, see Clémentine Gutron, L’archéologie en
Tunisie (XIXe–XXe siècles): enjeux généalogiques sur l’antiquité. Paris:
Karthala, 2010, pp. 81–86.
20
Ibid., p. 28. 21 On these tensions, see ibid.
unearthed Christianity from the soil and imposed their depiction of it on

the colonial public space.
It is important to mention that even though some of this early
archaeological work was not written in French, it was still translated,
sometimes even in the same year, into French. Some of it was not. What
was translated testifies to the fact that European knowledge of “others”
was developed as a single discursive formation obeying the same rules,
subject to the same constraints, and regulated by the same epistemol-
ogy. Colonial governmentality, however, made a difference and
allowed the creation of smaller discursive formations within a larger
one. Hence my argument is that even though French archaeology
constituted, along with other forms of knowledge on the region,
a discursive formation in and of itself, this was part of European
knowledge of “others.” Consider the work of Shaw, Travels or
Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant,
published in 1738.22 Here too, one can see that the region was per-
ceived as a whole indicated by a name, Barbary, the same name we
often find in the maps of the eighteenth century. Archaeological know-
ledge in this text is clearly not the product of excavation, but rather
observation of what lies in front of the eye of the explorer. Yet this
knowledge itself relied on historical texts from Muslim sources as well
as from classical authors. One can see that already by this time, Arab
geographers seemed to be well known among explorers such as Shaw,
who relied on them to conceive of a unity that set the area apart from
Egypt, yet also to isolate the parts that constitute the whole. For
instance, Shaw butted Idrissi and Abulfida (Abû al-Fidâ’) against each
other to achieve what he intended to be an accurate knowledge of the
area. However, in the discursive economy, Shaw relies even more
heavily on Greek geographers, uses Latin names, and seems more
interested in what he calls “Ruins.” In his text, the area is caught in
an array of names of places familiar to those acquainted with Greek
and Roman authors; the region is made to appear in its antique history,
and Shaw is keen to describe the traces of Christianity:
In examining the Ruins, I have often wondered, that there should remain so
many Altars and other Tokenes of the Pagan Idolatry and Superstition; and so
very few Crosses or other Monuments of Christianity. As to the latter, how
zealous forever the African Church might have been in putting them up, the
22
Shaw, Travels or Observations.
Saracens have been industrious enough in pulling them down. The Arabs
certainly, whenever they attend their Flocks, near any of these Ruins, make it
a piece of Devotion as well as Amusement to destroy and obliterate as much of
them as they can.23
This is one of the early judgments about local people and their
relation to the pre-Islamic past that found its natural place within
a colonial ideology and survived colonial times.24 It expresses the
same colonial (some would say Orientalist) ideology regarding
Muslims’ lack of intellectual curiosity, pitted against the unprecedented
curiosity of the Europeans. In other words, it has become a symptom of
modernity. The judgment then, as it is now, can be placed within the
larger problematic of modernity that claims its interests are universal
and considers their absence a sign of the unmodern and the backward.
In any case, Shaw’s work is part of an entire trend (“Christian
humanism,” to repeat Lévi-Strauss again) that seeks the origins of the
Christian European.25 Shaw was interested in anything Christian such
as “the several beautiful Churches and other Edifices, in the manner of
the Roman Architecture.”26 Left by the Spaniards during their occupa-
tion of Oran, these churches and edifices testify to the Christian pres-
ence in the region, as their imitation of Roman architecture itself
testifies to the presence of Rome. Thus in the case of Spanish traces,
Rome, in the past and in modern times, is unseparated from
Christianity as Christianity is unseparated from Rome.
Shaw’s work continued to be authoritative far beyond the first few
decades of colonization. Subsequent colonial authors positioned their
own work in relation to Shaw, whom they intended to correct and
complete at the same time, turning Shaw into a colonial author in his
own right.27 I contend this is not only because Shaw provided informa-
tion that Europe, and of course France, was in dire need of in a time of
conflict over future colonies, but because Shaw infused his body of
knowledge (in large part a synthesis of that of previous authors) with
23
Ibid., p. xi.
24
See Jocelyne Dakhlia, L’oubli de la cité. Paris: La Découverte, 1990. Also see
Gutron L’archéologie en Tunisie. See a critique of this idea in Effros, Incidental
Archaeologists, pp. 3–33.
25
See Hannoum, “Faut-Il Brûler l’Orientalisme?”
26
Shaw, Travels or Observations, p. 26.
27
Jean André Peyssonnel, Relation d’un voyage sur les côtes de Barbarie, Fait Par
ordre du roi en 1724 et 1725. Published by Dureau de La Malle. Paris: Gide,
1838, pp. xiii–xiv.
something that coincided with colonial politics from its beginnings to

its end – that is, the claim to a historical right in Africa. This historical
claim is based on the idea of Roman presence in the region and the
Christian legacy it left embedded in its physical sites as well as its
symbolic ones. Small wonder that these would be investigated system-
atically by colonial technologies of power at a time when modern
modes of knowledge were being constituted within the metropole and
its colonies.
Colonial knowledge, whether in the form of archaeology, historiog-
raphy, or ethnography, depended not only on local knowledge, on
forms of precolonial knowledge such as the narratives and maps of
Muslim scholars, but also the very technology of power in the form of
modern translation, and converted these into colonial knowledge and
its categories, perceptions, and ideologies that claim not only European
centrality but also European superiority. In other words, colonialism is
not only taking and transforming a land, but also taking and converting
modes of knowledge and forms of epistemologies that I have elsewhere
called the colonial imaginary.28
Archaeology of the Colony

Archaeology, as a strategy by which the colony was substantiated and
given meaning, was a discourse on traces and also the traces them-
selves, in need of interpretation, that is, in need of une mise en discours.
As such, archaeology too is a formation of a discourse whose geneal-
ogies are not to be found in Algeria, but rather in the emergence of
archaeology as an important means by which to interrogate the past,
and by which to endow the present with meaning that makes the
connection, or rather the continuity between past and present tangible
and concrete. Such making of a continuity is itself a making of the
present. On one hand, one finds archaeology formed around Roman
remains in France proper, and on the other hand, one finds archaeology
formed in the so-called Orient itself, around Christian traces as well as
Egyptian ones.29 As to be expected, the institution of the army was
28
29
See Myriam Bacha, “Paul Gauckler, le père Delattre et l’archevêché de Carthage:
collaborations scientifiques et affrontements institutionnels,” in Autour du
fonds Poinssot, ed. Monique Dondin-Payre, Houchine Jaidi, Sophie Saint-
Amans, and Meriem Sebaï. Paris: National Institute of Art History, 2017. Also
Archaeology of the Colony 85
initially instrumental in shaping the region’s Roman past and thus making
a connection, if not continuity, with the motherland that was France. First
was the Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie, whose work encompassed all
aspects of Algeria, with mapping and archaeology as two main strategies
of colonial development. Mapping delimited the colony that was Algeria
while at the same time, by drawing its frontiers, opening it to its surround-
ings. Archaeology provided “facts on the ground” that not only attached
the colony to France but also made it seem a piece within a whole. For if
Roman traces define Algeria, they also define, ipso facto, the region
westward and eastward, but not southward.
The Exploration scientifique happened within a historical context
marked by the recent experience of Napoleon in Egypt. In many ways,
the question underlining the research of its archaeologists, several of
whom were indeed part of the exploration of Egypt, was: in what way
is Algeria different from Egypt? The answer, for them, seemed to be
embedded in the question. In fact, since classics were part of the
education of the officers of the army, and even constituted by this
time the cultural model of Europe, Egypt itself was portrayed in clas-
sical Greek texts as part and parcel of Asia.30 The French expedition to
Egypt confirmed this or rather inherited it, yet it also invented Egypt in
a modern way, in a way that connects it to France, for “the invention of
Egypt” is inseparable from its conquest by France.31 Such a conception
remained uncontested in colonial times. It even took on a different
proportion. In 1939, Emile-Félix Gautier confirms this: “Egypt is at
the origin of all the Mediterranean civilization, meaning ultimately the
European civilization.”32
Geopolitics were of course also instrumental in the making of the
definition. Despite its presence in the Louvre, and thus as an essential
tool of shaping the French modern imaginary, Egypt was soon seen as
a “British possession,” a perception confirmed and consecrated by
diplomatic maneuvers. French authorities, despite or rather because
of neighboring British Egypt, had to differentiate it from the new
see Freed, “Le père Alfred-Louis Delattre (1850–1932) et les fouilles

archéologiques de Carthage.”
30
Lewis and Wigen, Myths of Continents.
31
Anne Godlewska, “Map, Text and Image. The Mentality of Enlightened
Conquerors: A New Look at the Description de l’Égypte,” Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers 1995 (20)1: 5–28.
32
Gautier, L’Afrique blanche, p. 19.
colony that was Algeria, comfortably sitting in a geography to which

the French had already started to lay claim. The proof is precisely that
Algeria, not Egypt, was seen as the territory once occupied by Rome. It
was in Algeria, not in Egypt, that the French initially excavated, by trial
and error, anything that had to be interpreted as Roman – even when in
doubt.33 It was Algeria, and not Egypt, that was to be seen at one point
as an extension of Rome, and in colonial times as a continuation of
France. In many ways, the Exploration scientifique, modeled on the
Expedition de l’Egypte, itself inscribed in an eighteenth-century scien-
tific travel tradition of descriptions, had the task to define the area in
new terms to highlight what was distinctive about the new colony.34
But the Exploration, like the Expedition, was only the “soft side” of the
army. In other words, they were the army deploying its other means of
conquest and rule – knowledge as a cultural weapon whose violence
can be felt but not seen. By this time, Great Britain was comfortably
seated in Egypt and its claim to Rome was no less strident than the
claim of France; it was even delegitimizing French claims.35 The
Description de l’Egypte constructed that country in pharaonic terms
and less in Roman tropes despite the aspirations and the Greco-Roman
ideology of Napoleon himself.36 What seemed to have been definitive
of Egypt is its own “indigenous past,” attested to by pharaonic objects
published in the volumes of the Description de l’Egypte. With the
Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie, Algeria (and its surroundings
east and west) emerged as a new geographical entity defined not only
by its Roman past but also by the absence of pharaonic objects and
traces. French archaeology of this period unearthed Rome from
a surface upon which, it was so believed, lay the history of Rome,
which was also a history of France. But why was such a far-back
historical time significant? Why was it the past, and not the present,
that had to provide a definition of the present?
By the nineteenth century, the experience of time had drastically
changed in Europe; the past, and more specifically the Greco-Roman
33
Effros, Incidental Archaeologists.
34
Boussif Ouasti, “La Description de l’Égypte,” Dix-huitième Siècle 1990 (22):
73–82 at 74.
35
Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and
Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003.
36
Ibid. Elliott Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian
Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
past, had become the model upon which Europe created its identity.37
Western civilization itself claims to be Greco-Roman first and foremost
while at the same time its Christian heritage is unquestioned and
unquestionable, and thus mostly unspoken. Even in the colony, it was
Rome that the archaeologist searched for (and he who searches finds),
and there too Christianity was found unseparated from Rome.
The Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie was founded on
Napoleon’s model of the Expedition d’Egypte – that is, it had
a modern imperial project. Even if several of its members had served
as young men in Napoleon’s army in Egypt, the goal they set for
themselves was different.38 One can even argue that the Egyptian
model provided them with lessons in what to replicate and what to
avoid. An important way to look at the construction of Algeria is
precisely to see how Egypt itself was constructed.
Eastward, in Egypt, the British were not justifying the legitimacy of
their presence by the Roman past, despite constant and systematic
reference to it. They scorned French claims to be the heirs of Rome.39
But in the formation of European nations, whether Great Britain,
France, or Germany, the claim to Rome was a means by which to
construct, not justify, a nation. A state needs to substantiate itself, to
articulate its contours, to provide the substance of its national
content.40
The archaeological work of the Exploration scientifique provided
such content – “facts on the ground,” as it was explicitly said some-
where else41 – on grounds not yet known and whose destiny was to
become part of the grounds for the empire. And this ground was not
Egypt: for geopolitical reasons, it was Algeria, and ipso facto, its
contours were still undefined eastward, southward, and westward. It
is here that facts or rather traces would constitute the material as well
as the symbolic culture of the region. This was constituted, again not
37
François Hartog. Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expérience du temps.
Paris: Seuil, 2003.
38
For Napoleon in Egypt, see Timothy Michel, Colonizing Egypt. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988. Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the
Middle East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Reid, Whose Pharaohs?
39
Reid, Whose Pharaohs?
40
Dietler, “Our Ancestors the Gauls.” Nicholas Dirks, “The Ethnographic State,”
in Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 43–60. Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground.
41
Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground.
for the sake of justification, not for the colony itself, but as part of the
very process of creating national culture and history for France. For the
existence of the empire constituted an important dimension of
European nationalism, and this may also be one of its unique charac-
teristics. In other words, the cultural project that created France
extended itself, via the same technologies of power, to make Algeria
and gradually the region part and parcel of France.
This is substantially different from Great Britain’s situation in Egypt
or in Iraq, where the defining feature of colonial archaeology was its
“indigenous” subject matter – pharaonic and Mesopotamian, studied
via Egyptology and Mesopotamian archaeology.42 Egypt was con-
structed as part of the ancient Mediterranean world and was thus
separated from Africa.43 The Greco-Roman period was of less import-
ance in Egyptology.44 Algeria, already by the first two decades of
archaeological research and excavations there, was defined as
Roman, not as Berber, and thus it was defined by an absence. The
very trope of this absence also tells us that the only civilization that has
ever existed is Roman. That is why Algeria, and by extension the region
called then northern Africa, was still defined by a local absence of
civilization and a foreign presence of civilization. West Africa, by
contrast, was defined not only by a total absence of antiquity,45 but
also ipso facto by an overabundance of primitiveness. “It was stone-
using hunter-gatherers who were the focus of early archaeological
investigations.”46 African archaeology was thus centered around the
“Stone Age,” and was of different use to Europeans in that it was
supposed to contribute to knowledge of the earliest Europeans.47
Thus, speaking about archaeological ruins in Senegal in 1916, Pierre
Jouenne notes that the region extending from the coast of Gambia to
42
Trigger, History of Archaeological Thought.
43
Graham Connah, “Archaeological Practice in Africa: A Historical Perspective,”
in The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology, ed. Peter Mitchell and
Paul Lane. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 15–36 at p. 16.
44
David O’Connor, “Egyptology and Archaeology: An African Perspective,” in
A History of African Archaeology, ed. Peter Robertshow. New Hampshire/
London: Heinemann/James Curey, 1990, pp. 236–251 at p. 236.
45
Francois Kense, “Archaeology in Anglophone West Africa,” in A History of
African Archaeology, ed. Peter Robertshaw. New Hampshire/London:
Heinemann/James Curey, 1990, pp. 137–138.
46
Connah, “Archaeological Practice in Africa,” p. 16. 47 Ibid.
the Ferlo Desert and from Nioro to the west and from Niani Ouli to the
east contains “numerous megalithic monuments.”48 He indeed writes:
The European was surprised to find in the Senegalese bush memories of the
past proving the existence once upon a time of a race with manners of seeing,
feeling, and showing personality comparable to those of his own ancestors.
These monuments struck the travelers with their “European” character.49
Such a view puts France in a position to connect its past with

a present in the colony of Senegal. But such a connection is different
from the one France created and established archaeologically in north-
ern Africa. In West Africa, there is a connection of primitive origins. In
northern Africa, there is a connection of civilization that France con-
tinues in the present, so it was believed. Roman archaeology made the
region much closer to France, or rather its extension in the past and in
the present. This characteristic itself separated the region from Egypt,
defined archaeologically by its pharaonic past and from West Africa,
defined by its primitiveness, also attested to by archaeology.50 Let us
consider now how the archaeology of the first few decades not only
emerged as a colonial science, but most importantly how it unearthed
a past in continuity with the one imagined for France, and in discon-
tinuity with the one in Africa and in the Middle East.
Let us be clear, however, that the point here is not to engage in
a history of archaeological practices in the colony or to evaluate these
practices according to standards of the discipline then and now,51 but
rather to show how archaeological knowledge, at this juncture, not
only played a major role in unearthing a past but was also instrumental
in shaping the region by using Roman history, its narratives, its cat-
egories, and ultimately its ideology to reconfigure space and landscape.
In the process, the local – that is, Punic, Arab, Islamic, Berber, and
other – narratives were minimized, eliminated, or transformed to take
on a colonial form. It should be clear also that in my analysis, I take
archaeology to be an ensemble of narratives and I analyze them as such
48
Paul Jouenne, “Les monuments mégalithiques du Sénégal,” in Annuaire
et mémoires du comité d’études historiques et scientifiques de l’Afrique
occidentale Française. Gorée: Imprimerie du Gouvernement Général, 1916,
p. 27.
49
Ibid. 50 Connah, “Archaeological Practice in Africa.”
51
For such a history, see Effros, Incidental Archaeologists. Paul MacKendrick,
The North African Stones Speak. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1980.
to lay bare the mechanisms of their constitution in order to show that

they create realities, colonial ones for sure, upon which the empire had
to be built and policies made and actions taken. I further show that the
creation of a continuous space from the borders of Libya to those of
Senegal allowed the creation of a vision of empire and a unified econ-
omy of policies.
To this end, I would like to illustrate my point by examining the
work of Captain Alphonse Delamare, an officer turned archaeologist in
the early phase of the colonization of Algeria, who was responsible
within the Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie for laying bare archaeo-
logical “traces” and discourse. In this period of the 1830s and 1840s,
I hope to show, this effort was not individual or isolated, but was part
and parcel of a strategic archaeology that was to continue throughout
the first half of the twentieth century and contribute to creating the
region as distinct, clear, and disconnected from Egypt, from the Sahara,
and from West Africa. In other words, the aim is to show how archae-
ology, as part of the technology of modernity, was congruent in its task
of creation with other modern modes of knowledge.
First of all, let us note that the archaeological endeavor of Delamare,
within the Exploration, generated three sets of semiotic objects to be
analyzed conjointly despite their distinct status: material objects called
antiquities, drawings of these objects, and a discourse of interpretation
of these antiquities. For behind the published work of the Exploration,
Delamare engaged in a real and sustained effort to offer the metropole
material objects to be placed in the Algerian section of the Louvre.52
Needless to say, these three semiotic objects not only support one
another and define one another’s meanings, but also contribute to
bestowing a constellation of meanings on the state’s definition of itself
and of the colony. The transfer of these objects to the metropole also
serves to “concretize” the new territory’s belonging to France.53 The
majority of Delamare’s work is contained in the volumes of the
Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie and consists in maps and drawings
52
Monique Dondin-Payre, Le Capitaine Delamare: La réussite de l’archéologue
romaine au sein de la Commission d’Exploration Scientifique d’Algérie. Paris:
Imprimerie Paillart, 1994.
53
Monique Dondin-Payre, “La mise en place de l’archéologie officielle en Algérie
XIXe siècle-début XXe siècle,” Aspects de l’archéologie française au
XIXe siècle. Actes du colloque international tenu à la Diana à Montbrison, 14 et
15 octobre 1995, éd. P. Jacquet et R. Périchon, Montbrison, 2000 (Recueil
de mémoires et documents sur le Forez, 28), pp. 351–400.
of Rome in the region.54 There is also Delamare’s efforts in the excava-

tion, collection, and transfer of these objects that are also narrated by
historians, several of them basing their narration on archives (letters,
reports, and correspondence by Delamare and others).
In 1912, the highest authority in the field, Stéphane Gsell, testified to
the great work of Delamare accomplished with “une conscience vrai-
ment admirable.”55 Delamare, Gsell continues, had collected a large
number “of sculptures, bas-reliefs, especially Latin inscriptions that
constitute the major part of the African museum of Louvre.”56
Delamare’s second work, consisting of drawings, was published, with-
out text, as the volume on archaeology of the Exploration
scientifique.57 Gsell commented on them in 1912. Yet, despite his silent
drawings, Delamare published a series of articles pertaining to archae-
ology; therefore one can say that Delamare interrogated his collections
in different venues, mainly in the pages of the Revue Archéologique. It
is there, then, that one finds the meanings Delamare wanted to give to
the material objects excavated during the 1830s and 1840s.
The archaeological work, once again, not only consisted of
a discourse that unearthed the past of the colony to display its
Roman heritage, but it was also a display of material objects some of
which were left on site but preserved, others of which were sent to
Algiers, the capital of the colony, to testify on behalf of the Romans in
the present, and still others, the most stunning, of which were sent to
the Louvre precisely to create the physical connection, which is in itself
also a testimony, of the metropole to the colony. The work of Louis-
Adrien Berbrugger in this regard was remarkable. For this man who
dominated the colonial research until 1870, Algeria was only a part of
a whole that he names Afrique septentrionale, once under Roman
occupation. Berbrugger and his contemporaries often made the parallel
between the French now of the region and the Roman then.58 Thus he
parallels current (1856) French names of the region with their then
Roman names:59
54
Commission Scientifique de l’Algérie.
55
Stéphane Gsell, Exploration Scientifique de l’Algérie. Paris: Ernest Leroux,
1912, p. III.
56
Ibid.
57
Adolphe Hedwige Delamare, Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie, Archéologie.
Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1850.
58
Berbrugger, “L’Afrique septentrionale,” p. 82. 59 Ibid., p. 81.
Table 2.1 Names of countries of modern North Africa and their

equivalent in Roman times
MARCO MAURITANIE TINGITANE.

ALGÉRIE á l’Ouest, –MAURITANIE CÉSARIENNE.
au centre, – MAURITANIE SITIFIENNE.
á l’Est. – NUMIDIE.
TUNISIE au Nord, – ZEUGITANE,-OU PROCONSULARE.
au Sud ; –BYZACÉNE.
TRIPOLI TRIPOLITAINE.
I come back in the next chapter to examining the strategy of names

and naming in colonial narratives. Here, suffice it to say that
Berbrugger traces the geography of the Romans, and thus of the
French, and intends to delineate the region from its surroundings:
“These four states contain all northern Africa or Berbérie. They are
well detached from the rest of the African continent, by the sea and by
the sands, that Arab geographers rightly called them, in their ensemble,
the island of the Occident.”60
Archaeology from now on serves as an important strategy to isolate the
region from the continent, by then called Africa. This isolation is in itself
a new identification operated by the creation of webs of colonial meanings
bestowed on the past. Or to say it more accurately, since the past is nothing
but narratives in past tense, in the colonial present of the region, the
historical narrative of Rome dominated and in so doing, the region
appears, from now on, as distinct from its African settings where the
narrative of Rome is absent and from its eastern settings where the narra-
tive of Rome is overshadowed by other narratives such as the pharaonic
and the Mesopotamian. The new area now appears defined by Rome, the
way Europe, and a priori France, came to be defined by it as well:61
To preclude the demoralization of the French army in what he described as
“primitive” conditions, Berbrugger argued that the colony needed to imitate
the conventions of metropolitan society if it was to push inhabitants toward
civilization. Libraries and museums were essential institutions for this
purpose.62
60
Ibid., pp. 81–82. 61 Dietler, “Our Ancestors the Gauls.”
62
Effros, Incidental Archaeologists, p. 117.
Archaeology and the Historiographic State 93
In any case, despite the astonishing diversity of objects “discovered”

and turned into pieces of narration that found themselves part and
parcel of an archaeological discursive formation, one can conclude that
archaeology as a technology of modern power was able to turn the
colony topsy-turvy, bring the deep to the surface, and make the surface
appear as parasitic habitats, made of foreign, unwanted, and harmful
objects – mosques, marabouts, Kasbahs, tribal tents, and seas of
deserts. It was indeed as if the colony itself was a tombstone under
which lay the remains of a prosperous past that colonial France claimed
as its own. What was at the surface – the cities with their streets,
mosques, neighborhoods – were transitory vicissitudes generated by
a recent Arab conquest. Of course, underground was where one found
the authentic depths of the territory’s real self – Roman cities, sites,
epigraphs, and statues and statuettes. The past belonged to Rome and
thus now to France. Its presence was a tenacious resistance against
time. Once again, this is not a question of justification, for there was no
crisis of colonial legitimacy; neither was there any need to justify
a presence that laid its claim on solid foundations – colonial conquest.
That Rome was also France was a means of empire building, and the
logic of that building goes beyond the country called Algeria to all parts
coveted by France. This work of interpretation, it could be concluded,
was waiting to serve in a different context, a post-conquest era marked
by colonial triumph, and at the moment also when the colony appeared
to have tremendous territorial possibilities to the east and west.
Archaeology and the Historiographic State

Colonials’ unmistakable triumph, achieved by 1870, happened in three
registers: against the power of the metropole, especially those policies
that did not directly serve settlers’ interests, against the military regime
perceived as too friendly to the Arabs, and against the Arabs whose
presence was deemed illegitimate in a land whose past and present were
“Western,” since they themselves were conquerors from the Orient.
Ironically, this last victory was accomplished, in its latest phase, against
a population that the colonial discourse long constructed as “not
Arab” – that is, Kabyle. As a consequence of these three triumphs,
which occurred in the wake of one of the most humiliating of French
defeats at the hand of Prussia in 1870, the entire landscape of colonial
politics in Algeria underwent a drastic transformation from a colony
ruled by the military to one ruled by the civilians. This not only made
the military depend on politics but also made Algeria emerge as a locus
of colonial power, where decisions on the colony were made, even
against the metropole, and where an entire set of institutions was set
up to govern the colony. In this set of institutions, the army was given
a marginal place at the expense of other institutions oriented toward
a different form of governmentality that relies more heavily on know-
ledge of the past than on ethnographies of the present.
In fact, Algeria, before 1870, was not ruled by a local state that we
can define as ethnographic or historiographic, but it was rather ruled by
the metropole, with policies that shifted with the vicissitudes of state
politics. Or to say it differently, Algeria was not ruled by the European
population, but for them, by a power outside of the colony. The
decisions about Algeria were taken by the emperor for the immediate
interest of the imperial state of which Algeria was only one colony
among others. L’armée d’Afrique had then a colonial mandate and
functioned with or without Napoleon III as a metropolitan institution
implementing policies of the French state. The year 1870 was decisive
in creating a colonial state with institutions that not only produced the
means of knowing the colony and thus governing it, but also trans-
forming the colony by the power of this very knowledge. I call this the
historiographic state. This state is undoubtedly different from the
ethnographic state Nicholas Dirks describes, not only by the fact that
it relies on knowledge of the past almost exclusively, or at least heavily,
but also because it was in a relation of competition, antagonism, but
also cooperation with other states, especially in Morocco where ethno-
graphic knowledge was the dominant, but not the exclusive form of
colonial knowledge.63 I come back to this issue in Chapter 4, to discuss
the operative modes and practices of this ethnographic state.64
Again, by historiographic state I mean that in this context, the
colony, Algeria, was endowed with institutions set up for its govern-
ance – that is, to manage, organize, classify, and thus govern the land
and the people (European settlers as well as local inhabitants). For this,
and because of the project of making Algeria part and parcel of the
metropole, history emerged at this juncture as a major mode of
63
Dirks, “The Ethnographic State.”
64
Edmund Burke III, The Ethnographic State: France and the Invention of
Moroccan Islam. Berkeley: California University Press, 2014.
knowledge. For many, not only was the experience of France in Algeria
modeled on the past in its Roman version, but the organizing of the
army itself, the specter of Rome itself, the roads, the stadiums, the
policies, the cities of course, and the figure of the settler himself all
gave colonial authorities in the colony, the Roman simulacra.
Societies and institutions oriented toward the past – to be modeled
on it and also to revive it – were created in this phase, adding to the
number of institutions and societies we have seen in the previous
section. The University of Algiers emerged at this juncture as an import-
ant institution of knowledge and of politics, where the two were
intertwined in ways that made them impossible to separate.
It should be recalled that military science emerged in this century, the
nineteenth, as the science of society whose usefulness, nay, necessity for
states and nations, was of tantamount importance. In the context of
Algeria, the historiographic state was hegemonic and its functioning
could be best seen in the institution of the University of Algiers with
monumental figures whose work, importance, and longevity exceeded
the immediate colonial moment, to include immortals such as Gsell (a
faculty member in the years 1894–1901)65 and later Fernand Braudel
(1923–1932). It is the historiographic state, I argue elsewhere, that
transformed Algeria into a French territory; it is also this same historio-
graphic state that not only created the semantic foundations of the
region called the Maghreb but also, and maybe even more importantly,
created the condition of its discursive possibility.66 Archaeology also
created a horizon that made colonial authorities already in 1856
believe that Algeria is only a piece within a whole, as attested by
these artifacts, these cities, and these histories that traverse the entire
area in all directions.67 Hence, not only the archaeological discourse
but even its authors defined the area with ease and in ways that unified
the archaeological discourse more than any other form of colonial
discourse.
65
Stéphane Gsell was nominated inspecteur des Antiquités d’Algérie and in 1912,
he was elected as a professor at the Collège de France. He remained in contact
with the academic milieu of Algiers until his death in 1932. See Charles Picard,
“Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Stéphane Gsell, membre de l’académie,”
Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
1947 91(1): 24–86.
66
See Abdelmajid Hannoum, “The Historiographic State: How Algeria Once
Became French,” History and Anthropology 2008 (19)2: 91–114.
67
Berbrugger, “L’Afrique septentrionale,” p. 82.
Archaeology itself, and this should be obvious by now, was

a “historical science.” It was also a science believed to be instrumental
for geography – that is, for a conception of geography. The profession-
alization of archaeology was marked by the founding in 1880 of
L’Ecole Supérieure des Lettres d’Alger, which transformed in 1909 to
become Faculté des Lettres, l’Ecole Supérieure des Lettres d’Alger.
Commonly known as the University of Algiers, it became an important
institution for the production of knowledge on not just Algeria but also
beyond it – on the region. This is because the school as an institution of
the historiographic state privileged research on the past that led its
members, almost ipso facto, to create a narrative in which Algeria was
only a piece of a whole. From this date, archaeology was no longer the
affair of military officers and amateurs, but became rather regulated.
Gsell, under the order of the governor-general, wrote instructions on
how to conduct excavations.68 By 1880 and the consolidation of colo-
nial rule in Tunisia, rare was the discourse that stressed just Algeria.
Even among the rare ones, the subtext was often, if not always, the idea
that Algeria is part of a geographic fabric extending east and west.
South, the Sahara served to impose what was considered a “natural”
barrier between the region and its sub-Saharan counterpart.
Nonetheless, in this crucial phase of the consolidation of colonial
rule, the expansion of its power, and the instrumentalization of the
historiographic state, the region took a shape that constructed one of its
defining features. If officers of the army focused on this or that portion
of Algeria to lay bare Roman remains, professional archaeologists
embraced the entire region as a totality. The work of Jules Toutain
and Gsell marked this period and created not only an archaeological
perception of the region but also a framework of archaeological think-
ing that has lasted until now. Toutain focuses on Tunisia, through
which he demonstrates an archaeological continuity. However, he
also raises the important issue of indigeneity that was put aside or
minimized by archaeologists such as Gsell himself. Toutain gives to
Rome only what belongs to Rome:
For four centuries, all the countries with coasts on the Mediterranean were
Roman provinces. For four centuries, all the shores of this inland sea that the
68
Stéphane Gsell, Instructions pour la conduit des fouilles archéologiques en
Algérie. Algiers: Adolphe Jourdan, 1901.
Romans called Mare nostrum, were subjected to one and the same power,
Roman power.69
Yet, for the region Toutain calls Maurétanie:

Elsewhere, as in Mauritania, urban life and municipal organization were
imported from the outside, thanks to the establishment of the colonies. In this
barbaric country occupied by nomadic tribes, the first sedentary inhabitants
were Roman soldiers released from service; the first cities were colonies set up
especially by Augustus and Claudius on the coast of Igilgili (Djidjelli), Saldae
(Bougie), Gunugi (Gouraya), Cartennae (Tenes), Lixus (on the western coast
of Morocco), and the inland Thubusuptu or Tupusuctu (Tiklat, near Oued
Sahel, southwest Bougie), Zucchabar or Succabar (on the Chelif, southeast of
Miliana), among others. The Roman cities did not substitute old indigenous
centers; municipal Roman law did not substitute the precedent organization.
There was no mixing and no conflict between the new institutions and
ancient traditions.70
The archaeological discourse also constantly deploys a strategy of

naming. As seen in the citation just referenced, not only is the region
claimed in the present by evoking its historical phase in the time of Rome,
but the existence of Rome is confirmed, both in the past and in the present:
Djidjelli, Bougie, Tenes, and Chelif are nothing but Roman locations with
altered names. Mauritania is this same land once inhabited and made
prosperous by Rome; it is also Africa, the name used in classical work of
Western civilization. Yet, in the same citation, Toutain makes clear that
indigenous centers existed, that entire organizations were present before
Rome, and, most importantly, that these centers and organizations were
neither replaced nor combined with the new.
The Romanization of the region – which is in fact the Frenchification
of the region via the narrative of Rome – went on unabated in Tunisia.
Beyond the work of Toutain, Tunisia had already been excavated via
the Exploration scientifique de la Tunisie.71 It was also explored by
Ernest Babelon and Salomon Reinach of the Mission archéologique en
Tunisie.72 Rome and Christianity were the guiding principles of these
explorations.
69
Jules Toutain, Les cités romaines de Tunisie: Essai sur l’histoire de la
colonisation romaine dans l’Afrique du Nord. Paris: Ernest Thorin, 1895.
70
Ibid., p. 2.
71
Charles Tissot, La province romaine d’Afrique. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1888.
72
Salomon Reinach and Ernest Babelon, “Recherches archéologiques en Tunisie
1883–1884),” BA/BCTH 1886: 4–40.
In Tunisia, France seemed to have learned from the many mistakes

committed in Algeria. A series of decrees regulating the field were
issued that included protecting the sites and creating a museum for
conservation. After the treaty of Bardo that established the French
Protectorate in Tunisia on May 21, 1881, the Académie des inscrip-
tions et belles-lettres created in 1882, the Commission d’Afrique du
Nord under the presidency of Léon Renier. In 1884, it was replaced by
the Commission de publication des découvertes archéologiques faites
en Tunisie.
With it, archaeological research was institutionalized in the metro-
pole. This institutionalization itself shows France’s attitude to the
region as a single bloc attached and subordinated to imperial power
in Paris. “The links between Algerian and Tunisian archaeologies were
confirmed once again: a shift from one to the other happens almost
naturally,” observes Clémentine Gutron.73 With the Protectorate in
Morocco in 1912, and despite frictions between the school of Algiers
and the school of Rabat, this shift became a real group effort to unearth
the pre-Islamic traces of the region, to bring them to the fore, to present
them as expressing the real, deep, everlasting self of the region in
contrast to the transient, contingent, and superficial character observed
upon the arrival of the French: “We can consider this period as the
golden age of Tunisian archaeology seeing that it had witnessed a very
important scientific production exceeding all productions of other
periods.”74
The work of Charles Tissot, undertaken more than thirty years
before colonial rule in Tunisia in 1881, by the admission of the author
himself, was an important contribution that connected the archaeology
of Algeria with the archaeology of Tunisia, and created thus
a continuity that was professional as well as ideological, accomplished
under the aegis of the Commission. For archaeologists, the entire area,
including Morocco, was a single unit; Roman traces confirm this
conception. In his book, Tissot makes this clear from the outset:
73
Gutron, L’archéologie en Tunisie, p. 28.
74
Sadok Ben Baaziz, “Historique de la recherche archéologique en Tunisie,” in
Hommes, Cultures et paysages de l’Antiquité à la période moderne, ed.
Isabelle Pimouguet-Pédarros, Monique Clavel-Levêque, and Fatima Ouachour.
Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013, pp. 57–78.
Bordered to the north by the Mediterranean, to the west by the Atlantic, to

the south and east by the Sahara, the part of northern Africa (Afrique
septentrionale), which includes the regency of Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco
form, as noted by Ritter, [is] an isolated whole, a sort of quasi island in the
large quasi African peninsula. By calling it, in their metaphorical language,
Djezirat el-Maghreb, “the island of the West,” the Arabs have only noted
a geographic truth.75
Yet, despite the reference to one of the Arab names of the region, the
delimitation Tissot makes is different:
Geographers of antiquity believed they could attach Egypt to Asia. Modern
science, with more reason, considers the part of Africa located between the
Mediterranean and the Sahara as an annex to Europe to which, according to
all appearances, it was connected to via more than one region and to the pre-
historic periods by more than one point. Today, it is certain that the north of
Africa, by its fauna as well as by its flora, belongs to this great natural region
that received the name of the Mediterranean zone.76
One can see explicitly with Tissot the intention not only to archaeo-
logically define the region but also to delimit its contours, to attach it to
Europe, and perhaps more importantly to give it a name. For archae-
ologists were all too aware that naming is an important strategy of
archaeological appropriation. The new name, in archaeological prac-
tice of the time, was also in a good number of cases an old name taken
from the Greek and Roman lexicon.
The archaeological discourse, as articulated by Tissot, also indicated
occupation and the existence of indigeneity in Roman times. In other
words, it admits the existence of other claims, both local and extra-
local (Punic). The archaeological discourse creates loopholes that
somehow contradict, to a certain extent, the national narratives that
wanted to make the region an extension of France and thus of Europe
itself. To admit that “indigenous” populations existed and that others
besides Rome brought civilization is to admit two ideas that contradict
the colonial discourse and its claim of the civilizing role of Rome.
Instead, Rome coexisted with the primitiveness of locals and Punic
civilization. Roman North Africa thus does not appear to be all
Roman. Duvivier also noted this contradiction: “For all time and in
all its aspects, Africa appears to be a country of Rome; this gratuitous
75 76
Tissot, La province romaine d’Afrique, p. 1. Ibid.
judgement will likely not be invalidated anytime soon.”77 However,

contradictions are part of the system from which they spring and may
constitute a potential discursive avenue for others and possibly for the
system itself to allow to generate.
The region, now called Africa or North Africa, does not in these
works appear identical to France. The archaeological discourse of the
historiographic state is then fraught with another serious contradic-
tion. Contrary to the archaeological discourse of the officers of the
army, in which Rome and Rome alone seemed to reign supreme in the
history of the region, in the professional archaeological discourse,
troublesome traces of the “other” appear with an ability to subvert
the archaeological discourse, and with it the making of the region under
French colonial rule. How to tackle this contradiction that seems to
have been created by the interpretation of archaeological traces?
In this phase, Gsell appears as the ultimate authority on the archae-
ology of the region. He is the author of an impressive discourse, prolific,
extensive, expansive, and even imperialist in a unique way. As Toutain
himself said of him, “Gsell is a monument of complete and accurate
erudition.”78 Gsell is by himself a name associated with an entire
discourse whose importance is attested to not only by its presence in
any archaeological discourse on the region but also by the fact that its
legacy continues in the present.
The early archaeology of French colonialism undoubtedly defined
the field; it also created an archaeological formation within which
future archaeology developed. But these developments owe their
importance not only to the transformation of archaeology from ama-
teur to professional, but also to the emergence of what I have coined in
the same context as a historiographic state.79 Colonial archaeology is
a field in and of itself. But it was mainly shaped by a man who created
the framework that made possible other works in the context of
Morocco and Algeria. Stéphane Gsell’s project carried within itself
a territorial ambition, North Africa, and not only Algeria where he
worked. It is his work that gave substance to the idea of North Africa as
an extension of France and thus of Europe itself, despite the presence of
77
Franciade Fleurus Duvivier, Recherches et notes sur la portion de l’Algerie ausud
de Guelma depuis la frontier de Tunis jusqu’qu’au mont Aures compris. Paris: L.
Vassal et cie, 1841, p. 65.
78
Toutain, Les cités romaines de Tunisie, p. 318.
79
Hannoum, “Historiographic State.”
a foreign element: the Arabs. Initially, and for most of his career, Gsell
concentrated on Algeria, excavating and interpreting previous finds.
From 1902 to 1911, Gsell published the Atlas archéologique de
l’Algérie, commissioned by the General Government of Algeria (i.e.,
the state), and published by the Ministry of War.80 What is most
interesting about this publication is not that it is comprehensive in
indicating Roman remains across all of Algeria, or in reactivating old
names, but that its publication was intended to complete the already
existing Atlas archéologique de la Tunisie.
This is to say that by the turn of the nineteenth century, the two
countries of Algeria and Tunisia were in the process of being mapped
archaeologically as a single unit that was once Roman. Again, the idea
that the region constituted a unit that France had the ambition to make
its own was already expressed by others, including Berbrugger, as
discussed earlier in this chapter. But to be considered as an archaeo-
logical unit was more than putting facts on the ground, but rather
mapping the ground of fact. Moreover, in this atlas, Gsell is compre-
hensive in mentioning every single publication, even that of Shaw, and
every single Roman trace, be it a city, a stadium, and so forth. This
unearthing of everything Roman, and only the Roman, was itself part
of the drastic transformation the area was subjected to under archae-
ologists and military officers.
It was in 1914 that Gsell undertook the ambitious project to
Romanize the ground of the entire region and not only Algeria, and
to claim the region as Roman. The studious efforts of Gsell on Algeria
culminated in Ancient History of North Africa, published between
1914 and 1930, a time often considered the height of French colonial
power.81 The book itself represents this colonial triumph. By now,
Morocco was already a Protectorate and the rivalries between France
and Great Britain seemed to be a thing of the past. It was Gsell who
provided the archaeological semantics supporting the idea of North
Africa that later, in 1928, became the Maghreb. The book is about
Roman North Africa even though Gsell examines also Punic history
and discusses their remains, their divinities, and their impact on an
“indigenous” population incapable of creating its own civilization.
80
Stéphane Gsell, Atlas archéologique de l’Algérie. Algiers: Adolphe Jourdan,
1911.
81
Stéphane Gsell, Histoire ancienne de l’Afrique du Nord. Paris: Hachette,
1914–1930.
However, Gsell not only gives greater importance to Rome over

Carthage as an occupying power, but he also writes as if the entire
history of Carthage was nothing but a prelude to the triumph of
Rome.82 “Thus,” he concludes his monumental study, “barely two
centuries after the creation, around the ruins of Carthage, of the
small province of Africa, Rome extended at last its domination till the
shores of the Ocean and beyond the Columns of Hercules.”83
For all the archaeological finds in Algeria, some of which were
excavated by Gsell himself, he made an archaeological effort of inter-
pretation. In his work, the region of Algeria became the terrain of three
major archaeological traces: “indigenous,” “Punic,” and “Roman.”
While making the traces of the indigenous minimal and indicative of
a state of primitiveness, he brushes aside the Phoenician traces as less
significant even in terms of presence. The Roman past, in the view of
Gsell, lives on under and above the soil of what Gsell started calling
Latin Africa.
We know what good results the Roman conquest had for this country called
today Algeria. It was especially in the second and the third parts of the third
century that this region could develop, thanks to the peace that reigned. The
old Punic and indigenous cities were transformed and enlarged. Elsewhere,
especially at the foot of the Aurès, new cities were founded and became
prosperous.84
Besides local objects that were not recognized as French, and thus as
European and Western, these Roman remains were categorized and
written about matter of factly as being the same objects that made
France and by extension, mutatis mutandis, Europe. Punic and local
traces, ignored in the amateur phase of archaeology, were paid atten-
tion to, but as “curiosities,” as Nicholas Thomas has observed in
similar colonial contexts.85 But with Gsell, working at the zenith of
colonial exploratory science, local objects are no longer curiosities, but
rather scientific objects in and of themselves. Gsell turns curiosity into
science, and the same “curios” are turned into European objects: Punic
and local cities, in his view, have no existence of their own; they have
become Roman cities. It is this recognition of other traces that
82
Ibid., vol. 8. 83 Ibid., vol. 8, p. 287.
84
Stèphane Gsell, Les monuments antiques de l’Algérie. Paris: Thron, 1901, p. 10.
85
Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and
Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
transforms them into recognizable traces. Rome built the new out of
the old. In doing so, the old has no other existence but in the new object.
One can see that Gsell pushes Romanization beyond its discursive
limits. He not only marginalizes local or Punic objects; he also
Romanizes them. Gsell engages in a real imperialist epistemology of
archaeology by which an object is not the object that offers itself to
perception, it is not an object by its appearance, but rather it is an object
falsely presenting itself as something else. It does not speak the truth,
but hides it. The archaeologists work to make it speak properly, truth-
fully, and authentically. These objects, despite appearances, are then
placed within a colonial regime of truths.
Gsell dominated the field of archaeology; his longevity, his prolifer-
ation, his political standing, his academic authority as a professor at the
University of Algiers from 1894, as an inspecteur des Antiquités
d’Algérie from 1901, and a professor at the Collège de France from
1912, the highest honorary academic position in France, assured his
discourse a solid authority with impressive intellectual power that
made him the main architect of archaeology of the region. Of course
this same discourse allowed him to secure important institutional
power. For the historiographic state after all produced Gsell, the
name associated with a colossal academic production that made
Africa Roman. This very work also stands as a monument to French
archaeology, “a monument of complete and accurate erudition,”86 “an
irreplaceable pillar of the scientific place of the French school” in the
region.87 It has been noted that his work constituted “the basis of all
subsequent work in the colony on Roman archaeology.”88 Yet this
work itself built on military archaeology and its power of persuasion,
which is also the power of shaping a certain colonial imaginary that is
itself the result of the institution that made it possible – that is, in the
final analysis of the historiographic state.
Even outside the context of Algeria, the historiographic state was
discursively hegemonic, making archaeologists of the region extend the
discourse of Gsell into the adjunct pieces of the colony. Thus, when
86
Jules Toutain, “Antiquités romaines,” Revue historique 1913 113(2): 318.
87
Monique Dondin-Payre, “Jules Toutain et Stéphane Gsell àl’Ecole française de
Rome (1886–1891): une étape décisive pour l’étude du Maghreb,” in Construire
l’institution. L’École française de Rome, 1873–1895, ed. Michel Gras and
Olivier Poncet (Hrsg.) Rome: École française de Rome, 2014.
88
Lorcin, “Rome and France in Africa,” p. 313.
Paul Gauckler wrote his book on the archaeology of Tunisia, he started

by confirming Gsellian truths. For him, Tunisia is a domain of Roman
rule and brilliance. All cities are Roman, even those one may consider
otherwise revived, which were built on and reemerged as Roman
cities.89 Phoenicians, Berbers, or any other population that had existed
left nothing but ruins under ruins, and especially graves. The work of
civilization was the work of Rome and Rome alone.
Besides, pre-historic or not, Libyan, Phoenician or Libyan-Phoenician, these
monuments have only a limited documentary value which is not enough: they
are all funerary. Of the people that preceded the Romans in Tunisia, we
know, strictly speaking, but the tombs.90
Tombs are, of course, for the dead; monuments – cities, stadiums,

arcs, statues, and the like – are works of civilization that defy the length
of time. They stand as a living presence to bear witness to the grandeur
of Rome that the colonial discourse made the grandeur of France.
The Historiographic State and the Politics of Discourse

“The Great Powers are very often expansive powers,” Max Weber said
in this same nineteenth century about modern states.91 However, the
expansion of a state should not be seen only as the result of “the use or
threat of force.” A state is expansionist also culturally by the deploy-
ment of means of culture. The state itself relies not only on violence
(despite its legitimate monopoly over it). It also relies on culture (that it
also monopolizes) in order to found a substance, a legitimacy, and even
an existence.92 This ideological expansion can precede territorial con-
quest and it can also proceed it. In the case at hand, one can surely see
that the ideological conquest came after the fact of conquest, but it
went beyond it once Algeria was militarily and ideologically subdued.
From Algeria, and because of it, an entire ideological conquest of the
region was under way, especially with the foundation of the historio-
graphic state.
89
Paul Gauckler, L’archéologie de la Tunisie. Paris: Berger-Levrault et Cie., 1896.
90
Ibid., p. 8.
91
Max Weber, “Structures of Power,” in From Max Weber: Essays on Sociology.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 161.
92
Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation As
Cultural Revolution. London: Blackwell, 1985. David Lloyd and Paul Thomas,
Culture and the State. London: Routledge, 1998.
The Historiographic State and the Politics of Discourse 105
By the turn of the nineteenth century, after the triumph of the civilian
region and the total annihilation of the so-called Kabyle Revolt, the
colonial state emerged stronger than ever, possessing important insti-
tutions, some of which could compete with the best of metropolitan
institutions. Schools, universities, associations, and societies of politics
and culture mushroomed in Algeria. On affairs pertaining to the region
itself, the colonial state reigned supreme, and politicians and scholars
of the metropole depended on Algiers for knowledge not only on
Algeria but also on Tunisia, Morocco, and the Sahara. Algeria emerged
as a strong colonial state to reckon with even in the metropole.
After the first century of the conquest of Algiers, in 1830, much had
changed in the politics, culture, and the state of knowledge of the
region and not only the colony that was Algeria. By this time, Tunisia
was long part of French colonial rule, and Morocco entered it fully
after decades of European maneuvering around it. For a century,
archaeological work had built up to a real library of immense vol-
umes, the most important of which were those of Gsell. This is to say
that the harnessing of archaeology in the formation of empire and
more specifically the remaking of the region as an extension of both
Rome and France was mostly a French endeavor. Like maps, the
colonial institutions of the historiographic state were numerous, and
not separate from both politics and the public. This contrasts with
Italian Libya where, despite the tremendous importance of the Rome
of Fascist Italy, archaeological work remains limited. As Stefan
Altekamp puts it, “The demographic constellation which partly
enabled the widespread archaeological activities in Algeria and
Tunisia, did not exceed a rudimentary status in Libya.”93 One may
also add that Italy, unlike France, was saturated by the presence of
Rome in its own territory, and thus archaeologists were too busy with
Roman heritage in Italy itself. Meanwhile, the French had the chance
to find impressive Roman heritage in northern Africa whose appro-
priation gave France a right to claim the heritage of Rome, especially
in northern Africa. Hence the acute interest in what was big and
grandiose, what signified the grandeur of Rome in the region –
93
Stefan Altekamp, “Modelling Roman North Africa: Advances, Obsessions and
Deficiencies of Colonial Archaeology in the Maghreb,” in Under Western Eyes:
Approches Occidentales de l’archéologie nord-Africaine (XIXè–XXè siècles),
Bologna: BraDypUS.net Communicating Cultural Heritage, 2015, p. 30.
localities and provinces with three cities, Tébessa, Lambaesis, and

Timgad, and by 1915, Volubilis.94
The French could thus claim and boast a Roman heritage of signifi-
cant importance in northern Africa even against Italy itself. These
impressive Roman colossal remains in northern Africa strengthened
France’s claim to Rome, and these same magnificent remains consti-
tuted the region as French. As Albert Ballu puts it when discussing
Timgad, the most significant of the three cities:
We rarely find anywhere conditions so favorable for the lively and palpable
study of the glorious Roman past. In France, in Italy, in Austria, in Turkey, in
Africa, and even in Asia Minor, and lastly in all the countries of the
Mediterranean, there is surely remarkable antique vestiges, monuments of
the highest value. However, these remains are isolated, and thus far nowhere
except in Pompeii, we found the equivalent of what Timgad offers us,
meaning a complete ensemble, an entire city.95
But Timgad, despite its importance, was only a city within an

urban archaeological heritage France now claims. Later, Volubilis
too earned the label of Pompeii and was added to the numerous
cities that made France appear as a de facto heir of Rome. This
presence in this large domain once ruled by Rome made France,
and not Italy, look like the almighty Rome of the past. French
North Africa was indeed an avatar of Roman Africa. Not even
Italy could contest that.
Yet colonial archaeologists in Algeria were all too aware of the
importance of Roman archaeological remains in Libya and some of
them, such as Louis Bertrand, ventured to investigate these
remains. However, by the 1930s, Italy too, under Mussolini,
showed interest in archaeology that was also harnessed for colonial
reasons. Like the French, probably from whom they took the idea
of Latinity, the Italians too claimed the idea of Romanity, an idea
that did not upset the archaeological pyramid constructed thus far
by French archaeologists and that redefined the region by a Roman
94
Nabila Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine: Monuments, musées et politique
coloniale en Algérie (1830–1930). Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme,
2004, p. 200.
95
Albert Ballu, Guide illustré de Timgad, Antique Thamugadi. Paris: Neurdein
Frères, 1915, p. 5, cited in Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine, pp. 205–206.
glorious past that the present continues and reproduces at the same
time.96
Similarly, in northern Morocco, in the Spanish Protectorate, arch-
aeological research was still amateurish and its work was limited, in
contrast to French archaeology, which had not only become profes-
sional with the foundation of the University of Algiers (also called the
School of Algiers) but also had numerous archaeological institutions
and organizations that made it even more imperialist.97 One can con-
clude that between 1830 and 1930, when the region was reconfigured
archaeologically as a continuum, Spain had no official interest in
archaeology in a region considered small especially in relation to its
large territories in Latin America.98 Yet, immediately after the Spanish
protectorate, la Junta de Monumentos Arísticos e Históricos was
created.99 The interest was clearly in Roman and to a certain extent
Punic traces, with a disinterest in the Arab period.100
Consequently, Spanish archaeology, marked by “low quality and
quantity,” did not play a role in this colonial endeavor of territorial
invention.101 In fact, the excavation of the ruins of Tamuda southwest
of the city of Tetouan and later of Lixus near Larache by César Luis de
Montalbán y Mazas, interestingly enough published by French archae-
ologists, just added a physical trace in a field that remained dominantly
French.102 As Margarita Diaz-Andrew puts it, “The comparison
between the abundant work of Louis Chatelain and the almost com-
plete lack of publications by Montalbán clearly exemplified that the
Spanish state was indifferent to the production of published scientific
96
Stefan Altekamp, “The Policy of Monuments: Dealing with Historical
Architecture in Libya under Italian Rule 1911–1943,” Historical Studies 1994
(53): 18–35.
97
For a view on Spanish archaeology, see Margarita Diaz-Andrew, “The
Archaeology of the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco: A Short History,”
African Archaeological Review 2015 (32)1: 49–69.
98
Ibid.
99
Fernando Valderama Martínez, “La acción cultural de España en Marruecos,”
Boletín de la Asociación Española de Orientalistas 2005 (41): 9–22.
100
Enrique Gozalbes Cravioto, “Los inicios de la investigación española sobre
arqueología y arte árabes en Marruecos (1860–1960),” Boletín de la
Asociación Española de Orientalistas 2005 (41): 239.
101
Ibid., p. 53.
102
Gozalbes Cravioto, “Los inicios de la investgación española sobre
arqueología.” Montalbán did not publish on the topic. See Diaz-Andrew,
“Archaeology of the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco,” p. 54.
data and proper curation of archaeological collections.”103 The study

of Moreno to Tamuda and his publication of 1922, especially in the
midst of the Rif War,104 was a rare instance of the involvement of
Spanish universities, at this stage, in the colonial archaeology of
Morocco.105 Even after the end of the Rif War, research in the area
and the quantity of publications remained scarce, according to Enrique
Gozalbes Cravioto.106
This disinterest also touched other modes of knowledge such as
anthropology and history. In addition to the indifference of the state,
the Rif War, in a small area, might have made the area appear too
dangerous for archaeologists. French modernity, with its technology of
power, its high claims to the land, its numerous institutions of know-
ledge, and above all its ambitious geopolitics in the region made France
uncontestably hegemonic especially around the mutual agreement
reached with its main rival, Great Britain, known as the Sykes-Picot
Agreement, in 1916. Yet by the 1950s, Spanish archaeology reached
maturity especially with the work of Miquel Tarradell.107 This import-
ant figure of Spanish archaeology also unequivocally shared “the colo-
nial ethos” of French archaeologists.
The West has lost a territory that logically should be its own – the south of the
Mediterranean . . . But it is more difficult to understand the failure of the
latinidad in Africa Minor. It is too simple to consider that its destiny . . . only
changed direction with the Muslim invasion. This was a definitive factor but
103
Diaz-Andrew, “The Archaeology of the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco,”
p. 54.
104
Manuel Gómez Moreno, “Descubrimientos y antigüedades en Tetuán,”
Suplemento al numero de 10 noviembre de 1922 de Boletín oficial de la zona de
Protectorado español en Marruecos: 5–13.
105
Mustapha Ghottes, “Histoire des fouilles à Tamuda,” in En la orilla africana
del Círculo del Estrecho. Historiografía y proyectos actuales, Actas del II
Seminario de Especialización en Arqueología (Cádiz, septiembre 2008), ed.
Darío Bernal, Baraka Raissouni, José Ramos, Mehdi Zouak, and
Manuel Parodi. Madrid: Colección de Monografías del Museo Arqueológico
de Tetuán II, 2008, pp. 459–471.
106
Gozalbes Cravioto, “Los inicios de la investigación española,” p. 235.
107
Ghottes, “Histoire des fouilles à Tamuda,” p. 465. See also Nejat Brahmi and
Mohcin Cheddad, “Espagnols et Français sur le terrain archéologique
marocain (1912–1956),” in Colloque international, Archéologie en péninsule
Ibérique. Plus d’un siècle de coopération internationale. Madrid: Casa de
Velzquez, November 15–17, in press.
not the only one. North Africa did not assimilate Latin culture with the depth
that other countries within the lines did.108
Archaeological work in Morocco was undertaken even before its

diplomatic conquest in 1912 by archaeologists working in Algeria, and
thus approaching the country with the same intellectual framework we
have seen in the case of Algeria. Charles Tissot, whose work on Algeria
and Tunisia we discussed earlier, also undertook excavations in
Morocco in 1874, in the area adjunct to Volubilis that was not yet
excavated.109 But with the Protectorate, and by orders of Hubert
Lyautey, archaeological excavations became subject to state rules and
regulations.110
Under Lyautey, and by his order, more excavations were conducted
by Lieutenant-Colonel Bouin and his deputy, Louis Chatelain,
a member of the Ecole Française de Rome. This work led to the
discovery of the Roman city of Volubilis north of the city of Meknes.
In addition to the city itself, this visible trace testifies to the presence of
Rome, and an entire archaeological narrative was generated around it
first by Tissot himself and then by Louis Chatelain within a specific
discursive continuity that itself was part of the archaeological discur-
sive tradition that has to define the entire region in terms of Roman
archaeology and Roman archaeology alone.111
Indeed, despite the fact that among historians of archaeology, the
name of Louis Chatelain is associated with Volubilis, Chatelain himself
situates the monument of Volubilis and its narration within an arch-
aeological and narrative tradition that was initiated, at least in colonial
France, by Tissot.112
The point here is that, archaeologically, the region from Tunisia to
Morocco, from the 1830s to 1930, was constructed as a continuous
108
Tarradell, “Investigaciones sobre los romanos en el Marruecos Español,”
Arbor 1951 (20): 4, cited in Diaz-Andrew, “The Archaeology of the Spanish
Protectorate of Morocco,” p. 60.
109
Charles Tissot, “Recherches sur la géographie comparée de la Maurétanie
Tingitane,” Mémoire présenté pardivers savants à l’Académie des inscriptions
et belles-lettres de l’Institut de France. Vol. 9, 139–322.
110
Nejat Brahmi, “L’archéologie coloniale en héritage: le cas de Volubilis-Walili,”
manuscript.
111
Louis Chatelain, “Les Fouilles de Volubilis (Ksar-Faraoun, Maroc),” Bulletin
Archéologique du comité des travaux historiques, 1916: 70–93.
112
Louis Chatelain, Le Maroc des Romains: Etudes sur les centres antique de la
Maurétanie occidentale. Paris: Edition de Boccard, 1944.
land, a single geography isolated by French colonial rule, still separated

from other French colonies by a past deemed the French present. So-
called Arab rule from the eighth to the seventeenth century and then
Ottoman rule from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century were
obliterated as artificial and momentary. Knowledge of archaeology
created an imaginary world where Rome reigns and where cities are
most visible. This archaeological unit also contrasted eastward where
pharaonic, Punic, and Mesopotamian traces define them differently.
Whereas this region, later called the Middle East, could well be defined
as indigenous, the new entity, later known as the Maghreb, could only
be defined as Roman, with Punic and indigenous remains either min-
imal or too primitive to testify to the presence of any civilization.
The Sahara constituted the limits of the Roman, and thus also in the
colonial narrative, the line that separates the region from Africa.
However, beyond the line one now finds France as a colonial power.
In fact, one finds it also in West Africa, on the very frontiers of
Morocco. There too the absence of Rome set that region apart from
North Africa. Again by this time, and even up to 1950, archaeology in
West Africa was marked by “the occupation floors of early human
sites,” a concern almost absent in the archaeology of northern
Africa.113
However, prior to the celebration of the first century of the occupa-
tion of Algiers in 1930, the region whose transformation I am seeking
to show had already taken the form recognizable today. Even before
the imposition of colonial rule in Morocco in 1912, under the guise of
the Protectorate, Morocco was seen as nothing as far as archaeology
was concerned other than an extension of the Roman presence seen
more strongly in Algeria, Tunisia, or Libya. Even archaeological know-
ledge of Algeria itself contained an important body of knowledge on
Morocco undertaken with the Mission scientifique. Charles Tissot, in
many ways, represents by himself this state of knowledge by which the
archaeology of Tunisia and of Morocco seem to complement the
archaeology of Algeria. He also highlights, by his own work, that
a strong historiographic state is also expansionist. The historiographic
state was able to reconfigure not only the territory of Algeria as Algeria
113
Augustin Holl, “West African Archaeology: Colonialism and Nationalism,” in
A History of African Archaeology, ed. Peter Robertshaw. London: Heinemann,
1990, pp. 296–308 at p. 299.
Careers of the Trace 111
but also, maybe even more importantly, the entirety of the region as
a distinct unit from within the colony that was Algeria, eastward in
a protectorate and westward in a country that had not yet entered the
French colonial yoke.
Careers of the Trace

Archaeology is both a trace and a narrative.114 As a trace, archaeology
testifies to the presence of the past in the now; it is tangible, concrete,
and unquestionable in its physical presence though not in its
interpretation.115 As a narrative, archaeology is no different from any
other historical narrative, not even with the physical presence of the
trace. For many historical narratives refer to traces. But archaeology is
constituted around these traces as interpretation, and not only as
evidence of discourse. Yet the archaeological narrative is not the his-
torical discourse, despite these uncanny similarities.
Its narrative may be one, but its trace has always been double. By the
oneness of archaeological narrative, I mean that archaeology also
develops a discursive formation with rules and constraints, but also
with contradictions and limits. The archaeological formation discussed
earlier in this chapter constructs the region as historically, profoundly,
quasi absolutely Roman. But this archaeological formation itself, des-
pite the fact it constructs its own object, has a reference: it claims to
proclaim its status as a scientific discipline. The reference is, in fact, the
trace, what archaeologists call the remains – that is, material objects
that serve as the support of archaeological interpretation.116 For our
purpose, colonial authorities in the countries of the region claimed
these not only as “facts on the ground,” but they also claimed them
by removing these facts from their ground and putting them in colonial
museums in the region and in the metropole. The traces surface in
narrative, first in drawings and then more assertively in photographs.
The archaeological photograph becomes then the reference, the trace,
that the archaeological narrative uses as a support of its own construc-
tion. These photographs were of course part of archaeological work
that serves as a visual support of argumentation. They naturalize the
114
Hannoum, “Historiographic State.” 115 Ibid.
116
For the concept of trace, see Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris:
Seuil, 2000, pp. 554–562.
archaeological narrative that speaks for them while giving the impres-
sion (and maybe the certitude) that its narrative is its own voice, as if
objects speak independent of the archaeologist. Archaeological photos,
as well as archaeological drawings, were essential parts of colonial
narratives since the expedition of Napoleon. With the Exploration
scientifique de l’Algérie, drawings played an important part along with
maps within a visual economy. It is especially within the historiographic
state that photography took on an important dimension and has become
common currency amongst archaeologists.117 In 1888, Gsell mentions
them in instructions on conducting archaeological research:118
At the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth
century, photography has been used frequently to present to the world of
scholars of the metropole the work produced by the service of the historic
monuments in Algeria and to extol to tourists the beauty of different ancient
sites.119
By the end of the nineteenth century, tourism emerged as a capitalist

enterprise.120 In addition to the fact that tourism as such is a highly
lucrative industry, it is also a great way to advertise the colony in order
to attract both settlers and capital from beyond France itself.121 The
colonial state thus developed this new industry that gave birth to a new
literature or rather a new genre that took the form of guides and
newspaper columns, different from the older narratives of travelers
and explorers. Tourist guides advertise regions and promise entertain-
ment and learning experiences. They tend to promise future enjoyment
by recounting past performance.122 Tourist guides were published
about Algeria and Tunisia from the 1840s onward. By 1901, one
117
Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine, pp. 202–205.
118
Gsell, Instructions pour la conduit des fouilles archéologiques en Algérie.
119
Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine, p. 203.
120
For a history of French colonial tourism, see Collette Zytnicki and
Habib Kazdaghli, eds., Le tourisme dans l’Empire français: Politiques,
pratiques et imaginaires (XIXè–XXè siècles). Paris: Société française d’histoire
des outre-mers, 2009. Also see Collette Zytnicki, Algérie, terre du tourisme,
Histoire d’un loisir colonial. Paris: Vendemiaire, 2016.
121
For British tourists, see Kenneth Perkins, “So Near and Yet So Far: British
Tourism in Algiers, 1860–1914,” British Abroad since the Eighteenth Century,
ed. Martin Farr and Xavier Guégan. New York: Palgrave, 2013, pp. 217–235.
For the case of Tunisia, see Adel Manai, “The Origins of Tunisian Tourism,”
Journal of Mediterranean Studies 2018 (27)1: 49–61.
122
Guide Michelin: Maroc, Algérie, Tunisie. 1920.
could find a tourist guide about both Tunisia and Algeria, connecting
the two countries as part of a French territory in the region, albeit an
incomplete one since Morocco was not part of the same tourist narra-
tive, reflecting a political situation.123 The two countries continued to
appear as the object of tourist guides. Thus, in 1906, G. Jacqueton,
Augustin Bernard, and Gsell authored a guide on Algeria and Tunisia
with eleven maps and twenty-three plans.124 The first tourist guide for
Morocco, Guides Blues du Maroc, is dated 1919 and was endorsed by
the first resident general, Lyautey himself.125 Now that the three coun-
tries were part of French Africa, the following year, in 1920, Michelin
produced its first comprehensive tourist guide of the Maghreb, with
several maps of the region as a whole, along with detailed maps of
particular cities, routes, and so forth. The guide offers travel itineraries
as well as instructions on routes, hotels, restaurants, and archaeo-
logical sites. Written in French, it also makes promises in English,
making clear that it seeks customers beyond France: “During my
holidays, I traversed the most picturesque roads and I saw everything
that was worthwhile.”126
Tourist guides of the Maghreb reinforce the idea that the region is
a single unit and yet, despite distance and geographical interruption
between it and France, it constitutes a continuous part of the metro-
pole, linked to it by historical connections. To create these connections,
tourist guides, such as the one produced by Michelin, deploy several
strategies: one is to employ nationalist historical narratives to inform
and boost the pride of the would-be tourist. The Michelin guide opens
with the conquest of Algiers, accomplished in what it dubs “a glorious
century.”127 It also uses a cartographic strategy to define the “single
natural region,” despite “artificial political frontiers,” and proves this
unity by employing names the region has retained over its long history.
The guide informs its reader, as if the names are natural, and not
colonial inventions of the moment, just like the conception it refers
to: Barbarie, Maghreb, and North Africa.128 The map of the Maghreb
123
Guides Pratiques Conty. Algérie-Tunisie. Paris: Administration des Guides
Conty, Publiés sous le patronage de Chemins de fer des grandes companies de
navigations. 1901.
124
G. Jacqueton, Augustin Bernard, and Stéphane Gsell. Guides-Joanne. Algérie
et Tunisie. Paris: Hachette, 1906.
125
Guides Bleus du Maroc. Paris: Hachette, 1919. 126 Ibid., p. 10.
127
Ibid., p. II. 128 Ibid.
shows a unit without frontiers between its units; it is also shown as an

extension of France. The discourse of archaeology cements the connec-
tions between the parts and between the unit and France itself.
Archaeological sites traverse the region from east to west. As traces,
they bear witness to the present. They testify not only to the presence of
Rome, but rather to the unquestionable presence of France itself.
The archaeological trace is also used as a means to invite the would-be
tourist (who may also be a future settler or investor) to take part in
a visual performance that connects him in its glory to a past that is his.
Indeed, the tourist guide reproduces the official archaeological narrative
articulated by Gsell: there is little of primitive times and of Punic civiliza-
tion, but “Romans have left cities [and] civil, religious, and military
edifices,” as did Muslims, the guide says, implying that the time of the
Muslims is past and that the time of Rome continues with France. Thus,
the French tourist can live the experience of the past in the present. The
Michelin guide of 1920 surprisingly does not offer photos of archaeo-
logical sites, but it does mention them: Volubilis, Djemilâ, Timgad,
Lambèse, Dougga.129 How can one explain the absence of the photos
in a guide that seeks to be comprehensive? A first easy explanation is that
the guide is not an atlas and thus is not required to include them and bear
the associated expense. However, perhaps a more convincing explan-
ation is that given the presence (and even over-presence) of the photos at
the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth,
constituting a colonial photographic culture in its own right, their inclu-
sion was not necessary. The guide offers useful and necessary informa-
tion that cannot be found anywhere else, or at least not as easily. So the
photos, we can say, are present in their very absence. Or else why
mention Volubilis or Timgad to a reader and expect she will make
sense of the reference? The guide offers what the reader cannot know,
not what she already (probably) does. It also offers an archaeological
education in the form of narratives of Roman sites, with a full-fledged
bibliography that includes the work of Gsell, Louis Bertrand, and other
historians and archaeologists. Needless to say, other guides may opt for
a different strategy and include, here and there, photos of archaeological
sites, but without turning the guide into an atlas.130
129
Ibid., p. XVIII.
130
Other tourist guides contained photos of some archaeological sites. For
instance, Thomas Cook, Cook’s Practical Guide to Algeria and Tunisia.
London: Thomas Cook & Son, 1908. Guide du Comité d’Hivernage de Tunis
The literature of tourism, and more specifically of archaeological

tourism, was often presented in newspaper columns written sometimes
by renowned archaeologists such as Louis Chatelain. Such columns
likely include photos.131 Even though tourist literature uses photos as
a form of advertisement to attract tourists, it also participates willy-
nilly in fulfilling the function of a visual education of colonial space and
landscape. The photos of Roman sites generate meanings that signify
the region as a continuous unit, archaeologically, historically, and
politically in the past and thus in the present.
The semiotic status of the photos within the narrative of tourism
changes drastically. Within a guide or within a press narrative, the
photo ceases to be just an evidence of a reality, or a referential photo,
or a text on its own.132 The photo exists within the narrative of tourism
as a visual citation of an intertextual narrative, part of its fabric. Yet
within these narratives, the photos appear natural, familiar, and a déjà
vu. It is as if the tourist is spared the task of interpreting the photos.133
The narrative of tourism does the interpreting for him and makes the
promise of a visual experience that will increase his cultural capital. His
reading of the narrative of tourism only confirms his civilizational
beliefs. For after all the tourist is a citizen already schooled in
“Western civilization,” already familiar with the national historical
narrative; he is already the product of a colonial education.
Therefore, he is already familiar with the place of Rome in the French
national narrative. Now he can better and more concretely connect
Rome to France, the past to the present, use to pleasure, science to
tourism, consciously or not – it is just like the air he breathes. The photo
is undoubtedly a means of visual education. The narrative of tourism
makes him that promise. In so promising, it contributes to the shaping
of the geographical imaginary of the reader, whether a future tourist or
not, whether a Frenchman or not. Archaeology is an esoteric discipline.
However, taken up by the tourist genre, it becomes accessible to the
et de la Tunisie, 1906. Jacqueton, Bernard, and Gsell, Guides-Joanne. Algérie et

Tunisie.
131
Emile Morinaud, “L’organisation du tourisme en Algérie,” Les Annales
coloniales November 1921: 1–2. J. J. Desmettre, “Les ruines en Tunisie,” Les
Annales coloniales November 1921: 3–4. Louis Chatelain, “Le tourisme
archéologique au Maroc,” Les Annales coloniales November 1921: 5–6.
132
Pierluigi Basso Fossali and Maria Giulia Dondera, Sémiotique de la
photographie. Limoges: Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 2012.
133
Ibid., p. 25.
ordinary person and thus participates in the formation of his concep-

tion of space – the national one as well as the imperial one. After all,
imagining one is not possible without imagining the other.
Produced and reproduced separately, selectively, and strategic-
ally, photos of archaeological traces were also used in atlases in
a complex semiotics where narratives seem to make them intelli-
gible while at the same time they serve the persuasive goals of the
narratives. Archaeological photos were also produced in albums
and perhaps most importantly for the topic at hand, in newspapers.
This is to say that archaeological traces entered the very domain of
the public, of the everyday, and of the ordinary, in this age of
technological productivity, to use an expression of Walter
Benjamin.134 After 1880, “appearances” were recorded “as faith-
fully as in a mirror.”135 Gisèle Freund argues that photography
emerged with the bourgeoisie and that with Louis Philippe I, pho-
tography was put at the service of “national sentiments, patriotism,
and the veneration of the ruling family.”136 But the power of the
photograph seems somehow to exceed the power of its referent, the
object to which it owes its existence. Benjamin suggests that sculp-
tures and architecture are more “readily apprehensible” in a photo
than in real life.137
He is describing, of course, what was then painting’s main function,
the portrait. But one may also suggest that photography ventured into
landscape art, sculpture, architecture, and archaeology to be at the
service of capitalism – to subject art to capitalist utility. In fact, soon it
was to be discovered that sculpture and architecture too could more
easily be apprehensible in photos than in real life.138 Photography
could amplify reality and thus render science (archaeology) more real,
offering a more objective vantage point for scientific application.
Albums about the region, including Morocco, still uncolonized,
134
Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in The Work of Art in the
Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed.
Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 274–298.
135
Ibid., p. 283.
136
Gisèle Freund, La photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle: essai de
sociologie et d’esthétique. Paris: La Maison des amis des Livres. A. Monnier,
1936, p. 84. See also Freund, Photographie et société. Paris: Seuil, 1974.
137
Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” p. 290. 138 Ibid.
were circulating among the French public, highlighting archaeo-

logical remains.139
These photos served to shape the colonial imaginary of an entire
generation when turned into postcards, as at the Exposition
Universelle of 1889 held in Paris.140 A postcard is, of course, an
image in and of itself, separate from any visible narrative save for
the title (i.e., “photo de Volubilis”). However, like maps, photos are
also images that are rarely readable without narrative. Thus the
many photos of Volubilis on postcards carry with them their own
narratives. For the French, Volubilis was not only a city to be
compared to Pompeii, but it was the “Moroccan Pompeii.”141
These postcards indicate, by and large, the Latinity (and
Christianity) of Morocco, they signal the Roman presence in the
region, and most importantly, they are also a form of visual know-
ledge reflecting colonial power. These photos were, after all, taken,
produced, and propagated by the colonial administration. They
were commodities for visual consumption in the metropole. Like
other types of postcards, archaeological photos were to be sent by
European residents and tourists to the metropole as proof of
a foreign and exotic reality made familiar.142
It is also important to stress at this point that the archaeological
creation of the region was a scientific one – that is, it was made
possible, produced, and made real by technologies of colonial
power. This creation was propagated, used, consumed, and made
available to a grand public who otherwise might find archaeo-
logical discourse esoteric. Postcards were undoubtedly an import-
ant means of creating realities, but no less important were literary
narratives, with greater power to shape views and perceptions in
aesthetic ways. Literature has indeed the power (and the means) to
make what is absent present, its very discourse becoming a vivid
memory. Thus from early on, literature, especially fiction, played
an important role in propagating archaeological ideas and images
139
H. M. P. de la Martinière, Album de 34 photos du Maroc. Paris: Société de
Géographie de Paris, 1887.
140
Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine, p. 20.
141
Eugène Salesses, “La Pompéi marocaine,” La Géographie
(March–April): 240–266.
142
Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986.
in canonical French works such as those of Gustave Flaubert143

and Albert Camus,144 and also in popular works of the time by
Robert Randau and Louis Bertrand.145 The journalistic discourse
itself took on a romanticized narrative about archaeologists, pre-
cursors to Indiana Jones. The press often published narratives
about these “archaeological heroes” who overcame great obstacles
in a hostile environment to conduct “scientific work.” In fact, the
narratives about explorers were part of the press culture: “For
sometime now all we hear about in Paris is explorers, some are
departing, others are arriving.”146 These narratives, though person-
alized, provide the grand public information about archaeological
remains, their significance, and their importance to the nation. The
example of Henri de la Martinière, the successor of Tissot in
Morocco, is a case in point.147 In press narratives, he is the archae-
ologist as hero. The model upon which Indiana Jones himself was
built,148 he appears a Hollywood man in physique and in deeds,
“svelte and blond with persuasive and gentle eyes,”149 “devoting
his life to cross endless routes across deserts full of obstacles and
hazy nights in the uncharted forests,” “escaping the bullets of the
Touareg assassins.”150 At the same time, the press narrative about
the hero is informative about archaeological remains, about Rome
143
Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô. Paris: Gallimard, 1951. See Said, Orientalism.
Also see Lisa Lowe, “The Orient As Woman in Flaubert’s ‘Salammbô’ and
‘Voyage en Orient,’” Comparative Literature Studies 1986 (23)1: 44–58.
144
Albert Camus, Noces. Paris: Chariot, 1945. On Camus and Latinité, see
Lorcin, “Rome and France in Africa.”
145
On Louis Bertrand, for example, see his novel Le sang des races. Paris:
Ollendorff, 1899. For more discussion of Bertrand, see Peter Dunwoodie,
“Colonizing Space: Louis Bertrand’s Algeria in Le Sang des Races and Sur les
Routes du Sud,” Modern Language Review 2010 (105)4: 998–1014. Also see
Lorcin, “Rome and France in Africa.”
146
Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, La Courneuve, Henri de la Martinière.
PAAP100/3, Doc 44.
147
The Courrier de la Presse published numerous narratives about this
archaeologist hero. “Tout jeune – trente deux ans à peine – svelte et blond, avec
des yeux persuasifs et trés doux, les traits réguliers à peine durcis par deux ans
de courses perilleuses au pays brulant des fièvres et des embuscades traitresses.”
Ministères des Affaires Etrangères, La Courneuve, Henri de la Martinière.
PAAP100/3, Doc 45. See also among other documents 44, 46, 47, and 48–67.
148
See Gananath Obeyesekere on the mythical models, The Apotheosis of Captain
Cook. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
149
Ministères des Affaires Etrangères, document 45. 150 Ibid., document 45.
Conclusion 119
and its presence, and about the entirety of the country.151 The
esoteric narrative of archaeology not only permeates photographs,
literary works, and press narratives, but was itself turned into
a narrative of Roman history. Its effects – in shaping historical
imaginaries that make the invention more tangible, more concrete,
and more natural – are thus maximized.152
Conclusion
I have dealt just with the narrative of archaeology, or of archaeology as
knowledge, in order to show how this specialized knowledge that refers
to concrete remains and material traces, small and big, is turned into an
important means by which colonial meanings are bestowed on
a colony. I have avoided the functionalist approach that seeks to
understand how knowledge justifies colonial rule and how it is har-
nessed as power to control and subdue. Instead, I wanted to stress,
given the topic at hand, that knowledge, as a system of meaning, and
ultimately as a system of colonial culture, was deployed in a systematic
way as part of the technology of modernity, to transform and to create,
but also to destroy, to conceal, and eventually to invent new realities.
Archaeology was able to reveal (or one might say, create), on the
ground and in discourse, the “Western,” “European,” and “French”
essence that makes this “foreign” land a “home” land. The process
deployed had already been applied with marvelous effect in France
itself to transform entire areas and regions, into entities that are insep-
arable from the larger imagined entity called France.153 In the process
of this invention, monuments were destroyed, languages were annihi-
lated, lives were changed, and peoples were transformed. As Eugen
151
Ibid., document 44 of Le Courrier de la Press (n.d.) titled “Une mission
archéologique. – Fouilles au Maroc. – Difficultés de l’exploration, le
fanatisme.”
152
For instance, it is the subject of “Jugurtha” that was proposed as a theme for
a competition of high school students by the academy of Ardennes that shows
how a fourteen-year-old, Arthur Rimbaud, internalized the history of Rome
with its racial dynamics. See his poem on Jugurtha in Oeuvres complètes. Paris:
Pléiade, 1963, pp. 18–24. For an examination, see Enid Rhods, “Under the
Spell of Africa: Poems and Letters of Arthur Rimbaud Inspired by the Dark
Continent,” French Review 1971 (44)2: 20–28.
153
Bras and Todd, L’invention de la France.
Weber puts it, this constituted “a white’s man’s burden of francopho-

nie, whose first conquests were to be right at home.”154
For the case at hand, I aimed to show the acts of creation that are also
at the same time acts of destruction. As Altekamp writes, in the case of
Libya, “excavations represent a destructive form of intervention.”155
Archaeology not only was carried out, from beginning to end, against
a land in an act of total aggression, but it was also carried out as
systematic destruction: destruction resulting, we are told, from mis-
takes of soldiers turned archaeologists, but also from other mistakes,
one can assume, resulting from the intentional annihilation, by the
same soldiers, of that which does not fit the system of preference.
Even when archaeology was professionalized, as we saw with Gsell,
archaeology, like other modes of modern knowledge, also eliminated
other archaeological possibilities in order to articulate and/or reinforce
“visual ideological expression,” to use again an expression of
Altekamp’s.156 Part of visualizing the ideological expression is pre-
cisely the existence of an archaeological discourse about the region in
the form of science. Local populations, as has so often been told,
showed no interest in these ruins and sometimes even contributed to
their destruction.157
On the ground, archaeologists created a system of preference where
the rule of relevance was the code: anything (or at least almost any-
thing) that was not Roman (or not perceived as such), that was not
Christian (or not perceived as such), and that was not Greek (or not
considered as such) took secondary or no importance at all. Historians
154
Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1976, p. 37.
155
Stefan Altekamp, “Italian Colonial Archaeology in Libya 1912–1942,” in
Archaeology under Dictatorship, ed. Michael L. Galaty and
Charles Watkinson. Boston: Springer, 2004, pp. 55–71 at p. 56.
156
Ibid., p. 58.
157
The existence of these ruins centuries after the end of Roman rule testifies rather
to the fact that there was an effort of preservation or at the very least, an effort
to not destroy. However, for all the archaeological excavation of colonial
archaeologists, destruction was part of this process. See Michael Greenhalgh,
The Military and Colonial Destruction of the Roman Landscape of North
Africa, 1830–1900. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Also see Effros, Incidental
Archaeologists.
Conclusion 121
have dealt with the destruction of Roman remains, especially the ones
deemed less relevant or less aesthetically worthy.158 The destruction
was massive.159 If Roman traces were objects of destruction, there must
have been far more significant destruction of those archaeological
traces that were not Roman. They were less valued because they existed
outside the colonial system of reference and preference. The region,
however, is defined less by this absence than by the presence made more
visible by excavations and by discourse. It is this discourse I opted to
analyze to show processes of transformation and creation, the end
result of which is a geopolitical area defined by its Roman past and
by its present remains. These have given the area, both its geographical
and cultural limits and its geographical and cultural continuities. If
Libya seems to be a poor parent of the region, it is because it does not
fully possess some of these fundamental elements. Its Roman archae-
ology, then understudied, was present, but somehow the Sahara dis-
connected it from the region and connected it to Egypt.
The point here is that what was laid bare, what was excavated, but
also what was narrated created the colonial webs of significance that
gave the region a unity and a face remarkably like that of Rome, and for
that reason alone, also like France. All of these colonial excavations of
objects and words made the region not only perceived as one single
geographical unit, even today, but also perceived as part of the metro-
pole, more than Spain, Italy, and definitively more than West Africa.
But the “Middle Eastern part” is also part of the perception, the way
Carthage was part of the region. But today this is deemed less import-
ant by francophone elites and totally refused by Amazigh activists.
As the historiographic state turned Algeria into a French territory, it
opened up discursive possibilities for a greater colonial territory with
its own coherence, logic, and continuity, the same that is now called the
Maghreb. In fact, the imperialist nature of the historiographic state
deeply affected ethnographic and linguistic practices in Morocco and
beyond in ways that make it difficult to speak of an ethnographic state,
as may be done for Great Britain in India.160 If there was indeed an
ethnographic state in Morocco, it was undoubtedly tributary to the
158
Effros, Incidental Archaeologists, pp. 78–108. Also see Altekamp, “Italian
Colonial Archaeology in Libya.”
159
Greenhalgh, Military and Colonial Destruction of the Roman Landscape.
Effros, Incidental Archaeologists.
160
historiographic state in Algeria, and thus helped to shape colonial

scholarship in the region and to construct the entirety of the region
discursively in such ways as these constructions appear quasi natural to
researchers even today. In other words, the discursive creation of the
region, its cognitive reconfiguration, its cartographic contours, its sys-
tem of names, became a real geographic creation whose configuration
is imposed, by the power of discursive representation, as an unques-
tionable reality. Behind this is the positivist idea that realities exist
outside of us, that they are not constructions of our mind. We tend to
forget that is what they are. But as long as we forget that, the created
reality becomes real.
3 Language, Race, and Territory
In the nineteenth century, history as a discipline proved itself of crucial

importance in creating national identities, and imperial ones as well.
The hegemony of the historiographic state not only touched Morocco
and Algeria and Tunisia but also reached beyond their borders to Egypt
and sub-Saharan Africa. Despite, or rather because of, the work of
historical narratives to create the connections and disconnections that
would invent and isolate the area of the Maghreb as distinct, other
modes of modern knowledge were also highly necessary. Colonial
agents required various technologies of power to account for the
immediate social life spread out before their eyes – to see it, to articulate
it, to substantiate it, and to validate it. One mode of knowledge put in
use to account for the colonial present was more concrete, more prag-
matic, and even more scientific than history; this was sociology,
broadly understood to include practically all the domains of what we
today call social science.1 It was understood as a science of customs and
manners, of language and communication. It had already been har-
nessed in Algeria; it became instrumental in Morocco and in the rest of
Africa.
Race became a key concept for understanding societies and their
development. For this reason, it also became a structuring principle
of historical narratives. The new science, sociology, tackled race in
different ways, especially at a time when colonial administrations
were struggling to identify, categorize, and manage the “native popu-
lation.” Sociology was the science of the concrete, the identifiable, the
tangible, and in short of the social world in the colony. Small wonder
that sociology tackled the question of race not to solve it as an
1
This was also sociology in the context of the Durkheimian school, an “imperialist
science” that covers society in the present and the domain of history itself. See
Lucette Valensi, “Le Maghreb vu du Centre: Sur sa place dans l’école
sociologique française,” in Connaissances du Maghreb, ed. Jean-Claude Vatin.
Paris: CNRS, 1984, pp. 227–247.
123
intellectual problem but as a political problem, and even as

a geopolitical one as well. Sociology also tackled the problem of popu-
lation in terms of language, and therefore altered the conception of
race. What do people speak? Who speaks what, and what is the relation
of their speech to who they are and where they are? These were among
the key questions that colonials in several parts of the African continent
posed and tackled from several angles. If missionaries tackled the issue
of language as an issue of the church, military officers, public servants,
and colonial researchers tackled it for the colonial state, to enable the
state’s functioning, and to create parts within a whole and invent
a whole out of parts. It is this process that I examine in this chapter
by looking at the role language played in defining the concept of race –
that is, the concept of the colonial populations and their place on the
general colonial map. Since the examination of language, as we shall
see, is also an examination of linguistic and racial localities, I also look
at how this examination isolated specific spaces for specific racial
populations, and how the isolation of these specific pieces of space
created larger linguistic and racial spaces that coincide, more or less,
with the cartographic and archaeological creations we previously
examined.
Race, Not from a Distance

The theories of race put forward by Arthur de Gobineau and that
dominated Europe and survived beyond the nineteenth century to the
first half of the twentieth century appear clear and clear-cut. These offer
views on human diversity as well as on human inequality. The world of
Gobineau is inhabited by humans and human beasts. These last possess
“the shared structure of the monkey” with the West African race. Yet,
as beastly as they appear to him from a distance, he sees the inhabitants
of the New World, from an even further distance, as “absolutely
hideous.”2 He prefers what is closest to him, what is most familiar,
his fellow Europeans, whom he places at the peak of the racial
hierarchy:
Not only are these peoples more beautiful than the rest of mankind, which is
I confess, a pestilent congregation of ugliness; not only they had the glory of
2
Arthur Gobineau, Inequality of Human Races. New York: H. Fertig, 1967,
p. 107.
Race, Not from a Distance 125
giving the world such admirable types as Venus, an Apollo, and the Farnese
Hercules; but also there is a visible hierarchy of beauty established from
ancient times even among themselves, and in this natural aristocracy the
Europeans are the most eminent, by their grace of outline and strength of
muscular development.3
Yet the racial world of Gobineau is not binary, even if it seems so.
Between the first group of humans and the second group of beastly men
he finds another group that shares no physical or moral qualities with
either. It is a third group, a product of intermixing. This is “the Semite
race,” a mixture of White and Black, a living warning of the danger of
mixing and how it creates a monstrosity, a human anomaly.
Transcending the racial binary does not make Gobineau offer
a complex picture of human diversity or allow him to nuance his
views. On the contrary, it is this category of a “hybrid race” that
makes the theory of Gobineau dangerous. As Claude Lévi-Strauss
notes, it is not the idea of racial diversity that was problematic, it is
rather the idea of degeneration at the heart of it.4 The idea of the danger
of intermixing, as forcefully articulated by Gobineau, was largely
espoused by colonials, probably before his birth.
In the colony of Algeria, not only was the racial diversity astonishing,
but intermixing itself was widely practiced among people from differ-
ent tribal, regional, and even religious affiliations. Here, the demo-
graphic condition was complex and diverse, and it posed serious
challenges to the easy, clear-cut theories of race that dominated
Europe, such as those of Gobineau. Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited
Algeria in 1841, noted “a prodigious mélange of races and customs:
Arabs, Kabyles, Moors, Negro, Mahonais [sic], and French.5 Each of
these races that agitate together seem to be in a space much too narrow
to contain it, [each] speaks a language, wears [specific] clothing, and
has different morals.”6
This racial diversity was also noted around the same time, in 1843,
by Louis-Adrien Berbrugger. He viewed the country as inhabited
mostly by a “Semite race.” This “Semite race” is itself diverse; it is
3
Ibid., pp. 107–108.
4
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire. Paris: UNESCO, 1952.
5
Mahonais may be only a typo for the term Mahomais, a variation of the French
term Mahometans – that is, Muslims. But why would Tocqueville consider them
a race? The term “race” may have been used loosely to mean also “type.”
6
Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres, vol. 5. Paris: Gallimard, 1951, p. 191.
made of Jews, Turks, Moors, Coloughli [Kouloughlis], Berbers, and

Arabs. Berbrugger gives a description of each. These “racial types” are
not equal morally or even physically, and some of them are astonish-
ingly diverse, such as the Turks.7 Racial representation constructed
these populations as different biologically (and consequently morally),
as antagonistic to one another, and as biologically, intellectually
unequal – and all of them are inferior in their relations to Europeans.
However, what is interesting about this early racial representation is
the diversity of populations it shows. And maybe the reality was even
more diverse than Tocqueville and Berbrugger could imagine.
Yet, over the following decade, in the 1850s, this racial diversity
quickly disappeared – and forever – to be replaced by one dichotomy,
of Arabs versus Berbers. The revival of the military institution of the
Arab Bureau in 1939 was instrumental in creating a new figuration of
Algeria and its population. This same racial model was later imported
to Morocco by the avatar institution of the Arab Bureau, called Service
des Affaires Indigènes.8 In the work of Eugène Daumas, Césaire-
Antoine Fabre, Charles Richard, and Adolphe Hanouteau, to mention
just the most authoritative, the Berber emerged as a new category of the
colonial discourse, with a pure racial identity, a pure language, a pure
territory, and with qualities that set him in total opposition against the
Arabs. In colonial narratives of the Arab Bureau are Arabs on one hand
and Berbers on the other. The two groups are perfectly distinct from
each other, as if centuries of coexistence did not cause any intermixing
and thus any redefinition of their racial identity. The Berber was
constituted as the only original inhabitant of the land, with a white
skin color, an indifference to Islam, and an open animosity to the Arab.
The Arab was constituted as an invader, domineering, dark skinned,
and fanatical.9 Representations that contradict this one, such as those
of Ismael Urbain and Edmond Pellissier de Reynaud, were marginal-
ized and even eliminated as inaccurate or fallacious.10
7
For a more detailed analysis of Louis-Adrien Berbrugger’s racial representations
of the population of Algeria, see Abdelmajid Hannoum, “Notes on the (Post)
Colonial in the Maghreb,” Critique of Anthropology 2009 (3): 324–344.
8
See Vincent Monteuil, “Les bureaux arabes au Maghreb,” Esprit 1961 (300)11:
575–606.
9
See Hannoum, “Colonialism and Knowledge in Algeria.”
10
On Ismael Urbain, see Hannoum, “Colonialism and Knowledge in Algeria.”
Also see Edmund Burke III, “Two Critics of French Rule in Algeria: Ismael
Race, Not from a Distance 127
This “biological” conception of race was important and can also be

seen in the work of those colonials used to separate the frontiers of the
Sahara from the region of the Maghreb. The biological conception was
easy to use to separate the population living at the border between the
region and the Sahara, since it entailed the color of skin. Thus, in 1916,
Paul Marty, a high officer who had long served in Algeria, defined the
category:
We can transfer a Moor from Trarza to Kiffa, north of Adrar or in the
Azawad, without him feeling out of place; the event justifies the thesis.
First, because we find many Moors living out of their factions in faraway
tribes without the intent to ever come back or [at least] not before a long
period of time. We do not find these conditions in a black country. This also
forces us to observe that the nomadization of razzia [raids], which are the
very life of the Moors, takes them everywhere in the Sahara without
a concern for the artificial frontiers we were able to establish.11
Thus, even as the Sahara geographically distinguishes western Africa

(pays des noirs) from the region, it also reinforces the racial separation
between the two:
The Moorish Sahara all the way to the high Adrar was populated by an
undetermined black population, by the name of Bafour in the Moorish
traditions, until the end of the tenth century. They were expulsed during
the eleventh century by the grand movement of political and religious expan-
sion that made Berber tribes (Lemtouna and Sanhaja) leave their zone of
habitat (situated then between Segua and Sous). This transformation is
known in history by the name of the Almoravid Empire.12
However, in a region with an astonishing diversity of colors, how

was blackness constructed in relation to other people with different
shades? What is black in the understanding of colonials of this period?
Who is Black? How is black, black? How much black is black? Émile-
Félix Gautier provides the answer, summing up the views of colonial
anthropologists:
Urbain and Frantz Fanon,” in Franco-Arab Encounters, ed. Carl Brown and
Mathew Gordon. Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1996, pp. 329–344.
11
Paul Marty, “Considérations sur l’unité des pays maures de l’Afrique
occidentale française,” Annuaire et mémoires du comite d’Etudes Historiques et
scientifiques 1916, p. 263.
12
Ibid.
Individually, the Negro is well-known. Anthropologists have made

a catalogue of his characteristics: black skin, flat nose, thick lips, salient
jaws, wolf-like hair “like pepper seeds,” [sic] well-built body, muscular,
elegant, bronze statue like, etc. Of course, this schematic picture has count-
less variations, but does not prevent the unity of the type. Everybody easily
pictures a Negro. It is one of the most individualized races that exist. These
characteristics are precisely more pronounced in West Africa than in eastern
Africa which is more mixed.13
From this racial point of view, West Africa is more African than the
continent’s eastern part, where the Negro has mixed with other groups.
Blackness in this modern view is what characterizes Africa most. West
Africa is more black, more preserved, and thus more authentic. This
also means the African continent itself was not invented as
a homogeneous continent, but rather as blocs that obey the rules of
geopolitical interests, including their racial criteria, with blackness as
the continent’s authentic essence. Blackness itself has become an index
of this new continent’s invention, and blackness is an index of the most
elementary primitiveness. Wherever there is less blackness, there is
mixing, and wherever there is an absence of blackness, there is
a presence of intruders and conquerors. For in the racial world, races
are not only exclusive, but their relation is always one of domination.
One also finds this idea in the work of Berbrugger. The Jews are
dominated by the Muslims, hence their submissive demeanor and
their deceitfulness. The Turks dominate, hence their honesty even
when they practice trade and commerce. The Arabs dominate the
countryside, hence their noble postures, and so forth. The Berbers are
dominated, hence their disdain for the Arabs. The concept of racial
domination is undoubtedly modern. In the work of Ibn Khaldûn, by
contrast, domination is the result of tribal solidarity; it is the presence
of the factors of hasab (tribal nobility), nasab (kin genealogy), ʿadad
(number, size), and dîn (religious affiliation). It is also a contingency.14
It is born only to die. Humans are subject to the rules of history, not to
biological rules that make some people inherently superior and others
inherently inferior. Yet, in the construction of the region, the idea of
racial hierarchy has undoubtedly survived colonialism. One finds its
dynamics playing out in the 1840s between Arabs and Berbers and
13
Gautier, L’Afrique noire occidentale, p. 85.
14
Language and Race 129
between Arabs and Berbers and Blacks. The rest of the groups
Tocqueville and Berbrugger noticed have disappeared from the demo-
graphic landscape. It does not mean they no longer exist in real life, it
only means they are no longer seen by those whose views are shaped by
the long, powerful colonial discourse. As a consequence, racial diver-
sity is no longer the object of discourse – colonial or national.
Language and Race

One of the characteristics of the discourse of modernity is its constant
self-critique, self-questioning, and thus self-correction to the point that
such discourse appears as a system of truths as well as a system of
errors. This critique, always carried out from within and always reject-
ing those coming from without, allows it to not only readapt and
reform but also to maintain itself and thus to be preserved from
epistemic destruction. Colonial modernity, a stage and a turn in the
history of modernity, has always deployed itself not only as a curious
intellectual pursuit in search of truth but also as a discursive practice in
search of error – its own as well as that of others. The discourse of race
that emerged full-fledged as a discourse of colonial modernity is a good
example. This discourse has always presented itself as a discourse of
multiple truths about what race is and what human diversity is made of.
By the turn of the end of the twentieth century, it seemed willing to
abandon the primordially given ideology of race in favor of a new,
emerging discourse on human collectivities. Racial thinking was shift-
ing from being biological to being linguistic. The study of language, not
philology, and not as interested in the etymology of words so much as
the structures of their phrases, was revealed to be an important turn in
modernity in this colonial period. Language, then, was revealed to
show movements of people, patterns of migration, and interchange at
the intersections of borders, as well as the mental and cognitive struc-
tures of people. It was thus important for the study of human groups,
their mixing, their relation to one another in terms of domination and
subordination, or in terms of trade and exchange, and the values of
their civilizations (or lack thereof). Therefore, such study could not but
alter the conception of race as biological.
The development of historical linguistics in Europe, with the great
discovery of language families, had significant impact on the concept of
race. By the end of the nineteenth century, one clearly notices not the
replacement of race with language, but rather the value assigned to

language in the study of populations in ways that unsettle the concept
of race without, however, making it obsolete. Race and racial thinking
continued to be instrumental beyond the nineteenth century and even
beyond the twentieth century, as much research on race in France and
beyond has demonstrated. But language was added to the definition of
a racial group. And even as the concept of race separates groups of
humans (a separation that presupposes hierarchy and conflict), the
definition of a language too presupposes boundaries and opposition
to other languages.15
In Africa – save for its northern part but not its borders – the study of
language was mainly carried out by missionaries, whose enterprise had
as a goal conversion and the translation of the Bible into African
languages. Their study appeared worthwhile and rigorous to the
point that there was – and perhaps in the domain of linguistics more
than in any other domain – a real exchange and borrowing between,
and even a convergence of the enterprise of the church and the secular
enterprises of the army and the merchants. There was also greater
exchange and borrowing between European nations (or empires) in
the domain of linguistics than in any other we now include in the social
sciences. This study of language, whether conducted by the church or
the army or merchant traders, willingly or unwillingly led to the unset-
tling of the major question of race in colonial epistemology.
Unlike in the rest of Africa (and even in the Levant), where the study of
language was chiefly the monopoly of missionaries, in Algeria and beyond
in Tunisia and later in Morocco, this study was the chief concern of the
armée, and more specifically the Arab Bureau in Algeria and the Affaires
Indigènes in Morocco.16 But missionaries were not legion; several (such as
Charles de Foucauld and Gustave Huyghe) contributed to the study of
language by making dictionaries and grammars.17 In the case of Algeria,
a military officer of the Arab Bureau, Adolphe Hanoteau, was a pioneer.
He was able to study Kabyle (the style of Berber spoken in eastern Algeria)
15
Judith Irvine and Susan Gal, “Language Ideology and Language
Differentiation,” in Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Politics, and Identities,
ed. Paul Krosrity. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 2000, p. 35.
16
Judith Irvine, “Subjected Words: African Linguistics and the Colonial
Encounter,” Language and Communication 2008 (28)4: 323–343.
17
Père G. Huyghe, Dictionnaire Kabyle-Français. Algiers: Adolphe Jourdan,
1901.
and to write a grammar and a dictionary.18 Most importantly for our case,
Hanoteau was also able to map Berber all over Algeria in an attempt to
identify a population (or rather race, i.e., Berbers) by location. And in
locating Berber, Hanoteau was also identifying where it had been, as he
thought, displaced by Arabic.19 However, Hanoteau stresses the novel
fact that his map indicates: “This map is not an ethnographic map, it is
only designed to show the parts of the Algerian soil where Berber nation-
ality [sic] has lived long enough to conserve its language.”20 He displays
a real ethnographic prudence when he maintains that there are Arab tribes
that adopted the Berber language while Berber tribes adopted Arabic.
Thus, there is a real mixing that constitutes a real challenge for science;
Hanoteau warns, “the elements of this mixing can be isolated and classi-
fied only after long and detailed studies about which we possess
only rudimentary data.”21
In this section, I intend to show how the study of African languages
was itself the instrument of creating geographical entities, racial iden-
tities, and linguistic units, and that these processes contributed to creat-
ing the continent of Africa as it is today, with its northern part in distinct
isolation from the rest. We have seen how racial ideologies contributed
to this process. We turn now to how language ideologies themselves
nuanced, solidified, and confirmed the creation of units versus the whole
of the African continent. The perspective of “language ideologies”
I espouse here is the same adopted and championed by linguistic scholars
such as Judith Irvine and Susan Gal, who argue that “the ways these
languages [of Senegal, particularly Fula, Wolof, and Seerer] were identi-
fied, delimited, and mapped, the ways their relationships were inter-
preted, and even the ways they were described in grammar and
dictionaries were all heavily influenced by an ideology of racial and
national essences.”22
Throughout the nineteenth century, the study of languages was no
longer the monopoly of missionaries. Linguistics had achieved auton-
omy, though not to the level of “scientificity” that would make it
a leading science (une science pilote) among the social sciences, with
Ferdinand de Saussure. Philologists, lexicographers, military officers,
18
Adolphe Hanoteau, Essai De Grammaire De La Langue Tamachek’:
Renfermant Les Principes Du Langage Parlé Par Les Imouchar’ Ou Touareg.
Algiers: Adolphe Jordan, 1896.
19
Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 281. 21 Ibid.
22
Irvine and Gal, “Language Ideology and Language Differentiation,” p. 47.
geographers, and public servants throughout Europe had accumulated

a colossal amount of knowledge about human languages – and not only
those of Africans – that they mapped.23 Africa emerged as an area with
its own specific languages not found anywhere else. This knowledge
may not have had the consensus of linguistics, but it surely contributed
to the creation of the continent of Africa itself with its parts and
divisions also justified based on linguistic logics. Within the continent,
Arabic seemed to dominate the north and only the north. Berber
seemed to coexist with it in a relation of subordination despite its
“indigenous” status. At the border of the Sahara, both Berber and
Arabic dominated other African languages. But Egypt seemed to be
a distinct unit with its indigenous language believed to be extinct.
Geographically it was connected, as then believed, with Asia, the
presence of an Asian language in its territory further reinforcing the
belief that Egypt was part of Asia.24
It was an Orientalist arabisant, Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis,25
who wrote the first Berber dictionary (1788) and the first Berber
grammar, published posthumously in 1844 at the request of the
Société de Geographie with the assistance of the Ministries of War
and Commerce.26 The manuscript was handed to the Royal Library
by Constantin-François Volney after 1890. Set apart from colonial
dictionaries, this one has a different ideology. First, it acknowledges
from the outset the intimate connection between Arabic and Berber, in
which “all the words pertaining to arts and to religion are borrowed
from Arabic.”27 Venture de Paradis continues, “they also borrow from
Arabic the epithets they lack.”28
Arabic, which defined the region of the Levant (later called the
Middle East) along with Egypt, was the monopoly of metropolitan
Orientalists – Silvestre de Sacy and his students.29 It was presumed to
be the language spoken by “Arabs” in the region of northern Africa and
even at the border of the Sahara. Opinions that Arabic was a Semitic
23
See Robert Cust, A Sketch of the Modern Languages of Africa. London:
Trubner, 1883. Also see F. W. H. Migeod, The Languages of West Africa, 2 vols.
London: Trubner, 1911–1913.
24
There was also another view, that Arabic itself originated in Africa.
25
On Venture de Paradis, see Daniel Reig, Homo Orientaliste. Paris:
Maisonneuve, 1988.
26
Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis, Grammaire et dictionnaire abrégés de la
langue berbère. Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1844.
27
Ibid., p. xviii. 28 Ibid., p. xviii. 29 See Reig’s erudite Homo Orientaliste.
language originating from Africa were also circulating, but were

ignored by Orientalists who studied Arabic in relation to other
Semitic languages, especially in the Levant.30 But unlike the ideological
vacuum surrounding African languages, Arabic was the focus of an
impressive array of language studies (grammars, dictionaries, philo-
logical treatises) and a well-developed language ideology difficult to
contest even by Orientalists.31 Like these African languages, Arabic
was constructed according to a colonial ideology of race and with
disregard for both multiculturalism and particularism. In short,
Arabic was presumed to be the language of Arabs, and thus an alien
language to Africa. But Arabic had already been normalized and insti-
tutionalized as a language of civilization. Missionaries had created
bilingual dictionaries and textbooks of Arabic grammar.32 Though
these were addressed mainly to a French public, and a fortiori,
Catholics interested in conversions, secular interests were also manifest
in them. Of these, perhaps the most significant was that of making
Arabic translatable – that is, transformable – and by the same token of
helping the “Orientals interested in learning French.”33 For instance,
the dictionary of Jean-Baptist Belot, Dictionnaire-Français-Arabe,
excludes and reduces the number of vocabularies pertaining to Islam
as a faith and favors “expressions relative to private and social rapports
[and] terms specific to administrative and judicial relations.”34
By contrast, Berber had to be constructed, normalized, and institu-
tionalized by colonial powers. In other words, it had to be colonized in
ways Arabic could not. By colonized, I mean its construction was done
by missionaries and military officers whose racial vision was integral to
their views of the language. Berber was constructed as opposed to
Arabic, and in a relation of subordination to both Arabic and French.
Its makers had a modern, Eurocentric conception of language that
made them overlook the specificities, the intermingling of local lan-
guages, and the historicity of African languages. This might be con-
trasted with the medieval, Arabic conception of language, as we find it
30
For the African origins of Arabic, see Irvine, “Subjected Words.”
31
See Daniel Reig, “Dictionnaire et idéologie dans la culture arabe,” Studia
Islamica 1993 (78): 63–97.
32
See Henri Fleisch, “Les Pères Cuche, Belot et Hava de diconnaires arabes,”
Arabica 1963 10(1): 56–63.
33
Jean-Baptist Belot, Dictionnaire-Français-Arabe. Beirut: Imprimerie
Catholique, 1890, p. v.
34
Ibid., pp. v–vi.
in the work of Ibn Khaldûn, who offers a much more ethnographic and
thus more sociolinguistic conception of language.
Ibn Khaldûn used two concepts that may seem synonymous at first,
but they are not. One is the concept of lisân (speech); the other is the
concept of lughat (language).35 Both lisân and lughat change as a result
of the passage of time and the geographical location of a population
and its contact with other, non-Arabic speaker communities. For Ibn
Khaldûn, lughat is similar to the Saussurian concept of langue; it is
langue in abstract, it is virtual. Hence to say “the Arabic language”
means the entire system of signs that constitute Arabic: Lughat ahl al-
maghrib wa amsâruh, lughat ahl-machriq wa amsâruh, lughat ahl al-
andalus wa amsâruh (“the language of the people of the Maghrib and
its provinces, the language of the people of the Levant and its provinces,
the language of the people of Andalus and its provinces”).36 Lughat is
the language spoken and written by a jîl (generation) of Arabs (or
Berbers, but Ibn Khaldûn does not seem to have known any Berber
language despite a few comments on pronunciations here and there).
The language of science, of sharia, in short of Islamic learning, is the
language of the Quran; it is what Ibn Khaldûn calls the language of
Mudar.37 However, language for Ibn Khaldûn seems to be a living
thing, not a static or fixed object, as in the work of Arab grammarians
and philologists. By contrast lisân is what people speak, it is the
actualization of lughat, it is lughat in practice, it is the Saussurian
concept of language – it is Arabic in speech and in writing. As a living
thing, people’s speech (language in context) too is subject to the law of
change caused by the passing of time and of successions of jîl. This is
what Ibn Khaldûn calls al-buʿd ʿani al-lisân (“distance from the
tongue”).38
35
Ibn Khaldûn, Muqaddima, pp. 252–258. 36 Ibid, p. 303.
37
Mudar is the language of a larger pre-Islamic tribe that the Prophet Mohamed
belonged to. Therefore it is a pre-Islamic language that constitutes the language
of the Quran, and thus it is considered the Arabic language par excellence. In
modern times, Taha Hussein, himself a scholar of Ibn Khaldûn, also questioned
the purity of this language not only in subsequent periods closer to Islam, but
even in the time of Islam itself: “Who can claim that the Quran used all
vocabularies (alfâz) that were common and of familiar [use] among the Mudar
[tribes] at the time˙ of the Prophet?” Taha Hussein, Fî al-adab al-jâhili. Cairo:
Hindawi Press, [1926] 2012, p. 222.
38
Ibn Khaldûn, Muqaddima, p. 257.
Ibn Khaldûn also identifies a major factor of transformation:

ikhtilât. We could call this “language contact,” using a modern linguis-
˙
tic concept. A lughat (language) changes in practice – that is, when it
becomes lisân (speech) – and comes in contact with other forms of
speech (in this case, non-Arabic ones). This change, for the case
of Arabic in Ibn Khaldûn’s time, is a consequence of time (buʿd) and
of contact (ikhtilât) with non-Arabness (ʿujmâʾ): al-buʿd ʿani al-lisân
˙
innamâ huwa bi mukhâlatati al-ʿujma (“the distance from the [Arabic]
˙
language is because of mixing with non-Arabic”).39 And the result is
a malakat mumtazija (a hybrid habitus).40 Thus the differences among
languages in his time are due to contact with other languages. Again,
Ibn Khaldûn identifies three types of lisân (speech) in his time. One is in
Ifriqiya and the Maghrib, where contact with Berbers was so strong
that Berber “dominated the Arabic tongue” and resulted in the birth of
another language, “a hybrid language” (lughat mumtazija).41
Likewise, in the Levant (mashriq), the lughat got so corrupted that it
became another language as a result of contact with the Persians and
the Turks. Similarly, because of their contact with Galicians and
Francs, the people of Andalusia have another specific language, lughat
ukhra.42 These formations of the fourteenth-century scholar do not
express any of the linguistic purity found in colonial understanding of
local languages. Also, they describe a complex linguistic reality not
reflected in the work of Arab medieval grammarians and colonial
lexicographers. They express the viewpoint of a man who lived in the
Andalus, in the Maghreb, and in the Levant, not as a grammarian, but
as a sociologist very interested in the phenomenon of change: change of
dynasties, of tribes, of nations, of languages, of religious practices, and
so forth.
If this was the linguistic reality in fourteenth-century Ifriqiya and the
Maghreb, by the nineteenth century, the language contact must have
become more profound, more diverse, more intermixed in both Arabic
and Berber. Five centuries must have introduced more changes in the
grammar, syntax, and lexicon of these spoken languages. Also, time
seems hopeless in eradicating all the additions a language acquires from
its old contacts. Communities of speakers (then as now) not only spoke
one or the other, but they spoke one and the other all at once. Modern
Berber is profoundly Arabized, the same way that “Maghrebi Arabic”
39 40 41 42
Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.
is deeply Berberized (in its vocabulary as well as in its syntax). In the

geography of language, in the area extending from central Morocco to
Libya, there are varieties of ways of speaking that were (and are)
distinct from one another. Yet these differences were sacrificed in the
attempt to construct Berber as a single language. Arabic too was
constructed as such. In these constructions, it is not similarities that
define Berber or Arabic, but differences that make them opposed to
each other. Modern linguistics stressed difference over similitude.
Berber emerged then as a separate language (despite its impressive
varieties) opposed to Arabic (also despite its impressive varieties).
Language ideology set them at opposite poles, in accordance with the
ideology of domination that constitutes an epistemic principle of nine-
teenth-century race studies. Even in one country, say Morocco, the
spoken “Arabic” is different from region to region and even from
ethnic group to ethnic group. To argue that spoken Arabic in
Morocco is one but not the other is to produce the same myth of the
purity of Arabic – or of Berber.
Colonial dictionaries and grammar treaties, from those of Adolphe
Hanoteau in Algeria to those of Henri Laoust in Morocco, treat var-
ieties of Berber as “dialects” or even “subdialects,” two concepts
absent in the ethnographic lexicon of Ibn Khaldûn.43 For Ibn
Khaldûn, these are languages in their own right. He does not devalue
them as “dialects,” but, according to his conception of language (dif-
ferent from those of Arab lexicographers and grammarians interested
in linguistic norms), these are languages that change over time as
a result of contact with other languages. There was (and still is)
a mixing of languages that includes forms of Arabic, forms of Berber,
of Turkish, and even of languages that are no longer spoken (in
a distinct way). For instance, both Punic and Latin left an imprint on
the spoken languages of the population of the region. But the colonial
ideology of racial difference made Berber a pure language distinct from
all others, particularly Arabic, despite the fact that on a practical level
those who speak Arabic in the region also use Berber’s grammatical
forms and also borrow from its lexicon. (And, of course, vice versa.)
From a Whorfian perspective, such mixing also implies the fact that
43
Emile Loaust, Etudes sur le dialecte berbère du Chenoua. Paris: Ernest Leroux,
1912. Also by Loaust see Mots et choses berbères: notes de linguistique et
d’ethnographie, dialectes du Maroc. Paris: Challamel, 1920.
Amazigh, or the “Algerian dialect” of Berber, contains hybrid categor-

ies of thought. Colonial linguists constructed Berber as a single lan-
guage that crosses northern Africa from central Morocco to Libya. But
the various “Berber languages” are as distinct from one another as
Hebrew from Arabic and as Arabic from Aramaic.
Whereas Arabic remained an expertise of Orientalists (and especially
in the metropole, including students of deSacy), military officers and
public servants seem to have found a new unexplored territory: the
study of Berber and African studies.44 In the case of Algeria, the study
of language by itself did not unsettle the question of race; if anything, it
reinforced this, as with the work of Adolphe Hanouteau, Aristide
Horace Letourneux, and Emile Masqueray.45 But it was the confron-
tation between the study of language and the study of race that created
new understandings of both. Arabic was already the monopoly of
Orientalists; with students of deSacy, it remained limited to the domain
of philology with a focus on major Islamic texts.46 The study of Berber,
meanwhile, was a new field emerging from the conquest of Algiers and
pioneered by officers of the Arab Bureau. With the founding of the
University of Algiers, the study of regional languages found its place,
given the importance of languages in defining races.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Gautier and Edmund Doutté
had published the results of a linguistic investigation carried out in
Algeria, a geography of Berber entitled Enquête de la dispersion de la
langue berbère en Algérie.47 In colonial discourse on language, Berber
is always positioned toward Arabic in a relation of antagonism, with
Arabic dominating Berber. Arabic too does not exist in the region
without this relation. And this relation provides a linguistic identifica-
tion to the region. In Egypt, such a relation does not exist. Arabic reigns
supreme without the linguistic antagonism of another local language.
The study by Gautier and Doutté was commissioned by the gov-
ernor-general of Algeria, as were many colonial studies about the
region. The aim set by the governor was “to fix as exactly as possible
44
See René Basset, Rapport sur les études berbères, éthiopiennes et arabes
1887–1891. Woking: Oriental University Institute, 1892.
45
Adolph Hanoteau and Aristide Letourneux, Kaybles et les coutumes kabyles.
Paris: Challamel, 3 vols. 1893.
46
For the history of the Arabic language in France, see Reig, Homo Orientalist.
47
Émile-Félix Gautier and Edmond Doutté, Enquête de la dispersion de la langue
berbère en Algérie. Algiers: Adolphe Jourdan.
the regions where [the] Berber language is spoken.”48 The declared

utility of this study was to identify “linguistic frontiers” and to see “if
Berber declines and in what proportion.”49 The result was clearly
a cartography of the Berber language, a language characterized as
proto-Semite. The study is inscribed in the linguistic tradition
Hanouteau pioneered. From the outset, one notices a change in the
analytical language of Gautier and Doutté: the population of Algeria is
not labeled in racial terms as Berbers and Arabs, but in ethno-linguistic
terms as berberophones (Berber speakers) and arabophones (Arab
speakers).50 However, the authors do not distinguish between berber-
ophones and Berbères non berberophones; this would be “absurd” in
their view since “the question of race is something distinct from the
question of language.”51 Hence this important conclusion for the
question of race in colonial Algeria: “It is impossible to distinguish
Berbers and Arabs amongst the Arab speakers.”52 However, the
authors do not draw the opposite (and logical) conclusion, which
would be the impossibility of distinguishing Arabs and Berbers
among Berber speakers. Such a conclusion is a slippery slope for colo-
nial authors, one that would lead to a rejection of the race theory upon
which the entire colonial ideology was founded and that uses the Arab
versus Berber duality as one of its structuring principles. If language is
determinant, there are only linguistic communities, not racial commu-
nities – a thesis close to the idea advocated much later, in 1952, by
Claude Lévi-Strauss that there are only cultural communities, not racial
communities, since language itself, like culture, is always not only
hybrid but also changing and shifting.53 After all, colonial reason had
limits and constraints beyond which it could not venture, at least not
without colonial consequences. Yet the authors could still argue that:
We do not trust in any way these arbitrary distinctions between Arabs and
Berbers. Language aside, there is no criterion that is likely to serve as the basis
for this distinction.54
And in the footnote, the authors add that “the anthropological

distinction between Arabs and Berbers is a question under
consideration.”55 Gautier sums up the result of this research again in
a single-author publication in 1913 under the title: “On the Dispersion
48
Ibid., p. 3. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., p. 5. 51
Ibid., p. 8, footnote 1. 52
Ibid.
53
Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire. 54 Ibid. 55
Ibid.
of Berber Language.”56 He first makes the distinction between Berber

and Arabic, but draws attention to a conflict that is seemingly linguistic
but is in fact racial, in his view:
Berber language has no unity, no literature, no grammar, no dictionary, and
no alphabets. And there is no official measure in the world that can give this
patois what it needs. That it is not in a position to combat Arabic, which is
a real language, this does not need to be explained. The strange phenomenon
is that the combat that started dozens of centuries before, is far from its end.
This is testimony to how long it takes for social reactions to occur in this
country.57
Gautier relies on archaeology, especially the work of Stéphane Gsell,

his colleague at the University of Algiers, to trace the presence (and
absence) of Berber. Berber exists, in his view, in the region correspond-
ing to the frontiers of the Roman Empire (the limes) and beyond it.
“The limes left outside of the Empire all the southwestern half of
Algeria, the high plateaus of Algiers and Oran with the Saharan
Atlas, and even the edge of the Tell of Oran.”58 Arabic, by contrast,
exists in the area called “the central Maghreb.” Using statistics, he
states that “36 549 indigenes abandoned their Berber language last
century. We predict 30 959 others will do the same during the coming
century. In our time, Berber lost over 60 000 [speakers] annually.”59
This linguistic struggle for survival is what marks the region, not the
race struggle we find in previous narratives such as that of Mercier. But
the region, and not only Algeria, is not marked only by the Arabic-
Berber dichotomy, but most importantly, as with race, the struggle of
Berber versus Arabic versus French, with the latter set apart as
a language of civilization and progress. French was undoubtedly for-
cing Arabic to retreat, according to Gautier:
French certainly takes vis-à-vis Arabic the position Arabic takes vis-à-vis
Berber. Literary Arabic itself is not a tool to sustain the competition with
a modern European language. Anyway, it is a dead language, a sort of Latin,
the only living language is vulgar Arabic, which takes more and more the
form of a patois.60
56
Émile-Félix Gautier, “Répartition de la langue berbère en Algérie,” Annales de
Geéographie 1913 (22)123: 255–266.
57
Ibid., p. 259. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., p. 257. 60 Ibid., p. 265.
One can see in this examination, meant initially to locate the Berber
language and estimate its retreat in relation to Arabic, that the issue of
language is posited in ways that not only further define the region
beyond Algeria but also bolster French as the language of modernity
(i.e., of progress, science, and civilization). Meanwhile, the question of
Arabic in Egypt and by extension of the region to become, after World
War I, the Arab Middle East, was posited only briefly in relation to
spoken Arabic (ʿâmmiya).61 In the region to soon become the
Maghreb, Arabic was posited in relation to Berber as a domineering,
oppressive, and exclusive language, and in relation to French as
a language of the past that left Arabic with the status of Latin, a dead
language. In other words, it is not Arabic itself that defines Algeria and
by extension the region to be called the Maghreb, but the complex
linguistic relations absent elsewhere – that is, the relation of Arabic to
the Berber it dominates and to the French it is in the process of being
dominated by. At the same time, the issue of race, even in the discourse
of Gautier, cannot be separated from the issue of language, not only
because in his treatment he “racializes” both Arabic and Berber, but
also because Arabic remains in his discourse the language of Arabs.
Arabs imposed their language, the way they also imposed their lifestyle,
nomadism, on a population known as Berbers. In the colonial discourse
of Gautier and his contemporaries, language is racialized. And given
the state of colonial knowledge, it could not be otherwise. This colonial
attitude toward Arabic would be used later, with the rise of Arab
nationalism in the Levant, to define what an Arab is. In this definition,
language was (is) considered a defining feature of an Arab. It is this
definition that associates the population of the Maghreb region with
the Middle East and would not make an exception of the Berber
population since they too are largely Arabic speakers.
Here, one may well interrupt and object:
I may well understand your attempt at trying to create a connection between
race and language and between language and the creation of geographical
units. But in trying to do so, you construct a case against colonials by
presenting their efforts at making dictionaries, grammar studies, and trea-
tises on language as merely ideological, while you overlook the fact that these
61
Abbas Mahmood Al-Aqqad, “Al-fasiha wa al ʿâmiya,” in Saâ ʿat bayna al-
kutub. Cairo: [1927] Hindawi, 2014. Taha Hussein, “Al-fasiha wa al ʿâmiya.”
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCIcx1WsQ9o. Last accessed August 24, 2020.
efforts saved Berber from loss or at least from further endangerment. In other
terms, you disregard their intellectual efforts. Even if their work was in
service of colonial ambitions, so what? Every work is in service of a power;
one may even say every work is in the service of an ideological case, no matter
what, and that includes yours. But the truth of the matter, the one you ignore,
is that without colonial scholars and their impressive efforts, these dictionar-
ies, grammars, and linguistic treatises that are “cultural products,” as you
say, would not exist. That would be a real loss, wouldn’t it? These same
colonial scholars, whether missionaries or military officers – whom you
critique as serving geopolitical interests and being involved, by their own
research, in the politics of empire – saved the Berber language and even
culture, and also restored the pride of the population in the region. Yet,
instead of pointing out to us how they have contributed to resuscitating the
Berber language (and also other languages in Africa), you say nothing. You
also seem to be interested only in those colonials who treated African
languages as inferiors. But what about those, such as Jean Dar and Jacques-
François Roger, whom you do not even mention, yet alone examine how
their work offers different views of African languages, views that clearly
express so much humanism, and so much respect for those African lan-
guages, which are, as they persuasively argue, reflective of a high degree of
intelligence and a great aptitude for creativity and thus civilization?62 They
too made dictionaries and grammars. And I am sure there are others. But you
ignore them to make a better case, don’t you?
Let me now address these objections. The service of colonials to

Berber (and generally African oral languages) is questionable, to say
the least. There is no doubt that colonial efforts at studying lan-
guages and creating written means for them are impressive. It is
undoubtedly true that the results of this linguistic research, these
same dictionaries and linguistic treaties, are indeed cultural prod-
ucts. However, my goal is to show how language nuanced the con-
cept of race and how the first and the second were harnessed in
creating geographical and cultural particularities. But Hanoteau,
Gautier, and Laoust were not thinking about saving the language
of the Berbers as much as they were thinking about learning these
languages themselves in order to facilitate trade, conversion, and
giving orders to the “natives” in their own languages. They wanted
62
Jean Dar, Dictionnaire français-wolof et francais-bambara, suivi du
dictionnaire wolof-français. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1825. Jacques-François
Roger, Recherches philoosphiques sur la langue ouolofe, suivies d’un
vocabulaire abreégé français-ouolof. Paris: Dondey-Dupre, 1829.
to free themselves from linguistic dependency on native interpreters

they clearly mistrusted, as Louis -Léon Faidherbe occasionally
expressed.63 This objection postulates something highly debatable,
which is the idea that the written is superior to the oral, that the written
saves and the oral endangers, causing causes loss and disappearance.
Nothing is further from the truth. Latin was a highly written language,
institutionalized in churches, monasteries, and courts, yet it died. Berber
was an oral language, yet by the time of the arrival of the French,
populations spread across vast areas spoke the language in ways, of
which the written dictionaries and grammars could offer only
a reductive glimpse. Even after eleven centuries, Berber languages and
cultures were astonishingly alive at the time of the arrival of the French.
If they had survived that long, there was no reason they would not have
continued to the present. Actually, the life of Berber languages in the
region today is still oral almost in totality, and there is no evidence of it
waning, and this is not due to colonial dictionaries and grammars, since
people in these regions have no access to them and do not even need
them to continue practicing their languages the way they have for
hundreds of years. The Berber-speaking populations, then and now,
did not need the French to have pride in their language and culture. The
proof is exactly that these languages and cultures flourished in coexist-
ence, as they took from Arabic as much as “spoken Arabic” took from
them, in a process that continues even today. Orality can guarantee the
longevity of a language and a culture, while a language’s inscription
does not protect it from death. If Berber languages depended on colo-
nial texts to survive, we would have only reduced versions of them. But
the richness of these languages today defies the reductionism of colonial
dictionaries, grammars, and lexicographic treatises.
The point I also want to make is that the efforts of colonials reduced
these languages and created relations that did not exist – one with Arabic,
assumed to be a hegemonic language, and one with French, presumed to
be a superior language. It is these relations that endangered both Arabic
and Berber and still do. It is also these relations that continue to linguistic-
ally define the Maghreb of the present. My neglect of scholars such as Dar
and Roger is justified by the fact that they did not fit the dominant trend
63
See Louis-Léon Faidherbe, Le Sénégal: La France dans l’Afrique occidentale.
Paris: Hachette, 1889, p. 569 and passim. The treason of native interpreters was
a real concern for Faidherbe, who wanted France to train its own interpreters,
“natives,” to be dedicated to the “cause of France.”
and had a marginal position in the social and political fields of their time.64
As schoolteachers, their linguistic discourse could not have the effect
of the linguistic discourse of the governor of Senegal, the same
Faidherbe whose work I examine now. But there is always a doxa,
constituted for political, cultural, and economic reasons, and there is
the marginal, the unacceptable, the heretical discourse whether about
race or whatever topic. The more serious the topic, the more robust is
the doxa. I am interested in the discourse that participates in creating
the racial vision of language congruent with dominant racial ideolo-
gies. I am interested in the doxa, with its power dynamics that create
social realities. I am interested in the marginal only when it threatens
the doxa – that is, when it has effects. I am also interested in those
linguistic discourses that created the connections between regions and
those that created disconnections between others, but not with the
discourses that were not part of this project. In linguistics too are
dominant trends and marginal ones, the orthodox and heretical. The
Maghreb, whose construction I am examining, was constructed by
a hegemonic discourse that survives to this day. As Joseph Errington
put it once, “actions of colonial agents outran their own intent, and
colonial linguistic work likewise had uses and effects beyond those
foreseen or intended by its authors.”65
Nevertheless, if language was able to create strong connections, it
was also able to “naturally” separate the region of northern Africa
from the rest of Africa. Arabic was present, as a language in use, only in
northern Africa and the Middle East. For the rest of Africa, it is absent
or almost so. It can be found at the border as a result of an Arab and/or
Berber push for domination in Black Africa. Yet Africa and its discon-
nection was not only defined by this absence but also, like race, with
which it has become now associated, by the presence of “African
languages.”
64
On the contribution of these two authors, see Judith Irvine, “Mastering African
Languages: The Politics of Linguistics in Nineteenth-Century Senegal,” Social
Analysis 1993 (33): 27–46. Also by the same author see “Genres and Conquests:
From Literature to Science in African Linguistics,” in Verbal Art across
Cultures: The Aesthetics and Proto-Aesthetic, ed. Hubert Knoblauch,
Helga Kotthoff. Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 2001, pp. 63–90.
65
Joseph Errington, “Colonial Linguistics,” Annual Review of Anthropology
2001 (30): 20.
In the 1870s, Louis-Léon Faidherbe, governor of Senegal and later

president of the Anthropological Society in Paris,66 published a study on
the Peul language.67 His interest in this language lay not only in its
dominance in Central Africa but also in its “remarkable linguistic
characteristics.”68 Using the ideas of Ernst Höckel and Friedrich Müller
on language and race, Faidherbe believes in the relation between language
and civilization and between language and “the nature of hair.” Höckel,
as cited by Faidherbe, distinguishes between “ulotriche” (laineux, wool-
like) that includes, among several races, “negros,” and “lissotriche”
(straight hair) that includes, among many, Mediterranean people
(among whom are Caucasians and Semites). Faidherbe, observing the
curly hair of Peuls, concludes that they are a mixed race from migration
from the Orient and from “Negros.” In their physique, “agreeable from
a European point of view,” they are superior to the Negros and more
intelligent than them.69 “The inferiority of the Negros is caused by the
relatively weak volume of their brain.” And this inferiority lies in their
“lack of foresight, coherence of thoughts, the active might of the will. This
is why they can be enslaved.”70 The Arabs, by contrast, cannot be
enslaved, he argues. Also, when the Peuls are enslaved, they will “surely
run away.” The Peuls are the first to convert to Islam. They are also
associated with Wolofs and Sereres. The Peul language, according to
Faidherbe, is distinct, especially phonetically. “The absence of kha, in
this guttural language, which is so difficult to pronounce by the French
and which is common in Arabic, Berber, and Malinke makes a noticeable
distinction between Peul and the other spoken languages around it.”71
Faidherbe then establishes a systematic connection between race
(characterized by phenotypes) and language. If races are mixed and
give birth to a different breed, so do languages. As Judith Irvine puts
it, “for 19th-century linguists, missionaries, and colonial administra-
tors it was a common assumption that language was the index of
ethnic distinctiveness – that Africans, and all other human beings for
that matter, had exclusive cultural identities, grounded in linguistic
difference.”72
66
See Leland Barrows, “Faidherbe and Senegal: A Critical Discussion,” African
Studies Review 1976 (19)1: 95–117.
67
Louis-Léon Faidherbe, Essai sur la langue Poul. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1875.
68
Ibid., p. 3. 69 Ibid., p. 13. 70 Ibid., p. 14. 71 Ibid., p. 21.
72
Irvine, “Subjected Words,” p. 337.
Therefore, what one finds on the border of the Sahara is not only
mixed races, paganized “Islam,” but also mixed languages. But the mix
is of less quality than the original, whether racially or linguistically.
This mixing is ideologically interpreted, as in the case between Serer
and Wolof, as “less versus more thoroughly penetrated by Islam.”73
Peul is not the only “race” at the border, albeit a dominant one,
according to Faidherbe. In 1888, inspired by the work of Faidherbe,
Louis-Gustave Binger published a study on the language of Bambara.74
He too makes the connection between race and language. From the
outset, he conveys to his reader that “the majority of historians agree
that there are two distinct races in West Soudan: the Peul race and the
Mandinka race.”75 Like Faidherbe, Binger provides a cartography not
only of the Bambara language but also of Peul. Faidherbe provides
a topography of these languages and shows that Arabic has an entirely
different one. As Judith Irvine puts it, “according to traditional ana-
lyses of Arabic’s linguistic history, Arabic emerged as part of
a Northwest Semitic language family, along with Aramaic,
Phoenician, and biblical Hebrew. Because of the Biblical-era connec-
tion with the Near East, Northwest Semitic was presumed to have
originated in that region.”76 Therefore, Arabic, like the Arab himself,
was considered in the colonial context as alien to Algeria (and by
extension to northern Africa).
On the level of, first, form, the construction of these languages –
Wolof, Hassaniya Arabic, Soninke, and Serer – itself signifies the
linguistic definition of Senegal.77 But these languages themselves, in
the view of the colonial lexicographer and translator, are not ideologic-
ally equal. They do not have the same status, the same value, or the
same merit. The value of each is determined by the “race” that speaks
it. But taken together, these languages also constitute a unit called
Senegal. One can indeed conclude that the linguistic map Faidherbe
provided sets Senegal apart from its southern neighbors and from its
northern neighbors, where Arabic and Berber constitute a linguistic
entity distinct from the entirety of West Africa and from the entirety of
the Levant.
73
Irvine and Gal, “Language Ideology and Language Differentiation,” p. 58.
74
Louis-Gustave Binger, Essai sur langue Bambara. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1886.
75
Ibid., p. 1. 76 Irvine, “Subjected Words.”
77
Louis-Léon Faidherbe, Langues sénégalaises: wolof, arabe-hassania, soninkr,
serere. Paris: Leroux, 1887.
Faidherbe states in his book that its purpose is to be useful for

European travelers and merchants so they can quickly communicate
with the natives. That may be the case, but the dictionary itself, by its
selection, and by its translation of what has been selected, also
expresses an ideology that not only isolates, or justifies the isolation,
of an area in a new configuration, and in apposition and opposition to
other linguistic units (corresponding to racial units that are themselves
an expression of territory), but also, in the French colonial context,
places them in relation to a power that expresses them, and puts them
all in a position of subordination and dependency.
Faidherbe also pays attention to the language(s) spoken at Senegal
and its border. They speak two languages, he notices, “klam el arab”
and “klam ezzenga.” The first is Arabic and is “quasi-identical,” in his
view, with the Arabic spoken in Algeria; the second is a “Berber dia-
lect” quasi-identical with “the Chellou[h] of the south of Morocco.”
Faidherbe notices a linguistic continuity across “Afrique septentrio-
nale.” Arabic and Berber, then, define the region:
From the Mediterranean at 15 degrees latitude and from the Atlantic Ocean
to the great desert of Libya, you cross Africa in all directions, and what
languages do you find? Arabic and Berber; everything is just that and nothing
but that.78
The existence of other visions on language (as well as on race itself)

remained marginal especially in light of highly authoritative scholars
who were also highly authoritative politicians and military officers.
Also, Faidherbe admits the existence of linguistic influences, but he
argues that this is just a phenomenon of the border. “You penetrate in
the country, you realize that tribes have conserved their languages
almost pure from all other foreign mixing.”79 The ideology of the
“purity” of African languages was commonly shared among scholars
of Africa.80
Berber dictionaries, language textbooks, and linguistic treaties
mushroomed by the turn of the twentieth century. These should not
be looked at as only an effort of colonial agents to learn and teach
78
Louis-Leon Faidherbe, “Les Berbres et les Arabes ds bords du Sénégal,” Bulletin
de la societe geographique February 1854: 89–112 at 93.
79
Ibid.
80
See Irvine, “Mastering African Languages.” Also see Errington, “Colonial
Linguistics,” p. 27.
“native languages,” so that communication with “natives” will be easier,

more effective, and increasingly independent of native interpreters.
Instead, these were themselves “cultural objects” carrying conceptions
about language, people, their relations, and their locations – original or
adoptive. As Daniel Reig argued a long time ago in an article that
announced the linguistic trend of language ideologies, “the object of
the dictionary is language, and through it culture, and beyond culture, it
is about the society that speaks this language.”81 But, in the case of
colonial dictionaries of other languages, one can say that the object of the
colonial (often a bilingual dictionary) expresses the ways the colonial
sees the subject society, thinks about it, and articulates that seeing and
thinking in his own language. Therefore, within the dictionary itself,
French has primacy, and the other language is subordinate, at the will of
the colonial lexicographer. This will is called power – power that allows
the colonial to subject another language, and thus another society, to his
interpretation. This interpretation becomes part of a hegemonic dis-
course difficult to challenge. In other words, the colonial in the colonial
situation is endowed with the power of creation, of invention, and of
transformation that contributes to reinventing society itself. Colonial
dictionaries are abundant in the colonial world. And so are grammars
and dictionaries, and dialogues that are also made possible by colonial
ideologies that constitute them as “cultural objects” of their own colo-
nial making. Therefore, their existence should not be looked at as only
an intellectual effort to understand the other, but a colonial will to
transform what is most intimate about the other, his language, the
expression of his being, of his dreams, of everything that constitutes his
world.
Consider the Manuel de Berbère marocain by Capitain Justinard.82
This is not just a dictionary that explains Berber words and the things
they signify, but rather involves a process of deciding first what the
Berber language is and thus, ipso facto, creating the “Berber fact,” as
conceived by Justinard himself. A dictionary, according to Daniel Reig,
is “a tool of cultural normalization that hence institutes the linguistic
truth (un vrai linguistique).”83 This normalization goes of course
beyond the colonial context of Algeria, deep into Morocco, to continue
81
Reig, “Dictionnaire et idéologie dans la culture arabe,” 67.
82
Capitain Léopold Victor Justinard, Manuel de Berbère marocain. Paris :
E. Guilmoto: Librairie Orientale & Américaine, 1914.
83
Ibid., p. 71.
the work of those who worked in Algeria, since the geographical and
racial conceptions that emerged postulated a continuity in language, in
race, and therefore also in territory between the units under French
colonial rule.
Whether with Faidherbe or with Doutté, with Gautier or with
Justinard and Emile Laoust, the colonial study of language was
intimately associated with race, even when the languages were
mixed with other(s). The region of northern Africa was discon-
nected from its neighbors and connected, albeit not entirely, with
Egypt, with whom it shares only Arabic – a language of conquest
and not an “indigenous language.” As Judith Irvine notices about
colonial linguistics in West Africa:
Language, ethnicity, and territory were supposed to coincide, and to
define population units on an administratively manageable scale – not
too small, and not too large. Whatever shapes African societies had
taken previously, and however variable or multifarious their popula-
tions’ ways of speaking, the moment of colonization is when they were
given that particular inflection that turns cultural traditions and geneal-
ogies into “ethnicity,” turns linguistic practices into named “lan-
guages” corresponding (supposedly) to ethnic groups, and interprets
multilingualism as a secondary effect.84
However, by this time, Berber was classified as a Hamitic lan-

guage and thus associated in the work of Carl Meinhof with lan-
guages from north, east, west, and south Africa (in the grouping
that includes Ful, Hausa, Bedauye, Somali, Masai, Nama Huttentot,
and what he calls “shilh,” spoken in Morocco and “selected as
typical of the Berber group”).85 This classification was appropriated
by Marcel Cohen in 1924, but was contested, even outright
rejected, by André Basset, who states, “also, and following with
great attention all these studies, we should consider this as
a hypothesis only and in fact, Berber remains always an isolated
language.”86 Edward Sapir, in his review, also contested Meinhof’s
84
Ibid.
85
Edward Sapir, “Review Carl Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten,” Current
Anthropological Literature 1913 (2): 21–27 at 23.
86
André Basset, “La parenté linguistique et le berbère,” Revue Africaine 1935
(76): 357–359 at 359.
classification.87And by the 1950s, the term Hamitic was gradually

replaced by the term Afro-Asiatic.88
This new paradigm consisting in connections between language,
race, and territory takes the issue of race in Morocco into an entirely
different direction. In this new reconfiguration of the race issue, two
territories emerge in the new colonial conception of this part of north-
ern Africa, a new conception that does not exclude what has been
established in Algeria, but only presents Morocco as a different variant
of the same question – the question of Arabs and Berbers. In Morocco,
the question became one of language in relation to space, and space in
relation to race.
Linguistics, as we can see, was undoubtedly instrumental in shifting
the geography of race. Racial theory, which saw in race a biological
tool of describing and analyzing collectivities, saw in the emergence of
language studies a way to shine a stronger light on these collectivities,
their histories, their cognitive structures, and their mental universe – as
revealed by the use of their language. For the case at hand, it was the
study of language (in its philological form) that allowed the critique of
the ideology of race, especially in an era of nationalism (for the case of
France, post 1870) when race itself no longer appeared to have
a comprehensive explanatory power though it continued to form the
subconscious culture of Europe. The proof is precisely the fact that the
emerging geographical unit was (and is) perceived in terms of race,
making it “white,” in a “Black continent.” “The realm of the negro is
well known and perfectly defined,” Gautier wrote in 1934.89 “It is the
entirety of the African continent, south of the Sahara. Outside of this
realm per se, we practically do not find him.”90 The “Sahara put
a brutal separation, without transition, between white and black.”91
But opposing this realm to the north in terms of religion only reinforces
the demarcation. However, as we will see later, it is race that defines
Africa in relation to the Maghreb. Linguistics gave an impetus to racial
thinking while at the same time adjusting borders and reinforcing units
as conquest advanced by the turn of the twentieth century.
87
Joseph Greenberg, “Africa As a Linguistic Area,” in Continuity and Change in
African Cultures, ed. William R. Bascom and Melville Herskovis. Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 15–27.
88
Ibid. 89 Gautier, L’Afrique noire occidentale, p. 85. 90 Ibid., p. 85.
91
Ibid., p. 93.
Race and Territory

With the de facto conquest of Morocco in 1912, the geography of the
new region started to reach its political completion. The cultural cre-
ation of the region had taken a new turn – an important one that
affected not only Morocco but also surrounding countries in the
African continent, and therefore on the overall dynamics of the
French empire itself. As Eugène Etienne writes, “only in Morocco –
the part that complements the countries that we already dominate in
the North-West Africa – we find the possibility of extending our ethnic
and linguistic domain.”92
Institutions, along with the discourse that makes them possible, do
not end abruptly without leaving any trace of their existence. They
rather transform and continue to operate by adapting to the different
circumstances in which they find themselves. The mode of knowing of
the Arab Bureau, ethnography, had become undoubtedly marginal
within Algeria, but continued to be carried out by men who shared
the vision of the Arab Bureau and who even attempted to reconcile the
conflicting views of the civilian regimes and the Arab Bureau.
The officers of the Arab Bureau and those who shared their vision
soon found an opportunity to pursue ethnographic (sociological)
research in the Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie, an institution
that can be considered an avatar of the Arab Bureau. Meanwhile, the
mission’s work was prepared and in fact framed in terms set by another
important source of influence, Charles de Foucauld. Foucauld arrived
from Algeria to Morocco, disguised as a Jew, in 1888. A learned man,
he acquired a great familiarity with ethnographic work undertaken by
members of the Arab Bureau. Like his colonial contemporaries in
Algeria, he presumed to be no different. Thus, de Foucauld attempted
to understand Morocco using the same colonial framework previously
discussed. De Foucauld extended but also set in place new themes that
were to be investigated, discussed, and repeated in the general colonial
discourse on Morocco.
De Foucauld arrived in Morocco in 1883 not so much with a racial
mindset as with a nationalist one. By the 1880s, race thinking in Algeria
had retreated in favor of nation thinking. Unlike the situation in 1830,
when the French approached Algeria with racial lenses, seeing the
92
Eugène Etienne, “La question marocaine,” Renseignements coloniaux July
1903 (1): 177–197 at 77.
Race and Territory 151
population as divided into “racial types,” after 1882, when French

historian Ernest Renan delivered his famous lecture “What Is
a Nation?” nationhood increasingly became the major category by
which countries were approached, understood, and categorized.93
Race thinking did not disappear, of course, but somehow it became
less predominant than nation thinking. Or, to be more precise, a new
layer called nationalism was added to it. In 1830, the question was:
what races inhabit Algeria? After 1882, the question became: does this
country constitute a nation? Nationhood was the hallmark of civiliza-
tion and its absence was the unmistakable mark of barbarism. “The
concept of nation is ours,” Renan proudly said.94 It was believed that
those, then, who do not live in nations, live in a state of anarchy and
barbarism.
Nationhood implied unity, homogeneity, and organization; its
absence implied divisions, chaos, and anarchy. The first ensures
peace, the second triggers war. But whether in peace or at war, nation-
hood also entailed two important concepts instrumental in European
politics: the state and territory. The two concepts were interconnected,
for territory was considered the prerequisite for a state and the state
implied a territory.95 In the view of Max Weber, the state is “a compul-
sory association which organizes domination.”96 And such domination
can happen only within a territory “by the legitimate use of physical
force.”97 What was meant by this “territory” is a modern conception
consisting in the belief in a “political unit.” As Jean Gottmann argues,
“territory is a compartment of space politically distinct from what
surrounds it”;98 this territory, he continues, “defines the physical exist-
ence of this juridical, administrative, and political entity.”99 In
European history (and its political thought), territory took on different
conceptions, especially after the French and American Revolutions
established “a particular relationship between a people and its terri-
tory.” Before the nineteenth century, such a relation did not exist in
93
Ernest Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” in Œuvres. Paris: C. Levy, 1947.
94
Ibid.
95
Janet Gottmann, La politique des états et leur géographie. Paris: Armand Colin,
1952, p. 70.
96
Max Weber, “Politics As a Vocation,” in Essays on Sociology. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1964, pp. 77–128 at p. 82.
97
Ibid., p. 83. 98 Gottman, La politique des états et leur géographie, p. 70.
99
Ibid. See also by the same author “The Evolution of the Concept of Territory,”
Social Science Information 1975 (14)3–4: 34.
a country such as Morocco, marked rather by the primary relationship

between the suzerain and his people, in the relationship between râʽî
and raʽiya.100 Therefore, one can say that allegiance governs this rela-
tion for the preservation of the oumma, and the cement of this preser-
vation is taxation. The relationship of people to territory was
introduced in Morocco by the nineteenth century, as is evident in
a letter of Hassan I responding to ongoing negotiations between
France, Great Britain, and Spain with tribes in the region of Sous over
the possible building of a port at the Canary Islands and possible
damage to the port of the city of Essaouira.101 Hassan I protests the
British negotiation with tribes (supposedly outside the realm of his
political control and the jurisdiction) in the area of Sous, where agents
of the makhzen (mkhazniya) were absent. Yet, he refers to the popula-
tion as raʽiya and orders Donald McKenzie not to engage in negoti-
ations with the population until Hassan I comes to the region of Houz,
which is next to Sous (implying that negotiation can happen between
him and European powers). As far as the people of Sous, they are
explicitly referred to as raʽiya. “Inform him [McKenzie], we govern
the people there (nasûsu al-raìya hunâk) in order to rally them to
negotiate with them [English state, dawlat al-nagliz] regarding the
port.”102 He also instructs the messenger that “if they ask you about
Agadir, tell them it is a dashra [a small village of no significance], seated
on a rock surrounded by a forest, in the midst of Idhawtan tribes; they
are mountaineers, not subject to a jurisdiction (la tanâluhum al
ahkâm), which does not benefit them and is of no interest to them (la
yahsul lahum bihi al gharad.”103
Clearly, Hassan I reclaims the population of the area as his subjects
(raʽiya) while at the same time acknowledging (in a private document)
that the area in question is not covered under his jurisdiction. There is,
then, the person of the sultan and there is the jurisdiction of the
makhzen. The absence of the makhzen, as the letter indicates, does
not imply that the area lies outside the makhzen’s sphere of power. This
is evident in his prohibiting the Europeans from conducting negoti-
ations with his subjects (raʽiya) in the area outside of the jurisdiction of
100
Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981.
101
Hassan I, “Letter 1220,” in Al-wathâ’iq: majmuʿa dawriya tusdiruha al-
watha’iq al malakiya. Rabat: Imprimerie Royale, 2000, 238–241.
102
Ibid., p. 240. 103 Ibid.
the makhzen. Only the sultan, by virtue of his status as a râʽî, can
conduct such negotiations. An interesting conception of sovereignty
can be detected in this letter: there is sovereignty on one hand and
there is jurisdiction on the other. A region outside the jurisdiction of
the sultan (because it lacks collective benefits) can still be under his
sovereignty. In other terms, an absence of jurisdiction does not mean
an absence of sovereignty. The official travels of Hassan I, called
mahalla, show that the sultan embodies sovereignty.104
Therefore, in this precolonial Morocco, conceptions of territory were
different, and so was the conception of population, hence its name, raʽiya.
Europeans could see that the sultan did not control all the area he was
supposed to control. This was by no means unique to Morocco; the same
western powers found themselves in similar situations despite the exist-
ence of modern states capable, with their technologies of power and with
their modern state institutions, to exert real and effective control over
a territory – if that were ever possible. In the case of Morocco, colonial
powers sought to negotiate with the sultan whenever possible – that is,
most of the time. They also sought to conduct what I call the politics of the
“soft belly” and maneuver whenever possible in the territory of the sultan.
The letter of the sultan itself is a political maneuver to counter tactics
aimed at him by being conducted in a territory where his jurisdiction
(ahkâm) and his force (mkhazniya) are absent.
De Foucauld, on the other hand, approached Morocco with the mindset
of nationhood, or generally with the mindset of a Frenchman with specific
conceptions of what constitutes a territory, a population, a nation, and
even sovereignty. These are cultural conceptions that predispose one to
construct reality accordingly. By the very end of the nineteenth century,
and the invention of nationhood as a polity, the concept of territory itself
witnessed a radical transformation that affected politicians, colonial
officers, and missionaries in and outside of the metropole.105 (It is also
interesting that this man was also a linguist in his own right and an
author of a bilingual dictionary on Touareg that was published
posthumously.106)
104
See Joclyne Dakhliya, “Dans la mouvance du prince: la symbolique du pouvoir
itinérant au Maghreb,” Annales: Histoire et Sciences Sociales 1988 (43)3:
735–760.
105
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1992.
106
Charles de Foucauld, Dictionnaire Francais-Touareg. Paris: Imprimerie
Nationale de France, 1952.
The perceived absence of the bond of nationhood in Morocco made

de Foucauld see a fracture in Moroccan society (whose bonds were
plural and multiple). In his work Reconnaissance au Maroc, de
Foucauld makes a distinction that will mark the discourse on
Morocco and distinguish it from that on Algeria:
There is a portion in Morocco where one can travel without disguise, but it is
small. The country is divided into two parts: one is subjugated to the Sultan in
an effective manner (blad al-makhzen) where Europeans circulate overtly
and safely; the other, four or five times larger, is peopled with unsubjugated
or independent tribes (blad as-siba) where no one travels safely and where all
Europeans cannot get in without being disguised.107
This situation was noticed in the 1700s by Jean-Michel Venture de

Paradis, who, despite his interest in languages, did not use the term
siba. “In the Empire of Morocco, and especially in the kingdom of
Sous, there are very powerful Berber tribes capable of defending them-
selves against the armies of the Emperor.”108 Venture de Paradis
notices the same thing in the mountains of Tunisia and Algeria, of
populations he calls Caibles or Gibalis: “Turks never penetrate in
these mountains and the populations found there do not pay tribute
[taxes] to the government except when famine or other convenient
reasons oblige them to come down.”109 De Foucauld calls this situation
siba, a name most likely conveyed to him locally that gives the dichot-
omy a definition marked by his own, French, conception of political
space.110
Modernity, as it is expressed in the work of Machiavelli as analyzed
by Michel Foucault, also invented the concept of territory as an essen-
tial element of sovereignty, since it involved, according to Foucault, the
control of population.111 Elsewhere, Foucault notes that “without
a doubt, territory is a geographical notion, but first it is a juridico-
political notion: the area controlled by a certain type of power.”112
Within the concept of territory itself, one finds other notions such as
107
Charles de Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc: 1883–1884. Paris:
Challamel, 1888.
108
Venture de Paradis, Abrégés de la langue Berbère, p. xix. 109 Ibid., p. xx.
110
See J. H. W. Verzijl, International Law in Historical Perspectives, vol. 3, State
Territory. Leyden: Brill, 1970.
111
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. New York: Palgrave
McMillan, 2007, p. 97.
112
Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits, vol. 3. Paris: Gallimard, 1994, p. 32.
domain, region, and horizon. For our case, it is the concept of region
that is relevant since what was perceived as bled as-siba was considered
a region of dissidence and thus escapes the sovereignty of the sultan.
“Region,” again according to Foucault, is “a fiscal, administrative, and
military notion.”113 To this notion one can add the notion of “cession”
that also affects the legal conception of territory. Cession here is
understood as a transfer of “competencies” by the “ceding State.”114
If territorial sovereignty has been defined as “a local sphere of compe-
tence,” I think it is more appropriate to define it as “a local sphere of
performances.” 115 This is not only because a state performs a number
of functions within its territory, but also because its territory is a sphere
of its performance, including the signs of its presence, the display of its
symbolic power, as in the case of shows and parades (as studied by
Clifford Geertz116). In other words, the very presence of territorial
sovereignty is in itself a state performance and vice versa.
Neither in colonial ethnography nor in precolonial Moroccan his-
toriography does one find this contemporary concept of infisâl (ces-
sion) used either as an accusation or a fact. Cession does entail the
presence of a concentrated power. It entails not a transferring or
a ceding, but a decision by a political power within the region that
claims it as a territory and cedes (or recedes) from (and against the will
of). Siba (as defined by de Foucauld) and the absence of ahkâm and of
mkhazniya (as stated in the letter of Hassan I) points not only to an
absence of a concentrated political power but also to a political dis-
order. In this sphere, regardless of its name, state performance is
absent. But state performance was not what defined political sover-
eignty in precolonial Morocco. Consider a letter given to archaeologist
Henri de La Martinière by Hassan I on June 16, 1884, in order to
facilitate his movement in the country. Hassan I warns the traveler of
the hostile tribes, including “Zair and Zemmour, and Ait Youssi and
others in the countries of the Berbers.” Not only is the term siba absent,
but these locations are considered “dangerous.”117 A dangerous
113
Ibid. 114 Verzijl, International Law in Historical Perspective, pp. 11–12.
115
Ranitzky cited by ibid., p. 11.
116
Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.
117
PAAP100/3, document 121 translation doc. 122. Mission archaeologique en
Tingitane, Correspondance – Press. Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Centre
des Archives Dimplomatique de La Courneuve.
territory for “foreigners” does not exclude the fact that it is within the
political and spiritual domain of the makhzen.
Since according to de Foucauld’s description, the siba is a land that
does not pay taxes, it was outside of the sultan’s sovereignty. But at no
time did de Foucauld or his successors argue that the siba is a territory
in and of itself, since bled as-siba consists of a fragmented region, not
a politically unified territory. Foucauld also expresses, in the same
definition of the dichotomy, the issue of security – “no one travels
safely,” as implicitly opposed to makhzen, “where one travels safely.”
We saw that with the letter of Hassan I, the area considered outside the
ahkâm is not to be interpreted as the absence of law but rather the
absence of its application. And therefore, the very fact that Hassan
I orders the raʽiya not to negotiate with Europeans entails a conception
of territory and sovereignty different from the ones de Foucauld and his
colonial successors had in mind.
The point here is not to be functionalist and argue for the ideological
purpose of this dichotomy, but rather to see that the dichotomy itself
constituted the territorial imaginary of French colonials and therefore
it displaced, without eliminating altogether, the thorny issue of race.
Since the concept of race was under constant critique, especially by
biologists and anthropologists, the concept of territory with its flipside,
the concept of population, was seen as constant, as given, as permanent
as long as its political frame was in place – that is, the nation, the
horizon of which seemed then limitless.
But for de Foucauld, the dichotomy is much more refined than in the
work of those who came after him. The bled as-siba, which is in fact the
object of his observation, is not homogeneous. On the contrary, it is
very fragmented. The general characterization is that the bled as-siba is
opposed to the bled al-makhzen. And even in this characterization, de
Foucauld introduces nuances. Sometimes the relation between bled as-
siba and bled al-makhzen is openly hostile. Sometimes the relation is
amicable because it is mediated by the marabouts who visit the sultan in
his capital and receive gifts. Sometimes the relation is on the limits,
when tribes that have been recently subjugated are self-governed des-
pite the presence of the qaid, a figure of the makhzen, who in this
instance has no authority or power.
The word siba does not exist in the historiography of the region and
seems also absent from political writings of the period. In Moroccan
dialect, siba is a common term for a situation of social and political
upheaval. More commonly it is used even to describe a rebellious child

(sâyib). The concept of siba involves, then, disorder (because of the
absence of rules) and insecurity (because of the absence of apparatuses
of security).118 So, the region was perceived as “ungoverned” accord-
ing to specific modern (i.e., capitalist) schemas. This means that
Morocco, then, had notions of sovereignty, territory, and regions
different from those colonials brought.
With the invention of the siba–makhzen dichotomy, colonial eth-
nographers such as de Foucauld must have also made recourse to
translation. Since perception is cultural and regulated with national
categories, de Foucauld translated the absence of ahkâm and mkhaz-
niya (i.e., the apparatuses of security) into a concept he encountered
during his travels in Morocco. However, in his writing, the dichotomy
of bled as-siba versus bled al-makhzen is not opposed in territorial
terms only, but in cultural and linguistic terms as well. Even though it is
diverse, the bled as-siba is mostly Berber. De Foucauld may be the first
one to give a cultural and linguistic definition to the term Berber, widely
accepted as a racial category by the officers of the Arab Bureau. The
bled as-siba, according to de Foucauld, is where Tamazirt is largely
spoken despite the fact that Arabic is not absent. It is also a territory,
where a sedentary lifestyle is predominant despite the presence of
nomads. The bled as-siba is also a territory where religious feelings
are weak even among the Arab nomads and despite the abundance of
the marabouts and aguram (saints, holy men).
The opposition is thus not clear and one wonders whether it is really
an opposition. The bled as-siba seems like a mosaic of small units that
oppose one another more than they oppose the bled al-makhzen – to
the point that one even finds a faction of one tribe belonging to the bled
as-siba and another faction of the same tribe belonging to the bled al-
makhzen. Within the bled as-siba, de Foucauld notes the existence of
three regimes of power. The first one is what he calls the absolute
democratic regime, where power is oligarchic but not personal.
The second is the despotic regime, where an ambitious person takes
over yet remains observant of tribal tradition. However, his power is
only temporary. The third regime of power is the despotic one that is
dependent on the makhzen, and therefore, by virtue of this dependency,
we can say it is an extension of the makhzen.
118
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 108.
However, despite the nuances, or maybe even because of them, de

Foucauld conveys forcefully that the country does not only lack div-
ision but also has deep fractures even within each unit, be it bled as-siba
or bled al-makhzen. Neither one is unified, both are fractured, and it is
this fracture that demonstrates not only the absence of nationhood, but
rather the lack of its possibility, and the ubiquity of the specter of war.
The racial division of Arab versus Berber still constitutes the basis of de
Foucauld’s thinking but its main new categories are territorial. It is as if
these divisions of territories, with their anarchies, even within the
territory of bled al-makhzen, beg for colonization – that is, for
a work of civilization for reunification that can only proceed through
pacification (which means, literarily, war).
By the early twentieth century, Morocco, not yet formally colonized,
was already on France’s colonial agenda. Its conquest was deemed
crucial to secure the colonization of Algeria and to complete the
French empire. In June 1903, Eugène Etienne, vice president of the
Chambre des Deputés, gave a speech at the Colonial Union in which he
said: “The day when the Moroccan question will be solved, I say it
publically, France will [then] achieve in Africa its colonial work. I think
it will no longer need to claim any other territories, with few excep-
tions. Its empire will be large enough to satisfy its activity.”119
Comité de l’Afrique Française, along with the Comité du Maroc, was
founded, thanks to the support of many politicians and the generosity
of banks, to advocate, propagate, and acquire more knowledge about
Morocco as a prelude to its conquest.120 Ethnographic expeditions
were sent one after the other attempting a penetration of Morocco to
know it, to categorize it, and to map it. The most important of these
were made by René de Segonzac and his team. They focused more on
the bled as-siba, they brought more knowledge about various regions,
and they preserved the framework de Foucauld had set in place.
Further, their studies, published as ethnographic monographs, resem-
ble more the diaries of travelers than systematic ethnographic research.
Thus, it is that Jacques Berque noted that de Foucauld’s exploratory
work “eclipsed all those that came after, even those of de Segonzac, des
119
Etienne, Renseignements coloniaux, p. 77.
120
On the Comité de l’Afrique Française and the Comité du Maroc, see Burke,
Ethnographic State, pp. 939–998.
Brives, and Doutté.”121 Let us stop at the example of Doutté, since he

offers a different view not common in his time among his peers.
Doutté associated himself with the school of Emile Durkheim,122 but
in it, he was marginal both because of his lack of credentials – he was
not a Normalian123 – and because of the total loyalty Durkheim’s team
required of its adherents. Doutté had half loyalty to the Mission
Scientifique du Maroc and the other half to the school of Durkheim,
meaning he was committed to neither. Moreover, as a colonial scholar,
he went against the grain and attempted to reverse the foundation of
colonial knowledge, its dichotomy of Arabs versus Berber. In 1901, he
wrote:
In Morocco as well as in Algeria the ethnic division with the indigenous
populations between “Arabs” and “Berbers” is a useless division. For
there is no criterion found in this division. First of all, it is very doubtful
that there is a Berber race. The Ethnographic research accomplished in
this direction has revealed that there are among the so called “Berbers”
a great variety of types . . . these types that are all considered entirely
Berbers are no more similar to each other than each of them to the so
called “Arab type.”124
We can see that Doutté reproduces an old yet marginalized discourse

defended early on by unorthodox colonial scholars in Algeria, most
notably Ismael Urbain.125 Reproducing it in the context of Morocco is
also reproducing its discursive marginality. The construct of the Berber
was fundamental to French knowledge of North Africa. Doutté pushes
the limits of the orthodox colonial discourse further by attacking the
positivism of his time. In 1914, he wrote:
It is difficult for a Christian to judge a Muslim; the racial prejudice blinds us
unwillingly. It make [us] see their piety degenerated into fanaticism, their
121
Jacques Berque, “Vignt ans de sociologie maghrébine,” Annales: Economies,
Societes, Civilisations, 1956 (11)3: 296–324.
122
See Valensi, “Le Maghreb vu du Centre.”
123
Graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, a postgraduate elite school founded
by Napoleon Bonaparte with the official intent to produce the highest elites of
French society in all domains. Its prestige has not diminished to this day.
124
Edmund Doutté, “Une mission d’études au Maroc,” Renseignements
coloniaux 1901 (8): 166.
125
Hannoum, “Colonialism and Knowledge in Algeria.” Also see Burke, “Two
Critics of French Rule in Algeria.”
asceticism into laziness, their aloofness into indifference, their resignation

into fatalism, their solidarity into partisanship.126
Let us be clear: one cannot invent anything one wants, neither can one
defend any thesis one wishes, let alone change the direction of colonial
research or question its foundations. Rather, the colonial discourse
contains rules that have to be observed, that cannot be transgressed, at
least without serious consequences, the most common and the most
immediate of them being exclusion, which translates as a marginal
position in the field where competition for prestige, authority, and
power is fierce and where most people would not be as adventurous or
as uncompromising as Doutté. Colonial knowledge was indeed hetero-
geneous and even conflictual, but there was always an orthodoxy
imposed on the public and the policy makers. It is this discursive ortho-
doxy that I am interested in because it is the one that shaped policies and
even outlasted colonialism. For the case of Morocco, this orthodoxy was
represented by Robert Montagne, a dominant figure in his time, and one
with a postcolonial discursive continuity still found today in French
postcolonial discourse on Morocco.127 Suffice it to say that even
Jacques Berque and Ernest Gellner are situated within his discursive
continuity, the first in his early rural sociological work, the second in
his anthropological work, Saints of the Atlas.128
By the time of the signing of the Treaty of Fez that established the
Protectorate in 1912, Hubert Lyautey, a general who had already
served in Madagascar and then in Algeria, decided to revive the Arab
Bureau tradition and to encourage its ethnographic mode. He immedi-
ately set up a new team; all of its members were part of the Mission
Scientifique du Maroc and thus all of them shared his colonial vision.
To mark the beginning of a new phase in the colonial rule in Morocco,
he renamed the Berber Archives Hespéris and founded a Moroccan
institute, the Institut des Hautes-Etudes de Rabat, in 1920 (that became
the University Mohammed V in 1956).129
126
Edmond Doutté, En Tribu. Paris: P. Geuthner, 1914, p. 436.
127
On the importance of this sociologist, see Ernest Gellner. See also
François Pouillon and Daniel Rivet, eds., La sociologie musulmane de Robert
Montagne. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1999.
128
See Abdelmajid Hannoum, “L’auteur comme authorité en ethnographie
coloniale: Le cas de Robert Montagne,” in ibid., pp. 249–264.
129
See Bulletin de l’Institut des Hautes Etudes Maocaines. Paris: Emile Larose,
1920. For the role Lyautey played in the production of knowledge, see
Lyautey did not think of himself as only an administrator, but also as

a thinker of colonization, and even as a scholar in his own right – in
a long tradition inaugurated by Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt and
confirmed by Bugeaud in Algeria. Lyautey too surrounded himself
with a team of scholars, mostly sociologists and ethnographers, to
record Morocco and thus to make knowledge an instrument of colon-
ization. One of those early recruits, the one with a lasting impact on the
state of colonial knowledge (and thus politics) was a young man by the
name of Robert Montagne. The relation between Lyautey and
Montagne is reminiscent of the relation between Bugeaud and
Daumas in Algeria, except that Montagne’s career lasted for almost
the entirety of colonial Morocco, when he was as prolific in scholarship
as he was militantly political.
Montagne’s beginnings were usual, meaning modest and unfocused.
He seemed to timidly duplicate the objects discussed by senior scholars
of Hespéris related to jurisprudence and folklore. Soon he seemed to
become interested, again rather timidly, in ethnography, carried out at
that time by Laoust and Justinard and more specifically by an interest-
ing yet relatively obscure figure by the name of Frédéric de la
Chapelle.130
La Chapelle was an agent of information. He did not seem to have
a clear political affiliation; he frequented various colonial political and
academic circles. Yet his interest seemed clear: it was the south of
Morocco and more specifically the political life of the Berber popula-
tion. His articles were published in different journals and magazines,
without discrimination. Already by 1926, he had published a piece in
which one finds all the objects developed later by Montagne.131 The
article resembles an agent report. La Chapelle sketches the political
situation in the south and discusses three distinct political formations.
There is a zone, according to him, administered by the makhzen, where
taxation seems to be a sign of obedience to the sultan. There is a region
ruled by a powerful chief with more or less great autonomy despite his
Daniel Rivet, Lyautey et l’institution du Protectorat au Maroc, 1912–1925.

Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988. Paul Rabinow, French Modern. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1989. Burke, Ethnographic State.
130
See Hannoum, “L’auteur comme authorité en ethnographie coloniale,”
pp. 250–251.
131
Frédéric La Chapelle, “Un grand Caïdat du Sud marocain,” Renseignements
coloniaux 1927: 372–386.
greater or lesser dependency on the makhzen. There is, last, a zone

where the autonomy of the chief is greater if not total. Being an agent
reporter, La Chapelle notes all along the attitude, hostile or amicable,
of such-and-such chief toward France, thus suggesting the location of
friends and foes in the region. It is also in this article that La Chapelle
notes the importance of the leff in the political life of the Berbers. “The
leff,” he writes, “is a commonplace alliance between small states that
compose the Chleuh society”; he adds that “the composition of the leffs
and the clans is at the base of all the political activities of the mountain-
eers.” However, La Chapelle does not analyze this political alliance or
turn it into a political concept able to account for the political organ-
ization of Berber society. Yet, he opens up that possibility: “it remains
interesting to study these constant links of alliances among the frac-
tions” of Berber society. One can see how the Berber had become a fact
and constituted henceforth a subconscious concept that no one seemed
to question.
La Chapelle continues to draw attention to what seemed to be
a novel aspect of Berber society, the system of alliances that had been
paid scant attention. In 1928, in a more sociological essay, he explains
how the government of Aït Arbin passed from a political entity, that of
the autonomous political chief, to another, that of the dependent
political chief; he thus explains how the Aït Arbin passed from auton-
omy to dependency.132 Here again he stresses the importance of the leff
as a political organization, yet raises for the first time the question of
the function of this alliance in the political life of the Berbers. He
perceives the leff as having a destructive function: “It is a permanent
cause of upheaval.”133
La Chapelle never became a recognized researcher. Most probably,
he himself did not think he was a researcher. He perceived himself as
a colonial agent and presented his work as that of renseignement (spy
information). This is why he never published a book and he never
attempted to turn the leff into an explicative theory, and maybe for
these reasons he is often forgotten in the history of colonial knowledge.
Montagne found his inspiration in the work of La Chapelle. By 1927,
Montagne had reoriented his research toward the political
132
Frédéric La Chapelle, “Les tribus de haute montagne de l’Atlas occidental,”
Revue des Etudes Islamique 1928.
133
Ibid., p. 347.
organization of Berber society and paid close attention to the same leff
to which La Chapelle drew attention. Discussing the case of the
Amghar of the Grand-Atlas, Montagne gives his first formulation.134
The leff, he says, is the link between the faction and the outside world.
By conciliating two definitions, seemingly contradictory – that of La
Chapelle, who sees the leff as having a destructive function, and that of
Masqueray, who sees it as having a stabilizing function135 – Montagne
shows the two sides of the coin, so to speak: “The leffs, he writes, which
are like a system of permanent assurance against the risk of destruction
in the face of a hereditary enemy, are at the same time sometimes
a means of pacification of the inside.”136
It is clear, then, that neither the theory of the leff nor the division of
bled as-siba and bled al-makhzen were novel objects of colonial schol-
arship. They had already been constructed as objects of discourse and
discussed by colonial scholars. Yet Montagne found in these objects
a new direction for colonial scholarship and for colonial politics, a way
to see how to operate in this tissue that seemed to be a bit more complex
than the Algerian reality.
The discussion of these timely subjects made Montagne gain some
notoriety among the members of Hepéris, what later would be known
as the School of Rabat (as opposed to the University of Algiers, dis-
cussed in previous chapters). It is only by the publication of his first and
major book, Les Berbères et le Makhzen, that Montagne gained the
name so familiar to us today.137 For it was thanks to it that Montagne
has become a (if not the) major author of colonial North Africa. Ernest
Gellner enthusiastically names him the modern continuation of Ibn
Khaldûn,138 which may seem interesting at first sight only because
the remark is so general that it applies to most scholars of North
Africa, whether colonial or national, especially since Khaldûn is omni-
present in all their scholarship. But he does not explain the continuity
between the work of Ibn Khaldûn, a sociologist of the state, and
Montagne, a sociologist of the siba (absence of the state).
134
Robert Montagne, “L’Aghbar et les Hautes Vallées du Grand Atlas,” Hespéris
1927: 1–32.
135
Emile Masqueray, La formation des cités. Aix-en-Provence: EDISUD, 1983,
p. 119. First edition, Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1886.
136
Montagne, “L’Aghbar et les Hautes Vallées du Grand Atlas,” p. 17.
137
Robert Montagne, Les Berbères et le Makhzen. Paris: Felix Alcan, 1930.
138
Ernest Gellner, “The Sociology of Robert Montagne 1893–1954,” in Muslim
Society Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 187.
Note that Ibn Khaldûn in colonial research is on one hand, the

author of a colonial text, Histoire des Berbères, that has served as the
foundation of colonial knowledge on the region (for his text generated
other texts in the form of arguments, counterarguments, reviews, com-
mentaries, and so forth).139 On the other hand, Ibn Khaldûn is also an
epistemic subject, a historian with a theoretical arsenal on the practice
of history, on dynastical power, on tribal sociology, on crafts of his
time, on education, on grammar, on poetry, and so forth. His text has
been used occasionally, especially by the then emerging sociology of the
school of Durkheim, and in the colonial context, by Robert Montagne.
Montagne did not just repeat or reuse Ibn Khaldûn’s thesis or concept
on this or that sociological issue, like Durkheim with his concept of
solidarity, but rather he was able to explode the discontinued – that is,
the discursively unexplored parts of Ibn Khaldûn’s text, the issues Ibn
Khaldûn left out because they were not relevant in his time.
Montagne was undoubtedly conscious of the fact that he was tack-
ling a discontinuity in Ibn Khaldûn’s work. He wrote:
Ibn Khaldûn, the only writer of North Africa who sought to penetrate the
interior life of this country, has often expressed in his work the sentiment of
melancholy inspired in him by this fragility of kingdoms and empires.
However, he has not consented to explain to us with enough precision the
play of interior forces that were unified sometimes to make them and some-
times to destroy them.140
It is well known that at the center of Ibn Khaldûn’s work is Berber

dynasties and the formation of dynastic power, its development, its
dissolution, and its succession. Ibn Khaldûn sought to understand the
emergence of dynastical power, its dynamics, and eventually its weak-
ening and how, in a cyclic process, the dynastic power is eliminated to
be replaced by another one that too is subject to the same rules of
emergence and fall.141
Espousing the clear-cut dichotomy of bled as-siba and bled al-
makhzen, Montagne considers that Arab authors, including of course
Ibn Khaldûn, explain only a part of the history and society of the
Maghreb, the one related to bled al-makhzen. The other side of the
dichotomy, bled as-siba, no less important, remains unexplored. It is in
139
See Hannoum, “Translation and the Colonial Imaginary.”
140
Montagne, Les Berbères et le Makhzen, p. vii.
141
Ibn Khaldûn, Muqaddima.
fact this aspect that Montagne attempts to explain, and he does so in

relation to the other side of the dichotomy, bled al-makhzen. He writes:
One should examine the conditions where the authority of the Sultan on
Berber republics has developed and was established, distinguished by what
insensible transitions a personal power founded on an unlimited and tyran-
nical force by nature, was born, grown, and exerted inside a country that is
traditionally hostile to the government of one chief until the moment when
dynastical crises or revolts give back to the bled as-siba its freedom.142
To use Weberian language, the enterprise of Montagne is centered

not on power as such – that is, the territory of the makhzen where the
so-called Arab and Islamic will is imposed successfully by force, but
rather on the territory of counter-power, where the same will was
unsuccessful in imposing itself and remains thus outside of that sphere,
foreign and unwanted. Montagne has sought to understand the success
of this resistance. Or, to say the same thing differently, he thought to
account for the bases of the counter-power and explain what consti-
tutes it as such. For Montagne, the question was, how is a territory that
escapes state power still mapped as a state territory? How is an ungov-
erned region, with the absence of central power, still functional? In
other words, why does a region of insecurity not plunge into total
disorder? Why is bled as-siba not really a siba?143
It is here that Montagne develops the leff as a concept with tremen-
dous explanatory power. For Montagne, the leff as a category is
necessary for understanding the entire Berber society in the past and
in the present. The leff explains how the siba is opposed to the makhzen
and how dynasties are born from within the first to eradicate and
substitute the second:
There is established . . . among all the cantons systems of alliances organized
in such a way as to constitute in the entire region two opposed leagues whose
efforts balance each other. This institution, that we label the leff and whose
importance we will discuss soon, as a consequence limits the expansion of
groups that are too active and establishes among all of them a sort of balance.
142
Montagne, Les Berbères et le Makhzen, p. 5.
143
A long time ago Hobbes argued that without a “common power” (i.e., state),
warre reigns. Thomas Hobbes, “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind,” in
Leviathan. New York: Penguin Books, 2017, pp. 182–188. Clearly, the case of
siba land unsettles an important idea of the Enlightenment regarding the nature
of man and the necessity of the state.
Surely it is thanks to its conservational effects that we [still] witness in the

Haute Atlas the presence of a great number of tribes and fractions from the
time of the Almohads.144
Thus the concept of leff is opposed (and complemented at the same

time) by the concept of ʿasabiya. The leff is restrictive; its destructive
function – that is, its ability to generate war in the entire country –
makes it paradoxically pacific. Thus understood, the leff becomes
a concept that explains why a tribe fails to become a dynasty. By
contrast, the ʿasabiya is a productive force; it explains how a tribe
becomes a dynasty. For the ʿasabiya, backed by religion, is integrative;
it assimilates its adherents. The leff is a system of oppositions. By
contrast, the ʿasabiya is a system of tribal adhesion. Yet, while the
leff is a system of alliance, its function is mainly exclusive. By contrast,
the ʿasabiya is adhesive: it seeks to include all possible oppositions to
strengthen the initial ʿasabiya of the tribe. But it does so only by use of
religion (din aw wilaya), says Ibn Khaldûn. The leff, on the contrary,
becomes weak and disappears with the interference of religion.
This discourse, though about Morocco, is inscribed in the discourse
about Algeria, and is thus part and parcel of the same discursive
formation. First, the Arab versus Berber dichotomy is now a self-
evident truth that no longer needs to be defined, discussed, or even
articulated. It is presupposed in the narrative, and is thus most unlikely
to be questioned. Second, despite the focus on the concept of leff as
a category of analysis, the discourse Montagne articulated has striking
similarities with the one of the School of Algiers, and more specifically
Masqueray, who gave it its latest formulation.145 Yet, the discourse of
Montagne has nuances despite the fact that it has as its toile du fond the
colonial dichotomy of Berbers, located mostly in the bled as-siba, and
Arabs, located mostly in the bled al-makhzen. Yet, like the discourse of
La Chapelle, his is openly politically informative – the aim seems to be
to provide the colonial administration with that which it can use for
ruling various localities. In other words, in the work of Montagne,
Morocco seems to be a mosaic of people, cultures, and polities. Thus in
it, one can see the preoccupations of the colonial administration that
consists in identifying the fabric of Moroccan society, so that adequate
144
Ibid.
145
Masqueray found the same type of alliances in Algeria, but under the name of
coff. See La formation des cités.
Conclusion 167
dosages of “oil drops” can be administered – this oil can be invisible

(culture, especially in the land believed to be of the makhzen) or
inflammatory (brute force, especially in the land believed to be of the
siba).
Conclusion
Race, as we have seen, was an important category by which the history
of the population of the Maghreb region was constructed. And this
racial construction was instrumental in defining the past (that is, the
present) of the region in a specific way that made it distinct and
therefore different from western Africa (defined as Black) and from
the Levant (defined as Arab). Needless to say, it also made regions
within a specific country (say, Algeria) distinct from one another in
antagonistic ways based on racial dynamics perceived by colonials. But
the divisions within a country and even within the entirety of the region
were internal, meaning populations were still connected to one another
according to racial rules of affinity and enmity (in relation to
Europeans, who became part of that human geography). A racial
grammar was then set in place in the region to order it, to comprehend
it, to give it meaning, and of course to control it and eventually govern
it.
These racial categories were not static, but rather highly dynamic.
This has changed over the course of colonial modernity and its chains
of reason. In the context of our region, the questions changed at each
stage of colonial modernity. First, they were simple: What do they look
like? What do they speak? Where do they live? And “they” were, of
course, always the “others” that colonial modernity defined first bio-
logically – that is, in terms of skin color and phenotypes, a definition
that also entails intellectual and moral characteristics. It also defined
them linguistically, in terms of a language constructed by colonials
themselves out of a variety of ways of speaking, that translate the
cognitive universe of the population, their so-called mentality. And
last, the others were defined in terms of cultural specificities – that is,
culturally, in their relation to the environment, and politically, in their
relation to a central power, be it that of a sultan or a chief. Needless to
say, the resulting definitions were meant to figure “them” out, to
control them, to fix them, and to exert colonial power over them in
their linguistic, cultural, and political aspects. This is to say that the
“native” was caught in colonial webs of power that left him most of the
time with a quasi-zero degree of power. He rebelled only when he
deemed it absolutely necessary, and his “revolts” were only demonstra-
tions of his minimal power since he was always crushed. Otherwise his
daily negotiations were transactions in which he always lost and paid
the full price from his own humanity. But the dynamics of racial
definitions also had effects beyond what was intended.
In our context, the Berber language was soon discovered to be part of
the Hamitic language family, an African family. Arabic, by contrast,
was considered, by and large, a Semitic language, originating not only
in the east, but imported to the region. In this conception, Arabic was
defined in relation to Berber, the same way racial Berbers were defined
in relation to racial Arabs, as exclusive, hostile, and adversary:
a dominant race and a subjugated race. However, the study of Berber
also allowed colonial researchers to rethink the “distribution” of the
population, and therefore discover that some “Arabs” spoke Berber,
and all Berbers spoke “Arabic.” These language dynamics defined the
region not only in relation to western and central Africa, where various
languages were considered, but even eastward, where Arabic reigned
supreme and was long defined in relation to its history by Orientalists.
Bilingual Arabic dictionaries were meant to not only create linguistic
competencies to free communication from the intermediary of the
interpreter but also to redefine Arabic in relation to French and subor-
dinate the first to the second.
From now on, the territory became part of the definition of popula-
tion, and ipso facto a different conception of race emerged. Race is then
two things intimately intertwined: on one hand, a population speaks
a specific language either because that population moved from
a specific place (Arabia) to another (the Maghreb region) – and thus
the presence of Arabic is associated with the mobility and the conquests
of Arabs. Or, a population speaks a specific language (Arabic) because
it was imported to it as a consequence of conquest. But, there are also
those who speak a specific language (Berber and/or Arabic) either
because of demographic pressure and population movement (over
borders between our region and west and central Africa), or because
this language has always been present, or at least efforts to trace its
origins have been inconclusive (Berber). Therefore, race in this new
conception was associated with language and with a territory. The
dichotomy of siba/makhzen that seems to be unique to Morocco was
Conclusion 169
only the result of the development of the concept of race at the turn of
the twentieth century.
But behind this dichotomy, there are Berbers (Berber speakers even if
some of them may be originally Arab), and then there are Arabs (Arabic
speakers, and the colonial discourse did not dare to conclude from here
that some Berbers may also be only Arabic speakers). However, the
essential in these nuances remains untouched and firm: there are Arabs
and Berbers in Africa whose relation is antagonistic and part of this
antagonism is precisely that some Berbers also speak Arabic and only
Arabic. Arabic is the language that is associated with a race (Arabs) and
may be adopted by others in a racial dynamic as part of the dominant/
subjected racial relations so inherent in colonial ideologies. This lin-
guistic (racial) relation was complicated (and for colonial authors such
as Gautier) bettered (for the sake of the colonial enterprise) by the now
dominant presence of French. The dominance of French also changed
the linguistic map of the region and participated in defining it – then
and now.
4 Naming and Historical
Narratives
The distinctions I have made between forms of colonial knowledge such

as archaeology and cartography were made for analytical purposes only,
in order to see how each form was constituted and how it participated in
the making of perceptions and the shaping of colonial imaginaries that
allow representation to become naturalized. However, on a practical
level, these forms of knowledge not only coexisted and completed one
another but they also technically could not (and cannot) be separated.
Archaeology is impossible without an interpretation that takes the form
of a narrative of the past – that is, a historical narrative. Likewise, maps
cannot speak for themselves; they make sense only through an act of
interpretation – that is, again, through a historical narrative, without
which they are unintelligible.
Further, the division of intellectual labor so often seen in academic
and corporate spheres today was not common in colonial times. In the
early formation of this knowledge, it was mainly the military officer
who transformed himself into a researcher, often wearing different
hats – archaeologist, historian, ethnographer, geographer. Since know-
ledge was proven instrumental to conquest during the colonial enter-
prise, from the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, the military officer
became a researcher in his own right and a sort of bricoleur who
could map, excavate, observe, translate, interpret, and write – in
short, produce – knowledge for the institution that assured both the
duty of order (violence, i.e., pure use of force) and the duty of know-
ledge (in itself a form of violence, a symbolic one, that not only justifies
the first but also destroys preexisting historical and social realities that
it replaces with its own).
History in this particular context means something specific.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the historical sciences encom-
passed several disciplines called the military sciences (sciences mili-
taires) and, later, the sciences of man (sciences de l’homme). These
170
Naming and Historical Narratives 171
disciplines deal with not only the past but also the present and future. In
this chapter, I examine historical narratives, meaning narratives about
the past whose reference is not the trace or the map, but rather is
physically absent, its existence assumed to be in texts. These texts, as
I show in the first section, refer to names, they narrate names, or, to use
the expression of Michel de Certeau, they “turn space into a name.”1
History, in this context and in all others, also means the interpret-
ation of past events, or to be more precise, events that are themselves
narratives. As such, these narratives are conditioned by institutional
rules – that is, power. Since these narratives lend themselves to different
interpretations, the act of interpretation itself is diachronically poly-
semic and synchronically infinite because time is infinite. Therefore,
history, as a narration is multiple in its meanings and limitless in its
interpretations. Its focus is the past along the axis of time, its narration
is in the present, and it anticipates the future. Yet, despite its multipli-
city and infinitude, only a limited number of interpretations are
allowed it at a given moment, and only a certain range of topics is
deemed vital, or at least important, and thus worthy of real attention.
Therefore, as colonials were in the presence of a long and well-
documented precolonial history in the region, they made a choice
according to the rule of “relevance,” weighing the importance of
certain narratives to the colonial enterprise, whose political present
was the entirety of the period from 1830 to 1962. This is how two
episodes of history acquired an almost absolute importance for the
colonial enterprise: the phase called Roman/Byzantine (from the eighth
century bce to the seventh century ce), and the phase called Arab
(roughly from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries ce). These two
periods refer to each other: the Arab to the Roman and the Roman to
the Arab. An entire colonial narrative emerged that presumes that the
“Roman period” ended with Arab domination and the “Arab period”
ended with French occupation. The study – that is, the reinterpretation
and the reinvention – of these two periods gave the region a new
identity in the colonial era. And a new name, Maghreb, announced
this identity.2
1
Michel de Certeau, “Introduction,” in Jules Verne, Les grands navigateurs du
XVIIè siècle. Paris: Ramsay, 1977, p. IX.
2
Abdelmajid Hannoum, “De l’historiographie coloniale à l’historicisme national;
ou comment le Maghreb fut inventé,” Hespéris-Tamuda 2013 (XLVIII): 59–79.
172 Naming and Historical Narratives
My aim in this chapter is to examine how colonial historiography

participated in the creation of the Maghreb, both the name itself and
what it refers to – that is, the constellations of meaning that constituted,
in the minds of the French people of the colonial time, the idea of the
Maghreb. It is my contention that this invention happened early on and
progressively, first in the specific context of Algeria, and later, by the
logic of colonial historical interpretation, in the rest of the region. Thus,
if this chapter refers most often to colonial Algeria, it is because this
colony was the French laboratory for the region. It is indeed in Algeria
that the Maghreb was invented, and it was also in Algeria that the
architects of the colonization of Tunisia and Morocco acquired their
skills and their experiences.3 However, it is important to stress that
military officers, politicians, and agents and ideologues of colonization
were acutely aware of the fact that they operated in a space that –
despite its differences, borders, and even contrasts – was continuous.
Colonial governmentality was in itself the political evidence of this
unity.4 It provided us the expression of its imagining as a historical
totality.
Turning Space into a Name

A map cannot exist without a name. A map is the graphic representa-
tion of a name, its image, its visual idea – it is even the name it
represents. As a graphic representation, a map is not false or true. It
is a system of signs that constructs its own truth (say, this country, or
this city, or this road). It can be claimed false only in relation to another
map regulated by greater cartographic power (power of a scientific
community, power of a state institution, etc.). Therefore, it is the
cartographic construction of a name that a map targets.
I would like here to identify some patterns of naming that led to the
final adoption of the name of the Maghreb. This is not a genealogy of
a name as much as it is an exploration of the politics of naming. For
3
The most well known of them is undoubtedly Hurbert Lyautey, who served first
in Algeria and then in Morocco. For his work, see Daniel Rivet, Lyautey et
l’institution du Protectorat français au Maroc 1912–1925. Paris: L’Harmattan,
1988. Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social
Environment. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Burke, Ethnographic State.
4
For colonial governmentality in Algeria, see Abdelmajid Hannoum,
“Gouvernementalité coloniale et la naissance du Khaldunisme,” in Figures d’Ibn
Khaldûn, ed. Houari Touati. Algiers: Belles Impressions, 2010, pp. 151–160.
Turning Space into a Name 173
naming is not only part of a strategy of knowing but also, more

importantly, of appropriating, of transforming, and ultimately of
inventing. The mere fact of the need to name something implies an
interest in the thing.5 To name something is to take possession of it, and
this taking possession happens within larger dynamics of geopolitics
that, as we will see, define not only what is shared (among colonial
powers) but also what is not shared, what is individual and national,
and what is transnational. However, naming something is not only
taking possession of it but also transforming it, inventing it, by the very
act of possession. Maybe it is for this reason that “a name signifies
a certain kind of particularity . . . it is a semiotic cornerstone in the
foundational effects of the nation.”6 If this is so for the nation, it is also
so, and maybe to a greater extent, for the colony that turns the nation
into an empire. Maybe that is why the name of the region, despite
colonial ownership, often denoted foreignness. Yet, despite the foreign-
ness of the name, there is a set of names applied to locations in the
region that denote “European-ness” – that is, Rome and Greece as
constitutive of Europe, and more specifically France, as we have previ-
ously seen.
We also have seen how the name Barbary, also conspicuously foreign,
dominated maps from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth. This is
reflected in the copious travel literature of the period that named the region
Barbarie or Côtes de Barbarie.7 In the European imagination of the period,
the name Barbary, a derivative of Greek naming, referred to a region
equated with a lack of rights and hospitality and characterized by an
utter hostility especially toward the “Europeans” and the “Christians.”
The name itself negates the new values of the Enlightenment. To enlight-
ened Europe, the Mediterranean Sea separated the civilized from the
barbaric, or Europe from its others. It was in accordance with this geo-
graphical imagining that Immanuel Kant wrote about a “Barbary Coast”
whose inhabitants were inhospitable and acted against “natural laws.”8
Barbary is the land of hostile tribes and dangerous corsairs.
5
Farhang Zabeeh, What Is in a Name? The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968,
pp. 66–67.
6
Jacqueline Stevens, Reproducing the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1999, p. 150.
7
See Peyssonnel, Relation d’un voyage sur les cotes de Barbarie.
8
Immanuel Kant, Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997, p. 106.
The name continued to be used during the early years of the

conquest of Algiers. Then the name Barbary morphed into
a similar, yet different name: Berbérie.9 The name Barbary, signi-
fying barbarism, indicated the land of a race (and, notably, not of
a civilization).10 However, Barbary was a land imagined to be part
and parcel of Africa and thus opposed to Europe, as savagery is to
civilization. By contrast, Berbérie was constructed in colonial times
as the land of the Berbers, disconnected from Arabia (and by
extension the Levant) and even disconnected from Africa itself.
Yet, it is racially connected to Europe in terms of both its white-
ness and its religiosity. For early on in the 1840s and 1850s,
officers of the Arab Bureau constructed the Berber as white and
Christian with European origins that explain both the first and the
second.11 The constructions became authoritative as later ethnog-
raphers, impregnated with the racial ideas of the Arab Bureau,
imported the model to Morocco, first to the Rif region, and created
a racial understanding of that place similar to the one found in
Algeria.12 French authorities had interest in the Rif because it was
“always a region of the Kingdom of Fes,” in the words of Edouard
Michaux-Bellaire.13
Nonetheless, on a map, the region could be still seen comfortably
sitting within a continent by then commonly called Africa. Throughout
the 1600s, the name Afrique was already in widespread use and seemed
indeed to refer to the entire continent, and not just to the area com-
monly called by Arab geographers Ifriqiya, whose designation was
generally limited to what became known later as La Régence de
Tunis. From early on, and already with Thomas Shaw in 1738, the
9
The name did not entirely disappear, however. In 1926, it was still in use, but
more in publications designed for the grand public and that were part of the
Orientalist literature. See, for instance, E. Alexander Powell, In Barbary.
New York: Century, 1926.
10
See Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta, eds., Reading Kant’s Geography.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.
11
See Abdelmajid Hannoum on the construction of the Berbers as white,
“Colonialism and Knowledge in Algeria.”
12
On the Rif region, see Henri de La Martinière and Napoléon Lacroix, “Régions
limitrophes de la frontière algérienne. Le Rif. Les Djebala,” in Documents pour
servir à l’étude du Nord-Ouest africain. Algiers: Gouvernement général de
l’Algérie, 1894–1897.
13
See Anonymous, “Le Makhzen et le Rif,” Rensignements coloniaux 1925:
453–455. Cited in Anonymous, “Le Makhzen et le Rif,” p. 453.
names Africa and Barbary became interchangeable for a region neatly

defined:14
The country of the Algerines, commonly called the Kingdom of Algiers, has,
since it became subject to the Turks, been one of the most considerable
Districts of that Part of Africa, which the later Ages have known by the
name of Barbary. It is bounded to the West, with Twunt, and the Mountains
of Trara; to the South, with the Sahara, or Desert; to the East, with the River
Zaine, the ancient Tusca, and to the North, with the Mediterranean Sea.15
(italics in the text)
Europeans called the region Barbary despite the fact that they were
aware of the names of its specific parts taken from Greek and Latin
authors such as Ptolemy and from Muslim geographers such as Idrissi
and Aboulfeda (Abû al-Fidâ’). Thus, Shaw states from the outset the
topic of his book:
The Epitomizer of Edrisi, the Nubian Geographer as he is commonly called,
places both the Cities and Villages of this Part of Barbary, and those of the
more Western and Eastern Districts of it, in his Third Climate, without any
particular Division into either Kingdoms or Provinces. But Abulfeda, besides
given us in Ptolemy’s Method, the Longitudes and Latitudes of the most
considerable Cities, is more full and distinct in his general Division, and that
Part of this Country I am now treating of, will take in the whole of what he
calls al Maghreb al-Awsat [‫ ]ﺍﻟﻣﻐﺮﺏ ﺍﻷﻮﺴﻃ‬and a Portion likewise of both his al
Maghreb al-Acksa [‫ ]ﺍﻟﻣﻐﺮﺏ ﺍﻷﻗﺻﻰ‬and [‫ ]ﺍﻓﺮﯾﻗﯾﻪ‬Afrikeah.16 (Arabic in the text)
Seeing Shaw’s bibliography and his system of references, it is clear

that by the 1700s, Europeans already possessed an impressive geo-
graphic knowledge of the region. Yet, this knowledge was mostly
bookish and was mixed with Greek geographic knowledge of the
region. It reflected both an emerging identification with Greeks and
emerging tropes of exoticism.17 European naming in the two centuries
before the conquest of Algiers indicated imperial power capable of
defining and naming any region in the world. The plethora of names,
new and old, we find in maps and even in historical and travel literature
implies the expansion of the European geographical imagination. By
the conquest of Algiers, imperial interests had already become global.
As it did on paper with its maps, Europe was able to reach every corner
14
Shaw, Travels or Observations, p. 5. 15 Ibid., p. 3. 16 Ibid., p. 5.
17
On the topic of geography and exoticism, see Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism.
of the world through trade and commerce, conquest and invasion.18

With the conquest of Algiers, it was time to give the region a new name.
This naming reflects the reality of conquest and rule – that is, ultim-
ately, one of possession and ownership. Of the necessity of naming,
colonials were well aware; early on, in 1841, General Duvivier noted
that “people who discover or conquer a new country, always impose on
it a new name.”19
Thus Barbary had to be replaced by a name or names indicating
familiarity and even the presence, in the past as well as in the present, of
civilization. This was not difficult, as the age of imperialism itself
revived the memories of Rome and of Greece. A whole repertoire of
names was brought forth to harken back to the antiquity so important
to the European imagination of the age of imperialism. For instance,
both Shaw and Chénier use Roman names to identify not only the
entirety of the region called Mauritania but also specific cities, regions,
or countries inside it. In fact, at this time old Roman names were used
to locate and identify new names. Consider the naming of Louis de
Chénier:
In the first centuries Mauritania was a considerable part of Libya, but having
been divided later into Tingitaine & Cesarienne, Mauritania Tingitania
conserved, by usage, this name. The Malva, Mulluvia, or Mullucha river
that separates today the Kingdom of Algiers from the one of Morocco
separated also [then] the Tingitaine & Cesarienne from Mauritania
Tingitania. From a little distance of Mulluvia, there was, a long time ago,
a city by the name Molochat. Following the west coast there is Ryssadirium
of a long time ago which we supposed to be today in the location of Melilla.20
The old names not only enabled the modern traveler to identify the
old spaces familiar in the bookish culture of France (and, by extension,
of the rest of Europe) but also prepared him or her to create important
connections in the French historical narrative between the present and
the past, between the colonial and the ancient, between France and
Rome. This connection was of the utmost importance because it
18
For European adventures, see Marc Ferro, ed., Le livre noir du colonialism:
XVè–XXIè siècle: de l’exterimination à la repentence. Paris: Robert Laffont,
2003.
19
General Duvivier, Recherches et Notes sur la portion de l’Algérie au sud de
Guelma. Paris: Imprimerie de L. Vassal, 1841, p. 57.
20
Louis de Chénier, Recherches historiques sur les Maures et Histoire de l’Empire
de Maroc. Paris: Polytype, 1787, t. 1, p. 69.
facilitated the reconfiguration of the region in relation to the new

power dynamics of colonization that itself created a relation of owner-
ship and appropriation.
After the conquest of Algiers in 1830, the colonial enterprise
approached the region as an unexplored terrain in need of investiga-
tion. To this end, two modes of knowledge were harnessed: direct
observation and the creation of archives in an effort to build know-
ledge. The goal of this knowledge was to guide colonization. It is
important to stress the newness of this approach, which put knowledge
at the service of occupation. From the beginning, colonial conquest,
according to the views of military officers such as Thomas Bugeaud and
Christophe Lamorcière or colonial ideologues such as Alexis de
Tocqueville, was only a means for ideological conquest, making know-
ledge a sine qua non of the colonial enterprise.21 By 1839, an enterprise
for colonial knowledge was created on the model of the Expédition
d’Egypte.22 It also had a similar name: L’Exploration scientifique de
l’Algérie.23 Its members had as a mission to make an inventory of the
country: statistics of the populations, maps of regions, histories of the
tribes, etc. Early on, in the 1830s, Ernest Carette named the region
Afrique septentrionale, a name Louis-Adrien Berbrugger also used.
Both authors also use, almost accidently, the name Maghreb (spelled
Moreb by Carette and Magreb by Berbrugger).24 Carette is among the
early colonial authors to define the region, giving it several names that
included nord de l’Afrique.25 He writes, “we can say in truth the
Afrique septentrionale is a large island whose borders are clearly cir-
cumscribed by the Mediterranean, the desert, and the Ocean.”26
Émilien Jean Renou, also a member of the Commission Scientifique,
writes in the same volume as Carette, “the country whose description
we provided is inhabited by tribes that belong to two different popula-
tions: one is Berber which inhabited it alone originally; the other is
Arab that spread only after it had invaded all the Mor’reb.”27
21
22
See Said, Orientalism. 23 On this, see Lorcin, Imperial Identities.
24
Berbrugger, “Des frontièrs de l’Algérie,” p. 404.
25
Carette, Recherches sur les origines des migrations, p. 2.
26
Carette, Recherches sur la géographie et le commerce de l’Algérie méridionale,
pp. 39–40.
27
Émilien Jean Renou, Notice géographique sur une partie de l’Afrique
septentrionale. Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1844, p. 340.
After the official annexing of Algeria to France in 1839, this institu-

tion soon developed into another: les Bureaux Arabes, a military insti-
tution in charge of establishing order in and acquiring knowledge of the
region. The officers of the Arab Bureau made more systematic and
more comprehensive inventories and produced a body of ethnographic
knowledge based on the close participation of local populations. The
bureau was indeed constituted both as a governing body and as
a thinking machine. The colonial state of Algeria thus became an
ethnographic state.28
The ethnographic state, again in the view of anthropologist Nicholas
Dirks, is a state that relies essentially on an investigation of the field to
collect necessary information pertaining to the population it intends to
govern. The goal is to be constituted as a state mechanism that has as its
substance and its validation its own ethnographic knowledge.29 One
can certainly say that this modality is a necessity for all modern states,
and a fortiori colonial states, given the fact that knowledge in modern
states is a vital instrument of power.30 However, a state may favor an
ethnographic mode at one point or a historic mode at another, depend-
ing on strategic aspirations (though colonial states tend to be ethno-
graphic before converting to a historiographic mode).
In Algeria, in a relatively short time between 1841 and 1870, the
Arab Bureau was able to build impressive ethnographic archives upon
which the entire colonial knowledge of the region was built. Whereas
for early observers the population was diverse, as it was made of Arabs,
Berbers, Kabyles, Blacks, Turks, Israelites, and Koulouglis,31 this
diversity soon disappeared in the ethnographic work of the officers of
the Arab Bureau, to be replaced by an opposition between Arabs and
Berbers. However, at least until 1871, one could still hear heretical
views that critique this division and call for rethinking it. Different
interpretations too contested the very definitions of Arabs and Berbers.
But such views were marginalized and eclipsed by the dominant inter-
pretations of the officers of the Arab Bureau, who made the dichotomy
a focal point of their discourse.32 Indeed, by 1850 the common
28
29
30
See Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” Historical
Sociology 1988 (1)1: 58–89.
31
Tocqueville, Oeuvres, p. 191.
32
Hannoum, “Colonialism and Knowledge in Algeria.”
understanding was that the country now called Algeria was inhabited
by two antagonistic populations: Arabs and Berbers. They were con-
sidered races who had opposed each other historically. Their relations
to France also differed. The Berbers, because of their presumed light
skin and their supposed superficial attachment to Islam, were con-
sidered primitive Europeans. Their racial condition as well as their
cultural retardation called for European colonization. The Arabs, as
conquerors of a Berber land, were perceived as the same Muslims who
had historically opposed Christian Europe and put an end to Roman
rule in the region.
However, it is important to stress that in the discourse of the Arab
Bureau, how the Arab is constructed cannot be separated from the
Berber. To say this differently, and maybe more clearly, not only is
the Arab defined in relation to the Berber and vice versa, but the very
category of Arab nests within the category of Berber, as does White
into Black, even as the category of Berber is inhabited by the category
of Arab. Therefore, the Arab of the Maghreb from early on emerged
as different from the Arab of the Levant, especially Egypt. In the
Description de l’Egypte are different types of Arabs, who seem to be
defined first by the environment, “Sur les tribus Arabes des desérts de
l’Egypte”33 and “Sur les Arabes de l’Egypte moyenne,”34 and then
by their economic activities, as we find in the studies of M. Du Bois-
Aymé and Jomard. The approach is a Saint Simonian, materialist
approach that stresses the economy and takes it as conditioning the
superstructure (i.e., modes of life). For instance, for the “Arabs of
Middle Egypt,” Jomard is nuanced, and in addition to the fact that
he takes the tribe as a unit of analysis, he warns that his description
applies only to these specific tribes. Based not on a preexisting litera-
ture, but on his direct contact with the tribes, “accompanied by
horsemen from these tribes” or even “camping among them,”
Jomard conducts a sort of ethnographic fieldwork avant la lettre,
and provides a context supported by vignettes. He describes “char-
acters and customs” as well as the political structure of the tribes,
their social organization, and their ways of life as conducted in war
and in peace. Bois-Aymé approaches “the Arabs of the desert” in the
33
Aimé Du Bois-Aymé, “Mémoire sur les tribus arabes des déserts de l’Egypte,” in
Description de l’Egypte: État moderne, tome premier. Paris: Imprimerie Royale,
1809, pp. 570–606.
34
Jomard, “Sur les Arabes de l’Egypte moyenne.”
same manner.35 In his description, the Arabs of the desert have a life
determined by the ungenerosity of the land. Hence their mode of life
as “Arabes errants” (nomads) is interpreted far differently than by
Gautier. They are not “les grands tribus chameliers” who wage war
against urban life and indulge in unnecessary destruction; on the
contrary, they are sedentary tribes who were chased from their
lands and resorted to the harsh life of the desert. Here and there,
Bois-Aymé, like Jomard, cites an incident of war, or aggression, or
theft, but also of generosity toward others, including the French.
These events, as both authors describe them, seem to be context
specific; each reveals a side of the tribe or even of a faction of the
tribe, but is not taken as general or timeless. In other words, war and
generosity are triggered by material causes. They are not set by
cultural norms. We are far from the highly negative and essentialist
descriptions found in literary Orientalism, especially in the work of
creative writers such as Edward Lane, Gustave Flaubert, François-
René Chateaubriand, and the like.36
That said, by the end of the nineteenth century, a different depiction
of the Arab emerges, especially in the arts and fiction, as Europe’s
exterior other. This fictional Arab’s opposite is typically the
(Christian) European. But in the region under examination, the oppos-
ition is mediated via a third party, the Berber, even when the themes
and tropes of these representations are Orientalist and not based on
direct contact but on old bits of hearsay found in the Christian archives.
Since the Berber is a primitive European, in the colonial discourse, he
opposes his conqueror not only politically, because of an old conquest,
but also racially, which is the reason for this conquest. The European
(also Christian) is undoubtedly part of this racial dichotomy.37 The
reasons for these differences in representation between the Maghreb
and Egypt have to do not only with differences in the colonial rule that
the region and Egypt experienced, but also with the cognitive experi-
ences these differences engendered. In the region, colonial rule was
longer, more direct than in Egypt and the ambition itself was more
grandiose – to make the region part of France, as it used to be in Roman
times. In Egypt, the indirect rule and the presence of a native
35
Du Bois-Aymé, “Mémoire sur les tribus arabes des déserts de l’Egypte.”
36
Said, Orientalism. Timothy Mitchel, Colonizing Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge
37
See Hannoum, “Faut-il Brûler l’Orientalisme?”
Westernized elite, convinced by the ideals of Arab nationalism and

Islam, created a resistance to colonial representation.
One of the main responsibilities of the officers of the Arab Bureau
was the writing of an annual report about the region under their
administration. Thus their writings focus not on the entirety of
a country, and less so on the region as a whole, but only on a specific
area under the command of a high officer: Grande Kabylie, Petite
Kabylie, Djardjoura, Aurès, Chaouia, Sahara, and so forth. In other
words, in this process of ethnographic investigation, the parts were
named one by one, and defined as colonization advanced. And as
colonization advanced, even smaller parts had to be named.38
However, the ensemble of these parts remained to be defined. The
gaze of the officers was not panoramic and of course, was not histor-
ical. This is a characteristic of the ethnographic narrative: it relies on
the particular, the part, and the now, and is often little concerned with
larger narratives of the whole. The officers of the Arab Bureau could
only see Algeria as an administrative unit, and beyond Algeria, they
could only sense the vastness communicated to them by historical
narratives in the work of Ernest Carette and later of William De
Slane on the history of the Berbers.
In 1899, Alfred Le Chatelier uses the name Maghreb; he also uses the
name North Africa interchangeably. To distinguish the Maghreb from
Egypt, he says, “after having been formed, for a time, as an annex of
Egypt, the Maghreb was constituted first as a distinct government. It
was soon divided into several independent states, the most important of
which were the Aghlabids of Kairouan and the Idrissites of Fes, repre-
senting the supremacy of the Arab race to which their dynasties
belonged.”39
These names mainly result from the translation of Arabic historiog-
raphy, but, as we have seen, other strategies of naming relied on Greek
and Roman sources. Thus the first name used by military officers, by
archaeologists, and by politicians to designate the entire area that was
perceived as a single unit despite being made up of several parts was
Africa. This is by no means surprising, for this name is found in Greek
and Roman sources with which the officers and archaeologists were
38
Hannoum, “Historiographic State.”
39
Alfred Le Chatelier, L’Islam dans l’Afrique occidentale. Paris: Steinhell, 1899,
pp. 40–41.
familiar. In fact, as we have seen, the early colonial maps were modeled
on Ptolemy, who also refers to the region as Africa. Gsell suggests the
name is derivative from the name Afer about which different hypoth-
eses exist, putting into question whether it is originally Latin or Semitic.
He prudently concludes that “it is better to admit our ignorance of the
origin of this name [Afer] and consequently of Africa.”40 Yet he argues
that the name Africa, whose origins are unknown, was used by the
“indigenous” people and by the people of Carthage or by both.41 Gsell
also affirms that the official name Africa is an abbreviation of provin-
cial Africa in 46 bce to designate the area created by Caesar. When
Caesar annexed the kingdom of Juba I, it was called Africa nova.42
Gsell concludes:
Administratively, Africa had a limit, in the West, the lower course of
Ampsaga (Oued el Kebir) that flows into the Mediterranean near Cap
Bougaroun, the Metagonium of the ancients. At the Southeast, the limits of
Africa were fixed by the Autels of Philenes, at the bottom of the grand Syrte.
Afri was the name given by the residents to the province of Africa, the one of
146 bc and then, the one more vast, of the Empire.43
Gsell also maintains that “besides this administrative use of the term
Africa applied to the ensemble of Afrique septentrionale, in the land of
Whites by opposition to Aethiopia, the land of Blacks, this usage is very
rare.”44 However, Gsell also notes that the name Africa, with the
Greeks, was “commonly” used to designate the entire continent,
“Blacks as well as Whites.”45 Was the name Africa borrowed from
the name of the north and applied to the entire continent? Or was it
rather borrowed from the continent and applied to the Roman prov-
inces north of the continent? Gsell argues it is rather the latter. But
where does Africa end? Greeks and Roman differ on the eastern limit of
Africa. For some authors, it is the Nile, for others it is at “the isthmus
between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.” For others, “Africa ends
at the frontiers of western Egypt.”46
In the work of Charles Tissot too names were used strategically to
define and separate. Thus, following an established tradition of nam-
ing, Tissot uses Greek and Roman names to identify parts of the region
that colonialism saw as a single unit: Mauretanie Tangitaine (Ptolemy),
Numedie, and Proconcul. Tissot also provides Roman names and their
40
Gsell, Histoire ancienne de l’Afrique du Nord, vol. 7, p. 4. 41 Ibid., p. 4.
42
Ibid., p. 5. 43 Ibid., pp. 5–6. 44 Ibid., p. 6. 45 Ibid., p. 7. 46 Ibid.
Ibn Khaldûn, a Colonial Author 183
local equivalents. He writes, “The central Maghreb is the equivalent of

Mauretania Caesariensis, of the Maghreb el-Aksa which represents
Tingitaine.”47 Tissot concludes, “we see there is an uninterrupted
tradition, a limit indicated by the force of things. This limit has not
varied in antiquity, neither in the Arab or Berber Middle Ages [sic]), nor
in the modern epoch.”48 Tissot not only uses the old to invent the new
but also attempts to convince his readers that the new is the old. The
continuity he attempts to create between the region in its older epochs
and in its modern times is reflective of the ideological continuity colo-
nialism had established between antiquity and modernity, between
Rome and France.
Gsell wrote at a time when the region was being reconfigured and
when a plethora of names were used to designate it. But in his publica-
tions, he clearly favors the name Afrique antique which, ipso facto,
evokes Rome, itself evoking France, its supposed heir. However,
because of the intense power of the ideology of Romanization, ubiqui-
tous in state institutions, it was most common to use the name Afrique
to designate the entire region. Early on, colonial authors and adminis-
trators used specifics to describe the region, even as colonial powers
disputed parts of this new continent. Thus, the name Afrique septetrio-
nale was common, as differentiated from Afrique de l’Ouest, used to
refer to the population living west of the continent in an area also under
French colonial rule. We will see how these geographical categories,
used to divide space, were gradually replaced by other, racial categories
that imposed color as a major criterion to distinguish parts of the
continent and, ultimately, divisions imposed by geopolitics. But first
let us see how historical narratives not only used these names but also,
because they were narratives, entrenched them in colonial imaginaries.
Ibn Khaldûn, a Colonial Author

Arabic sources as local knowledge in the form of chronicles, geograph-
ies, legal treaties, Quranic studies, and historiography were of vital
interest to the colonial enterprise by the time of the conquest.
Immediately after the conquest, William de Slane, an Irish student of
47
Tissot, “Recherches sur la géographie comparée de la Mauretanie Tingitane,”
p. 144.
48
Ibid., p. 144.
Isaac de Sacy, was dispatched to inquire into the state of Arabic

manuscripts in the new colony.49 De Slane enumerates the number of
manuscripts in the bibliothèque d’Alger, estimating them to be 107. De
Slane stresses the importance of these manuscripts pertaining to “treat-
ies on religion and Muslim jurisprudence.”50 However, he notices that
“works of history, and scientific and literary works, are rare.” De Slane
gives in fine detail an annotated bibliography of the library of Algiers
and another library he visited in Constantine. What is most surprising
in this list is that the work that became foundational for French histor-
ical knowledge of the region is not there. Ibn Khaldûn’s three volumes
on the history of the Arabs and the Berbers does not seem to be among
the books De Slane catalogued in colonial Algeria.
However, it is this work of history, I argue, that greatly contributed
to reconfiguring the region – but in translation, direct and indirect.
While Ernest Carette used Ibn Khaldûn extensively in his history of
tribes in Algeria, De Slane’s translation of the three-volume history,
under the title of L’Histoire des Berbères, became the source of colonial
knowledge on the area.
Ibn Khaldûn, as translated by De Slane, is undoubtedly a colonial
author whose importance for colonial (and even later national) know-
ledge of the region is instrumental. By the word author, I mean the
“author function,” as Foucault calls it, meaning he authored not only
his own work but also “the possibility of other texts”51 – and one of
these possibilities is precisely L’Histoire des Berbères. Ibn Khaldûn, as
a colonial author, is undoubtedly a major one whose discourse (of
course French) generated a plethora of narratives, images, and categor-
ies whose history, despite the old and acute interest in Ibn Khaldûn, has
not yet been written. Here, it will suffice for me to explain how Ibn
Khaldûn’s discourse generated racial categories (i.e., of Arabs versus
Berbers) and a narrative of a quest that, according to this colonial
Khaldûnian discourse, governed the history of the region.
49
William de Slane, Rapport addressé à Monsieur le Ministre de l’instruction
publique par Monsieur le Baron de Salne chargé d’une mission scientifique en
Algérie suivi du catalogue des manuscrits arabes les plus importants de la
bibliothèque d’Alger et de la bibliothèque de Cid-Hammouda â Constantine.
1846.
50
Ibid.
51
Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” Bulletin de la Philosophie
Française de la Philosophie 1969 64: 73–104.
Ibn Khaldûn, a Colonial Author 185
To give an example, when Ibn Khaldûn speaks of jîl al-barbar, De

Slane translates the concept as “the Berber race.” However, Ibn
Khaldûn is specific and nuanced in his use of the concept of jîl; he refers
to a group as the al-jîl al-awwal (first jîl), al-jîl al-th-thânni (second jîl),
and so forth. Ibn Khaldûn also uses the same concept when speaking of
Arabs. The concept of jîl that we can translate as “generation” does not
just mean “the entire body of individuals born and living at about the
same time,” but it also means a distinct group – distinguished by nasab,
by sima, by shaʿâ’ir, etc.52 Jîl is a concept that pertains to time; it thus
conveys the important social change that time brings. A specific gener-
ation (i.e., the first jîl of Berbers or the second jîl of Arabs) is different
from the one it precedes as it is also different from the one that succeeds
it. It is within a generation that a tribe goes from a bedouin stage
(badâwa) to an urban stage of culture (ʿumrân); it is also after one
generation that a tribe can go from a dynastical power to a defeated
tribe. Besides these extremes, it is from a generation to a generation that
a tribe can gain solidarity, and it is also from a generation to
a generation that a dynasty loses a bit of its might (shawka) as it
moves away from the stage of savagery (wahshiya). These important
˙
Arabic categorizations that introduce great sociological nuances dis-
appear in the translation, to be replaced by categories specific to
nineteenth-century France, such as race and nation.53
In the Arabic text of Ibn Khaldûn, there are only tribes because
tribalism was the dominant polity in his time. One either belongs to
a Berber tribe X or to an Arab tribe Y, but tribe X and tribe Y are not
necessarily opposed, and oppositions (i.e., war and conflict) may be
noticed between Berber tribe X and Berber tribe S, for economic
reasons that can be symbolic and material, or both. Opposition is
also to be found within tribes that are Arabs. Tribal affiliation was
a sine qua none for political and social existence. Foreigners and slaves
were also affiliated with tribes. In other words, politically, the individ-
ual does not exist in the tribal world of Ibn Khaldûn and in his time.
Tribalism was the most common form of belonging, even stronger than
religious affiliation.54 Tribes themselves were not homogenous, neither
52
Random House Dictionary of the English Language. Second edition,
unabridged. New York: Random House.
53
For more details, see Hannoum, “Translation and the Colonial Imaginary.”
54
Thus in the work of Ibn Khaldûn itself, ʿasabiya is a tribal solidarity; the base,
and the origin is tribal; religion only cemented the tribe with other tribes. But
were they harmonious. Intertribal relations were fraught with conflict

that, according to Ibn Khaldûn, create the ghâlib and the maghlûb,
a relation of domination that is first and foremost tribal. Hence, there is
also the absence of “minority identities” in his text. For the hegemonic
tribal order, not only do individuals not exist, but entire groups fuse in
this or that tribe usually as a consequence of a stronger ʿasabiya (tribal
solidarity).
Also, it is important to stress that De Slane’s translation not only
strengthened and even naturalized the racial opposition of Arab versus
Berber but also introduced the concept of domination to the narrative.
Ibn Khaldûn speaks of fath, a Muslim concept common in Arab his-
toriography of early Islam, but De Slane renders it as Arab “domin-
ation.” Yet in Khaldûn’s reflection on his historical narrative – an
introduction called the Muqaddima – domination clearly is an explana-
tory key concept. It is ghalaba, itself the result not of a racial conflict,
but of tribal antagonism that the concept of ʿasabiya further explains.
In the region, as Ibn Khaldûn witnesses and ponders, tribal polities
dominated even with the existence of states because states were first
and foremost political tribal formations. A state is a tribe in power. The
ʿasabiya allows a tribe to become more powerful and thus more expan-
sionist not only as far as territory is concerned but especially, in this
tribal world, as far as a tribe is concerned. The ʿasabiya allows a specific
tribe to multiply, to create a system of subordinate tribes that are not
cognizant that they are subordinated because what they obey is not the
dominant tribe, but rather what it represents – religion. Ibn Khaldûn
also noted this process of the transformation of the tribe into a state in
the early development of Islam. He notices too another political pro-
cess, a second one, that brings the state to its political demise, always
inevitable. Therefore, it is a specific tribe, whether Arab or Berber, that
subdues another one in the name of religion and makes it a support of
its conquest of power and an ally in dynastical power. Those important
nuances in the political theory of Ibn Khaldûn were not lost in transla-
tion, but were never part of the text that informs the history of the
region.
In metamorphosis, Ibn Khaldûn camps at the threshold of colonial
times. L’Histoire des Berbères by itself constituted a discursive
even in the case of the nation of the dawla (state), the tribe reigns. Hence my
interpretation that in the view of Ibn Khaldûn, the state is a tribe in power.
The Narrative of the Race Struggle 187
formation, for it had the impressive characteristics of generating count-

less narratives, in Arabic as well as in French, amongst colonial authors
as well as among Arab ones, in the colonial period as well as in the
postcolonial era. No other Arabic or French text on the region has the
power that the text of Ibn Khaldûn/De Slane has. By this, I specifically
mean the possibility of racial texts at the heart of which colonial
categories of race, of Arabs and Berbers, of Arab domination, and
even of ʿasabiya constituted the episteme of a new historiography.
Hence, the colonial discourse constructed the Berbers not only as
a white race, but also as a race in an antagonistic relation with Arabs,
a relation regulated by the idea of domination. Thus the term Arab in
the context of the region became fundamentally different from the
concept of the Arab, say, in Egypt or in Syria. In the region at hand,
the term Arab is defined by the term Berber, and vice versa. And this
definition is colonially historical and racially political. But its racial
dichotomy is neat and clear-cut only because other possibilities were
silenced or, rather, eliminated, to make it so. These possibilities include
the other categories we find in the early phases of colonial historio-
graphic construction, other racial groups: Blacks, Haratin, Moors,
Turks, Kouloughlis, and Jews. These groups are the collateral damage
of the violence of the colonial discourse, and their erasure from the
demographic colonial landscape outlasted colonialism.
The Narrative of the Race Struggle

Epistemic disturbance is often caused by events that resist being com-
prehended by old categories or old frames of reference. Epistemic
disturbance is not an epistemic murk, but rather the result of
a disconnection between discourse and perception – when perception
prevails and makes the discourse obsolete, or at least inadequate.55 The
catalyst of this disconnect may be a cognitive event, in the sense that an
accumulation of knowledge may have created the conditions for other
possibilities of knowing. It may also be an occurrence that disturbs the
discourse and its chains of reason.56 Or, it may be an unsustainable
contradiction between the discourse and the reality that begs to be
55
Michael Taussig, “Culture of Terror, Space of Death,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 1983 (26)3: 467–497.
56
See, on the concept of event as occurrence, Paul Ricoeur, “Evénement et sens,”
in L’événement en perspective, ed. Jean-Luc Petit. Paris: EHESS, 1991.
resolved. This was the case for colonial knowledge at this juncture of its
construction.
The discourse of the Arab Bureau describing the Berbers as originally
a white race closer to the European by culture and even by religion was
contradicted with the emergence of the Kabyles in 1870 as a fierce
enemy of French occupation. Called the Kabyle Revolt in colonial
language, the event demonstrated to the French that the Kabyle is no
different from the Arab: he opposes the French, he resorts to violence,
and he calls for jihad.57 After the brutal repression of the uprising, the
fall of the empire, and the rise of a civilian regime to replace military
rule, an entire civilian discourse started to form about the colony and its
larger geographical surroundings. This discourse built ideas, main-
tained new ones, and also “corrected” old ideas not congruent with
the civilians’ ideology and their agenda of appropriating the land.
Among other concepts, they retained, from the body of knowledge of
the Arab Bureau, the dichotomy of Arab versus Berber, with all the
racial prejudice this dichotomy entailed, and stressed the idea of the
invading Arab who occupied the best land as a prelude to expulsing him
from it.
Oftentimes, when speaking of the Arab Bureau, historians describe
its officers as having a pro-Arab policy.58 This description was origin-
ally an accusation leveled against them by settlers who ferociously
opposed the practices of the officers who, to them, seemed unwilling
to pay attention to the implications of their ethnographic discourse and
act accordingly. If the Arab is presented as a dominant conqueror,
foreign and opposed to the Berber, why not eliminate him, right the
wrong, end his political and economic domination, and free his land to
colonization? Napoleon’s policy was opposed to such practice and
aimed to make the country a new America. The war against Prussia
soon halted this ambitious project, and its disastrous outcome brought
the settlers to power, constituting what became known as the civilian
regime (as opposed to the military regime, or the “sword regime” as the
settlers disparagingly called it). From this time onward, not only did the
political regime drastically change but so did the very mode of colonial
knowledge in Algeria. An ethnographic state upheld by military officers
57
See on this, Hannoum, “Colonial Violence and Its Narratives.”
58
See, as an example, Lorcin, Imperial Identities, who also repeats it uncritically in
a book supposed to be critical of colonial categories. See a discussion of this
book in my review essay “Writing Algeria.”
The Narrative of the Race Struggle 189
was now officially replaced by what I call a historiographic state.

A historiographic state relies on the past to legitimize its presence, to
validate itself, and to provide itself with a political existence.59 Hence
the crucial importance of L’Histoire des Berbères as a text that, by
itself, created a discursive formation from which the Maghreb emerges
as a cultural and historical unit. However, by the time of the emergence
of the post-military civilian regime, the text needed restructuring to
respond to new needs. By this time, and with the settlers in power, new
and bigger colonial ambitions emerged as well.
The coming of the settlers to power coincided also with the emer-
gence of a historical narrative not only about the country that became
Algeria but also about the entirety of the region. Ernest Mercier,
a settler who became the mayor of Constantine, the second largest
city in Algeria, authored the first civilian narrative about the region,
a profoundly racial narrative at the heart of which one finds the
opposition of Arab versus Berber.
The book’s title announces a new name and a new agenda: Histoire
de l’établissement des Arabes en Afrique septentrionale.60 In and of
itself, this name indicates already the colonial ambition to expand
beyond Algeria. If the author, Mercier, speaks of the region as
a whole, Algeria is only a part of it. The ambition of his historiograph-
ical enterprise is in its title, and from the outset, he makes his goal clear
and claims to show:
The transformation of North Africa from a Berber land into an Arab land. To
this end, one has to specify the period or the periods when the Arab entered
the country, follow the trajectory of the invaders, indicate the resistance they
faced from the indigenous population, and finally recognize particularly how
they have been grouped, and how they compare in proportion with the
indigenous population, and what places they occupy.61
Mercier provides a new colonial name for the entirety of the region
that extends west from the Atlantic to the east at the “region of Barca”
(pays de Barka), at the border of Egypt not shown in the map. He then
redefines its characteristics, especially against the definitions of the
59
See Hannoum, “Historiographic State.”
60
Ernest Mercier, Histoire de l’établissement des Arabes en Afrique septentrionale
selons les documents fournis par les auteurs arabes . . . Constantine. L. Marle,
1875.
61
Ibid.
military officers of the Arab Bureau. His new definitions served to support
the new colonial policy championed by the settlers for whom Mercier was
a spokesman and now, with his three-volume work on the region,
a historian. Afrique septentrionale, as he calls it, offers a continuity in
space and in time. In space, it extends to all the regions that include
neighboring countries. In time, the continuity is even more significant
since the present of the region, now French, takes us to a historical time
that was Roman. This is despite the fact that in Mercier’s narrative,
because of its historic chronology, it is the Roman past that takes us to
the present. The narrative unifies the region across both space and time:
North Africa was an extension of Rome, and the French present is an
extension of the Roman past. Its demographics are characterized by two
populations in total opposition to each other, first and foremost at the
racial level: Arabs, invaders from the East, and Berbers, an early European
population under Arab domination. Indeed, Mercier unresistingly claims
a European ancestry to what he calls “the indigenous populations.”
Berbers are originally blondes from the north, he asserts.62
Mercier’s historical narrative is based almost exclusively on De
Slane’s L’Histoire des Berbères, but with an important update to its
form. In De Slane’s racial narrative, Ibn Khaldûn’s expert accounts
remain organized according to a medieval structure that for the modern
reader appears disorderly.63 In other words, its narrative sequence
remains intact in the translation. Mercier’s merit was to introduce
a modern narrative arc to the accounts of Ibn Khaldûn while highlight-
ing their racial basis, and therefore his narrative is essentially
a restructuring of De Slane’s translation.64 Therefore, despite the fact
that it provides the settlers with a narrative that justifies their racial
vision of colonial land policy, it still has “holes.” One that is not
immediately obvious is the fact that Mercier relies on an Arab author-
ity. This is especially problematic in light of the settlers’ critique of the
Arab Bureau and its supposed dependency on “les indigènes” to build
colonial knowledge. The second one is more serious, especially at the
62
Ernest Mercier, “Ethnographie de l’Afrique septentrionale. Note sur l’origine
du people berbère,” Revue Africaine 1871 (25): 420–433. Also, by the same
author, see “La race berbère. Véritable population de l’Afrique septentrionale,”
Société Archéologique de Constantine 1905 (39): 23–59.
63
Abdelmajid Hannoum, “The Muqaddima of Ibn Khaldûn” in Classical Texts in
Context. Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method, ed. Stefan Berger. London:
Bloomsbury Press, in press.
64
See Hannoum, “Translation and the Colonial Imaginary.”
The Nation and Its Opposites 191
moment of the annexation of Morocco. This pertains to the fact that

the concept of race, still important, became less operational in the
historiographic discourse of the metropole. If by 1875, racial theories,
especially those of Ernest Renan, to whom Mercier dedicated a copy of
the book, were still in fashion, soon another category emerged and
became instrumental in political thinking.65 This was the concept of the
nation that Renan first and forcefully theorized. By 1928, race was
increasingly being substituted by the concept of the nation. Yet
Mercier’s narrative reshaped colonial imagination in creating Algeria
as a part of a whole that it should not be separated from: northern
Africa.
The Nation and Its Opposites

By 1912, after the Treaty of Fes and the establishment of the first
colonial administration under Herbert Lyautey, the region as a whole
was completed and referred to systematically as L’Afrique du Nord in
the diplomatic language of the day; only Libya seems to have been
excluded from this domination since the name in use was l’Afrique du
Nord et la Lybie.66 The separation of Libya from the rest of North
Africa was undoubtedly a result of colonial geopolitics since North
Africa (i.e., the Maghreb) was under French rule and Libya was under
Italian rule. The name North Africa itself excludes Egypt, and this
exclusion, itself a product of geopolitics, was now taken for granted.
These exclusions, to appear legitimate and natural, needed to be based
on geographical and cultural reasons. Similarly, and equally impera-
tively, an intellectual effort had to be deployed to contrast this same
bloc, North Africa, with West Africa and therefore with the rest of
Africa. Creating smaller blocs, separating them, contrasting them, and
opposing them was also a way to create geographical and cultural
devices to manage and govern the colonies more effectively and less
onerously, the same way districts were managed and governed in
France itself, or in any center of imperial power, be it Great Britain,
Italy, or the Netherlands.
65
Fund Ernest Renan, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
66
La conférence africaine française de Brazzaville, rapport de M. Vallat, Rabat,
February 23, 1944. 2MA/1 Maroc SGP 326, Ministeres des Affaires Etrangeres,
Archives Diplomatiques, Centre de Nantes.
Therefore, for the case of Africa, a distinction had to be made

between Islam and naturism67 on one hand, the first Arab, the second
African, and between “Arab Islam” and “Black Islam,”68 the same way
it had already been made between “Arab Islam,” characterized by
fanaticism, and “Berber Islam,” lacking the “tide” of fervor and indif-
ferent to the scriptures of the Quran. This opposition at times took
complex forms, as is the case with Captain P. J. André, who sought to
know the locations of Islam noir in countries of West Africa, one by
one, providing statistics, and evaluating the degree of Islam of this or
that population, and their relation to other non-Muslim groups, espe-
cially animists.69 “French Sudan is at the moment the battlefield of
Islam against Animism,”70 he wrote. But all signs, according to him,
indicate Islam is losing the battle. Among all the Muslims of the French
Sudan, 9,300 were “Islamized” within a population of 2,475,000. But
of the “Islamized” (and these are, of course, distinct from Muslims), he
finds an “Islam façade.”71 Of all the countries in West Africa, he
designates only Mauritania as entirely Muslim. In all the others, either
their Islam is less “Islamic” or it is retreating with the advance of
animism.72 But then, Mauritania was part of Senegal.73
These views constitute what Alain Quellien in 1910 called
“Islamophobia,”74 that is, “a bias against Islam common among the
people of Western and Christian civilization.”75 Quellien, who wrote
earlier than Frédéric de La Chapelle and André, had a different view of
Islam in West Africa. He expresses views similar to those of Ismael
Urbain, who wrote in the context of the early colonization of Algeria in
the 1850s. For him, Islam is a factor of progress for the Black popula-
tion; it spread peacefully and with success.
These successes are due to numerous and different causes. They pertain as
much to the essence of the Muslim religion as to the affinities between blacks
67
Jules Brevie, Islamisme contre “Naturisme”: Essai de psychologie politique
colonial. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1923.
68
Paul Marty, Etude sur l’Islam au Sénégal. Paris: Le Roux, 1917.
69
Capitaine A. J. André, L’Islam noir. Paris: Geuthner, 1924. 70 Ibid., p. 17.
71
Ibid., p. 18. 72 Ibid.
73
Frédéric de La Chapelle, “Esquisse d’une histoire du Sahara Occidental,”
Hespéris 1930 (11): 35–95.
74
Alain Quellien, La politique musulmane dans l’Afrique Occidentale Francaise.
Paris: Emile Larose, 1910, p. 133.
75
Ibid.
and Muslims (mahométans) and to the easiness by which Islam can adapt to
the political, economic, and social Negro populations.76
However, despite its “successes,” Islam was unable to entirely eradi-

cate the “primitive practices” of some populations, Quenelle argues.77
He makes the suggestion, then, that Islam in West Africa could be
“nuanced.” Yet, a distinction remains between Islam in West Africa
and Islam in Algeria, not only in terms of influences and practices but
also in terms of the threat and danger to “our civilization,” and “our
domination,” he warns. Black Muslims do not constitute a danger or
a threat, he says; one may wonder why. Because their Islam, according
to Quenelle, is different from the one in North Africa, which is more
institutional, more organized, and more supported by a clergy than the
Islam of West Africa, which is not fanatical or zealous and remains
indifferent to calls for reconstituting the Caliphate.78 One can see that
Quenelle denounces Islamophobia in West Africa even as he promotes
it in North Africa. The Islam of the first is a threat to French presence;
the Islam of the second is not. What makes Quenelle fall into this
seeming contradiction is precisely the idea, espoused by his contempor-
aries, that Arab Islam is fundamentally different from Black Islam: the
first is fanatical, but the second is only a shadow of the first and is thus
without its power to threaten and harm.
In any case, regardless of nuances, these distinctions between Islam
noir and Arab Islam or, which amounts to the same thing, Islam of
“White North Africa,” are crucial in the distinction between the region
of northern Africa and western Africa in the colonial discourse.79 They
also take on an important dimension later, in the work of George
Hardy80and Vincent Monteil for Black Islam,81 and were even
espoused by pan-African authors to highlight the distinctiveness of
Africa in relation to the Middle East that starts for them in North
Africa, and not only in Egypt. Yet, it is in Egypt that these authors
find the civilizational argument against hegemonic racial Europe.
I return later to Egypt in the discourse of pan-Africanism.
76
Ibid., p. II. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., p. VI.
79
Vincent Monteil, Islam noir. Paris: Seuil, 1964, p. 125.
80
George Hardy, Le problème religieux dans l’empire français. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1940.
81
Monteil, Islam noir.
Associating Black Africa with naturism and thus separating it from

Islam was an important element in the construction of both Africa and
the Maghreb. Islam, for an author such as Maurice Delafosse, “has not
penetrated in any profound or effective fashion [Black Africa] except
among the Negro and Negroid populations who live on the border of
the Sahara.”82 Furthermore, for Delafosse, even African Islam and
African Christianity are of different types, specific to Africa. “All the
rest, that is to say, the immense majority of the Negro population of
Africa, is pagan.”83 He adds, “on the whole, the Muslim Negroes and
the Christian Negroes remain faithful to their ancestral beliefs and
many rites of their ancient paganism.”84 Blackness and paganism are
then the hallmark of Africa. For Delafosse, one can see that the first is
more constant, for one can change religion, but one cannot change
race. This is what might have made Delafosse argue that “it is likely
that North Africa was different from the rest of the continent and was
closer to Mediterranean Europe than to central or meridional Africa
which was inhabited by another race of men.”85
Race and systems of belief create further distinction and separation
between Africa and its north. Colonial administrations bet on these
oppositions of race and religion to separate, to isolate, to oppose, and
to rule parts whose connections to the whole were assured by nothing
but colonial governmentality itself, especially at the metropole level.
Within the colonial whole, the parts (say Morocco, Algeria, or Senegal)
were ruled by administrations that had colonial commonalities and
colonial differences. The first were more predominant than the second
since colonial interests rise above all differences.
Historical narratives that delineate the history of northern Africa
and the history of Africa appeared early on in the discourse on the
region. Regulated by the categories of race and the hierarchy they entail
in the margins south of the Sahara, the colonial narrative of Felix
Dubois,86 Le Chatelier,87 and Capitaine Octave Meynier,88 among
many, presents the incursion of the Berbers into the Sahara as
a happy event for Blacks, long buried in primitivism. Consider a book
by Capitaine Myenier, l’Afrique Noire, published in 1911 shortly
82
Maurice Delafosse, Les Noirs de l’Afrique. Paris: Payot, 1911, p. 110.
83
Ibid., p. 110. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., p. 13.
86
Felix Dubois, Tombouctou, la Mysterieuse. Paris: Flammarion, 1897.
87
Le Chatelier, L’Islam dans l’Afrique occidentale.
88
Capitaine Octave Meynier, L’Afrique noire. Paris: Flammarion, 1911.
before French expansion in Morocco. Taking much of his categories

(and even some material) from Le Chatelier, Myenier also reproduces
the narrative of the race struggle in western Africa as well as in equa-
torial Africa.89 The entirety of the region – west, north, and center –
seems fraught with racial conflict. And the political map of this region is
marked neither by tribalism nor by a balance of power between tribes,
regions, and even families, but by pure force, evident in the fact that
domination is the rule of the superior race. Between two races, force
always decides and shows the superior and the inferior, the dominant
and the dominated. In this vast region of unequal (and inferior) races,
mixing is a common practice. This mixing degenerates one race, the
superior one, and, by the same token, improves the inferior one. Thus,
in this racial narrative, the Arabs of Arabia, not the Arabs of the
Maghreb, elevated the Berbers who, in their turn, pushed outside the
Sahara and improved the lot of Blacks. The author even speaks about
a new category, Arab Berbers. But this mixing clearly led to a general
degeneration that returned West Africa to an earlier stage of barbarism
before the arrival of Europeans, in his view. Blacks are inferior even in
the deficiency they may share with others such as the Berbers and the
Arabs, he maintains.
He takes slavery as an example, to argue that slavery among Blacks is
so common that they enslave each other – something Arabs and Berbers
do not do. Amongst Blacks, the slave endures a particularly harsh
condition, he notes, but among Arabs and Berbers, slaves are treated
humanely. And once a black slave converts to Islam, Arabs and Berbers
treat him as a free man. These views that may seem positive regarding
Arabs and Berbers are in fact, only tropes to highlight the relative
deficiency of Blacks. The point one can withdraw from Myenier is
that Blacks are at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, a view already
common among Europeans, thanks to the work of Gobineau, and that
civilization, for them, is always an import. But behind this barbarism,
low intelligence, and lack of initiative is race – not geography, not
religion. One can almost see a contradiction in French writings on
Black Africa among authors who maintain that Islam is a factor of
civilization among Blacks of the Sudan, whereas at the same time Islam
is not only a factor of retardation but itself a religion of barbarism,
cruelty, and war. How to explain this contradiction?
89
Ibid.
With these authors, race is an instrumental category, one with

a powerful explanatory function. It is so instrumental that it deeply
affects religion itself. It explains behaviors and actions. It explains the
state of civilization and the state of barbarism. In itself and compared not
only to France, but also to Christianity, Islam is a barbarity. Compared
to black barbarism, Islam is an improvement. Nevertheless, this
improvement remains a threat to civilization, a danger.90 Consider Le
Chatelier’s views:
A Muslim African power by [its annexation of] Algeria and by being adjunct
to Morocco, Senegal, Soudan, and its new provinces of Chad, France is
particularly interested in the development of Islamic studies, in a practical
form to become useful for political action. However, it seems that this simple
notion is not well understood outside of Algeria.91
This is an old idea one finds even in the earliest colonial writings about
West Africa. Islam was perceived as a threat, not to Christianity as in the
old Orientalist tradition, but to civilization itself. Ignoring it is to “hin-
der the work of French civilization in North and West Africa,” wrote Le
Chatelier in 1888.92 Therefore the effort to distinguish, and possibly to
oppose, the presence of Islam in West Africa to Islam in northern Africa
was of tantamount importance to the colonial enterprise – and not only
the French one. Pioneering work by British missionaries, explorers, and
soldiers was of great importance to French authorities. David
Livingstone, Edward Bylden, and Joseph Thompson, among others,
were constant references in French writings before and after 1870.
As late as 1947, in a conference whose keynote speaker was General
Charles de Gaulle, where young Jacques Berque was also a participant
along with other experts on the region of the Maghreb and on West
Africa, the distinction between regional forms of “religiosity” was
stressed, and the warning that the Islam of the region should not mix,
influence, and change the animism of West Africa was issued.93
90
Henri Busson, “L’Islam dans l’Afrique occidentale d’après l’ouvrage de Mr. Le
Chatelier (note critique).” Annales de Géographie 1900 (45): 269–273 at 269.
91
Chatelier, L’Islam dans l’Afrique occidentale, p. 8.
92
Ibid. The book was written in 1888.
93
La conférence africaine française de Brazzaville, rapport de M. Vallat, Rabat,
February 23, 1944. 2MA/1 Maroc SGP 326, Ministères des Affaires Etrangères,
Archives Diplomatiques, Centre de Nantes.
Lastly, as far as Islam is concerned, all the delegations of North Africa had to
insist to take advantage of the opinion of the General Secretary who rightly
maintained that it should as far as possible stop its expansion. If Islam may
appear to the disinterested sociologist an instrument of civilization because it
is accessible to the mentality of blacks, it constitutes, however, a clear pro-
gress over fetishism. However, it is obvious for anyone with experience that
Islam is both at the origin of the major difficulties we encounter in our Empire
and the most redoubtable tool of opposition.94
The historiographic continuity was assured interestingly enough by

a geographer who, despite being an outsider to the field and especially
despite the fact that he was not Arabisant or Berbérisant, would impose
himself as the dominant historian of the region. In fact, this dominance
itself is reflected in the fact that the name he invented is the one this
chapter is examining. Émile-Félix Gautier invented the name Maghreb
that was to be imposed as soon as the date of its publication in 1928.
His book in question is entitled L’islamisation de l’Afrique du Nord.95
The multiplicity of names that the region had gained and the fact that
none of these names had gained a consensus meant, to Gautier, that the
region “is a country without a name.”96 To say this means two things:
first, that the country does not exist and therefore it belongs to no
one; second, that the country is to belong to those who can name it.
Gautier names it for the colonial administration:
Arabs give to the name Maghreb a little more extended meaning. They apply
it to all the part of North Africa that extends from the west of Egypt and that
includes Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. From a human point of view, they are
right. Cyrenaica and Tripolitania are in fact barbarian countries (pays bar-
baresques) populated by Berbers. However, they [Cyrenaica and
Tripolitania] rather constitute the “avenue” that leads from the Levant to
the Maghreb.97
Arabs, of course, did not use the name Maghreb to designate the
entirety of the region. Depending on the time period, the name was
never a reference to a totality. In the time of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hakam, the
˙
region was called Ifriqiya and the Maghreb. Later on, another entity
was added to compose a triad of names: Ifriqiya, Maghreb, and al-
94
Ibid.
95
Émile-Félix Gautier, L’Islamisation de l’Afrique du Nord. Les siècles obscurs du
Maghreb. Paris: Payot, 1927.
96
Ibid. 97 Ibid.
Andalus.98 Yet Gautier displays colonial authority that allows him to

create and impose colonial truths even in the face of a highly “native”
text that contradicts it. Thus, he excludes Libya (then an Italian colony)
from the French region just because it is an “avenue” of a bloc he calls
“the Levant,” which is mostly and historically under British rule. He
concludes with his habitual overconfidence, “let us agree to adopt the
name Maghreb.”99 This name, Gautier contends, does not then refer to
what the name Maghrib (‫(ﻣﻐﺮﺏ‬, in Arabic historiography, meant in the
book of al-Bayân al mughrib fi târikh al maghrib, which Gautier takes
as the source of his naming.100 Gautier aims at demonstrating that this
region, now called the Maghreb, had never been Arab. It was French at
the time he was writing his book, and naming the region clearly made it
so. Now that the region is named, it is possessed.
Since the most authoritative text prior to 1928 was that authored by
Mercier on the authority of Ibn Khaldûn, it is this authority that
Gautier wanted to put an end to before formulating his own concept
of what the Maghreb was or rather had been historically. This was not
a huge challenge for Gautier. He racially disqualifies Ibn Khaldûn and
all Arab historians, in the same way that the colonial administration
would exclude or freely correct “native” points of view, by pointing to
the biological and intellectual inferiority of the Oriental mind. Gautier
writes about Arab historians with a colonial assurance, “all of them,
including Ibn Khaldûn, have an oriental mind; which means that their
conceptions of history are not always intelligible to us Occidentals.”101
Having eliminated out of hand all Arabic historiography, only
a portion of which was available to him in translation, Gautier under-
takes a rethinking of the region he just named the Maghreb according
to its past, to wit the Berbers, their origins, and their relation to Europe.
His explanation claims to be geographical, taking into account man in
his relation with the land. To this end, he distinguishes between two
modes of living: one sedentary, especially in the east, and the other
98
ʿ Abd al-Rahmān Ibn ʿAbd al-H akam, Futūh Misr wa-Ifrı̄qı̄yah, ed.
Charles Torrey.˙ New Haven, CT:˙ Yale University
˙ ˙ Press, 1920.
99
Ibid. The name Maghreb can be found early on in French historiography, often
with its Arab connotations, but sometimes without them. For instance,
Meynier uses the word Maghreb in 1911 and he distinguishes it from what he
calls Afrique noire. See his L’Afrique noire, p. 92.
100
Ibn ʻIdārı̄ al-Murrâkushî, Al-bayān al-muġrib fı̄ akhbār mulūk al-Andalus wa-
ˉ
al-Maghrib.
101
Ibid.
nomadic, in the rest of the country. The sedentary man is “a pure

Berber” because of his mode of living: he lives in a village. The
nomad is “elusive”; he is an Arab in pursuit of plunder and pillage.
“The tragedy of the Maghreb,” he continues, lies in this intense con-
flict, or rather war, between the sedentary and the nomad. It is this
internal war that prevented the birth of a state and therefore created the
impossibility of a political union. It is here that Gautier displays an
originality, or rather novelty, in relation to previous colonial texts. He
introduces the concept of the nation to explain the region whose name
he invents. Ernest Renan, then the theoretician of the nation, once
claimed with pride that “the concept of nation is ours.”102 Gautier
undertakes to explain why the Berbers, who are one of “us,” were
unable to constitute a nation. The answer lies in the presence of the
other, a historical enemy: the Arabs. However, the Arab of Gautier is
a specific type, different; he is a nomad, and hence his absence in the
Sahara of Egypt in and of itself makes the Maghreb fundamentally
different from Egypt, including its own Sahara. Actually, the Arab is
present only in the Maghreb:
In any case, the fact is certain. The Egyptian desert has no nomads. At least it
does not have the large nomadic tribes. Those tribes are elusive, looters,
powerful by their instinct and their war training. They are an eternal threat to
the public order, as long as we do not resign to entrusting them with its guard.
Egypt has its own Bedouins. It is an old name, “badaoui,” which was
naturalized in all European languages, I do not know when. Would the
expedition of Bonaparte in Egypt be at the origins of this naturalization?103
Colonial authorities, whether in northern or western Africa, were

acutely aware that colonial geography had to be invented, that lands
had to be explored, defined, and named. They were also equally aware
that the pieces they created should be connected to others, or discon-
nected, as the case may be. Many of those who contributed to
the Comité d’études historiques et scientifique de l’Afrique-
Occidentale française, such as Meynier and Marty, served in Algeria.
They did not lose sight of that country, a real colonial model that
allowed them to rethink any other colonial situation, far or near.
Their construction of Africa, and more specifically of West Africa,
was also, ipso facto, a construction of how it was different from
102
Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” 103
Gautier, Le Sahara.
Algeria, and by extension northern Africa. In their mind, the region was
a cultural and a geographic continuum, but not with West or Central
Africa. Yet they did not publish in Algerian venues, but created their
own venues and their own institutions. The Comité d’études histori-
ques et scientifique de l’Afrique-Occidentale française was transformed
later, in 1938, to the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire.104
In addition to these scholars of Algeria becoming experts on West
Africa, there were also scholars of Algeria who stayed in Algeria, but
never lost sight of the colonies elsewhere and especially not in eastern or
western Africa. For those, Algeria was of tantamount importance, and
the elsewhere in Africa helped define Algeria’s distinctiveness. One of
these scholars was the same Gautier, an overwhelmingly domineering
figure of colonial knowledge and its institutions.
In 1934, he published a book called L’Afrique noire occidentale.105 By
this time, the Maghreb as a name and a geographical entity was already
constructed and isolated as distinct. Similarly, western Africa itself had
been invented and made separate by authors of the Comité d’études
historiques et scientifique de l’Afrique-Occidentale française and later
the Institut de l’Afrique Noire. But this book of Gautier’s is undoubtedly
significant because it was written by one of the main, and at least the final,
architects of colonial geography and an expert on the Maghreb to boot.
In the views of Gautier, the characteristics of Egypt, once again part
of Asia since Herodotus, offer similarities with the rest of northern
Africa. They share two geographical entities that are distinct and
instrumental, the Mediterranean and the Sahara. Of course, these
distinctions are constructions; they are made within a geopolitical
framework to make French “possessions” distinct from adjunct col-
onies (Egypt and Libya) France did not control. In other terms, what is
at play in the discourse of Gautier is the logic of empire to transform,
appropriate, separate, and connect to French geography and history as
well. It is this logic, with its discursive power on mind and imagination,
that creates parts separated despite, or even because of, their continu-
ous connections created throughout the course of history as a result of
different logics of conquests and rules.106
104
Theodore Monod, “L’institut Français d’Afrique Noire,” Africa: Journal of the
International African Institute 1943 (14)2: 194–199 at 194.
105
Gautier, L’Afrique noire occidentale.
106
For the case of Ottoman Empire and its logic in Africa, see Minawi, Ottoman
Scramble for Africa.
Gautier’s text did not only invent the name and even impose it, but he
gave it a specific meaning as well. This meaning is made by all colonial
stereotypes about “inferior races” – Arabs and Berbers alike – two
categories the officers of the Arab Bureau created before they surfaced
in the translated text of Ibn Khaldûn. The Arab hates the European, the
Berber hates the Arab because he is European, and the European is
superior to the Berber, despite shared kinship, because he developed in
his natural environment. The tragedy of the Berber is that he was
subjected to the domination of the Arab. This is to say that the
Maghreb is a region defined by its racial conflict, racial inferiority,
and thus political incapacity. Therefore, the Maghreb is a region in
a pre-European stage: it is premodern and prenational, and it can be
saved only if it accepts the French civilizing mission. However, the
civilizing mission presumes, as in the very text of Gautier, an aptitude
to change and to progress. The Berber has this aptitude by virtue of his
presumed European ancestry. The Arab, on the other hand, is unable to
acquire this aptitude. He is a nomad who does not learn. Even worse, in
the view of Gautier, he is the enemy of Western civilization, he is the
one who put an end to it in the region that he transformed into an Arab
one. Therefore, two conditions are required for a political solution to
make Algeria French: exclude Arabs and teach the Berber to catch up
with Europe.
This text was written at the height of French colonialism in the
region. It expresses the raw colonial power’s unshakable confidence
in itself. Its author knew neither Arabic nor Berber yet uttered cookie-
cutter judgments to be accepted as truths. One of the ironies in his
naming of the region was that he did not know its Arabic semantics.
The other irony is that another colonial author, a philologist of Arabic,
William Marçais, despite his linguistic skill, and despite his huge effort
to critique the name Maghreb and replace it with the name Berbérie,
was unable to do so.107 The text of Gautier along with the name he
invented for the region remained authoritative. Critique only seemed to
prologue its authority. The name Berbérie has continued to be used by
scholars, who argue for the thesis that the real indigenous of the region
is the Berber. However, this name has not survived in the postcolonial
107
William Marçais, “Les siècles obscurs du Maghreb d’E-F. Gautier,” Revue
Critique d’Histoire et de Literature 1929: 255–270. Reprinted in
William Marçais, Articles et conferences. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1961,
pp. 69–82.
period; the last time it was used in an important historiographic text

was in 1946.108 Meanwhile, the authority of Gautier can still be seen in
the work of all subsequent French colonial and postcolonial authors,
including Jacques Berque, who systematically uses the name Maghreb
in all his writings and often evokes the figure of the Bedouin camel rider
so dear to Gautier. Even as Gautier is confronted head on by Abdallah
Laroui, his argument appears again, full-fledged and intact, in the text
of Gabriel Camps.109 Thus Gautier’s work is not just an individual
text, and not just an accumulation of colonial historical theses, but also
the discursive embodiment of the Maghreb. Subsequent texts, such as
those by Berque, Camps, Allal al-Fassi, and Laroui, willy-nilly continue
its discursive existence, as any critique of it confirms its relevance.
By the time of the independence of Algeria in 1962, and most likely
before, Gautier’s work had lost most of its authority. A new historio-
graphical text had emerged by 1951, written by a man highly sympa-
thetic to the movements of liberation that were part of the climate of
the time, even among those French politicians and diplomats who were
once fervent champions of colonization. This was L’Histoire de
l’Afrique du Nord, authored by Charles-André Julien.110 The book is
inscribed in the long colonial historiography of the region. In fact,
Fernand Braudel, who then reviewed it, saw in it a synthesis of previous
works, especially those of Mercier and Gautier, whose “historio-
graphic imperialism” Braudel applauds, “along with the great things
we have done there.”111 This was not only a glowing review but also an
acknowledgment that Braudel, the historian of the Mediterranean,
owed a great deal in his conception of the Maghreb to Gautier.112
Julien clearly wanted to depart from Gautier, even in naming the
region that he calls l’Afrique du Nord (North Africa). But he was
unable to impose the name, let alone to undermine the huge popularity
the name Maghreb enjoyed in scholarly writings as well as in political
108
Robert Brunschvig, La Berbérie orientale sous les Hafsides, des origines à la fin
du XVe siècle. Paris, Adrien Maisonneuve, 1940.
109
Gabriel Camps, “Comment la Berbérie est devenue le Maghreb arabe,” Revue
des mondes musulmans et de la Mérditerranée 1983 (35): 7–24.
110
Charles-André Julien, Histoire de l’Afrique blanche. Paris: PUF, 1966.
111
Fernand Braudel, “A propos de l’histoire de l’Afrique du Nord de Ch.-André
Julien,” Revue Africaine 1933 (74)1: 37–53.
112
See frequent references to Gautier by Braudel, especially in his geographical
conception of the area of the Maghreb. La Mediterranée et le monde
mediteranéen.
Conclusion 203
speeches both in France and in the region itself. The name Maghreb
gained a natural existence in part because it sounded like a local name.
It has Arabic connotations, of course, but it also has roots in a classical
historiographic book, al-Bayân al mughrib fi târikh al maghrib.113 On
the eve of colonialism, and in the local writings of historiography, the
name could also be seen, albeit with adjectives: al-Maghreb al-Awsat,
al-Maghreb al-Aqsâ’, al-Maghreb al-Adnâ’. In 1888, in Morocco, and
more specifically in its northern parts, the local name of Maghreb al-
Aqsa seems to have been still adopted by the Spanish, as attested by the
Spanish newspaper al-maghreb Al-aksa.114
The name Maghreb, made more popular by Gautier, meant some-
thing entirely different by the 1920s. First, it indicates a French posses-
sion in the colonial period and a French zone of cultural and political
influence in the postcolonial era. Julien’s use of the name Afrique du
Nord was not successful also because it does not delimit the French
colonial zone from the whole, especially from the west, where Nasser’s
Egypt, with its pan-Arab ideology, menacingly sat in 1952. However,
Gautier’s main thesis, regarding the permanent conflict between the
nomadic (Arabs) and the sedentary (Berbers) is present in Julien’s
narrative. And thus the very idea of the region’s political incapability
to unite and/or found a nation is rearticulated. It is to refute this thesis
that Abdallah Laroui wrote his l’histoire du Maghreb which, at least in
postcolonial historiography, continues the use of the name.115 Let us
not anticipate.
Conclusion
If cartography constituted the form of the narrative on the Maghreb
(that became the Maghreb itself), historical research, including arch-
aeological narratives, constituted the content of this narrative. This
content itself was made of semantics on one hand and narrative gram-
mar on the other. In terms of semantics, lexemes such as Arab, Berber,
Roman, and French denote a racial ideology with a hierarchy where
Europeans are on top and Berbers are on the bottom, followed by
113
Ibn ʻIdārı̄ al-Murrâkushî, Al-bayān al-muġrib fı̄ akhbār mulūk al-Andalus wa-
ˉ
al-Maghrib.
114
Centre des Archives Diplomatique de La Courneuve. PAAP100/4 document
108.
115
Laroui, L’histoire du Maghreb.
Arabs. This narrative grammar denotes a societal grammar that may be

rearranged into a plot, easy to read, easy to remember, and easy to re-
narrate – that is, also easy to politically manipulate.
This colonial narrative can generally be divided into parts, one that
pertains to the race struggle in which Arabs and Berbers are in constant
conflict since the Arab invasion of the eighth century, with the absence
of a third actor who is recent but old, superior but benevolent,
a conqueror too, and at the same time a civilizer who came to put an
end to centuries of Arab domination and save the Berber European
from both domination and primitiveness. This narrative is of a quest
whose real hero is none other than the Frenchman and whose avatar is
Roman. The second narrative is also a narrative of racial struggle, but it
displaces the grammar of the first narrative. Race is replaced with
language, but not eliminated as an instrumental category that main-
tains the initial narrative grammar of the Arab (synonymous with
Muslim), Berber (primitive after all), and European (behind whom
Christianity quietly hides). But language unsettles some of these cat-
egories. It makes the Berber become Arab and the Arab become Berber.
The object of the conquest in this second narrative is not domination,
but rather the foundation of the nationhood that is absent from Berber
history, always obstructed as it is by Arab disturbance and pillage,
though finally achieved by the French.
One can think about these narratives in functionalist terms and argue
that they justify colonial rule and conquest, but one cannot explain why
colonial administrations needed more than one narrative for justifica-
tion and why they risked contradiction and uncertainty to develop
several. Perhaps “Frenchmen sought to justify these conquests by eco-
nomic arguments.”116 The truth of the matter is that these narratives,
despite or maybe even because of their contradictions, uncertainties,
and contingencies, are attempts at making sense of the colony and at
connecting the colony to new parts as conquest continues unabated and
new colonial rules are set up in new lands and in new contexts. With
historical narratives, a constellation of meanings is created to make
sense of the colony, to give it an identity and a face, to root it in French
history itself by connecting it to the French Empire, to connect this
116
Henri Brunschwig, “French Exploration and African Conquest,” in
Colonialism in Africa, vol. 1, ed. L. H. Gan and Peter Duignan. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969, pp. 132–164 at p. 139.
Conclusion 205
colony (Algeria) to other “colonies” of Tunisia and Morocco, to create

a continuity between the three.
Historical narratives also join archaeology and maps and create
discontinuities, borders, and frontiers. They eliminate, they exclude;
in doing so, they interpret, create, invent, and explain why this whole is
different from this part, and why this part cannot be connected to this
other part. For these reasons, three major categories have been put into
use with wonderful effects since they seem most natural – that is, they
seem to be integrated in the very objects they signify, and not imposed
on the objects for the purpose of signification. These categories are
space, race, and language. With space, the geographical notion is
imposed: the region is North, and North itself as a geometrical category
seems natural, despite the fact that Egypt was excluded along with
Senegal from the North, and these were arbitrarily named – one as
East, the other West. The first was East in relation to Asia, despite its
African geography, the second was in West Africa, despite its being
adjunct to Morocco.
In terms of race, perceived exclusively in terms of color and phenotypes,
the colony, Algeria, was connected eastward and westward to Tunisia
and Morocco, retrospectively. But it was disconnected eastward and
westward from Senegal and Egypt racially. From the first, “white
Berbers” were disconnected from Senegal, and the same Arab-Berber
relation also disconnected them from Egypt, where the “Arab” is pre-
sented differently. And last, religion was a major factor in that the colony
and its connected surroundings were Muslim, disconnected from both
Senegal and Egypt by the fact that in the first Islam is “paganized” and in
the second, Islam is “literalized.” The separation from central Africa was
the easiest. The Sahara stood as an important marker between the
Maghreb and Africa, not only in modern times but in times immemorial.
At the border with the Sahara is an animal-like man, the Bedouin, the limit
of savagery, and beyond it is another animal-like man, the Black, the limit
of primitiveness. At the limit of this space, civilization was not possible.
France was only concerned with what is civilizational. The region under
discussion had the potential to become civilized and become French. The
name Afrique française was already a common name in atlases and in
diplomatic dialogue.
5 Strategies for the Present
The Maghreb, as an idea, a realm of discourse, and an expression of

colonial power, could not have been imposed without the complicity of
local historians, ideologues, and politicians. However, this complicity
pertains less to a political collaboration and more to the hegemony of
the colonial discourse and its power dynamics. Colonial power is not
like any other power. It is not the modern power that operates in the
metropole and transforms rules and dynamics, creates discourses and
sentiments, transforms land and people, determines attitudes and sexu-
alities, and invents subjects and sensibilities.1 This modern power, it is
worth noting, was at one point in time unique to Western societies,
where the state was set up to invent a new citizen.2 In the colony,
meanwhile, power functions differently and of course also means
something quite distinct from the way modern power functions and
what it means in Western societies. Power in the colony operates in
a vacuum: a vacuum of modern institutions, a vacuum of equivalency,
a vacuum of counter-modern power, an absence of citizenship with
rights, and thus, precisely because of this set of vacuums, power in the
colony exerts itself more destructively, more abruptly, and more effect-
ively even. Power in the colony is not designed to create a new citizen,
but new subjects characterized by racial difference that not only
deprives them of rights, but constantly subjects them to state violations
of person, dignity, land, and history. Power in the colony is exerted
against a land deemed foreign and even threatening, and against masses
considered, or rather created, as utterly “other” in their racial, cultural,
and religious differences. The effects of colonial power are maximal
because colonial power operates against land and masses (mostly
tribes) not yet considered a population in the political sense, and barely
1
Of course, as it appears in the later work of Michel Foucault on prison, the
history of sexuality, etc.
2
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare, Geoffrey Nowell
Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1991, Reprint 1999, p. 246.
206
Strategies for the Present 207
treated as a people because of racial ideologies. They do not even

qualify for the use of “bio-power,” an elevated power designed for
citizens. Tribes especially were the object of collective power – that is,
the colonial management of tribalism – which is the display and the
deployment of brute power manifest in the use of sheer force when
necessary – and it was often necessary – to make the land available and
its people not just docile but also increasingly more accepting of the
unacceptable, more enduring of injustices, and more subject to
violence.3 Theorists of this power unleashed against the colony include
Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Robert Bugeaud.
The use of bio-power in the metropole is nuanced and subtle and
aims at banking on and maximizing labor – the real source of wealth. In
the colony, colonial power prioritizes land, seen as the source of
wealth, to the detriment of people (especially tribes) regarded as dan-
gerous, a real hindrance for civilization. Even in the colonial city, the
urban natives are the “undifferentiated brown staff”4 George Orwell
wondered about and on “which” he pondered, “do they even have
names?”5 For a name is the property of individuality, not of collectiv-
ity. Bio-power operates in a society that is industrial, colonial power in
a society that is nomadic and agricultural and whose peasantry are
turned into something like serfs. Colonial power may face counter-
power, of course, with the rise of tribal resistance. However, this
counter-power is often minimal, approaching at times the zero degree
of power. For modern power may be everywhere, but the colony is not
modern, and modernity was brought to it violently.6 This imbalance of
power, in case of confrontations, often results in more destruction and
more violence inflicted as punishment, as in all the cases one might
consider, including that of Abdelkader and El Mokrani in nineteenth-
century Algeria.7 Only in the 1950s did the native acquire the same type
of power, and he launched it against a settler society with all the force
and savagery it inherently contains.
3
On colonial violence that was part and parcel of its very functioning, see
Hannoum, Violent Modernity. Different views by William Gallois, A History of
Violence in the Early Algerian Colony. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Brower, Desert Named Peace.
4
George Orwell, “Marrakech,” in Collection of Essays. New York: Anchor
Books, 1954, pp. 186–193 at p. 187.
5
Ibid.
6
On how violence is inherent to modernity, see Hannoum, Violent Modernity.
7
See Hannoum, “Colonial Violence and Its Narratives.”
Nevertheless, the naming of the region, as this chapter argues, is itself

a manifestation of power and thus an act of possession – and of
dispossession. It could be reclaimed, especially in the era of anticolonial
protests, only by an equal local power backed by nation-states both in
the region and beyond, and fostered by international solidarity move-
ments worldwide. By 1928, the Maghreb was born – officially, that is.
Its birth was long and contradictory, and its form changed, or rather
autocorrected, as the politics of the production of knowledge changed
and as the political dynamics of the region and of the world trans-
formed. The birth of the Maghreb was a semantic one as well as
a political one. By this point in time, as is manifest in the work of Émile-
Félix Gautier, Les siècles obscurs, the Maghreb, as a name and as
a thing, constituted the ensemble of colonial cartographic, ethno-
graphic, and historiographic representations accumulated to date.
These representations, along with their network of names, were
repeated and propagated in newspapers, journals, books, and maps,
and of course in literary works (such as fiction, essays, and poetry). This
is to say that colonial power seemed ubiquitous, and so was the name
Maghreb after its invention. What were the reactions of local intellec-
tuals and the ulama of the time in the presence of perhaps an unprece-
dented manifestation of a colonial power that was everywhere and
seemed invincible?
Ulama are religious scholars, and thus in precolonial Muslim soci-
eties they represented the intelligentsia, the intellectual elite. The ulama
were indeed the elite who produced knowledge and reproduced it; they
were the ones who propagated it and taught it.8 This knowledge
consisted mainly of forms of religious studies (al-ʿulûm al-
sharʿiya), but also of forms of adab, that classical form of literary
knowledge, and last of hikma, a form of philosophical knowledge
˙
that may even combine forms of religious knowledge with forms of
adab. Modern technologies of power were undoubtedly the monopoly
of Europeans. Yet, because of a long historiographic tradition that they
believed they mastered and owned, the ulama felt confident creating
narratives about the past using Arabic sources, but they lacked the use
of archaeological excavation, archaeological interpretations of traces,
the techniques by which to measure and to create maps. In lacking
technologies of power, they also lacked that scientific authority that
8
See Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant.
Oppose and Continue 209
endowed the colonial discourse and its technical auxiliaries. Oftentimes,

the ulama avoided the realm of science, and at times they borrowed from
it, especially maps – they could translate their names, but not really alter
their contours. In short, the semantics of coloniality was such that the
ulama were unable to think outside of it; they had the power of contest-
ation, but not the power of competence, which is the ability to impose
reception. At best, their discourse was only paid heed as a subversive
activity of the natives to be watched, not a social discourse to engage, let
alone as one that could affect the course of colonial representations or
alter the construction of the region as imagined by the colonial discourse.
The national discourse generated the existence of that which coloni-
alism denied: the nation and the larger political unity of the region as
a whole. This discourse has itself been generated by the colonial dis-
course. It has a colonial genealogy despite change and alterations in its
categories. The image emerging from this cultural production at the
end of colonial rule is the same as the colonial images, with the only
difference that it does not narrate the history of a lack, or a history of
misfortunes, but histories of deeds, of continuity, of larger brotherhood
with the outside east, but never the outside west or south. In short, it
created the Arab Maghreb out of the French Maghreb. The difference
between the one and the other is the difference between a thing in
a given time and the same thing out of that same time – the time of
nationalism, the time of the celebration of past glories, the time of the
confirmation of unity against the racial and cultural diversity existing
in precolonial times and reemerging in postcolonial times, like a threat,
first begging for recognition, then demanding it with a loud voice –
often in the French tongue. Its dynamic consists in affirming itself
against that which discursively obliterates its existence, the nation-
state, by turning that into the enemy and wishing it the same fate.
The colonial dynamic in the postcolonial world cannot be clearer,
more decisive, or more imposing of its realities.
Oppose and Continue

It is expedient to note, first, that the local reaction to the colonial
discourse originated from the newly founded Salafi (i.e., Islamic mod-
ern) movement in the region. Founded in Egypt by Sayyid Jamal al-Din
al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, Salafism preached a return to the
origin of the purity of faith, the period when Islam prevailed and
opened new ways for civilization.9 The aim was to reinvent Islam and
not just the region, to create a new Muslim, and to bring back lost
civilization and glory. For them, there was no contradiction between
Islam and modernity. On the contrary, they argued that the spirit of
Islam itself is modern. Unmodern is everything that deviates from the
teachings of Islam in the age of the salaf (the ancestors, or one might say
the founding fathers of the oumma, the original Muslim community).
However, while Abduh and Afghani in Egypt were concerned with an
educational project, the Salafi of Algeria had another urgent priority to
tackle: an argument for national existence. Neither Egypt nor Syria nor
Iraq faced the problem of national existence.
The movement reached Tunisia and Algeria at the moment of the
height of the colonial enterprise in the region.10 Abduh himself visited
Algeria and Tunisia, where he met the founders of the Association of
Algerian Muslim Ulama. The association was more openly political in
Algeria and Tunisia (and later in Morocco) than it was in Egypt. In
addition to a political discourse about Islam and about colonization,
the ulama of the Salafi movement in the three countries of the region –
Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco – transformed themselves, among other
things, into “secular” historians with a declared aim: to challenge the
very colonial historiography that created the name Maghreb and
defined its content. They were also engaged in the French project of
Laïcité, which they defended, requesting its application in Algeria.11
But their enterprise was even larger. The most painful colonial argu-
ment facing the Salafi was that the region had always been under
domination, that it had never existed as a state or as a nation.
Successive invasions culminating in the Arab conquest introduced
a racial divide that still defines the region today and that prevents any
national unity, unless helped by the French. It was mainly this challenge
9
Elie Kedourie, Afghani and ‘Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and
Political Activism in Modern Islam. London: Frank Cass, 1997.
10
See Ali Merad, Le réformisme musulman en Algérie de 1925 à 1940. Essai
d’histoire religieuse et sociale. Paris: La Haye Mouton, 1967. See also
James McDougal, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. For the teaching of Mohamed
Abduh in Algeria, see Ali Merad, “L’enseigment politique de Mohamed Abduh
aux Algériens,” Orient 1963 (8): 75–123.
11
See Achi Raberh, “La séparation des Eglises et de l’Etat à l’épreuve de la
situation coloniale. Les usages de la derogation dans l’administration du culte
musulman en Algérie (1905–1959),” Politix 2004 (17)66: 81–106.
that the Salafi had to face. It was this challenge that prompted them to
rewrite history as a strategy of contestation and as a means to anticipate
a better future for the nation.
At the height of the colonial rule that France celebrated in 1930 with
great fanfare, as the first century of its occupation of Algiers, Abd al-
Hamid Ben Badis founded the Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama.
He planted the seeds of Algerian nationalism. Among the chief goals of
his association was to demonstrate the existence of Algeria as a nation.
Their strategy, historiographic narration; their audience, the Algerians
themselves. Soon several members of the association had created
a historical discourse with national coloring against the then dominant
colonial discourse that had made the region what it was: a French
territory with its proper name, the Maghreb. However, whereas the
colonial historiographic discourse enjoyed exceptional power originat-
ing both from specific institutions (such as the University of Algiers, the
Institut des Hautes Etudes marocaines in Rabat, the Sorbonne, etc.) as
well as from the academic profession itself – which claimed history as
the privileged scientific discourse on society even, or rather especially,
in the metropole itself – the Algerian Salafi, as well as the Tunisian and
the Moroccan ones, were deprived of the support of the institutions of
the colonial state. Worse, the Salafi positioned themselves against
colonial institutions, aware that settler society could not oppress and
rule without them. This state had history as its mode, and so it could
only be fought with greater historiographic fervor. Small wonder, then,
that the Salafi approached history with confidence in their domain,
believing that the long Arabic and Islamic historiography upon which
the colonial discourse had built itself was their property. They under-
took with confidence a historiographic endeavor to reclaim the region
as their own – body and soul – and from time immemorial.12
Yet the Salafi discourse of members of the ulama, such as Abdel ʿAziz
Thaʿâlibi, Abdelhamid Ben Badis, or Mubarak al-Mili – and, later on
Ahmed Tewfik al-Madani and even Allal al-Fassi – functioned rather as
a contesting discourse among those who could read it in Algeria,
Tunisia, or Morocco. Whereas the Salafi historiographic discourse
responded to the colonial discourse often by reversing it ideologically,
colonial authors such as Gautier and Charles-André Julien remained
12
See Abdelmajid Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Memories.
Heinemann: 2001, especially chapter 3.
indifferent to these responses because the voice of the native, the

subaltern, whether he speaks or screams, is irrelevant – just like the
noise of the Souk. It was clear that colonial power bestows competence
to not only express (even when ignorant of local languages, as in the
case of Gautier) but also to ignore, to give or not to give importance to
this or to that. The colonial discourse had such power to impose
reception on a large and diverse audience, in the colonies, in the
metropole, and beyond both of them even, in the form of English
translations. The Salafi historian and ideologue lacked this competence
and was unable to impose any reception in colonial societies and circles
of academic discourse. However, he could find a reception in native
society. One can see, then, how competence can exist at the level of
native society yet not at the level of colonial society.
The native society is the one of the local, the indigene, the Muslim,
who is the object of colonial representation but not an interlocutor.
While the Salafi discourse could find an audience among readers,
including elites, across the region, it could only circulate among mem-
bers of this native society, which is indicative of the dynamics of
colonial power. Their discourse was performative on one level, yet
not on another. While the Salafi discourse sometimes drew the atten-
tion of the colonial administration, it was only as a subversive activity
undertaken by the “indigenes” and not as a historiographic discourse
in its own right.13 However, the Salafi aim was not to reach the colonial
audience, but the native one. Most importantly, in their historiographic
contestations, they carried over, willy-nilly, the colonial discourse they
protested. Thus an important characteristic of the discourse of power is
its ability to subvert contestation, to convert protests, to generate itself
in the form of critique, to survive even in the very act of the attempt to
destroy it. It was in these colonial/local dynamics that the perception of
the Maghreb was rearticulated in the discourse of the native, repro-
duced, and entrenched in local imagination.
Nonetheless, most of the historical writing of the Salafi authors
claims the existence of a nation whose constitution they find in the
past. After all, since the past is only possible through the interpretation
of historical texts that lend themselves to various interpretations, the
13
See Joseph Desparmet, “La résistence à l’Occident,” Afrique française
May 1933: 265–268. Also his article on the historiographic writings of Madani
and Mili, “Naissance d’une histoire ‘nationale’ de l’Algérie,” Afrique française
July 1933 : 387–392.
nation was not difficult to construct. The nation was constructed of

narratives of the past commanded by colonial narratives that directed
their meanings. The nation was specific, a part of a whole, but autono-
mous in and of itself; it appears to have existed in the past as well as in
the present. A piece of a whole, Algeria appears as part of the geog-
raphy that the same colonial narrative formulates under different
names, with a multitude of maps, and an enormous amount of arch-
aeological traces.
Hence there is the publication of a certain number of historical
narratives that bear the name of a nation: Algeria, Morocco, or
Tunisia.14 Yet the content of these different books revolves around
a central idea – to reject colonial interpretations and offer local
ones.15 However, local interpretations, as stated earlier, were
themselves conditioned by colonial interpretations. Local narratives
had the form of narratives of opposition and of contestation. They
operated mainly by negation; they offered their own historical
regimes of truths. Since the colonial discourse was faced with the
highest suspicion as a discourse of deformation for the sake of
exploitation, statements of the colonial discourse were reversed to
obtain their opposite, deemed true. Paradoxically, the system of
colonial “lies” imposed itself and not only created its audience
amongst the local elites but also commanded their responses. As
a discourse of power, the colonial discourse was contested by the
Salafi. Yet this contestation itself ensured the longevity of the
colonial discourse that constituted the Maghreb as a colonial
geography.
Whereas the Salafi discourse is fundamentally a discourse of opposition –
which claims Carthage against the discourse of Rome, or for Arab origins
of the Berbers against purported European origins – the colonial discourse
is declarative and affirmative; it is a discourse of power unconcerned with
14
Moubarak al-Mili, Târîkh al-jazâ’ir fî al-qadîm wa al-hadîth. Constantine:
1932. Thaʿâlibi, La Tunisie martyre. Paris: Jouve, 1919. Al-Fassi, Hadîth al
maghrib fî al-sharq. Cairo: Matbaʿat al-ʿAlamiya, 1956.
15
See also Thaʿâlibi, La Tunisie martyre. Mili, Târîkh al-jazâʿir fî al-qadîm wa al-
hadîth. Also, Twefik Madani, Qartâjanna fi arbaʿati ʿuṣûr: min ʿasr al-hijra ilâ
al-fath al-islâmi. Tunis: Matbʿat al-Nahda, 1927. Allal al-Fassi, al-Ḥarakât al-
istiqlâliya fi al-Maghrib al-ʿArabi. Tangier: Abdassalam Jasus, 1948. Also by the
same author, Ḥadîth al maghrib fî al-sharq.
discursive contradictions. These contradictions further guaranteed the

continuity of the colonial discourse; they created the conditions of its
proliferation. They generate multiple interpretations and multiply all pos-
sibilities of interpretations. There is indeed little to say about it if not to only
repeat it, especially when opposing it. To say this more clearly, the colonial
discourse, as a discourse of power, repeats itself in the Salafi discourse that
opposes it. Yet it is this very contradiction that opens the way to greater
opposition and thus this discourse is like Hydra, the monster with several
heads: each time one of them is cut, it immediately grows another.
Since Rome was central in the colonial historiographical narrative,
the Salafi had neither the classical education of French colonials nor
the skills in Latin and archaeology that, as we have seen, served as the
main tools for historiographic and archaeological practices con-
sidered scientific. The Salafi had access to Arabic sources, but they
often, by the logic of power dynamics, relied on the same authorities
colonial agents relied on, mainly Ibn Khaldûn (albeit in his Arabic
version). Yet the Salafi felt confident in a field with a long tradition in
Islamic “sciences” and with authorities (recognized by the French as
credible and important, albeit with hesitation, as we saw in the case of
Gautier and Ibn Khaldûn). But what was important in this ideological
struggle was the fact that the French relied on technologies of power,
modern institutions, and material resources that the Salafi lacked.
Technologies of power were the monopoly of French authorities;
the “native” would only rely on his own associations and on forms
of “institutions” – namely the zaouias (Sufi lodges), the madrasas, and
the mosques that were carefully controlled and surveilled by French
authorities.16
Consider Madani’s book on Carthage.17 Madani refers to the area
with its colonial names: Maghreb (maghrib) and North Africa (shamâl
ifriquiya).18 He also gives the same geographical definition of the
region: “The Mediterranean covers the land of the Maghreb north
and east, the Atlantic limits it west. From the south, the Sahara split
it from the rest of Africa.”19 He expresses pride in this part of Africa
that he visualizes as a “crown” for the body of Africa. Given the
16
Gouvernement Géneral de l’Algérie, Instruction sur la surveillance politique et
administrative des indigènes algériens et des musulmans étrangers. Algier:
Imprimerie Pierre Fontana, 1895. For the surveillance of mosques and zawiyas,
see pp. 26–27. Archives Aix-en-Province. B1767. F 90 2029.
17
Madani, Qartājannah. 18 Ibid., p. 7. 19 Ibid., p. 9.
˙
centrality of the Berbers and Rome in the colonial discourse, Madani

centers his book on Carthage to oppose the myth of Rome. In doing so,
he asks the unavoidable question about the origins of the Berbers, and
provides an answer that opposes those provided by colonial authors
from Eugène Daumas to Émile-Félix Gautier. Using Ibn Khaldûn,
Gsell, and Daumas, Madani reaches the conclusion that “the Berbers
are descendants of Kanaan son of Ham son of Noah,” who reached
North Africa coming from the north of Arabia. The Phoenicians share
the same origins, according to Madani, who refers to new research:
“There is an irrefutable proof that the Phoenicians are descendants of
Kanaan and they are closely related to Arabs” (yamitun ila al-ʿarab bi
nasab qarîb).20 The Phoenicians are then cousins of the Berbers, and
the Berbers and Arabs share the same origins as the Phoenicians.
The Phoenicians were established peacefully in northern Africa,
founded Carthage, and created a civilization beyond the region that
included parts of Europe such as Sicily, Corsica, and parts of southern
France. Phoenicians generally expanded peacefully via commerce,
except when they were forced to defend themselves. But all in all,
their work in northern Africa amongst the Berber is undoubtedly
civilizational:
If we look generally to the influence of Carthage in this land, we will see that
it had the greatest merit and biggest benefit in spreading civilization and
elevating the scientific, social, and moral condition. It is this civilization that
took hold of the soul of the Berbers. The long Roman occupation (iḥtilâl)
only influenced it a little. It is this civilization that helped the establishment
and the fast spread of the rule of Islam.21
Madani even asks “whether the government (ḥukûma) of Carthage

was a national (waṭaniya) government or a government of
occupation?”22 His response is categorical and quick. “The govern-
ment of Carthage was a national government in this country.” For one
thing, Phoenicians and Berbers share the same origin, and then the
foundation of the Phoenician kingdom was the result of cooperation
between the two populations, whose language was also mixed – neither
really Berber nor purely Phoenician, but “a new national language.”23
Sporadic Berber revolts, Madani contends, are against some of the
injustice and this in itself is “natural,” but all in all, “the Berber had
20 21 22 23
Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid. Ibid.
never experienced a condition before Islam better than their condition

with the government of Carthage. Those Berbers who lived under the
yoke of Romans experienced a life of misery and suffering.”24
Madani celebrates the work of Carthage, including the heroic deeds
of Hannibal. But after his narration of the Punic Wars, Madani
addresses the issue of statehood and national unity that colonial
authors saw as a major lack in the Maghreb, one that allowed its
subjugation by foreign armies from the Phoenicians to the Arabs.
Madani finds in Masinissa the national hero par excellence, the one
who created a state, “founded a strong national army, constructed
a powerful navy, and issued national coins with his name; he did his
best to foster agriculture, and develop trade; he propagated the
Cartagena’s language amongst all classes. And in his speeches, courted
the Greeks, and was close to Rome.”25
The image of Rome that emerges from Madani’s narrative is that it
perpetrated pure colonization, ruthless and exploitative. It was not
civilizational and did not benefit the Berbers. The Berbers never
accepted Rome; they revolted against it whenever they could and
sought their independence constantly. This is clearly a rejection, but
not a deconstruction, of the myth of Rome, only to replace it with the
myth of Carthage. “Thus we conclude that with the end of Roman
occupation ended all its influence in the country. By its end, the only
thing left was the Berber race (or element) (al-ʿunsur al barbari), pure
for having endured no influence but the early influence of Carthage.”26
Madani’s conception of history is colonial modern, and thus pro-
foundly racial. He thinks of the actors in terms of race and race for him
too is antagonistic. If Carthage accepted and integrated the Berber
population, it is because they shared the same origin. If Rome or the
Vandals after them excluded the population, this was because there
was no affinity between the people, he assumes. At the end, when Arabs
arrived, it was because they “shared the same Semitic origin” that
allowed them to accept Islam and “live side by side.”27 Yet in this
racial history, and despite an effort to fuse Arabs and Berbers together,
his narrative, like those of colonial authors, is made of actors that are
Arabs and Berbers. Madani replaced the myth of Rome, but repro-
duced the myth of the Semitic origin of Berbers and Arabs as a defining
feature of the history of the Maghreb, and thus of its very present. His
24 25 26 27
Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 161.
historical narrative is not only fraught with colonial categories, the

same that were harnessed in the creation of the Maghreb, but is itself
a modern form of knowledge, one that assumes the feasibility of
accessing the past, of understanding it, and therefore of comprehending
the making of the present, the colonial one. Through his narrative, one
can see that Rome for him is France, and Arabs are still Arabs in his
time, and so were Berbers. This is even far from the conception of Ibn
Khaldûn, for whom Arabs can only be explained within a specific
generation and in relation to a tribal genealogy that constituted their
history.
Moreover, the power relations are also manifest in the very use of
names. Whereas colonial authors use the name Maghreb to mean
French possession, Salafi authors are restricted in the way they name.
They only speak in their writings of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco.
Incapable of defending the whole or rethinking it, they limit themselves
to defending a nation whose existence the colonial discourse denies. It
is this very power dynamic that allows one to understand even the birth
of names such as Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. The common idea in
the writings of Ahmed Tewfik Madani, Mubarak al-Mili, and Ben
Badis is that Algeria has always been a nation. Tunisian Salafi, such
as Béshir Sfar and Thaʿâlibi, argue similarly that Tunisia has always
been a nation. And so does al-Fassi in Morocco. Consider a book by al-
Mili, Târikh al-jazâ’ir fî al-qadîm wa al-adîth, published in 1932 in the
very context of the celebration of a century since the conquest of
Algiers, which had marked the height of French colonial triumph.28
The very title of the book announces something new: the birth of
national history. With this, Algeria is the object of a history in modern
times. It is not a colonial creation, but existed in the distant past. And it
is that history that al-Mili sets as a goal for himself to write, at the very
moment when French colonials are writing histories of the Maghreb or
histories of French Africa, or even histories of northern Africa. The
point here is not only to see how Algeria has come to occupy a place in
history, but rather, for the purpose of our general topic, what the place
of Algeria is within this larger geography called the Maghreb. How
does al-Mili perceive the part within the whole and the whole in
relation to the part that is Algeria?
28
al-Mili, Tārı̄kh al-Jazāʾir fı̄ al-qadı̄m wa-al-hadı̄th.
˙
First, al-Mili is aware that the name of Algeria is recent: “It refers to
an extended nation only with the arrival of the Ottomans.”29 Before
that, al-jazâ’ir “was the name of a great city on the Mediterranean
[bahr rumi] and was known before the arrival of the Arabs as
˙
ICOSIUM [sic].” The name Algeria is part of “a larger nation”
(waṭan kabîr) known in Phoenician times as Libya, “consisting of
Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Marrakech.” Al-Mili gives the name of
these parts according to Roman and Greek geographers. It is the Arabs
who gave the name maghrib to the region because “it is west of their
nation, Arabia.” He then lists Arab divisions of the region called
maghrib: the Near Maghrib (al-Maghrib al-Adnâ), the Middle
Maghrib (al-Maghrib al-Awsat), the Far Maghrib (al-Maghrib al-
˙
Aqsâ). However, despite this genealogy of names, al-Mili offers
a definition identical to that of the French:
Maghreb or North Africa, with all its parts, is separated from the rest of
Africa by the Sahara, some parts of which are impossible and others difficult
to access. This is why the connections (rawâbiṭ) between it [Maghreb] and
between the continent weakened to the point it almost does not count as part
of it. It constitutes a geographical, racial (jinsiya), religious and historical
unit.30
Despite an acute awareness of the entirety of which Algeria was

a part, al-Mili writes the history of Algeria, not the history of the
Maghreb. He even uses anachronisms such as the origins of old
Algerians, the ruins of old Algerians, and the lives of old Algerians.
By Algerians al-Mili means, of course, the Algerians he sees in his
everyday life, the colonized population he lives among, and the ones
not called Algerians by colonial authorities, but called the Muslim
population, or les indigènes. The name Algerians was devoted to the
European population who were born or naturalized as French in the
land demarcated as Algeria. The use of the name by al-Mili itself is
political, but the historical narrative is no less so, especially in the ways
it tells the story of the nation of Algeria, and especially in the 1930s.
Al-Mili’s overall narrative, long as it is, does not differ in essence
from the narrative we previously examined by Madani, except in
details. Like all historical narratives that are about the present, Mili’s
narrative is even more explicit. The main character of his narrative is
29 30
Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 23.
Algeria (with its two racial populations of Arabs and Berbers), its
helpers (Phoenicians and Arabs), and its anti-hero (Rome, and what
he means by Rome is France). About this, he could not be more explicit.
Having narrated Roman occupation, he ends the first volume by
saying:
If Romans lived in this epoch, they would have said: we came to save the
Berbers and spread Latin civilization (al-madaniya al-latiniya) amongst
them. And if we ask them about the degree of barbarism after a century,
they would have said: the Berber has barbaric morals and is rebellious by
nature, he does not accept to learn, and does not know how to borrow from
his Roman neighbor. But maybe they will have nothing to say if we tell them:
this nation learned well from the Phoenicians and reached, thanks to that, the
height of its glory, and founded great states (duwal ʿuzmâ). And after one
˙
century, we tell them also: this nation has again benefited from the Arabs,
and learned well from them, and recuperated its greatness, and founded great
kingdoms as in the past.31
One can see al-Mili reproduces the narrative of the Maghreb, with its
names, its geographical contours, and also with its historical narrative
that he reserves for the new entity, the same one colonial authors had
created, as a part of a whole. What is interesting is this same narrative,
with stylistic changes, was reproduced by other Salafi writers regarding
Tunisia and Morocco. Hence there is an interesting duplicate: the
Maghreb is a narrative that applies to its parts as well as to its whole.
This narrative, also found in the 1930s and 1940s among Maghrebi
nationalists, will later change to become a competitive narrative of
narrow nationalism. The dynasties of the Almohads, Almoravids, the
Merinids, the Hafsids, and the Zayanids were contested as being
Moroccan, or Algerian, or Tunisian.32
The Salafi narrative of the Arab Maghreb had a long life, not only in
different parts of the region but also in Egypt, where it resonated with
the rising Arab nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s. By the 1950s, the
Arab Maghreb had become an important part of the historiographic
narrative of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt.33 It could not be otherwise;
Nasserism, more than Baʿathism, found in the Maghreb a strong basis
31
Ibid., p. 280.
32
This nationalist competition extends beyond the history of dynasties and
includes intellectual icons (most notably Ibn Khaldûn) and cultural heritage,
including the culinary one.
33
Hussein Mounis, Fatḥ alʿArab li al-Maghrib. Cairo: Maktabat al-adab, 1947.
for its own truths about the colonial domination of Arab land. That
was also how French colonialism saw it.34 One can even say that if
Salafi historiography reinvented the Arab Maghreb out of colonial
semantics, the Arab nationalism of the Middle East used that same
narrative to claim the region as part of its then nascent geopolitics.35
Historicism and the Invention of the Present

The Salafi critiqued and yet reproduced the configuration of the region
from outside of the semantics of the French language, in Arabic. Their
purpose was to produce a counternarrative to the colonial discourse,
which is at the same time a narrative of nations. The result was still
a colonial construction, and this construction itself cannot be seen
either outside colonial semantics, despite its expression in Arabic, or
separate from colonial politics, despite its exclusion from it. Soon a new
generation of historians schooled in French institutions and masters of
the language of historical writing emerged. Moroccan historian
Abdallah Laroui sees Mohamed Salhi as a turning point, a figure who
initiated the practice of “decolonizing history.”36 Yet Laroui also
points out the limitations of Salhi who, I would say, like the Salafi,
proceeded by reversing the colonial thesis. What was needed, according
to Laroui, was both a critique of the colonial discourse and a national
interpretation of history.37 This project was carried out by Laroui
himself in a way that has not been surpassed. His historical narrative
of the Maghreb is the last of its kind and is surely the most authoritative
in the postcolonial era. While the historical narrative of Laroui is
oppositional, it has a national difference that is important to stress in
this analysis.
Not all oppositions to colonial constructions were in Arabic and not
all were religious. Secular responses by a younger generation schooled
in colonial institutions were formulated early on, some of them in
34
Robert Montagne, “L’Orient Contre l’Occident,” Etudes February 1953:
145–159.
35
Several historical narratives constructed on the Salafi model were published in
Egypt, especially in the era of Arab nationalism. See Mounis, Fatḥ alʿArab li al-
Maghrib. Abdel Hamid Zaghloul, Târîkh al-maghrib al-ʿarabi. Cairo: Dār al-
Maʻārif, 1964.
36
Mohamed Salhi, Décoloniser l’histoire: Introduction à l’histoire du Maghreb.
Paris: Maspero, 1965.
37
Abdallah Laroui, “Décoloniser l’histoire,” Hespéris 1965 (6): 239–242.
Historicism and the Invention of the Present 221
literature, especially fiction, and others in the domain of history. The

one that stands out, even today, is The History of the Maghreb pub-
lished in French by Laroui in 1970.38 Semiotics shows that the form of
a narrative is as meaningful as its content and that form and content
cannot be separated, as they were in old philological tradition.39 There
is quite a cultural paradox in a national narrative that argues that the
Maghreb is Arab and Muslim, and that it has a unity and a culture of its
own. This discrepancy between the form and the content can be
explained only once the national is examined, not as a discourse of
resistance and challenge, but rather as a genealogical narrative that
owes its very existence to the colonial. It follows, then, that given the
form and the content of the national narrative, it is not a counter-
history (of the colonial), but rather it is a postcolonial history.
Therefore, the national, as the colonial, stands as the counter-history
of the precolonial (and in this case Muslim) historiography. This
should come as no surprise, since the colonial dismissed Muslim his-
toriography (on merely authoritative grounds) as lacking historicity.40
The national followed suit most of the time. Laroui, arguably the most
influential Maghrebi national historian, sets as a goal for himself (and
for the nation) to articulate its history and thus to define its present. He
does so by arguing against colonial historiography and against what
Laroui himself calls Khaldûnism. By Khaldûnism, Laroui means the
framework of analysis, but also the theses, found in the work of Ibn
Khaldûn.41 Why Ibn Khaldûn? Because the French Ibn Khaldûn gener-
ated an entire discursive tradition that the national historian could not
ignore since it bore the name of Ibn Khaldûn and was constituted under
his authority. This discursive tradition was erected as that which
expresses, signifies, and ultimately constitutes the Maghreb.
This is what the national historian inherited – a discursive colonial
situation, itself the result of an entire age of colonial cultural produc-
tion. This colonial cultural production is nothing more and nothing less
than a narrative called the Maghreb. About it, the discourse of the
38
Laroui, L’histoire du Maghreb.
39
Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. Baltimore, MD:
Waverly Press, 1953. Algirdas-Julien Greimas, Sémantique structurae. Paris:
Larousse, 1966.
40
Gautier, Les siècles obscurs, p. 79. See for a discussion Hannoum, “La
gouvernementalite coloniale et la naissance du Khaldunisme.”
41
Abdallah Laroui, Esquisses historiques. Casablanca: Centre Culturel Arabe,
1992.
national historian is rather ambiguous. In Laroui’s narrative, the his-

tory of the Maghreb was not a history of struggle between dominating
Arabs and dominated Berbers (this is the colonial argument repeated in
the national), but rather a history of class struggle undertaken within
a national territory threatened by an imperialist other – Rome (whose
heritage, even in the Maghreb, colonial France claimed; this is the
colonial myth hiding in the skirts of the national). To quote Laroui:
The Moors were disposed peasants who chose freedom; the Numidians were
free peasants and farm workers who periodically avenged themselves on their
exploiters. It was on the one hand a national, on the other a social, protest.
Roman development of the land brought not only forced sedentarization, but
also exhaustion of the soil, deforestation and social debasement.42
One can see how the term Berber, so dear to colonial authors, is
replaced in the quote by other names, Moors and Numidians, each term
endowed with a socioeconomic meaning, not a racial one. However,
despite or because of this effort to delegitimize the colonial discourse of
the race struggle, Laroui could not ignore the very important question
of the origins of the “races,” which is part and parcel of the colonial
discourse. In fact, the category of origin itself is a colonial category. As
seen earlier, the colonial discourse traces the origins of Berbers to
Europe. The thesis of the European racial origin of the Berbers makes
the race struggle not only between Berbers and Arabs, but also between
the latter and Europeans, who, by it, are given the legitimacy to be
“here” to liberate. Laroui offers rather a narrative of diversity, mostly
socioeconomic. Laroui assumes that the purported cultural unity
stemmed from the Sahara and from contact with the Mediterranean,
which resulted in the end of cultural diversity (itself relative, given the
“Eastern” origins of Mediterranean countries). Thus the problems of
the origin of both sets of cultures and inhabitants are differently solved;
both are originally diverse and both are originally Oriental. The
Phoenicians did not play any role in a civilizing mission, but only
brought urban commerce to an agricultural society. Nevertheless, and
as a result of this contact, one finds at center stage the formation of
monarchies in the north, which in some ways ultimately created
a discontinuity between the east and north. Thus, one can find the
three geographical divisions of North Africa: the Sahara, the east
42
Laroui, L’histoire du Maghreb, p. 55.
(where a number of colonies developed), and the north, where local

monarchies established themselves. This division, already established
by the Phoenicians, became more flagrant during the two centuries of
Roman occupation. While the east was under occupation, in the south,
the Sahara had become a refuge for those who chose freedom instead of
submission to Rome.
It is clear to see here how instead of the historical narrative of the
struggle of races, Laroui maintained (and in fact imported) the narra-
tive of the struggle of classes. The transition from one – the race
struggle – to the other – the class struggle – was natural because the
narrative of the struggle of classes itself has its origin in the narrative of
the struggle of races. Karl Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels, saying “but,
our class struggle, you know very well where we found it: we found it in
the [work of] French historians when they narrated the race
struggle.”43 The national historian operated here, then, the same trans-
formation created by the European historians of the nineteenth century
in the discourse of class struggle. This means that even within the
framework of the nation, epistemological discontinuities are nothing
but continuities of the former colonizer. What happens in the second
sooner or later happens in the first.
It is also clear how this discourse is fraught with colonial categories,
some of which may not seem so. Categories such as “foreign,” “occu-
pation,” “domination,” and “liberation” all denote the national body.
In colonial narratives, they were introduced to maintain the thesis of
the Arab (race) invading and dominating “the Berber” (race) who were
liberated by the French (nation). The terms foreign, occupation, and
domination draw their meanings only from within the frame of the
national semantics that establish who is “us” and who is “other,” what
territory is “occupied” and what territory is or has to be “liberated.”
What the population of the region referred to in Muslim historiography
as Ifriqiya thought of these “events” at the time of their occurrence, no
one asked. However, for the sake of clarity, given the absence of the
major category of the nation, the absence of its associated categories
must have been also absent in precolonial times in the region.
Equally absent from previous pre-national writings is the name
Maghreb itself. The name was made mostly popular by Gautier, and
43
Cited in Michel Foucault, Il Faut défendre la société. Paris: Hautes Etudes,
1997, p. 69.
behind it is a whole colonial politics of naming that had to isolate

a French zone called the “Maghreb” as distinct from what is not
French, and give it a personality of its own that cuts it from other
colonial entities, eastward, westward, and southward, in a complex
game called “geopolitics.” Laroui himself seems well aware of this, or
why else would he write: “The idea is to trace the genesis of the concept
of the Maghreb and discover how it ultimately took on an objective
definition”? Yet he does not show how the name itself is colonial and
because it is so, the name itself is an appearance of colonial power. For,
as Judith Butler, echoing Nietzsche, nicely put it: “Power comes to
appear as something other than itself, indeed, it comes to appear as
a name.”44 Regardless of the national historian’s impressive intellec-
tual strength, and even acuity, he accepts colonial naming and reiter-
ates colonial categories, even when he does so to refute them. The
question now is: could he have done otherwise?
Here, one can see the pervasive power of the colonial over the
national and cannot but accept the argument of Benedict Anderson
that nationalism in the third world is a colonial import and that the
nation was also imagined on the colonial model.45 Such an argu-
ment, I believe, was misunderstood by Partha Chatterjee, who
argues for a thesis that would rather give credit to the third world
and restore their agency. He maintains, as a counterargument, that
the third world did not seem to even have an agency to imagine
itself.46 While one can understand Chatterjee as consistent with
Foucault’s theory of omnipresent power, Anderson’s view does
not undermine the agency of the third world, neither does it even
undermine the idea that power is everywhere. On the contrary, one
should look at the term imagination and understand it as
a philosophical and more specifically phenomenological concept.
To imagine is not to create ex nihilo, but rather “imagining is the
restructuring of semantic fields.”47 Even a discursive Foucauldian
approach maintains that an “idea is born out of an idea not out of
44
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York:
Routledge, 1997, p. 35.
45
Anderson, Imagined Communities.
46
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
47
Paul Ricoeur, “Imagination in Discourse and Action,” in Rethinking
Imagination, ed. Gillian Robinson and John Rundell. New York: Routledge,
1994, pp. 18–35.
the absence of an idea.”48 Therefore, what the nationalists have

imagined – that is, created – whether in Algeria, India, or elsewhere,
is a transformation of available colonial semantics. Yet such trans-
formation bears within itself the unequal power relationship
between what is transformed and what it is being transformed
from. The concept of the nation, with its key categories of unity,
territory, language, history, progress, modernity, and even will, is
comprised of colonial modern categories, regardless of their restruc-
turing in national narratives. Nationalism in Europe was trans-
formed out of the semantics (or the content) of what Anderson
calls print capitalism.49 Third world nationalism is a restructuring
of colonial semantics. It is an idea created out of another one.
Anderson does not maintain that nationalism in Europe is the
same as that in Indonesia. Rather, nationalism in the third world
was an import and because it was so, it had to adjust to where it was
imported to. Yet the national ideologue (in the form of a historian,
a writer, a politician, or all of the above) had nothing available to
him but those same colonial categories that he oftentimes reversed
and, in doing so, not only reproduced but also perpetuated.
Such national discourse, created out of the colonial semantics, in
reaction to it, and often against it, has been espoused by the nation-
state. It constitutes the discourse of the nation. It remains, as of today,
the main and maybe the sole legitimate reference on the history of the
Maghreb. It offers a national narrative, but also a colonial critique.
Because it does so, it is called by its authors and its readers alike
a “decolonization of history.” But such a narrative, as we saw, is not
decolonizing. For in order to be so, the historian needs to manage to
either become epistemologically able to ignore the colonial – which is
impossible given the effective postcolonial power axis shaping the
imagined national community – or to become a critic and engage in
an examination of colonial discursive practices in and of themselves, in
order to deconstruct them and show how they have participated in the
making of a postcolonial culture in whose webs the national subject is
still caught or rather suspended. Such a project is possible, only now,
because it links itself to other postcolonial histories and anthropolo-
gies, especially in India and Latin America, where different conditions
gave birth to a postcolonial epistemology.
48 49
Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
Let us make clearer that the foregoing critique does not mean that the
national historian missed the point and did nothing but perpetuate
colonial symbolic domination. The culture of nationalism that the
national historian articulated and helped to put in place was perhaps
what was needed in the period following independence, when national-
ism constituted the cultural and political horizon of what was then called
the third world. Compared to the colonial condition, nationalism offered
what one may call an ideology of hope. However, half a century of state
nationalism, through violent events inside and outside the borders of the
nation, should make one think that nationalism should be subject to
a rigorous critique to show its limitations and lay down the necessary
conditions to go beyond it. However, what I wanted to underscore by
this examination of Laroui’s text is the fact that the relation between the
national and the colonial is a relation of continuity, not rupture, and that
a critique, an engagement with the colonial discourse, in its language, in
a postcolonial context still marked by colonial legacy, could not but
reproduce the colonial text, and with it its own reconfiguration of the
region, and conception of it, and of course its own name, the Maghreb.
Fiction and Geopolitics

Literature, more specifically fiction, has a specificity common to ethno-
graphic writing: it too stresses the local, the specific, the ordinary, and
the contingent. Even though it focuses on the details of everyday life,
these details that may appear trivial speak to larger issues.50 Literature
was (and still is, to a large extent) context specific, yet in its local
specificity there is something transcendental; it strives for meaning of
a higher order, its expression is more abstract, more symbolic, and also
more elusive than the ethnographic narrative. This is the case even
among literature that tends toward realism, the most common literary
trend with the rise of nationalism. And like ethnography, there seems to
be a tacit principle of the division of intellectual labor. By tackling
larger issues through small facts, the ethnographer and the literary
author both are well aware of the fact that they write within a larger
field of representation consisting of different experiences and a variety
of human experiences. They also engage in forms of writing as
50
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1973,
p. 23.
Fiction and Geopolitics 227
primordial characteristics of the craft. “What do ethnographers do?

They write,” Clifford Geertz noticed. And they write different forms,
some of which are literary in one or another tradition.51
Thus, to understand Paris in the nineteenth century, one ought to
understand also the ensemble of its literary depictions. A highly prolific
writer such as Honoré de Balzac may indeed capture Paris at a certain
time, but his is only one expression; to read more literature about the
city at that time allows more nuances, more points of view, and thus
a larger social discourse on Paris, or to speak like Edmund Husserl, it is
to receive multisided views of the city and the experiences of its inhab-
itants. Consider the Orient Edward Said studied half a century ago.52
What created the Orient was not only the work of Gustave Flaubert or
Gérard de Nerval but an entire literature with many authors, the major
and the minor ones. This is what Edward Said also understood when he
said that he wants “to see Camus’ fiction as an element in France’s
methodically constructed political geography of Algeria, which took
many generations to complete, the better to see it as providing an
arresting account of the political and interpretative context to repre-
sent, inhabit, and possess the territory itself – at exactly the same time
that the British were leaving India.”53 What Albert Camus and an
entire generation of writers accomplished in Algeria was to not only
possess Algeria but also to connect Algeria to its larger context, which
colonials called the Maghreb. And what Camus and generations of
writers did in Algeria became part of a regional heritage, to be added to
what Jean and Jérôme Tharaud and entire generations of French
writers did in Morocco and Tunisia. What is called Francophonie is,
at the end, this tradition of literary representations, with its language,
its aesthetics, its repertoire of images and, of course, a tremendous
amount of prestige bestowed upon it.
Literature speaks and also provides the language of the nation. In this
sense, its crafted writing is a model of – and a model for – reality, to
borrow the words of Geertz. If this is the case, the question is: Given its
focus on individual experiences, on localities, on the everyday, how has
literature participated in the creation of the Maghreb, a geographic
51
Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist As Author. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Also, for the writing of Claude Lévi-
Strauss within the tradition of symbolism, see James Boon, From Symbolism to
Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972.
52
Said, Orientalism. 53 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 176.
formation that undoubtedly transcends the nation? In what language(s)

was this creation undertaken, what small details were used to create its
edifice? In what ways do these small details express the Maghreb? What
are the sources of the creation?
Generally, literature offers more freedom of national representation
than do historical narratives. In literature, one finds a variety of such
representations, some of them openly and unapologetically diverse.
Beyond Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma, one can find an array of alternative
national narratives, especially about the Berbers, by authors such as
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine54 and Jean Amrouche. Fiction allows his-
toriography to reach a larger audience, but also it allows it a greater
effect on shaping national imaginaries. For fiction operates through
images, not through arguments. Therefore it is my contention that the
role of fiction in the creation of the Maghreb went hand in hand with
colonial constructions. Postcolonial literature, especially the franco-
phone production, echoes colonial historiography and only rarely
Arabic historiography.55
The literature of the region is marked by specific texts celebrated as
canonical because they are expressions of the nation in its sublime
form, in its essence, in its ideals. Yacine’s Nedjma is the novel that
marks the Algerian nation. Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi’s poem “Life’s
Will” (irâdat al-ḥayât) undoubtedly captures the Tunisian national
condition and its aspirations for nationhood and freedom.56 The liter-
ary work of Allal al-Fassi and Abdallah Guennoun, consisting of essays
and poems in Arabic, can be seen as the expression of Moroccan
nationalism. Even the francophone work of Driss Chraïbi can be
considered an example of the post-independence national condition,
marked by the struggle between tradition and modernity.57 One thing
immediately catches the eye: national fiction in the region is not about
the region of the Maghreb as such; it is about the nation (i.e., Morocco,
Tunisia, Algeria). Second, canonical national fiction is expressed, espe-
cially in the immediate post-independence years, in French, in the
54
Mohamed Khair Ed-Dine, Agadir. Paris: Seuil, 1967.
55
Such literature remained almost unknown. An example of this is a short story
that argues, in the tradition of Ibn Khaldûn, of the Arab origins of the Berbers by
Mohamed Hassar, “Abhathʿan barbari” (“In Search of a Berber”). Published in
Majallat al-maghrib December 1933 15(10).
56
Abû al-Qasim al-Shabi, “Irâdatual hayat,” in Dîwân Abû al-Qâsim al-Shabi.
Beirut: Dâr al-ʻAwdah, 1972.˙ ˙
57
Driss Chraïbi, Le passé simple. Paris: Denoël, 1954.
colonial language, not in the languages that the nation now claims (i.e.,
Arabic or Amazigh).
But if there is no Maghrebi character in fiction it is because literature
does not take larger geographies as the theater of its narrations.
Literary characters are specific, with clear individualities, with names,
a lexicon, and a world all their own. Such is the case of the four friends
in Nedjma: Lakhdar, Mourad, Mustapha, and Rachid. Nedjma herself
is a character, a woman, a symbol of the nation; she is there, but cannot
be seen, and she is a nedjma (“star”). She is Algeria, but she could have
also been the Maghreb; she shares all the characteristics of the region
and not just Algeria. Nedjma (not any nedjma, but an eight-pointed
star), as a symbol, is inscribed in the most authentic art of the region: in
ceramics, in mosques, in houses, in palaces, in plates, in rugs, in short,
in every aspect of the Maghreb. Its imprint is also inscribed in the very
novel of Yacine, with its eight parts. It is le polygone étoilé (“a star-
shaped polygon”).58
In his novel Le polygone étoilé, originally part of Nedjma, the charac-
ters are national characters – that is, Algerians. But the Maghreb appears
here and there, associated with some of them. The character Nedjma is
considered in this novel “the star of the Maghreb.”59 Ibn Khaldûn, as
a historical character, is also associated with the Maghreb. “The
Maghreb calls him back to Bougie.”60 Maghrebi is also used to describe
a veil that Nedjma wears as dark blue “à la Maghrébine.”61 Moreover,
political and geographical frontiers of Algeria themselves may appear,
for instance, “frontières Algéro-Tunisiennes,”62 with Morocco also
appearing in different indirect references.63 The point here is while the
novel participates in substantiating the nation, it does so within a larger
unit of which it is a part. In his interviews, Yacine claims Africa to be the
larger unit encompassing Algeria, but these remain declarations lacking
the historical and cultural elements that cement Algeria to the continent.
In his novels, he is able to weave these elements in such a way so as to
attach Algeria to the Maghreb, yet he also distinguishes it from the
region by focusing on unique historical elements, most notably the
symbol of Algerian nationalism, the founder of the Algerian nation:
58
For an analysis of the polygon in the work of Yacine, see Bernard Aresu,
“Polygonal and Arithmosophical Motifs: Their Significance in the Fiction of
Kateb Yacine,” Research in African Literatures 1978 (9)2: 143–175.
59
Kateb Yacine, Le polygone étoilé. Paris: Seuil, 1966, p. 142. 60 Ibid., p. 80.
61
Ibid., p. 153. 62 Ibid., p. 180. 63 Ibid., pp. 77–78.
Abdel Kader. Unlike the sultan of Morocco, Abdel Kader is “a man of

the pen and the sword, the only chief capable of uniting the tribes into
a nation.”64
By contrast, in the work of Camus, the Algerian did not exist; or
rather he existed anonymously as the Arab with no name, no individu-
ality, no history, no voice, and no language. Yacine, using the very same
colonial language, depicts voices, faces, and names that come from
deep in Algeria. His characters are those found in the everyday; they
are the ordinary Algerians living in a colonized society and aspiring for
more, including, in the case of Nejdma’s four protagonists, the white
French girl they can see, dream of, and yet will never reach. It is also
from deep in Algeria that Mohammed Dib populates his novel
L’incendie with the stories of men and women living day to day amidst
the challenges of colonial occupation and suffering social exclusion
even in their own village.
In Shabbi’s most celebrated poem, al-Shaʿb (“The People”), a new
collectivity erupts with force in the national imaginary – and from their
will comes liberty and freedom. Compared with its neighbors, Tunisia
appears the most Arab – that is, the most Arabized, with a recognized
Berber population of barely 1 percent; it comes as no surprise that it is
poetry, in a classical form, that expresses what is most Tunisian about
Tunisia.
In Morocco, the construction of the nation was done by its Fassi
bourgeois: Chraïbi, Abdelmajid Benjelloun, Abdelkrim Ghallab, and
the older generation of Abdallah Guennoun and Allal al-Fassi. And the
culture they expressed was mostly an Andalusian one: music, dress,
names, and tastes that are distinct from and even exclude the several
other ways of being in Moroccan society. For Chraïbi, it is the
Moroccan bourgeoisie (Andalusians to boot) that populate the
national imaginary: they are young, rebel against tradition, are open
to modernity, and are unshakable in their belief in the nation. And in
Moroccan literature, the expression of the nation was mostly (though
not exclusively) in Arabic. This last point explains, to a certain extent,
why francophone literature, including the work of Chraïbi himself, was
marginalized, drawing the attention mostly of intellectual elites from
Chraïbi’s own milieu – the milieu of the Fassi bourgeois of colonial
64
Kateb Yacine, Nedjma, trans. Richard Howard. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1991, p. 135.
times. However, within the linguistic dynamics of colonial (and post-

colonial) times, Arabic does not stand alone. It exists, as we saw in the
previous chapter, in relation to other languages: in subordination to
French (a language of modernity, according to its ideology), and dom-
inant vis-à-vis all Berber linguistic variations. This is to say that even as
the expression of the nation is in Arabic, France is omnipresent. The
question of modernity is central to the work of the first generation of
Moroccan writers.
The construction of the nation in Morocco, despite the dominance of
Fassi men, was also constructed via other experiences, those of women,
of Berbers, of Jews.65 These experiences appear later, in the work of
authors especially in the postcolonial era, and were often excluded
from the national curricula. For instance, the Berber component
appears early on, as might be expected, in the work of
Khaïr-Eddine,66 Mohamed Choukri, and Mohamed Zefzaf. The
Maghrebi novel of the post-independence era articulates the distinct
culture of each nation-state, yet the genre itself, in France as well as
elsewhere, is specific to a geography called Le Maghreb. And thus one
finds its common name, littérature maghrébine, even though it is often
also called littérature maghrébine d’expréssion française to distinguish
it, of course, from its arabophone twin that too expresses something
similar, but more in line with Arabophonie, and finds its main audience
in the Middle East. Francophone literature finds its audience (as well as
most of its publishers) in metropolitan France.
These expressions of nationhood are not of the region, yet they are
decidedly part of it. Literature depicts particularities, but it also opens
up geographical horizons, especially when these particularities reson-
ate, calling forth other particularities, the sum of which is precisely the
Maghreb. For the Maghreb has particularities and resonances, among
them the colonial experience and invention of the region – and, import-
antly, the very language of this experience and invention. Language is
in itself a repository of memory; it stores the categories, the images, old
and new constructions, and releases them again and again in the work
of those that speak the language. It is this language that created the
Maghreb, and it is also this language that came to define it as such, and
65
Jonathan Wyrtzen, Making Morocco: Colonial Interventions and the Politics of
Identity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016.
66
Mohamed Khair Ed-Dine; see especially his novel Agadir.
that deepened its roots with the efforts of native authors in colonial
times. Of this, Yacine was well aware: “Francophonie is a neo-colonial
machine, it does nothing but perpetuate our alienation.”67
In colonial times, and at the height of the Algerian revolution, Yacine
wrote in French. In order to be heard, he needed to write in French: “I
write in French to tell the French I am not French.”68 Yet he also wrote
to demonstrate the existence of Algeria. He narrated the experiences of
ordinary youth, described colonial society with its settlers in their
particular relation to natives. He also attempted to connect the present
to the past – an important undertaking, especially considering how
hegemonic and ubiquitous the historiographic discourse was. It is
especially in his examination of the past that the colonial shows its
uncanny power of subversion. Yacine seems to argue against Salafi
historiographic representations of the past, though, like the Salafi, his
main source was the same colonial historiography. He thus argues
against the Arab myth of the Salafi using the Berber myth. Even though
the context was Algeria, both myths speak to the entire region, whose
racial construction is made of the opposition of these two myths.
Algeria, as part and parcel of a larger narrative called the Maghreb,
was (as it still is) ubiquitous, powerful, and discursively self-generative
even (or especially) when it is opposed. In it is the colonial and the local
(colonized), the discourse of the colonial author and the discourse of
the arabophone author, the narrative of the colonial author and the
narrative of the francophone author. The name Maghreb illustrates
these heteroclite, discursive elements all produced by coloniality even
in the form of “resistance.”
Consider the name Maghreb; it is almost unchallenged. It appears
Arab, even local, from the heart of the local tradition, yet it is
a francophone name as well, invented from a translated Arabic trad-
ition, its “foreign” resonance hiding its colonial invention. When
Yacine rejects the name of Algeria (because it is Arab; he would reject
the name Maghreb for the same reason), he suggests, “we should say
African.”69 His was a lone voice in the wilderness. Africa itself was
constructed as black, and neither the population to the north nor the
populations in the rest of Africa saw it otherwise. For the population of
the northern part of the continent, their region is “white.” The
67 68
Kateb Yacine, Le poète comme un boxeur. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Ibid.
69
Ibid.
Maghreb turns its back to Africa and looks toward the Middle East and
Europe (i.e., France). For the rest of the population of Africa, Africa is
black.70
In literature, the Maghreb exists the same way France exists: in
pieces, in subtle ways in the work of its writers, poets, and artists.
The existence of the Maghreb in this body of colonial and postcolonial
literature is also, ipso facto, the existence of colonial France, with its
images reproduced (even when reversed), its language, the form of its
colonial culture (the novel, the essay), and even the journals (Esprit, Les
Temps Modernes, etc.) and the publishing houses (notably Seuil for
canonical writers such as Yacine and Mohamed Dib). Yet this body of
literature does not depict the totality of the Maghreb, only particular-
ities, only individual experiences, only lives in smaller locales. Within
each nation, this literature is considered national (Moroccan, or
Algerian, or Tunisian); outside of it, especially in France, it earns the
label of Maghrebi literature.
However, what one may find most important in the literary con-
struction of the region as part of a larger unit that was called the
Mashreq (a version of the Middle East) was the fact that in the national
curricula of the five countries of the region (that include Mauritania
and Libya) was the diffusion of literature of the Arab Renaissance
(adab al-nahda) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Writers and poets such as Georgy Zaydan, Mustafa al-Manfaluti,
Ahmed Shawqi, Kahlil Gibran, Taha Hussein, Abbas Mahmood al-
ʿAqqad, and many others enjoyed immense popularity in the region,
even amongst francophone authors themselves. Also this Nahda litera-
ture considered pre-Islamic poetry, called the muʿallaqât, as the foun-
dation of Arab culture.71 Both the Nahda literature and the premodern
Arabic literature (pre-Islamic, Islamic, Omayyad, and Abbasid) consti-
tuted the foundation of the high culture of the region of the Maghreb
and attached it deeply to the Mashreq, where the same literature was
70
Not only in Africa, but even beyond it. In the United States, for instance, African
studies programs as well as African and African American studies are essentially
Black studies. The Maghreb almost never can be found there. It is found in the
Department of Middle Eastern studies, if only marginally.
71
Muʿallaqât: seven according to some scholars of Arabic poetry, ten according to
others. These pre-Islamic poems constitute the foundation of Arabic literature.
Arabs in pre-Islamic times selected them, wrote them in golden ink, and hung
them on the walls of the Kaaba. They are known in several translations in
English and in French.
also claimed as foundational for the al-Qawmiya al-ʿArabiya (Arab

nationalism). Consider this statement of Taha Hussein, the dean of
Arabic literature, from the 1920s: “We want our ancient literature to
be the foundation of culture, the nourishment of our minds because it is
the base of our Arab culture. Thus, it constitutes our identity and
achieves our national unity. It prevents us from dissolving into the
foreign (ajnabi) and helps us know ourselves.”72 Taha Hussein was
speaking of Egypt in the 1920s, but this statement was echoed, because
of his tremendous influence, throughout Arabic-speaking countries.
After all, he only expressed what millions then felt and what states
were pursuing as an educational policy.
However, the emergence of the Arab Maghreb was nurtured as much
by political alliances, according to geopolitics, as by policies of cultural
cementation, not only with the Mashreq but also with its very founda-
tion, classical Arabic literature (adab). Therefore two versions of the
Maghreb coexisted in the region, a francophone one instituted by the
powerful institution of Francophonie, and an Arab one assured by
the nation-state that strategically attached itself to the Middle East
more than to Africa through education policies shared across Arabic-
speaking countries. Yet the realities are complex. The region also
remains attached to France, in an unequal power relation still manifest
today. It also remains attached to the Middle East by the same history
one finds in the national and Salafi discourses.
Arabism and Negritude: Who Is “Really” African?

If, by the time of independence, the region under consideration
emerged as the Maghreb, but with an Arab identity that linked its
past and its destiny to the Middle East and that made it part and parcel
of a geopolitical entity called the Arab world, that association further
disconnected the Maghreb from Africa, itself constructed mainly in
terms of color. We can see in the historical writings, echoed by political
statements of national leaders, that the region of the Maghreb, the same
l’Afrique Blanche, consecrated the rupture between the region as con-
structed by colonial powers and Africa. Caught in the semantics of the
colonial discourse and its power dynamics, authors in Tunisia, Algeria,
72
Taha Hussein, Hadith al-Arabiʿa. Cairo: Matbaà tijariya, 1926. Reprint:
Beirut: Dar al-kitâb al-lubnâni, 1973, p. 17.
Arabism and Negritude: Who Is “Really” African? 235
and Morocco reproduced the categories, and in reproducing the cat-

egories, they produced the images, albeit with changes and transform-
ations that were themselves conditioned by power dynamics of the
colonial discourse and its chains of reasoning. In this reproduction,
the region of the Maghreb emerged (as Arab) and its disconnection
with Africa was reinforced (despite the existence of cultural, religious,
economic connections) in favor of the geography of race established by
colonial technologies of power, as we have seen in previous chapters.
The question now is: how did the intellectual from “Black Africa”
think about his region and its relations to its surroundings, its history,
and its destiny? In other terms, how did he construct his own imaginary
region?
To answer this question, I examine the work of a major Senegalese
intellectual whose work was influential in shaping the views of gener-
ations of Africans about Africa. Cheikh Anta Diop is an interesting
figure also because his intervention is anthropological. He himself
traces his intellectual heritage to Gaston Bachelard, Marcel Griaule,
and André Leroi-Gourhan, the last two being demigods in the field of
French anthropology and the first in philosophy, specifically a pioneer
in the philosophy of science. At the outset, Diop clarifies the aim of his
book called The Cultural Unity of Black Africa:
I attempt to depart from the material conditions to explain all the cultural
characteristics common to Africans, from domestic lives to the one of the
nation, to the ideological superstructure, the successes, the failures, and
technical regressions.73
Both in the title and the introduction what is clearly announced is

a project focused on the continuity of colonial constructions of Africa
as Black Africa and the essentialist idea of its cultural unity. Defining
a population by a continent is a colonial novelty that arose in the
nineteenth century as a result of colonial powers dividing the world
into entities – large, such as Africa and Europe, and small such as North
and South America or Asia. Racial categories were also instrumental in
these constructions: Africa is black, Europe is white, Asia is yellow, the
Americas are red, and Australia is black. But amongst this array of
73
Cheikh Anta Diop, L’unite culturelle de l’Afrique noire. Dakar: Présence
Africaine, 1954, p. 7.
colors, blackness was often cited as an index of both early biological

development and cultural primitiveness.
Diop’s project also carries within it the germ of the racial ideas that
were instrumental in defining these large and small units – some of
which we discussed in previous chapters, notably the idea of the
Maghreb itself in relation to West, Central, and East Africa. Culture
was also a colonial analytical concept that was introduced to nuance
the concept of race. In the French language (and even in the social
sciences tradition), culture means something different from the com-
mon Anglo-American concept of culture worked out by Franz Boas,
Ruth Benedict, Geertz, and others. Culture, in that tradition, generally
means the system of symbols by which humans create the world; it is
constituted of ideas and actions. It is this creation that defines what it is
to be human.74 Last, the citation just given also assumes the existence
of a culture common to Africans – all of them, or at least all those who
qualify to be called Africans. Some people may not.
A prolific writer, but also one who often repeats himself, Diop not
only inscribes names and ways of naming that are colonial, but also
undertakes a reversed civilizing mission, one more comprehensive,
more holistic, and more totalizing than the ones encountered in the
colonial discourse with its varieties and variations. Diop’s narrative
centralizes Africa of course, but without provincializing Europe. And
this is not because his own discourse is European, with its language
(French), its system of references from anthropology, archaeology,
history, etc., but also because at the center of his narrative is Europe
itself. At first sight, Africa seems to be the main historical actor of this
seemingly African narrative because, according to Diop, Africa is the
origin of humanity, the origin of civilization, the origin of all origins.
But Diop is writing about an Africa constructed in colonial times,
whose essence is color (race) and primitiveness (animism, witchcraft,
etc.). Diop’s Africa is Black and that is also its name: Afrique Noire.
Thus the narrative of origins Diop articulates is also found in colo-
nial narratives. However, in colonial narratives, the narrative of origin
is also a narrative of being stuck in early human development. It is
a narrative of progress that defines Black Africa negatively. Here,
unlike the Salafi Maghrebi writers who relied on Islamic
74
See Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures. Also see Ruth Benedict, Patterns of
Culture. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
historiography, and even unlike Laroui, Hichem Djait, and Mohamed

Talbi, who rely on the same historiography and on historical methods
in fashion at the time, Diop relies exclusively on the European “sci-
ences” to make Black Africa appear differently. But it appears reversed.
Black Africa, in this narrative, erases particularities, localities, and
distinctiveness, and appears as an expansive Black entity that sweeps
aside not only all its parts, but also Europe itself. Black Africa is all that
exists in Diop; there is no “White Africa” against which “Black Africa”
was constructed. The region of northern Africa disappears in black-
ness. Africa becomes Black and Black is what Africa is. Even Egypt,
used by colonials to distinguish Africa from Asia, has been blackened in
Diop’s narrative. Egypt was black. Its civilization was black. Its
achievements are black. The history of Africa is a Black history with
Egypt as a central character. Yet Diop does not displace Europe, he
does not provincialize it; he participates in the creating of an African
Black imaginary populated by colonial imageries. Europe is expressed
all over his discourse, or to be more precise, Europe is the manifestation
of that discourse itself, with its grammar, its semantics, its aesthetics, its
politics, its imagery, its scientific paradigms, its mode of knowing, and
its claims to truth.
The hegemonic discourse of Europe (i.e., France) on Africa, because
of its racial dynamics of superiority, offers itself to critique and chal-
lenge. This is a discursive trap. Critique is what allows it to generate
and multiply, and multiplication keeps it alive. Of course Diop is
situated in the privileged position of speaking for himself, for his
people, for Africa.75 Critique is a response, but the response itself is
commanded; it sets the rules by which a response may be formulated.
However, the grammars of these rules are themselves the grammars of
the colonial discourse: race, blackness, Africa, Europe, civilization,
progress, primitiveness, Islam, animism, jihad, Sufism, nation-state,
tribes, nomadism, tribalism, witchcraft, origins, destiny, science,
anthropology, the very conceptions of history itself. And finally, the
imaginary of an educated person is made of a colonial library. Diop is
Mustapha Said, Mustapha Said is also Leopold Senghor and the Black
intellectual of Africa who sets as a goal for himself to reverse the image
Europe created for him. Mustapha Said is the Black Muslim hero of
75
Francois-Xavier Fouvelle, L’Afrique de Cheikh Anta Diop. Paris: Karthala,
1996.
Season of Migration to the North, the one who was expulsed from
Europe for his alleged barbarism. Yet his mind, his home, his library,
are European made.76 The citation as a metaphor points toward the
colonized imaginary (with its canonical references and lack of refer-
ences that question them and open the horizon to a new imaginary – the
absence of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, among many others). Like
Diop, Senghor had a similar, yet different project he expressed in his
defense of the literary movement of negritude. Negritude constructs
Africa as black and therefore as racial, making the northern part that
includes Egypt alien to the continent because it is assumed to be devoid
of the blackness that defines Africa.
Since language was also important in making the separation dis-
cussed earlier in Chapter 3, African authors used the same means to
connect Black Africa to Egypt, while also disconnecting the same Black
Africa from North Africa. Arabic was not part of the argument since it
was considered by and large a Semitic language. But Berber, in the
colonial linguistic discourse, was initially part of the so-called Hamitic
languages before the term was replaced by Afro-Asian languages.
Théophile Obenga, whose project is similar to that of Diop, attempted
to establish that linguistic kinship between ancient Egyptian and what
he calls negro-African languages. Since ancient Egyptian is extinct,
Obenga considers Coptic a parent to it. But not Berber: “We see easily
that Berber deviates by itself from Egyptian and from negro-African
[languages] in vocalized sounds that are apparently inherited.”77
Intellectuals from West Africa had vested interest in prehistory, in
the question of origins, in early man and early civilizations.
Intellectuals from northern Africa had interest in the Islamic period,
the one expressed in Arabic, in order to link themselves to Arab-ness,
and therefore to a geographical area outside the continent itself. Both
were reactions to the colonial discourse. The first claims universalism
and a blackness of prehistorical times, including those that precede
European geography and its populations. The second claims particu-
larism and sees itself as part of the Arab nation, which was a highly
popular claim then and was also strategic. These articulations of geog-
raphy and race were also expressed in literature, especially essays and
76
Tayeb Saleh, Season of Migration to the North. New York: New York Review of
Books, 2009.
77
Théophille Obenga, “Egyptien ancient et négro-africain,” Cahiers Ferdinand de
Saussure 1971–1972 (27): 6–92.
fiction at the moment of the creation of the nation-states. But what

about Islam?
Diop is consistent in his racial thinking; Whites (he calls Berbers)
tried to impose Islam by force, but only once – when “the Amoravids
besieged Aoudaghast and Ghana” in the first half of the eleventh
century.78 But Islam spread rather peacefully, first thanks to Arabo-
Berber travelers and second, more massively, by the efforts of Black
African “national chiefs.” Diop gives reason for the “successful spread
of Islam” among Black Africans. “There is, in his view, a metaphysical
relationship between African beliefs and the ‘Muslim tradition.’”79
And African religions, at the time of conversion, were dying, Diop
argues. Yet Diop also Africanizes Islam and harbors its accomplish-
ments against dominant white Europe. He agrees that “Islam has often
been the mystical underpinning of African nationalism,” and he nar-
rates the epics of Mahdi of Sudan and Amadu Sheiku, among others.
Though Diop’s major issue is white Europe, he refuses to concede to it
on any front. Just like W. E. B. Dubois before him,80 Diop runs the
gamut against white Europe. If Europe has Christianity, Africa has
Islam. He writes:
Mohammedan Black Africa in the Middle Ages was no less original than
Christian Europe at the close of antiquity. Both continents were invaded in
the same way by alien monotheistic religions which ended up being at the
foundation of the entire sociopolitical organization, ruling philosophical
thought, and carrying forward intellectual and moral values during this
whole period.81
Europe has Greece, but Africa has Egypt, Diop argues. For Diop,
Egypt is not only an extension of West Africa (or the rest of Africa), it is
rather Africa itself, a Negro Africa. Egypt is that which allows Diop to
make civilizational claims over Europe via Greece. But it is interesting
to note that while the West African looks at Egypt to counter the
colonial civilizing mission with a Black civilizing mission, the Arab
intellectual (in the dominant literary figure of Taha Hussein) uses
78
Diop, Precolonial Black Africa Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Book, 1988, p. 163.
79
Ibid.
80
W. E. B Dubois, “The Soul of White Folks, 1920,” in Voices of the African
American Experience, ed. Lionel Bascom. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2009, pp.
385–394. Also in The World and Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007. First published in 1949.
81
Diop, Precolonial Africa, p. 173.
Egypt to run away from Africa and connect to Europe. Egypt for him
was part of Europe, an idea promulgated by the Kedives of Egypt and
that found an echo among Egyptian elites.82 While on his annual
vacation in France, Taha Hussein heard the news that Egypt was
plagued by cholera. It was a shocking reminder for him that Egypt is
part of Africa (not Europe). For cholera was an African disease!83
In the time of Nasser, Egypt turned toward Africa, even as Nasser
officially advocated an Arab nationalism. Continental affinities had to
be found to create more political alliances in a world still dominated by
European powers. It is in this context that a conference on the topic of
Arabism and Africa was organized in Cairo in February 1967. The
speakers were distinguished. One of them was the sparkling literary and
political figure of Senghor. Invited, Senghor prepared a long, rather diffi-
cult discourse titled Négritude and Arabisme. In it, he aims to show the
similarities and differences between what he calls, following colonial
authors, Arabo-Berbers and Negro Africans which is, for him, first
a racial division between “marginal whites” and “marginal blacks.”84
Despite his ingenuity in showing similarities in languages and cultures, the
division between northern Africa, inhabited by Arabo-Berbers, and
between Negro Africa, inhabited by Blacks, is given a native authority.
And this in turn is despite Senghor’s exclusively European references
(Jacques Berque, Louis Massignon, Maurice Delafosse, among others)
and systematic use of colonial naming (Afrique noire, nègres, race, Arabs,
Berbers, Arabo-Berbers). Whereas Senghor defines the Maghreb as
inhabited by Arabo-Berbers, he identifies the Arab with the nomad in
a citation of Jacques Berque that is reminiscent of Gautier’s high
Orientalism.85 His conclusion, in which he calls for humanism, confirms
the divide between North and South. To his “Arab audience” in Egypt, he
says: “I ask you to look South as we look North so that the equilibrium of
Humanism of the twentieth century looms over the destiny of Africa.”86
82
“Egypt has always been part of Europe, in every aspect of its intellectual and
cultural life.” Taha Hussein, Mustaqbal al-thaqāfah fı̄ misr. Cairo: Hindawi,
2014 [1938], p. 29. ˙
83
Taha Hussein, al-Muʻadhdhabūn fı̄ al-ard. Dār al-Maʻārif, 1961, pp. 182–192.
˙
Cited in Abdallah Laroui, L’idéologie arabe contemporaine. Paris: Maspero,
1966, p. 17.
84
Leopold Senghor, Les fondaments de l’Africanité ou Negritude et Arabité.
Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1967.
85
Jacques Berque, Les Arabes d’hier à demain. Paris: Seuil, 1969.
86
Ibid., p. 105.
Senghor stresses then the negritude (blackness) of Africa, yet calls for
openness. This was a common view among Black Africans and even
African Americans (who influenced them), who continued to see Africa
in racial terms excluding, de facto, its northern part. Maybe that is why
when V. Y. Mudimbe published The Invention of Africa, its northern
part is entirely missing despite the fact that in colonial times (let alone
precolonial ones), the north existed in all forms of knowledge about the
era.87 But it existed only to be separated. Postcolonial authors seem to
have confirmed the separation, making Africa a Black Africa or making
North Africa a region attached to the Middle East. Commenting on
negritude, Mudimbe writes, “The colonized internalizes the imposed
racial stereotypes, particularly in attitudes towards technology, cul-
ture, and language. Black personality and negritude appear as the
only [sic] means of negating this thesis.”88 But the origin of the Black
personality can be found in Dubois and even earlier in the work of
Marcus Garvey, both of whom conceived of Africa as black. The
negritude movement continued it. Colonial authors and politicians of
the (post)colonial period, such as Aimé Césaire and Kwame Nkrumah,
when they speak of Africa, mean Black Africa despite the strong
presence of Egypt and the Maghreb in African associations. Even
Mudimbe himself follows suit in a book that was supposed to trace
the invention of Africa (and leaves the name uninterrogated and unana-
lyzed despite its being a manifestation of colonial power); he is con-
cerned only with Black Africa. Islam in Africa seems to be alien to
Africa in his work, as it is in the work of Nkrumah, a champion of
African unity.89
87
Mudimbe, Invention of Africa. 88 Ibid., p. 93.
89
Ibid. Despite Blyden’s explicit wish to see Africa Christianized, Mudimbe is
suspicious of him and concerned about his “naïve admiration of Islam.” He even
concludes that “in spirit, Blyden was a Muslim” (Invention of Africa, p. 133).
Such a suspicion, that masks a rejection of Islam from Africa, was common in
colonial times among Blyden’s peers, and it clearly survived in a critical
postcolonial text, such as the one of Mudimbe, and is common among Black
nationalists. It is correct that Blyden speaks favorably about how Islam was
blind to race whereas colonial Christianity was not. This should be read more as
a critique of Christianity than a eulogy of Islam. But Mudimbe ignores Blyden’s
negative views of Islam and his plans to use it to Christianize Africa. See
Jacob Dorman, “Lifted Out of the Commonplace Grandeur of Modern Times:
Reappraising Edward Wilmot Blyden’s Views of Islam and Afrocentrism in
Light of His Scholarly Black Christian Orientalism,” Souls: A Critical Journal of
Black Politics, Culture, and Society 2010 (12): 4398–4418. Even Nkrumah,
However, negritude is a sort of consciousness, in the view of its

authors, and thus a culture in and of itself. It is also a racial culture
formed by reading major colonial texts that construct the idea of
negritude as a racial truth.90 Derived from the idea of Black Africa,
the construction was initially and mainly part of the construction of
Africa, one that is distinct by color and is separated from the rest also
by color. There is Africa and there is White Africa, of which the
Maghreb is a large part. The two entities are not homogeneous.
Africa is also defined by its own racial/ethnic antagonism (Arabs versus
Blacks, Moors versus Haratin, Hutu versus Tutsi, Pygmy versus Bantu,
Dogon versus Peul, etc.), as the Maghreb is defined by its racial oppos-
ition between Arabs and Berbers.91
Consider Frantz Fanon, whose most celebrated work is on
Algeria.92 Fanon displays an internationalism inherent in Marxist
ideologies of the time. He attaches Algeria neither to Africa nor to
the Middle East, but rather to a geography of imperial domination,
a geography of the man subjected by colonial powers whose condi-
tion, struggle, and destiny he shares with other men outside of
Algeria. If the colonial condition creates a unique man transcending
class parameters, the same colonial condition also creates a man
whose condition is not defined by class, but by colonial subjugation,
the wretched of the earth. Algeria and the Algerian war allowed
Fanon to go beyond the noir and find not only the African man, but
Man in his full force, might, power, idealism, brotherhood, sacrifice,
and invention. Yacine says that “colonial Algeria rejects the Algerian,
even if he is an intellectual, it vomits him somehow, especially if he is
unlike Blyden, accepts Islam, but only if it is “digested,” meaning if it is

Africanized (an idea that refers to Black Islam). In any case, twelve centuries of
the presence of Islam, in its particularly African form, which is mainly Sufism, is
still seen by Nkrumah as alien in a book meant to be an effort of decolonization.
See Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964.
90
On the history of the term nègre, see Simone Delesalle and Lucette Valensi, “Le
mot nègre dans les dictionnaires d’Ancien régime histoire et lexicographie,”
Langue française 1972 (15): 49–104.
91
For the example of the Hutu versus the Tutsi, see Mahmood Mamdani, When
Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Also see Lisa Malkki, Purity
and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees
in Tanzania. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995.
92
Franz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre. Paris: Maspero, 1961.
Conclusion 243
an intellectual.”93 Such an attitude was undoubtedly displayed vis-à-

vis anyone under the French colonial yoke within or outside of
Algeria. In Algeria, a black man like Fanon has no special privileges,
hence his view that the colonized world is one: man under colonial
oppression. The colonized world is one: it is neither just this nor just
that, neither this attached to this, nor that attached to that. It is
a world where men of different color suffer daily domination not at
the hands of an economic class, but at the hands of an imperial power.
Yet Fanon, who started his political career by writing a book about
the Black condition when he was just twenty-six years old,94 was
appropriated later, more via his first text, to reinforce blackness and
thus to separate the blackness of Africa from its nonblackness.95
Works and authors often have careers they might have never intended
or wished for. The death of the author may not be just a figure of
speech, after all.
Conclusion
The invention of the Maghreb was an invention of an ensemble of
discourses constituting a system of references that generate themselves
in a variety of cultural forms. Therefore the Maghreb is a conception
built gradually, throughout colonial times, by corrections, by transla-
tion, by politics of representation, by strategies of names and naming,
and so forth. At the end, this life of texts and discourses springing from
within the colonial structure of power emerged as a geographical entity
with a history of its own, a culture of its own, a set of maps of its own,
all unified by the very colonial governmentality that made these aspects
possible in the first place. Colonial modernity was undoubtedly cre-
ative, but also tyrannical in its ways of transformation, destruction,
and ultimately imposition of its truths. Resistance to it, especially with
a lack of or with insufficient technologies of power, generates it and
infuses it with the oxygen that guarantees its longevity. Thus in the
93
Kateb Yacine, “J’ai fini avec la France,” interview 1966. https://www.youtube
.com/watch?v=DXUOD71ylP8. Last accessed April 24, 2020.
94
Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952.
95
Fanon became indeed an influential figure of Black ideologies; see
Mabogo More, “The Intellectual Foundation of the Black Consciousness
Movement,” Philosophia Africana: Analysis of Philosophy and Issues in Africa
and the Black Diaspora 2012 (14)1: 23–39.
colonial period, the many attempts to oppose the colonial construction

of the region via its history were doomed to repeat it.
The intellectual efforts of the Salafi writers in the three countries of
the region not only contributed to reinforcing the parts, but they also
willy-nilly solidified the invention of the whole – the Maghreb. The
work of authors such as Sfar, Thaʿâlibi, Ben Badis, al-Mili, Madani,
and al-Fassi testify to the obvious fact that colonial representations
were imposed on the colonized. Moreover, they made them respond
and more problematically commanded these responses. In the process,
racial culture was itself reproduced by these authors. The colonial
division of Arab versus Berber was a regulating dichotomy in the
colonial discourse. It has become a focal point of the discourse of the
Salafi, albeit with changes that consist mainly in making Berbers versus
Arabs a thesis that is not alien to the colonial discourse.
Here too, in his very opposition to the colonial discourse, Laroui
reproduces a nationalist perception of the Maghreb, one that makes the
Maghreb a unit that has always existed with a language, with a will to
live together, with a shared destiny. Instead of a narrative of lack of
nationhood, the national historian creates a narrative of a conquest of
a nationhood that has, in his opinion, always marked the history of the
Maghreb. In other words, out of the colonial Maghreb, elaborated
gradually through its colonial times, we find a national Maghreb also
made out of colonial semantics in its postcolonial times.
Laroui constructs a complex idea of a Maghreb whose discursive
origins are to be found in colonial authors as well as in Salafi writers.
The Maghreb is Arab; however, Laroui adopts the conception of Arab-
ness that was common during the Nasserite era (1952–1970), mainly
the association with the language and with a shared system of values.
But for Laroui too, the Maghreb has existed, and it has done so against
the very image constructed by colonial scholars, notably Gautier, an
author who by himself sums up an entire historical discursive forma-
tion that led to the formation of the Maghreb. Laroui not only repro-
duced the Maghreb from a Maghrebi perspective, balancing the Salafi
and the colonial discourse, balancing the Arab Ibn Khaldûn and the
Orientalist Ibn Khaldûn, but in the process, by virtue of the argumen-
tative dimension of his discourse, he reproduced also the colonial
Maghreb, if only negatively. The proof is that in his attempt to refute
the colonial Maghreb, Laroui at no point made connections between
the region and Africa, some of which we find in precolonial
Conclusion 245
historiography. The Maghreb of Laroui extends its cultural frontiers to

the Middle East and limits its geographic borders no further than the
Sahara.
The Maghreb was confirmed in its (post)colonial identity also by the
silence of Black African scholars. It is not only that Africa inherited
colonial frontiers, but also that it inherited the conceptions by which
frontiers and nations are imagined. Africa has a personality and one
can only see that color is part and parcel of that African personality.96
Even when it connects to Egypt, it is not to Arab Egypt that it connects,
but rather to ancient Egypt that it blackens before it claims it as its own.
Modern Egyptian scholars do not see themselves as part of Africa, but
rather as part of the Middle East, and at the heart of the Arab world.
The Maghreb has come to be seen as part of the continent only through
colonization, the same colonization that created it and separated it
from Africa. Maybe it is this same colonization that allowed it to be
included in political associations and unions called African. But this
pertains more to geopolitics and less to geoculture.
96
Edward Blyden coined the concept in May 1893. However, prior to this date,
Blyden used similar concepts, especially in his article “Africa and Africans,” first
published in Fraser’s Magazine, August 1878, and reprinted in Christianity,
Islam, and the Negro Race. New York: Eca Associates Chesapeake, 1990. The
concept of African personality also inspired Marcus Garvey and the activist
work of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. See Marcus Garvey,
Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. New York: Universal Publishing
House, 1923. See W. E. B. Dubois, The World and Africa and Color and
Democracy, ed. Henri Louis Gates Jr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
6 Cracks
There is something undoubtedly paradoxical about the entity called the

Maghreb. On one hand, it is an idea, a narrative, a perception of a unit,
a conception of something united, seemingly concrete, and real. It is out
there, so it seems, with a geography of its own, a history of its own,
a population of its own, in short, an identity of its own shared neither
by the rest of Africa nor by the Middle East. On the other hand, this
entity is fragmented, disunited, existing in pieces called nation-states
with strong identities that are at times antagonistic and conflictual.
Marked from within by rigid yet disputed frontiers triggering at times
open war – even into the present – it is also traversed from one corner to
the other by racial, linguistic, and political divides. If the French colo-
nial experience constitutes one of its defining characteristics, this is
because the region was reconfigured by it. If in colonial times, the
region was perceived as a unified entity, especially by those who con-
structed it as such, in postcolonial times, the region is also perceived as
such from the standpoint of the former metropole. In France, the
region’s existence is never in doubt. For, after all, the former colony
of the past is an essential francophone zone in the present.
The idea of the Maghreb is also a real one for the political actors of its
nation-states. Even before the Algerian war, the idea was conceived by
the first political organizations in the region, such as the Etoile Nord
Africaine and the Algerian Popular Party, both founded by Messali
Hadj in 1926 and in 1946, respectively.1 In 1948, the Committee of the
Liberation of the Maghreb was created in Cairo. The idea of the
Maghreb was thus inherent in the idea of liberation from the colonial
yoke. For the leaders of these political organizations, the unity of the
Maghreb was vital, a question of life and death – “a strategic whole,”
1
On the history of these political organizations, see Mahfoud Kaddache, Histoire
du nationalism algérien. Paris: Méditerranée, 2003. Benjamin Stora, Les sources
du nationalism algérien. Parcours idéologiques. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000.
246
Cracks 247
as young Hocine Aït Ahmed described it in 1948, and to launch the

struggle for liberation outside its framework would be “suicide,” he
added with great conviction.2 The young militant’s warning echoes
sentiments repeatedly expressed by others, including Abdelkrim al-
Khattabi, the president of the Committee of the Liberation of the
Arab Maghreb. The call for political liberation was itself based on the
idea of a people united by “history, religion, language, [and which]
nothing separates or opposes.”3 In other words, once the Maghreb was
constituted as a whole, as a distinct geography by the colonizers, this
idea was accepted, as a matter of fact, even by the most intransigent
opponents of colonial rule. Al-Khattabi, who was in Cairo working
with Salafi ideologues such as Allal al-Fassi, defines it as “having owed
its existence to Islam”; the Maghreb, for him, is “Muslim” and “Arab,”
and is “indissolubly part of Arab countries.”4 This is the same concep-
tion of the Maghreb we have previously examined in the work of the
Salafi writers of the region. But this Maghreb somehow ignores Libya
and Mauritania, as a hybrid zone between Blacks and Whites, separat-
ing the Maghreb from West Africa.5 For the young generation of Aït
Ahmed, as well as the older one of al-Khattabi, the Maghreb was
specifically “Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.”6 Clearly, Libya was not
seen as part of the struggle and therefore as part of the Maghreb, most
likely because it was outside the francophone zone.
In any case, while the struggle was carried out from within this unit
called the Maghreb, independence was individual, negotiated by
selected groups of future nation-states, not a unified popular front.
And it was not liberation as such, but independence, and in the case
of Morocco, “independence within interdependence,” the formula
2
Rapport de Hocine Ait Ahmed au comité central élargi de Zeddine, décembre
1948. www.scribd.com/doc/294397805/Ait-Ahmed-rapport-pour-l-Organisati
on-Secrete-en-1948. Last accessed May 3, 2020.
3
Ibid. “Nous espérons que l’idéal maghrébin ressuscitera par les idéaux d’unité,
d’intégration et de solidarité qui manquent fortement aujourd’hui, avec une
génération consciente et des dirigeants d’envergure, intelligents et déterminés à
dépasser leurs égoïsmes, transcender les obstacles et réussir à unir les peuples du
Maghreb que tout rassemble : l’histoire, la religion, la langue, que rien ne sépare
et ni oppose.”
4
Abdelkrim al-Khattabi, ʿAraa wa mawaqif (1926–1963): hawla al-tajribah al-
rifiyag, al-Maghrib ba`d harb al-rif. Al-Sukhayrat: Manshurat ikhtilaf, 2002.
5
See Christelle Jus, Soudan-Mauritanie, une géopolitique coloniale (1880–1963):
Tracer une ligne dans le sable. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003, p. 18.
6
Khattabi, ʿAraa wa mawaqif; Aït Ahmed, Rapport.
248 Cracks
French prime minister Edgar Faure coined in 1955. What emerged

from these independent movements was a regional nationalism whose
cultural elements we see in the ideological and historiographic Salafi
discourses. Nationalism is an ideology of an elite, the same ones who
were able to speak in the name of the nation and for it. Regional
nationalism was also shaped by the specific struggle of independence
and was constructed around its symbols: the monarchy in Morocco,
the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria, and the Destour in
Tunisia, each personified by a national figure: Mohammed V,
Boumedienne, and Bourguiba. Yet the idea of the Maghreb, or rather
of the necessity of its unity, was still part of their ideological education,
a sort of étoile de fond because of the ideological work provided by the
Salafi, whose impact on national movements was not only instrumen-
tal, but who were integrated in the state apparatus. Once claimed as
a goal, the unity of the Maghreb became – after independence –
a “destiny,” and was thus relegated to the future, which means it was
taken out of the concerns of the present. One of the main concerns of
the present, and for sure the most urgent, was that regarding the very
frontiers of the Maghreb – were they to be the ones inherited from
colonial or from Ottoman rule?
Yet, despite conflicts and even wars over those frontiers, the idea of
the Maghreb remained in the national discourse of all countries of the
region, including Libya, because the founding of the nation-state could
not obliterate it. The Maghreb was considered a reality, a geography –
fragmented, yes, but still existent – and political will could end its
fragmentation. Thus, in 1986, and after a long process, the idea of
l’unité du Maghreb was created. But this was short-lived, as the conflict
in the region over the Sahara continued unabated and every nation-
state struggled with political, social, and economic issues, all part of the
colonial heritage.
Since my analysis is centered at the level of the unit called the
Maghreb, I would like to investigate in this chapter the fissures in its
edifice, the cracks that prevent its cohesion. There are several, but
I consider three of them essential. First is the conflict over the Sahara,
which is a conflict not only of borders but also of geopolitics, pertaining
to ambitions and interests of nation-states in a postcolonial era. Second
is the Amazigh question, which pertains to politics, to identity, to
culture, and to postcolonial race. And third is the question of language,
which is a question of culture, but also a question of geopolitics,
Fragments of Fragments 249
especially as it involves antagonism between French and Arabic.

Francophonie is and was a cultural and political project that guarantees
the presence of France in the region. These complex issues, made up
and passed on from colonial times and impossible to separate from
intricate games of colonial policies and geopolitical maneuvering,
define the region. For these problems are unthinkable outside of the
conception called the Maghreb, or to be more precise, the creation of
the Maghreb made these problems possible in the first place.
Fragments of Fragments
With the independence of the countries that formed the French
Maghreb, a cultural project for its nations had been conceived and
was in order. We have seen, in Chapter 4, how Muslim reformists in
these three countries initiated this cultural project, drawing both from
an imagined Arab nation and from an equally imagined Muslim
oumma. The differences between Sfar, Thaʿâlibi, Ben Badis, and Allal
al-Fassi are in fact minor considering that their responses were after all
a reaction to the colonial discourse, in an unbalanced power relation
with the colonial establishment in their countries. Also deeply para-
doxical in these responses was the fact that while they were responding
to a discourse involving the three countries of the region, their response
was specific to their respective countries: Morocco, Algeria, and
Tunisia. The national historian proceeded differently, and in some
ways in opposition. While he undertook to demonstrate a national
culture specific to the region, he was nevertheless and because of the
immediate postcolonial condition engaged in the nationalism of the
nation-state, and not of the entire region. It is not at all surprising that
the same historian would find himself at the forefront of an ideological
nationalistic battle that opposes Morocco to Algeria.
The national historical discourse exists as a continuity of the colonial
discourse. Consequently, it is part of the same colonial discursive
formation. It functions mostly, but not exclusively, as a contradiction
to a larger discursive colonial unit. Contradictions constitute an essen-
tial part of a discursive formation. The colonial historical discourse,
itself a translation of the local discourse, represents the other with its
own textual material whereas the national discourse self-represents
with colonial materials. The concept of nationhood that structures
both colonial historical knowledge and national knowledge, the first
250 Cracks
in the form of a lack, the second in the form of a quest, is a modern

colonial category, and it implies that all citizens of the same country
share its history, its language, and its ideals. None of the three categor-
ies is deconstructed to see that the official history cancels other histor-
ies, the official languages marginalize other languages, and declared
ideals mask other ideals, all of which are also part and parcel of the
constitution of the national unit.
However, there is something quite peculiar about national history in
the region under discussion. On one hand, it constructs nationalism
that substantiates the nation-state (e.g., Morocco), and on the other, it
articulates a broader history that feeds an atypical nationalism we can
call pan-Maghrebism, since it celebrates the same idea that was
inherited from the colonial discourse and rearticulated, again mutatis
mutandis, by national historicism. Yet regional nationalism is intense
within the region, with Moroccan and Algerian nationalism crystalliz-
ing around the issue of the Western Sahara.7 Hence, in Algeria, is an
ambivalence about the idea of the Sahara, an idea that is strong at the
level of political (mostly military) elites (who are militant about it) and
that almost disappears at the level of the masses in Algeria (who are
indifferent to it).8 In Morocco, the Sahara has intensified the feeling of
nationalism, and even unified once-fragmented, conflictual political
parties, if only regarding the issue of the Sahara, further legitimizing
the monarchy as the guarantor of national unity.9
The point is, if the national discourse is larger (much larger) than its
territory, it is also because of the unsettled and unsettling questions of
the frontiers of the nation. The example of the Sahara is only one
example among several, albeit it is the most known, the most timely,
the most unresolved, and potentially also the most dangerous one.
From early on in the phase of decolonization, the problem of frontiers
was forcefully announced by Allal al-Fassi, the Salafi ideologue turned
staunch Moroccan nationalist:
7
For a brief history of the Western Sahara, see Osama Abi-Mershed and
Adam Farrar, “A History of the Conflict in Western Sahara,” in Perspectives on
Western Sahara: Myths, Nationalisms, and Geopolitics, ed. Anouar Boukhars
and Jacques Roussellier. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014, pp. 3–27.
8
Interviews conducted in 2005 and 2008 in Algiers and Constantine.
9
George Joffeé, “Sovereignty and the Western Sahara,” Journal of North African
Studies 2010 (1)3: 375–384.
Fragments of Fragments 251
If Morocco is independent, it remains not completely unified. The

Moroccans will continue the struggle until Tangier, the Sahara from
Tindouf to Colomb-Beachr, Touat, Kenadza, and Mauritania are liberated
and unified. Our independence will only be complete with the Sahara! The
frontiers of Morocco end in the South at Saint-Louis-du-Senegal.10
Independence brought a slew of postcolonial problems just at the

frontiers of the nation. These problems were the immediate conse-
quence of the long divide-and-rule policy of colonial France. The
national historian and ideologue alike (often infused in each other)
are aware of the presence of colonialism in the present, but only in
terms of its responsibility for dividing the nation, and rarely in terms of
discourse – that is, in terms of creating a cognitive universe that is
hegemonic, in which the opponents of colonialism itself are caught.
To say it plainly and bluntly, the national historian does not recognize
that the colonial discourse comes out of his mouth and pen in the forms
of categories that structure his thoughts, his imagination, and even the
language and the tools of his critique. Neither does he seem aware that
the language itself that he speaks is not a neutral means of communica-
tion; no, it makes him think, argue, and persuade in a certain way. The
very terms he uses to substantiate the nation or to critique colonial rule
are the same ones inherited from a long era of colonial discourse.
Therefore, it is by deconstructing those and possibly inventing a new
language that the problem of the Sahara needs to be rethought, not
within a historical and political discourse unable to think outside of
colonial semantics, but within a framework that interrogates the legit-
imacy of these same categories that structure its reason and fashion its
arguments.
One can take any example from those engaged in this political
debate, irrespective of their political leanings, to find out that the
arguments used by one side or the other draw their meaning from
colonial semantics; the categories of the discourse themselves are colo-
nial, hence the fact that the arguments turn in a circle. One cannot
rethink a precolonial situation with colonial arguments without
obscuring the period under discussion. Consider the argument of
Abdallah Laroui regarding the same dichotomy of makhzen and siba
whose constructions and politics, we have seen in Chapter 4. For him,
10
Cited in Bertrand Fessard de Foucault, “La question du Sahara espagnol,”
Revue francaise d études politiques africaines 1975 (10)119 : 74–106 at 78.
252 Cracks
siba is not an independent territory, but rather a land of fiscal dissi-

dence. The proof that it is not a land of spiritual autonomy is that the
authority of the sultan was recognized even in times of active dissidence
(siba). The Sahara might, as with other parts of Morocco that are now
decidedly Moroccan, switch between fiscal dissidence and spiritual
obedience. Its existence as a political entity is unsubstantiated, accord-
ing to Laroui. Once the colonial category of siba is accepted and used as
a departing point for argumentation, the colonial discourse is reacti-
vated, and colonial understanding of a precolonial situation is
deployed. For, as shown in Chapter 3, the concept of siba, absent in
local thinking of the time, could not be separated from an arsenal of
modern political concepts that colonial ideologues put into practice to
understand a situation totally alien to them.
Consider also the official Moroccan arguments:
Within the mechanism of the functioning of the secular Moroccan state, the
Sahara has always held a privileged and decisive position. Thus, the founders
of the different dynasties in Morocco were often members of one of the tribes
of the Western Sahara. This was the case for the Almoravids, whose founder,
Youssouf Ben Tachfine [ninth century] was later to create the “Greater
Morocco” which extended to the frontiers of Senegal. Those close ties with
the Sahara had not been interrupted with the advent of the Alaouite dynasty
[seventeenth century] that came from Tafilalet [the Sahara] and which never
stopped consolidating the national unity and strengthening the immemorial
ties between all parts of Morocco.11
The concepts used – secular state, frontiers, national unity – are not
only forms of postcolonial anachronism; they are categories that struc-
ture the thoughts and arguments of the Moroccan discourse again
about a situation that is precolonial, meaning that it was conceived in
different terms. The point here is not to restate the obvious – that the
Sahara is a colonial problem resulting from colonial policies of divide
and rule – but rather to stress the fact that the Sahara is a major
problem that highlights the idea of the Maghreb while, paradoxically,
constituting one of the major obstacles (if not the major one) in the way
of Maghrebi political unity. The point is also to stress that the actors in
the region (and even beyond) think, argue, and make decisions
11
Ministry of Communication, “Historical Foundations of the Moroccanity of the
Sahara.” 1997.
Postcolonial Regimes of Language 253
according to colonial semantics that can be properly understood only

in local terms, the archaeology of which needs to be undertaken.
The problem of the Sahara generates a discourse that displays the
conflict of nationalism mainly between Algeria and Morocco.
However, this conflict mobilizes other discourses in Africa as well as
in the Middle East. The reason is that the problem of the Sahara is
undoubtedly a postcolonial problem whose equivalents exist virtually
in every colonized territory: Namibia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Kashmir, and
Palestine, to mention just a few examples. The question now is, can
a colonial problem of frontiers and geography be resolved through
political thinking in a colonial cognitive universe? The answer may be
yes only if we assume that the problem was initially created in colonial
times. And this leads me to my next contention: the invention of the
Maghreb bears serious cracks that are defining of the invention. In
other words, the Maghreb was created as a unity, but with racial,
linguistic, and geographic divisions that explode that unity into pieces.
The Sahara is the most visible of these, but there are others at the
eastern borders with Algeria, and the northern border with Europe,
and at the border between Algeria and Mali.12
Postcolonial Regimes of Language

A political problem is often a linguistic problem, and vice versa.
Language is profoundly political. Politics itself is unthinkable without
language; one can even define politics as the art of discourse. What do
politicians do? They talk. We have seen previously that colonial power
did not only reconfigure the region via technologies of power; it has
also introduced, via the founding of schools and institutions of cul-
tures, a system of meaning, a web of significance that is inseparable
from its language – French. French, in a matter of decades, had become
a defining feature of the region. Through the very formation of regional
nationalisms, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian, the language of
engagement between the elite (often young) and colonial administra-
tors (often older) was French.
12
For Mauretania that was rather attached to the Sahel before colonialism, see Jus,
Soudan-Mauritanie. For a view on the problems of frontiers in Africa after
independence, see Boutros-Boutros Ghali and Nabiyah Isfahani, Les conflits des
frontières en Afrique. Paris: Editions techniques et économiques, 1973.
254 Cracks
Colonial knowledge functioned as a means by which to order the

colonies and to make them understood so that effective colonial pol-
icies would be informed and founded on solid, empirical grounds. This
is also to say that this knowledge was produced in a specific historical
context with the intent to understand and control colonial reality. If
this understanding and control failed (as evident by the collapse of the
colonial system), one would expect a dismissal of this same knowledge
that either failed to maintain control or, which does not amount to the
same thing, caused it by its myopia or its “errors.” Yet an important
point still cries out for an explanation: if the colonial public no longer
exists, one may assume that colonial knowledge also disappeared, or at
least is considered no longer accurate and thus no longer relevant. Why
isn’t this so?
It is almost surprising that the effectiveness of colonial knowledge
became increasingly efficacious, albeit at times invisible, only after the
departure of the French. The colonial signifying objects still constitute
a postcolonial public, most notoriously a national one, who consume
them in the form of French modernity. And here one finds another
crucially important characteristic of colonial knowledge, or any form
of modern knowledge for that matter – the creation of imaginaries, of
realities that produce subjects who themselves reproduce the same
realities, albeit with changes and alterations. One might well ask
then: how, why, and in which conditions do colonial objects still
participate in the making of a (postcolonial) public? What are the
dynamics, the rules, and the constraints of such making?
The postcolonial period brought up a new condition: when the
formerly colonial scholars retreated to French institutions, the formerly
colonized national elite inherited colonial institutions such as the
Institut des Hautes-Études Marocaines (Rabat), the University of
Algiers, the University of Oran, the University of Tunis, and even
institutional or bureaucratic organs such as Hespéris, Tamuda, and
Revue Tunisienne. The national elite, the inheritors of the colonial
state, were still in a state of dependency, given that the passage to
French institutions had become a necessity, a rite de passage not only
for any would-be intellectual, but also for any would-be politician or
ideologue. In other words, colonial culture not only stayed where it was
born and developed but it was also consumed as a commodity to
enhance one’s symbolic capital. One can even make a general but still
accurate remark and state that the educational system was inherited
from colonialism, as were most of the forms of modern governance and

state surveillance. At the same time, most of the intellectual effort was
directed against the colonial legacy. Thus, seven years after the inde-
pendence of the last North African country, Algerian president
Boumediene declared at the first Pan-African Cultural Festival:
To reject the counter truths spread by colonialism, to bring proofs from the
past and the intellectual presence of Africa, such was from the outset our
struggle, a task to which we have assigned its place and its role.13
Boumediene represented – and not only in Algeria – this willingness

to cut off the colonial past. However, his condition as a postcolonial
subject makes him unable and in fact unwilling to think outside of
colonial parameters: indeed, he had never spoken French in public,
neither had he ever visited France, and during French official visits, he
always made recourse to the traditional Algerian burnous – beneath
which, however, one could still see the European suit. This is different
from the attitude of the king of Morocco, Hassan II, who visibly
enjoyed speaking French in front of an audience of French journalists,
and who often boasted of speaking French better than a French-born
person. In these contrasting cases, it is clear how the action of the
former colonized is nothing but reaction. This means that the culture
of colonialism still governed and imposed itself on the attitudes and
behaviors of even the most fervent detractors.
Whether through the political or intellectual elite (often fused in the
case of the Maghreb, especially immediately following independence),
colonialism has become a focal point of competing Maghrebi national
discourses. In other words, colonial categories, as articulated in various
discursive formations (whether nationalist, religious, or variants
thereof), not only contain the colonial categories of race and nation,
modernity and progress, a certain vision of time, and the profane and
sacred, but are often reformulated to fit the postcolonial condition. The
point is seen most evidently in the postcolonial era, when the formerly
colonized have categories of their own to think about themselves, to
contest the colonial other, to resist him, but the same categories of
colonial modernity linger. Or, as Pierre Bourdieu succinctly puts it:
13
Houari Boumedienne, “Discours inaugural au Syposium du Premier Festival
culturel panafricain,” in La Culture algérienne dans les textes, ed. Jean Dejeux.
Paris: Publisud, 1995, p. 87.
256 Cracks
When the dominated apply to what dominates them schemes that are the
product of domination, or, to put it another way, when their thoughts and
perceptions are structured in accordance with the very structures of the
relation of domination that is imposed on them, their acts of cognition are,
inevitably, acts of recognition, submission.14
Postcolonial power is marked by a horizontal not a vertical relation-

ship, no matter the constraints and maneuvers of the so-called native. It
remains limited, yet at critical junctures it can even be effective in the face
of strategies and tactics of postcolonial struggle and human liberation.
Nowhere is this relationship more apparent than the domain of language.
Small wonder, as language is often seen as one of the defining characteris-
tics of a nation. Colonial language, in this context French, holds profound
symbolic charge. It provides the new masters – the nationalist elite – with
the language of power, and in turn allows for the proprietary monopoly of
knowledge and resources both symbolic and material vis-à-vis the masses
whose salient characteristic is precisely the absence of such language. Let
us discuss three examples: one from literature, the second from political
rhetoric on education, and the third drawn from historiography (the
textual form of the national discourse).
By language, I do not mean langue in the sense given by Ferdinand de
Saussure – that is, as an abstract, a virtual system of signs – but rather as
an actual system of signs, precisely that which Saussure calls langage,
language-in-use, language as practiced in communications, in litera-
ture, and in all types of speaking and writing. The importance of
language as an ideological project vital to the nation-state is better
seen, I believe, in the domain of artistic creation, especially in literature,
and even more specifically in the novel. In the Maghreb, an impressive
body of literature is written in the language of the colonizer. More
importantly, the canons of Maghrebi literature are invariably articu-
lated and penned in French and recognized in France. Abdallah Laroui
writes in 1967 that “a large part of francophone North African litera-
ture is transitory, circumstantial, not expressive because it is conceived
as a regionalist branch of a culture elsewhere centered, and it is [this
culture of elsewhere] that approves or disapproves [of the francophone
North African literature].”15 Laroui makes an exception, Kateb
14
Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2001, p. 13.
15
Laroui, L’idéologie arabe contemporaine, pp. 175–176.
Yacine. But Yacine may beg to differ; he indeed states that the “only
reason the French took interest in me is because I represent an extreme
form of alienation.”16
Yacine once wrote, “French is the booty of war.” This expression has
been repeated by francophone Maghrebi writers such as Assia Djebar
(even though, in practice, Yacine actually refused to write in French
after independence and chose instead the Algerian “dialect,” which he
considered more Algerian than either Arabic or French).17 For him,
writing in French was justified only by the fact that he needed to
communicate his “Algerianism” to France in the language France
could understand. After independence Yacine took a more critical
stand toward Francophonie, a stand ignored by those who repeat his
phrase about French being the “booty of war.”
This is to say that Yacine stored, or recycled, this booty once the war
for independence reached its goal. Yacine’s act can be clearly seen as an
attempt to achieve cultural liberation. But for other francophone
writers, the booty came to imprison the soldier. Consider
Mohammed Dib, one of the most notorious francophone Maghrebi
writers, who only a few months before his death asserted that writing in
Arabic was shameful:
The Algerians who write in Arabic should be ashamed to write in an archaic
language which is for the Algerians as Latin or Greek is for the French.18
Dib makes a parallel that otherwise he would not have been able to
make, had he not opted for a linguistic counter-ideology against Arabic
rooted in the ideology of modernity itself – namely, that modernity is
possible only in European languages. The strongest means of persua-
sion is the one that uses what the public already believes in. The public
of Dib is a francophone one and for them, Arabic is indeed a language
of the past, archaic, dead at least as far as they are concerned. The
deficiency of the argument becomes obvious if one does not accept this
ideological premise. Latin is a dead language and Arabic is not; Greek is
a language of the Greeks, not of the French. Therefore, one could say,
just for the sake of clarification, that “the Algerian who speaks French
should be ashamed; it is for the Algerian as German is for the French.”
16
Yacine, Le poète comme un boxeur.
17
Assia Djebar, “Du français comme butin,” Quanzaine littéraire 1985 (436):
16–31.
18
Mohamed Dib, Interview. Magazine Littérature January 2003 (416): 65.
258 Cracks
The comparison of Germany’s invasion of France to France’s occupa-

tion of Algeria was indeed suggested one day by Farhat Abbas, only to
receive a swift response from Charles de Gaulle: “I did not marry
a German, I did not doubt the reality of the French nation in my
younger age,19 and I did not believe it was a duty to give my family
a German education.”20
These linguistic problems, despite their genealogy and omnipresence
since independence, have surfaced in the past ten years or so, especially
in the midst of a real renaissance of Arabic. The cultural production of
Arabic in recent years has been indeed impressive. Its renaissance is also
due to the age of globalization when the Internet can connect commu-
nities of speakers across the globe in the blink of an eye. It is also due to
the economic rise of the Gulf States, which play an important role in the
spread and development of Arabic via precious, highly lucrative state
prizes and state channels with impressive global reach, especially Al
Jazeera. This channel especially, with its staff from all over the Arab
world and with a significant share of staff from the region of the
Maghreb itself, has undoubtedly made the competition with French
more difficult and more ferocious. In the age of globalization, French
also appears more and more like a regional language in the presence of
the spread of English worldwide, including increasingly in the region of
the Maghreb. Thus there are frequent calls to replace French with
English when the issue of modernity and global connectivity is raised
in the debate – which is also always a debate about Arabic. Spanish,
despite its longer presence than French in the region, does not enter the
competition, not even in the so-called Spanish zone.21 The dichotomy is
postcolonial, meaning it has a colonial genealogy.
In Morocco, the question of language reached a turning point ten or
so years ago, just before the outbreak of the so-called Arab Spring.
A real campaign to replace Arabic with darija (i.e., colloquial Arabic) in
the educational system had been launched with great vigor in the
19
This was in reference to Farhat Abbas’s well-known statement that “I have
asked history, I have asked the living and the dead; I have visited the cemeteries:
no one talked to me about it [the Algerian nation],” cited in Jean Lacouture,
Cinq hommes et la France. Paris: Seuil, 1961, p. 274.
20
Jean Daniel, Express, January 25, 1961, cited in Lacouture, Cinq hommes et la
France, p. 323.
21
See discussion of French in Tangier, Abdelmajid Hannoum, Living Tangier:
Migration, Race, and Illegality in a Moroccan City. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
media, most often by francophone writers who tend to use French and
not darija as their daily language, which too exists with differences in
syntax and vocabulary and accent, depending on region and social
class. This paradox is indicative of the linguistic war not only in
Morocco but also in the region by and large. For linguistically, the
opposition is between a francophone Maghreb and an Arab Maghreb.
Amazigh (with all its different variations) is often harnessed, albeit
differently, in this context. The truth of the matter is that there is no
movement that argues for replacing Arabic with Amazigh, or French
with Amazigh. The reasons are many, and chief among them is the fact
that unlike Arabic and French, Amazigh is not a carrier of bookish
civilization. Arabic claims Islam, with which it is closely associated. It
also claims the entire cultural production contributed throughout the
ages by Persians, Arabs, Kurds, Greeks, Berbers, and other ethnicities.
Long ago, Benjamin Whorf drew attention to the crucial fact that
language is not only a means of communication, as in the Saussaurian
conception, but is rather the means by which one analyzes and reasons:
Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are
culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not
only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of
relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of
his consciousness.22
However, language is not only a means of expression, or an assem-

bling of words that translate things; it is, rather, a cultural system in
and of itself. It makes the things it translates. Language is also the
means by which our consciousness is made, the cognitive universe
that we create, the space in which we think, reason, and remember. If
history is “us,” as Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues, language is the
transcendental us, connected to others in time and in space. Language
is also “us” in that it connects us to what is most intimate about
ourselves. It inhabits us as it expresses the most abstract of our thoughts
and the deepest of our emotions. Without it, history is impossible, and
the very idea of “we” is unthinkable. Yet, as free and spontaneous as it
may appear, language is unseparated from power – that is, from
rules.23 Power is constitutive of language first in the form of rules
22
Benjamin Whorf, Language, Thoughts, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1956, p. 235.
23
Roland Barthes, Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France. Paris: Seuil, 1978.
260 Cracks
(grammatical rules),24 in the form of narrative and discursive

grammar,25 and of course in the form of institutional constraints.26
Therefore, French is not simply a medium that allows one to com-
municate with Europe and gives access to modernity – this claim is
rather an expression of its ideology – it is rather a specific cultural
system, with its own categories, providing a social world of its own. To
say that “French is the booty of war” is to espouse the simplistic, naïve,
and even dangerous view that language is simply a means of communi-
cation. In the colonial period, it was understandable that French was
booty, since the Algerian writer needed to express his protest and make
his demands heard by the French public.
Nevertheless, French ties the Maghrebi writer to a system of domin-
ation that continues in the present. This is particularly so in that writing
in French is always at the expense of the national language – be it
Arabic, Berber, or a Maghrebi “dialect.” Cultural creation, especially
in the case of literature – and more so in the case of the novel – is very
much associated with the formation of the nation-state.27 But in the
case of Europe – or, to be more specific, in the case of France – this
nation-state was given substance from within its own territory by
French writers formulating and articulating French bourgeois values.
Even in France itself, French established itself as the national language
at the expense of other languages that became marginalized or even
eliminated. This process, long and difficult in some parts, short and
easy in others, was deftly called by Weber “a White man’s burden of
Francophonie, whose first conquests were to be right at home.”28
However, whereas for obvious reasons, the process of Frenchification
was inclusive, indiscriminate in France, it became selective in northern
Africa. French was taught to Europeans and was also the privilege of
a small lucky local elite.29 It was (and it still is) deemed modern, clearer,
and scientific.30 The same French myth of clarity and precision that
24
Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.
25
Algirdas-Julien Greimas, Du sens. Paris: Seuil, 1971. Also see Algirdas-Julien
Greimas, ed., L’analyse du discourse n sciences sociales. Paris: Hachette, 1979.
26
Barthes, Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France. Foucault, L’ordre du discours.
27
Anderson, Imagined Communities.
28
Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, p. 73.
29
Jonathan Gosnell, The Politics of Frenchness in Colonial Algeria: 1930–1954.
Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002.
30
As Moroccans, our philosophy teacher explained to us in high school how
French is a language of clarity and precision by giving us an example. In Arabic,
developed as French, rose to become a dominant language was

redeployed in the colonies.31 And this was given greater power by the
fact that French was the language of importance and prestige. Indeed, as
a colonial language, it was the language of power itself, of the rulers, of
the masters.
In any case, writing in French is essentially writing to the French
public, making the Maghrebi writer a soldier of the fifth column (légion
étrangère, as Nouvel Observateur labeled them).32 The Maghrebi
writers, unlike their Indian peers in the United Kingdom, for instance,
do not have a place in the French literary establishment. Their work is
taught neither in French high schools nor in universities. Being them-
selves products of colonial culture, their effects on the French imagin-
ary are minimal, despite the fact that the values they advocate are ones
of Francophonie except when their writings participate in French
debates regarding Islam, the veil, violence, and so forth. Therefore
they are looked at with paradoxical suspicion by the national ideologue
who accuses them of providing the literature of folklore.33 They
remain, at the end, writers for a small, liberal, Frenchified elite. They
reach the national elite because of language and because they are, after
all, an expression of “national” culture after independence. Yet they
are as far from the masses as a foreign language is for a people. For,
despite or maybe because of its high symbolic capital that makes it
a desired and a highly competitive commodity, French is not spoken by
he said, when one describes the weather, one says: “al jawwu jamîl” (“The
weather is nice!”). This is neither clear nor precise, he noted. The French
expression, on the contrary, is “aujourd’hui, le ciel est bleu (‘Today, the sky is
blue’). He explained to us how the last sentence is more descriptive and thus
clearer and more precise.
31
Pierre Swiggers, “Ideology and the Clarity of French,” in Ideologies and
Language, ed. John Joseph and Talbot Taylor. London: Routledge, 1990,
pp. 112–130.
32
Interesting metaphor by Nouvel Observateur, as the légion étrangère was the
military regiment with only foreign recruits from the colonies.
33
The judgment was generalized to all francophone literature by Laroui, who
noted one exception – Kateb Yacine. See L’idéologie arabe. The term folklore is
a pejorative one in the language of nationalists, who in the name of modernity,
considered it part of local culture unworthy of the nation. Folklore, literally
popular culture, is a culture in its own right. In fact, it is more local than national
culture that owes its expression and existence to colonial culture. For an
anthropological understanding of the concept of folklore, see Alan Dundee,
“Folk Ideas As Unit of Worldview,” Journal of American Folklore 1971 (84)
331: 93–103.
262 Cracks
the masses of the Maghreb; they do not even know it enough to read
it.34 This takes me to the second issue of the political discourse on
language and culture.
In May 2000, during a lecture on the political situation in Morocco
given by the US ambassador to Morocco, the president of Al-
Akhawayn University (who has since served as a minister of education)
was asked about the state of education in Morocco in front of a small
audience of students and faculty. His response was:
We admit that we failed in the educational project. This failure has to do with
the fact that we were in charge of educating a multilingual population. In
Morocco, Arabic is not spoken, but what we find instead are three languages:
Moroccan dialect, Berber, and French. We formulated the educational pro-
gram as if all Moroccans speak the same language.35
He then proposed a solution:

What should be done is to educate the people according to the language they
speak. Therefore, those who speak French need to be educated in that
language; others speak Arabic, they should be educated in it; and others
speak Berber, they needed to be educated accordingly.36
The university president, was not, in fact, stating his vision of

Moroccan education, but was expressing the cultural situation in
Morocco, which he described as a failure. In other words, he confessed
“our” failure in education and surprisingly proposed the same failed
program as a solution. The linguistic divisions are the result of colonial
rule. Both Arabic and Berber have come to be defined in relation to
French. In practical terms, languages are endowed with different and
unequal symbolic capital, mainly because of ideologies associated with
them. French is undoubtedly considered the language of the elite – that
is, the language of distinction. It is the language that allows access to –
and the ability to monopolize – important positions in Moroccan
34
This remark by no means applies to the generation of French Maghrebi writings
in French in France.
35
Author’s notes on lecture, May 2000. Eight years later, in February 2008, after
a forum on education, the minister of education of Morocco made a public
announcement about “the failure of education” in Morocco. In 2008, one
would have expected the failure already announced in 2000 to be addressed, not
to come again to the conclusion reached already in 2000.
36
Author’s notes, May 2000. The case of Berber he mentions is not clear and
highly problematic, to say the least, as there are varieties of “Berber dialects”
and no written tradition.
society (as well as in the francophone Maghreb), mainly because it is

deemed the language of modernity – of science, and of savoir faire and
savoir vivre. Arabic is second and even secondary to it. Yet its relative
importance stems mostly from the fact that it is seen as the language of
Islam, sacred in the views of the masses, but useful in the eyes of the
state. It is the language by which state ideology is articulated and
communicated. Berber (or rather the ensemble of dialects referred to
as Berber) is a language with minimal symbolic capital. It is mostly the
language of those masses located at the periphery of the nation-state –
both physically and metaphorically. Language through education has
always been the strongest means by which a state assures linguistic
hegemony and homogeneity in modern liberal societies. The vision of
the Moroccan university president, which is an official vision, shows
that the institutional power of education is seen as a means by which to
assure the continuation of socioeconomic inequalities. Not only are
linguistic divisions needed to be bridged to achieve social justice, but
rather, the solution, which is the same as the problem, is that these
divisions need to be maintained with their differential access to power
and social positions intact.
However, French remains a commodity of competition that not
many can afford, especially in a time when education has been increas-
ingly privatized. It constitutes the currency that can give one access to
greater and better material goods. This does not mean those who do not
speak it or know it are free from colonial culture. On the contrary,
French becomes a symbol in and of itself, which may have a greater
impact on the minds of those who do not master it. The value of
a commodity may become more appreciated by those who do not
possess it. Those who have it keep it, jealously.
A system of domination consists of a set of symbols that are present
and hence naturalized in different cultural guises. It has effective,
sometimes even everlasting consequences, both symbolic and material.
Symbols of domination, because they are often naturalized, permeate
all aspects of social life; hence the tremendous power they exert on
bodies and fissured or colonized minds. Colonial knowledge, as it
survived in its customary forms as well as those disguised in what
appears to be an anticolonial discourse, are generative of what
Bourdieu calls “symbolic power.” Here, symbolic power is “that invis-
ible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those
264 Cracks
who do not want to know that they are subject to it or that they
themselves exercise it.”37
Racial Difference in a National Age

The Amazigh question is first a question of the nation-state, especially
Morocco and Algeria, but it also concerns the region as a whole. For
the Amazigh question is a question of nationalism, one that competes
with different nationalisms all born, for the case of the region, in
colonial times. These nationalisms include Arab nationalism,
Maghrebi nationalism, and of course, Amazigh nationalism, once
called Berberism. The genealogies of all these nationalisms are to be
found in colonial politics first in the context of Algeria, as we have seen
with both the Arab Bureau and the civilian regime within the University
of Algiers, and then in the context of Morocco, as we also have seen in
the case of the Institut des Hautes-Études Marocaines (Rabat).
An important dimension in the construction of the Maghreb was not
only to trace the contours of its geography, make its map, or to rewrite
its history in ways that are comprehensible and useful for the colonial
state eager to classify and order, but also to categorize its populations
using secular categories that betray the very religiosity (e.g.,
Christianity) of the colonial state: Berber, Arabs, Israelites. Beyond
the first there is primitive, but deep-seated Christianity, behind
the second there is clearly Islam, and behind the third there is of course
Judaism. That the signified of these categories are invented can be
testified by the fact that from the fourteenth century, with Ibn
Khaldûn, to the nineteenth century, with Nassiri and Ibn Diyâf, the
population of the region was undoubtedly categorized differently in
ways that were invented according to a specific episteme that includes
faith affiliations (Muslims and Jews) and tribal belongings, as well as
oumma identifications (the group from which an ensemble of tribes
derive their affiliation, Ismael for the Arabs, Madiz for the Berbers);
these identifications were context specific.
Colonial categories, as I showed in the preceding chapter, privileged
racial categories without abandoning religious identifications. This was
not only a question of divide and rule, as has been often noted, but it
37
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991, p. 164.
Racial Difference in a National Age 265
was especially a question of the colonial episteme. It is also the question

of minorities, introduced into the Ottoman Empire by Europe. In the
Middle East, for instance, this question of minority rights was associ-
ated with religious liberty introduced by European powers in parts of
the Ottoman Empire marked by the existence of different religious
communities.38 Christianity disappeared from the Maghreb by the
fourteenth century. The Jews as indigenes disappeared from Algeria
and were considered a category between indigenes and Europeans in
both Morocco and Tunisia – not indigenous because of their faith, also
shared by European Jews, but not quite European because too Arab.
The case of the Maghreb was similar to the case of West Africa,
where racial ideology was also introduced into the fabric of societies
with disastrous postcolonial effects, resulting sometimes in real
instances of genocide. Racial categories were invented in West Africa
between the Negro and Moor, between the Peul and Touareg, and in
East Africa, between the Hutu and Tutsi. But religion was also
a category of secular colonialism (unliberated from its Christian the-
ology and with a modern state that was itself the precious daughter of
the church). Opposing Africa in terms of religious categories, as in
Egypt, was not an easy matter. Africa, say Senegal or Mali, or
Nigeria or Niger, had a significant Muslim population. Therefore,
Islam itself had to be racialized. Paul Marty is renowned for coining
the term Islam noir.39 But what is this Islam noir? It is undoubtedly
Islam, but its fundamental difference is “noir” as opposed to “White”
or to “Arab” also, in the colonial discourse considered as white, but
a “white” that Arthur de Gobineau differentiated from the Aryan or
even the Latin white. It is the degenerate White that is white only
because he cannot be called black, and he cannot be called black
because he does not have what French colonial anthropology called
negroide. The term has had a fortune of its own. It has become an
explanatory concept for understanding West African Islam by
P.-J. André and even later, in 1962, by Vincent Monteuil.40
In the region of the Maghreb, in the quasi absence of sectarianism,
the French observed the same modern attitude, observed elsewhere by
colonial powers, between the public and the private. Islam became an
38
Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report.
39
Marty, Islam au Sénégal. 40 Monteil, L’Islam noir.
266 Cracks
issue for the colonial state only, and only when it rebelled or resisted. In
other words, Moroccan Islam (or rather its various forms of Islam) was
not invented by Edouard Michaux-Bellaire and Hubert Lyautey, or
even by Robert Montagne and Jacques Berque. Once in the region, and
from 1830 onward, new understandings of Islam emerged in the work
of colonial officers, scholars, ideologues, and politicians. But this is
a colonial understanding of Islam, not a Moroccan Islam. The work of
invention, or rather of reinventing Islam in Morocco, Algeria, and
Tunisia was a daily endeavor carried out not only by scholars such as
Sfar, Thaʿâlibi, Ben Badis, al-Fassi, and Guennoun, or Sufi brother-
hoods such as the Qadiriya, Rahmaniya, and Tijaniya,41 but also by
ordinary people who had to negotiate their faith, day to day, in
a condition marked by the violent presence of a colonial power42 that
considered them racially outside the sphere of civilization. Saying that
the French invented Moroccan Islam, or Maghrebi Islam for that
matter, should mean only that a certain understanding of Islam
emerged as a consequence of the encounter with colonial power, with
its ideology of modernity, and its claim to secularism – and not that
Islam as a faith, a system of belief and an ensemble of practices in
Morocco, or in the Maghreb for that matter, was invented by the
French. People, everywhere and not only in the Maghreb, negotiate
their faith (as part of their culture) in everyday life, in relation, in
reaction, and in continuation of historical practices. For the case at
hand, these negotiations happened in relation to the advent of modern-
ity generally and in relation to the colonial culture of secularism, in
particular. Modernity created another alternative that is secular. This is
well captured in the memoirs of one of the early nationalist writers,
Abdelmajid Benjelloun, when he compares the figure of a schoolteacher
of Arabic with a figure of a schoolteacher of French: one represents
negative traditionalism, awkward conservatism, and old age; the other
41
On these brotherhoods in Africa, see B. G. Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods in
Nineteenth Century Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Jamil Abun-Nasr, Muslim Communities of Grace: The Sufi Brotherhoods in
Islamic Religious Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Also see
Abdelmajid Hannoum, ed., Practicing Sufism: Sufi Politics and Performance in
Africa. London: Routledge, 2016.
42
Julia Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest,
Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904). Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994.
represents dynamism, openness, and youth – in short, he represents

modernity with its sparkling and seductive signs.43
This is not to say that there was no French understanding of Islam, an
understanding that must have affected, maybe even been espoused by
those exposed to it. There is undoubtedly an understanding of Islam by
the French in the region. By this, I mean the region was not only
reconfigured cartographically, geographically, historiographically,
ethnographically, but also religiously – that is, it was understood
according to colonial categories of nineteenth-century Europe, and
more specifically, French. And this understanding too was to be distin-
guished from other understandings of Islam eastward and westward
and southward. Westward, Paul Martin and Capitaine André argued
that Islam in Senegal is indeed black.44
In colonial times, one already finds a Berberist discourse that was an
appropriation of the colonial discourse itself. Consider the statement of
a native, “I feel closer to Saint Augustine than to Sidi Oqba,” which not
only reproduces the Christianity of the Berber, but also claims current
affiliation with it and its opposition to Oqba, the Arab conqueror.45
For Saint Augustine represents here Christian France just as Oqba
represents “Arab Islam.” Or consider the more eloquent essay of Jean
Amrouche, “L’éternel Jugurtha.”46 Amrouche, who, unlike Yacine,
opted to be French, does not oppose the colonial discourse and neither
does he espouse it, as is. Rather, he accepts it with alterations that could
be acceptable to the colonial mind. For instance, he accepts the idea of
the versatile Berber, but for Amrouche, the characteristics of this
Berber are the result of contradictions in the situations he has experi-
enced, not really of a pre-logical mentality, as the colonial discourse
maintains. The Berber, in the view of Amrouche, is capable of the
“most passionate devotion.”47 In other terms, he can become
a genuine friend and ally to the French, but only if he is respected.
Amrouche implies that France can win the Berber to its side only on the
condition that he be granted equality.48
43
Abdelmajid Benjelloun, fi al-tufûla. First published in 1949, selections of it were
part of the Moroccan textbook for primary and elementary schools. The
selection mentioned was part of a textbook.
44
Paul Marty, Etudes sur l’Islam au Sénégal. Paris: Le Roux, 1917.
45
Lahmek Husayn, Lettres algeriennes. Paris: Jouve & Cie, Ed. 1931, p. 179.
46
Jean Amrouche, “L’éternel Jugurtha.” L’Arc 1946 (13): 58–70.
47
Ibid., p. 63. 48 Ibid.
268 Cracks
Those who insist that the Berbers are originally Arabs, as a solution
to the colonial argument of the distinctiveness of the Berber, do nothing
but to obliterate this identity and dissolve it into an equally colonial
construct, Arab. Consider also the essay by Moroccan writer
Mohamed Hassar, abhath ʿan barbarî (“In Search of a Berber!”).49
Published in 1930, this short story tells of a Berber who, after death,
wanted to enter paradise because he was a Muslim, but upon question-
ing, he insisted that he was a Berber. Modeled on the Epistle of Pardon
of Syrian poet Abu al-ʿAlâ’ Al-Maʿarri (died 1057), the author of this
short story takes the reader to the Day of Judgment, and more specific-
ally to the entrance to heaven, where believers, Muslims and non-
Muslims, are allowed to enter and enjoy paradise. A Berber man who
announced himself as such was not allowed because the keeper of the
gate did not recognize him. Even though Christians and Jews could
enter, the Berber man was kept at bay. Finally, a man appeared,
a Muslim, who was of course allowed to enter. They asked him about
the Berber man, and he recognized him, and immediately informed the
gatekeeper of the man’s genealogy that links him to Arabs. The Berber
man was thus an Arab, and thanks to the man who revealed his
identity, he was allowed to enter and enjoy an eternity in paradise.
His savior was none other than the historian of the Berbers: Ibn
Khaldûn. The early national discourse in the region Arabized the
Berbers not only to counter the colonial opposition but also to antici-
pate a homogenous nation made of all Arabs, and thus also part of
“Arab countries,” as al-Khattabi himself advocated.
The colonial discourse clearly sought to do what it always
did anywhere else: divide, a policy that constituted part of its strategy
to conquer and rule. The native discourse instead sought to homogenize
as a strategy of “unifying the lines” (tawḥîd al-ṣufûf ) to use its leitmotif,
in order to oppose colonialism and later face the challenge of develop-
ment. To say that the colonial era introduced the opposition of Arab and
Berber to the detriment of a richer, more complex social fabric in the
precolonial period is not to say that the region was diverse only in its
demographic variety. It is to also say that the diversity disappeared from
the academic discourse, colonial and national alike. But it can still be
49
Mohamed Hassar, “Abhath ʿan barbarî.” Majallat al-maghrib 1933 (15)10:
1933. Reprinted in Ahmed Ziyadi Tarikh, al-wataniya al-maghribiya mina al-
qissa al-qasira. Casablanca: Dar al-thaqafa, 1998, p. 84.
seen today in the region by those unschooled in the colonial discourse. It

is lived daily in the region by those whose national imaginary was not
shaped by colonial modernity. In short, it is lived in the countryside of
the Atlas mountains, in the shantytowns of the cities, and even in the
streets of the cities by people whose daily experience exposes them to this
diversity of race, of class, of region, of gender, and of family affiliation,
old tribal genealogies, and so forth. Of course, it can rarely be seen by
those schooled by the colonial discourse and its firstborn legitimate
child, the national discourse. It can also not be seen by organizations
that profit and bank on the simplistic and dangerous dichotomy of Arabs
versus Berbers.
Even when the late colonial discourse disowned its old affirmation,
“It would have been, then, that from the obscure millenaries of prehis-
tory the countries of the Maghreb were tied to Africa and to the
Orient,” the Berberist discourse continued to espouse its old truths.50
It not only used the old colonial discourse of opposition between Arab
and Berber, but also systematically reappropriated its colonial version
of history and even its heritage of archaeology. Here too, as with the
Salafi and with the nationalists, Berber nationalism was reinvented out
of colonial semantics. However, whereas the first reinvented national-
ism, reversing colonial semantics, through an act of translation from
French into Arabic, the second invented Berber nationalism out of the
colonial semantics, with little change, and in the very language of
France. The intellectual Berberist discourse is a francophone discourse,
and as such, is completely cut from the reality of the population who
often speak Berber as well as a Maghrebi Arabic.
Nonetheless, the appropriation of the colonial discourse on the
Berbers by intellectuals such as Jean Amrouche, Kateb Yacine,
Mohamed Dib was in itself the beginning of the development of
a Berberist movement in Algeria that expanded to Morocco and even,
though to a lesser extent, to Tunisia. In other words, it was not only the
birth of a cultural movement that celebrated the heroes who stood
against Rome, such as Massinissi, Jugurtha, and Juba I and II, but
also those who stood against the Arabs, most notoriously the Kahina
and Kusayla.51 These heroes transcend the limits of the nation-state to
50
Lionel Balout, “Quelques problèmes Nord-Africains de chronologie
préhistorique,” Revue Africaine 1948 (262): 416–417.
51
On these mythical heroes, see Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Postcolonial
Memories.
270 Cracks
embody Berber history in the entire region. With the “departure” of

France, this nationalism had no others to stand against but the Arabs,
believed to be those who do not speak one of the Berber dialects of the
region. We have seen in Chapter 4 that the category Berber in the
colonial discourse not only did not mean what it meant in precolonial
times, but most importantly it was created as part of another category
against which it stands, Arab. A category is not only a signifier, but it
always refers to its negation that defines it. And this dichotomy has
become hegemonic: other groups had to join the first or the second.
Therefore, the creation of the modern Berber was done using racial
semantics where the enemy, opposition, and negation are part and
parcel of its makeup. This is also to say that Berber nationalism
found its substance in history and in language, as provided by the
colonial discourse of history and archaeology, but also by French
colonial literature and artistic representations. To say it differently,
the Maghreb was here again reproduced, mutatis mutandis, but with
a societal fracture made of Berbers and Arabs, while the groups that
existed at the outset of the colonial enterprise, and that most likely
existed centuries before, remained erased for they had to choose a camp
and identify either as Arabs or as Berbers.52 Or rather the camp was
already chosen for them: they are Berbers if they speak one of the
Berber dialects or else they are Arabs. This explains but does not justify
the initial attitude of the nation-state in the region toward such move-
ments. Even though these movements claimed a cultural and linguistic
recognition, they were seen as decidedly political, not only because the
divide between the political and the cultural is very difficult to make but
also because these movements contain within themselves the important
trope of Arab domination found in De Slane/Ibn Khaldûn and repro-
duced almost systematically by novelists, intellectuals, and even politi-
cians of the movements. This trope takes on a highly intense racial and
racist dimension in the discourse of activists, especially on social media.
The nation-state reacts to these movements in various ways. They
were seen, even in the case of Algeria, where Kabyles are perceived as
highly represented in the state apparatus, as a threat to the unity of the
nation.53 Hence an attitude of suspicion, mistrust, manipulation, and
52
Different groups such as the Persians, the Jews, the sub-Saharan Africans, the
Turks, and the Cologouli were simply subsumed in this dichotomy.
53
This is also a matter of popular perception often expressed in racial (and racist)
terms in Algeria, “laqbayli al-idara, shawi, lpara, lʿarbi, zammara” (“The
Conclusion 271
eventually, repression was exerted against these movements. In

Morocco, after an initial mistrust, the state adopted a strategy of
appropriation by recognizing Amazigh as a national language, by
introducing it into the educational system, by institutionalizing it in
centers and associations, even by promoting it on state television. This
was important to the makhzen not only because it allowed the appro-
priation of a movement, but also because the movement itself feeds into
the dominant ideology of the monarchy as a symbol of unity of
a fragmented nation. Only the king can unite; no political party, or
other figure can bring together a deeply fragmented nation. Yet, the
attitude of the state remains vigilant toward the Rif, seen as an area
resisting integration and clinging to its distinctive character intensified
by its different type of colonial rule, its resistance to it and its history
with it, and even with independence. This is not to say that the question
of the Rif is the question of Amazigh, but rather to say that the Rif
offers a complex and thus unique case, where Amazigh is a dimension
that offers an ideology for a situation that is economic and historic at
once. In Tunisia, the question of Amazigh, because of the small per-
centage of Tamazight speakers, has not been raised to a degree that
would make it a national problem.
Despite the fact that the movements of Amazigh in both Morocco
and Algeria achieved considerable gain, symbolized especially by the
fact that the language became official in the constitution of both
countries – the first in 2001 and the second only in 2016, the move-
ments are considered highly political in both countries. Their politics
are perceived as a threat, a danger to the national cohesion, so much so
that Amazigh movements are compared to Islamism (i.e., political
Islam).54 Needless to say that these two are entirely different political
projects. One is a secular nationalism with a strong racial dimension;
the other is a religious project with a global dimension.
Conclusion
Since so-called independence in the region, a plethora of national
events have succeeded one another, and in some cases occurred
Kayble [occupies] the administration, the [Berber] shawi, the military, and the
Arab, the flute [i.e., popular entertainment often associated with begging]).
54
Mohamed Touzy, “Amazighité et Islamisme,” in Usages de l’identité Amazigh
au Maroc, ed. Hassan Rachik. Casablanca: Najah El Jadida, 2006, p. 69.
272 Cracks
simultaneously. I call national events occurrences that are considered

happenings at a national scale, involving the nation-state and the
citizenry it commands. For instance, independence itself is one of
these national events that create in the narrative of the nation
a before and an after. Yet, when one analyzes this event in one of the
nation-states that constitute the Maghreb, one can see that there are
narratives that are hegemonic and claim or rather impose the truth of
what happened. These same narratives also contain categories of
thoughts, assumptions, and ideas that are not thinkable without the
colonial narrative.
In this chapter, I focused on three major events in the region that
I believe are constitutive of the idea of the Maghreb. I argued that the
creation of the Maghreb as a cultural and political unit was a colonial
process of invention and that its creation, tentative, contradictory, and
changing, created cracks in the construction. I identified three that are
defining of the postcolonial Maghreb, the one reinvented nationally as
well as the colonial one that traveled transnationally. Those were the
racial invention of the demography of the Maghreb, the invention of
the language of the Maghreb, and the invention of the problem of the
Maghreb.
Demographically, colonialism introduced race and race thinking as
powerful and dominant modes of identity and identification. If the
population of the region adopted multiple modes of identification
(regional, familial, genealogical, urban), religious affiliation used to
be the dominant mode of identification, as evident not only in the
colossal Arabic historiography from Ibn Khaldûn to Nassiri but also
in early colonial ethnography from Berbrugger to Masqueray.
However, by 1870, racial identity became binary in the entirety of the
region even if the concept of race changed from being biological in
1830 to becoming cultural in the 1870s and linguistic in the 1900s.
Race is an important dimension of modernity. As the region was
invented as modern, race is inherent to its very composition. The
diversity once noticed amongst the population as late as early colonial
encounters disappeared, to be replaced by a binary racial opposition
between Arabs and Berbers. Outside the region are Arabs and Berbers.
Inside the region, the diversity once noticed still plays out in the city as
well as in the countryside. The demographic composition of the region
today bears witness to the profoundly rich human diversity that is still
ignored, including or rather especially by the academic discourse and
Conclusion 273
its reference to the militant discourse. Yet, it is exactly this racial binary
that defines the Maghreb. Whether in Egypt or West Africa, the racial
composition is unique – yet it could have been similar or even identical
because of the possibilities of other redefinitions.
Yet the racial problem in the region not only opposes Arabs to
Berbers, but this same dichotomy semiotically implies a category that
is neither Arab nor Berber, one that is surely discursively invisible, if
nonetheless a defining category. Since by late colonialism, race was
defined by language, the region opposes not only Arabic speakers
(Arabs) and Tamazight speakers (Amazigh) but also another language
that inserts itself in the dichotomy and that is the defining category of
both Arabic and Berber. This is French, a language of distinction and
mobility, of power and bureaucracy, a language associated with an elite
referred to in Algeria as hizb fransa (party of France) or in Morocco as
wlâd frânsa (children of France).
Thus we have the linguistic relations between French on one hand
and Arabic on the other, and French on one hand and Berber on the
other. If the relationship between Arabic and Berber is one of exclusion,
interpreted by colonials in terms of domination and retreat, the relation
between France and Arabic is also one of exclusion, but defined as
modernity against un-modernity. The relation between French and
Berber is the same, but since Berber is not a threatening civilizational
language, it supports the opposition with Arabs; at no point did colo-
nial authorities claim to make Berber the language of the region, yet
their intention to force Arabic to “retreat” was expressed, defended,
and fought for. The point was to impose French as the language of
modernity. It is this same problem that has been playing out in these
societies still composed of a francophone elite and arabophone masses.
Yet, despite the official ideology of Arabic (and in Morocco, also
Berber) as the official language(s), the de facto language of modernity
in the region is French, which does not need recognition from the
nation-state. France watches over its linguistic heritage in the region
with the eyes of a hawk. It harnesses efforts and resources for its
support via the very ministry of Francophonie. The resources are
enormous and so are the efforts: powerful francophone institutions in
the region itself: consulates, lycées français; instituts français; presti-
gious prizes for francophone authors, including the most prestigious of
all, the Prix Goncourt; Parisian publishing houses; and last but not
least, a French-like elite in the region monopolizing cultural capital
274 Cracks
with the executive power to orient education in each country.

Regardless of what one may think of the linguistic dynamics between
these languages, the Maghreb remains a francophone zone of the
utmost importance. This importance is due to the fact that it is the
backyard of France, and also that the long-standing colonial linguistic
and cultural investment in the region must be saved and protected. It is
also this francophone dimension that explains the liminality of Libya in
the geography – neither entirely Maghrebi nor really Middle Eastern. It
is torn between the first and the second. And in the time of Qaddafi, its
ambivalence made it look beyond the region itself, in Africa, to connect
with a geography that colonialism separated from the Maghreb.
Nevertheless, the region was also invented with cracks in its geog-
raphy, its frontiers, its demographic composition, and its linguistic
regimes. If culture and language cemented the whole while at the
same time creating cracks within it, the geography of frontiers consti-
tutes a more political, more conflictual, and more unresolvable prob-
lem. The Sahara is this problem. But if it were not the Sahara, it would
have been Mauritania, or Tlemcen, or even the entirety of the eastern
frontiers, once the object of a war between Morocco and Algeria. It
could also have been Mellila and Ceuta, still occupied by Spain. These
problems of frontiers and these still colonized spots in the region are
undoubtedly other cracks; they almost seem natural, like old healed
wounds. By contrast, the Sahara is an open conflict that represents and
personifies the failed idea of the Maghreb, yet its very realization also
evokes it. Put plainly, the conflict of the Sahara, mainly between Algeria
and Morocco, seems to be the obstacle to the unity of the Maghreb –
that is, to its concretization. The Maghreb is now parts, fragments, and
even states connected to one another in a whole that begs to be unified.
It is also this same lack of unification that has made various actors
believe there is something unfinished, but waiting to be finished, like
a destiny.
Postscript
In the previous chapters, I have examined how the Maghreb came into
being – how it was constructed and defined as a distinct geopolitical
and cultural entity separate from Africa and from the Middle East, both
of them also colonial inventions created at the same time and in relation
to each other. I argued that the Maghreb as a field of discourse is
a modern reconfiguration of the region operated by and through mod-
ern technologies of power of colonial France. I demonstrated that the
construction of the area was a discursive process elaborated gradually,
piece by piece, and tentatively, with changes, contradictions, and alter-
ations. This discursive process culminated in the elaboration, by the
1920s, of a conception of the region – taken as the region itself. Despite
the fact that part of the region was also at the same time under Italian
and Spanish colonial rule, these two powers were at the margin of
industrial Europe and therefore were not only inadequately industrial-
ized but also technologically dependent on the rest of Europe, espe-
cially France. France had the lion’s share of the region, and the
construction of the Maghreb is essentially a French construction.
Nevertheless, French colonial creation of the region was reproduced
and confirmed, despite alterations and changes, despite contradictions
and corrections, by an early generation of local historians and ideo-
logues. Instead of arguing that the Arabic discourse of the Salafi is
a discontinuity and that it constitutes a separate discursive formation,
I argued that the Salafi discourse on the region is inscribed within the
same colonial discursive formation, as a discursive continuity,
a counterargument. This conception was further confirmed by and
through colonial, inherited, modern technologies of power of the
newly founded nation-state in the region.
It should be noted that the intensity of colonial power was such that
not only was it highly effective and pervasive but it also converted those
who resisted its effects, turning their work into discursive complicities.
They could only think within the cognitive discourse the French had
275
276 Postscript
invented. Their actions were always reactions, and their reactions

themselves carried the logic and the dynamics of colonial power.
Thus, even after independence, French colonial knowledge has
remained the foundation of modern knowledge of the entire region.
Its categories, its semantics, its framework of thought, its theses and
antitheses, even its system of discursive authorities, have remained
highly operative beyond colonial times. National leaders of the region
pursued the political realization of this conception even before inde-
pendence, guided by the very idea of the existence of the Maghreb as
a geographic unit, and as a cultural one as well, the evidence of which is
the existence of a history of the Maghreb that unfolds from Roman
times (as a quest narrative) to the present (when the aim of this quest is
waiting to be achieved). The various attempts undertaken to make this
perception a political unit should be the subject of another project,
mainly because they pertain to a political history that might examine
how the idea of the Maghreb made its way into the political realm, and
how attempts at implementing it have failed over and again.1 If the idea
of the unity of the Maghreb refuses to die, it is because it has a strong
discursive existence. Such a discursive existence makes it real and
tangible.
What is most important then, if only for the present book, is not the
political will that manifested itself, in good faith or not, to claim the
region as a political unit, but rather the conception itself that inspired
such a political pursuit. What is most important is not how actors in the
region have used the discourse on the unity of the Maghreb as
a political strategy to pursue peace, diplomatic gains, or victory in
conflicts over political adversaries within the civil societies of nation-
states. Instead, what is important and urgent is to consider the region’s
construction and thus to unfold the history of its present problems that
constitute the main obstacles to its political unity. A first step toward
a genuine work of decolonization is to undertake a critical historical
deconstruction – not only to rewrite history and offer alternative
interpretations of past events, but rather to see how the construction
of geographies, of histories, and of the making of racial and political
1
On June 10, 1988, the heads of state of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania,
and Libya met and decided to create a commission in order to explore ways to
fund the union of the Maghreb. The Arab Maghreb Union (UMA) was founded
the following year, on February 17, 1989. See the website of the UMA: https://
maghrebarabe.org/fr/. Last consulted April 29, 2020.
Postscript 277
identities was itself constitutive of the present. Such a work of critical

decolonization can greatly contribute to the creation of the conditions
of cognitive liberation – a necessary condition for true political
liberation.
First, let us clarify some concepts I used here and there and left
undefined. By field of discourse, I mean the cognitive space in which
one thinks, writes, and elaborates conceptions; it is the realm of discur-
sive truths, the social world that we create. By discursive truths, I mean
the very ideas whose existence is made possible only by discursive
strategies and devices cemented by power. One example of
a discursive truth is precisely the invention of the Maghreb. To say
that the Maghreb is a French colonial invention means above all that
the incessant effort to make sense of it, to conceptualize it, to reconfig-
ure it, to categorize and define its population, to describe its geography,
and to trace its contours was mainly the work of French colonial
agents, officers, and scholars (often one subsuming the others) in an
age of military, cultural, political, and technological domination
unparalleled in human history. French imperial power and colonial
technologies could only be matched by those of Great Britain and not at
all by Spain or Italy. This work was the product of a French colonial
imaginary – that is, the product and the field of an imagination specific
to Europe, and particularly France, in the age of colonial modernity.
This conception was not only constructed by power; it was also
imposed by it in an age of colonial inventions and truths that converted
even its most ferocious detractors via engagement, critique, and above
all colonial reception.
As demonstrated in Chapter 4, the colossal colonial historical and
sociological production about the region constituted the modern intel-
lectual production of the region in the postcolonial era that no scholar
or politician can escape. For, after all, what we call modernity in this
context is also this production that has constructed our present, and for
the topic at hand, our conception of the region. French remains the
medium to access this production, this field of discourse that is self-
generating as it changes and mutates. This may explain why one can
(and often does) easily dispense of Arabic, the only local written
language, and rely exclusively on French to engage in examining the
region, its history, its politics, and its cultures – or what are thought to
be so. For such an endeavor, however critical it may claim itself to be,
and however extensive its use of this or that critical theorist, of Michel
278 Postscript
Foucault or Frantz Fanon, only perpetuates colonial understanding,

categories, discourse, and practically everything else that these imply in
the academic discourse and beyond it. The former coloniality of the
region is transposed to its field of study and thus prolongs a cultural
coloniality that has long followed the political one. The postcolonial
era is an era of a colonial heritage, politically and culturally, that
a scholar faces willingly or unwillingly, consciously or not.
This tendency to ignore local languages and rely exclusively on
a colonial language, found also in African studies, does not constitute
a trend in Middle Eastern studies, where knowledge of languages
(Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, and Persian) is a condition of the study of
the region.2 One of the reasons may lie in the fact that the Maghreb was
invented by colonial agents, by diplomats, whereas the Middle East
owes its invention to Orientalists whose knowledge of languages was
(and still is) a sine qua non for their crafts. The other reason may lie in
the drastic cultural form of colonization that the region called the
Maghreb has experienced, and that is unparalleled in the region called
the Middle East. One of these differences is precisely that the Maghreb
was mapped, created, narrated, and named from within, in the ways we
have seen, by the French in relation to vital colonial interests of the
nineteenth century that, despite independence, are no less vital. The
Maghreb was constructed as a geopolitical and geocultural entity.
“From within” means by institutions in the region that functioned
independently from the metropole and by researchers, most of whom
claimed “colonial nativism” in the region. Therefore, in its postcolonial
era, the Maghreb as a field of discourse is essentially francophone – that
is, French – which means that the acquisition of competence cannot
happen outside of it, and therefore any discursive performance could
only be possible through such a competence. The acquisition of com-
petence requires an initiation into French colonial research or its muta-
tion in the postcolonial era, which constitutes a colonial discursive
formation in and of itself – it lives in the present, it shapes, it
2
Abdelmajid Hannoum, “Archiving Algeria:Violence, Secrecy, and the Archives,”
in Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism: Approaching the Imperial
Archive, ed. Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley. London: Routledge, 2017, pp. 67–80.
It also true that Middle Eastern studies has witnessed an epistemic revolution,
with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, that has not much affected
Maghrebi studies, save for literary studies that have witnessed a real renewal.
This is also thanks to the fact that literary studies tend more toward cultural
studies and are traditionally more receptive of cultural theories.
Postscript 279
reconfigures, and it invents, and, as I said before, it makes the region’s

unity appear real and tangible.
In his book The History of the Maghreb, previously analyzed as
authoritative in its confirmation of the conception of the Maghreb,
Abdallah Laroui diagnoses what he calls the “misfortune” of the
Maghreb:
That of always having had inept historians: geographers with brilliant ideas,
functionaries with scientific pretensions, soldiers priding themselves on their
culture, art historians who refuse to specialize, and, on a higher level, histor-
ians without a linguistic training or linguists and archaeologists without
historical training.3
This is a description of symptoms, of abnormalities in the field, but

not a diagnosis of the cause. One may well ask: What indeed are the
reasons for this misfortune that has befallen the region? Why is it
“cursed” by historians with no language training and linguists with
no historical training? What makes a soldier turn into a historian and/
or anthropologist? Why do art historians refuse to specialize? What
prompts a functionary without knowledge of local languages to
become a historian of the region? In other words, why is the
Maghreb discursively unregulated and ungoverned?
These are problems inherent to the very construction of the Maghreb.
When the Maghreb was constituted as a field of discourse, it was also
constituted without epistemological sovereignty and without discursive
independency. Its architects were missionaries, colonial agents, military
officers, historians without linguistic training (such as Émile-Félix
Gautier), linguists without historical training (such as Ernest Mercier),
and so forth. Its birth, its discursive constitution, its grammar of dis-
course, and its categories of thought were created in colonial times. It
continues to have a career of its own, to develop and deploy itself in the
postcolonial era. For this reason, local languages (the very voice of the
colonial indigene) can be ignored (metaphorically and strictly speaking),
but not the French or French (post)colonial field of discourse. Therefore,
the problem of which Laroui saw the symptoms is still present and will
continue to be as long as the invention is in place. Or rather the very
dynamics of the invention of the area condition the existence of these
symptoms whose real cause is coloniality – that is, the very condition of
3
Laroui, L’histoire du Maghreb, p. 3.
280 Postscript
the existence of the region as a colonial construction and therefore as

a field discursively dependent on the old metropole then and now.
Coloniality is both the body of knowledge we inherit and the
institutions that keep this knowledge alive and relevant, generate it,
correct it, and revive it even in times that strictly speaking are no
longer colonial. Or else how can we explain the astonishing life of the
colonial discourse in our present? Why do we still find it worthy of
engagement? Why do we strive to bury it by a critique that does
nothing but to prolong it in our intellectual life? Why does it refuse to
die and go away? Coloniality is, therefore, not only the state of being
colonized, it is rather the condition of our intellectual and political
existence. It is not only a past we left behind us; it is a cognitive
legacy that submerges us, a discursive heritage that constitutes our
very existence.
The question of language is undoubtedly of critical importance
given the fact that language, as we previously saw, is not a neutral
medium, it is not just a means of communication by which and
through which information is expressed and conveyed. It constitutes
a cognitive universe, and power is also an essential component of its
making. Therefore, to say that the Maghreb was constituted in French
is to say that it is a French conception made possible, credible, and
even true by power. Thus the Maghreb is a French discursive forma-
tion even when it changes and mutates. Its foundations, its major text,
and its archives are not only French in the sense that they are
expressed via the French language, but they are French in the sense
that they are owned by France itself. The Maghreb as a field of
discourse here too is a francophone discourse, one that comes with
its own objects, its own categories, its own modes of thought, its
structure of silence, and its own language even when “translated.”
And because of this, it also comes with an army of biases and preju-
dices – for instance, to unapologetically think of colonial modernity,
of colonialism itself, as a blessing for the region and its people, the
price for it justified in the establishment of modernity itself, even with
the tremendous number of human lives lost and the huge sum of
human suffering that continues into the present. For it also comes
with an attitude of superiority toward and disdain of the (post)colo-
nial other, an attitude and disdain that operate in entirely different
postcolonial contexts but that are still reminiscent of the colonial
attitude and disdain.
Postscript 281
Institutionally, the study of the Maghreb, today as before, is unsep-

arated from France. Consider the question of the archives. Postcolonial
France continues to monopolize the archives of the modern history of
the region. This history covers almost the entire modern period of the
region and surely the part that is most significant to its transformation,
or rather to its invention. Archives are an important source of the study
of a nation. Yet most of the archives are French. To say archives is not
only to refer to all sorts of documents stored in space but also to the
very institution, part and parcel of the Ministry of Culture, that creates
the space and that organizes its contents according to specific rules of
exclusion and inclusion, but also exposition and concealment.4
Therefore, it is simplistic to think that the archives are the repository
of “raw knowledge.” Rather, the archives are constituted as knowledge
and create, by the rules of their very constitution, the condition of the
possibility of new knowledge. Therefore, decolonizing knowledge is
not only about offering an alternative discourse, an alternative inter-
pretation, and neither is it about harnessing the critical arsenal of
Fanon or Foucault, or even of Marx and Heidegger, and claiming to
provincialize that which colonizes us, France or Europe. Decolonizing
knowledge ought to be about the now quasi-impossible task of freeing
institutions themselves from postcolonial power – institutions that are
themselves the postcolonial avatars of the colonial state. For colonizing
knowledge is imposing the frame of thought, the rules of writing, and
the categories of the discourse. I would even say colonizing knowledge
is ultimately and fundamentally creating a hegemonic cognitive uni-
verse in which we think, the semantic space in which we critique and
the parameters of our critique, and the venues of our desperate cries.
The immense challenge is that coloniality (in time and in space) not
only tolerates critique but it rather invites it, it seeks it, it invests in it.
Far from displacing it, it is critique that rejuvenates it, gives it new life,
and guarantees both its longevity and its power of transformation. It
constitutes not only our present, but also our intellectual and political
horizon. The absence of colonial institutions (morphed into postcolo-
nial ones) makes it barely visible and in this discursive invisibility, its
power becomes maximal and enduring.
Knowledge is a form of culture, albeit a processed one. As such, it is
the means by which we think ourselves, we situate ourselves in the
4
Ibid.
282 Postscript
present, we identify directions for the future, we invent anticipations,

and we create our actions in space and time. It is the web of significance
in which we are caught. It is our “program” for thinking and for acting,
in the well-known phrases of Clifford Geertz.5 The knowledge that
constituted the Maghreb as such pertains to a specific type of know-
ledge that we should call historical, even when it is linguistic and
sociological – that is, even when it is ethnographic. As we have seen,
the construction of the Maghreb was made out of precolonial Arabic
knowledge through translating, interpreting, domesticating, and
appropriating the classical Arabic production about the region and
what lies beyond it. Therefore, the entirety of the periods these sources
cover is colonized. And also colonized is the present in which these
interpretations and appropriations were completed. As history is not
only a view of the past, but rather narratives of the past that rethink the
present, one can see how colonizing knowledge is not just a cognitive
and a political process. It is rather an ontological one. History is “us,”
“it wraps us,” says Maurice Merleau-Ponty;6 a colonized history is
therefore an “us” assigned to us from a location of power by another. It
is the inability to think ourselves except within the parameters set for
us, inside the cognitive universe created about us. Colonizing history is
wrapping us with a significance we have not spun. This wrapping is
indicative not only of power but also of an “us” devoid of effective
agency and constructive will. Colonizing the other is reducing his
freedom, in thought and in action, in the present and in the future.
Liberating is freeing human potentials and unfettering possibilities – in
thought and in action – and similarly in the present and in the future.
To rethink ourselves inside the cognitive universe created by the colo-
nial discourse (and its chains of postcolonial reasoning) is to not only
perpetuate a domination but also to generate, even if rejuvenated, that
colonial cognitive universe.
However, one might object again and say:
How can you argue that something pertaining to the far past has continued in
the present and has continued with the same force, the same acuity, and the
same pervasiveness as in the nineteenth century? Study of the region in
today’s France is in decline, relative to its recent past and also compared to
5
Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures p. 44.
6
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le philosophe et la sociologie,” Cahiers
Internationaux de Sociologie 1951 (10): 50–69 at 65.
Postscript 283
new centers that historically did not colonize the area and did not show that
much scholarly interest. There is undoubtedly much research about the area
in the region itself, in the United Kingdom, and also in the United States,
where centers, journals, chairs and positions are dedicated to the region in
a way that we do not find in France today. Are you saying that the construc-
tion has remained the same? Or are you saying that the power of the
construction is still operative the way it was in colonial times? One could
argue that the field is detached from the once French metropole, and that
knowledge of the area has drastically changed. Either the construction you
speak about no longer exists or if it does, it does so in a form that has little
resemblance to what it was in the colonial period.
Let me address these statements and start with the first one. Doubtless,
knowledge is also a changing system of meaning, not a fixed one; it is self-
generating in the sense that it mutates while remaining itself. The creation
of the concept of the Maghreb that has become the reality of the Maghreb
is also a field of study. It has changed, it has mutated, but the Maghreb as
a geographic unit, as a constructed historical entity, as a sociological
totality, is as recognizable to us today as it was in the time of Roger Le
Tourneau and Charles-André Julien. The definition of 1966 became
clearly possible in the 1920s. Today, it makes sense to us and if we have
to define the Maghreb, we can comfortably offer the definition of Le
Tourneau. Why? Because the Maghreb is a field of discourse where
statements have been made across an entire age of colonization. And
this field now has a postcolonial discursive career that transcends
France. In the United States, the concept of the Maghreb has emerged as
a geopolitical concept, as a geographical concept, and (concomitantly) as
a field of study, all at once. The Maghreb, as a field of discourse, has also
its own reality in the Anglo-American context, more in the United States
than in the United Kingdom. Yet what is inherited is rather a French
colonial creation. Sometimes this creation is reproduced willy-nilly, often
as the categories of the colonial discourse itself are reproduced. The first
thing the field inherited from the French colonial one was the fact that it is
divorced from the other colonial geopolitical entity we call since 1916 the
Middle East.7 It is not the Middle East and it is not Africa.8 Yet, in the new
7
Berque, “Perspectives de l’Orientalisme contemporain.”
8
Edmund Burke III, “Theorizing the Histories of Colonialism and Nationalism in
the Arab Maghrib,” in Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib:
History, Culture, Politics, ed. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida. New York: Palgrave, 2000,
pp. 17–34.
284 Postscript
context, without the discursive constraints alluded to, it could have been
the Middle East and Africa.
Despite claims that the study of the region has declined in France in
the past few decades,9 the construction of the Maghreb is no less French
today than it used to be at the time of its full construction – that is,
around the 1920s. However, it is correct that the region is no longer the
object of intense scholarly scrutiny in France the way it used to be half
a century ago. The field itself no longer produces the renowned experts
it once did in profusion: Louis Massignon, Robert Montagne, Le
Tourneau, André Adam, Charles-André Julien, Charles-Robert
Ageron, Jacques Berque. One may of course link this phenomenon
not only to the field of Maghrebi studies, but also to academic life in
France, which lost much of its prestige. Postcolonial France does not
produce scholars of the caliber of Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Raymond Aron, Paul Ricoeur, Michel
Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu. The connection between the first and
the second exists and may lie in the fact that France has long ceased to
be that empire that dominated militarily, economically, and intellec-
tually. But still the field is a French creation, as this book has shown,
even if France lost its monopoly over it. Perhaps the dearth of new
French research on the topic is also because the region seems to be in the
French orbit already; it does not represent that great a challenge to
France, and it is definitively not among the emerging (or already
emerged) geopolitical entities of utmost significance, such as China,
India, and the turbulent regions of the Middle East.
It is true that cultural production on the region is also accomplished
within the francophone zone of the Maghreb. This production is
assured by francophone publishing houses and journals, some
inherited from colonial times. It is also assured by a contingent of
francophone scholars trained in France itself or schooled in the aston-
ishingly alive French education in the region. However, it is important
to mention that the monopoly over the field is held in the United States,
in the very domain of colonial studies as they pertain to the area of the
Maghreb. This interest did not emerge in a vacuum, but is largely the
result of postcolonial studies mapped by the work of Edward Said and
9
Ruth Grosrichard, “Comment la France a delaissé les études sur le Maghreb,” Le
Monde, September 18, 2015. www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2015/09/18/com
ment-la-france-a-delaisse-les-etudes-sur-le-maghreb_4762870_3212.html. Last
accessed April 29, 2020.
Postscript 285
the subaltern studies that ironically emerged out of the work of French
and francophone authors such as Fanon, Laroui, Anouar Abdel Malek,
and Foucault. In the English-speaking world (i.e., North America and
United Kingdom), the study of Maghrebi literature is more touched by
this trend than is the study of the region’s history, which remains, by
and large, contained within a positivist framework, often privileging
a history of events over other forms of history that the development of
the discipline has known in the past half century.
Yet events may happen to challenge discourse. The so-called Arab
Spring, a revolution in and of itself, happened to break something that
had seemed unbreakable since the formal independence of the region. It
also indicated something important about the region. Given that the
protest spread from Tunisia eastward all the way to Syria and west-
ward all the way to Morocco is itself a sign that cultural patterns make
the parts of the region move and respond in ways that are similar
despite their distinctiveness. In other words, the emergence of that
important event itself is a postcolonial reminder that the region is
part of a larger fabric that colonial geography canceled, and that the
divorce the colonial encounter created was fragile despite its long and
sustained efforts of construction. After all, the people in these regions
speak, read, and most importantly listen to the same language, share
the same cultural references, and are initiated into the same historical
narrative – in short, they share the same language and set of values.
This is what Arabness means, and being an Arab (which is not exclusive
of being an Amazigh, a Kurd, or a Jew) also means sharing a language
and a set of values transmitted by a cultural heritage produced in
Arabic throughout the ages by Arabs, Kurds, Amazighs, Jews, and so
forth. In its colonial meaning, being an Arab is a racial identity that, in
the case of the Maghreb, is unthinkable without the category of Berber.
Yet in postcolonial France, the Arab is the Maghrébin, which is syn-
onymous for being Arab regardless of self-identification as Amazigh.10
The same category of Arab is defined differently in the Mashreq,
depending on the geographical area and its history (Arab is defined in
relation to Kurd in Syria and in Iraq, and in relation to Jew in the
context of Palestine, and in relation to Copt in the context of Egypt).
And in all of these contexts, the category is not the same, it is not fixed
10
Abdelmajid Hannoum, “Qu’est-ce qu’un Maghrébin?” Awal: Cahiers d’Etudes
Berbères 2015 (43): 75–87.
286 Postscript
or certain. Being produced by the state through the census, often out of
vestiges of colonial naming, these categories are marked by
uncertainty.11 A consequence of the creation of the region is not only
that it introduced race thinking but also that it reduced human diversity
into two categories that it set against each other. The same set was also
set against others in a complex racial grammar that put the categories
eastward (Blacks) and westward (Arabs) in a relation of inferiority to
the north.
New racial dynamics in the region, from Morocco to Tunisia, sur-
round sub-Saharan African migration that is itself to be seen as
a renewal of a long pattern of movement. It has only been reactivated
and intensified by neoliberal policies, especially since the 1990s. What
is at play are racial (modern and colonial, as we have seen) identities
that created demographic resistance, if not outright rejection of sub-
Saharan migration to the region. Whereas historically, sub-Saharan
Africa was part and parcel of a larger geography, in colonial and later
in postcolonial times, sub-Saharan Africans are seen, by and large, as
foreign, alien, and not constituting the Maghreb or any of its parts.
Despite this postcolonial racial resistance, the sub-Saharan Africans are
there to stay (when they are unable to cross to Europe). Their presence
is not new, it has only been masked under the hegemonic racial dichot-
omy of the Arab versus the Berber. For again, the Maghreb has also
been invented racially, and in the process of this long and powerful
invention, some historical realities were transformed and others were
concealed. National ideologies have undoubtedly contributed to these
processes of transformation and concealment. To accept this allows the
possibility that the region is far greater than its representations (colo-
nial and national), far richer, and much stronger. To accept that the
Maghreb is a construction is also to accept it as conjectural and cir-
cumstantial, thus making us aware that our interpretations of the past
and present and our predictions of the future are determined by the
cognitive framework of these interpretations. In itself, this conscious-
ness may open for us new ways of understanding, new discursive
possibilities, more cognitive sovereignty, and thus for the region and
its population maybe also new ways of living.
11
Arjun Appadurai, “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of
Globalization,” Public Culture 1998 (10)2: 225–247.
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Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence
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British Library Maps, London
Centre des Archives diplomatiques du ministère des Affaires étrangères,
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Service historique de la Défense, Château de Vincennes
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Index
Abdel Kader, Émir, 230 145–147, 149–150, 154, 158–161,

Abduh, Muhammad, 209–210 166–167, 172, 174, 177–178, 181,
Abû al-Fidâ’, 82, 175 184, 188–189, 191–194, 196,
adab al-nahda, 233 199–202, 205, 207, 210–211, 213,
Adam, André, 284 217–219, 225, 227–230, 232, 234,
Afri. See Africani 242, 247–250, 253, 255, 258, 260,
Africa, iii, viii, ix, 1–2, 4–5, 7–9, 13, 16, 264–266, 269–271, 273–274, 276,
18, 23, 28, 33–34, 36–39, 42–43, 278
46–48, 50–52, 60–61, 64, 66–68, Algerian nationalism, 211, 229, 250
70–74, 78–80, 83–84, 88–89, 92, 97, Algerian Popular Party, 246
99–103, 105–106, 108, 110, 113, Algerian revolution, 232
118–121, 123, 127–128, 130–132, Algerian war, 4, 242, 246
137, 141, 143–146, 148–149, al-Idrissi, 26
158–159, 163–164, 167–169, Al-Khattabi, Abdelkrim, 247
174–175, 180–182, 189–194, al-Madani, Ahmed Tewfik, 211
196–197, 199–200, 202, 204–205, al-Manfaluti, Mustafa, 233
214–215, 217–218, 222, 229, al-Mili, Mubarak, 211, 217–219, 244
232–246, 253, 255, 260, 265–266, al-Shabi, Abu al-Qasim, 228, 309
269, 274–275, 283 Altekamp, Stefan, 105, 107, 120–121
African kingdoms, 37 Althusser, Louis, 4
Africani, 8 al-Wazzân, Hassan. See Leo Africanus
Africanus, 9, 16, 41 Amazigh nationalism, 264
Afrique. See Africa Amazigh question, 248, 264
Afrique blanche. See White Africa Amrouche, Jean, 228, 267, 269
Afrique noire. See Black Africa Andalusia, 9, 135
Afrique Septentrionale, 41, 51 Anderson, Benedict, 153, 224–225,
Aït Ahmed, Hocine, 247 260
ʿAjîssa, 14 André, Pierre Capitaine, 192, 267
al-Afghani, Sayyid Jamal al Din, 68, animism, 68, 192, 196, 236–237
209 Arab, 2–3, 5, 8–9, 12, 15, 17–19, 26,
Alaouite, 16, 252 31, 41, 45, 47–48, 50–51, 53–54, 59,
al-ʿAqqad, Abbas Mahmood, 233 66, 72, 82, 89, 92–93, 99, 107, 110,
al-Bakri, 26, 29 126–127, 130, 134–138, 140, 143,
al-Fassi, Allal, 202, 211, 213, 217, 247, 145, 150, 157–160, 164–167, 169,
249, 266 171, 174, 177–181, 183, 185–190,
Algeria, 2–6, 17–22, 41, 43–45, 47, 50, 192–193, 195, 198–199, 201,
52–55, 60, 65, 71–72, 74, 76–78, 203–205, 209–210, 213, 218–221,
84–88, 90–91, 93–96, 98–106, 223, 228, 230, 232–234, 238–240,
109–110, 112, 114, 118, 121, 123, 244–245, 247, 249, 258, 264–265,
125–127, 130, 136–137, 139–140, 267–271, 273, 276, 283, 285–286
312
Index 313
Arab Bureau, 18, 26, 50, 53, 126, 130, Berbérie, 92, 174, 201–202
137, 150, 157, 160, 174, 178–179, Berberism. See Amazigh nationalism
181, 188, 190, 201, 264 Berbrugger, Louis-Adrien, 44, 49–50,
Arab Islam, 192–193, 267 60, 91–92, 95, 101, 126, 129, 177,
Arab Maghreb, 5, 209, 219, 234, 247, 272
259, 276 Bernard, Augustin, 113
Arab nationalism, 2, 140, 181, Berque, Jacques, 5, 158–160, 196, 202,
219–220, 234, 240, 264 210, 240, 266, 283–285
Arab Spring, 258, 285 Bertrand, Louis, 106, 114, 118
Arab, Greek, and Roman maps, 31 Beulé, Charles Ernest, 80
archaeo-Christian narratives, 81 Binger, Louis Gustave, 145
archaeological formation, 100, 111 biopower, 207
archaeological trace, 114 Black Africa, 2, 68, 74, 143, 194–195,
archaeology, 4, 19, 24, 27, 77–78, 235–236, 238–239, 241–242
80–82, 84, 86, 88–91, 93, 96, 98, Black Islam, 192–193, 242
100, 102–111, 114, 116, 119–121, blackness, 1, 48, 127–128, 236–238,
139, 170, 205, 214, 236, 253, 241, 243
269–270 Blacks, 61, 192, 197, 240
archives, 44, 50, 65, 91, 177–178, 180, blad al-makhzen, 154
280–281 Blais, Hélène, 3, 43, 50–52, 64, 76
Armée d’Afrique, 43 bled as-siba, 155–158, 164–166
ʿasabiya, 13, 15, 166, 185–187 Boas, Franz, 236
Asia, 2–3, 8, 37, 42–43, 48, 70, 85, 99, Boumedienne, Houari, 249, 255
106, 132, 195, 200, 205, 235, 237 Bourdieu, Pierre, 255–256, 263–264,
Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama, 284
210–211 Braudel, Fernand, 6, 22, 25, 61–62, 64,
atlas, 18, 65, 69–71, 73, 75, 101, 114 95, 202
Aurès, 102, 181 British Egypt, 3, 85
Burckhardt, Jacob, 41
badâwa, 185 Burke III, Edmund, 94, 126, 158–159,
Bani Yfran, 12, 14 172, 283
Barbarie. See Barbary Butler, Judith, 224
barbarism, 151, 174, 195–196, 219,
238 Camus, Albert, 118, 227, 230
Barbary, 17, 37, 39, 41, 52, 74, 82, Carette, Ernest, 45–46, 53–54, 56,
173–176 58–60, 72, 177, 181, 184
Béja, 48 Carthage, 8, 80–81, 84, 102, 121, 182,
Belot, Jean-Baptist, 133 213–216
Ben Badis, Abdelhamid, 211, 217, 244, cartographic power, 172
249, 266 cartographic representation, 30
Benedict, Ruth, 236 cartography, 24, 33, 43–45, 52–53,
Benjelloun, Abdelmajid, 230, 266–267 138, 145, 170, 203
Berber, 12, 14, 27, 59–60, 63, 66, 72, Césaire, Aimé, 241
88–89, 126–127, 130, 132–148, 154, Chad, 73, 196
157–166, 168–169, 174, 177, Chancel, Ausone de, 44
179–180, 183, 185–189, 192, 199, Chateaubriand, 180
201, 203–205, 215–216, 219, Chatelain, Louis, 107, 109, 115
222–223, 228, 230–232, 238–239, Chatterjee, Partha, 224
244, 260, 262, 264, 267–271, 273, Chénier, Louis de, 41, 176
285–286 Chraïbi, Driss, 228, 230
314 Index
Christian Europe, 5, 37, 179, 239 destruction, 27, 120–121, 129, 163,
Christian humanism, 80, 83 180, 207, 243
civilization, 8, 37, 39, 52, 62, 64, 69, Diaz-Andrew, Margarita, 77, 107–109
85, 87–89, 92, 97, 99, 101, 104, 110, dictionaries, 130–133, 136, 140–141,
114–115, 133, 139–141, 144, 151, 146, 168
158, 174, 176, 192–193, 195–197, Dielter, Michael, 77–78, 87, 92
201, 205, 207, 210, 215, 219, Diop, Cheikh Anta, 235–239
236–237, 259, 266 Dirks, Nicholas, 87, 94, 121, 178
colonial domination, 4, 220 discursive formation, 25–26, 81–82,
colonial imaginaries, 25, 170, 183 93, 111, 166, 187, 189, 244, 249,
colonial modernity, 20 275, 278, 280
colonial power, 3–5, 7, 27–28, 31–32, discursive invisibility, 281
36, 65, 69, 71, 76–77, 94, 101, 110, Djait, Hichem, 237
117, 167, 201, 206–208, 212, 224, Djardjoura, 181
241, 253, 266, 275 Djemilâ, 114
Comité de l’Afrique Française, 158 Dougga, 114
Committee of the Liberation of the Doutté, Edmond, 137–138, 148,
Maghreb, 246 159–160
conquest of Algiers, 4, 16, 79, 105, 113, Du Bois-Aymé, 39, 179–180
137, 174–175, 177, 217 Dubois, Felix, 194
Constantine, 14, 46, 184, 189–190, Dubois, W. E. B., 239
213, 250 Dundes, Alan, 261
Crone, G. R., 36 Durkheim, Emile, 68, 159, 164
Cyrenaica, 9, 197 Duvivier, General, 99, 176
d’Anville, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon, East Africa, 2, 66–67, 236, 265

36–37 Ecole Française de Rome, 9, 109
Dar, Jean, 141–142 Ecole Normale Supérieure, 159
Daumas, Eugène, 53–55, 59–60, 126, Effros, Bonnie, 79, 83, 86, 89, 92,
161, 215 120–121
Davis, Natalie, 16–17 Egypt, 1–2, 7–8, 12–13, 19, 28, 35–37,
Dawla, 186 41–43, 50, 63–64, 74, 82, 85, 87–90,
de Gaulle, Charles, 196, 258 99, 121, 123, 132, 137, 140, 148,
de Gobineau, Arthur, 124–125, 195, 161, 179–182, 187, 189, 191, 193,
265 197, 199–200, 203, 205, 209–210,
de Nerval, Gérard, 227 219–220, 234, 237–241, 245, 265,
de Saussure, Ferdinand, 131, 238, 273, 285
256 Egyptian desert, 63–64, 199
de Segonzac, René, 158 Egyptology, 86, 88
De Slane, William, 51, 181, 184–187, Empire of Morocco, 46, 54, 154
190, 270 Errington, Joseph, 143, 146
de Tocqueville, Alexis, 21, 125–126, Essaouira, 152
129, 177–178, 207 Ethiopians, 14
decolonizing history, 220 ethnographic state, 17, 94, 121, 178, 188
Delafosse, Maurice, 194, 240 ethnography, 24, 84, 150, 155, 161,
Delamare, Alphonse, 90–91 226, 272
Delattre, Alfred Louis, 80–81, 84–85 Etoile Nord Africaine, 246
Delisle, Guillaume, 35–36, 38, 40 Europe, 1, 3–4, 7, 9–10, 14, 16–17, 19,
Description de l’Afrique, 16, 41, 51 21–22, 27, 32–33, 35, 39, 41–42,
Deslile, George, 22 47–48, 52, 67, 69, 72–74, 77–79, 81,
Index 315
83, 85–86, 92, 99–100, 102, 211–212, 214–215, 221, 223, 240,
124–125, 129, 132, 149, 173–176, 244, 279
180, 193–194, 198, 201, 215, 222, Geatuli, 46
225, 233, 235–237, 239–240, 253, Geertz, Clifford, 17, 27–28, 155,
260, 265, 267, 275, 277, 281, 286, 226–227, 236, 282
299, 309 geographic imagination, 26, 30, 51, 75
European colonies, 37, 66, 70, 73 geography, 3–4, 7, 11–12, 14, 23–24,
Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie, 3, 28, 32–33, 36–37, 39, 41, 46–47, 50,
26, 45–46, 50–51, 85–87, 90–91, 53–54, 61, 63, 66–67, 69–70, 73–74,
112, 150, 177 77, 86, 92, 96, 110, 136–137,
149–150, 167, 175, 195, 199–200,
Faidherbe, Louis Léon, 142–146, 148 205, 213, 217, 227, 231, 235, 238,
Fanon, Frantz, 127, 159, 242–243, 278, 242, 246–248, 253, 264, 274, 277,
281, 285 285–286
Fazzan, 9 geopolitics, 66, 74, 108, 173, 183, 191,
fez, 2, 44 220, 224, 234, 245, 248
field of discourse, 275, 277–280, 283 Germany, 44, 87, 258
Flaubert, Gustave, 118, 180, 227 Ghallab, Abdelkrim, 230
FLN, 248 Gibran, Kahlil, 233
Foucauld, Charles de, 130, 150, Gozalbes Cravioto, Enrique, 107–108
153–158 Grande Kabylie, 181
Foucault, Michel, 4, 25, 154–155, Graphic representation. See
157–158, 184, 206, 223–225, 251, cartographic representation
260, 278, 281, 284–285 Grataloup, Christian, 8, 35
France, 2–3, 6–7, 9, 18, 21, 23, 32–33, Great Britain, 23, 44, 86–88, 101, 108,
35, 43–44, 48, 52–53, 60, 66–67, 121, 152, 191, 277
71–73, 77, 79, 81, 83–90, 92–95, Greimas, Algirdas-Julien, 221
98–106, 108–110, 112–116, Gsell, Stéphane, 91, 95–96, 100–103,
118–119, 121, 130, 137, 142, 149, 105, 112–115, 120, 139, 182–183,
152–153, 158, 162, 172–173, 176, 215
178–180, 183, 185, 191, 193, 196, Guennoun, Abdallah, 228, 230, 266
200, 203, 205, 211, 215, 217, 219, Gutron, Clémentine, 81, 83, 98
222, 227, 231, 233–234, 237, 240,
243, 246, 249, 251, 255–260, 262, Hanoteau, Adolphe, 130–131,
267, 269–270, 273, 275, 277, 136–137, 141
280–285 Haratin, 187, 242
francophone literature, 230 Hardy, George, 193
French Africa, 43, 49–50, 62, 70, 113, Hase, Johann Mathias, 34, 37
217 Hassan I, 152, 155–156
Front de Libération Nationale. See FLN Hassan II, 255
Fula, 131 Hassaniya (language), 145
Hassar, Mohamed, 228, 268
Gaetulian, 9 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 238
Gal, Susan, 131 Herodotus, 8, 45–46, 200
Gambia, 73, 88 Hespéris, 160–161, 163, 171, 192, 220,
Garvey, Marcus, 241, 245 254
Gautier, Emile-Félix, 1, 8, 53, 60–64, historicism, 220
75, 85, 127–128, 137–141, 148–149, historiographic state, 93, 95, 100, 104,
169, 180, 195, 197–203, 208, 181, 189
316 Index
historiography, 4, 7, 9, 13, 17, 24, 77, journalistic discourse, 118

84, 155–156, 172, 181, 183, Julien, Charles–André, 1–3, 8,
186–187, 198, 202–203, 210–211, 202–203, 211, 221, 283–284
221, 223, 228, 232, 237, 245, 256, Justinard, Captain, 147–148, 161
272
Hobbes, Thomas, 165 Kahina, 269
Hobsbawm, Eric, 23–24 Kant, Immanuel, 173–174
Höckel, Ernst, 144 Khaïr-Eddine, Mohammed, 228,
Hussein, Taha, 233 231
Huwâra, 14 Kitâb al-ʿibar, 11
Huyghe, Gustave, 130 Kouloughlis, 126, 187
Kusayla, 269
Ibn ʿAbd al-Hakam, ʿAbd al-Rahmān, 8 Kutâma, 14
Ibn Abi Diyâf, ˙ 18 ˙
Ibn Battouta, 41 l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-
Ibn Hawqal, 17, 26, 41 lettres, 26, 109
Ibn ʻIdārı̄ al-Murrâkushî, 15 L’Histoire des Berbères, 11, 184, 186,
ˉ
Ibn Khaldûn, 10–18, 26, 128, 134–136, 189–190
163–164, 166, 172, 183–186, 190, L’islam arabe, 67
198, 201, 214–215, 217, 219, 221, L’islam berbère, 67
228–229, 244, 264, 268, 270, 272, L’islam noir, 67
300 L’islamisation de l’Afrique du Nord,
Idrissites, 15, 181 197
Ifriqiya, 8–9, 12–15, 48, 66, 135, 174, La Chapelle, Frederic de, 161–163, 166,
197, 223 192
indigenous, 8, 86, 88, 97, 99, 101–102, Lalande, Jérôme, 41
110, 132, 148, 159, 182, 189–190, Lambaesis, 106
201, 265 Lambèse, 114
Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines, Lane, Edward, 180
26 language, 3, 7, 12, 23, 28, 37, 48, 63,
Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, 200 69, 99, 123–126, 129–149, 165,
Iraq, 9, 88, 210, 285 167–169, 188, 191, 204–205,
Irvine, Judith, 130–131, 133, 143–146, 215–216, 220, 225–227, 229–231,
148 233, 236, 238, 241, 244, 247–248,
Islam, 18, 24, 39, 42, 52, 67–68, 76–77, 250–251, 253, 256–262, 269–274,
94, 120, 126, 133–134, 144–145, 277–280, 285
172, 179, 181, 186, 192–197, 205, language ideologies, 131, 147
209–210, 215–216, 237, 239, 241, Laoust, Henri, 136, 141, 148, 161
245, 247, 259, 261, 263–265, 267, Laroui, Abdallah, 10, 202–203,
271 220–224, 226, 237, 240, 244–245,
Islamophobia, 192–193 251–252, 256, 261, 279, 285
Italy, 17, 23, 44, 72, 105–106, 121, Le Chatelier, Alfred, 181, 194–196
191, 277 le polygone étoilé, 229
Le Tourneau, Roger, 1–3, 283–284
Jacqueton, Gilbert, 113, 115 leff, 162–163, 165–166
Jews, 72, 126, 128, 187, 231, 264–265, Leo Africanus, 16
268, 270, 285 Letourneux, Aristide, 137
jîl, 134, 185 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 22, 80, 83, 125,
Jomard, 39, 179 138, 227, 284
Jouenne, Pierre, 88 Libophoenicians, 46
Index 317
Libya, 5, 9, 17, 36, 43, 74, 90, 105–107, Mediterranean, 1–3, 8, 12, 23, 25, 35,
110, 120–121, 136–137, 146, 176, 46–48, 52, 62–64, 72, 77, 79, 85, 88,
191, 198, 200, 218, 233, 247–248, 96, 99, 106, 108, 112, 144, 146, 173,
274, 276 175, 177, 182, 194, 200, 202, 214,
Libyan-Phoenician, 104 218, 222
linguistics, 4, 24, 129–130, 132, 136, Meknes, 109
143, 148 Mercier, Ernest, 139, 189–191, 198,
literature, 17, 24, 75, 112, 115, 117, 202, 279
139, 173–175, 179, 221, 226–231, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 259, 282, 284
233–234, 238, 256, 260–261, 270, Mesopotamian archaeology, 88
285 Messali Hadj, 246
local knowledge, 17, 21, 27, 29, 51, 84, Meynier, Capitain O., 194
183 Michaux-Bellaire, Edouard, 174, 266
Lyautey, Hubert, 109, 113, 160–161, Michelin, 75, 112–114
172, 191, 266 Middle East, 2–5, 7, 9, 28–29, 66, 68,
89, 110, 132, 140, 143, 193, 220,
Machiavelli, 154 231, 233–234, 241–242, 245–246,
Maghreb, 1–2, 4–7, 9–10, 12–15, 21, 253, 265, 275, 278, 283–284
23–28, 31–32, 41, 43, 48, 51, 53, 61, millet, 17
63–66, 75, 79, 95, 99, 101, 103, 105, Ministry of Commerce, 132
110, 113, 121, 123, 126–127, 135, Ministry of the Colonies, 70
139–140, 142, 149, 153, 159, 164, Ministry of War, 101, 132
167–168, 171–172, 175, 177, Mission archéologique française à
179–181, 183, 188–189, 191, Carthage, 26
194–198, 200–203, 205–206, Mission scientifique au Maroc, 26
208–214, 216–223, 225–229, Missions Catholiques, 80
231–234, 236, 240–249, 252–253, modern Egypt, 2
255–256, 258–259, 262–265, modernity, 4, 7–8, 10, 19, 21–23, 27,
269–270, 272–286, 305 42, 73, 81, 83, 90, 108, 119, 129,
Maghrebi literature. See francophone 140, 167, 183, 207, 210, 225, 228,
literature 230, 243, 254–255, 257–258,
Maghrebi nationalism, 264 260–261, 263, 266, 269, 272–273,
makzhen, 152 277, 280
Mali, 45, 48, 61, 253, 265 Mogador, 22
Mandinka (race), 145 Montagne, Robert, 160–166, 220, 266,
Marin, Louis, 35, 305 284
Marrakech, 10, 74, 207, 218 Montalbán, César Luis de, 107
Martinière, Henri de la, 117–118, 155, Monteil, Vincent, 193, 265
174 Moors, 46, 125–127, 187, 222, 242
Marty, Paul, 127, 192, 199, 265, 267 Moreno, Manuel Gómez, 108
Marx, Karl, 223, 238, 281 Moroccan bourgeoisie, 230
Masqueray, Emile, 137, 163, 166, 272 Moroccan nationalism, 228
Massignon, Louis, 240, 284 Morocco, 3, 5, 17, 22, 44–45, 47, 51,
Mauretania Caesariensis, 9, 183 59, 69–74, 94, 97–101, 105,
Mauretania Tingitana, 9 107–110, 113, 116–118, 121, 123,
Maurette, Fernand, 67–68 126, 130, 136, 146–150, 152–155,
Mauritania, 46, 97, 176, 192, 233, 247, 157–161, 166, 168, 172, 174, 176,
251, 274 191, 194–196, 203, 205, 210–211,
McKenzie, Donald, 152 213, 217, 219, 227–231, 235, 247,
318 Index
249–253, 255, 258, 262, 264–266, Pelet, Paul, 70–73, 75

269, 271, 273–274, 276, 285–286 Pellissier, Edmond de Reynaud, 46–47,
Moulouya River, 12 126
muʿallaqât. See pre–Islamic poetry Pères Blancs, 80
Mudimbe, V.Y., 7, 23, 241 Petite Kabylie, 181
Müller, Friedrich, 144 Peul (language), 144–145
Mullucha river. See Mulluvia river Peul (race), 144–145, 242
Mulluvia river, 176 Phoenicians, 63, 104, 215–216, 219,
Musée Lavigerie, 80 222
Musulamian, 9 photography, 112, 116
photos. See photography
Nafzawa, 12 Pompeii, 106
naming, 46, 92, 97, 99, 170, 172–173, postcolonial power, 225, 281
175–176, 181–182, 198, 201–202, pre-Islamic poetry, 233
208, 224, 236, 243, 286 premodern Arabic literature, 233
Napoleon, 2, 19, 43, 52, 85–87, 94, Pricot de Sainte-Marie, Jean Baptiste
112, 159, 161, 170, 174, 188 Evariste Charles, 80
Napoleon’s expedition, 2 Prussia, 93, 188
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 203, 219, 240 Ptolemy, 8, 11, 41–42, 175, 182
Nassiri, Ahmad ibn Khalid, 20, 264, Punic, 63, 89, 99, 101–102, 107, 110,
272 114, 136, 216
national discourse, 209, 225, 248–250,
256, 268–269 Qadiriya, 266
national elite, 254, 261 Qayrawan, 15
national identities, 77, 123 Quellien, Alain, 192
nationalism, 6, 28, 88, 149, 151,
209–210, 219–220, 224, 226, 239, race struggle, 139, 195, 204, 222–223
246, 248–250, 253, 264, 269–271, racial theory, 149
283 Rahmaniya, 266
Nedjma, 228–230, 311 raʿiya, 152–153, 156
Neffousa, 12 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista, 16
Negritude, 234, 238, 240 Randau, Robert, 118
Negroes, 14, 39, 48, 52, 54, 61, Ranger, Terence, 23–24, 301
194 realm of discourse. See field of discourse
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 76, 224, 238 Reclus, Elisée, 47–48, 67–68
Nifzawa, 14 Red Sea, 36–37, 63, 182
Nile, 1, 47, 63 Regimes of Language, 130, 253
Nkrumah, Kwame, 241–242 Reig, Daniel, v
Numidia, 9 Rémusat, Abdel, 47
Numidians, 46, 222 Revue Tunisienne, 254
Ricoeur, Paul, 111, 187, 224
Obenga, Théophile, 238 Rif region, 174
Oran, 22, 46, 83, 139, 254 Rif war, 108
Orwell, George, 207, 307 Roger, Jacques-François, 141–142
Ottoman Empire, 3, 10, 17, 19, 22, 42, Roman Africa, 50, 106
66, 200, 265 Roman Mediterranean, 8
oumma, 12, 66, 152, 210, 249, 264 Roman past, 77–78, 85–87, 102, 106,
121, 190
Pan-African Cultural Festival, 255 Roman ruins, 76
Paris, 118, 227 Roman rule, 104, 120, 179
Index 319
Rome, 6, 9, 13, 42, 77, 79–81, 83, sub-Saharan Africa, 9–10, 37, 51, 123,
86–87, 91–93, 95–97, 99–100, 286
102–106, 110, 114–115, 118–119, Sudan, 12, 192, 195, 239
121, 173, 176, 183, 190, 213–216, Sudanese, 14
219, 222–223, 269 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 108
Rosenthal, Franz, 18, 208 symbolic power, 155
Royaume d’Alger, 22, 35 Syria, 9, 43, 187, 210, 285
Royaume de Tripoly, 35
Royaume de Tunis, 22, 35 Talbi, Mohamed, 237
Royaume du Maroc, 35 Tamuda, 107–108, 171, 254
Tangier, 12, 22, 41, 48, 213, 251, 258
Saadian, 16 tanzimat, 19
Sacy, Antoine Isaac de, 184 Tarradell, Miquel, 108–109
Sahara, 14, 28, 35, 46, 51–55, 59–61, Tébessa, 106
63–64, 71–74, 90, 96, 99, 105, 110, technologies of power, 3, 9, 16–18, 20,
121, 127, 132, 145, 149, 175, 181, 27, 39, 43–44, 74, 76, 84, 88, 123,
192, 194, 199–200, 205, 214, 218, 153, 208, 214, 235, 243, 253, 275
222, 245, 248, 250–253, 274 territory, 69, 123, 150–151, 154–155,
Said, Edward, 227, 284 157
Salafi historiography, 220 Thaʿâlibi, Abdel ‘Aziz, 211
Salafism, 209 Tharaud, Jean, 227
Salhi, Mohamed, 220 Tharaud, Jerome, 227
Saqâliba, 14 third world nationalism, 225
savagery, 33, 39, 64, 174, 185, 205, 207 Thomas, Nicholas, 102
school of Durkheim, 159, 164 Tijaniya, 266
school of Rabat, 98 Timgad, 106, 114
secular, 81, 130, 133, 210, 252, Tissot, Charles, 97–99, 109–110, 118,
264–266, 271 182–183
Semiotics (of the Atlas), 69, 221 Tlemcen, 14, 274
Senegal, 61, 68, 88–90, 131, 142–146, tourism, 112, 115
192, 194, 196, 205, 251–252, 265, Treaty of Fez, 160
267 tribalism, 11, 185, 195, 207, 237
Senghor, Leopold, 237–238, 240–241 Tripolitania, 9, 197
Serer, 145 Tunisia, 3, 5, 17, 22, 44, 47, 50–51, 59,
Sfar, Béshir, 217, 244, 249, 266 71–72, 74, 96–98, 101, 104–105,
Shaw, Brent, 8 109–110, 112, 114, 123, 130, 154,
Shaw, Thomas, 41, 81–82, 175 172, 205, 210–211, 213, 217, 219,
Shawqi, Ahmed, 233 227–228, 230, 234, 247–249,
Shiʿa, 15 265–266, 269, 271, 276, 285–286
Siba, 155 Tunisian nationalism, 228
Sidi Ferruch, 2 Turks, 17, 21, 37, 126, 128, 135, 154,
Soninke (language), 145 175, 178, 187, 270
Soudan. See Sudan ʿumrân, 185
Sous, 127, 152, 154
south Africa, 148 University of Algiers, 26, 60, 62, 95–96,
Spain, 10, 23, 39, 44, 72, 107, 121, 152, 103, 107, 137, 139, 163, 211, 254, 264
274, 277
Spanish archaeology, 108 Venture de Paradis, Jean Michel, 132,
Strabo, 46 154
Sublime Porte, 16–17, 19 Verzijl, J. H. W., 154–155
320 Index
Vidal de la Blache, Paul, 67 Western Sahara, 250, 252

Villefosse, René Héron, 80 White Africa, 1–2, 53, 237
violence, 4, 21, 44, 77, 86, 104, 170, White North Africa, 193
187–188, 207, 261 whiteness, 1, 174
Volney, Constantin-François, 132 Whorf, Benjamin, 259
Volubilis, 106, 109, 114, 117 Wolof, 131, 145
Wadi Tine, 8 Yacine, Kateb, 228–230, 232–233,

Walckenaer, Charles, 36, 41 242–243, 257, 261, 267,
Weber, Max, 104, 151, 260 269
West Africa, 2, 7, 28, 60, 66, 68, 72–73,
88–90, 110, 121, 128, 132, 145, 148, Zaydan, Georgy, 233
150, 191–193, 195–196, 199–200, Zenata tribes, 12
205, 238–239, 247, 265, 273 Zuwâwa, 14

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The Invention of the Maghreb

Abdelmajid Hannoum is Professor of Anthropology at the University of

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Abdelmajid Hannoum is Professor of Anthropology at the University of

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Abdelmajid Hannoum is Professor of Anthropology at the University of

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

List of Maps page viii

1 Africa, 1737, by Johann Mathias Hase page 34

2.1 Names of countries of modern North Africa and their

A book owes its existence as much to others as it does to its author.

In 1966, Charles-André Julien, a major historian of the region known

is decidedly attached to the western Mediterranean and often to the Iberian

tremendous work of the Exploration scientiﬁque de l’Algérie. It took

a distinct political status, power strategy, and modes of knowledge

also upon a process of translation of Islamic texts known in Christian

The geographical milieu, I would argue, is an actor only insofar as it

Egypt is decidedly part of Asia.12 It appears so in the geography of

However, neither in the Roman deﬁnition nor in the Arab one is

Europe (Andalusia) or in sub-Saharan Africa. One can undoubtedly

As a prelude to this book, I would like to brieﬂy evoke the conﬁgur-

Ibn Khaldûn is keenly aware that human conception of geography

For Ibn Khaldûn, geography is the theater where history unfolds.

colonial powers invented and monopolized and that made of know-

Already, by the sixteenth century, these were part of “a project of

ulama, were of various backgrounds.60 In the case of Algeria, the

Colonial Modernity and the Violence of Invention

dispense of Arabic or Tamazight or local languages (often called dia-

speciﬁcally ﬁction, helped propagate the idea of the Maghreb to a large

conceptions of the region through time, from within colonial and

their own realities, or to defend old ones.71 However, I do argue, all

Africa. As such, it is a history of a space whose conﬁgurations will

Cartographic representation is a potent modern means of spatial visu-

are cultural artifacts, produced and reproduced, communicated and

geography. Indeed, what I intend to examine is precisely the categories

Before French Hegemony

For instance, in a work by Guillaume Delisle, geographer to the king

Coptes.”19 Even among Arabs, there was description of variety.20

During the Age of Empire, from the sixteenth century onward,

With the experience of Napoleon and the mapping of Egypt, cartog-

in Algeria was used as an argument for France to establish itself in

septentrionale après le partage du monde romaine en empire d’Orient et empire

above all a spatial perception, the French (and by extension European

In this synthetization of Greek and Roman authors, Carette proceeds

the telling title of Histoire de l’Afrique, is in itself a text of the

These deﬁnitions, despite their uncertainties, were reproduced also in

A translation is, of course, a process of converting a linguistic sign to

Sahara: Geographic Limits and Discursive Possibilities

nègres) and “White Africa” (l’Afrique blanche).52 Let us clarify ﬁrst

Tell and les pays des noirs. He represented it differently, as a “vast

Carette attaches the Sahara to the Tell to make it an economically

vocabulary: “everywhere, or almost everywhere, [there are] cities and

The Sahara, as portrayed by Daumas, is surely a hybrid space; there

This distinction takes on a discursively fertile valence with Émile-

What is interesting about this text is also Gautier’s distinction

Surrounded by the sea eastward and northward, one ﬁnds in these

Map 8 L’Afrique Francaise (French Africa), 1890, by Georges Roland84

Gautier was rather a human geographer, and thus a sort of anthro-

The Egyptian desert, for Gautier, is also deﬁned by the Nile. It is

Gautier clearly cuts Egypt from Afrique septentrionale, using the

The Logic of Division

understood by those exposed to it – that is, to a large public in France,

The racializing of Islam was part of the thinking about “religion” in an