The Zouaves were drawn from the Zouaoua Berbers who lived in the mountainous Kabylia region east of Algiers. These legendary units served France well through WWII. Their dress was imitated by both Union and Confederate units during the American Civil War.
An elite corps composed from captive Christian children, converted to Islam, trained and educated by the state. In the Regency, they represented the summit of the social pyramid.
Some officers in the French army advocated extermination, also known as “the American strategy.” In 1837, there were only about 20,000 colonists in Algeria; many were political malcontents deported from France, versus some two to three million Arabs and Berbers. By 1954, the number of colonists had grown to only one million compared to nine million indigenes, as the French called their Indians.
The Christians would have been ex-slaves, men of commerce and the odd priest; the Mozabites would likely have been businessmen. Mozabites are Mzab Berbers who belong to a morally strict Kharajite Islamic sect known for producing honest, enterprising businessmen and merchants. Their communities are located in the Sahara around Laghaout, Quargla and Gardaia. The Jewish community in Mascara at the time has been estimated in the several thousands. (see chapter notes)
The Koran doesn’t specifically mention treason, but sura 5:34 presumably includes it under the language … “Those that make war against God and his Apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be put to death or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on opposite sides, or banished…”
Al-Bukhari was a 9th-century, saintly religious scholar from Bukhara who authenticated 7,000 hadiths out of many tens of thousands attributed to the Prophet, though not claiming those omitted were unauthentic. This monumental and meticulous work of devotion required verifying chains of witnesses and their reliability.
French military doctors who had been prisoners of the emir observed that the Arab dressings used for treating wounds resulted in far fewer infections and faster healing than normally found among the French. They also developed a special clamping device (djebira) designed to push out bullets lodged in joints (see chapter notes; Bernadette Paillet-Flitti, unpublished paper).
His foreign advisors generally were prisoners who defected to the emir’s cause, often from the Foreign Legion, which explains the presence of Italian and Polish soldiers in his entourage.
Algeria didn’t have any recognized centers of religious scholarship on a level equal to those in Fez or Tunis. Because of proximity and a longer history of learning, Moroccan religious jurisprudence was considered authoritative for Muslims in Oran.
Alexis deTocqueville noted a big difference between those officers who made a career serving in Algeria and those who were there temporarily. The former were “ardent, ambitious, full of energy; they love the country and are passionate about its conquest.” The latter were “sad, mournful, sickly and disheartened and speak and think only about France. The first wage war, the second endure it.”
Close to Tipaza, this tomb measures 180 feet in diameter and 90 feet to the apex of the cupola. It is thought to date from the first-century AD, but as Christianity had not yet spread to North Africa, and the Arabic word for Roman and Christian is the same, the mausoleum is more likely the Tomb of the Roman.
In 1840 there were only about 25,000 Europeans living in Algeria, of which 11,000 were French. The rest were mostly Spanish, Maltese and Italian immigrants.
Aicha was the seductive daughter of Ben Salem, an important caliph in Kabylia. Kheira was also a political wife, though true love was evidently present. Embaraka or Baraka may have been a negro servant (zinijate), though it is unclear whether they were ever married.
His seal was composed of two triangles, one inverted over the other to form a sixpointed star, surrounded by a circle. The upward pointing triangle represented the spiritual power, the downward pointing one, the earthly power. The circle represented divine compassion.
Abd el-Kader was owned and trained by a Joe Osborne of Julianstown, County Meath, Ireland. His time of 9.57 minutes set the benchmark until 1862. The eight-year-old was the smallest horse in the field.
This allowance or “pension” was calculated as an annuity when General Randon was war minister under Louis Napoleon. It represented the compensation value over time of his vaste family domains that were expropriated by the French. The annuity was paid by the government to his heirs up until 1954. The amounts paid over time speak millions of the goodwill the emir had earned in France.
Hillel is thought by some to have been a teacher of Jesus. When asked by a pagan to explain Judaism, Hillel replied: “That which is harmful to you, don’t do to others. The rest is detail. Go forth and study.”
The Eastern Orthodox Church was generally more tolerant than the Latin one in the West, yet also known to have had fits of persecution toward nonOrthodox sects, such as Nestorians and Armenians.
In Peace to End all Peace, David Fromkin points out that Kitchner’s staff in Cairo had considerable expertise on the Muslim world going into World War I. Yet, life in Cairo was provincial and the British community homogenous, its life centering around the Turf Club and going to balls. Many of his staff were competent Arabists, yet their insularity caused some to miss much of the complexity of the Muslim and Arab world. According to Fromkin, Kitchner’s experts held two basic misconceptions: the widespread assumption that Islam was an “it,” a single entity whose believers obeyed their leaders, and a failure to realize that Arab dissatisfaction with Turkish rule didn’t mean they were willing to accept rule by non-Muslims. (pp 93-96)
The lowest number is based on the French estimate of dead as of July 13, when the worst of the rioting ended; the higher number includes those who died in the aftermath from wounds, exposure and sickness.
Because of a widespread but mistaken belief among Muslims today that the Masons were a quasi-Zionist organization at the time, the emir’s affiliation with the Masons is perplexing to many Muslims, or considered a stain on his reputation and hotly disputed by members of his family. In reality, there were hardly any Jews in the Masonic Lodges of his day, nor did they have a Zionist agenda. (More in the chapter notes.)
French nationality, however, did not carry with it the full rights of French citizenship. French Algerians, like black Americans, remained second-class citizens.
Muslim and Hindu natives serving in the British Indian Army whose mutiny was triggered when rumors spread that the cartridges of their Lee-Enfield rifles, which they had to bite off before loading, were greased in pig fat or beef tallow.
They believed God is in all things and all things are in God. In the mixed Muslim-Christian quarter of Shugar where the Shazlis were concentrated, their reasoning may well have been responsible for the absence of any Christian deaths during the rampage of 1860.
There is no way of knowing how accurate was Digby’s wifecount or whether she mistook a concubine for a wife. There is talk among some descendents of the emir living in Damascus of his having taken a young Circassian wife and one of them does believe he had five wives at one point. It would not have been characteristic of the emir to violate the limit of four wives permitted in the Koran, yet neither was he perfect.
Abd el-Kader’s humanitarianism, and specifically, his rules for the treatment of prisoners anticipated Geneva Code of 1949 codified human rights and prisoners’ rights. The emir’s humanitarian accomplishments were the subject of an international conference at The Place of Nations in Geneva sponsored by the United Nations in April 2006: Emir Abdelkader, forerunner of human rights and champion of interreligious dialogue.