A thorough investigation remains pending into the French colonialists who designated France as a “great Muslim power.” The attribution of the epithet of “a great Muslim power” to an ostensibly secular state invites a subtle irony followed by a grand provocation. The French Empire flattered itself by claiming this self-aggrandizing designation which became evident in the complex field of imperial governance that was devoted to the management of its Muslim subjects – 'la politique musulmane française'. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the secular Third Republic and its overseas Empire adopted the epithet quite overtly in their official documents to promote their imperial rule in North and West Africa. This paper traces the persistence of the idea of Islamic governance in the French imperial enterprise. I endeavor to show how the French imperial venture in the Maghreb was deeply intertwined with a particular misperception of political power in Islam as systematized and conceptualized by Montesquieu’s theory of the “Oriental Despot.” How did the French Empire administer its North African Muslim subjects on the basis of a certain idea of Islamic Governance? How did the fiction of the Oriental despot through its 'politique musulmane' haunt the imperial imaginary up to the denouement of the Empire? This paper seeks in the French scholarly and political orientalist production on the Maghreb a privileged stance to contemplate the psyches, desires, imaginaries that enervate imperialism. I argue that the fantasy of the Oriental despot delineates more about the colonial political project in the Orient than it does about the indigenous structure of governance supposedly typical of the Orient. I attempt to illustrate how the fiction of Montesquieu’s Oriental despotism was omnipresent in the writings of the Empire’s officials and scholars, who perceived it as the most suitable regime for their Muslim colonies in the Maghreb. During the colonial period, Oriental despotism evolved into the projection of the colonialists’ fantasies of subjugation, and the colonial sovereignty which they sought to accomplish without constraints in the mythic vastness of the Oriental lands. This paper explores how the illusion of the Oriental despot takes us to the deepest corridors of colonial sovereignty in North Africa.

In 1915, French officers sought to subdue the powerful Beni Mestara tribe of the Jbala region of northern Morocco by cutting off the tribe’s access to grain imported from the Gharb plain. These officers read the Jbala in terms of its lack of grain, thereby overlooking the diverse and storable production of the hill country. The French blockade of the grain markets of the eastern Gharb in 1915 and 1916 was based on the faulty premise that the Beni Mestara needed grain from the Gharb to survive. French confidence that occupying the town of Wazzan and thereby denying the Beni Mestara access to its large market would be decisive was also misplaced. Mountain fractions of the Beni Mestara, led by the Beni Ymmel, fought until 1927, holding out even after the Rifian rebellion collapsed with 'Abd al-Krim's surrender in 1926. This long resistance speaks to the moral perception of the mountaineers; they were sustained by their confidence that resistance was just and pious. They were also sustained by their diverse and storable production, particularly their olives, figs, legumes, and herds. This factor constituted the sine qua non of the moral stand that the mountaineers made. The French officers had defensible reasons for identifying grain as the critical vulnerability of the mountaineers. Morocco, especially viewed from the flats, was a land of grain, and indeed there typically was a robust exchange between the Jbala and the Gharb, with olive oil and figs flowing down and grain moving up. Yet the contrary reports of those Frenchmen who knew the Jbala best, Auguste Mouliéras and Édouard Michaux-Bellaire, who attested to either the richness or the self-sufficiency of the Jbala, suggest that the officers of the Gharb were swayed by a discourse that took hold during the first decades of the protectorate: that of Morocco as the granary of Rome. Scholars have described how this discourse drove the agriculture policies of the protectorate during this period, and how it encouraged the forcible settlement of tribes on truncated bits of their former territory. Here we see a different effect of this discourse: its impact on military strategy.

In his poetic work, Tuareg poet and painter Hawad exibits a twofold commitment to art– as a field of critical discourse and as a form of social activism that fosters indigenous cultural and political resurgence. Born in the Air region of Niger, Hawad deploys a mythopoetic method he terms "furigraphie" centered on “fureur” : a revolutionary spirit that calls for a clear social/civil engagement with the forces of oppression that systematically marginalized his Tuareg community politically, economically and culturally. Tuaregs are a stateless people from Berber, Arab and black African ancestry with unique cultural and linguistic idiosyncrasies spread across several countries in central Sahara and the African Sahel who mounted several secessionist rebellions to establish Tuareg nationalism in the region. Drawing on a shared spring of urgency and anger, a considerable number of Hawad’s poems are centered on themes of nomadism, resurgence and “border gnosis” through which the poet excavates the “modern world system’s imaginary, and the manner in which “other” knowledges have been subalternized by hegemonic orders of knowledge (Mignolo, 2000, 109). In Le coude grinçant de l'anarchie, for example, Hawad underscores the inevitability of political radicalism for the “men carrying a rifle on their shoulders” and “the trash of roads and songs on their hands” in protesting the colonial matrix of power and its corrosive repercussions on the Tuareg people (Hawad 79). The poet also expresses a belief in the ability of art to transform socio-political reality by calling his “dawn generation” to be “the rusty splinters of history” and “roam around the world by the tendons of its testicles” and agitate the powers that could make the lives of his people better (Hawad 70). Drawing upon the theoretical postulations of Maria Lugones and Walter Migolo, this paper sets out to analyze the decolonial potentials of anger, a common theme in Hawad’s poetry, in pushing the possibilities of resistance among Tuareg people. It will also articulate the decolonial possibilities of nomadism in delinking from colonial national borders and settled racial hierarchies in the Sahel region.

In 1949, the Algerian religious intellectual Malek Bennabi (1905-1973) formulated a lengthy series of questions and concerns deeply attuned to the coming socio-cultural challenges of decolonization. In Les conditions de la renaissance (Conditions of the Renaissance), Bennabi originally points to Algeria’s “problem of civilization” as its main impediment to parity with Europe. Like the other occupied nations of the Maghreb and Fertile Crescent, Algeria by the end of World War II had experienced the contradictions of colonial development. While urban centers and their agricultural environs prospered—administered by Southern European settlers, the Pied-Noir—Algeria’s majority of Arab-Berbers had sunken into crushing illiteracy, poverty, and backwardness. Given these conditions, Bennabi critically asks: how were we defeated? While in the Middle Ages a center of learning and cultural sophistication, Algeria had failed to enter a new “cycle” of civilization that transcended the heights of its Golden Era. Like his pre-modern forebear Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), Bennabi had again subjected Maghrebi society to immanent criticism—Algeria and other nations were not conquered simply by force of arms, but instead by their insufficient experience of civilization. What was necessary was for the Arabo-Islamic world to develop what G.W.F. Hegel calls a “systematized reality” unique to its “geographic and anthropological existence.” Drawing from Bennabi’s call for a renewed “Islamic Civilization” in the twentieth century, I argue for the significance of his critique for those interested in the legacies, failures, and triumphs of the anti-colonial era in Algeria and elsewhere. An Islamist intellectual, his interventions nonetheless offer conclusions worthy of consideration across sectarian boundaries. Specifically, his prescient realization of the coming failures of the postcolonial nation-state as insufficiently ambitious and global. As early as 1955’s L’afro-asiatisme (Afro-Asianism), Bennabi pointed to the necessity of an alternative, third-worldist “civilization” to challenge the dominance of the world-system erected by former colonizers—then already locking newly independent nations into exploitative socio-economic structures and relationships. This civilization would create genuinely new institutions, civic structures, and economic systems without constant recourse to an essentially alien universe of European values and symbols. Finally, I ask if Bennabi’s strand of “civilizational” thought might prove a fruitful point of entry into the numerous points of contact between religious and secular ideas in the revolutionary Middle East. For Bennabi and others, the threat of neo-imperialism made common cause between the Left and Islam, unified in their shared rejection of the commercialist and technocratic “developmentalism” foisted on nations like Algeria.

Arabization, broadly understood as the replacement of French by Standard Arabic in schools, administrations, and courts, has been one of the major policies of nation-building in post-independence Morocco. Conceived as the linguistic aspect of decolonization, Arabization was also at the heart of a project of Moroccan modernity. Since 2011, the state’s discourse on Arabization has drastically changed. Shifting from the promotion of Standard Arabic as the only language of instruction in primary and secondary education, the 2019 framework law of education established French as the language of instruction for science subjects. The post-2011 discourse of the Ministry of Education and the monarchy on Arabization as the cause of the education system’s turmoil has become the dominant discourse. Whereas there is today a general agreement across the political spectrum on the ‘failure of Arabization,’ the views on how it failed differ. The opponents of Arabization insist that the policy per se was doomed to fail, while its advocates only condemn its implementation. In the two strands of literature on language policy and nation-building in Morocco, Arabization has been described as a legitimating policy for the monarchy, often related to Islamic legitimacy. The post-2011 counter-narrative on Arabization championed by the state challenges the previous symbolic understanding of Arabization and invites a new interpretation of the policy. In this paper, I look at the first appearance of the discourse on the failure of Arabization. I argue that, before the state adopted this discourse in 2011, the discourse had emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s under the pen of academics in the context of the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment program. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, the paper retraces the history of a marginal counter-narrative that has become dominant. The paper highlights how the discourse on Arabization as a ‘problem’ moved from a category of knowledge produced by academic scholarship in a specific economic context to a category of practice used by the state after the Arab Uprisings. By dissecting the discourse around Arabization and its symbolic character, the paper offers a more historically informed analysis of state legitimacy and nation-building.

Upon Algeria’s independence in 1962, a group of teachers was recruited from around the Arab world to teach the Arabic language in Algeria’s the newly-Arabized school system. This new teaching corps was meant to fill a void of personnel left by the departure of the French, whose colonial education system had all but erased the teaching of Arabic for over a century. While these teachers came to fulfill a significant and immediate educational need, they would later become an point of heated controversy. Popular memory has attributed different legacies to them: they became scapegoats for the spread of Islamism, representatives of Algeria’s investment in Pan-Arabism, or symptoms of the abandonment of Algerian identity in favor of a Middle-East centric curriculum. Historical record has little concrete to say about these teachers: their number, their provenance, or their religious and political affiliations. They seem to have survived primarily in the form of rumor, particularly in histories of Algeria’s Black Decade that cite the “impression” or “popular consensus” that they radicalized Algerian youth. This paper will attempt to reconstruct the historical traces of this teaching corps through a variety of sources. Written histories of the period, published memoirs, and other historical documents will be used to outline both the facts of these teachers’ presence in Algeria, and the development of (often distorted) historical memory about them. In particular, this paper will focus on one less-examined place that memory of these teachers has survived: fictional literary portraits of the school. Algerian novels, especially those written in French, often portray foreign teachers as “new colonizers” intent on destroying Algerian culture and indoctrinating its students. Contrasting books in both French and Arabic, written both by Algerians and (in at least one case) non-Algerians who spent time there teaching Arabic, this paper will trace the reputation of this controversial teaching corps. It will illuminate the traces they left in literature, and the persistence of the metaphor in Algeria of these teachers as “new colonizers” and Arabization as a “new colonialism.”