From the 1930s, the Zionist-Palestinian conflict influenced emergent nationalist thought in Algeria, and often blamed for rising tensions between Algerian Muslims and Jews. After the 1934 riots against the Jewish community of Constantine, Algeria, for example, the boycott of Jewish stores in the weeks that followed was justified by putative Jewish Algerian support for the Zionists in Palestine. In 1952, the Algerian Jewish philosopher Raymond Benichou traced (what he insisted were) new tensions between Muslims and Jews in Algeria to the Palestine question. Later on, FLN statements openly questioned Algerian Jews’ solidarity with the revolutionary cause, often citing their possible sympathy for colonialism in Palestine. In one instance, a pro-FLN newspaper asked rhetorically whether pied-noir settlers had convinced Algerian Jews that their struggle against “Algerians” was tied to their struggle against Arabs in the Middle East, demanding an investigation into “the links between Jews in Algeria and global Zionism.” By the end of Algeria’s colonial period, nationalist thought often associated Jews in Algeria with Zionists atrocities in Palestine, and thus the European colonial enemy more generally. Yet, voices of Islamic reform in Algeria often countered this tendency. This paper explores how, since its founding in 1931, figures associated with the Association des Ulama Musulmans Algériens (AUMA) such as Abd al-Hamid ben Badis (1889-1940), and Tayyib al Uqbi (1888-1960) made a point of distinguishing Algerian Jews from Zionists in Palestine, even as they brought attention to the Palestine issue in their publications. Their advocacy of an Islam of brotherly love encompassing adherents of other religions in Algeria translated into powerful statements against anti-Semitism. Sheikh al-Uqbi, for example, helped found the Union des croyants monotheistes with a number of liberal Jews in 1935, and criticized Messali Hadj for condemning Muslims for working with Jews suspected of Zionist sympathies. Uqbi insisted, in contrast, that Muslims support the Ligue internationale contre l’antisemitisme (LICA) because “LICA is the true incarnation of the Islamic spirit.” Sheikh Bin Badis, similarly, during the escalation of tensions in Palestine during the Great Revolt of 1936-1939, often vocally supported events that brought Jewish and Muslim Algerians together in the name of “rapprochement,” sometimes suggesting that Jews could serve as positive examples for Muslims. This paper represents an early stage of an investigation into how Islamic reformist leaders balanced their celebration of Muslim-Jewish solidarity with a firm defense of Palestinians.

This paper reviews the recent historiography of the sixties and seventies in the Maghrib to shed light on histories of radical engagement under authoritarianism. This blind spot concerns the first and second generations of Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians after independence who saw their modernist aspirations frustrated by their nationalist leaders. This paper will address the nebula of leftists, students, workers and intellectuals during these two decades whose attempts to remain off the regimes’ radars meant insufficient scholarship on their contribution to their countries’ nation-building. The events of 2011 have sparked an interest in re-examining local radical traditions in and out of the region, by making use of unconventional sources and materials that include memoirs, cultural journals and oral testimonies. Two groups stand out in this recent renewal: Perspectives/Amel Tounsi in Tunisia and Souffles/Anfas in Morocco. These renewed efforts have addressed the profiles of their members, their cultural productions and their modes of action and shed light on their contributions to nation-building. They have opened a path for others to write the histories of other lesser discussed (but no less influential) figures and groups in the Maghrib. These two examples illustrate how the social and cultural histories of radicalism offer new light by illustrating how subaltern groups have offered alternative imaginations of the nation. They also offer a methodological contribution by subverting the traditional approaches of history from the top (that usually focus on the Moroccan monarchy or the centrality of Habib Bourguiba), by identifying alternative chronologies and turning point. These include episodes of mass arrests and political trials (1968 Tunis trials, 1973 Kenitra trials). The article will then review the potential for similar radical histories in Algeria, arguing that the state’s socialist agenda forces us to think differently about the Algerian modernist intelligentsia. These groups continue to be understudied (in large part due to the dominance of the nationalist paradigm in the historiography), but we see encouragement in recent efforts to excavate the lives and trajectories of intellectuals such as Malek Bennabi, Mostafa Lacheraf and others. This paper will review ongoing efforts in English, French and Arabic to tell the histories of students, leftists and cultural dissidents in the region through this comparative angle. This paper will conclude with an assessment of these histories on the wider historiography of the post-independence period and the prospects for anchored and grounded histories of their radical traditions to take shape.

“Father, what do the colors of our flag stand for?” “The green is for Islam, the red for the blood of our martyrs, and the white for the pages of our history.” - Dialogue from cartoon in Gyps, FIS End Love (1996) of a discussion between an Algerian father and son. Activists throughout Algeria’s post-independence era have been confronted and interacted with multiple narratives surrounding their country’s post-independence historical trajectory. A number of these takes have hailed from government-backed or supported publications and speeches crafting a limited perspective on the country’s past. Official accounts of history since liberation in 1962, as expressed through the organization of public spaces, memorials, or texts, have particularly glossed over certain moments in the country’s history while stressing others, in effect producing the “white” that Gyps mentions above. In turn, organizations dedicated to the remembrance of victims of the country’s “Dark Decade” such as SOS Disparus have sought to fill in the blank space imposed by the government’s reconciliation process that ended the country’s civil conflict of the 1990s through a variety of mechanisms. They have insisted instead that the country sit with the horrors that the government has insisted that the nation recognize as a “tragedy” and move forward from. Furthermore, artists and “popular intellectuals” (Baud and Rutten, 2004) have also asserted a belief that Algeria’s “march forward” through time can also be reset or put back in time through political figures’ missteps. How can challenging official conceptions of time’s passing in Algeria serve as a source for achieving social justice and/or a means of speaking back against the violence that state-sponsored/enforced amnesia and organizing of time entail? Through an examination of texts from activists, popular intellectuals, and figures that miriam cooke (2016) would qualify as “activist-artists,” this presentation argues that various civilians and groups in Algeria have sought to reshape popular understandings of time as a form of “resistance” and “social memory activism.” These efforts include portraying time as proceeding in a non-linear fashion as well as highlighting how, against state accounts, various members of Algeria’s national community occasionally view time as moving circuitously or in fits and stops. In the process, the present work aims to expand current literature in the field of Middle Eastern and North Africa of social memory activism (Eldridge, 2016; Gutman, 2017) while deepening scholarly understanding of how Algerian communities have viewed post-1962 history and time.

Responding to this panel’s focus on the “new wave” of Algerian (and Maghribi) historiography, enabled by decentralized approaches and access to new sources, this paper will examine the ways in which non-elite Algerian subjects strategically engaged with and/or resisted the French colonial legal apparatus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper presents both research from my work with recently-opened Algerian judicial archives and reflections on the possibilities and limitations of these archives for the study of Algerian “everyday life” under colonial occupation. This research attempts to correct for the narrowed focus on prescriptive texts and state-centric perspectives endemic to much of the literature on both law (especially Muslim legal traditions) and colonialism, which are often abstracted from the material realities of the subjects with whom they were concerned. The core evidence for this study is drawn from the records of appeals that were filed with the French civil tribunal in the city of Blida, which also served as the district court hearing Muslim appeals for the ertswhile Blida arrondissement (in the hinterland of the département d’Alger). These archives show us how Muslim litigants pursuing civil suits either before qadis or French magistrates (and often both) displayed competencies in Islamic legal norms, local extra-legal norms, French law, as well as French Orientalist understandings of Islamic law (often inspired by contemporaneous Ottoman reforms). I thus propose that “legal pluralism” is an often inadequate, and sometimes distorted, lens through which to view these processes. For many Muslim disputants, the hierarchy between Islamic, French, and local “customary” legal norms and forums was not given, a fact reflected in their strategies which are more akin to legal syncretism or synthesis. Litigants might, for example, bring their French lawyer to the qadi court or bring their elder kin to French court; not infrequently, they used French legal venues in order to gain leverage in Islamic or non-state venues of dispute resolution, and vice versa. This paper also aims to contribute to the project of “provincializing Europe” within colonial history generally and Algerian history specifically, not only by privileging microhistory at the local scale, but also by situating these histories within wider regional and global circuits of knowledge-production about Islam, legal reform, and “modernization” in which Algeria was a nexus and transfer point.

Responding to this panel’s focus on new waves in Maghribi history, including the recent historian interest in the post-independence, this contribution will concentrate on the first years of North-African independence. It will focus on the ways in which city youth, in particular students, have developed practices allowing them to connect or reconnect with the peasantry or the countryside of their countries. Focusing on Algerian youth and to a lesser extend on Tunisian students, it will describe and analyze several such practices that developed in the 1960s and the 1970s, when young men and women from the cities had the opportunity to travel to the countryside and enter in dialogue with peasants and their families. These practices are of three types: the Algerian Volontariat de la Révolution agraire, or agrarian revolution brigades of volunteers (who went to the countryside to explain the Agrarian revolution to the peasant as well as give courses in reading and writing); amateur theater troops that circulated to collect information and inspiration for their creations; and finally students who took part in research projects in sociology, anthropology or even popular literature that also brought them to the countryside. This question of how young people of the cities attempted to connect or reconnect to the peasantry takes place in a context that is both demographic and political: in the first years of independence, the major demographic transformation at work was the migration of rural populations to the cities (accelerated in the case of Algeria by war and it’s 1962 resolution). Many of the young men and women who took part in these returns to the countryside were the first city-born generation in their family and often also the first educated generation. This paper will explore how reconnecting with the countryside may have been a way of dealing with such rapid demographic change. The peasantry and the countrysides were also at the core of nationalist discourses (in particular in the more populist Algeria) and the experience of direct knowledge of peasant life can also be analyzed as a means of insuring a form of legitimacy in the new societies that were emerging from independence. This contribution is based on interviews conducted with participants in such forms of return to the countryside, as well as on the books presenting the research in which, as students in anthropology or sociology, they participated.