The ability of the Kabyles to govern themselves through deliberative assemblies structured by a binary system of party politics was predicated in part on the fact that there was at all times a great deal of common ground between the parties in contention. Ideological differences were radically absent from political disputes. The character of Kabyle society and the constitutive principles of its system of government were taken for granted by all and never at issue. There was no basis in pre-colonial Kabylia for the conflict between reformist (let alone radical) and conservative (let alone reactionary) tendencies. Ideologically, the Kabyles were all of one party, which is to say conservative.
This unanimous conservatism in respect of the social structure and the political system was paralleled by an equal unanimity in respect of religious belief. The fact that the Kabyles were all Sunni Muslims of the Maliki rite meant that there was no basis for political conflict in formal religious difference. Religion was a fundamental part of the common ground on which political conflict about other matters could be conducted. It was because religion united the Kabyles that they could indulge their disagreements over other matters without this threatening to disrupt the political order. That they were members of the same community of religious belief was a point recalled to all and sundry at the meetings of the jema‘a itself, which invariably began with the amīn calling on the amrabedh to recite the Fātiha (the first sura of the Qur’ān), before the jema‘a got down to business.
Misconceptions of the relationship of religion to politics in Kabylia were central to ‘the Kabyle myth’ as we have already noted.1 The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French purveyors of this myth regularly insisted that the Kabyles were especially conspicuous for their lack of religious fanaticism2 and that as such they were possibly susceptible to religious conversion3 and certainly promising material for cultural assimilation into the French national community.4 In particular, it was suggested that the Kabyles were only superficially – that is, not ‘really’ – Muslim,5 and some observers even went so far as to claim that the constitutive principles of the Kabyle ‘republics’ were close to those proclaimed in France in 1789 and that the Kabyle polity was more or less secular in the French sense.6 These notions were hallucinations.
Fanaticism is not a belief. It is the particular form – vehement and intolerant – that assertion or defence of a belief may assume in particular contexts, especially when that belief or the community which identifies itself in terms of it is under attack. The Kabyles certainly had it in them to become fanatical, in reaction to the colonial conquest, notably in the great rebellion of 1871. But because their beliefs as Muslims and their way of life were under no pressure from non-Muslims after the recapture of Bejaia from the Spanish in 1555, there was no basis for fanaticism in Kabyle society throughout the rest of the Ottoman period. The absence of fanaticism was evidence not of a merely superficial adherence to the Muslim faith but of the fact that this adherence was general and unchallenged.
The relationship of religion to politics in the Kabyle polity was quite different from that which has obtained in France since the establishment of the secular state. The separation of church and state in modern France entails (in principle) the reduction of religious belief and observance to a private matter and the emancipation of the category of citizen from that of believer. A Frenchman may believe in whatever God he chooses, or in none at all, and belong to whatever religious congregation he likes, or none at all, without this (in principle) affecting his rights as a citizen in the slightest. There was no analogy with this state of affairs in pre-colonial Kabylia.
The Kabyle polity was a Muslim polity. Membership of the political community was exclusively an affair of Muslims. Adherence to the Muslim faith and thus membership of the general Muslim community of the faithful, the umma, was a precondition of membership of the particular political community of this or that ‘arsh or village. That this condition was not subject to emphatic assertion was entirely due to the fact that it could be taken almost entirely for granted.7 But this meant that religious belief was the very opposite of a private matter. It was a public matter par excellence, as a condition of citizenship.
Because this condition was universally (and one might say effortlessly) fulfilled, it was never at issue. And because it was never at issue, religion itself was never at issue and was correspondingly depoliticised in the sense that political disputes were never about religious belief or affiliation or doctrine or observance. There accordingly developed an important degree of de facto separation between religious activity and political activity, but this separation was quite different in nature from that enjoined by French secularism. (If one wants at all costs to find a modern analogy for it, one must look once again to England, which has never been a secular state but one where political enfranchisement was long predicated not merely on adherence to the Protestant faith but on membership of the Church of England and this state of affairs, far from confusing religious and political activity, tended rather to separate them, by facilitating the development of party-political divisions over other matters.)
There is, however, another reason why there was no tendency for religion to be politicised in pre-colonial Kabylia, which is simultaneously another reason for the perceptible lack of fanaticism of the Kabyles. ‘Fanaticism’ is not only the expression of a defensive reaction to external pressure; it may also develop where a community which identifies itself in terms of religious belief goes onto the offensive. The Islamic conquests of North Africa and Spain may be said to have had their ‘fanatical’ side. And, within populations wholly or at least overwhelmingly composed of Muslims – indeed, Sunni Muslims of the same, Maliki, rite – Islamic revivalist movements have provided occasions for the development of fanaticism, in that religious revivalism has pitted itself against what it has conceived as decadence or unbelief or heresy, with which no compromise is envisaged.
The locus classicus of this phenomenon is, of course, Morocco, where the rise of successive dynasties (the Almoravids, the Almohads, the Sa‘adians, etc.) was regularly accompanied by the assertion of a revivalist Islam. It is not for nothing that Gellner’s elaboration of the segmentarity theory of Berber political organisation in the Moroccan context should have taken as one of the elements of its point of departure the cyclical theory of Maghribi history developed by Ibn Khaldun. In this schema, which posits a fundamental antithesis between urban life and the life of the tribes (‘umrān hadarī and ‘umrān badawī), religion – and the religion of Berber populations on the margins of the Moroccan state in particular – was regularly politicised, as the ‘wolves’ at the periphery rose against the central power and, when successful, installed a new dynasty legitimated in terms of a strict Malikism8 before this dynasty, in turn, succumbed to the fleshpots of city life and provoked its own nemesis in a fresh coalition of hungry tribesmen mobilised in the name of religion.
It follows that the uniformity of religious belief of the Kabyles was not a sufficient condition of their perceptible lack of fanaticism in the later pre-colonial period. It was the internal condition of this state of affairs, but the latter required an external condition as well. The external condition was that the Khaldunian schema did not apply to Algeria.
Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406 CE) not only wrote about the inhabitants of what has long since been known as Kabylia, he knew them at first hand. In March 1365 CE he was appointed prime minister by the Hafsid ruler of Bejaia, Abu Abdallah, and retained this post until Abu Abdallah’s fall. From the vantage point of high office in Bejaia he was in an excellent position to observe the populations of Greater Kabylia, to whom he referred indiscriminately as ‘the Zawawa’. What he wrote about them has often been quoted by French and occasionally other writers on the Kabyles. But the inadequacies in Ibn Khaldun’s account have never been commented upon.
According to the Berber genealogists, the Zawawa are divided into several branches, such as the Medjesta, the Melikech, the Beni Koufi, the Mecheddala, the Beni Zericof, the Beni Gouzit, the Keresfina, the Ouzeldjia, the Moudja, the Zeglaoua and the Beni Merana. Some people say, and perhaps rightly, that the Melikech belong to the Sanhadja race.
In our time, the most outstanding Zawawa tribes are the Beni Idjer, the Beni Menguellat, the Beni Itroun, the Beni Yanni, the Beni Bou Ghardan, the Beni Itouregh, the Beni Bou Youçof, the Beni Chaïb, the Beni Eïci, the Beni Sedca, the Beni Ghobrin and the Beni Guechtola.
The territory of the Zawawa is situated in the province of Bejaia and separates the country of the Ketama from that of the Sanhadja. They live among precipices formed by mountains so high that the view is dazzled by them, and so thickly wooded that the traveller could not find his way. Thus it is that the Beni Ghobrin inhabit the Ziz, a mountain also called Djebel Ez-Zan on account of the large quantity of cork oaks which cover it, and that the Beni Fraoucen and the Beni Iraten occupy that which is situated between Bejaia and Tedellis. This latter mountain is one of the most difficult of their refuges to approach and one of the easiest to defend. From there, they defy the power of the government and pay tax only when it suits them to do so.
Nowadays, they hold fast to this elevated summit and defy the forces of the Sultan, although, however, they recognise his authority. Their name is even enscribed on the registers of the administration as that of a tribe which submits to the tax (kharadj).9
It is worth noting that most of the ‘tribes’ mentioned in the first paragraph quoted above have long since ceased to exist and there is, to my knowledge, no record of where they may have been located. But three of these, the Melikech, the Beni Koufi and the Mecheddala (sic), had not only not disappeared when Ibn Khaldun wrote, but have survived to the present day, as have all the others cited in the rest of the above passage.10 Thus the passage attests both to political upheavals which are likely to have occurred at some point in the distant past and to the impressive degree of subsequent stability in the political map of Greater Kabylia.
But what is most striking about this passage is that Ibn Khaldun makes no mention of the Zwawa’s most remarkable features, their unusually large villages, their elaborate mode of self-government and their highly developed commercial aptitudes and traditions. Yet, had these existed in the fourteenth century CE, they would certainly have been well known in Bejaia where he lived at the time, and he goes on to show detailed knowledge of the Ath Irathen. It is likely, then, that he did not note these remarkable features of Zwawa socio-political organisation because they did not yet exist. The Zwawa existed; they were the populations of the Jurjura and they were known about in Bejaia because they defied its Sultan’s power and sometimes refused to pay taxes, unlike the populations of Lower Kabylia; they therefore merited a mention. But they are spoken of in the same way that the Ketama of Lesser Kabylia (specifically, the Babor and Ferjiwa districts) were spoken of, turbulent populations with inaccessible mountain refuges, awkward customers to watch on the periphery of the state, but nothing more.
The Ketama have disappeared. But the Zwawa are still there, because of the remarkable economic and political development which occurred among them after Ibn Khaldun’s time, from the arrival of the Turks onwards.
Modern Algeria is the heir of the Ottoman Regency. In much of the French literature, Algeria is presented as substantially a French creation, with independent Algeria the offspring, if by caesarean section, of l’Algérie française. But French power in Algeria was itself the successor by conquest of the Ottoman state and, while disrupting much of the political and cultural life of the country, established a structure of colonial rule which preserved and built on certain fundamental features of the Regency. These included not only aspects of the administrative legacy of Ottoman rule – notably the country’s eastern and western frontiers and its internal division into three main provinces – but also aspects of the Regency’s political legacy and its Kabyle policy in particular.
Prior to the establishment of Ottoman power in the central Maghrib, the region we now know as Greater Kabylia had been located for generations on or near the frontier between rival states. With the break-up of the Almohad empire, which had briefly unified the entire Maghrib, what is now Algeria was divided between the Hafsids, who controlled Ifriqiyya (Tunisia) and eastern Algeria, and the Abd el-Wadids (also known as the Ziyanids), who from their capital at Tlemcen dominated western and, intermittently, central Algeria. On the coast, the western outpost of Hafsid power was Bejaia and the frontier between the two states ran south from Bejaia11 – or, at most, from around Azeffoun,12 some 50 miles further west along the coast – to the edge of the Sahara and beyond. It thus corresponded, in its northern section, to the subsequent line of demarcation between Greater and Lesser Kabylia.13 The populations of the Soummam valley and the mountains to the east of this were firmly within the Hafsid territory, but the Igawawen of the Jurjura and the population of the maritime districts of Greater Kabylia were on the edge of this and their political orientation was unstable. Culturally and economically, however, the populations of Greater Kabylia were oriented towards Bejaia as the most important urban centre in their vicinity.
Ottoman rule changed this radically. The rapid rise of Algiers as the capital of the Regency14 precipitated Bejaia, previously by far the more important city, into irreversible decline15 and led to a reorientation of the society of Greater Kabylia and the Igawawen above all to Algiers. The growing prosperity of the city in the course of the sixteenth century attracted migrants from Kabylia and encouraged the development of a substantial Kabyle element in the city’s population, while Algiers became an important source of goods which Kabylia did not produce and an outlet for Kabyle commodities (notably olive oil). In addition, Ottoman Algiers was the first state in the history of the central Maghrib to have possessed and to have relied heavily upon a substantial navy. As we have already seen, the maintenance of this navy was facilitated by the availability of vital raw materials – timber, resin and pitch – in the wooded districts of Kabylia, especially the Jebel Ez-Zeen and the Akfadou forest.
There accordingly developed a degree of complementarity and reciprocity in the economic sphere between Ottoman Algiers and Greater Kabylia that was quite unlike the asymmetrical economic relationship between ‘umrān hadarī and ‘umrān badawī described by Ibn Khaldun. But, while the degree of their economic dependence upon Kabylia was likely to have been a factor in the calculations of the Ottoman rulers, it was probably secondary to strictly political factors in determining the development of relations between Kabylia and the Regency and the consequent impact of this relationship on the political organisation of the Jurjura.
The stereotype of Berber tribesmen stoutly defying the central power from the remote fastnesses of the Atlas or the desert on the distant periphery of the bled el-makhzen is impossible to reconcile with the actual facts of the history as well as the geography of the relationship between Greater Kabylia and Ottoman Algiers. This relationship was an intense and intimate one and it produced identifiable effects on both parties. The population of Greater Kabylia was instrumental in the original establishment of Ottoman power in Algeria and played a significant role in the evolution of the Ottoman regime thereafter. For their part, the Ottomans were instrumental in the consolidation of the sultanate or kingdom of Koukou, which endured for over a century, in the upper Sebaou valley in Greater Kabylia, and also in precipitating its eventual decline. In addition, following the fall of Koukou, Ottoman power intervened directly in the political life of Greater Kabylia and acted to refashion it in several ways.
The net effect of this complex interaction between the population of Greater Kabylia and the Ottoman Regency was the crystallisation of a new socio-political order in the Jurjura predicated upon a novel relationship to the central power. Neither of these developments had been anticipated by Ibn Khaldun and their combination implied the obsolescence of his analysis in respect of Algeria’s subsequent history and its dynamics.
Ibn Khaldun identified two main ways in which, in the arid zone of the Muslim world, a new state might be established at the expense of a previous one. One way
is for provincial governors to gain control over remote regions when [the dynasty] loses its influence there. Each one of them founds a new dynasty for his people and a realm to be perpetuated in his family. His children or clients inherit it from him. Gradually, they have a flourishing realm … This way of forming a new dynasty avoids the possibility of war between the [new rulers] and the ruling dynasty … The latter is affected by senility, and its shadow recedes from the remote regions of the realm and can no longer reach them.
The other way is for some rebel from among the neighbouring nations and tribes to revolt against the dynasty. He either makes propaganda for some particular cause to which he intends to win the people, or he possesses great power and great group feeling among his people. His power is already flourishing among them, and now he aspires with the help of [his people] to gain royal authority. They are convinced that they will obtain it, because they feel that they are superior to the ruling dynasty, which is affected by senility …16
The first way fits the advent of Hafsid rule in the eastern Maghrib very well. It also works for the rise of the Abd el-Wadid state at Tlemcen. Both dynasties took over fragments of the Almohad empire, promoting themselves from provincial governors to sovereign rulers in the process, as the shadow of Almohad power receded. But this is not how the Ottoman Regency of Algiers was established and it was not established in the second manner either.
The foundation of the Regency of Algiers was a major event in the protracted conflict between the Ottoman empire and Spain over what Andrew Hess has called ‘the Ibero-African frontier’17 in the sixteenth century. But, if it was the decision of the Sublime Porte to invest in this venture that secured its success, it did not itself instigate this venture, which no more resembled the Ottoman empire’s expansion into the Arab lands of the Levant and Egypt than it conformed to Ibn Khaldun’s description of the revolutionary foundation of states in an earlier period of North Africa’s history.
The founders of the Regency, Aruj and his brother Kheireddine, were neither officers of an empire nor provincial governors on the make nor leaders of rebellions. They were sea-faring opportunist adventurers, freebooters as Hess aptly terms them, whose attitude to and conduct along the Barbary coast resembled nothing so much as that of the more enterprising British buccaneers on the Spanish Main 140 years later. Between 1516 and 1529, Aruj and Kheireddine secured Algiers for the Sublime Porte at Spain’s expense much as in the 1660s Sir Henry Morgan secured parts of the West Indies for the British Crown at Spain’s expense. But, while their bold initiatives made this possible, they would not have succeeded had it not been for the practical assistance of the Ottoman empire.
Initially, Aruj and Kheireddine acted under Hafsid sponsorship. It was the Hafsid sultan of Tunis, Mulay Mohamed Ben El-Hassan, who allowed them to conduct their corsairing ventures out of Gouletta from 1504 and to establish a second base on the island of Jerba in 1510. It was at the Hafsids’ request that Aruj and Kheireddine tried in 1512 to recapture Bejaia from the Spaniards who had seized it two and a half years earlier; it was to Tunis that they withdrew when the attempt failed, and, after their capture of Jijel from the Genovese in 1514, it was with a degree of Hafsid assistance that they mounted a second unsuccessful attack on Bejaia the following year. Up to this point, Aruj and Kheireddine had not been acting against the Hafsids, but as their cats-paws against the Spanish. Nor had they been acting on behalf of a substantial element of the indigenous population, let alone as the leaders of a revolt. The only significant support they received inside what we now call Algeria came from Kabylia, where a certain Ahmed ou l-Qadi (or Ben el-Qadi) had raised important forces in support of the second unsuccessful assault on Bejaia and for the subsequent expedition to Algiers in 1516. But, while this support was mustered in the name of Islam and in the spirit of the jihad, it was not directed against Hafsid power, but mobilised in its name against the Spanish. It was therefore not entirely surprising that Ou l-Qadi’s forces should reportedly have let Aruj down when he went on from Algiers to seize Tlemcen, where the Spanish based in Oran promptly beseiged him before managing, after he had fled the city, to kill him at Rio Salado in early 1518.
The way the Kabyle forces seemingly abandoned Aruj to his fate was apparently resented by Kheireddine, who had immediately assumed military command of Algiers, and led to a sharp conflict between him and Ou l-Qadi, which Ou l-Qadi initially won. Having successfully repulsed a Spanish assault under Hugo de Moncada on Algiers in early 1519, Kheireddine was forced to abandon Algiers and withdraw to Jijel, where he made his base for the next six years. Boulifa claims that, having defeated de Moncada, Kheireddine mounted a punitive expedition against Ou l-Qadi in Kabylia, but that Kheireddine’s forces were defeated by Ou l-Qadi’s army, which had been reinforced by contingents sent from Tunis, and which then went on to occupy Algiers in late 1519 or early 1520.18
The behaviour of Ou l-Qadi’s Kabyles is described as simple perfidy by Kheireddine’s Ottoman chronicler19 and by most subsequent historians. Abun-Nasr, for example, remarks that ‘the treachery of (Kheireddine’s) Kabyle warriors enabled the Hafsids to seize Algiers from him’.20 But the hypothesis of treachery is superfluous and unfair; what had occurred was an entirely understandable recomposition of alliances.
According to Boulifa, Ahmed Ou l-Qadi was the Hafsid governor of Bona21 in 1513 when he was instructed by Mulay Mohamed Ben El-Hassan to raise the populations of his native Kabylia and assist Aruj in delivering Bejaia.22 Robin records that he was a lesser official, merely a qādi (Muslim judge) in the Hafsid administration in Bejaia.23 In either event, his primary loyalty was to the Hafsids.24 These had had no interest in Aruj’s expansion into western Algeria, especially since the Spanish remained to be dislodged from Bejaia as well as from the Peñón of Algiers (the small island just opposite the city that the Spanish had seized and fortified in 1510), and they had every reason to view with alarm the brothers’ various moves to build up Algiers into a political capital as the expression of independent ambitions at odds with Hafsid interests. Moreover, Ou l-Qadi had his own reasons to view the trend of his allies’ project with concern. He had raised Kabylia to support the liberation of Bejaia, not to conquer Tlemcen, in which neither he nor the Hafsids had a stake, and, while Aruj and Kheireddine were extending their power west of Algiers and leaving Bejaia alone, the Spanish ensconced there were developing an understanding with the rulers of Qal‘a n’Ath Abbas in the northern Biban mountains, which threatened to undermine Ou l-Qadi’s position in Kabylia. Both Ou l-Qadi and Mulay Mohamed had grounds for considering that it was Aruj and Kheireddine who had departed from the terms of the original alliance,25 not themselves.
Evidence of this emerging conflict of interests and arrière-pensées may already have been suggested by the presence of Turkish janissaries in Aruj’s and Kheireddine’s forces in 1516,26 and was certainly provided by Kheireddine’s behaviour after withdrawing to Jijel, since he set about expanding his control of the coast as far east as Bona and of the interior as far as Constantine,27 thereby emphatically trespassing on Hafsid territory. But it appears to have been their ambition to make themselves the rulers of Algiers that had been the Rubicon so far as Aruj and Kheireddine were concerned, since they did not do this in the name of the Hafsid sultan. At some point in 1519–20 Kheireddine resolved to contract a clear political relationship with Istanbul28 and it was with Ottoman support, including troops – ‘2,000 men equipped with artillery, followed by 4,000 volunteers having the privileges of janissaries’29 – that he conducted his subsequent expansion in eastern Algeria before eventually defeating Ou l-Qadi’s forces on the edge of Kabylia in 152530 and retaking Algiers in the Ottoman sultan’s name.
The state power which was established at Algiers in this fashion and consolidated over the succeeding decades by Ottoman military and diplomatic support was unlike anything described by Ibn Khaldun. It was not a dynasty, but a Regency. It was not based on a coalition of tribes recruited from the remoter parts of the interior of the country in support of a particular family’s ambitions, animated by a powerful ‘group feeling’ (‘asabiyya) and cemented and legitimated by a vigorous revivalist Islam which simultaneously delegitimated the ‘senile’ ancien régime. It was essentially a foreign creation, the accomplishment of a political project led by a pair of remarkable outsiders who had built up a private navy and then secured the support of the distant empire of which they were subjects and whose strategic interests their project served, and it was consolidated with the deployment of regular troops furnished by this empire.
Ottoman rule at Algiers was not dynastic; it was rule in the name of a dynasty, but it was itself military-bureaucratic in character. Kheireddine behaved as a dutiful officer of the empire and founded no dynasty of his own; after his recall to Istanbul in 1533 to command the Ottoman navy, his successors in Algiers were never able to build up a solid and durable family interest in the political power they held only temporarily and the dynamics of intra-dynasty dissension could not come into play. As for the janissaries, their esprit de corps was founded on their privileged status as Turks, career soldiers and servants of the Sultan – that is, their position as an imperial and colonialist military elite, not on tribal or kinship ties – and because their strength was regularly renewed by fresh drafts from the central provinces of the empire they evinced no tendency to go ‘soft’ and succumb to sedentary decadence.
The specific character of the regime as a regency had another implication; far from the rulers having a tendency to rely on ostentatiousness, pomp and luxury as instruments of rule, they had a marked tendency to the opposite. The image left by the Regency was more that of barracks-room severity than an inclination to self-indulgence; its vice was harshness rather than debauchery. This was partly because the absence of the kind of court characteristic of dynastic rule meant that the dynamics of courtly rivalries expressed, inter alia, in competitive ostentatiousness and the entertaining of demanding clientèles were also absent or at least muted, but it was also because the revenues from corsairing were often barely enough to pay the Ojaq’s wages,31 let alone fund splendid living. Moreover, the dependence of the Regency on external sources of revenue meant that, whatever degree of comparative luxury it rulers might attain and exhibit, this was, at least until the eighteenth century, not derived for the most part from the exploitation of the indigenous population through taxation and therefore did not tend to excite popular resentment and fuel subversive propaganda, whether couched in Islamic or other terms. And since incorporation into the Ottoman empire facilitated the repulsing of the Spaniards, kept the territory and its populations within Dār el-Islam and appeared to guarantee this state of affairs indefinitely, the Regency had no difficulty in securing religious legitimacy and conserving it.
The state power which took shape in the central Maghrib in the course of the sixteenth century was not one which it was a simple matter to challenge. Its inner cohesion was not liable to fray within three generations, nor was it liable to become decadent in anything like that time. The divisions which later developed within the Ottoman regime, while acute, were divisions between the conflicting interests vested in the respective prerogatives of different components of the military-naval-administrative apparatus, not divisions between contending branches of the same ruling family condemned to the enduring as well as profound rivalries of zero-sum games played over extended periods. And because they were divisions between members of the Ottoman ruling caste, it was difficult if not impossible for indigenous political forces to get any purchase on them and turn them to account. In consequence, while often resolved brutally, with an impressive number of rulers meeting violent ends, these divisions were clearly not fatal or even very dangerous to the cohesion of the Regency as a whole. At the same time, its ability to rely upon external sources of legitimation and extra-territorial sources of revenue as well as troops tended to insulate it from internal challenges. None of this meant that the Regency was insured against revolt and numerous revolts occurred throughout its history. It meant rather that these revolts were of a particular character and fell short of threatening the overthrow of the state.
The Regency had to face three main kinds of challenge to its control of the central Maghrib. First, there was the challenge of regional power holders derived from or linked to pre-existing dynasties, notably the Ziyanids or Abd el-Wadids at Tlemcen and what was left of Hafsid power in the east; these challenges were essentially centrifugal and separatist in nature. Second, there was the threat from the European powers, above all Spain, whose concerns were geo-political; this challenged not so much the regime in Algiers in itself as its relationship with Istanbul. Finally, there was the challenge of local power holders disposed to resist Ottoman suzerainty or, at least, to seek to negotiate the conditions of their recognition of it, notably the lords of Koukou and Qal‘a in Greater and Lesser Kabylia, but also several Saharan principalities which defied the Turks and resisted their southern expansion (Ouargla, Touggourt). The new Algerine state was really vulnerable only where these various kinds of opposition combined against them, as when the Spanish in Oran successfully intrigued to get their preferred Ziyanid candidate on the throne in Tlemcen, or encouraged either Koukou or Qal‘a to rebel against Algiers.
In the superficially bewildering events of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, virtually all the political actors seem to have taken it for granted that internal opposition to the new Regency could get somewhere only in alliance with foreign powers. At no point do the various internal forces appear to have contemplated, let alone effected, an alliance of their own spanning the country and not one of them appears to have considered for a moment that it might be able to raise the country as a whole to its banner. It is as if the manner in which the Regency was established with powerful external support was taken as the template of purposeful political action by all parties thereafter. But this state of affairs testified above all to the fact that the central Maghrib at this time – in fundamental contrast to Morocco – did not constitute a unified political field in which the power at the centre was the principal stake at the highest level of the political game. It would eventually tend to do so only in so far as the expanding Ottoman power integrated the various regions into a single polity, and this took time. Of the various internal forces with which the Ottomans had to reckon, only the Kabyles can be said to have had a significant interest in the central power, over and above an interest in preserving a regional power by resisting the political pretensions of Algiers in alliance with an outside (Spanish, Moroccan, Tunisian, etc.) force. This interest induced the Ath l-Qadi to intrigue with the Spanish at the time of the Emperor Charles V’s ultimately disastrous expedition against Algiers in 1541.32 But at no point thereafter did the Kabyles seriously seek to overthrow or replace the Ottoman Regency.33
Between 1527 and 1574, Kheireddine and his successors acted very energetically to simplify the political problems they faced. In 1529 the Peñón was recaptured and the Spanish sent packing; in 1541, Charles V’s massive combined land-sea assault on Algiers was decisively repulsed; in 1551 Ottoman power was finally established over most of western Algeria when the last Ziyanid sultan of Tlemcen, having played the Spanish card, was forced to flee to his patrons in Oran and replaced by a Turkish governor, and in 1555 Bejaia was at last retaken by a Turkish force under Salah Ra’is. This left the Spanish ensconced at Oran (which they retained until 1792), but with little purchase on the interior; although they continued intermittently to intrigue with both the Sa‘adians in Fès and the rulers of Koukou and Qal‘a in Kabylia for some time, the crisis was past. As for the Hafsids, the retaking of Bejaia and the consolidation of Ottoman authority in eastern Algeria with the installation of the first bey at Constantine in 1567–8 was the writing on the wall; in 1574 Eulj Ali and Sinān Pasha conquered Tunisia and put an end to Hafsid power for good.
Thus the particular constitution of the new state and its command of its relations with the other internal forces in the political field it was transforming in the process of establishing itself meant that the Khaldunian schema was ceasing to apply. But there was another reason for this, and this was the particular character of the second major exotic intervention in the political life of the central Maghrib at this time, the maraboutic movement.
Between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century, a large number of maraboutic communities and zawāyā (religious ‘lodges’) were established in Kabylia and in Greater Kabylia in particular and this development ultimately modified the political environment in important ways. This social and religious movement was not the first to reach the region, for an earlier wave of maraboutic missionary activity and settlement occurred in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and certain maraboutic communities which were later to attain considerable influence appear to date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and thus from the interlude between the two main waves. Nor was the second wave of religious activism the last: beginning in the late eighteenth century, Kabylia witnessed the development of a third wave with the spread of Sufi brotherhoods or religious orders, the turuq (sing. tarīqa), which assumed spectacular proportions in the nineteenth century in the context of the Algerian reaction to the colonial conquest. While it is important to distinguish the turuq from the maraboutic lineages, since they are social phenomena of different kinds, there is no doubt that the two interacted very intensively and that the activity of the turuq was itself a stimulus to a further development of Kabyle maraboutism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But it was the impact of the second wave that was historically decisive for the political development of Kabylia.
In Greater Kabylia the first wave of maraboutic activity and settlement can be linked to three developments: first, the spread of the Almoravid empire,34 which reached the borders of Kabylia when Ibn Tashfin besieged Algiers in 1082; second, the foundation of the city of Bejaia by the Hammadid dynasty in 1062–335 and the subsequent decision by the Hammadid Sultan Al-Mansour, in response to pressure from the invading Hilalians,36 to move from the dynasty’s initial base at Qal‘a Beni Hammad in the Hodna mountains and make Bejaia its capital in 1090; third, the capture of Algiers and Bejaia by the Almohads, the successors to the Almoravids, in 115137 and the installation of an Almohad governor in Bejaia the following year. The turmoil in the central Maghrib at this time undoubtedly contributed to the peopling of the mountains of Greater Kabylia, in large part by refugees from the disputed lowlands, and the religious dimension of the successive empires undoubtedly lay behind the initial wave of maraboutic activity and settlement. There is no real reason to doubt that the first marabouts in Kabylia were an offshoot of the zealous missionary activity associated with the Almoravids and their successors, and that the local significance of the terms (as pronounced in Algerian colloquial Arabic) mrābit, plural: mrābtīn, and their Berber forms – amrabedh, imrabdhen – dates from this era.
In the process of settling the region, however, the first wave of mrābtīn mutated; the initial missionary activity gave way to a process of adaptation to the religious life and social structures of the society they were settling in. The mrābtīn ended up compromising with the numerous survivals of pre-Islamic belief and practice, allowed the project of converting insufficiently pious tribesmen to Islam to evolve into the less ambitious one of embodying and representing Islam while marrying it with pre-Islamic traditions and providing the latter with a veneer of Islamic legitimacy, and were themselves absorbed into the pre-existing social structure as a new set of lineages, albeit lineages distinguished by their saintly descent and the special status which they derived from this. Thus the maraboutic movement should, as Salhi and others have noted,38 be understood in terms of two main phases, the active and reforming phase of Islamic proselytising, and the subsequent conservative phase where the mrābit changes from missionary – da‘i – to ‘saint’ – sālih or walī – and merges with the characteristic holy man of the pre-Islamic era, the tribal thaumaturge, performing miracles, mediating relations between groups, articulating the common interest, arbitrating disputes and providing moral and spiritual protection for the particular wider community to which he and his descendants are attached.
The second wave of maraboutic activity and settlement in Greater Kabylia dates from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The evidence suggests that it was stimulated by the turmoil into which the Maghrib as a whole was precipitated by the reconquista in Andalusia, the aggressive incursions of the European powers, especially Portugal and Spain, and the various social and political crises which accompanied the decline of the three dynasties which between them had imposed a degree of order on the Maghrib since the Almohad era – the Merinids in Morocco, the Abd El-Wadids or Ziyanids in western and central Algeria and the Hafsids in eastern Algeria and Tunisia. The locus of origin and centre of gravity of the second wave, as of the first, was Morocco, and it is not for nothing that historians of Morocco speak of the protracted ‘Maraboutic crisis’ of the period stretching from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century as a defining era in the shaping of the Moroccan state.39 As a movement with ideas to realise or at least promote in its first, ascendant and missionary phase, the second wave of maraboutism appears to have been concerned above all with the need to mobilise against the Christian threat, and the need to assure a degree of order within Muslim communities in the political vacuum that was opening up with the decline of the central power. However, as Salhi has remarked,
The maraboutic reaction took two forms. Unitary in Morocco, it gave birth to the sherifian (Saadian, Alawite) dynasties. In Algeria it was divided, and the Ottoman intervention substituted itself for it as the leadership of the counter-offensive against the attacks on and occupations of the Algerian coastal towns.40
Thus it was that the movement in Morocco tended to have two decisive effects in the political sphere. Ultimately, it engendered new dynasties legitimated in terms of a revivalist Islam which were able to restore the central power (the Sa‘adians, 1510–1603; the Alawis, 1668 to present); in the shorter term, the movement threw up a number of ‘maraboutic states’ (Dila, Ahansal, Boujad) which established a degree of political order in the regions under their control. In Algeria, however, the movement, while inspired by the Moroccan example and a prolongation of it, did neither of these things. Not only was there to be no Algerian equivalent of the new sherifian dynasties, but there was no Algerian Boujad or Dila or Ahansal either. In effect, the intervention of the Ottomans pre-empted and diverted the maraboutic movement and conditioned its political impact by subordinating it to their project.
In trying to assess this impact in Kabylia, we are, it must be admitted, working to some extent in the dark. But such evidence as is available concerning some of the most significant maraboutic groupings and zawāyā in Greater Kabylia suggests a number of hypotheses. Table 5.1 lists a number of such groupings and zawāyā from both the first and second waves of maraboutic settlement by location, group origin (where known) and approximate date of settlement in Kabylia. It leaves out many maraboutic lineages and settlements in the region and merely includes all those for which information concerning their date of establishment is to be found in the published sources. But, while the evidence it contains must be used with caution, certain points stand out.
It will be seen that settlements explicitly claiming sherifian descent belong exclusively to the second wave. It is only in the context of the second wave that the link is established between maraboutic status and descent from the prophet, and the existence of such sherifian settlements from this era is evidence of the Moroccan connections of the extraneous element of the second wave of maraboutism in Kabylia. But the most striking thing to emerge from this table is the almost total absence of maraboutic establishments dating from the first wave in the eastern and southernmost districts of the region.
Table 5.1: Distribution of major saintly lineages and zawāyā in Greater Kabylia, by location, date of establishment and point of origin (where known)41
The first wave of maraboutic activity affected only the populations of the west-central massif (the ‘aarsh of the Maatqa and Ath Aïssi confederations) and maritime Kabylia (Ath Jennad); it left virtually no trace of its activity in the Akfadou/Wad Boubehir district or in the Jurjura proper. The only saint of note to have established himself here at this time was Sidi Ahmed Wedris, a scholar of Bejaia who took up residence among the Illoulen Oumalou – midway between Akfadou and the eastern Jurjura – at some point in the mid-fourteenth century.42 As for the second wave, while it reinforced the established tissue of maraboutic establishments in the central and northern districts, it appears to have been canvassing a vacuum in the east and south and to have had a pioneering role among the populations of these districts.43
This role enabled the mrābtīn of Greater Kabylia eventually to exercise an important influence in the political sphere. But they did not do this as wholly independent actors operating exclusively with political agendas and ambitions of their own. They did so in conjunction with the Ottoman state in Algiers on the one hand and the lay political leaderships of the region on the other, in the context of the decline, fall and aftermath of the regional power known to history as the kingdom of Koukou.
