This panel highlights the connections between Mashriq and Maghrib in the development of linguistic, cultural, and political resistance to European colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. It examines the salience of Islam and Arabic to the imagination of common bonds that were then used to mobilize resistance to European occupation and refute colonial discourses.
The panel brings together discussion of two regions, Mashriq and Maghrib, whose colonial experiences are most commonly treated in isolation. This enables us to highlight similarities, differences, and connections, while recognizing the limitations inherent in the idea of a common struggle transcending national boundaries.
Paper one examines how the 1911 Italian invasion of Libya played a role in the emergence of a new discourse in Palestine surrounding anti-colonial struggle, one that emphasized the common threat of European occupation faced across all Arab Ottoman territories. It also investigates how a subset of activists began using explicitly Islamic language to mobilize resistance to colonialism in Palestine, a trend that would become increasingly important in the Mandate period.
The second paper examines efforts by Arabic-language experts to counter colonial denigration of Arabic as inferior and inappropriate for education by engaging in language reform, starting in Egypt in 1908. It argues that these experts used culturally-authoritative knowledge to resist colonial narratives with national and transnational significance, and that their struggle should be seen alongside nationalist struggles to change British policies on Arabic education and Islamic modernist efforts to make Islam relevant to reforming states and societies.
Paper three highlights how the 1921-26 Rif War in Morocco was seen by intellectuals and activists in the Mashriq and traces the development of a transnational imaginary among intellectuals and activists who saw the conflict as providing moral justification for national independence. It highlights how some Mashriqi thinkers viewed the Rif’s state-building experiment as a model for a just and balanced Islamic nation-state, and used it to support calls for independence and pan-Islamic unity.
Paper four looks at the transnational ties invoked in the political and cultural imaginary surrounding the first Algerian political party to call for independence. It examines how this imaginary placed Algeria in wider contexts, stressing affinities with communists, anti-imperialists, and nationalists across Mashriq and Maghrib. It shows how Algerians interpreted notions of pan-Islam and pan-Arab nationalism, and how they emphasized connections to wider Arab and Islamic movements when expressing opposition to French colonial rule at home.
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Dr. Jacob Norris
This paper contributes to the panel’s discussion of the cross-fertilization of anti-colonial ideas across the Maghrib-Mashriq region by examining the impact of Italy’s 1911 invasion of Libya upon political discourse and practice in Palestine. While the Italian-Ottoman war for Libya of 1911-12 is the subject of a wide body of historical scholarship, rarely does the literature place the conflict in a wider context of Arab and Islamic notions of an anti-colonial struggle. By zooming in on the war’s reception in the Palestinian territories of the Ottoman Empire, this paper will argue that Italy’s invasion of Libya was in fact an event of major significance for Arab politics in the Mashriq. It played an important role in shaping a new language of anti-European struggle that would become increasingly prominent during the Mandate period.
The paper will draw upon depictions of the Italian invasion of Libya in the Palestinian Arabic press (particularly al-Karmil, al-Quds and Filastin) as well as the diaries and memoirs of Palestinian public figures such as Najib Nassar, ‘Awni ‘Abd al-Hadi and ‘Izzat Darwaza. Through these sources a sense of an encroaching European colonial threat to the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire can be sensed, binding the North African territories to the Ottoman-ruled Eastern Mediterranean in the Palestinian political mindset. The paper will argue this process must be viewed against the wider canvass of French occupation in Algeria and Tunisia, British rule over Egypt, and in particular the establishment in 1912 of a Franco-Spanish protectorate in Morocco.
Finally, the paper will discuss the ways in which events in Libya played a major role in shaping a more specifically Islamic type of anti-colonial activism in Palestine. Here the legendary figures of ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam and Fawzi al-Qawuqji are exemplary - two men deeply affected by the Italian invasion of Libya. Although neither of them were Palestinian in the strictest sense, they both went on to play crucial roles in the anti-colonial uprisings in Palestine during the 1930s, and they both recognised at an early stage the power of Islam as a mobilising force in such struggles. The paper will therefore weave their stories into the history of the Libya war and its reception in Palestine, exploring the ways in which the war bound the Maghrib more closely to the Mashriq, as well as the limits to these new bonds.
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James Roslington
This paper explores how a colonial war in north-west Africa was re-imagined at the other end of the Mediterranean, thereby providing a novel insight into the worldview of Mashriqi nationalism in the 1920s. The Rif War, fought in the Rif region of Morocco between 1921 and 1926, was one of the most celebrated conflicts between the world wars, and received extensive press coverage in the Mashriq. In part, this owed to the cult of reportage and celebrity generated by the expansion of print media in the Middle East during the inter-war period. But, more than this, the paper will argue that Mashriqi intellectuals and activists saw in the Rif a moral argument in favour of national independence and, ultimately, the rebalancing of the global order in the aftermath of the First World War.
The paper will use contemporary Arabic-language newspapers and publications to argue that, for Mashriqi thinkers, the fledgling Rifian polity was recast as a model Islamic nation-state with a written constitution and an elected presidency. Likewise, the Rifian leader, Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi (1882-1963), became a paragon of Islamic virtù, a mujahid celebrated in nationalist poetry and literature.
Of course, it is possible to overstate the affective strength of such transnational imaginaries. This moral vision bore little relation to the actual Rif: an impoverished Amazigh (Berber) society split by tribal divisions. Moreover, the Rif War perhaps garnered less enthusiasm among Mashriqi intellectuals than the revolt in Syria in 1925-26 or the upheavals in Palestine during the 1930s; geographic, as well as imagined, proximity still mattered.
Nevertheless, this paper will argue that the moral vision of the Rif War was an important component in a wider trend in Mashriqi political thought that called for the unity of ‘the Islamic world’ (al-‘alam al-islami). For Salafi thinkers, the war was one episode in an eternal struggle of East against West; but, more commonly, Mashriqi intellectuals saw in the Rif the future possibility of an alliance of self-confident nation-states bonded by Islam and Arabism and stretching from the Maghrib to the Mashriq. This paper will therefore conclude that the Mashriqi discourse on the Rif War was not only a moral argument in favour of the nation-state; it was also part of an appeal for a more just, more balanced global nomos in which the nations of the Islamic umma would regain their rightful place in the order of the world.
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Dr. Hilary Kalmbach
Arabic was at the center of tension in the Middle Eastern cultural landscape for the first half of the twentieth century, with colonial narratives dismissing it as inferior and inappropriate for science education, and nationalist activists asserting its importance as a source of cultural authenticity. This paper furthers the panel’s consideration of anti-colonial struggle by revealing how Arabic language reform countered colonial discourse by asserting the value of Arabic, and furthered the formation of a language on which pan-Arab and pan-Islamic nationalisms could be built, in both the Mashriq and Maghrib.
The state language academies founded across the region, including in Damascus (1919), Jordan (1924), Cairo (1932), and Rabat (1961), were central to Arabic language reform. Also important, though less recognized, are earlier activist language associations comprised of concerned teachers, school inspectors, religious scholars, and other Arabic professionals.
The paper focuses primarily on Egypt, where British educational policies marginalizing Arabic led to nationalist protest and a 1907 agreement that increased coverage of Arabic, religion, and national history in Egyptian government schools. Largely excluded from mainstream histories, however, is the subsequent role played by language professionals, in Egypt and elsewhere. The paper reveals that, shortly after the 1907 agreement, graduates of Egypt’s training school for Arabic teachers, Dar al-‘Ulum, launched an array of Arabic reform projects, beginning a tradition of reform that continues through today.
This paper examines how language experts defended Arabic against colonial narratives of inferiority, reforming it such that it could be taught more easily in an expanding school system and inventing authentic vocabulary for new technologies. It ties together successive reform initiatives and their transnational implications by focusing on Egyptian educationalist and poet Ali al-Jarim. He was a founding member of the Cairo Arabic Academy, though his contributions to the organization have been unfairly characterized as reactionary by more liberal figures such as Taha Husayn. The paper is based on full runs of rare periodicals associated with Arabic language professionals, as well as al-Jarim’s collected works.
The paper argues that language reform efforts formed an essential part of anti-colonial resistance because they helped establish the relevance of local culture within rapidly modernizing states and societies, and as a result they should be seen in parallel with both Islamic modernist defense of Islam and nationalist anti-colonial agitation.
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Prof. Martin Evans
This paper will consider two inter-connected threads, both of which demonstrate the extent to which notions of anti-colonial struggle moved across the Maghrib and the Mashriq in the early twentieth century. The first thread will explore the political imaginary of the first Algerian party to demand independence: the North African Star. The party was formed in Paris in 1926 and over the next decade developed in France amongst Algerian workers. This paper will analyse how the North African Star’s ideas, symbols and slogans situated Algeria within a broader international imaginary.
Partly this language linked nationalism to international communism and the wider anti-imperialist movement. But it also stressed connections with Moroccan and Tunisian nationalism and with the wider Arab and Muslim World. This thread, therefore, will analyse how the North African Star conceived of this political, cultural and religious link with the Maghrib and the Mashriq. It will explore the transnational networks that stretched across Egypt, Syria and Palestine, analysing the exchange of ideas and how these moulded the North African Star’s international perspectives. In this way the paper (drawing upon surveillance records of nationalists in the Paris Police Archive and the Colonial Archive in Aix-en-Provence, as well as the nationalist press) will address a gap in our historical knowledge: a micro-history of these links and how they contributed to the making of Algerian nationalism.
In 1936 Messali Hadj, the North African Star leader, looked towards the newly elected French Popular Front. He also returned to Algeria after a thirteen year absence. In 1937 the North African Star was banned as a threat to French sovereignty, but then quickly reformed. With the North African Star now transplanted to the Algerian context, the second thread will explore how the message of Islam and Pan-Arab nationalism was understood by Algerians in Algeria. It will explore how popular enthusiasm for Messali Hadj reflected a flowering of sporting, cultural and religious associations which, in reacting against the triumphalism of the 1930 colonial centenary but also linking up with other political and religious movements in the Middle East and North Africa, now stressed the political, religious and linguistic connections with the rest of the Arab and Muslim world. Here the link with Egyptian culture, expressed through the importance of Egyptian cinema, was crucial. This bottom up process is still largely under-explored and is a further lacuna that I will be addressing within the paper.
