In this article, I outline a conceptual critique of the divide between Imazighen and Arabs, an ethnic and racial distinction that prevails in countries such as Algeria and Morocco. It is common but problematic to define the Imazighen as Berbers.Footnote 1 Most Imazighen define themselves as the indigenous population of North Africa. The French word “berberisme” is often used to describe this cultural claim of indigeneity as well as the political movements that stem from this claim. The notion of “Berberism” emerged from a schism in 1948 and 1949 between factions of the Algerian nationalist movement. Two conflicting definitions of the Algerian nation were then being opposed to one another: an Arab Algeria, on the one hand, and an Algerian Algeria, on the other. Kabyle nationalist activists were mostly responsible for advocating the latter definition of Algeria. The idea of an Algerian Algeria referred to a pluralist society in which Arab and Amazigh legacies deserved equal weight and acknowledgement.Footnote 2 Messali Hadj, one of the founding fathers of the Arab-first notion of Algerian nationalism, played a crucial role in this crisis. By strictly identifying Algeria with the Arab world, Hadj incensed the Kabyle revolutionary activists, goading them to formulate counter-definitions of who is properly called Algerian. For example, Rachid Ali-Yahia wrote:
Algeria is not Arab but Algerian. It is necessary to form a union of all Algerian Muslims who want to fight for national liberation, without distinction of Arab or Berber race. . . . We stand well above the racial problem. . . . For some time we have read in newspaper articles and certain leaders have been saying that Algeria is Arab. This statement not only is not true but it expresses ideas that are clearly racist, even imperialist.Footnote 3
Ali-Yahia's response is interesting in many ways. First, it indicates that the concept of Algeria deployed by Kabyle activists of the 1940s is neither culturalist nor identitarian. The exclusivist idea of Algeria's Arabness is questioned on grounds of an anti-colonial project of liberation. The Kabyle activists represented their idea of an Algerian Algeria as a radically democratic refusal of both the centralization and the personification of power. It rejects neither Arabness nor Islam but instead extols a pluralistic “union of all Algerian Muslims” regardless of whether they identify as Arab or Berber. The text deploys a revolutionary pluralism aimed at dissolving the “racial problem” – namely, the ethnic divide between Arabs and Berbers – within the nationalist movement. The legacy of this alternative tradition sustained itself during the Algerian revolution, as figures such as Abane Ramdane, the “founding father” of the Soumman Congress, and Hocine Aït-Ahmed demonstrate.
While the word “Berberist” refers to the Kabyles who deployed this discourse by refusing the exclusionary implications of an Arab Algeria, the word has, since then, been used quite differently. “Berberist,” in contemporary Algeria, now seems to refer to a counter-nationalist discourse that rejects Arabness by claiming the indigeneity of the Imazighen as non-Arabs. Despite its internal complexity, one of the defining features of the “Berberist” discourse is the idea that North Africa – and especially the Maghreb – was colonized by “the Arabs” before the Ottoman and French Empires. In the most explicitly anti-Arab versions of this discourse, Islamization is viewed as a program of coercive Arabization, with the essence of the religion misconstrued as a result of Arab colonialism.Footnote 4 This discourse is a counter-discourse because it stems from a reaction against the exclusion of the Imazighen since the beginnings of the Algerian nationalist movement. It is this exclusion that Ali-Yahia has, problematically, described as both racist and imperialist. But, despite the usage of this language, Yahia's position is not reducible to what Berberism became after 1962. The political inclusivity – the fusion of both Arabness and Amazighness into a single Algeria – that marked the discourse of the 1940s activists such as Ali-Yahia and Aït-Ahmed contrasts with the anti-Arab tropes of contemporary Berberists.
In order to make the distinction clearer between these two discourses, I will use the word “Berberist” to describe the identitarian claims of Amazighness and the term Amazigh as a broader category that includes the more open concepts of Algeria that were deployed by Ali-Yahia or Aït Ahmed. Needless to say, this analytical distinction is questionable to the extent that there are multiple overlaps between varieties of the Amazigh discourse.Footnote 5 Nevertheless, it helps to distinguish between a pluralist definition of Algerian nationalism and a culturalist rejection of Arabness and Islam. This article criticizes the impasses of the second discourse and uses the name “Berberist” to describe it. The article further attempts to understand why the first claim has been marginalized and silenced since 1949. One interesting lesson to take from the facticity of this marginalized discourse is that the definition of Algeria as an Arab nation cannot be posited as fact. It is the result of both a decision and a repression of an alternative concept of Algeria and the Maghreb that does not reject its Arabness but rather integrates it within a broader pluralism.
This article considers how the definition of Algeria as an Arab nation has marginalized Amazigh populations after 1962. I therefore wish to demonstrate that Berberist activists have challenged this definition by using the very language through which they have been reduced to a cultural minority. The article adopts a historical perspective in order to understand the impasse engendered by this language and analyzes its emergence during the era of French colonialism. My methodology draws mostly on colonial and postcolonial historical documents. It can be described as a historical critique of the coloniality of concepts to the extent that it analyzes the genealogy of the Berber–Arab divide. Nevertheless, contrary to what has been recently argued by Ramzi Rouighi, I do not assert that the “Berbers” do not exist or that their identity was retroactively invented.Footnote 6 My approach differs from most existing perspectives on the subject by arguing against the idea that the “Amazigh question” in contemporary Algeria can simply be seen as the continuation of French colonialism. By focusing on the postcolonial continuity of the Berber myth, scholars of North Africa have fueled a one-sided narrative of colonialism-as-assimilation that they share with the French historiography of Algeria and the Algerian nation-state's official ideology. As I will show, the literature on the Kabyle myth reproduces a false reduction of the history of colonized Algeria to assimilation, thus reducing the effects of colonialism to a mere extension of French culture. Against this view, the article argues that the postcolonial legacies of the Kabyle or the Berber myth can be seen as failed modes of resistance against an equally colonial legacy of Europe: the transformation of Imazighen into cultural minorities by the nation-state. Arabness and Berberness thus become something else than what they were under colonialism when Arabness is equated with the identity of the majority of the populations of Algeria and Morocco.
The article does not use genealogy to dismiss the contemporary usages of the categories of Berbers and Arabs. Nor does it deny their social reality on the grounds that they are “constructed” concepts. While the concept of being Amazigh refers to a construction and not to an ahistorical ethnicity, its reality is inseparable from the predicament of being a minority in the context of the post-1962 Algerian nation-state. Hence, the reduction of the Imazighen to a cultural minority by the Algerian nation-state and its self-definition as Arab are both colonial legacies and policies that French colonialism never implemented as such. In other words, being an Amazigh refers to a political predicament that is inseparable from the formation of the nation-state after 1962. It is therefore reducible neither to a mere effect of the French colonial “Kabyle myth” nor to a so-called “Arab colonization” of North Africa. Against both these views, the paper argues that the usages of the divide between Berbers and Arabs by the government and Berber activists alike should be understood in light of the transformation of the Imazighen into a cultural minority by the nation-state. The nation-state's definition of the majority as Arab, as well as the very concept of a minority, thus determines the status and the grammar of the Arab–Berber divide in ways that are irreducible to how this binary functioned under French colonialism. Hence, despite its anticolonial genealogy, the nationalist exclusion of the Berbers is indebted to two elements of European colonialism: the distinction between a majority and a minority and the definition of what constitutes the identity of a nation. Both aspects are inseparable from the existence of the state itself. My argument is that, in order to understand the particular ways in which these categories function in Algeria today, one must analyze how the language of the nation-state determines how these categories are used within the political context. While the formation of the ethnographic language of the nation-state is colonial, its mechanisms are not reducible to colonialism. Therefore, I argue that, by focusing on French-colonial representations of race epitomized by the Kabyle myth, scholars have failed to analyze the political centrality of the nation-state in the formation of the so-called “Amazigh question.”
Is There a Kabyle Myth?
In order to think critically about Algeria's present state, this section traces some of the colonial genealogies of the divide between Arabs and Imazighen. It examines the formations of the racial divide between Berbers and Arabs in colonial Algeria. It also challenges the traditional understanding of the Amazigh question within Anglophone Middle East studies. Many scholars remain credulous to the idea that most Imazighen have internalized the French racial conception of the “Berbers,” and particularly of the Kabyles, as sedentary and European, and thus more easily convertible to Christianized civilization. This reading of the Imazighen is a caricature that is premised on multiple misunderstandings of both colonial history and contemporary events in Algeria. Accordingly, this section questions these assumptions.
The literature addressed in this section focuses on the history of the Kabyle myth and tends to analyze the French discourse on the “Berbers” through this lens.Footnote 7 Consequently, by focusing on representations of race as prejudice and stereotype, the Anglophone literature on the Kabyle myth does not sufficiently describe the articulation of racial discourse, not so much with effective colonial policies, but with mutually conflicting sides of a janus-faced colonial state.Footnote 8 In many ways, the Kabyle myth remained marginal in the colony because no policy succeeded in implementing it through consistent and systematic practices.Footnote 9 The main institutional actor of massive land expropriations after the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870, Auguste Warnier, popularized the idea of the Berber's convertibility to French civilization and Christianity due to the alleged superficiality of their faith in Islam. For this reason, the racial definition of the Kabyles, and more generally of the Berbers, as having European origins can be approached as an ideological formation of settler colonial assimilation, rather than French colonialism per se or as a policy characterized by massive land expropriations and direct rule.
In other words, most of the scholarship on the topic reproduces the colonial narrative of assimilation by neglecting the fact that settlers played a central, if indirect, role in colonizing Algeria and shaping Europeans’ ethnographic knowledge about its populations. These policies of indirect rule are described as association, commonly understood as assimilation's “other.”Footnote 10 These policies were implemented by the Bureaux Arabes through the systematic surveillance of “tribes.” The gathering of information about their customs and the usage of their chiefs as allies of colonial rule were at the center of these strategies. The word association originates in the writings of the Saint-Simonians and is expressed in Napoleon III's idea of Algeria as an Arab Kingdom. This policy failed in Northern Algeria after the collapse of the Second French Empire in 1870, as the victory of the settler's party after the repression of Al Moqrani's uprising in 1871 testifies. The police of assimilation demanded the application of French metropolitan institutions to the colony and the destruction of indigenous institutions, after which point it became hegemonic. Despite the fact that Algeria became a settler-colonial state, assimilation was not the only modality through which colonialism operated throughout the rest of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, although it had been dominant since 1870.Footnote 11
The Kabyle myth is inseparable from this assimilationist model of colonialism. Although it was formed during the 1850s, the Kabyle myth became central to French colonialism when settlers began challenging the policies of the Arab Kingdom. Hence, most of the Anglophone literature on the Kabyle myth is premised upon the questionable assumption that French colonialism in Algeria is reducible to assimilation, i.e., a form of “direct rule” characterized by massive land expropriations. The French military-ethnographic complex that forms the foundation of the ethnographic state has produced a multiplicity of racial discourses on Arabs and Berbers and they did not implement any one of these multiple discourses to the exclusion of the others. To the extent that the Kabyle myth is the ideological reflection of the settler policies of radical assimilation, it was used against policies of association that settlers dismissed as Arabophile. For this reason, the myth has remained much more marginal than the literature assumes. The importance of the Kabyle myth should thus be relativized by describing how the making of this racial “myth” intervenes within a larger colonial framework characterized by an internal conflict between the settlers and the metropole's representatives.
Hence, the focus on the Kabyle myth among scholars of North Africa and the Middle East since Ageron downplays the importance of a complementary racial formation in colonial Algeria, which may be called – with a knowing and perhaps necessary sense of provocation – the “Arab myth.” The mythology of the Arabs’ past greatness and decline not only augurs their future regeneration but also holds the key to deciphering the significance of Islamic uprisings such as ʿAbd al-Qadir's, unfolding them as signs of the coming to fruition of a still-embryonic Arab nation. Hence this puzzling paradox: Arabs were thought of as the kernel of Algeria's nation precisely when they were defined as colonizers and the “Berbers” were deemed natives.Footnote 12
Colonial Ethnography and the Colonial State
The Arab–Berber divide should thus be seen as a discursive formation that emerges between 1830 and 1871 in Algeria. As such, it participates in the invention of the ethnography of the Maghreb. This section analyzes colonial ethnography as an object of historical inquiry. It can be read as a critical history of ethnographic concepts. According to Edmund Burke III, the notion of the ethnographic state can be used in the context of North Africa as a way of understanding the invention of Moroccan Islam, a colonial and postcolonial formation premised upon a nationalization of traditional Islam. These policies were structured by the practices of the French protectorate in its attempt to present its rule as a continuation of the Moroccan monarchy.Footnote 13 Burke's analysis does not, however, systematically analyze the continuities between the policies of association in Algeria and the practices of the protectorate.
Burke suggests that, after Ageron, the Kabyle myth was abandoned after repeated proofs of its failure, but neither his nor Silverstein's account situates the formation of the Arab–Berber divide in a broader dialectic of conflicting modes of colonial rule, ideologically defined as association and assimilation, direct rule and indirect rule.Footnote 14 Arguably, the very notion of an “Arab Kingdom” applied by Napoleon III to Algeria should furnish evidence of the need to interrogate these supposedly conflicting methods of rule. Far from being some insignificant dream, the notion of an Arab Kingdom refers to an attempt at limiting the policies of massive expropriation advocated by the settlers. Thus, it has been described as one of the matrixes of the protectorate policies in the Maghreb.Footnote 15 The trope of the “Arab Kingdom” is a late formula that should be placed in the context of a larger history in which the Bureaux Arabes and the Saint-Simonians have played a key role.Footnote 16 During this era of military rule, the French produced reams of ethnographic knowledge on the populations of Algeria. This knowledge supported the techniques of warfare, control, and surveillance that were used in the colonization of Algeria – techniques which were reactivated as a method of counterinsurgency during the Algerian war of liberation.Footnote 17 They appeared in prominently in rural areas, the maquis in which the organized forces of resistance waged guerilla warfare against the French colonial state.
It is only in Northern Algeria that settler colonialism and civil administration were deployed on a mass scale. The military government of tribes through a form of “indirect rule” remained in most Southern parts of Algeria and was implemented by the officers of the Saharan Affairs (Affaires sahariennes). The narrative of this strategy's failure still informs the colonial French historiography of association and the imperial criticism of assimilation's violence in the name of “French-Algerian” or “French-Muslim reconciliations.”Footnote 18 I argue that the project of “associating” Muslims to France was fragmented and disseminated beyond Algeria to other areas in both North and West Africa. The posture of “becoming” through the policy of association served as a form of “decentralized despotism” and should complicate our understanding of settler colonialism in Algeria. If there is such a thing as an “ethnographic state” in colonized Algeria, it might be seen as one face of the colonial state. Furthermore, this “ethnographic state” became the name of fragmented disseminations after civil administration was implemented.
How is one to understand the formation of the “Kabyle myth” if one situates it within the conflicts between different modes of colonial rule in Algeria? One tentative answer is that the “Kabyle myth” seems to be a minor set of discourses corresponding to an interregnum between military and civil colonial rule. To the extent that the Kabyle myth encapsulates the settlers’ ideology of total assimilation of North Africa to France, it cannot be considered as a dominant ideological discourse. The absence of any systematic implementation of this discourse through specific colonial institutions demonstrates its relative status. By exaggerating its importance, the literature on North Africa may have generated what might be called “the myth of the Kabyle myth.”Footnote 19
While the Arab–Berber divide stems from a colonial translation of Ibn Khaldun's writings, this divide cannot be considered as the center of race-relations in the colony. Another limitation of the literature on race in North Africa and Algeria, with its focus on the Kabyle myth, is that it ignores the centrality of the racialization of Islam and the attempts to secularize the indigenous Muslim society within the settler-colonial state. In the segregating logic of association, the figure of the “Arab nomad” serves as an instrument of the exploration of sub-Saharan Africa, thus designating Arabs as allies in the colonization of Black Africa.Footnote 20 This grammar of Arab nomadism is part of an ecological colonial formation in North Africa by which Arabs could be accused of transforming North Africa into a desert because of their nomadic ways of life.Footnote 21
Race, Nomadism, and Military Ethnography
The racial divisions between Berbers and Arabs stem from colonial translations of Ibn Khaldun's theory of civilization. This reappropriation-through-translation offered pseudoscientific legitimacy for the colonialist project via a retrospective transformation of the historian into a native informant. Through the French translation, the Khaldunian distinctions between regional modes of life became a racial hierarchy dividing the populations of North-Western Africa.Footnote 22 This translation produced racial and colonial classifications of populations not only in colonial Algeria, but also elsewhere in the Maghreb and the Middle East. Previously, these categories were used to explain the progressive separation of Jews from Arabs as a result of sedentarization. This definition of the Arabs as a nomadic people as distinguished from sedentarized Jews seems to emerge only in the eighteenth century, in a foundational text of Biblical criticism.Footnote 23 In the discursive context of the text, the divide between the nomadic and the sedentary becomes racial when it functions as an explanation of the Bible and of the Jewish election as God's chosen people through secular historical concepts. The idea of Arab nomadism is thus used alongside the idea of the Egyptian origins of Moses in order to explain the Old Testament as a religious and mythological depiction of ancient Oriental ways of life. One might object that this hierarchical divide is not purely Western, as Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah testifies. But while pre-colonial grammars of the sedentary versus the nomadic do exist, they do not have the same technique of racial divisions. De Slane's French translation of Ibn Khaldun in the 1850s rendered the Khaldunian anthropological categories as racial divides. Hence, De Slane transformed a non-hierarchical study of multiple human modes of life into a racial narrative.Footnote 24 Far from describing racial differences between Blacks, Berbers, and Arabs, Ibn Khaldun compared multiple ways of life and the ways in which climate conditions group feelings and forms of collective cohesion or solidarity (‘asabiyya). Khaldun did not think of Arabness as a racial category or of Arabs as a nation; nor did he consider Arabs as more civilized than Berbers and Blacks. Even the urban or sedentary modes of life are not conceived of as superior, but rather as fucntionig around different social and economic assoications than the rural and nomadic forms of social organization.
Arabness was therefore transformed into a racial category when it became impossible to convert to it, to actually become an Arab when one was Black or Amazigh.Footnote 25 A new, “secular” interpretation of Islamic history is also at stake in the way in which this transformation occurred. Once Muhammad's prophecy was translated into the concept of the Lawgiver (législateur),Footnote 26 Muhammad could be defined as a great man whose action is supposed to unify different tribes into a single nation. Arab secularists and nationalists are indebted to this concept to the extent that they describe Muhammad as a Great Man leading an Arab nation, as Talal Asad demonstrates.Footnote 27 Hence, different attempts at explaining Islam as a secular event occurring within a homogeneous historical time led to the conceptualization of Islam as a unification of Arab tribes into a single nation.
The fact that the Prophet Muhammad has been redefined as the Prophet of Islam and not as the rasul, or Messenger, of Allah, as it is for Muslims, is of crucial importance in the invention of a racializing equation between orthodox Islam and Arabness. This identification is precisely the assumption that colonizers deployed when they characterized Berbers as convertible and superficial Muslims while later separating a West-African ‘Black’ Islam from a North-African ‘Arab’ Islam. For this reason, postcolonial divides in North Africa should be understood as conflicting ideas about what North Africa is, where it belongs, and what it should be. A critical anthropology of power in North Africa might therefore be inseparable from an anthropology of conflicting concepts of North Africa as either Mediterranean, African, or Arab. The Arab–Berber divide thus functions as part of a larger colonial geography of Africa that racializes native Africans and Arabs on the continent. The division between Black Africa and North Africa is part of this geography. While one cannot doubt that these divides are racial, it is impossible to analyze anti-Blackness and anti-Amazigh forms of exclusions in North Africa through the lens of a Black–White divide. Indeed, the nationalization of Arabness and Islam are not identifiable with the way in which whiteness operates as a norm in Europe and America. Imazighen and Black Africans, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, are repressed and discriminated upon in North African states where the majority's identity is defined not as white but as Arab and Islamic. However, the Arab-Islamic norm that the postcolonial nation-state implements is by no means a continuation of a pre-colonial form of Islam or Arabness; rather, it is the sole product of modern European categories. No strict continuities can be posited between pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial definitions of Arabness, as anti-Arab discourses in Africa and elsewhere imply. In other words, the specific modalities through which Arabness is being nationalized cannot be reduced to a pre-colonial notion of Arab identity. Arabness and Berberity thus became something other than what they once were as soon as Arabness was identified with the majority and Imazighen were transformed into a cultural minority within the postcolonial nation-state.
Pluralism, the State and the Hirak
These historical inquiries help to deepen our understanding of the exclusionary dimensions of the idea of Arabness in its nationalistic configurations. Indeed, the marginalization of the Imazighen within the Algerian nationalist movement is a result of the nationalization of both Arabness and Islam before 1962; it anticipates the transformation of Islam into a state religion after 1962. Properly, the official ideology of the nation-state should be seen as a consequence not of Islam itself but of the historical processes through which Islam has been nationalized and translated into a modern idiom of Arabness. As part of the transformations of the revolutionary FLN into a single-party state, Islam came to be defined as a state religion. Hence, the Algerian state did not politicize religion, nor did it fail to provide a secular and democratic constitution as a foundation of a pluralist state. The state reconfigured Islam in ways that made it amenable to redefinition as the liberated Arab nation's religion. In consequence, Imazighen were defined as a “cultural minority.” The nationalization of Islam cannot be separated from the reduction of the Imazighen to a cultural minority. This critique is not a defense of Berberism. On the contrary, it compels recognition of the ways in which Amazigh movements, and more specifically contemporary Berberist responses to Algerian state-nationalism, are confined by the colonial divide against which their forefathers struggled. As long as the Arab–Berber divide persists, the language of resistance against postcolonial nation-states in North Africa will remain limited by the hegemony it refuses.
A tentative hypothesis regarding the Algerian Hirak, an ongoing massive popular movement against the Algerian military state, will illustrate the stakes of this double critique. In multiple demonstrations, Hirak protesters have raised the Amazigh flag along with the Algerian national flag, whereas earlier such movements used only one flag or the other. This emergent phenomenon forces us to ask how the future of the Hirak might reconfigure our understandings of the past: To what extent does this gesture represent a refusal to recognize the division between Arabs and Imazighen, which is constantly used as a counter-insurrectional strategy by the postcolonial nation-state? Can this emerging act of solidarity be seen as a moral and political response to the nation-state's exclusion of the Imazighen? To what extent are we witnessing a softening of the divide between Arabs and Imazighen with the spread of the Hirak?
“Imazighen: Casbah, Bab El Oued!” – this chant expresses a collective will to transcend the Arab–Berber divide. Decades of Amazigh cultural and political activism might have played a crucial role in making this gesture possible.Footnote 28 To the extent that Amazigh movements have been contesting the military state's central authority, one might retrospectively think of them as anticipations of the Algerian Hirak movement. But one might also stress the differences between these movements. While Amazigh movements challenged what might be described as the “coloniality of the state,” they did not deploy a unifying logic at a national level. Even if contemporary Berberist discourses tend to challenge the nationalist Arab-Islamic definition of Algerian nationhood, they mostly do so by claiming an alternative colonial identity or by advocating for Christianity against Islam.Footnote 29 The political limitations of these discourses lie in a non-critical usage of colonial divides opposing “Berbers” to “Arabs.” This ethnicization of a political struggle perhaps allows postcolonial states in the Maghreb to neutralize these movements by reducing their demands to the cultural claims of a minority.Footnote 30 The state is therefore involved in a process of both culturalization and museumification of politics in which anti-Arab “Berberist” ideologies participate despite their critique of the centralizing nation-state and the military government.Footnote 31 Many Berberists seem to share this culturalist language with the state ideology that they politically, if not morally, oppose.
This tentative interpretation of contemporary Algeria is not “neutral.” Rather, it is intended to consider the following questions: Are culturalist languages capable of challenging the nation-state's divide between Berbers and Arabs? Is it possible to contest the state's reduction of Arabness to a national identity by asserting “Berber” languages and cultures against so-called “Arab colonialism”? Is a critique of a nation-state's hegemony doomed to degenerate into the assertion of one's alleged identity, one that reinforces a nationalistic doctrine of Arabness through a Berberist counter-nationalist movement? Are “minoritized” identity politics of a folklorized Amazigh language capable of challenging a majority's identity politics without dismantling the military-ethnographic complex of the state? How can this language of resistance be repoliticized and defolkorized?
As a response to these questions, I would suggest that the process of minorization has been so hegemonic that it has been internalized by Berberist movements themselves. The resulting limitation has made it impossible to transform the concept of Amazigh into a “signifier” of a common North Africanity shared by self-defined “Arabs” and “Berbers” alike. Hence, the kind of gesture that has emerged since the advent of the Hirak can be seen as the enactment of this transformation. Amazigh seems to act as a vanishing mediator of the endless conflicts that the very divide between Arabs and Berbers never ceases to engender. We are all, so the chant could be interpreted, both Arabs and Imazighen. Marginalization of the Imazighen is inseparable from the ideological imposition of a nationalized concept of Islam and Arabness that many “Berberists” mistakenly confuse with Arabness as such. While the criticisms of the definition of Algeria as an Arab state have challenged this repressive state ideology, they remain trapped by the colonial divide that separates Berbers and Arabs. This limitation seems to be what some protesters of the Hirak have been willing to challenge. The gesture of raising these two flags should not be romanticized. While the kind of unification I am trying to examine remains at the level of political symbols, its importance as a performative claim should neither be ignored nor undermined. What was emerging during the protests could be seen as an attempt to dismantle the division between Arabs and Berbers by actively translating the word Amazigh into a shared concept that defines “the people” in regard to its performative and political existence. Instead of asserting a Berber identity against the alleged Arabness of Algeria, the Hirak has questioned the political foundation of these very conflicts: namely, the coloniality of the military nation-state. It has reminded us that the culturalization of these movements’ claims has been a constant tactic of the regime.
The nation-state therefore governs its population by converting the ethical and political claims of Amazigh movements into mere folklore. Following this hypothesis, an anatomy of the postcolonial nation-state in North Africa could examine how its incapacity to respond to democratic claims manifests its tendency to organize pluralism in ways that reassert its regulative powers. The processes by which conflicts between governments and civil movements are recast in terms of race and ethnicity tell us something interesting about the nation-state and its mode of existence. The nation-state does not exist as a totality but rather as a process.Footnote 32 The existence of the nation-state is tied to the way in which it regulates violence by constantly translating the demands of moral protests and acts of civil disobedience into its own language. Needless to say, these languages are far from homogeneous. Still, if one tentatively suggests that liberal states – states in which the rule of law structures the exercise of power – tend to translate moral and political protests in the procedural language of rights and law or by responding to civic unrest via civil rights, one might ask: How do postcolonial states in North Africa translate moral and political protests into languages of race and ethnicity? The suppression of the Imazighen illustrates the way in which race and ethnicity participate in the deployment of these kinds of counterinsurrectional translations. The experience of the Hirak shows us how the Algerian State constantly tries to depict political movements against the military oligarchy as divisive threats to the security of the nation and the personality of the state by defining those movements as either Berber or Islamist. By so doing, the military state tries to obscure the fundamental political demand of the people: real independence through the primacy of the civilian over the military, a dawla madaniyya (civil state) instead of the actually existing military state.Footnote 33 In other words, the language which has been and still remains silenced by these counterinsurrectional forms of translation is a language of civility – expressed through the formula of dawla madaniyya – and thus irreducible to any European notion of secularism.Footnote 34
Conclusion
The political gesture that nurtures this essay can be thought of as a double critique. Its aim is to challenge both Arab nationalist and Berberist definitions of Algeria and the Maghreb. In problematizing the definition of Algeria as an Arab nation, I have questioned the way in which the counter-discourse deployed by Kabyle activists such as Aït-Ahmed since the end of the 1940s has atrophied to a narrow culturalist claim. Anti-Arab claims of Amazigh indigeneity are trapped by the nation-state's definition of the Arab majority whom they reject. The colonial dimensions of anti-Arab Berberism can be seen as failed modes of resistance against equally colonial legacies: namely, the transformation of Imazighen into cultural minorities by the nation-state and the resulting anti-Berber discourse. I have argued that Arabness and Berberity morphed into more politicized or racialized concepts under French colonialism when Arabness came to be equated with the identity of the majority demographic in both Algeria and Morocco. While Berberist discourses challenge the definition of Algeria as an exclusively Arab nation, many of them also seem to be mired in the ethnographic knowledge produced by the French during the nineteenth century. When these discourses are politicized, they become encircled by an ideological language that belongs to the very nationalist hegemony that they seek to challenge. Hence, claims of Amazigh indigeneity are not reducible to a mere internalization of French colonial ethnographies of the region, as Arab nationalists and a large number of scholars of the Middle East argue. These claims, I have suggested, should rather be seen as part of an ongoing insurrection against the coloniality of the nation-state. Nevertheless, the Amazigh language of resistance is more often than not problematically confined by Berberist culturalism and identity politics.
I have suggested that being an Amazigh in the contemporary Maghreb is less a stable cultural identity than it is a political predicament. Aside from being defined as a “cultural minority” the experience of being an Amazigh is now inextricable from the globalization of the nation-state as the dominant form through which sovereignty is being exercised. The marginalization of the Imazighen in Algeria is not a consequence of a cultural or linguistic conflict. It is an effect of the nation-state's existence and of its (post-)colonial hegemony. The ideological definition of the “majority” as Arab, and the resulting invention of so-called “Berber minorities,” is the primary matrix of this marginalization. Since the construction of Algeria as a nation-state after 1962, Imazighen populations have been repressed not by Arabness itself, let alone by Arab racism, but by this divide between an Arab majority and a Berber minority. The institutional minorization of the Imazighen, Blacks and non-Blacks alike, can be seen as a consequence of the way in which Arabness and Islam have been transformed into defining features of the majority's identity by the nation-state. The ideological conflicts between Arabs and Berbers in contemporary Algeria are thus inseparable, in my view, from the nationalization of Islam and Arabness, and the resulting transformation of a revolutionary and anti-colonial notion of Arabness into a nationalist state ideology.Footnote 35
Examining the conflicts surrounding the divide between Arabs and Imazighen in Algeria raises questions of pluralism in the Maghreb. By defining Algeria as an Arab nation, the Algerian nationalist ideology has not only marginalized self-defined Imazighen, including Kabyles, but it has also rendered the formation of a pluralistic society virtually impossible. The tensions between the demands of pluralism and the very existence of the nation-state inhere in the conflicts between multiple geographies of the Maghreb. Indeed, defining Algeria as an Arab nation is also a geopolitical decision in that it tends to ignore and ostracize the African belongings of North Africa. For this reason, the marginalization and the exclusion of the Amazigh legacies of the Maghreb are just one of many forms of anti-Blackness that exist in the region. Both modes of violence are aspects of a single process by which the nation-state defines itself as exclusively or primarily “Arab” and thus separates North Africa from Africa. In other words, the exclusionary effects of Arabness should be questioned as results of the way in which Islam has been nationalized and translated into the modern language of the nation-state.
