The French intifada

In Algeria the twentieth century began quietly, with no sense of the storms to come. Yet there were already dangerous undercurrents at work in this unstable and unfixed world. Around the turn of the century, most Algerian Muslims were caught between despair, anger and frustration at what had happened to their land. Waves of migration had transformed the country from an essentially rural backwater into an economic powerhouse. Resentment against the colons was fierce and widespread, but there was no real nationalism or Nationalist movement.

One of the stumbling blocks for Muslims was that, for most of them, there was no such country as ‘Algeria’. Until the invasion of 1830, the territory, according to the French, had been nothing more than an unruly wilderness of warring clans and tribes. Although this was not entirely accurate, it was true that even by the end of the nineteenth century, most Muslims did not describe themselves as ‘Algerian’ but defined themselves as belonging to a family or a local region, or to the wider world of the Muslim umma.

There are two words in contemporary Arabic which can be translated as ‘nationalism’. The first is qawmiyya, from qawm, meaning ‘tribe’ or ‘race’, and this is often taken to mean a kind of pan-Arab nationalism without reference to a specific country. The second is wataniyya, from watan (homeland, or nation), which refers to a precise region. The shift between these two poles was often blurred and ambiguous in Algeria, but when the two did come together later in the century, they did so with devastating effect.1

None the less, after decades of humiliation, by the beginning of the twentieth century there were the first stirrings of a sense of pride in these twin identities. This was cultivated first of all by looking to the East, to the journals and newspapers of Cairo or Istanbul, where young intellectuals were beginning to assert a new sense of self in the face of Western colonialism. For Muslims in Algeria, turning to the East was natural, since it was also the home of the purifying force of original Islam. In 1908, when the French introduced compulsory conscription, several hundred leading Algerian intellectuals migrated to other Muslim countries in protest. The Italo-Turkish war of 1911–12 gave the Algerians new hope, as they prayed for a Turkish victory over the Europeans and dreamt of nahda – the rebirth of Islam. In the years before the First World War, this renewed sense of community was commonly expressed in the mosques in the prayers for a Mahdi – the ‘messenger of God’ who would also be moual es-sa’a, ‘the master of the hour’, capable of delivering Algerian Muslims into freedom. But for all their prayers, no one in the Muslim nation knew how this might happen.2

These nascent hopes were soon in ruins after the outbreak of the First World War. Suddenly, the intellectual and cultural traffic between Algeria and the rest of the Arab world came to a halt, with the introduction of passports and travel restrictions. Most importantly, the disintegrating Ottoman Empire was split into two by the conflict between the European colonial powers. The Germans cultivated Turkey as an ally, providing money, troops, advisors and equipment in return for an Ottoman declaration of war. The Turks agreed to this alliance because they believed that the Germans were the only European power that could stop further encroachment into Ottoman territory by Britain, France or Russia. The Germans also persuaded the Turkish authorities to call for a jihad against Britain and France – a potentially devastating move, given the millions of Muslims in French and British colonies.

The call was never answered. But the already fragile links with the Ottoman Empire which had underpinned Algerian Muslims’ sense of self were now broken, and at the same time the old trading patterns with the East were wrecked by the new realities of war. Most devastating of all was that Muslims in Algeria now had to look to France for employment and for military protection that they didn’t want. All of a sudden those who had looked to the East were forced to look to the North, a place which few Muslim had ever visited but which they all knew to be a spiritually barren and hostile territory.

With the war came the first wave of Algerian immigration to France, as 120,000 Muslims were forced to come to France to replace the domestic labour force lost to the trenches. For most of them, this was their first encounter with ‘Western civilization’ and it came as a profound shock. The Muslims found that the world of their ‘masters’ was a harsh and brutal place. They encountered not only ignorance and racism, but also exploitative working practices and class hatred. In Algeria, the pieds noirs and the Muslims were not friends, but they were bound together in a society that both sides understood. In France, the Algerian Muslims were cast adrift in every sense.

In a parallel shift, one of the consequences of the war was that it brought together the pied-noir community in a new way. Until 1914, most pieds noirs had rarely or never visited France, a country which existed in their minds only as a distant and abstract concept. Although the notion of France as the motherland was always a useful rallying point for all pieds noirs, the reality was that Paris and its politicians were all too often seen in Algeria as meddling bureaucrats with no direct knowledge of the harshness and the beauties of ‘Latin Africa’. To this extent, Algiers and Paris were usually locked in combat over the everyday politics of taxes and legislation.

From 1914 onwards, several hundred thousand pieds noirs were conscripted into the French army. On French soil they naturally found a sense of solidarity and common destiny – Corsican, Maltese, Spanish, Italian and French pieds noirs were now bound together in a single identity. In the conflict 22,000 pieds noirs were killed. One of them was Lucien Camus, a poor farmer of Spanish origin from the region around Oran. Lucien was the father of Albert Camus, who belonged to the generation of French Algerians who, when they felt that France was about to betray them by granting Algeria its independence, ‘returned to this blood sacrifice and asked that France repay them this debt’. This view was not shared by Camus, but he was ‘Algerian’ enough to understand it.3

During the war, a few Muslims discovered Socialist politics and began to think of their return to their homeland of Algeria in terms of reform or even revolution. These ideas were underscored by the events of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and Woodrow Wilson’s declaration in 1918 of peoples’ right to self-determination. They were one of the roots of the nascent Nationalist movement in Algeria after the war.

Many more Algerian Muslims, suffering in exile, found comfort in Islam. German propaganda disseminated among Muslim soldiers in the French army sought to take advantage of this instinct. The propaganda campaign was informed by a young intellectual, Shayk Salih Al-Sharif, who fervently believed that the Germans would free the Algerians from the French. Al-Sharif was born in Tunis around 1880 to an Algerian family known for their devout religiosity and hatred of the French. He began his career as an Islamic scholar and took an interest in the debates emerging from Cairo and Istanbul on reforming Islam. Essentially, Al-Sharif was opposed to modernity and the Egyptian and Turkish modernizers who were trying to separate Islam from politics. He took a hard-line position against the possibility of secular democracy in Islamic lands.

In the run-up to the war, from 1902 onwards, Al-Sharif undertook a complicated and shadowy itinerary which took him from Istanbul, where he worked for Turkish Intelligence agencies, to Berlin, where he represented the Turkish Minister of War and was soon asked to draft pamphlets in Arabic against the French. The Germans treated him as an honoured guest and he enjoyed swaggering around at meetings and parties, always dressed in traditional clothes, hobnobbing with the leading German figures of the day, the men who dreamt of the destruction of the French and British Empires.

Al-Sharif was by now known to the French authorities for texts he had published in Tunis and Algiers. In these he loudly supported the caliph’s call for jihad. In an essay entitled ‘A Declaration on the Machinations of the French against Islam and its Caliph’, which was secretly distributed in Algiers at the beginning of the conflict, he called for Muslims not to betray their religion and to fight the ‘unbeliever’ wherever he could be found (mainly France). He also wrote a longer, historical text, ‘An Account of the Savagery of France in the Lands of Tunisia and Algeria and an Appeal to Aid’, which described how France had ignored international law and had done exactly as it pleased in Algeria and Tunisia. These arguments, in reduced form, were dropped on the trenches by German aircraft, in the hope of encouraging Muslim soldiers to desert.

There were also rumours among North African Muslims that the German emperor, Wilhelm II, aware of the spiritual emptiness of the West, had converted to Islam, and might even be wreaking holy justice on the French as the Mahdi, the ‘master of the hour’. Wilhelm was renamed El Haj Giyum (from the French ‘Guillaume’) and songs were sung in his honour. One of these, popular on the battle-front, was:

Russia is dead

Germany has stripped her bones

France takes mourning and weeps

Hail, Giyum,

Who rises in an aeroplane does battle with the stars4

Al-Sharif himself also believed in propaganda by deed. As the conflict intensified, he toured the German prisoner-of-war camps, seeking out Muslim prisoners, making sure that their religious needs were met, and reassuring them that the final victory of Islam was at hand. This was also the message that he preached in the trenches, where – presumably to the bafflement of French, German and Muslim troops alike – he appeared in the full costume of an Arab knight, declaiming in classical Arabic and reading from the Koran.

Al-Sharif was clearly not a Nationalist in strict terms. Rather, he was a virulent anti-modernist to whom ‘nationalism’ was part of the modernity he hated. He was calling for revolt in Algeria to save Islam, but in the early twentieth century even the most faithful Muslims did not see that this could be a political reality in a world defined by the economic and military might of the colonial powers. After the catastrophe of the First World War, the countries of Europe and America held the reins of power, slicing up and scattering the remains of the Ottoman world at will. This was not just the end of a civilization; it was the end of the unity of the Muslim world. Those who wanted to resist the Europeans needed new weapons, a new set of ideas.