Al-haqīqa lubb al-Sharī‘a (Truth is the heart of the law).
Hussein Al-Warthilani1
On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go.
John Donne2
At some point in 1765 CE the ‘ulamā’ of Bejaia expressed an opinion about the state of affairs in Kabylia. It is not clear that this amounted to a fatwā. Houari Touati has inferred that they considered the region to be ‘un pays de mission’,3 which might be understood to mean that they regarded Kabylia as no longer firmly part of Dār al-Islām but rather a land whose inhabitants needed to be reconverted to the true faith. This would not necessarily mean that they regarded the Kabyles as apostates, but that they considered them at least to have strayed and to need to be brought back to the right path through the good offices of the religious mission, al-da‘wa. But the matter was not exactly of this kind.
The source of this report is the fancily titled Nuzhat al-anzār fī fadhl ‘ilm al-tārīkh wa ’l-akhbār (‘Promenade of the eyes with the benefit of the study of history and news’), commonly known as the Rihla, of Sheikh Hussein Al-Warthilani. A rihla is a journey that an ‘alīm or tāleb or sufi adept makes in search of knowledge and enlightenment, visiting renowned scholars and sufi masters to learn from them; by extension, it is also the written narrative of that journey. Hussein Al-Warthilani was from a cultivated family of maraboutic lineage,4 an ‘alīm who was also a sufi master, an adept of the Shadhiliyya order5 and the sheikh of a zāwiya at Borj Zemoura, at the foot of the Atlas on the edge of the Mejana plain in Lesser Kabylia.6 He was born in 1710 and died in 1779. His family, which claimed sharifian status, was originally from Mila in the Constantinois but subsequently settled at Zemoura. As his nisba indicates, Hussein himself developed a connection, as the sheikh of a second, smaller, zāwiya, with the Beni Warthīlān, known by the French as Beni Ourtilane and in Thaqbaylith as Ath Warthīrān, a respected but rather reclusive ‘arsh of Lesser Kabylia, discreetly tucked away in the folds of the Guergour mountains to the east of the Soummam valley, about 30 miles south of Bejaia. He set off on his journey – which took him on an extended tour of Kabylia before joining a caravan of pilgrims to Mecca – in the year 1179 of the Hegiran calendar, corresponding to 1765–6 CE, and completed his account of this in 1768. The reference to the ‘ulamā’ of Bejaia appears early on in his narrative and he cites their opinion with approval.7
Before examining this incident in its context, let us seek our wider bearings by briefly glancing ahead. Some 170 years later, in the 1930s, concern about the standing of Islam in Kabylia would be expressed by the Islamic reformers inspired by the Salafiyya movement and organised from 1931 onwards in Sheikh Abdelhamid Ben Badis’s Association of the Algerian Muslim ‘ulamā’ (Association des Oulémas musulmans algériens, AOMA).8 This fact may be misunderstood as lending support to the suggestion not only that the Islamic faith of the Kabyles was questionable but also that this was a constant, permanent, aspect of Kabyle society and culture. But this would be to overlook the difference between the judgment of the ‘ulamā’ of eighteenth-century Bejaia and that of their twentieth-century counterparts.
In the view of Ben Badis and his associates, the waning or undermining of the Islamic faith of the Kabyles had causes that were quite recent, for they could be attributed to the activity of Christian missionaries in the region in some degree but above all to the influence of France’s secular culture, transmitted to the population in part through French schoolteachers imbued with the secularist principles of French Republicanism but mainly as a side-effect of the reorientation of Kabyle labour migration to France from 1914 onwards (a factor the AOMA could do nothing about and did not emphasise).9 The view of Ben Badis & Co. should therefore not be read as providing belated vindication of the views of the late nineteenth-century French adepts of the Kabyle myth such as Sabatier. But to say this is not to end the matter.
I have described the French belief, central to the Kabyle myth, that the Kabyles were not ‘really’ Muslims as a hallucination. But, while maintaining this judgment, I consider that a plea of mitigation could be entered here on the mythmongers’ behalf. For, unlike the view of the twentieth-century ‘ulamā’, that of the eighteenth-century ‘ulamā’ may appear, at any rate in Touati’s account of it, to have provided an element of corroboration of this aspect of the Kabyle myth and to have done so, moreover, in advance. What the French adepts of the Kabyle myth believed to be true of the Kabyles in the matter of religious faith and observance, Algerian ‘ulamā’ may appear to have already judged to be the case a century earlier. In other words, the septic question of the relationship of the Kabyles to Islam was not entirely an invention of French colonialism. This relationship seems to have exercised some at least of the ‘ulamā’ of Ottoman Algeria long before it was problematised anew by the French.
It is clearly important for us to understand why. But before we address this question – and in order to address it fully – we need to consider a second question. To do this we must glance backwards from this event, to the Kabylia of some 100–130 years earlier – that is, of the period between c. 1630 and c. 1660 – and the situation, as this has been so far, rather vaguely, understood, in the aftermath of the end of Koukou. Boulifa presents this aftermath in positive, indeed lyrical, terms. Celebrating the maraboutic movement as the real artisan of the overthrow of the Ath l-Qadi’s tyranny, he further presents the imrabdhen of Kabylia not only as preachers of the good word but as the architects of a new, just and harmonious order in the region and simultaneously as the guarantors of ‘Kabyle independence’ in relation to the Ottoman Regency.10 The unreliable elements of this vision will be addressed presently. For the moment, let us face this question: if, as Boulifa claims and, I believe, is indeed the case, the imrabdhen were important social actors in Kabylia during the decline of Koukou and thereafter, why should the Islamic character of Kabylia have been in question 130 years later?
Let us in turn sharpen this question somewhat. To do so, we should bear in mind that at no point between 1514 and the 1630s – that is, at no point during the protracted relationships between the Barbarossa brothers and their successors in the government of the Ottoman Regency on the one hand and the lords of Koukou and Qal‘a on the other – were the Muslim credentials of the Kabyles at issue. Not even when Algiers and Koukou or Algiers and Qal‘a were in armed conflict did the Regency seek to stigmatise or delegitimate as ‘bad Muslims’ either the Ath l-Qadi and Ath Abbas in particular or the Kabyles in general. Throughout the first century and more of Ottoman rule in Algeria, neither the religious faith nor, for that matter, the mother tongue of the Kabyles were at issue at all. In short, there was a Koukou question and a Qal‘a question, but not a Kabyle question. Had some significant change taken place, then, in the character of Kabyle society by the mid-eighteenth century to warrant the raising of a Kabyle question, at any rate in the overlapping spheres of faith and law, by the ‘ulamā’ of Bejaia and by Al-Warthilani himself?
Elements of two possible answers to this question can be found in Houari Touati’s fascinating study of the religious life of Algeria in this period.11 Touati presents evidence that, as early as the 1660s, the ‘ulamā’ of Constantine were noting and denouncing the failure of the mrābtīn of the mountain districts to uphold Islamic law in their communities. The sources he draws on are two: the Manshūr al-hidāya fī man idda‘ā al-‘ilm wa al-wilāya (‘Pamphlet providing guidance concerning those who pretend to knowledge and authority’), a tract written by a leading ‘alīm of Constantine, Abdelkrim Lefgoun (died 1073 AH/1663 CE), and the body of legal case histories known as the Nawāzil collected by his son, Mohammed Lefgoun (died 1114 AH/1702 CE), who inherited the title of Shaikh al-Islām as well as other titles to preeminent religious authority in the city, including the office of imām of the Great Mosque, on his father’s death.
The principal concern expressed in the Nawāzil of Constantine was with the marriage customs of the Kabyles. The custom singled out for particular condemnation as contrary to Islamic law was the ‘right of flight’ accorded to a married woman oppressed or mistreated by her husband.
One feature of their detestable conduct is the custom whereby the woman lives for a time with a man and that she subsequently leaves him by fleeing to the home of another man without divorcing …
The runaway wife is debauched. The man who receives her is also debauched. And both of them are fornicators. There is no solution of tolerance for them, whether the wedding gifts are returned or not … It is consequently illicit for whoever justifies this irregularity, as is said to be the case of many tribal fakirs who meddle in this matter on the pretext of seeking piety and peace among the people.12
That such concerns were expressed up to a century before the ‘ulamā’ of Bejaia delivered themselves of their opinion may suggest that the failure of the Kabyles to conform to orthodoxy in religion and law was chronic, a constant feature of their society. This is the interpretation to which Touati himself tends. In this light, the fact that Kabylia at this time was also producing a striking number of distinguished Islamic scholars and that scholars from elsewhere would come there to pursue their studies assumes, Touati suggests, the status of a paradox. As he puts it,
this paradoxical Kabylia, at one and the same time land of Berber oral tradition and of scholarly Arab culture, of custom and of the study of Islamic law … In the entire Berber Maghreb at this time only the Moroccan Sous could rival Kabylia in its cultural originality.13
At the same time, however, Touati himself provides evidence that supports a different understanding of these matters.
First, it is not clear that the strictures of the ‘ulamā’ of Constantine applied to the society of Greater Kabylia. The corroboration of their concerns provided by Leo Africanus was limited to ‘the mountains of the province of Constantine’.14 This phrase would embrace the Edough, Collo and Ferjiwa in the north, the Mejerda mountains in the east, the massifs of the Aurès and Nememcha in the south, the Hodna in the south-west and the mountains of Lesser Kabylia in the west. But the Jurjura massif was not in the province of Constantine and it may be doubted that legal case histories collected in Constantine would include material relating to Greater Kabylia.
Second, even if these strictures were intended to apply to Greater Kabylia, we may well ask whether they were justified at the time and also, even if they were, whether they continued to be justified. The ‘right of flight’ of a desperately unhappy wife was indeed a recognised right in Greater Kabylia, as the qawānīn collected by Hanoteau and Letourneux documented.15 But these same qawānīn imposed strict conditions on the exercise of this right: the unhappy wife might flee only to her parents’ home. The woman who fled to an unrelated man with whom she then cohabited without securing a divorce from her husband was clearly condemned by the qawānīn, and the man who took her into his household was also condemned and severely penalised.16 It is a misuse of language to describe as a ‘custom’ conduct that Kabyle law itself unequivocally condemned and punished. And if we assume – on the basis of no evidence and purely for the sake of argument – that the unconditional resort to this practice was indeed a ‘custom’ of the society of Greater Kabylia (with the occasional ‘fornication’ tacitly tolerated instead of penalised) in the seventeenth century, it had clearly ceased to be a custom by the nineteenth century, as the qawānīn in force by then make clear, in which case a significant change had evidently taken place in the mores of Kabyle society and moreover one which, if anything, enhanced rather than weakened the Islamic credentials of the society and its legal code.
Third, we may note that the preoccupations of the ‘ulamā’ of Constantine as recorded in the Nawāzil and those of the ‘ulamā’ of Bejaia and Al-Warthilani a century or so later were not identical. While the Nawāzil fulminate against the ‘fakirs’ for misguidedly tolerating the ‘fornication’ allegedly allowed by the ‘right of flight’, Al-Warthilani does not mention this nor was this what concerned the ‘ulamā’ of Bejaia. The problem which exercised them was not that of the onset of unbelief either, but the fact that the Kabyles were constantly fighting one another, a problem Al-Warthilani and his companions undertook to address.
So we departed with the intention of visiting and satisfying the needs of some Muslims in bringing accord between them, since fighting (al-qītāl) between Muslims in our country occurs often and conflict (fitna) is seldom lifted and disorder (al-harj) abounds – may Allah in His generosity and His grace lift that off them!17
Al-Warthilani was quite clear where the root of the matter lay. It was not that the Kabyles lacked faith, but that
the authority of the Sultan has no influence with them, as he fails to exercise it over them. Although the people in this region are close to Algiers, they have built themselves fortified places in the mountains. It is only the zeal of the righteous and of those people who do good that has had any effect with them. It is therefore the duty of those whose deeds are accepted by God the Almighty to go to those people and try to repair their situation and stop them from committing sins and disobedient acts; this is in accordance with the saying of the Prophet (peace be upon Him) that, when two Muslims fight, the slayer and the slain will be in Hell fire. And the ‘ulamā’ of Bejaia have stated that it is the duty of the people of goodness and righteousness who are accepted to mediate and mend the rift between those Muslims, otherwise they would be considered as having disobeyed God, the Almighty.18
This is the ‘mission’ to which Touati alludes.
So, insofar as Kabylia exhibited a scandalous aspect, this lay not in the fact that the Kabyles were not good Muslims, but, on the contrary, that, although Muslims, they were constantly fighting one another and defied the ‘Sultan’. Al-Warthilani and the ‘ulamā’ of Bejaia thus took it for granted that the Kabyles were Muslims; their faith (al-īmān) was not in question.
Other authors who have quoted this passage have accepted it as a reliable observation on the state of the region at the time.19 But there is reason to doubt this, at least in respect of the Jurjura district. There is no significant evidence from another contemporary source to corrorborate this picture of Greater Kabylia as a scene of constant fighting and there is testimony from a slightly earlier source that it was not.
Thomas Shaw was the chaplain of the British factory20 in Algiers between 1721 and 1733. He visited many parts of Algeria, including Greater and Lesser Kabylia, and noted an important difference between the latter. ‘The Zwowah [sic; Zwawa]’, he tells us, ‘the richest and the most numerous Kabyles of this province, possess a large and impenetrable tract of mountains to the eastward of the Sebowe [Sebaou].’ As for the ‘Beni Abbess’ (sic; Ath Abbas),
These are almost as powerful Kabyles as the Zwowah, bringing into the field upwards of three thousand foot, and half the number of horsemen … However the Beni Abbess are not supposed to have the riches; It is certain, they enjoy not the quiet and tranquility of the Zwowah, who, from a more difficult situation, have not, for many years, been molested by the Algerines.21
Thus in the 1720s at least the Jurjura district was noted for its peacefulness. It is possible that the ‘ulamā’ of Bejaia were projecting onto it the more anarchic conditions they were familiar with in Lesser Kabylia. But while Al-Warthilani, as a near neighbour of the Ath Abbas at Zemoura, might equally be inclined to this mistake, and cites several examples of lawlessness at Zemoura and in the Mejana nearby,22 he also speaks explicitly of those Kabyles ‘close to Algiers’ – that is, of Greater Kabylia. This had indeed known a series of intense conflicts since Shaw wrote, especially in the decade from 1745 to 1755, as we shall see, and routine vendettas, short-lived clashes between ‘aarsh and villages, and occasional confrontations between certain ‘aarsh and the Ottoman authorities in the lowlands no doubt continued to occur. But there is no reason to suppose that Al-Warthilani’s picture of an entire region in a state of constant warfare and chaos is a factually accurate one and good reason to discount it, especially in view of the ease with which he himself travelled across the region.
A little later Al-Warthilani emphasised a very different set of aspects of Kabylia:
Our country is a good country that abounds with science, shows friendliness and generosity to strangers, and is full of olives, grapes, figs and the cultivation of land. Our country is greatly cherished and treasured by its people. The number of the population is great …23
But, he immediately reiterates,
bereft of the Sultan and his authority; consequently, the country is lawless (sā’ib).24 May God, the Almighty, cause it to thrive with the prescriptions of the Sharī‘a, root out strife (al-fitna) and replace it with everlasting well-being (al-‘āfīya).25
Thus the Kabyles were accused not so much of a few particularly ‘detestable’ customs contrary to Islamic law and morality but rather of general lawlessness, in the absence of the authority of the ‘Sultan’. The condemnation of this state of affairs, Touati tells us, entailed – if it did not presuppose – a refusal to recognise the qawānīn as valid law. As Touati put it,
the problem is not only that the region transgresses the rules of legal marriage,26 but, more gravely, that its substitutes its own customary rulings, the famous kanouns [sic], for the Sharī‘a, Islamic legality. Engaged in rebellion, sība, it recognizes neither ‘the authority of the prince’ nor ‘legal qualifications’.27
At the same time, this disqualification of Kabyle law en bloc entailed a condemnation of the thajma‘th in its role as promulgator of this flawed law.
The champions of the Sharī‘a cannot conceive of a worse transgression than that which makes law a product of a human institution and sets up the tajma‘at, the Kabyle village assembly, as a legislator, as a source of juridical authority.28
If there is a criticism to be made of Touati’s otherwise admirable exposition, it is that by interweaving citations from the Manshūr al-Hidāya and the Nawāzil on the one hand and Al-Warthilani’s Rihla on the other, he tends to elide the differences between them and thus obscures the element of change over time and other differences between the outlook of the ‘ulamā’ of seventeenth-century Constantine and that of Al-Warthilani a century later.
Consider, for instance, the contemptuous reference that we find in the Nawāzil to some of the religious leaders of the society of the countryside (and especially of the mountains) as ‘fakirs’.29 The resort to this delegitimating term expressed the hegemonic ambitions of the urban ‘ulamā’ and thus their claim to be the authoritative arbiters not only of Islamic orthodoxy but also of who was and who was not a true ‘alīm, combined with the standard urban prejudice against rural and provincial society. In Al-Warthilani’s case, the matter was more complicated, for he was himself a ‘provincial’; he was moreover of maraboutic lineage and enjoyed the company of those of his fellow mrābtīn he respected as true men of religion, ahl ‘ilm wa fadhl (‘people of knowledge and merit’),30 making a point of visiting many such mrābtīn in the course of his journey through Kabylia, and was as inclined to criticise the urban ‘ulamā’ (except those of Bejaia, with whom he had strong ties) as he was to denounce those mrābtīn who in his view failed in their proper, religious, mission or whose credentials were bogus. Clearly more discriminating in its choice of targets, Al-Warthilani’s critique above all articulated an important shift in perspective, from a piecemeal condemnation of the mores and unorthodox customs of the mountain populations to a general criticism of the Kabyles for subsisting in a state of lawlessness. But the charge of ‘lawlessness’, we can now see, was essentially the logical corollary of the observable fact that the Sultan’s writ did not run among them, and the exaggerated complaint that the Kabyles were forever ‘fighting’ was the corollary, owing as much to sophistry as to logic, of the charge of ‘lawlessness’.
In short, by the 1760s the main issue was no longer the irregular marriage customs or the (allegedly) debauched sexual mores of the Kabyles, but rather the quite different question of legitimate authority in all matters of law. This issue was not, as has so often been mistakenly asserted, that of the opposition: Sharī‘a vs ‘urf. As we have already noted in Chapter 3, it was entirely accepted that the custom of a country or region might be one of the sources of law. But Islamic legal theory, while recognising in principle the validity of law derived from custom, nonetheless sought to subject the process of derivation to certain conditions. As Touati explains, the condition was that each derivation of law from local custom should be validated by a procedure known as ‘amal.31 This procedure was the business of the qualified specialists, the ‘ulamā’. Thus at one level, the problem with the Kabyle qawānīn was that they had derived law out of custom without this necessary validating procedure. But underlying this problem was the more fundamental problem of legitimacy. The legitimate ruler had the right to promulgate a qānūn and in doing so would enlist the assistance of the ‘ulamā’ to effect the required ‘amal; from the point of view of the central power and its doctors of law, a mere mountain village had neither the political authority to make qānūn law nor the properly qualified ‘ulamā’ available to it to ensure the validating conditions.
This reasoning led logically to the condemnation of the Kabyle thajma‘th and its law. But it should be noted that a premise built into this argument was that Kabylia was an integral part of the rightful jurisdiction of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers and its provincial and local representatives. In other words, the assemblies of Kabylia were, as legislatures, illegitimate whatever decisions they took and their laws invalid whatever their actual content, by virtue of the fact that, in seeking to preserve their system of sovereign self-government from interference by the Regency, the Kabyles were denying the latter’s authority and ipso facto in a state of ‘rebellion’. The political parti pris underlying Al-Warthilani’s discourse should be clear. It was not that he was subjectively pro-Turk; indeed, the Rihla contains powerful criticisms of aspects of Turkish rule. But he was the sheikh of the zāwiya at Borj Zemoura, one of the most important outposts of Ottoman power on the southern marches of Lesser Kabylia, and, while critical of corruption and other bad practices, accepted the framework of the Regency as the object of political obligation. In line with classical Sunni teaching, he insisted on the religious duty of obedience to those who hold authority,32 and in Algeria it was the Ottomans who did so. Thus in the conflict between Kabyle self-government and the claims of the Regency, he sided with the latter.
Paradoxes are tricks of the light, the light being manipulated by the author of the paradox. In reality, Achilles can easily outrun Zeno’s tortoise. The fact that Kabylia in the pre-colonial period produced a striking number of distinguished religious scholars and that others came to the region to study there only appears paradoxical if the assumption is made that the Kabyles in general were bad Muslims in dire need of reconversion to the true faith. The basis of this assumption is the disdainful and partisan discourse of the ‘ulamā’ of Constantine, the unreliability of which we have shown, and the critical discourse of Al-Warthilani. And a crucial premise of Al-Warthilani’s critique turns out to be the determination of the Kabyles to make and preserve their own political order and to make their own law independently of the Regency, deriving part of this law from custom as they saw fit by means of careful deliberation in representative assemblies which carried an authority with the society that the Regency and its relays could not rival. Seen in this light, we might rather think that it is not at all surprising that a society that possessed the capacity to govern itself and to make its own law should also have produced doctors of law capable of distinguishing themselves elsewhere. It should also be clear that the origin of the ‘cultural originality’ of Kabylia of which Touati speaks was its political originality.
It remains for us to establish what prompted Al-Warthilani to develop his radical critique of Kabyle law. Had some development in the political life of the region occurred that acted as a catalyst to his thoughts and thereby radicalised the orthodox critique of Kabyle society? There is reason to believe the answer is yes and that the development in question was the decision of the Igawawen to break explicitly with the Sharī‘a in respect of the right of women to inherit. While Al-Warthilani does not refer to this development, we know he sided with those mrābtīn who opposed the exheredation of women in the name of the Sharī‘a,33 and so he would certainly have been concerned by it. And it is reasonable to suppose that the matter would have been among those he discussed with the mrābtīn of Greater Kabylia whom he visited on his journey across the region.
For Al-Warthilani’s promenade around Kabylia was not a conventional rihla in the sense of a quest for spiritual enlightenment, but a quest, as the title he gave his text makes plain, for news (al-akhbār) and expressed his interest in current affairs. It is striking that he wasted no time visiting the most eminent centres of spirituality and religious teaching, the zawāyā of Timizart n’Sidi Mansour, Tifrit n’Ath ou Malek, Sidi Wedris or Sidi Abderrahmane El-Illouli. Instead, in halting among the Ath Menguellat, the Ath Bethroun, the Ath Irathen, the Ath Fraoucen, the Ath Yahia and at Werja among the Ath Bou Youcef, in addition to the centres of Ottoman authority at Tizi Ouzou and Dellys,34 he was visiting most of the principal collective actors in the story we are about to tell.
At an extraordinary deliberative assembly held in 1162 AH/1748–9 CE, the Ath Bethroun confederation – ‘the heart of the Igawawen’35 – together with four allied ‘aarsh proclaimed their decision to abolish the right of women to inherit. The question is: why? This decision placed Kabyle law in unprecedentedly explicit opposition to the Sharī‘a. To do this and to do it so openly was surely to invite trouble. What, then, motivated this decision?
Boulifa insisted that the decision was a response to the problem that arose when numerous Kabyles who had been held in captivity by the Spanish were finally released, for they found on their return to their villages that they had already been given up for dead, their ‘widows’ had remarried, in some cases outside the village or even the ‘arsh, and their property had been redistributed among their heirs, including their female heirs, and had in some cases passed into the hands of total strangers.36 The gravity of the conflicts – within villages, between villages of the same ‘arsh and even between different ‘aarsh – that were precipitated on the return of the living dead accordingly prompted the decision to avoid a repetition of such problems by depriving all women of the right to inherit.
The first difficulty with this theory is that the release of the Kabyle captives occurred as a by-product of the treaty which the Regency concluded with Spain in 1767. Boulifa accordingly insisted that the conventional date of 1748 for the exheredation decision was wrong and that it must have been taken after 1767.37 But this does not work. The text of the decision of the Ath Bethroun is both full of convincing detail and is dated 1162 AH – that is, in 1748–9 CE38 – so it must have been prompted by something other than the locally inconvenient side-effects of the 1767 treaty. A second difficulty with Boulifa’s theory is that only 1200 Algerian Muslim captives were released and many of these, perhaps more than half, will not have been Kabyles;39 it may well be doubted that the return of a few hundred dispossessed men would have caused a problem big enough to prompt such a dramatic and controversial measure to remedy it.
An explanation that avoids Boulifa’s problem with the chronology was advanced by another Kabyle writer, Oukhalfoun, who suggested that the issue arose simply as a consequence of a growing tendency of Kabyle women to marry into families from other villages or ‘aarsh.40 This hypothesis resembles Boulifa’s but does not need to posit the return of the living dead as catalyst and so can be squared with the conventional dates of the decision. The weakness of this explanation is that it fails to account for or even demonstrate the alleged new fashion of marrying into other villages and ‘aarsh. It is not as if young Kabyle women in those days were free to marry whomever they chose, irrespective of the wishes of their parents. I therefore regard Oukhalfoun’s hypothesis as purely speculative and implausible. I also consider that Boulifa was displaying a sound instinct in looking for a specific event that might explain the Kabyles’ resort to this drastic measure. If the later treaty with Spain will not do, can we find a convincing alternative?
Let us begin by considering what we know.
We know a great deal about the Ath Bethroun’s deliberation, thanks to the survival of an extended record of the meeting. This knowledge includes the date and place of the meeting, the terms of the decisions taken, and the names of most of those who attended and of their villages of origin and thus, by derivation, the names of the ‘aarsh represented at the meeting.
We also know that there is a tradition among the Ath Irathen to the effect that they too held a similar meeting, which took an identical decision, at a place called Tizra Waguemoun.41 The date of this meeting is not known, but it must have been no earlier than 1737, since there is evidence that the qawānīn of the Ath Irathen were in at least superficial conformity with the Sharī‘a in respect of female inheritance at that time.42 We should also note that it may have been held as late as 1748, close to the time of the Ath Bethroun meeting, except that there is reason to believe that the Ath Irathen held their assembly first, before the Ath Bethroun, a point to which I shall return.
Finally, we know that there used to exist an impressive monument to this affair in the shape of a large stone, known in French as la pierre de l’héritage (‘the inheritance stone’), in the centre of the village of Jema‘a n’Saharij,43 the capital of the ‘arsh Ath Fraoucen, the immediate neighbours of the Ath Irathen to their east. This fact has fuelled various speculations. Some have suggested that the meeting claimed to have been held at Tizra Waguemoun among the Ath Irathen was really held at Jema‘a n’Saharij. Others have apparently supposed that the decision recorded as having been taken by the Ath Bethroun in their own territory in the high Jurjura was really taken at Jema‘a n’Saharij.44 These speculations bear witness to a shared reluctance to accept that the people of Jema‘a n’Saharij would have gone to the trouble of commemorating a decision taken elsewhere and by others.
I am inclined to agree with this. I see no reason to suppose that the ‘inheritance stone’ commemorates anything other than a decision taken at Jema‘a n’Saharij itself. At the same time, I believe that this meeting should not be confused with either the meeting held by the Ath Irathen or the meeting held by the Ath Bethroun. In short, I submit that the evidence supports the view that three distinct assemblies occurred45 and took, one after another, the same dramatic decision. I also believe, for reasons I shall explain presently, that the meeting at Jema‘a n’Saharij was the last of the three and took place no earlier than 1752.
The next step we should take is to examine with care the precise decisions taken. The assembly of the Ath Bethroun and its allies actually resolved upon four distinct measures:
In considering what prompted these decisions, we clearly should examine their likely effects. What did these measures actually achieve? Did they make any real difference to the material position of women in Kabyle society? Virtually all commentary has taken it for granted that they did. And virtually all discussion of this point has taken it for granted that, in disinheriting their women, the Kabyles were not only deviating from the Sharī‘a but also distinguishing themselves very radically from the other rural and mountain populations of the Maghrib.
Let us reconsider the latter point first. The central problem posed by the insistence of Islamic law on the right of women to inherit is that this threatened the integrity of the landholdings of the extended family. In order to preserve the family patrimony, especially its patrimony in land, it was necessary to deny to wives and daughters and sisters the right to any share of the inheritance. This problem did not confront the Kabyles alone; it also confronted the populations of the Oranie and Constantinois, to look no further. How, then, did these other populations deal with it?
In the Oranie, it appears that the standard ploy to get around this provision of the Sharī‘a was that the female heir would make a ‘gift’ of her share of the inherited property to her male kinsmen, in exchange for their commitment to provide for her for the rest of her life. This ‘gift’ was of course in many if not most cases an imposition on the woman concerned; under pressure from her family, she would have no choice but to make it. That this was how things worked emerges from the legal debate concerning this practice of ‘donation’ that took place in the district of Ghris, near Mascara in the central Oranie, in the second half of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century. Touati remarks of the social context of this debate that ‘we are in a country that disinherits its women’46 and informs us that the debate turned on the following question:
What is the point of view of the law with regard to the gift, hiba, that the daughters and sisters who live among their tribe make to their kinsfolk when the local custom, ‘urf, is to disinherit them?47
How that debate was concluded need not concern us here. The point is that it clearly emerges that the practice of denying women their right, under Islamic law, to inherit property was by no means confined to the Kabyles or even the Berbers in general; it was a characteristic feature of rural society in Algeria, if not the Maghrib, as a whole. The procedural device of female donation, hiba, appears to have been the standard one employed in western Algeria48 but it was not the only expedient to which rural society might resort.
Mahé has suggested that, prior to the mid-eighteenth century assemblies that met to consider this question, the standard ploy in Kabylia was the resort to mortmain, hubus49 – that is, the constitution of all or part of the family property as a bequest to a religious foundation such as a zāwiya.50 The rule here was that the former owners would continue to enjoy use-rights to the property up until the extinction of the family, at which point (which of course might never be reached) the land in question would become the absolute property of the foundation to which it was bequeathed, unless kinsmen of the family that originally owned it exercised the right of shefa‘a in respect of it. Thus the device of hubus made it possible to arrange for women to be taken care of since they too might enjoy use-rights in the property, without this entailing the alienation of a part of the property to an unrelated family.51
Mahé accordingly asks the following pertinent question: given that the Kabyles could get round the Sharī‘a in the matter of female inheritance by the unobtrusive and licit means of the hubus, what could have motivated them to affront the Sharī‘a so openly by explicitly rejecting, in principle as well as in practice, women’s right to inherit?52 Mahé offers two hypotheses in answer to this question, both speculative and neither wholly persuasive.
The first is based on a document recording the decision taken in 1818 CE by the thajma‘th of the largest of the Ath Yenni villages, Ath Lahcène, to go back on the decision to which it had been party in 1749 and to re-establish the right of women to inherit in the village’s code of law. The document in question records that this decision was taken after a plague had broken out in the village. Mahé accordingly infers that this misfortune threatened to create a situation where a family might become extinct in the male line, leaving only women with no near relatives to take care of them, and he suggests that it was under the pressure of this threat that it was agreed to revert to the Sharī‘a on this point. As he himself remarks, however, ‘this explanation seems insufficient’ and how it might throw light on the earlier decision to disinherit women is unclear.53
Mahé’s second suggestion is that the procedure of constituting landed property as hubus had inconvenient consequences which eventually became intolerable. Speculating that the resort to this expedient led to a proliferation of ahbās, he points out that this led at least by implication to a serious conflict of interests. As we have already explained in Chapter 2, all land held as melk, ‘private property’, ultimately belonged to the community. Thus when a family became extinct, its landholdings would revert to the village, which would then decide how to exploit or reallocate them. By making land over to a zāwiya or ma‘ammera (Quranic school; in Thaqbaylith: thim‘ammerth, plural: thim‘ammrin) as mortmain, a family was implicitly arranging for this land to escape the ultimate ownership and control of the village community. Were this to happen on a large scale, the long-term consequences for the villages of Kabylia would be very serious, for it would entail the rise of the zawāyā as major landholders that were independent of and in at least latent rivalry with the thiddar of Kabylia.54
This is a far more interesting theory and persuasive in one respect, in the latent rivalry it tacitly posits between thaddarth and zāwiya in the society of the Jurjura. But it too fails to account for the decision taken to abolish the right of female inheritance. Even if we accept one of this theory’s indispensable premises, that the ahbās had proliferated to an intolerable extent by c. 1748 (a premise for which there is no documentary support), it remains to explain why the Igawawen dealt with this problem as they did. It was, after all, open to them to place restrictions on the resort to hubus and encourage the practice of hiba as a preferable alternative. As we have seen, the Ath Bethroun did indeed place a restriction of a kind on the resort to hubus in the decisions they took in 1749. Why, then, did they also abolish the right of women to inherit, instead of simply relying on the customary practice of hiba?
There can be no doubt that the Igawawen were aware of this practice. Not only is this a reasonable inference from the fact that the Igawawen would by the mid-eighteenth century have acquired an extensive experience of western Algeria and its customary law as a by-product of their trading ventures there and also their military activities in the service of the Regency; it is also a fact documented by Hanoteau and Letourneux. For, in their discussion of the question of the exheredation of women in the case of the Ath Irathen, they record that, up until 1737 at least, the Ath Irathen relied on the procedure of female donation as their way of getting round the Sharī‘a and preventing female inheritance.55 It was because they were able to employ this expedient that their qawānīn did not openly conflict with the Sharī‘a on this question. Why, then, did they not continue to do so? And why did the other Igawawen populations not resort to this procedure more extensively if they had reason to curb the recourse to hubus?
Dissatisfied with his own hypotheses, Mahé goes on to suggest that we need to know more about the state of the religious field in Kabylia during this period in order to understand this event fully.
Some supplementary elements of an explanation are certainly to be found in the religious situation of Kabylia at this time. The second half of the 18th century is precisely the beginning of a profound reconstitution of the religious leadership in Kabylia.56
But it is in the changes and developments of the first, not the second, half of the eighteenth century – and, for that matter, of the second half of the seventeenth century – that we must seek the supplementary elements – that is, the elements of the historical context that we need in order to discern the chain of cause and effect and thereby make sense of these events. As we shall see, the changes and developments in question were predominantly political, not religious, in nature and Al-Warthilani was not alone in finding them disturbing.
Between c. 1610 and c. 1760, a complex transformation occurred in the socio-political organisation of Greater Kabylia. This transformation established the premises both of Al-Warthilani’s critique and of the ‘Kabyle myth’ of a century later. In doing so it also established several – but not all – of the premises of the Kabyle question, which emerged with the rise of popular nationalism from the 1920s onwards and remains unresolved.
The transformation was not the achievement of a single coherent force oriented by the purpose of reordering the region, let alone of a definite project made explicit in documents available for historians to contemplate. It was the product of the vigorous interaction of several distinct forces with competing interests – the imrabdhen, both as missionary movement and as locally notable lineages forming networks of complicity and influence; the Ottoman Regency, seeking to extend its control of the hinterland; the jawād families of the lowlands seeking to hold or gain power at the local level; and the egalitarian society of the highlands determined to preserve, in its system of representative and law-bound self-government, the political and juridical framework on which its complex economic activities depended. The respective purposes of these forces were rarely if ever made explicit and the processes of their interaction through which the new order in Kabylia was forged were correspondingly obscure and had a chaotic aspect.
These features of the story, together with the scarcity of written sources, has rendered the historian’s task of doing justice to it an especially challenging one. In the absence of a reliable body of evidence, the tenuous historiography of the pre-colonial era has been enlisted by the opposed sides in the successive variants of the controversy over Kabylia that has been a constant of Algerian life for the last 250 years, and ahistorical and partisan theses have structured the debate at every stage.
These theses have proposed essentialist readings of Kabyle society and its religious and political organisation that are mutually exclusive because of the ‘all or nothing’ variety. To the French myth-monger Sabatier and his thesis – that ‘the Kabyle is essentially anti-clerical’ and his laws ‘the most energetic negation of the fundamental principles of the Muslim code’ – which reduced the Islamic dimension of Kabyle society and the Islamic factor in Kabyle history to virtually nothing, we find opposed Chachoua’s comparable claim that the importance attached to the Kabyle jema‘a by nineteenth-century French (and, by implication, all subsequent) observers was simply part of the same bêtisier (‘collection of howlers’) of which anti-clerical zealots such as Sabatier were guilty and that not only was Kabyle society profoundly Muslim but the only institutions it possessed in the pre-colonial period were the zawāyā.57
There can be no question of mediating such differences of opinion. The positions staked out by the protagonists of that debate are not to be reconciled. We must instead follow our own course while navigating between them, recognising that, while neither is true, both contain an element of truth which we can appreciate at its real value only within a soundly based historical vision of Kabylia which resolutely rejects essentialist theses. Such a vision will enable us to see that a tension between religious and lay leadership in Kabyle political life has been a feature of the society of Greater Kabylia throughout the period we are discussing. It will also allow us to notice that the balance between the two has varied from one period to another and also from one district to another and encourage us accordingly to ask the interesting question why that should be so and to attempt an answer to it. A provisional answer is that religious leadership has repeatedly come to the fore when lay political leadership has, for one reason or another, been weak or absent. This was actually the situation that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the end of Koukou.
The re-emergence of the imrabdhen as major actors in Kabylia in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was not prompted by the need for an access of missionary zeal in the face of a region-wide loss of faith. Although a resumption of missionary activism was a feature of this period, faith as such was not the issue. Rather, the main cause of this development appears to have been the descent of the region into a condition resembling in some degree that of Morocco at the time of the ‘maraboutic crisis’ there, namely the opening up of a political vacuum in a context of growing social crisis.
Let us consider this social crisis first. While we must operate with little in the way of solid evidence and content ourselves with putting forward hypotheses rather than hard and fast assertions, we can be sure of the existence of this crisis in the first place and, in the second, reasonably confident that we understand its main elements.
One of these was the pressure on the socio-political order generated by the influx of immigrants into the region as a whole and into Greater Kabylia in particular. Bejaia after its fall to the Spanish was the first major source of these immigrants, in a process that involved simultaneously a degree of ruralisation of a previously urban population and a corresponding degree of ‘urbanisation’ of the society of the countryside and the society of the mountains above all.58 In addition to the exodus from Bejaia from 1509, we may mention the return to the hill districts of many Kabyles drawn to Algiers in the heyday of good relations between Koukou or Qal‘a on the one hand and the Regency on the other but who subsequently felt unwelcome and unsafe there when relations deteriorated from 1590 onwards, and the influx of the Moors of Andalusia after the last expulsion of the ‘Hispano-Muslims’ from Iberia in 1609–14,59 some at least of whom arrived in Kabylia.60 While we have no detailed accounts to rely on and no statistics at all, we can be confident that to a large extent the remarkable development of craft manufacturing in the Jurjura and also parts of Lesser Kabylia, notably among the Ath Abbas, owed much to this influx of refugees bearing elements of urban culture with them, as did, no doubt, the developments of certain centres of Islamic scholarship and teaching. As Morizot notes, there is evidence that in its heyday Qal‘a n’Ath Abbas had both a Jewish quarter and an Andalusian quarter and the sophisticated artisanate there included the manufacture of weapons61 as well as the weaving of the fine burnouses for which the Ath Abbas became famous.62 Finally, there is reason to believe that a significant element of the populations of the low-lying districts that saw most of the fighting of the Ottomans against Koukou and Qal‘a and also between the latter in the various campaigns between 1518 and 1624 – the Sebaou, Wad Sahel and Soummam valleys, the Hamza and Mejana plains – fled to higher ground at various points and at least some of these will have settled in the mountain districts for good. Subsequent movements of population for similar reasons are likely to have occurred later also, during the conflict between rival factions of the Ath l-Qadi over the dynastic succession from the 1690s onwards and during the numerous conflicts arising out of the Ottoman penetration of the region from 1710 onwards, matters to which I shall return.
Thus the society of Greater Kabylia will have had to cope with a complex set of pressures arising from these population movements. Unlike the pressure of population movements in the Moroccan High and Middle Atlas, which were predominantly a series of migrations by one tribe after another from the south-east to the north-west, each successive migrant population pushing the one that went before it in a steady chain-reaction effect that occurred over four centuries,63 the movements of population besetting Kabyle society were more abrupt and much more complex in their cultural and political impact and occurred in virtually all directions, with newcomers arriving from the east, the west and the south.64 To these we should add the pressure of migration within the region. Some of this will have been caused by the need for individuals or entire families to escape vendettas, but much of it may have had economic motives, such as the migration of families into the fertile middle Sebaou valley from the mid-sixteenth century onwards as this began to be settled and farmed under the supervision of the Ath l-Qadi,65 but also the migration of families from the more arid districts on the southern side of the Jurjura and in Lesser Kabylia to the verdant districts of Greater Kabylia north of the watershed. The names of several settlements bear witness to this, notably Ighil Oumecheddal,66 ‘the ridge of the man from the Imecheddalen’; Isikhen Oumeddour,67 ‘the escarpments of the man from the Ath Meddour’; Imelikchen,68 ‘the descendants of the man from the Ath Melikech’; Bou Aïdel,69 ‘the place of the man from the Ath Aïdel’; and Iwennoughen,70 ‘the descendants of the man from the Wennougha’.71 The same is true of the names of quarters or neighbourhoods within villages: at Jema‘a n’Saharij, part of the quarter of Hallawa is called l-Hara guizerkhfawen (‘the neighbourhood of the Izerkhfawen’): its inhabitants are the descendants of families who migrated to the village from the ‘arsh Izerkhfawen of the Azeffoun district in maritime Kabylia.72 No doubt further research in the field would discover more such cases.
We evidently cannot know the particular motives in each case, but we can observe that movement occurred not only from lower to high ground but also from the high Jurjura to lower-lying areas and from one part of the Jurjura to another. The villages of Ourthi Bouakkach (‘the orchard of the man from the Ath Bou Akkach’) of ‘arsh Ath Khelifa of the Maatqa confederation overlooking the Sebaou valley, Ath Ougawa (‘the descendants of the Agawaw’73) of the tūfīq of Tahanouts, ‘arsh Ath Aïssa ou Mimoun of the Ath Waguenoun confederation (also overlooking the Sebaou), Aafir Oukoufi (‘the entrenchment of the man from the Ath Koufi’), of ‘arsh Ath Slegguem in north-western Kabylia, Ath Illoul (‘the descendants of the man from the Illoulen’), of the tūfīq of Ath Melloul of ‘arsh Izerkhfawen, and the village of Ibouyoucefen (‘the descendants of the man from the Ath Bou Youcef’) in ‘arsh Ath Hantala of the Ath Ijjeur confederation, all testify to the first tendency. In the Kouriet district of the central Jurjura, the ‘arsh Ath Ali ou Illoul (‘the descendants of Ali the son of the man from the Illoulen’) of the Ath Sedqa confederation bears witness to the second, which undoubtedly was far more frequent and important than may be suggested by the rare cases that explicitly commemorate it in this way.
Some of these movements of population will have taken place after the period we are presently considering, but many of them undoubtedly occurred between 1510 and 1630. We can also be confident that the most important direction of movement was into the highlands and that this movement, by greatly increasing the population density of the mountain districts, both created a problem of social order in these districts and furnished elements of a solution to this problem through the quantitative and qualitative development of craft manufacture and the development of commercial migration associated with this that would ultimately enable the economy of the mountains to support their greatly increased population. In the meantime, however, these population movements and the endless jostling and frictions that they will have occasioned undoubtedly posed problems of order and security. These problems can only have been aggravated by the side-effects of the end of Koukou.
The fact that the Ath l-Qadi did not govern the Igawawen did not mean that the society of the Jurjura was not adversely affected by the end of their kingdom. From 1529 to the 1630s the Ath l-Qadi were the Ottomans’ principal interlocutors in Greater Kabylia. As such, they were the guarantors of the security of the Zwawa residents of Algiers and other towns under Ottoman control and of the security of Zwawa traders as they travelled outside the region. In acting as recruiting sergeants for the Ottomans’ campaigns to establish their rule over the interior of the country, they were undoubtedly able to acquire and maintain considerable influence with the ‘aarsh of the Jurjura that furnished the main body of auxiliary troops. These circumstances will have enabled the lords of Koukou to maintain a degree of order in the Jurjura, as well as the other districts of Greater Kabylia, even while refraining from levying taxes on the Igawawen or interfering in their internal affairs. Not only did they mediate relations between the population of the region and the Ottoman authorities, but they also were available to mediate and had an interest in mediating relations between the ‘aarsh of which this population was composed. In addition, their control of the communication routes made them the principal guarantors of the safety of travellers throughout the region. The end of Koukou deprived the society of the Jurjura of these mediating functions and guarantees of security at precisely the time when the stresses to which this society was subject made them more than ever indispensable.
To these urgent problems the society of the Jurjura found an at least partial solution through an expansion of the presence and social role of the imrabdhen. This expansion comprised several elements, notably the founding of zawāyā in the full sense of the term, the founding of Quranic schools, thim‘ammrin, and the establishment of maraboutic settlements – that is, hamlets or sometimes full villages composed exclusively of maraboutic families; these saintly settlements were and still are commonly called zawāyā also, whether or not they regularly receive visitors and offer instruction or other distinctive religious services.
An illustrious instance of the first is the celebrated zāwiya of Sidi Abderrahmane el-Illouli near the hamlet of Ihamziin of tūfīq Abourghas in ‘arsh Illoulen Oumalou. Sidi Abderrahmane was a native of this ‘arsh, born in 1601 in the hamlet of Ikherdouchen of the tūfīq of Ighil Gueltounen. He became a tāleb (student of Islamic theology and law) and studied first at the nearby zāwiya of Sidi Ahmed Wedris and then under Sidi Mohamed Saadi al-Bahlouli in the Mizrana district of maritime Kabylia. He subsequently returned to his ‘arsh of origin and founded his zāwiya in 1635 CE.74 In doing this, he had of course been preceded by Sidi Mansour, who founded his zāwiya at Timizart in ‘arsh Ath Adas of the Ath Jennad confederation about 20 years earlier. Some 65 years later, in 1700 CE,75 another zāwiya which was to prove extremely influential, that of Sidi Mohammed Ben Ali Cherif, was established near Tizi n’Ichelladen (the Chellata pass) amongst the Illoulen Ousammeur.76
Most of the thim‘ammrin in the Igawawen region were established on its northern edges, at or near the point of contact with the plain; this was the case of the thim‘ammerth of the Ath Ameur of Tamazirt and the thim‘ammerth at Adeni, both of ‘arsh Irjen; that of Arous, ‘arsh Ath Oumalou, and those of Chorfa and El-Kouadhi at Jema‘a n’Saharij, ‘arsh Ath Fraoucen.77 The main exceptions were two thim‘ammrin established among the Ath Itsouragh (at Tizi Guefres and Ath El-Mançour) and that of Sidi Ali ou Taleb of Koukou, ‘arsh Ath Yahia.78 According to the testimony of Si Yidir Brahimi of Koukou (a descendant of Sidi Ali), Sidi Ali lived at the time of the decline of the Ath l-Qadi. When Sidi Ahmed El-Tounsi decided not to stay at Koukou after avenging his father’s death there, he bequeathed the palace of justice and gardens he inherited there to Sidi Ali ou Taleb, who established his school on this property.79 The story neatly illustrates and symbolises the transition from the old authority of the warlords to the new authority of the pious and pacific imrabdhen. It also places Sidi Ali ou Taleb in time, since the encounter with Sidi Ahmed El Tounsi will have taken place no later than 1638–9. The thim‘ammerth of Sidi Ali ou Taleb is credited with missionary influence in this period, for one of its tolba went on to found an important maraboutic centre in the ‘arsh Ath Douala of the Ath Aïssi confederation. This was Sidi Abdallah ou Hassan, from Igouras, tūfīq of Ath Mellal in ‘arsh Ath Yahia, who around the middle of the seventeenth century settled among the Ath Douala at Akal Aberkane and established nearby the village of Ath Bou Yahia, which is the most influential maraboutic settlement among the Ath Aïssi to this day.
With the case of Ath Bou Yahia we have begun to address the third aspect of the maraboutic expansion, namely the proliferation of saintly settlements in the mountains of Greater Kabylia. This proliferation exhibited very striking features in the Jurjura especially. The first is that the resulting distribution of such settlements is extremely uneven: certain ‘aarsh of the Jurjura contain several while others contain not one. Thus the Ath Menguellat, Ath Yahia and Ath Itsouragh have numerous exclusively maraboutic hamlets, whereas the Aqbil, Ath Bou Akkach and Ath Yenni have only one apiece and the Illilten, Ath Attaf, Ath Boudrar and Ath Wasif none at all. Clearly the distribution of these settlements has not reflected a standard requirement of the internal political organisation of each ‘arsh. What then might account for it?
As already mentioned, the Igawawen district consists of the system of high parallel ridges that extend northwards from the central spine of the Jurjura massif. By far the most important of these ridges is the one that extends from just below the Tirourda pass in a broadly north-westerly direction all the way to the Sebaou valley. This central ridge is occupied successively by different ‘aarsh. The highest and most southerly part of the ridge is the territory of the Ath Bou Youcef, which boasts in its second largest village, Tiferdoud, situated at an altitude of 1175 metres, the highest village in the whole of Kabylia. A secondary ridge branching off to the north-east culminates in a large outcrop that forms the territory of the Ath Itsouragh. To the north of the Ath Bou Youcef, the main ridge as well as a couple of secondary ridges that branch off from it are occupied by the Ath Menguellat, while another, very substantial, secondary ridge branching off to the north-east forms (with a few side branches) the territory of the Ath Yahia. Then, as the main ridge curves to the north-west, it becomes the territory of the Ath Irathen confederation, occupied first by the Aouggacha, then the Ath Akerma and finally ‘arsh Irjen, with ridges branching off to the left and right forming the territories of the Ath Ousammeur and Ath Oumalou.
The location of saintly settlements along this main ridge from the southernmost point of the Ath Bou Youcef territory to the northern limits of the Ath Menguellat and Ath Yahia territories has corresponded to two historic imperatives: the need to guarantee safe passage for travellers on the roads80 (especially those communicating between the Sebaou valley and the Tirourda pass) and the need to minimise frictions along the boundaries between neighbouring ‘aarsh.
One of the first settlements encountered when descending the main ridge from Tizi n’Tirourda is the hamlet of Werja (Ourja), one of the constituent hamlets of the tūfīq Ath Khelifa and situated no more than a few dozen metres from the road. At first sight a modest and easily overlooked settlement, Werja is in fact the historic cradle of the most important saintly lineage in the Jurjura, the Ath Sidi Ahmed, which has numerous ramifications across the central Jurjura district.81 It was a young woman of this lineage, Lalla Fadhma n’Ath Sidi Ahmed ou Meziane, more generally known as Lalla Fadhma n’Soumeur (1830–63), still very much celebrated to this day as ‘Kabylia’s Jeanne d’Arc’, who inspired the resistance to the French in the Jurjura from 1849 to 1857. Her capture in the Illilten village of Thakhelijth n’Ath Atsou, on 11 July 1857, marked the completion of Randon’s campaign and the end of ‘la Kabilie indépendante’.82
In addition to its original settlement among the Ath Bou Youcef, the Ath Sidi Ahmed boast a cluster of small settlements among the Ath Menguellat (see Map 7.1), and the two settlements of the Ath Ahmed in ‘arsh Ath Yahia are a branch of this lineage.
The presence of saintly settlements along ‘arsh boundaries is a striking feature of this district. In addition to the Ath Sidi Ahmed settlements, which act as a line of buffer communities between the Ath Menguellat and its northern neighour (‘arsh Aouggacha of the Ath Irathen confederation), the string of settlements of the Ath Sidi Saïd, the patron saints of Aïn el-Hammam,83 line the boundaries with the Ath Yahia to the north-east and the Ath Bou Youcef to the south-east. They also straddle two important junctions of the main ridge road with side roads leading north-east via the Ath Yahia and the Ath Fraoucen to reach the Sebaou valley near Jema‘a n’Saharij and south-west to the market of Souq el-Jema‘a and beyond that towards the Ath Wasif and Ath Yenni. The saintly settlements of Ath Ahmed, Ath Si Amara and Ath Bou Thetchour similarly guarantee ‘arsh boundaries by occupying the northernmost part of the Ath Yahia’s territory (see Map 7.2) where this protrudes in a kind of salient separating the territories of the Ath Khelili to the north, the Ath Fraoucen to the west and the Ath Bou Chaïb to the east.
Map 7.1: The territory of ‘arsh Ath Menguellat, showing the settlements of the Ath Sidi Ahmed – Agouni Ouzemmour, Thamukrest, Ighil ‘aqsir, Thimizar and Imezzoughen – and those of the Ath Sidi Saïd – El Qarn, Tagensa, Tajujet and La‘azib (but omitting Bou Aggach, below Tagensa to its north). Source: Genevois, 1962, op. cit.
Many of the maraboutic villages and hamlets of the Ath Itsouragh perform the same function. The Ath Itsouragh inhabit an outcrop that is the culmination of a secondary ridge that extends from the main ridge just north of Werja (see Map 7.3). This outcrop resembles that on which the Ath Yenni are settled but, whereas the main Ath Yenni villages are perched on top of their mountain, the Ath Itsouragh villages are nearly all located on its slopes, like a series of pendants hanging from a girdle,84 or at its foot, while the top of the mountain is bare of human settlement. It is probable that sheer altitude, around 1,300 metres, made the top of this mountain unsuitable for settlement; the highest Ath Yenni villages are at about 900 metres. Whatever the reason, the location of the Ath Itsouragh settlements on the slopes, with few higher villages to retreat to, made them vulnerable. The presence of the imrabdhen settlements along the boundaries with the neighbouring ‘aarsh compensated for this by guaranteeing these boundaries.
Map 7.2: Part of the territory of ‘arsh Ath Yahia, showing the saintly settlements – Ath Si Amara, Ath Ahmed and Ath Bou Thetchour (here misspelled as ‘Boutchoun’) – on its northern frontier. The villages to the east, north and west belong to the ‘aarsh Ath Bou Chaïb, Ath Khelili and Ath Fraoucen respectively.
Map 7.3: The mountain outcrop that forms the territory of the Ath Itsouragh, showing the saintly settlements along the ‘arsh boundaries with the Ath Yahia to the north-west (Tanalt, Ath Asker, Ath Youcef ou Ali, etc.) and with the Illoulen Oumalou to the east and Illilten to the south-east (Ikhdachen, Bou Aïdel, Iberber). The important maraboutic village of Werja can just be seen (misspelled as ‘Rourdja’) next to the road bottom left.
Thus, while imrabdhen elsewhere in the Jurjura have also performed this role of ‘spiritual lords of the marches’,85 it was most highly developed and most visible among these three particular ‘aarsh, the Ath Menguellat, Ath Yahia and Ath Itsouragh, to a degree that distinguished them from the rest of the Igawawen.
Finally, a feature of this expanded presence of maraboutic lineages in the central Jurjura was the development of solidarities between maraboutic families that transcended ‘arsh divisions. The fact that branches of the Ath Sidi Ahmed were to be found in various different ‘aarsh (Ath Bou Youcef, Ath Itsouragh, Ath Yahia, Illilten, Aqbil and Ath Bou Akkach)86 gave the lineage a capacity for political influence in the central Jurjura that was independent of ‘arsh interests. The same could be said of the Ath Sidi Saïd who, in addition to their settlements among the Ath Menguellat, also had (and still have) a settlement near the Aqbil village of Aourir Ouzemmour as well as branches of the family at Tiferdoud in ‘arsh Ath Bou Youcef and no doubt elsewhere.87 In addition, intermarriage between the various maraboutic lineages soon created a very powerful network – or, rather, a series of overlapping or interconnecting networks – of maraboutic solidarity and influence. These alliances were especially important between the imrabdhen of the Ath Menguellat and those of the Ath Yahia on the one hand and those of the Ath Bou Youcef on the other.88
Putting definite dates to when this configuration and distribution of saintly settlements in the central Jurjura occurred is very difficult. Salhi, whose thesis is by far the most informative study available of the maraboutic lineages of Greater Kabylia, is unable to provide much information on this score. But there are grounds for believing the configuration was effected between c. 1600 CE and 1700 CE. We know that it was in this period that important maraboutic settlements were established elsewhere in Kabylia, notably the Ath Sidi Braham who, profiting perhaps from the loss of influence of the Ath Abbas, established themselves in the early seventeenth century near ‘Les Portes de Fer’, the crucial passage of the Algiers–Constantine road through the Biban mountains, a position that enabled them to levy toll payments in return for guarantees of safe passage.89 In the Jurjura, the ancestor of the Ath Sidi Saïd is believed to have founded the first settlement of his lineage among the Ath Menguellat in the fifteenth century.90 But the lineage will have taken time, two or more generations, to grow and expand on the ground and it is unlikely that the disposition of the Ath Sidi Saïd settlements as reported by Hanoteau and Letourneux in the 1860s (and as they have remained, largely unchanged, to the present) took shape before the large village of Taourirt, the capital of the ‘arsh Ath Menguellat, was established out of the regrouping and unification of previously scattered hamlets. This most probably occurred at some point in the early seventeenth century also, since local tradition firmly credits the founding of Taourirt as an integrated village to the action of a saint of a different lineage, Sidi L’Hadi Bou Derbal, who was born c. 1544 CE and is known to have died in 1637 CE.91
This bring us to the other main part which the imrabdhen played, or at least are said to have played, in the response of the society of the Jurjura to the pressures on the social order during this period, namely the reconfiguration of the settlement patterns of the lay population through the constitution of large, integrated villages (thiddar) out of previously dispersed hamlets (ikhelijen) linked if at all in the looser form of ‘associations’ (tuwāfeq).
We possess at present accounts of how this happened in only six cases, namely the local traditions collected by Genevois concerning the constitution of the present village of Taguemount Azouz of ‘arsh Ath Mahmoud; of Taourirt n’Ath Menguellat, as we have just noted, and of the three central villages of Ath Lahcène, Ath Larba‘a and Taourirt Mimoun among the Ath Yenni, and a local tradition, which remains to be investigated and fully documented, that the village of Tifilkout in ‘arsh Illilten was reformed in the early seventeenth century as well as moved from an opposite slope to its present location.92 All these traditions situate the events in question in the seventeenth century. The fact that these are the only such traditions we know of does not mean that other, similar, traditions do not exist elsewhere in the Jurjura or the broader Kabylia region.93 The entire question is under-researched. But the coming into existence of what I have called the Igawawen thaddarth – that is, the large, highly integrated and nucleated village settlement that is not a kinship unit because composed of a plurality of iderman (‘clans’) that do not share a common ancestry – is not hypothetical but a palpable fact. Many of the villages of the Jurjura which are of this nature may have been formed later than the seventeenth century and, as I have suggested, constituted from the outset as nucleated settlements in imitation of an already established model. But the fact that all the traditions concerning the constitution of such villages out of previously dispersed and much smaller settlements locate these events in the seventeenth century supports the thesis that the initial development of the Igawawen thaddarth was a response to the crisis I have described arising out of the conjunction of the pressure of chaotic population movements and the aggravation of insecurity following the end of the ‘kingdom’ of Koukou. The fact that, in two of the cases cited, Ath Yenni and Taourirt n’Ath Menguellat, imrabdhen (Sidi Ali ou Yahia and Sidi L’Hadi Bou Derbal) are credited with instigating the change is, however, ironic. For the eventual effect of the change was not to reinforce the influence of the imrabdhen in general but to submerge them in the lay population and subordinate them to the interest of the village community and the authority of its jema‘a.
Figure 7.1: Villages of the Illilten today: Ath Adalla in the foreground and the very important village of Tifilkout extending along its ridge in the middle distance, with Agoussim of ‘arsh Illoulen Oumalou beyond.
Clearly this trend did not go far among the Ath Itsouragh, Ath Yahia and Ath Menguellat (where the case of Taourirt was exceptional). Something else happened instead. For these three ‘aarsh possess a level of internal organisation between that of the ‘arsh and that of the constituent settlements (whether thiddar or tuwāfeq) that no other ‘aarsh of the Jurjura have possessed. The Ath Itsouragh are composed of two ‘fractions’: the Imesdourar (‘the highlanders’) and Imessouhal (‘the lowlanders’); the Ath Yahia of three: Imesdourar and Imessouhal again, and Taqa; the Ath Menguellat of four: Ahnini, Ath Ameur ou Saïd, Ath Ikhlef and the Ath Sidi Ahmed. One could reasonably say that they are ‘segmented’ into these fractions. The logic of this arrangement seems clear: consisting of unusually large numbers of small settlements, these ‘aarsh needed this extra level of internal organisation for the purpose of maintaining their internal equilibrium while the settlements in question needed, for their own security, to be grouped in this way to compensate for their small size. Thus these three cases resemble the ‘segmentary’ organisation Gellner describes in the case of the Central High Atlas of Morocco. The premises of their peculiarity in this respect are the near total absence of the ‘Igawawen thaddarth’ and the presence of numerous exclusively maraboutic settlements. The imrabdhen in these ‘aarsh clearly did not as a rule encourage the smaller settlements to combine to form larger ones, but seem to have exercised a conservative influence that impeded such a development.
It follows that what actually happened is that the society of the Jurjura responded in two quite different ways to the pressures it faced in the seventeenth century and produced in effect two different formulas for coping with these pressures. One formula was that of the ‘aarsh Ath Menguellat, Ath Yahia and Ath Itsouragh and involved the following features:
The second formula was the opposite of the first, viz.:
The perfect illustration of the first formula is provided by the Ath Itsouragh. As Salhi notes, the maraboutic element of the population of this ‘arsh has been very high indeed, no fewer than 2,489 persons representing perhaps as much as 40 per cent of the population of the ‘arsh (and 31 per cent of the total maraboutic population of the Jurjura district), when this question was investigated in the late nineteenth century.95 The dispersed settlement pattern is clearly shown in Map 7.3. Hanoteau and Letourneux identified no fewer than 34 settlements in this ‘arsh; eight of these are listed as independent thiddar; the other 26 are grouped in 10 tuwāfeq. Seven of the eight thiddar are small; the largest, Ahfir, is credited with a population of 495; the average population of the thiddar is a mere 228, and all of them, except Ahfir, can be assumed to be kinship units. The average population of the 26 hamlets grouped in tuwāfeq is 115.96
The perfect illustration of the second formula is provided by the Ath Wasif. This ‘arsh consists entirely of seven thiddar. When investigated by Hanoteau and Letourneux, the smallest thaddarth had 360 inhabitants, the largest 1,272; their average population was 790.97 There were no exclusively maraboutic settlements. The imrabdhen represented about 3 per cent of the population in the late nineteenth century98 and they are all integrated into the various thiddar alongside the lay population.
Arguably these are both extreme cases. But the ‘aarsh of the Jurjura resemble the Ath Wasif far more than they resemble the Ath Itsouragh. This is true not only of the Ath Wasif’s neighbours of the Ath Bethroun confederation (Ath Yenni, Ath Bou Akkach, Ath Boudrar) in the south-west of the Igawawen district, but also of the Ath Attaf and Aqbil of the Ath Menguellat confederation, the Illilten (southern neighbours of the Ath Itsouragh), the Ath Ousammeur and Irjen of the Ath Irathen confederation and the three ‘aarsh to the north of the Ath Yahia, namely the Ath Fraoucen, Ath Khelili and Ath Bou Chaïb. It is also true of the easternmost ‘aarsh of the Ath Aïssi confederation, namely the Ath Douala and the Ath Mahmoud, which, while not counted as Igawawen, are their close neighbours, facing the Ath Ousammeur and Ath Yenni across the Wad Aïssi valley. It is entirely possible that the regroupment of scattered hamlets into a large, tightly integrated village at Taguemount Azouz of the Ath Mahmoud was precisely a case of imitation of the model pioneered by the Igawawen and most probably by the ‘aarsh of the Ath Bethroun.
Thus, in the districts of Greater Kabylia identified with the Igawawen in the broader sense (the region that extends from the Sebaou valley to the main watershed ridge of the Jurjura), only a small minority of ‘aarsh conformed to the first formula. The socio-political and religious organisation of the Ath Itsouragh, Ath Menguellat and Ath Yahia was exceptional. Yet the location of these ‘aarsh – especially ‘arsh Ath Menguellat – in the vicinity of Michelet (now Aïn el-Hammam), the administrative centre of the high Jurjura, encouraged subsequent observers to overlook their peculiarities. Can it be that it is in large part their central position that accounts for the latter? To put it the other way round: may it be the case that it was above all in the ‘aarsh located on the edges of the central Jurjura region – the Irjen, Ath Ousammeur, Ath Yenni, Ath Wasif and Ath Bou Akkach on the western edge, the Ath Fraoucen, Ath Khelili and Ath Bou Chaïb on the northern and eastern edges, the Illilten, Aqbil, Ath Attaf and Ath Boudrar on the southern edge – that the need to regroup in a smaller number of larger villages was most pressing and accordingly acted upon? And is there any other evidence that supports the hypothesis of a significant dichotomy between the centre and the edges of the region in question at this period?
It is here that we should consider another ingredient of the crisis of the society of the Jurjura during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This was the conflict that broke out between the descendants of the lords of Koukou for control of what was left of the family’s possessions and influence, for this conflict implicated most of the populations of the region as a whole, because it also involved the Ottoman Regency.
The end of the kingdom of Koukou was not the end of the Ath l-Qadi. They were to remain a force in the political life of Greater Kabylia for a further 120 years, from the 1630s to the 1750s. And there is a case for saying that, over most of this period, they were the premier political force in the region.
This is not generally known. The truth of the matter has gone unrecognised, where it has not been denied, in the literature on pre-colonial Kabylia. It has been widely supposed that, after Koukou, the Ath l-Qadi disappeared into oblivion,99 while the political life of the region was dominated by the imrabdhen, certain jawād families in the lowlands, and the Ottomans. Various authors have acknowledged the influence of a family known as the Ath Bou Khettouch or Iboukhtouchen, but the fact that these were the direct descendants and continuation of the Ath l-Qadi dynasty has not been generally understood and has been explicitly denied by some (notably Boulifa), while the extent and importance of their influence has not been fully appreciated. In addition, the conflict that erupted in Kabylia in the 1690s, and which began as a dispute within the Iboukhtouchen family itself before widening to implicate other forces, has been almost entirely neglected. In these ways, the political history of Kabylia has been relentlessly obscured.
As we have already seen, in 1632–3, or more probably a few years later than this,100 the son of Ameur ou l-Qadi, known to history as Sidi Ahmed (or Hend101) El-Tounsi, returned to Kabylia with troops provided by his Tunisian connections, settled accounts with his father’s murderers by killing them all, bequeathed his family’s property at Koukou to Sidi Ali ou Taleb, and returned to the ancestral home at Aourir n’Ath Ghoubri before subsequently establishing himself at Tifilkout in ‘arsh Illilten.102 At some point he acquired the sobriquet Bou Khettouch – ‘the man with the lance’ – and this eventually replaced Ath l-Qadi as the family name, at any rate of his direct descendants.
An alternative version promoted by Boulifa holds that Bou Khettouch was the sobriquet of one of Sidi Ahmed El-Tounsi’s lieutenants who was not a member of the Ath l-Qadi lineage, which soon died out and was supplanted by the descendants of Bou Khettouch, who somehow managed to appropriate the prestige and baraka and estates of the defunct Ath l-Qadi family. I do not believe this version at all, but rather that the Iboukhtouchen were and are (for they still exist) the lineal descendants of Sidi Ahmed El Tounsi ou l-Qadi.
The only evidence that can be cited for the existence of someone other than Sidi Ahmed called Bou Khettouch is the name itself and the fact that it became the name of the family which inherited the Ath l-Qadi’s estates and influence. But ‘Bou Khettouch’ was originally a nickname. Khettouch is a typically Algerian and Kabyle deformation of the Arabic word khattī, meaning spear or lance, but the effect of the deformation (i.e. the suffix -ouch) is to make a diminutive.103 Thus ‘Bou Khettouch’ really means ‘the man with the little lance’, which would have been a natural, ironic if also affectionate, nickname for a young princeling leading a small army and bent on revenge.
Second, it is established that both before and after settling accounts with his father’s murderers Sidi Ahmed El Tounsi stayed at the Illilten village of Tifilkout, where a shrine to his memory exists to this day and is regularly visited by members of the Iboukhtouchen family of Jema‘a n’Saharij.104 This is evidence that he was indeed their ancestor, but it may be thought to be less than conclusive; a sceptic might suggest that the annual pilgrimage merely asserts rather than proves the Iboukhtouchen’s claim and that this claim is false. But a problem with this (i.e. Boulifa’s) thesis is that it is entirely unclear when the pretender Bou Khettouch is supposed to have supplanted the extinct Ath l-Qadi.
It is widely accepted that Sidi Ahmed El Tounsi lived to a ripe old age and died in 1696–7 and that he had two sons. The conflict referred to earlier assumed the form of a conflict between the latter in its early stages. But, if it was this fratricidal conflict which finally destroyed the Ath l-Qadi, it follows that Bou Khettouch took over the Ath l-Qadi inheritance only in the early 1700s. This timing is implausible, however, since a former lieutenant of El Tounsi would have been in his 80s by this point. The alternative is to suggest that Sidi Ahmed El Tounsi was Bou Khettouch but not an Ou l-Qadi at all. In that case, we are faced with several mysteries. If he was not an Ou l-Qadi, why should he have sought revenge on Ameur ou l-Qadi’s assassins? Why should the Tunisian friends of the Ath l-Qadi have supported and equipped him? Why should he have returned to Aourir n’Ath Ghoubri? And if he had no title to the Ath l-Qadi’s inheritance in the region, how did he manage to get hold of it all? I submit that Boulifa’s thesis has no answer to these questions and holds no water. Reason and evidence support the straightforward view that Bou Khettouch was simply a nickname of Sidi Ahmed El Tounsi, that the latter was Ameur ou l-Qadi’s son and heir and as such had good title to what was left of the Ath l-Qadi inheritance, which was why he did in fact inherit it.
But an equally cogent objection to Boulifa’s thesis is the fact that the crucial premise of his argument – that the Ath l-Qadi died out or at least disappeared – is simply untrue.
In the early part of his Rihla, devoted to his journey across Kabylia in 1765–6, Hussein Al-Warthilani speaks of visiting members of the Ath l-Qadi lineage in several localities and, in the first place, Jemaa n’Saharij, where he notes that he met ‘the honourable and noble Sidi Mohammed Ibn el-Qadi Al-Sherif, Sultan of Zwawa’.105 The Ath l-Qadi lived at Jema‘a n’Saharij and also among the Ath Bou Chaïb, which Al-Warthilani also visited (and where a lineage of the Iboukhtouchen exists to this day).106 How is this to be understood? There is no suggestion that the lineage of the Ath l-Qadi that had been dispossessed by El-Tounsi in the 1630s had somehow regained primacy within the Ath l-Qadi as a whole. Clearly the Iboukhtouchen were themselves Ath l-Qadi and, moreover, recognised as the legimate heirs to the main line of royal descent. So the two names – the broader one, Ou l-Qadi, and the more specific one, Ou Boukhtouch – could both be used by the decendants of Sidi Ahmed El-Tounsi, while descendants of the collateral branch(es) of the Ath l-Qadi had only the original lineage name available to them and kept it.
The inheritance El-Tounsi came into was considerable. It is generally acknowledged that the Iboukhtouchen continued to enjoy political pre-eminence in the middle and upper Sebaou for several generations, but no attempt has been made to assess this influence. Let us therefore do so now.
The family of Sidi Ahmed El-Tounsi and his heirs are associated with a large number of different places and credited with ownership of an impressive number of properties in Greater Kabylia. They possessed or acquired connections and in many cases properties or residences in the following places: Jema‘a n’Saharij, the political capital of ‘arsh Ath Fraoucen;107 Adeni, tūfīq of ‘arsh Irjen of the Ath Irathen confederation (in fact, the Irjen settlement closest to the Sebaou valley floor);108 Souama, the principal village of ‘arsh Ath Bou Chaïb;109 the village of Moknia in ‘arsh Ath Ghoubri (in addition to their pre-existing connections at Aourir, Achallam and Tabburt);110 Tamda, village of the Iamrawien Oufella in the middle Sebaou valley;111 ‘Borj Kara’ in ‘arsh Ath Jennad112 (most probably the village of Khahra, on the right bank of the Sebaou, due south of Timizart n’Sidi Mansour); a stronghold on Jebel Tamgout, the important mountain immediately to the east of the Ath Jennad;113 a residence on Jebel Zeraïb, a mountain that forms the southern boundary of the ‘arsh Ath Fliq, north of Azazga;114 Ath Aouana, a village of ‘arsh Asif el-Hammam, situated just east of the Ath Ghoubri village of Yakouren on the road that leads to Bejaia along the northern edge of the Ath Ghoubri territory;115 Tifilkout, the principal village of ‘arsh Illilten;116 Tizit, another important Illilten village, and its satellite hamlet Iqfilen close to Tizi n’Ichelladen.117
Several of these will probably have been in the possession of the Ath l-Qadi for some time before the 1630s, notably those in the vicinity of the Ath Ghoubri – at Ath Aouana, in the Jebel Tamgout and Jebel Zeraïb, and possibly also at Tamda in the Sebaou valley. It is also probable that a branch of the Ath l-Qadi was already settled at Jema‘a n’Saharij before the 1630s. But there is no doubt that it was Sidi Ahmed El-Tounsi and the Iboukhtouchen who secured the bases at Iqfilen and Tifilkout in ‘arsh Illilten and at Adeni; there is no doubt that they also subsequently established themselves at Jema‘a n’Saharij (whether or not other Ath l-Qadi already lived there) and at Souama;118 and, if ‘Borj Kara’ is correctly identified with Khahra, the family’s position there is likely to have been a late addition to its portfolio of bases and properties.
What, then, are we looking at? The answer is a redeployment of political assets and new political investments. Under Sidi Ahmed El-Tounsi, the Ath l-Qadi dynasty gave itself a new lease of life qua the Iboukhtouchen. The first step was the liquidation of an old and no longer profitable asset, the position at Koukou. As already noted, the choice of Koukou as the dynasty’s political capital was predicated on the long-standing orientation of the society of Greater Kabylia to Bejaia and the Ath l-Qadi’s ambition to recover and if possible improve upon their old position in the political dispensation centred on Bejaia. With the definitive defeat of the Hafsids, the decline of Bejaia and the rise of Algiers under the Ottomans, that strategic perspective had become obsolete and the mismanagement of matters by Ameur ou l-Qadi had alienated the Ath Yahia into the bargain. So the Koukou-Ath Yahia investment was finally written off119 and new investments oriented by a new strategic perspective were made.
This new perspective evidently took as its premise the reorientation of the society of Greater Kabylia towards Algiers that had occurred since 1529. It probably also took as a further premise the vanity of intriguing with the Spanish and the danger in doing so, given the social influence of the maraboutic movement. The strategy accordingly appears to have been to negotiate a compromise with the Regency based on a balance of power in the region. Control of the Sebaou valley was the central issue around which this negotiation had to take place and the Iboukhtouchen made their investments accordingly.
Up to this point the Ottomans had established their presence on the marches of Greater Kabylia but had not tried to penetrate further into the region. The forts established at Borj Hamza (Bouïra) and at Sour el-Ghozlane to the south-west, like those further east on the southern edge of Lesser Kabylia at Borj Bou Arrerij and Borj Zemoura, had the purpose of protecting the routes from Algiers to Constantine. The fort at Borj Menaïel had established the Regency’s authority over the westernmost marcher populations – the ‘aarsh of the mainly Arabophone Isser confederation and of the western Iflissen Oumellil – and had the further function of giving warning of Kabyle incursions into the Mitija. East of Borj Menaïel they had mounted occasional punitive expeditions but had no permanent presence. This now began to change.
In 1640, the Regency established a military observation post at Tizi Ouzou.120 In fact, there is no record of the existence of any settlement at Tizi Ouzou prior to the establishment of the Ottoman post there and it is possible that the village of Tizi Ouzou, subsequently incorporated into ‘arsh Iamrawien Bouadda, grew up around the Ottoman military presence.121 This move took the permanent Ottoman presence 20 miles further east from Borj Menaïel and into the middle Sebaou valley; it also brought representatives of Ottoman authority into regular contact with a new range of populations: the Iourgioun (Taourga) to the northwest, the Ath Waguenoun to the north, the eastern Iflissen Oumellil to the south-west, the Maatqa and Ath Aïssi confederations to the south, and the Ath Irathen to the south-east. This move thus had an audacious aspect and also a provocative or destabilising aspect. By moving into terrain previously controlled by the Ath l-Qadi, the Ottomans were taking advantage of the vacuum that had opened up since the end of Koukou. The logic of this seems clear: if the pro-Ottoman lords of Koukou were no longer available to control the lowlands, the Ottomans would have to undertake this themselves. Their advance is likely to have been regarded by the Iboukhtouchen as a challenge they had to meet.
It was probably around this time that the family established itself at Jema‘a n’Saharij and at Souama.122 The first position gave them the perfect vantage point from which to reassert their influence in the middle Sebaou. With their establishment at Souama, the capital of the Ath Bou Chaïb, immediately to the north of the Ath Yahia and directly opposite the Ath Ghoubri, they could continue to control access to the Wad Boubehir, where they had in any case already reinforced their position through their new connections with the Illilten villages of Tifilkout, at the head of the valley, and Tizit, the village controlling the northern approach to Tizi n’Ichelladen, while their positions among the Ath Ghoubri, Ath Fliq and Asif el-Hammam will have enabled them to retain control over the main road to Bejaia.
The redeployment of the Iboukhtouchen in this way will have established a new balance of power in the Sebaou valley that at least contained the Regency’s advance there, and this balance appears to have remained stable for the next four decades, until the 1690s. But this understanding did not extend to the south-western districts of Greater Kabylia. From their bases at Borj Hamza and Sour el-Ghozlane the Ottomans will already have gained some purchase over the populations of the southern side of the Jurjura. But this still left a vacuum. For neither the Ottomans’ presence on the southern marches nor their understanding with the Iboukhtouchen addressed the issue of the political control of the other main low-lying district, the narrow but fertile plain that lies at the northern foot of the western Jurjura and extends from east of Draa el-Mizan through Boghni, Amechras and Tizi n’Tleta to just beyond Wadhia. At some point, most probably in the mid-1650s, the Regency took steps to deal with this.
An official decision dated 1659–60 CE is the earliest evidence we have of the assertion of Ottoman authority over this district by the creation, under the Regency’s mandate, of the sheikhdom or chieftancy of bled Guechtoula, covering the ‘aarsh of the north face of the western Jurjura that formed a thaqbilth known in Thaqbaylith as the Igouchdal.123 This was initially entrusted to a certain Sheikh Gacem Ben M’Hamed, who held this post for many years, at least until 1089 AH/1678–9 CE,124 if not till the month of Sha‘abān, 1104 AH/1693 CE, when a certain Ferhat Ben Seghir Ben Ahmed was appointed Sheikh of the Guechtoula.125 At some point, possibly from the outset, the Ottomans sought to levy taxes on the populations concerned.126
The timing of this development is interesting, for it was in 1659 CE that the form of government of the Regency underwent a major change, with the agha of the janissaries assuming supreme power in Algiers at the expense of the triennial pashas.127 This new form of government proved short-lived: four aghas ruled, each of them briefly, before meeting violent ends in a bloody succession that lasted until 1671, when the ra’īs al-tā’ifa (admiral of the navy) finally intervened to introduce a new governing formula, the rule of the deys, elected by the armed forces as a whole.128 It is possible then, that the creation of the command of bled Guechtoula expressed the more aggressive policy which the Ojaq had always favoured towards Kabylia and likely that this development was resented and discreetly resisted by the Iboukhtouchen.
It is also interesting to note that both of the sheikhs appointed to command bled Guechtoula were outsiders imposed on the Igouchdal by the Regency. According to Robin, Sheikh Gacem was from Meneja, which was near a place called Mehalet Ramdan; neither place can be found in the Igouchdal district. The first cannot be found at all on the maps of the region, and the nearest candidate for the second is Dechra Mehalla, on the south side of the Jurjura at its extreme westernmost point, adjacent to or possibly part of the ‘arsh Er-Rich to the north-west of Bouïra. As for Sheikh Gacem’s replacement, Sheikh Ferhat, Robin describes him as from the Arib Ben El-Thaalibi tribe. The Arib were not Kabyles but an important Arabic-speaking population situated between Bir Ghbalou and Aïn Bessem, to the south-west of Bouira. That the Ottomans appointed such outsiders strongly suggests that they could not find suitable candidates for the post from the leaders of the Igouchdal ‘aarsh or anywhere else on the north side of the Jurjura for that matter. Could this be because the influence of the Iboukhtouchen was enough to ensure that no plausible local candidates put themselves forward? Moreover, in recruiting Sheikh Ferhat from the Arib, the Ottomans were having to seek much further afield than before. This suggests that it had become harder not easier to find appropriate candidates in Kabylia and that this was a side effect of a more general deterioration or crisis in relations between the Iboukhtouchen and the Regency. A reason for entertaining this hypothesis is that the appointment of Sheikh Ferhat more or less coincided with the eruption of a major dispute within the Iboukhtouchen themselves, to which the Ottomans cannot have been indifferent.
The fact that a conflict among the Iboukhtouchen occurred in the 1690s and expanded for some time thereafter, drawing much of the population of Kabylia into a party division of a kind, is in itself well known. What is absent from the literature, however, is any understanding of the significance of this conflict. Instead, the practice has been to make a passing mention of the affair while admitting, usually quite frankly, that it is impossible to know what it was all about. I wish to show that it is, in fact, possible to work out what it was probably about and as a result to specify and evaluate its historical significance.
According to the tradition, one of Sidi Ahmed El Tounsi’s sons, known to history as ‘Ourkho’, fell out with his father over a point of honour – the fact that his father had violated the ‘anāya (guarantee of protection) that ‘Ourkho’ had offered an unidentified third person – and left the region to establish his base in ‘arsh Ifenayen in the Soummam valley.129 His conflict with his father continued after Sidi Ahmed’s death as a conflict with his brother, Sidi Ahmed’s other son, Si Ali, and the dispute divided the populations of Kabylia into two hostile camps, Ourkho’s partisans being known as ‘the upper party’ – saff oufella – and Ali’s supporters as ‘the lower party’ – saff bouadda.
It is not clear when exactly this conflict took place. It must have begun before 1696 CE, since Sidi Ahmed died in this year, and may well have begun in the early 1690s. According to the traditions collected by Hanoteau and Letourneux, it continued up to the end of the eighteenth century and so lasted for over a hundred years.130 This claim is undocumented and hard to believe if all that was at issue was the wounded amour-propre of a son who had fallen out with his father and brother and I doubt that it is to be taken literally. In the oral culture of Kabylia, situations and events remembered would normally not go back beyond two or three generations. Thus informants questioned by French ethnographers in the 1860s would be unlikely to ascribe a memory to a time earlier than the late eighteenth century and would be inclined to bring a distant event remembered, however dimly, forward to a time when they or their parents or grandparents could have witnessed or heard tell of it and handed the tradition concerning it on to their own offspring. But the fact that there was a recollection of the fitna of the sfūf in the popular collective memory in the 1860s suggests that this event was important to the society, as does the fact that, according to Hanoteau and Letourneux, it was still possible at the time they undertook their research to specify the saff allegiances of all the main ‘aarsh of Greater Kabylia.
Like their mention of the four saff systems, the reference Hanoteau and Letourneux made to the division of the ‘aarsh of Kabylia into saff oufella and saff bouadda is brief and subsequent studies have taken scarcely any notice of it.131 Our difficulty in interpreting this event is that we know very little about it beyond the fact that it occurred, the approximate timing of it and the support given by the populations of Kabylia to one side or the other as indicated by the enumeration of the ‘arsh allegiances that Hanoteau and Letourneux provided. These are shown in Table 7.1.
The information in Table 7.1 is intriguing. It does not suggest that the saff division was a kind of order-maintaining mechanism. Hanoteau and Letourneux explicitly dismiss Carette’s earlier suggestion that the saff divisions in the Boghni district assumed a ‘chess-board’ pattern (an anticipation of Montagne’s view of the liff alignments in south-western Morocco) and suggested that what we are looking at here were ‘veritable leagues for attack and defence’ – that is, the two sides of what may have amounted to a civil war. The data tabulated here supports their view.
For instance, we find that only one of the ‘aarsh of the Wad Boubehir district supported saff oufella, namely the Ath Yahia. All the other ‘aarsh of the Wad Boubehir lined up with saff bouadda – that is, stayed loyal to the main line of descent, now known as the Ath Bou Khettouch or Iboukhtouchen. Clearly there was no local ‘chess-board’ pattern in the district but near total unanimity.132
A second feature of the conflict is its sheer scale. Not only were the vast majority of ‘aarsh of Greater Kabylia implicated in the saff division, some of the populations of Lesser Kabylia were as well, including nearly all the ‘aarsh of the left bank of the Wad Sahel and the Wad Soummam and many of those of the right bank.
Table 7.1: Saff allegiances of the ‘aarsh of Kabylia in the fitna of the Iboukhtouchen succession133
Examination of those ‘aarsh which did not take part provides clues to what may have been at issue in this conflict and why such a large proportion of the population of Kabylia was drawn into it. The ‘aarsh of those districts of Lesser Kabylia – the Biban, Guergour and Babor – where the lords of Koukou had never had any authority because pre-empted by the lords of Qal‘a, did not take part in the conflict. Nor did the ‘aarsh of the north-western marches of Greater Kabylia north of Borj Menaïel136 and the southern and south-western marches around Borj Hamza,137 districts under Ottoman control since the 1590s if not earlier. The ‘aarsh of all the other districts did.
This suggests very strongly that it was the region-wide political influence of the Iboukhtouchen that was at stake and that the Ottomans had a very direct interest in the conflict and its outcome. The scale of the mobilisation on either side and the duration of the conflict – since it certainly lasted a considerable time (if well short of a century) – are impossible to explain if all that was at issue was the injured pride of a member of the Iboukhtouchen family. And if the political position of the family was at stake, we can be certain the Ottomans sought to influence the outcome and played a part in mobilising support for the saff which was challenging the family leadership, saff oufella. In short, there are grounds, for thinking that the dynastic conflict between the partisans of, successively, father and son and then opposed brothers masked a far broader and more significant conflict, between the pro-Ottoman and anti-Ottoman wings of Kabyle opinion.
That this was the truth of the matter is further suggested by another intriguing feature of the alignments tabulated above. This is the fact that all of the confederations on the northern and eastern edges of the Jurjura massif or outside it – the Ath Irathen, the Ath Ijjeur, Iflissen Oumellil, Iflissen Lebahr, Ath Waguenoun, Ath Jennad – acted in a united manner, rallying en bloc to one saff or the other, whereas those of the high Jurjura – Ath Menguellat, Ath Boudrar, Ath Sedqa and Igouchdal – displayed no such coherence and their constituent ‘aarsh were split between the two sfūf. A hypothesis that would explain this is that the thiqbilin that were either already in substantial contact with the Ottomans or occupied terrain of immediate strategic significance for the relationship between the Iboukhtouchen and the Ottoman Regency – those of western and maritime Kabylia and those immediately bordering the Sebaou and Boubehir valleys – were conscious of their collective interest in the saff conflict and chose their camp accordingly, whereas the thiqbilin of the high Jurjura, far removed from regular contact with the Ottomans and occupying terrain that was yet to assume geopolitical significance in relation to the Regency, felt no such compelling common interest and allowed other considerations to determine the allegiance of their constituent ‘aarsh.
This hypothesis would explain the split in the Ath Bethroun, with the Ath Yenni and Ath Boudrar taking their lead from the Ath Irathen to the north while the Ath Wasif and Ath Bou Akkach aligned themselves with their neighbours to the west (‘aarsh Ath Ahmed and Aouqdal of the Ath Sedqa confederation). As for the split in the Igouchdal confederation, with the Ath Bou Addou, Ath Mendas and Ath Ismaïl (sic; i.e. Ath Smaïl) supporting saff oufella and the Ath Bou Gherdane, Ath Koufi and Amechras supporting saff bouadda, this is consistent with our surmise that the appointment by the Ottomans of outsiders to command ‘bled Guechtoula’ signified that they were far from assured of its unanimous loyalty.
But the hypothesis that may explain the split in the Ath Bethroun does not fully account for the split amongst the ‘aarsh of the Ath Menguellat confederation, in which ‘arsh Aqbil supported saff bouadda while ‘aarsh Ath Attaf, Ath Bou Youcef and Ath Menguellat proper all supported saff oufella. For, whatever may have determined the Ath Attaf’s alignment, the decision of the Ath Menguellat and the Ath Bou Youcef to choose saff oufella – that is, align themselves with the Ath Yahia – undoubtedly had something to do with the nexus of maraboutic connections which, as we have already demonstrated, was a major feature of these three ‘aarsh and a powerful link between them. There is evidence, moreover, that the Ath Menguellat and Ath Bou Youcef had displayed solidarity with the Ath Yahia on a previous occasion, namely the tradition, collected by Genevois,138 that in order to settle accounts with his father’s murderers, Sidi Ahmed El-Tounsi had first to fight not only the Ath Yahia, but also the Ath Bou Youcef and the Ath Menguellat. The source of this tradition was a certain Fodil Salem Ben Mouhoub from Bou Aggach, one of the exclusively maraboutic hamlets of the Ath Sidi Saïd of Taourirt n’Ath Menguellat. The implications are far-reaching. Far from the imrabdhen of the central Jurjura being hostile to and determined to overthrow the Ath l-Qadi of Koukou en bloc and for good and then assert Kabylia’s independence against the Turks as Boulifa implied, they were, on the contrary, inclined to defend the family’s position at Koukou once the latter had got rid of Ameur ou l-Qadi, and they were able to determine the policy of these three ‘aarsh in this matter. They accordingly opposed Sidi Ahmed El-Tounsi in the 1630s and again opposed him and his preferred son Si Ali in the 1690s and thereafter. Given that Ameur ou l-Qadi’s murderers and usurpers were the pro-Ottoman wing of the family, it made perfect sense for the ‘aarsh influenced by these imrabdhen to support the pro-Ottoman saff in the 1690s, which is what they did, the outlook and implicit loyalties of the imrabdhen being the factors guaranteeing continuity in this respect.
The final feature of the data in Table 7.1 which calls for comment is the order in which the two saff alignments have been drawn up. The table scrupulously follows the order in which Hanoteau and Letourneux listed the component ‘aarsh and thiqbilin in each saff.139 They themselves made no comment on this order; indeed, they made no attempt to make sense of the information they reproduced about this entire affair, which they clearly saw as irrelevant to the Kabylia of the 1860s and which they included in their discussion of the Kabyle sfūf mainly for the sake of completeness. And they made a point of remarking that they saw no rhyme or reason in the fact that the two sfūf in this case were traditionally known as the Upper Saff and the Lower Saff, anticipating by 90 years Pierre Bourdieu’s attitude to the question of saff names. But the order is extremely interesting, for it contains a hidden logic which they clearly did not notice, and this logic enables us to understand the saff names among other things. Since it is reasonable to assume that Hanoteau and Letourneux reproduced the order given them by their informants,140 we may imagine that the latter understood this logic even if they refrained from explaining it to the French ethnographers.
Given the traditions that Sidi Ahmed El Tounsi Bou Khettouch resided at Aourir n’Ath Ghoubri (and later Tifilkout) and that Ourkho found refuge among the Ifenayen, we might have expected the Ath Ghoubri (or the Illilten) to head one saff and the Ifenayen the other. This is not at all the case. As the table shows, Hanoteau and Letourneux place the Ath Yahia at the head of saff oufella, immediately followed by its close allies, the Ath Menguellat and Ath Bou Youcef, and the Ath Irathen confederation at the head of saff bouadda, immediately followed by the Iamrawien of the Sebaou valley and then the Ath Waguenoun confederation, whose southernmost villages (those of ‘arsh Ath Aïssa ou Mimoun) overlook the middle valley on its north side. These are followed by the Ath Irathen’s immediate neighbour to the east, the Ath Fraoucen, and then by the ‘aarsh and confederations of the Wad Boubehir to the south-east.
The AthYahia’s alignment with and leading role in saff oufella make good sense given that saff bouadda was identified first with Sidi Ahmed El-Tounsi Bou Khettouch and subsequently with the son who stayed loyal to his father and thus with the main line of descent from the assassinated Ameur ou l-Qadi.141 It was natural that, with bad memories of Ameur ou l-Qadi – whether it was his ‘tyranny’ or his intrigues with the Spanish that were most held against him – the Ath Yahia should line up with the rebellious Ourkho rather than his father or brother.
The alignment and leading roles of the Ath Irathen, Iamrawien, Ath Waguenoun and Ath Fraoucen similarly make perfect sense. It was in the leading Ath Fraoucen village of Jema‘a n’Saharij that the Iboukhtouchen had established the forward base from which to conduct their new strategy;142 the Iamrawien had been settled in the valley by the Ath l-Qadi and were still loyal to the latter’s principal descendants; and the Ath Waguenoun resented (as they subsequently made clear) the threat of Ottoman encroachment on their territory since the establishment of the post at Tizi Ouzou and naturally made common cause with the Iboukhtouchen as an important ally of the latter. As for the Ath Irathen, neighbours and long-standing allies of the Ath Fraoucen, it was natural that they should be in the pro-Iboukhtouchen and implicitly anti-Ottoman party. In addition, given their size and weight, as a powerful thaqbilth composed of five ‘aarsh, and their position, controlling the eastern side of the Wad Aïssi as well as the northernmost third of the central ridge that extends from the Jurjura to the Sebaou and thus both the low road and the high road into the central Jurjura districts, as well as a section of the southern side of the Sebaou valley, it was equally natural that they should have assumed the leadership of their saff. Finally, it is very likely that it was at this time that a section of the Iboukhtouchen family established itself at Adeni, tūfīq of ‘arsh Irjen of the Ath Irathen confederation, the Irjen settlement closest to the Sebaou valley floor.
The headquarters of the anti-Iboukhtouchen saff in three ‘aarsh of the high Jurjura made it natural for it to be called saff oufella. And the headquarters of the pro-Iboukhtouchen saff in villages on both the edges and the floor of the Sebaou valley made it natural for it to be called saff bouadda. The saff names were not meaningless or arbitrary. The irony in them lies in the fact that it should have been certain ‘aarsh of the high Jurjura which, guided by their imrabdhen, organised support for the Ottoman interest in this affair. But that is what happened.
A remarkable by-product of the victory of saff bouadda is that it appears to have enabled the Ath l-Qadi/Iboukhtouchen family to return to Koukou. In his observations on Kabylia, Thomas Shaw notes the importance of ‘The Jimmah at Saritch’ (sic; Jema‘a n’Saharij) but then adds that ‘Kou-kou’ (sic) ‘where their Sheikh or Sultan as they call him, resides, is their principal village.’143 Unless Shaw misunderstood his sources – were they speaking of the present or the past? – the implication is that the people of Koukou changed their attitude towards the Iboukhtouchen following the defeat of saff oufella, the party their ‘arsh (Ath Yahia) had favoured, and made the family welcome there anew, although to describe Koukou as the region’s principal village was undoubtedly an anachronism by this time and perhaps simply a courtesy.
The saff conflict we have been examining can therefore be seen to have had three levels. In the first instance, it was a conflict within the Iboukhtouchen family which was almost certainly decided relatively quickly in favour of Sidi Ahmed and his son Si Ali and at the expense of Ourkho, who then disappeared from history. The second level pitted pro- and anti-Iboukhtouchen forces (whether or not the latter were bound to Ourkho: for example, the Ath Abbas of the Soummam valley) against each other in Kabylia. It is likely that it continued for a period of years, but that this aspect of the conflict was decided by the early eighteenth century CE, c. 1710 or 1715 at the latest, since this is when the Regency began an entirely new phase of its penetration of Kabylia. It is reasonable to suppose that Algiers waited to see whether the anti-Iboukhtouchen party, which it favoured, might prevail without (possibly embarrassing) Ottoman support, and that it resumed its forward policy on its own account only after and in reaction to the resolution of the conflict to the Iboukhtouchen’s advantage.
This left the underlying third level of the dispute, between those forces allied to or implicated in the expansion of the Regency’s presence and authority in the region and those forces resisting this (whether or not the latter were partisans of the Iboukhtouchen). This fundamental level of the conflict was, of course, not decided promptly at all. Indeed, it is in this respect that the tradition recorded by Hanoteau and Letourneux might best be understood, in that the conflict between pro- and anti-Ottoman interests and forces in Kabylia undoubtedly continued until the end of the eighteenth century, indeed beyond that date. While we know very little about the incidents that composed the first two aspects and phases of the conflict, we know substantially more about the last phase, since it embraced the rest of the history of Kabylia in the pre-colonial era.
In 1127 AH/1715–16 CE, the village of Tikobaïn on the north-eastern edge of the Jebel Aïssa Mimoun was destroyed by order of the qā’id of Tazarart. This was undoubtedly a punitive measure, to teach a lesson; the people of Tikobäin were able to rebuild their village subsequently. Despite its proximity to the settlements of ‘arsh Ath Aïssa ou Mimoun of the Ath Waguenoun confederation, Tikobaïn seems always to have belonged to the Iamrawien. By the time Hanoteau and Letourneux investigated these matters, it was much the largest settlement of the Iamrawien Oufella and it may well have been the leading village of the latter for long periods. The great eighteenth-century poet Youcef ou Kaci (b. c. 1680 CE)144 sang the praises of the village, extolling the courage and honour of its inhabitants, especially the noble Azouaou family.145 That the Ottoman-appointed qā’id decided that it needed to be destroyed suggests that Tikobaïn was at that time a centre of the resistance to the Regency’s encroachment on the middle Sebaou.
The destruction of Tikobaïn in 1715–16 is the first we hear of the existence of the fort of Tazarart and its qā’id – that is, of the new forward position east of Tizi Ouzou which the Ottomans had established in Kabylia. The literature is unclear as to where exactly this position was, perhaps because of a mistaken transliteration of the place name. The spelling is that given by Robin, who reported that the fort was the first place occupied by the Ottomans on the right bank of the Wad Sebaou, opposite the confluence with the Wad Aïssi. The place which best corresponds to Robin’s description is occupied by a small agglomeration called Tazmalt,146 midway between Timizar Laghbar and Tala Atmane, on the right bank of the Sebaou, almost opposite the mouth of the Wad Aïssi and at the foot of the Jebel Aïssa Mimoun, where it could not have failed to irk the Ath Waguenoun as well as the Iamrawien Oufella; its name – ‘the little zmāla’ – also corresponds to the function presumably performed by Robin’s ‘Tazarart’, a zmāla (plural: zmoul) being a military encampment or base.147
Around this time a forceful personality emerges as the organiser of the Regency’s drive to expand its authority in Greater Kabylia. His name was Ali Khodja – ‘Ali the scribe’ – but what his official status may have been is unclear. Robin notes that he described himself in his correspondence as ‘emir el-outon’ (sic) – that is, ‘commander of the country’ – but what exactly ‘the country’ (‘elouton’, i.e. el-watan) referred to, we do not know. Robin also quotes Peysonnel as referring to Ali Khodja as having been appointed ‘qā’id’ in Kabylia, an equally vague indication of his jurisdiction and responsibilities. Perhaps this vagueness was in the nature of the situation, in that the territory over which Ali Khodja had ‘command’ could only be defined after the event, the event being the transformation which it was his mission to bring about in the political character and geographical extent of the zone under Ottoman control. For there was nothing vague about the radical changes he proceeded to introduce.
In 1132 AH/1720–1 CE, Ali Khodja established the new fort of Borj Sebaou, midway between Borj Menaïel and Tizi Ouzou, on the right bank of the Sebaou near the point where it turns north and enters the final stretch of its course to reach the Mediterranean just west of Dellys. This was to become the headquarters of a new administrative jurisdiction, the qā’idate148 of the Sebaou. In 1724 or 1725, a second fort, Borj Boghni, was established midway between Draa el-Mizan and Wadhia to be the headquarters of the qā’idate of Boghni and thus the centre of Ottoman authority in the southern plain.
With these two major initiatives, a new dispensation began to take shape in the lowlands. Between 1720 and 1730, Ali Khodja sought to assert Ottoman authority over the Iamrawien of the Sebaou valley and convert them into a makhzen tribe loyal to the Regency. In doing so, he inevitably clashed with the Iboukhtouchen and their allies and is recorded as having defeated them in two pitched battles, at Draa Ben Khedda near Borj Sebaou, and then at Bou Ilzazen near Jema‘a n’Saharij.149
The co-optation of the Iamrawien involved two main elements. First, the land they farmed – 20,000 hectares in all – became beylik or state property;150 thus the Regency was claiming and appropriating the Sebaou valley floor and part of its sides. Second, the Iamrawien villages were reconstituted as zmoul, military settlements; their inhabitants could keep their plots of land but had to undertake military service for the Regency, for which they were supplied with horses. According to Robin, 16 villages were reorganised in this way.151 The remaining seven or eight villages, all from the Iamrawien Bouadda,152 were not reconstituted as zmoul and had no horses.
In addition to suborning the Iamrawien, Ali Khodja imported a population of black slave descent and established it in the new settlement of Abid Chamlal to form a kind of advance observation post a few kilometres to the east of Tizi Ouzou on the left bank of the Sebaou close to the mouth of the Wad Aïssi, and thus on the northern edge of the territory of the Ath Aïssi confederation and just opposite the Irjen (Ath Irathen) villages on the Wad Aïssi’s right bank. He also began to assert Ottoman control over the commercial life of the region by establishing new markets at Baghlia in the lower Sebaou valley and at Wad Defali (also known as Wad Sebt) between Draa Ben Khedda and Tizi Ouzou. Shortly afterwards, a second colony of blacks was established at Aïn Zawiya, south-west of Borj Boghni. We know from documents that a qā’id of the Sebaou was in post by 1136 AH/1723–4 CE at the latest153 and a qā’id of Boghni was in post by the following year.154
The new qā’idate of the Sebaou covered the town of Dellys, the confederations of the Iflissen Oumellil, Ath Waguenoun, Iflissen Lebahr and Ath Jennad, and the following ‘aarsh: Ath Khalfoun; Beni Thour; Ibethrounen; Ath Khelifa; the northern part of ‘arsh Maatqa; Ath Aïssi; Ath Douala; Ath Zmenzer; Ath Ghoubri and ‘the tribes of the Upper Sebaou and Asif el-Hammam’.155 The qā’idate of Boghni covered, at least in principle, the Igouchdal confederation, the ‘aarsh Iwadhien, Ath Bou Chennacha, Ath Chebla, Ath Ali ou Illoul and Ath Irguen of the Ath Sedqa confederation,156 the southern part of the ‘arsh Maatqa and ‘arsh Ath Abdelmoumen of the Ath Aïssi confederation. The qā’idate of Boghni was subordinate and answerable to that of Borj Sebaou, which in turn came under the authority of the bey of the Titteri.
Map 7.4: Western Kabylia: section of a French map showing – from left to right – Borj Menaïel, Naciria (Haussonvillers), Borj Sebaou, Draa Ben Khedda (Mirabeau), Tizi Ouzou and Abid Chamal, with Baghlia (as Rebeval) and Taourga (Horace Vernet) to the north-west and north-east of Borj Sebaou and Boghni as the principal settlement in the southern plain. The settlements from Borj Menaïel south-east to the forest of Bou Mahni are those of the Iflissen Oumellil confederation. The settlements from Tizi Ouzou south-west to Bou Mahni are those of the Maatqa confederation, including the important zāwiya of Sidi Ali ou Moussa in the hills NNE of Boghni.
In both cases, the qā’id would appoint sheikhs responsible for particular ‘aarsh or confederations, charged with maintaining order and also with collecting taxes annually and any other moneys due on occasion, although it was some time before the actual collection of taxes became possible. In this way, the new administrative structures generated as their political corollary the constitution of sheikhdoms which, since they tended to remain in the same family from one generation to another, favoured the development of aristocratic dynasties in the society of the lowlands.
There was, of course, a ‘divide-and-rule’ aspect to this, particularly in the middle and upper Sebaou, so long the chasse gardée of the Ath l-Qadi and their successors, the Iboukhtouchen. In order to suborn the Iamrawien Oufella effectively, it was necessary to enable new political loyalties to supersede the old, and these new loyalties had to be local ones; reliable loyalty to the frequently rotating Ottoman personnel was not to be expected and the Regency itself was scarcely a regime to evoke enthusiasm. And so, among the populations of the Sebaou valley, the piedmont and the lesser ranges of the mountains in the northern and western districts, this period witnessed the emergence of new local power-holders drawn from or acquiring the status of the ajwād, the warrior nobility,157 and suddenly the political life of these populations acquired colour and its own dramatic interest in tandem with the dramatis personae who appeared, in such marked contrast to the anonymity that had obscured its actors in all previous epochs.
From around 1730 onwards, the political history of the lowlands is the story of the relations of the Ottomans with the Mahieddine family of Taourga (the chiefs of the Iamrawien Bouadda); the Ath Kaci or Oukaci family of Tamda and Mekla; the Azouaou family of Tikobaïn, rivals of the Ath Kaci for the leadership of the Iamrawien Oufella; and, dominating the western approaches to Kabylia from Borj Menaiel to Draa Ben Khedda, the Ben Zamoum family of Tighilt Iternach, Tigounatine and Naciria, the chiefs of ‘arsh Ath Amrane of thaqbilth Iflissen Oumellil and rapidly established as the dynastic chiefs of the entire confederation, a position they would maintain to the very end of the Ottoman period, as their role in mustering and co-ordinating Kabyle military support for the Regency against the French in 1830 would testify.158
While the emergence of these ajwād families owed a great deal to the developing fluids of Ottoman favour, this by no means ensured their loyalty. The chiefs of the Isser confederation and the Iamrawien Bouadda, already in the zone of Ottoman authority for some time, were reliably docile, but those of the Iflissen Oumellil and the Iamrawien Oufella were another matter, about as troublesome clients as might be. But it would be a mistake to interpret the rebellions which punctuated the history of their relations with the Regency for the next century as expressions of a will to genuine independence; they were more in the nature of political strikes, the manifestations of a temporary withdrawal of loyalty pending a renegotiation of the terms of allegiance.
It is likely that a key variable here was the burden of taxation. The system introduced by the Ottomans was a system of tax-farming, with the qā’id obliged by the dey in Algiers or the bey of the Titteri in Medea to raise a certain amount each year and he in turn requiring the sheikhs under his command each to furnish their parts of this, while keeping a smaller part, usually 10 per cent, for themselves. In years of good harvests, the burden may have been borne with equanimity, but in bad years some sheikhs will have found it hard to collect the expected amount. The refusal of the ‘aarsh in their charge to deliver would put their own authority in question, inclining some of them at least to place themselves at the head of the revolt against the qā’id rather than meekly admit their inability to satisfy their Ottoman patrons, for by leading the rebellion they could hope to make themselves indispensable to the process of bringing it to an end. Such rebellions were thus manoeuvres, in which the vigorous demonstration of nuisance value would normally be followed by renewed acceptance of co-optation on more acceptable terms or even the same terms as before if nothing better was to be had.
In all these respects, the society of the lowlands and the lesser ranges of north-western Kabylia, once incorporated into the Ottoman system in this way via the institution of initially appointed but subsequently hereditary chieftaincies, came to resemble much of the rest of Ottoman Algeria. There was, however, an important difference between the Iflissen Oumellil and the Iamrawien Oufella which was simultaneously a difference in their relations with neighbouring ‘aarsh and a difference in their relations with the Ottomans.
In the 1860s, the Iflissen Oumellil confederation counted no fewer than 14 ‘aarsh, much the largest thaqbilth in Greater Kabylia, with a total population of over 24,000. It is likely to have had comparable dimensions a century earlier. Its settlements are spread over both the north-west and south-east slopes of a long mountain ridge known as Sidi Ali Bou Nab and to the south-east extend beyond the Wad Bougdoura-Asif Tleta-Wad Ksari159 river to the Bou Mahni forest. These circumstances gave its chiefs, the Ben Zamoum, a degree of strategic depth and tactical flexibility in their relations with the Regency that the Iamrawien Oufella, confined to the middle Sebaou valley with few if any settlements occupying high ground, never possessed. To compensate for this lack, the Iamrawien Oufella had to rely on their alliances with the confederations controlling the high ground in their vicinity, the Ath Waguenoun and the Ath Jennad to the north and the Ath Irathen to the south, a state of affairs that qualified their status as a makhzen tribe and complicated their relations with the Ottomans. These alliances also eventually implicated them, as we have seen, in the saff systems of both the Ath Irathen and maritime Kabylia. In contrast, the Iflissen Oumellil were big enough to act independently; they did not often need allies and there were no saff systems among any of the populations to the west of the Maatqa.
Thus for the Regency its dealings with the Iflissen Oumellil were a comparatively straightforward affair. The confederation had taken the anti-Iboukhtouchen and pro-Ottoman side in the conflict between the sfūf in the 1690–1710 period but, thereafter, whether inclined to be amenable or refractory, its behaviour was its own affair rather than a function of complex alliances. With the Iamrawien Oufella, matters were uncertain from the Ottomans’ point of view. The ‘arsh’s dependence on its relations with its southern and northern neighbours involved it in their strategies and calculations and so made its behaviour unpredictable. Dispossessing the Iboukhtouchen and promoting new jawād chieftaincies had not resolved the Regency’s problem in the middle Sebaou at all; arguably it had simply fragmented it and made it more complicated. It had not even dealt with the Iboukhtouchen fully, since they remained a leading family among the Ath Fraoucen, Ath Irathen, Ath Ghoubri and Ath Bou Chaïb and still had cards to play, and may well have used this influence from time to time to remind the Ottomans of the fact by making a nuisance of themselves with the Iamrawien Oufella. The Ottomans accordingly resolved, eventually, to do what they had so far mainly fought shy of doing, namely take on the ‘aarsh and thiqbilin of the mountains.
The man who incarnated this resolution was Mohammed Ben Ali, who was appointed qā’id of the Sebaou in 1150 AH/1737–8 CE. He held this position for eight years and was then promoted to the position of Bey of the Titteri, but continued to direct Ottoman policy in Greater Kabylia, since the new qā’id of the Sebaou, El-Hadj Mohammed Ben Hassan, was under his authority.
Born at Blida c. 1700, Mohammed Ben Ali had studied at the zāwiya of the Ath Amar – a maraboutic lineage whose ancestor was a Turk – at Adeni in ‘arsh Irjen, and in the course of this he had got to know the Iboukhtouchen family.160 After his appointment as qā’id, he first concentrated on strengthening the Ottoman order in the lowlands, distinguishing himself by the severity of the summary justice he meted out and so earning the sinister nickname Ed-Debbah, ‘the throat-cutter’.161 He then turned his attention to the populations of the mountains. Before doing so, however, he had asked for and obtained the hand of the daughter of Si Amar ou Boukhettouch, who directed the Iboukhtouchen family fortunes from his seats at Aourir and Jema‘a n’Saharij and an additional residence at Adeni. Ben Ali thus sought the neutrality if not the support of the Iboukhtouchen and those ‘aarsh and thiqbilin under their influence, notably the Ath Irathen and Ath Fraoucen. This seems to have been forthcoming at first, undoubtedly because Ben Ali’s initial campaigns targeted the populations to the west of the Wad Aïssi – the Ath Aïssi and Maatqa confederations of the central massif and the Igouchdal and Ath Sedqa confederations of the western Jurjura – and left the Igawawen alone.
According to Robin, Ben Ali began with the Ath Aïssi and did so with vigour, mobilising two columns of troops, one commanded by Ahmed Agha and the other by Ali, the Bey of the Titteri. The campaign met with initial success, obtaining the submission of the ‘aarsh Ath Zmenzer, Ath Douala and Iferdiwen in a single day.162 But it encountered fierce resistance from the villages of Taguemount Azouz and Ath Khalfoun of ‘arsh Ath Mahmoud and was unable to overcome this. At this point, the qā’id Mohammed Ben Ali was promoted Bey of the Titteri at Ali Bey’s expense. He soon resumed his campaign, now targeting the Igouchdal and the Ath Sedqa of the south-west with a view to consolidating Ottoman authority in the qā’idate of Boghni. In this he was successful, obtaining the submission of the Igouchdal and certain ‘aarsh of the Ath Sedqa (Ath Bou Chennacha and Ath Ali ou Illoul), although apparently leaving the Iwadhien alone, and imposing a fairly light obligation to pay taxes to the Regency.
A significant feature of Ben Ali’s strategy in this campaign was his harnessing of the influence of the major maraboutic lineage of the western half of the central massif, the Ath Sidi Ali ou Moussa of the southern Maatqa.
We have already seen, in the cases of the imrabdhen of the ‘aarsh Ath Menguellat and Ath Bou Youcef of the high Jurjura, that important maraboutic lineages were disposed to align themselves with the pro-Ottoman point of view at critical junctures, such as the fitna of the sfūf disputing the Iboukhtouchen succession. There can be no doubt that the Ottomans were alive to the potential of this and were interested in enlisting the good offices of imrabdhen from an early stage, perhaps seeing them as cards to be played against the Ath l-Qadi at some point. The mosques of least two of the Ath Yenni villages, Taourirt Mimoun and Ath Larba‘a, were built on the initiative of the Ottoman authorities, most probably in the mid-seventeenth century.163 Well before this, in 1582, the Regency’s preliminary dealings with the populations of north-western Kabylia had included an apparent attempt to acquire the goodwill and services of one of the latter’s imrabdhen when Jaffar Pasha authorised the sale of land at Sebaou El-Kedim (see Map 7.4) on the west bank of the lower Sebaou to a certain Si Ali Ben Haroun of the Iflissen Oumellil.164
We know of no subsequent dealings with the imrabdhen of this confederation, however. It would appear that the recourse to jawād families and the recourse to maraboutic lineages were alternative ploys, each appropriate in particular cases but not to be combined in a single case. In the lowlands and piedmont districts from the 1720 onwards if not earlier, the Ottomans consistently gave priority to the ajwād as their preferred interlocutors. This practice was not without producing, sooner or later, certain ironies. According to an official document dated the month of Ramadan 1136 AH/1724 CE, the qā’id of the Sebaou, a certain Mahmoud, charged the qā’id (or sheikh?) of the Guechtoula, Gacem Ben Aïssa, to arbitrate and settle a dispute over inheritance among none other than the Ath Sidi Ali ou Moussa; thus were the mediators mediated.
But this and other evidence shows that the Ottomans had been developing their relations with the Ath Sidi Ali ou Moussa for at least two decades by the time Mohammed Ben Ali launched his campaign against the Ath Aïssi in 1745. According to Robin, the assistance of these imrabdhen secured for the Ottomans the levée of native troops from the Maatqa, who proceeded to play a large part in the crushing of the Igouchdal and Ath Sedqa, and it was as a reward for these services that the Bey Mohammed had the zāwiya of Sidi Ali ou Moussa rebuilt and its cupola restored, all at his own expense. Adli suggests this was done before the campaigns in which Maatqa fighters participated; Robin that it was immediately afterwards. Either way, there was a clear quid pro quo. And we can in any case be confident that the Bey Mohammed had assured himself, through the Ath Sidi Ali ou Moussa, of the benevolent neutrality of the Maatqa early on, around the time that he secured that of the Iboukhtouchen, so that he might take the Ath Aïssi in a pincer movement, having deprived them of possible allies on both their eastern and western flanks from the outset. The Ottomans’ failure to reduce the Ath Mahmoud at the first attempt, while standing out from their general success, only delayed matters. Before long, Ben Ali returned to this unfinished business, again deploying two columns, captured Taguemount Azouz and Tizi Hibel, and the Ath Mahmoud submitted.
It was at this point, which we can date approximately as late 1746 or 1747 CE, that the Bey finally decided to take on the Igawawen, which he did, not by attacking the Ath Irathen from the Sebaou valley floor, as Randon would do 110 years later, but by first mounting an expedition against the Ath Wasif, which ended in a deadly fiasco for the Ottomans, who were obliged to withdraw.165 I believe that it was in the wake of this event that the first of the assemblies held by the ‘aarsh of the Igawawen to decide on the exheredation of their women took place, and that this was the assembly of the Ath Irathen at Tizra Waguemoun.
It is an interesting fact that Robin, whose account of Ottoman policy in Kabylia at this time is indispensable and much the best that exists, should say nothing about the meetings that proclaimed the exheredation of women. The most natural explanation for this striking omission is, I believe, the true one: he did not know about them. He certainly can have had no motive for suppressing this information. We can infer that he simply did not possess it. But it is odd that he should not have possessed it. Is it possible that his informants possessed it and withheld it?
Robin’s principal source for his account of the Bey Mohammed Ben Ali was, as he acknowledges, a certain Mohammed Ben Mohammed Ben Belkacem El-Zouggari, a mrābit of the Ath Sidi Ali ou Moussa lineage who was the Bey Mohammed’s contemporary and wrote a set of notes about him which were preserved and made available to Robin a century or so later.166 Had these notes made any mention of the exheredation of women and the Igawawen assemblies that resolved on this, we can be sure that Robin would have included this in his account. The omission of this important topic could have been due to ignorance in the case of the mrābit as well. We do not know when he died, and he may have died around the time the Bey died (1754 CE), before hearing of the assemblies and their decisions. But it seems far more likely that he would have known about these assemblies and either omitted any discussion of them from his notes or that this part of his notes was withheld from Robin. For the Ath Sidi Ali ou Moussa would have had a motive for suppressing this information as we shall see.
We know for a fact, supported by documentary evidence, that such an assembly was held by the Ath Bethroun confederation together with allied ‘aarsh of the eastern Ath Sedqa, almost certainly in 1749. We know, in addition, of the oral traditions among the Ath Irathen and the Ath Fraoucen that they too held assemblies to take the same decision, the former at Tizra Waguemoun and the latter at Jema‘a n’Saharij, although no documents have come to light and neither of these traditions specifies the year the assembly took place. We also know that the exheredation of women was a common practice in other parts of the Algerian countryside and was already established practice in Kabylia and that the Kabyles, like their counterparts in other regions, had the procedures known as hiba and hubus at their disposal to enable them to get around the stipulations of the Sharī‘a without flagrantly breaching them. So we still have not elucidated the reason for these assemblies and their decisions.
Let us therefore now reason about all this from what we have established concerning the historical context of these events. Two questions need to be answered. What was the object of these exercises? And in what order did these assemblies take place?
I shall argue that they took place in the following order: first, the assembly of the Ath Irathen, in 1747 or 1748; second, the assembly of the Ath Bethroun and their allies, in 1749; and, third, the assembly of the Ath Fraoucen and their eastern and southern neighbours some time later, most probably in 1752–3. My hypothesis concerning the order and timing of these assemblies is connected to what I think the object of these exercises was.
We know that the object of the exercise was not to exheredate Kabyle women, since they had long been denied the right to inherit. Thus Hanoteau and Letourneux were mistaken in supposing that these assemblies were restoring an ancient customary law. What possible benefit, therefore, could these confederations and ‘aarsh have been seeking in taking and proclaiming a decision that was, in content, largely if not entirely superfluous and, in form, a public scandal? If we give further consideration to the record of the Ath Bethroun’s deliberations, we shall find elements of an answer.
The text of the French translation of this record as given by Hanoteau and Letourneux is reproduced in Appendix 1. It will be seen that it contains not the slightest attempt to explain or justify the four measures upon which the Ath Bethroun had resolved, beyond the most perfunctory and cryptic reference to ‘that which is a permanent cause of brawls, troubles and discords in the villages’, a phrase which seems to allude, or so the reader may infer, to the right to inherit which women had enjoyed up until then. But we know that they did not, in actual fact, enjoy this right for practical purposes, so even this reference to the problem to be dealt with explains nothing. The record then specifies the four decisions taken and does so very briskly, in a mere five lines. These are followed by a remarkable passage.
These dispositions being accepted by a common accord, only an iniquitous man could wish to revive those which they have abolished. Now, iniquity is a thing that is condemned. The authority of usage and custom is inviolable and immutable like the authority of a king. Whoever will wish to infringe and violate the aforementioned rules will become for his fellow men a cause of misfortunes and discords. Now, ‘discord is a fire’, according to the words of the Prophet (blessings and peace be upon Him). ‘Discord is a fire; may God’s curse be upon him who lights it, and his mercy upon the man who restores peace.’ Whoever will wish to violate these laws, God will crush him under the weight of abjectness, of poverty, of hunger and of misfortune in this world and the next, whether the culprit is one of us, or one of our children, or one of our children’s children, for as long as one generation replaces its predecessor. If any one of the marabouts or the notables of the villages does not conform to the above-mentioned dispositions, God will hold him accountable.167
The length and tone of this passage suggests that, although the decisions were formally unanimous, these measures were in fact controversial, and a disposition to defy them in some quarters was anticipated. The gist of the passage is clear: whoever defies these new rules is a trouble-maker and God is not on his side. Thus the validity of the new rules from the point of view of religion is clearly in question and this passage is a warning to those disposed to dispute the decisions in the name of the Sharī‘a that if they do so they will be precipitating fitna (discord, division of the community of believers) and so putting themselves in the wrong in God’s eyes. In effect, the doctrinal debate concerned the relative importance of the letter of the Sharī‘a and the preservation of the community, with the decision taken giving emphatic priority to the second.
The concern to represent the decisions as valid in relation to religious orthodoxy is evident throughout the document. The meeting which took the decision is described as ‘an assembly of the marabouts of the Beni Bethroun, assisted by the sages of their villages and the imam of the mosque’. In the detailed enumeration, village by village, of those who were present at the meeting, the imrabdhen are always mentioned first, followed by the ‘udūl,168 if any, and then the lay ‘uqqāl (sages, elders). The sherifian status (descent from the Prophet) of the imrabdhen is stressed wherever this obtained, as well as their invariable honourableness. The author of the record of the meeting, Sidi Ameur ben Sidi Ahmed ben Yahia of Tiqichourt, makes a point of referring to himself as ‘the honourable, the rightly guided, the erudite, the orthodox’ (my emphasis), terms also applied to another amrabedh cited as present when the original document was copied in 1225 AH/1810 CE. And, in case the warning in the earlier paragraph is not clear enough, it is repeated in pithy terms at the end:
It is by the order of the above-named marabouts and sages that the aforementioned customs have been abolished; whoever, among the descendants, would violate the new dispositions, God will hold him to account. Goodbye!
The fact that this assembly was a public meeting of imrabdhen has gone entirely unremarked in the literature on the history of Kabylia. But it is a fact of the first importance. The assembly of a village consists of the officers of the thajma‘th (the amīn, oukīl and aberrah), the temman of the various lineages and perhaps a number of other ‘uqqāl; in plenary session (aberrah), it consists of all adults males of the village. The assembly of the ‘arsh, an infrequent event, would consist of the umanā’ – the presidents of the thijemmu‘a – of the constituent villages, the meeting electing an amīn el-umanā’ – ‘the president of the presidents’ – to take the chair and possibly hold office for the duration of whatever emergency (such as a war with a neighbouring ‘arsh) provoked the assembly in the first place. In both cases, the actors in these instances would be lay Kabyles, not the imrabdhen, whose role, if they attended, would be confined to the ritual recital of the Fātiha at the beginning of the meeting. For the imrabdhen to be the principal actors and participants in an assembly held as a public event to debate and resolve questions of policy and law and placed on record in writing was entirely unprecedented. If the meeting of the Ath Bethroun was, as I believe, the second in the series, after that of the Ath Irathen, the latter was a precedent for the former, but the point of course is that these meetings, taken, as they should be, as a unified series, were events without precedent and, we might add, without sequel. What, then, can have induced or prompted the imrabdhen of the Ath Bethroun to assemble, deliberate, resolve and, crucially, bear witness, through the written record, to their resolutions as they did?
In abolishing the right of women to inherit, the assembly of 1749 made no practical difference to the material condition of the women of the Ath Bethroun and their allies. But the explicit abolition of this right in Kabyle law obviated all future recourse to the expedients previously employed to get round the Sharī‘a. In particular, it obviated recourse to the expedient of hubus. There was no longer any need for a family to bequeath its property to a religious foundation in order to avoid the division of the patrimony and the alienation of part of it through marriages of daughters into other families. The beneficiaries of the practice of hubus were the religious foundations to which such properties were bequeathed, the thim‘ammrin and zawāyā of the imrabdhen. There could be no question of abolishing the practice of hubus in itself; but abolishing one of the main reasons – the right of women to inherit – for lay families to resort to it was another matter.
Moreover, as we have seen, the assembly of 1749 did not only abolish this reason; it also abolished the right of shefa‘a by anyone, man or woman, in respect of property already made over to a religious foundation as hubus. Previously, should a family that had bequeathed a property as hubus and thereafter enjoyed user rights in this property become extinct, its nearest relatives in the male line of descent would have the right to buy this property and so pre-empt the definitive acquisition of the property in question by the foundation concerned. The right of pre-emption in this specific case was now abolished. At first sight, this measure might appear to be to the advantage of the religious foundations, which could henceforth expect to secure absolute ownership of hubus properties without the interference of pre-empting relatives. But the matter is at least ambiguous, for the fact that a family or quite possibly several families no longer had the right to buy a cousin’s property once this was bequeathed to a zāwiya as hubus would give them a strong incentive to dissuade their cousin from making this bequest in the first place. In short, while the first measure removed a major motive for making bequests to religious foundations, the second measure created a socially potent disincentive to do so.
These measures can hardly have been welcome to the imrabdhen families connected to those zawāyā and thim‘ammrin that benefitted or stood to benefit from the practice of hubus. How, then, can we explain the pre-eminent role of the imrabdhen of the Ath Bethroun and their allies in the taking of these decisions?
Given the controversial character of the decisions taken, it is entirely unrealistic to suppose that they were not discussed and largely resolved well in advance of the assembly held at Souq el-Sebt n’Ath Wasif. We can be confident that this assembly was preceded by numerous other meetings, very probably in the thajma‘th of every village of every ‘arsh of the Ath Bethroun and their Ath Sedqa allies. We can also realistically suppose that there are likely to have been reservations about and opposition to the proposals, at least at first, and that much of this came precisely from the imrabdhen, concerned as they would naturally be both about possible loss of material benefits connected to the ahbās and also about their credentials as the local representatives of Islamic doctrine. We can therefore most realistically understand the assembly that was finally held as having the function of consecrating the decision taken – that is, the measures favoured by the majority opinion among the ‘aarsh concerned, by formally establishing these measures as being unanimously agreed and by inducing the imrabdhen to do the honours in taking responsibility for promulgating the new laws and so both validating them from the point of view of religion and publicly implicating themselves in the agreed change.
It was, I believe, the last point that was crucial. By consecrating the decisions, affirming their validity in respect of Islam and bearing witness to their own role, the imrabdhen of the Ath Bethroun and their allies were making themselves immediately and massively vulnerable to critical attack by the urban guardians of orthodoxy, the ‘ulamā’ of Algiers and Bejaia. In inducing their imrabdhen to do this, then, the Ath Bethroun and their allies were inducing them to break with and openly defy the Regency and its religious scholars and to take sides in the developing conflict between the coalition of forces supporting the Ottoman penetration of Kabylia and the emerging resistance to this.
Thus the Ath Bethroun and their allies found a way of putting their imrabdhen on the spot and obliging them to declare their political allegiance. But why did they think they needed to do this?
It is possible that it was the Bey Mohammed’s attack on the Ath Wasif that concentrated minds and triggered the Ath Bethroun’s response. But the timing does not work very well, since the Bey’s attack will have taken place no later than 1747, and the meeting at Souq el-Sebt was most probably held in 1749. And it is not evident that the attack on the Ath Wasif, which was repulsed effectively, would have been enough on its own to galvanise the entire thaqbilth of the Ath Bethroun, not to mention its Ath Sedqa neighbours, into taking such a far-reaching and audacious decision. I therefore believe that something else happened in the interim and that this was the meeting of the Ath Irathen, which then served as an example for the Ath Bethroun to follow. For the expedition against the Ath Wasif will have given food for thought to the Ath Irathen as well.
Let us consider how the Bey’s behaviour will have appeared to the Ath Irathen. He first married the daughter of Si Amar Ou Boukhettouch and, through this family connection and the Iboukhtouchen’s connection at Adeni, obtained the Ath Irathen’s neutrality in respect of the campaigns he then undertook. At the same time, he enlisted the assistance of the Ath Sidi Ali ou Moussa and, through them, the southern Maatqa. By doing this, he isolated and encircled the Ath Aïssi and proceeded to crush them and then crushed the Igouchdal and part of the western Ath Sedqa with the help of Maatqa auxiliary forces. By this stage, the Bey’s strategy will have become clear to all observers and it is unrealistic to suppose that the Ath Irathen will have looked on complacently as if none of this concerned them in the slightest. By neutralising the Ath Irathen and crushing the Ath Aïssi, the Bey had made himself master of the Wad Aïssi valley leading into the heart of the high Jurjura. By crushing the Igouchdal and western Ath Sedqa, he had further gained control of the southern plain, the other line of access to the central high Jurjura. These two routes, from the north and the west, converge at Takhoukht, in the valley below the Ath Yenni and the ‘arsh Ath Ousammeur of the Ath Irathen, which is where the expeditionary force sent against the Ath Wasif will have been mustered prior to launching its attack. By this stage, however, it must have dawned on the Ath Irathen that the Bey was systematically depriving them of potential allies to their west, south-west and south and simply leaving them till last while steadily encircling them. Although they may have been comparatively indifferent to the fate of the distant Igouchdal, the fate of the Ath Bethroun was another matter, for they constituted the Ath Irathen’s own strategic hinterland. This is something that may have alarmed some ‘aarsh of the Ath Irathen more immediately than others. It would be natural for the Ath Ousammeur, the ‘arsh directly neighbouring the Ath Bethroun, to be more sensitive to what was happening than the Irjen, where the Iboukhtouchen had their seat at Adeni, on the edge of the Sebaou valley. The Bey’s expeditionary troops will have marched south down the Wad Aïssi valley directly under the Ath Ousammeur villages of Ath Ferah, Ath Atelli and Taourirt Amoqran and the Ottoman troops’ engagements with the Ath Wasif will have been hot news in the thijemmu‘a of these villages and the subject of intense debate. This debate will undoubtedly have spread eventually to the other ‘aarsh of the confederation before culminating in the historic assembly at Tizra Waguemoun, ‘the rocks of Aguemoun’.
The village of Aguemoun is neither in ‘arsh Irjen nor in ‘arsh Ath Ousammeur, but in ‘arsh Ath Akerma, whose settlements extend all the way from the very edge of the Sebaou valley floor (the hamlets of tūfīq Tizi Rached) to the high central ridge where the French built their town of Fort Napoléon after the conquest in 1857. Aguemoun is the highest of all the Ath Akerma villages (905 metres) and one of the most southerly, near the point of contact with both ‘arsh Ath Oumalou to the east and ‘arsh Ath Ousammeur to the south-west, while belonging neither to the Ath Ousammeur nor the Irjen and so in that respect neutral ground. It was therefore a very apt place at which to hold a general assembly to decide the strategy of the thaqbilth as a whole.
My hypothesis, then, is that a reaction set in among the Ath Irathen against the policy favoured by the Iboukhtouchen. The latter were comparative newcomers to the Ath Irathen and their deal with the Bey, which amounted to a policy of appeasement, would no longer have been seen as working in the general interest of the Ath Irathen as a whole. I further believe that it would most likely have been the southernmost ‘aarsh of the confederation, the Ath Ousammeur and the Aouggacha, immediate neighbours of the Ath Yenni, which pressed most energetically for a change of policy. The long experience that the Ath Irathen possessed of dealing with the central power – formerly the Hafsids at Bejaia and now the Ottomans in Algiers – would have equipped them with the political sophistication to work out what their alternative strategy should be. Since the Bey was working his connections with influential maraboutic lineages, the Iboukhtouchen and the Ath Sidi Ali ou Moussa, it was imperative to put a stop to that and pre-empt any fresh attempt by him to suborn the imrabdhen of the Ath Irathen or those of their neighbours among the southern Igawawen.
This, I submit, was the true rationale and function of the meeting at Tizra Waguemoun, to force the imrabdhen to clarify and then affirm their loyalties. Were they the Ottomans’ fifth column, aligned with the Regency and its ‘ulamā’, in the name of the Sharī‘a and scriptural orthodoxy? Or were they aligned with the Ath Irathen, whose patron saints they claimed to be, in the name of the general interest of the community in which they lived? In going along with the proclamation of the exheredation of women, the imrabdhen of the Ath Irathen repudiated the Iboukhtouchen’s policy, burned their bridges with the Regency and committed themselves to the anti-Ottoman resistance.
In view of the Ath Irathen’s leading role in saff bouadda in the 1690–1710 period, it may not have been very difficult for the Ath Irathen and their imrabdhen to agree on this position, which amounted to reverting to their previous independent and anti-Ottoman policy while disconnecting this from support for the Iboukhtouchen family interest, since the latter no longer coincided with the former. Matters stood very differently in this respect with the Ath Bethroun.
In the fitna of the sfūf, the Ath Bethroun had been divided, as we have noted. Their northernmost ‘arsh, Ath Yenni, had aligned itself with the Ath Irathen in saff bouadda and the Ath Boudrar had followed the Ath Yenni’s example, as had most probably the Ath ou Belkacem.169 But its two westernmost ‘aarsh, the Ath Wasif and Ath Bou Akkach, together with their nearest neighbours of the eastern Ath Sedqa, ‘aarsh Ath Ahmed and Aouqdal, had gone the other way, rallying to saff oufella, the implicitly pro-Ottoman saff headed by the Ath Yahia, Ath Menguellat and Ath Bou Youcef, the three ‘aarsh whose position in this matter had been determined by the influential nexus of maraboutic families in the central Jurjura. Thus for the Ath Bethroun and its allies to take a unified position against the Ottoman Regency in 1749 was not at all easy; it required an about-turn in the position of the Ath Wasif, Ath Bou Akkach and their Ath Sedqa neighbours. This is why it is doubtful that this would have occurred had the Ath Irathen not already set an example with their own assembly and thereby exerted a powerful influence. And these considerations explain the very striking fact that, in the record of the assembly of the Ath Bethroun in 1749, the list of participants begins with the Ath Bou Akkach and Ath Wasif and mentions them in considerable detail and then continues immediately with the ‘aarsh of the eastern Ath Sedqa, for it is the representatives of these ‘aarsh that were required to bear public witness to their commitment to the new position. This was probably easier for the eastern Ath Sedqa, since the Bey Mohammed’s crushing of the western Ath Sedqa will have concentrated their minds, so it was above all the position of the Ath Wasif and the Ath Bou Akkach that had to be reversed, which is undoubtedly why the Ath Bethroun chose to hold its meeting on the Ath Wasif’s territory, thereby implicating the latter to the utmost degree. The mention made of the representatives from the other Ath Bethroun ‘aarsh – Ath Yenni, Ath ou Belkacem and Ath Boudrar – was perfunctory because their position had not changed and was not the problem; their commitment was already established and could be taken for granted.
The third assembly, at Jema‘a n’Saharij, took place not long afterwards. The local tradition credits the Iboukhtouchen family with the initiative of holding this assembly.170 If this is reliable, the assembly may have been held shortly before Si Amar ou Boukhettouch finally took a stand against his son-in-law the Bey, which happened in 1753, when the Bey sent forces to crush rebellions by the Ath Jennad and Iflissen Lebahr and Si Amar sided with and actively aided the rebels.171 Given the Iboukhtouchen’s role in calling this assembly and the tradition that it was a gathering of many ‘aarsh, it is likely that the participants included those ‘aarsh to the east and south-east of the Ath Fraoucen with which the Iboukhtouchen were connected, notably the Ath Bou Chaïb and the Ath Ghoubri.172 It is likely that Ou Boukhettouch finally decided to lead the Ath Fraoucen and their allies into emulating the Ath Irathen and Ath Bethroun as a way of mobilising the largest possible alliance to support his siding with the anti-Ottoman rebellion in maritime Kabylia. The following year, 1754, the Bey Mohammed finally attacked the Ath Irathen, beginning – rather pointedly, one might think – with the village of Adeni. His troops had taken a number of villages when the Bey himself suddenly fell dead, shot, apparently by one of his own soldiers;173 his troops, demoralised, abandoned the attack and withdrew.
The success of the Igawawen in weathering the Ottoman assault and the news of the Bey’s death triggered a general rising across the region, in which even the Iflissen Oumellil joined, while the ‘aarsh of the qā’idate of Boghni attacked and destroyed the Borj there and killed the Turkish qā’id. When the rebels turned south and tried to repeat this success at Borj Hamza, it took three columns of Ottoman troops to stop them and quell the revolt.
The Ottoman authorities were to make no further attempt to subdue the Igawawen and incorporate them into their system of rule on the same basis as the lowland populations. They contented themselves with developing a modus vivendi with them, respecting their sovereignty over their own territory while negotiating certain matters, such as the passage of Ottoman troops between Tizi Ouzou and Bejaia along the periphery of the Igawawen district, negotiations in which certain imrabdhen provided their good offices.174 The independence of the Igawawen, asserted with such success in this way in 1747–54 CE, was to last another century, together with the political arrangements which had been forged in the fire of these events.
If the Iboukhtouchen did indeed promote the assembly at Jema‘a n’Saharij, they were, as Algerians today would put it, jumping on a moving train. A political process had been set in motion by the Ath Irathen and given further momentum by the Ath Bethroun and their allies and it is likely that the other ‘aarsh of the Igawawen region would have followed suit sooner or later in any event. It was politically astute of Si Amar ou Boukhettouch to act as he did but, while it put his family on the winning side, it made little difference to its own political prospects in the longer term. For the change which had begun to take place spelled the end of the Ibouktouchen as a major force in Kabyle political life.
This is because the assemblies of the Igawawen established the foundations of two of the four saff systems described in Chapter 4 and triggered the formation of the other two, and these systems consolidated the democratic character of the form of government of Igawawen society by ensuring that in future the relations this society entertained with the Ottoman Regency would be determined by assemblies representing public opinion instead of being decided by a dynasty acting in its own interest. The rise of the saff systems signified the eclipse of the dynastic principle in the highlands. While the political life of the lowlands becomes personalised at this time, a colourful drama dominated by the Ben Zamoums and Mahieddines and Oukacis, that of the Jurjura becomes depersonalised or, one might well say, institutionalised, an affair of ‘aarsh and thiqbilin and sfūf.
None of the ‘aarsh which assembled at Jema‘a n’Saharij were united in thiqbilin. In consequence, the endorsement by this assembly of the position already proclaimed at Tizra Waguemoun signified in effect the acceptance by the Ath Fraoucen and their eastern and south-eastern neighbours of the leadership of the Ath Irathen as the thaqbilth dominating the southern side of the middle Sebaou valley and the northern approaches to the Jurjura district. At the same time, the Ath Irathen had themselves been acting to restore their relations with the Ath Aïssi to their west and did so with success. In this way, the Ath Irathen saff system, which embraced all these populations, was brought into being. So powerful was the gravitational pull of the Ath Irathen as a consequence of these events that even the Maatqa were drawn into their saff system.175
In the high Jurjura, matters were, once again, more complicated. It is a striking fact that there is no oral tradition whatever – let alone a written record – of any assembly to resolve upon the exheredation of women among the ‘aarsh to the east of the Ath Bethroun, those of the Ath Menguellat confederation and the ‘eastern Igawawen’ – that is, the Ath Yahia, the Ath Itsouragh and the Illilten. Given the unusual degree of political influence of the imrabdhen among several of these ‘aarsh (Ath Menguellat, Ath Bou Youcef, Ath Itsouragh), this is very understandable. In effect, the confederation of the Ath Menguellat proved quite unable to emulate the Ath Bethroun in this respect. As a result, the Ath Bethroun were able, like the Ath Irathen to their north, to exert a considerable gravitational pull on the ‘aarsh to their east. It was the Ath Bethroun who had given a lead in the high Jurjura in defining the attitude to be taken towards the Ottoman Regency’s ambition to subdue the region and this lead remained uncontested locally. At the same time, the dissociation of this anti-Ottoman position from its former connection to the Iboukhtouchen interest made it possible for ‘aarsh which had taken the anti-Iboukhtouchen side in the fitna of the sfūf to abandon their old attitude and gravitate towards the Ath Bethroun. As a result, the Igawawen saff system that came into being was in reality an extension of the saff system of the Ath Bethroun confederation, enlarged to include its eastern neighbours. At the same time, however, the Ath Wasif, the ‘arsh which had hosted the assembly of 1749 and taken the lead in sealing the Ath Bethroun’s alliance with the eastern Ath Sedqa, was itself undergoing a dramatic internal change arising out of its own enlargement to absorb the villages of Tassaft Waguemoun and Ath Eurbah, formerly of the ‘arsh Ath ou Belkacem, which had disintegrated and disappeared. This change set up a new basis, in the Igherbien vs Isherqien rivalry, for the saff division within the Ath Wasif as we have seen and this then became the division structuring the Igawawen saff system as a whole.
As for the saff system of the eastern Jurjura and Akfadou district, this appears, given the scarcity of information available, to have been constituted almost by default. One factor was the decline of Iboukhtouchen influence in the Wad Boubehir district: while this was still strong enough among the Ath Ghoubri to draw them into the Ath Irathen system, it clearly no longer had any purchase on the Ath Ijjeur. The ability of the Ottomans to negotiate their relations with the Ath Ijjeur directly, through the latter’s own imrabdhen, was an index of this change. Above all, the Ath Ijjeur were a confederation in their own right, comprising four ‘aarsh; their collective self-respect may have ruled out their implication in the Ath Irathen system but in any case they occupied a quite distinct piece of terrain, the western side of the Akfadou district, and their geo-political situation naturally inclined them to give precedence to their relations with their southern neighbours, the Ath Ziki and the Illoulen Oumalou. As for the Illilten, who might otherwise equally have entered the Igawawen system, it would appear that it was their close relations with the Illoulen Oumalou which decided their choice of saff system.176
Finally, it was natural enough that the thiqbilin and ‘aarsh of maritime Kabylia should constitute a saff system of their own. They may have done this merely in imitation of the populations to the south. If Adli’s hypothesis that the return of Kabyles from Spanish captivity in the late 1760s prompted the thiqbilin and ‘aarsh of this district to hold their own assembly to resolve upon the exheredation of their women, this may well have precipitated the formation of their saff system. But two of the thiqbilin in the district, the Iflissen Lebahr and Ath Jennad, had already engaged in united action in the rebellion against the Bey Mohammed in 1753, so the nucleus of a unified saff system already existed in some degree.
Thus the political process initiated at Tizra Waguemoun and then generalised to other districts of Greater Kabylia had a number of crucial effects that one might call revolutionary. It completed and consolidated the system of political organisation and government founded on representative assemblies at village, ‘arsh and thaqbilth level by adding a fourth, higher, level, that of the saff systems. In doing this, it substituted the democratic principle of represention of public opinion for the aristocratic and dynastic principle – incarnated in the Ath l-Qadi and subsequently the Ibouktouchen – that had predominated at this level up until this moment. In the process, the systems of representative government that had developed in the highlands of Greater Kabylia domesticated the imrabdhen by subordinating them to the general interest of the community as determined by its thijemmu‘a. They thus asserted the primacy of the political field over the religious field. In so doing, the Kabyle polity was in a sense mirroring the Regency itself, for there can be no doubt that, for the rulers of the Regency, religion was subordinate to and an instrument of raison d’état, as official Islam has been in all Muslim states in the post-colonial era.
The decision of the Igawawen in their historic assemblies to subordinate the letter of the Sharī‘a to the preservation of the community and the defence of the general interest did not mean that the Kabyles were not good Muslims. It meant merely that they could henceforth be attacked by the urban ‘ulamā’ as bad Muslims or misconceived a century later by French administrators as trans-Mediterranean Auvergnats who were not really Muslims at all. But the Kabyles who acted in this way were undoubtedly as pious and as devout as any of the other populations of the countryside and mountains of Algeria and their polity was a Muslim polity. They had acted to preserve the political and juridical framework which was necessary to the orderly reproduction of the very particular society that had developed in the mountains and, in respect of the right of women to inherit, they had differed from the other rural populations of Algeria only in frankly proclaiming their decision not to uphold that right.
In declaring that ‘the authority of usage and custom is inviolable and immutable like the authority of a king’, the Igawawen were in effect claiming for their assemblies, as the creations of custom and the institutional agents of the transmutation of custom into law, precisely ‘the authority of the prince’ that the urban ‘ulamā’ and Al-Warthilani reproached them for defying. They were, of course, simply defying the pretension to authority of the Regency in the name of the substantial authority their representative assemblies possessed. And the fact that the audacious and controversial decisions taken at Tizra Waguemoun and at Souq el-Sebt n’Ath Wasif were then accepted and adopted by all the other populations of Greater Kabylia is a very clear index of the hegemony of the Igawawen over the society of the region as a whole.
