In an erudite and exceptional study, James McDougall analyzes the “place of cultural authority and historical imagination” (p. ix) in the development and representation of Algerian nationalism. In particular, he examines the production of Arabophone discourse and historiography and how they ordered their narratives to conceptualize the Algerian past. Theoretically influenced by Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Fanny Colonna, among many others, McDougall introduces the reader to his subject with an epistemological approach to the “language of history.” He is not interested in simply the development of a “closed narrative” but in its deeper meaning regarding the consequential discursive production and presentation of an Algerian identity and perceived “destiny.” The nationalist competition over “authenticity” and “representation” are thematic throughout the book. McDougall describes the imaginations of an Algerian nation with its competing and conflicting discourses and practices.

The prologue presents the axial figure (referred to as a “mobile pivot” [p. 22]) in his work: the scholar, historian, and statesman Ahmad Tawfiq al-Madani. Born in Tunis in 1899 to Algerian parents, al-Madani participated in the reformist (iṣlaḥ) nahḍa (renaissance) movement of the transcolonial salafiyya and played an important part in the founding of the Destour Party. By referring back to al-Madani's historiography (and ambition), which provides an organizing framework, McDougall configures the development of principally Arabophone nationalist discourse.

In Chapter 1, McDougall challenges the “canonical narrative” regarding the evolution of Algeria under colonial rule and the emergence of an incipient nationalism. Instead, he perceives “a much more complex story of overlapping shifting patterns of resistance and strategies of negotiation, of social conflicts and cultural change, of attempts to assert authority and speak for one's community” (p. 31). McDougall recounts the role of the self-imposed exiled Algerian community in Tunisia and provides an informative and important narrative of its activities. The Algerians living in Tunisia, although a marginal community, still embodied the dislocative and disruptive consequences of French colonialism. Nevertheless, their liminality allowed “spaces of lesser constraint” (p. 34) that offered discursive opportunities not available in Algeria.

In this environment, a maternal uncle who was an Islamic modernist was especially influential in raising the young al-Madani's political and social consciousness. The reformist vs. antireformist contention among the ʿulamaʾ (Muhammad ʿAbduh vs. Salih al-Sharif [an Algerian]) also played a formative role in al-Madani's development. The diversity and activism among the ʿulamaʾ in Tunisia is especially well covered. McDougall sees al-Sharif's “transgressive itinerary” (support for the Central Powers during World War I as a means to free Tunisia and Algeria from French control) as an example of a search for discursive space to empower “representative authority.” To McDougall, al-Sharif's contemporaries, Messali Hadj and Emir Khaled, were just as marginal but were able to project a greater sense of authority and presence. Sidi Lakhdar (al-Khidr) ben Husayn is also included in this chapter as another example of an exiled Algerian activist who sought representational space. He eventually became rector at al-Azhar.

Chapter 2 considers the political environment and competition affecting the development of nationalist elites. McDougall concentrates on two contests: “the meaning of Algerian history” and “the legal-discursive constitution of ‘Algerian-Muslim identity’” (p. 66). The renowned salafī ʿAbd al-Hamid ben Badis is portrayed as a scholar asserting cultural identity who was also interested in negotiating with colonial authority. Al-Madani, expelled from Tunisia in 1925 for his nationalist activities, immediately became involved with the Algerian salafiyya, principally Shaykh Ben Badis and Mubarak al-Mili, who also became a renowned historian.

Despite colonial triumphalism (the centenary celebrations in French Algeria), a growing number of the elite, namely, Ferhat ʿAbbas, and even members of the ʿulamaʾ believed that liberalizing colonialism would free France, thereby realizing an idealized, “recreated” metropole. ʿAbbas provocatively illustrated his position in his controversial article in L'Entente franco-musulmane in February 1936, in which he questioned the historical existence of an “Algerian nation” and linked the future of Algeria with France. The ʿulamaʾ retorted in Al-Shihab in April with a different reading by claiming the historical existence of an “Algerian Muslim nation” (pp. 84–85). Other voices sought enunciated space that fundamentally opposed the salafīs, such as Si Amar Saʿid Boulifa, Chérif Benhabylès, and Hocine Hesnay-Lahmek. Boulifa and Hesnay-Lahmek emphasized the Berber rather than Arab role in Algeria's history. Benhabylès closely followed ʿAbbas's political positions (eventually signing the Manifeste du peuple algérien in 1943) and viewed Algeria's future mediated by France's culture and civilization. The competition over history (and the interpretation of the future as well as the past) was additionally over which person or group possessed “the legitimate representation of the community” (p. 86).

Intimately involved in the identity question was the naturalization issue. To become a French citizen, an indigène had to give up Muslim status, a renunciation of Islamic civil law. Although ʿAbbas and the influential ʿālim al-Tayyib al-ʿUqbi eventually hoped for a general naturalization, the ultimate failure of the Blum-Viollette initiative in 1938 and the inadequacy of Charles de Gaulle's ordinance of 7 March 1944 inevitably raised questions about the “Muslim personality,” thereby projecting “the primacy of Islam as the central defining factor of what ‘Algerian’ should actually mean.” The reformist ʿulamaʾ appropriated this occasion, which gave them “authoritative enunciation” (pp. 93–94).

Chapter 3 considers how the ʿulamaʾ exploited this opportunity to envision an Algerian nation. With its self-perceived religiocultural authority, the Algerian salafiyya aimed to restore, renew, and reeducate the population. According to McDougall, “the reformists' Islam was a thoroughly new kind of response, seeking to integrate the transformative power of modernity—science, the school—with an essential and changeless conception of the community's ‘personality’ in a language of enlightenment as progress and self-discovery, which the ʿulama alone were fit to enunciate as the true leaders of the community” (p. 113). The ʿulamaʾ rejected not only French secularism but also Algerian pluralism. They aimed for unanimity and subsequently targeted Sufis and zawaya. The Association des Oulamas Musulmans Algériens, (AUMA) organized in 1931, was nonetheless resisted by the important jurist Mulud Ben al-Muhub and eventually by Tayyib al-ʿUqbi, who broke from it in 1938. Nevertheless, the ʿulamaʾ succeeded in asserting their dominance in the articulation of Islam.

The sudden appearance and popularity of the National Liberation Front (FLN) displaced the ʿulamaʾ's cultural authority and led to the decline (McDougall refers to it as the “death”) of their influence. Bashir al-Ibrahimi, the president of the AUMA, failed to organize “an alternative union of Algerian political groupings” (p. 141). He retired from active nationalist participation. On the other hand, Tawfiq al-Madani, the secretary general of the AUMA, and other salafīs joined the FLN in 1956. By that time, the FLN had forced the AUMA to support it financially, signaling the ʿulamaʾ's loss of independence.

Chapters 4 and 5 collectively deal with the historiographical framing of memory. The nationalist imagination of venerated iconic heroes like Sidi ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Thaʿalibi (14th–15th centuries) and later ʿAbd al-Qadir (19th century) bookend Chapter 4. They are presented as illustrations of the nation's posited “changeless self, awaiting the moment of its re-possession” (p. 148), which would arrive with the revolution and independence. Indeed, although the reformists targeted the idea of maraboutic sainthood, they also ironically constructed another canonization: “Instead of abolishing the idiom of sainthood, the reformists recreated it, investing it, particularly through the medium of historiography, with the new legitimate language of civilisation, science, rationality and the nation” (p. 152). In this context, Tawfiq al-Madani played a crucial role in providing “master-narratives” ordering Algerian nationalist history, with its requisite myth-making. For example, al-Madani presents the Phoenicians as civilizing protagonists, but imperial Romans (implicitly identified with European colonialism) appear as barbaric antagonists (p. 158). Hannibal, Sophonisba, and Jurgurtha are naturally championed. The arrival of Islam “completes a process begun long before. Islam is the crowning glory of civilisation, not the whole edifice” (p. 165). The carefully managed and publicized return of ʿAbd al-Qadir's remains to Algeria in 1966 resulted in “a new form of saint-worship, a newly imagined common ancestry” (p. 182).

In Chapter 5, McDougall presents al-Madani's consideration of the difficult problem of the Berbers, renowned for resisting the Arabs in the 7th century. He links the Berbers to the civilizing influence of the East (Phoenicians, then Arabs) and claims that they are originally from Canaan. Admiring Berbers for their courage and character, al-Madani views Islam as the vehicle that delivers to them “the true and final ‘moral’ or ‘spiritual’ civilisation of which the Arabs are bearers” (p. 203). Indeed, “the ‘conjoined race’ [ʿunṣur mazīj] of Arabs and Berbers becomes one Islamic nation” (p. 204). This neat conclusion denied Berbers their distinct identity. As a consequence, the salafī-inspired imagination of an Arab Muslim nation incensed Berbers and eventually incited postcolonial violence, namely, the “Berber Spring” of 1980 and the uprising in Kabylia during the “Black Spring” of 2001. McDougall contends, “It is neither an Arab nor a Berber ‘authenticity’ in itself that is at stake, but the terrain of legitimate self-definition and political representation that is contested, in ongoing processes of social struggle, through the cultural resources of historical imagination” (p. 214).

In “Epilogue: Algiers 2001,” McDougall points out an important legacy of the ʿulamaʾ and their imagination of culture and state: “The reformists, with their centralising proselytism, their denunciation of cultural plurality and of the people's ignorance and incapacity for self-direction, had produced a propitious environment for the reinforcing of the political culture of monolithic, authoritarian and prescriptive unanism” (p. 223). They failed “to re-establish an autonomous, depoliticised religious sphere, to construct an open public culture in competitive tolerance with other forces, both religious and secular, to preserve their own, and others', independence of thought, and ultimately, to appreciate the part of colonial history that was their own inheritance” (p. 224). Al-Madani contributed to this failure.

In “The Invention of Authenticity,” the concluding chapter in the book, al-Madani perceives himself, the nationalist historian, as the embodiment of the nation. “Incarnation of the nation's history, a son of unyielding resistance who never himself ceased to resist, guardian of the pure Arabic language and of pure Islamic culture, emblematic figure of a salafī ‘Algeria’ whose life was devoted to returning the people to their ancestral grandeur, al-Madani's own self-view, as he writes it, is thoroughly heroic, thoroughly self-same” (p. 229).

Nevertheless, the pastoral discourse of al-Madani and the salafīs prevented “the creative possibilities of newly liberated Algeria in the restatement of a dominating, total societal ‘truth,’ an authentic substantial ‘Algeria’ that would insist that Algerians be, not what they might freely, creatively wish to become through the constant recreation of their own religious, linguistic, artistic and historical imaginations, but what the ‘deep reality’ of (newly invented) ancestral tradition showed they ‘truly were.’ Barely freed from the fixing essence imposed by colonialism, Algerians could be reimprisoned in another, imposed this time by dogmatic definitions operating in the name of their own ancestors” (p. 234). The outcome was “outlawing pluralities” and “occluding futures” (p. 238). Thus, the salafptīs are assigned with some of the responsibility for Algeria's postcolonial problems and tragedies. McDougall ends his study hoping for an epistemic shift, “a new polyphony of expression, in newly creative words creating new, and freer, histories” (p. 238).

McDougall's book is an outstanding achievement and contribution to modern Algerian history. In many ways, his work is also an anthropological and epistemological study. Reminiscent of Julia Clancy-Smith's groundbreaking narrative, Rebel and Saint (1994), McDougall illustrates the complexity and multiplicity of resistant and nationalist Algerian discourse.

This book is deeply researched with very impressive readings and renderings of Arabic literature testifying to McDougall's skills as a gifted historian and linguist. A map and eighteen illustrations enhance the work. Advanced students and specialists, especially those familiar with postmodern critical theory, will benefit most from it. Nevertheless, McDougall's work will undoubtedly serve as an essential reference for any study of the historical development of Algerian nationalism.