Tawḥīd, or Unicity

A key rationale for discourses and practices of unanimity is no doubt linked to the reformist doctrine of tawḥīd, which derives from the Arabic root meaning “one” and can translate as unicity, unification, or union as well as belief in the unity of God.Footnote ⁴⁸ Doctrinally, tawḥīd refers to the conviction, central to reformist thought, that Muslims must return to the source of their religion, to practices grounded in the belief in a single God and in the foundational authority of God's words as conveyed in the Quran, the Hadith, and the Sunna. The premise of tawḥīd led reformists to categorically reject the various intermediaries (sometimes referred to as marabouts or saints) who had long dominated popular practice throughout the Maghrib.Footnote ⁴⁹ For the reformists, practices related to such intermediaries were considered “innovations” (bidā‘at) that were at odds with Islam's basic tenets. Within the broader reform movement, which by the 1940s was emerging as a dominant religious force across the Arab world, tawḥīd was also invoked to attenuate antagonisms between the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, each of which elevated the teachings of its particular foundational imām over the underlying unity of the Islamic community, or umma (Commins Reference Commins1990).Footnote ⁵⁰ Divisions among Sunni and Shi'a Muslims were similarly subordinated, at least in theory, to the overarching unity contained in the notion of tawḥīd. In Algeria, which was primarily Sunni,Footnote ⁵¹ and almost exclusively aligned with the Maliki school of legal thought, the reformists concentrated their energies primarily on the sufis and their many followers. The sufi organizations, called zawāyā, were built around a saint and his followers or adepts (sometimes called ikhwān, brothers), but they could bring together hundreds or, for the most popular saints, thousands of people for saint-day festivities and other ritual occasions. While some saints were associated with a single locality, others had regional and even national renown, and belonged to brotherhoods that stretched across the Maghrib and the Middle East. Although many sufi organizations had challenged colonial power during the early decades of conquest and occupation, by the 1940s, most had reached accommodation with the French ranging from mutual tolerance to working relationships to outright support. To the reformists, however, the sufi leaders were little better than charlatans who took advantage of an uneducated population to enrich themselves and their organizations. The doctrine of tawḥīd challenged the entire sufi edifice—both the presumed existence of intermediaries between Muslims and their god and the many kinds of miraculous or, from a reformist viewpoint, “superstitious” practices associated with these intermediaries.

Tawḥīd was not merely a theological doctrine. It was also a factor “at every level, and in all aspects of Islamic life.” Indeed, tawḥīd was to serve as a unifying force for the Islamic community “in the moral, psychological, political, and even cultural sense” (Merad Reference Merad1999: 238). As James McDougall put it, tawḥīd constituted “a theological principle to be rigorously applied to social life” (2006: 114). Yet how did the unifying principle of tawḥīd articulate with the rich plurality of social experiences and political perspectives? How was agreement produced on the ground? If, in Omar Carlier's words, “community is placed under the sign of unicity while society itself unceasingly produces diversity,” how was the resulting tension handled in practice? (Carlier Reference Carlier1998, cited in McDougall Reference McDougall2006: 234). Although Carlier was speaking of the resurgence of Islamism in Algeria in the 1990s, the question is equally relevant to the reformist period.

One way unicity was produced was via the pragmatics of speech, through speech acts that bring into being what they call for (Austin Reference Austin1962). As Ben Badis toured the countryside in the 1930s, he called for “unitarism (tawḥīd), union, and generosity toward all human beings (‘ibād), concord and mutual assistance (ta'alūf, ta’āwun) among all the inhabitants of Algeria, without distinction of race or creed” (Merad Reference Merad1999: 127, quoting Ben Badis). This message was recast on a more intimate level in the play under consideration here, where it was performatively invoked at key decision points. During the general assembly, for instance, the muḥtadā (who had just been approved by voice vote as temporary president) evoked a divinely bestowed unity prior to the final two unanimous votes (held to elect the permanent committee and agree on the project): “I am grateful,” says the muḥtadā, “that you granted me the honor of presiding over this general assembly. And I congratulate you for your honorable determination and your zeal in striving for the common good. You are driven by sincerity and goodness toward the flourishing of Arabness (al-‘arūba). I thank God for bringing together our dispersed affairs and unifying the word of the disunifed umma in this blessed general assembly. ‘What is brought together by the hand of God cannot be separated by the hand of Satan.’”Footnote ⁵² As a speech act, this may have worked to produce the very sense of oneness that it references: If God were on the side of unity, how could a member of the assembly dissent?

The tawḥīd model seems to have been adopted even by the AUMA at its creation. According to Merad, the association formed after five and a half years of discussion and debate (1999: 115). By the time of the AUMA's first general assembly, in May of 1931, they had largely reached agreement. On the very first day, the statutes were adopted and the administrative council designated. The rapidity of these moves suggests that the details had been hammered out beforehand. In such a situation, the general assembly comes to resemble a ritual festival of unity more than a moment of electoral decision, which is how Malika Rahal characterized the general assemblies of the Union démocratique du manifeste algérien (UDMA) from 1945 to 1954. As she put it: “The systematic and repetitive character of the election of the committee gave it a surprising ritual value.… The number of these elections shows that they go beyond basic organizational necessities to constitute an activity in and of themselves, participating in the normal activity of members of the section and symbolizing the beginning of any collective action” (Rahal Reference Rahal2007: 66). The Muslim Scout organization appears to have worked in much the same way. Brahim Mamouchi reported in his memoirs that when he helped to bring the scout organization to Constantine he called a general assembly in April of 1932 at which “comrade Belattar M'Hamed was designated president” (Mamouchi n.d.: 4, my emphasis).Footnote ⁵³ It seems that once an association was at the point of selecting a slate of officers, its members had had so much advance back-and-forth discussion that they knew already who their representatives would be; in effect, they had reached unanimity before the general assembly took place, so that it became a rubber stamp of sorts.Footnote ⁵⁴ The vote thus had a different significance than it would in an election governed by majority rule—it was not usually a moment of choice. Rather, it was a ratification of a decision that people had already labored long and hard to reach. Associations that could not reach prior agreement ended up splitting or dividing. Meetings and elections thus became celebratory occasions, “festive reunions” (Rahal Reference Rahal2007: 66) at which members celebrated their common vision in a Durkheimian moment of collective effervescence.

The public nature of the votes themselves also merits attention. Whether by voice vote or show of hands, association members were called on to publicly perform their allegiance to a common agenda. This is an entirely different use of the vote as social activity than voting by secret ballot, which became naturalized within Western democracies over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁵⁵

Vernacular Decision-Making Practices

Members of artistic associations may also have been drawing on vernacular modes of decision-making found in adjacent forums for argumentation and debate, such as those found in the Berber tajma‘at system. The tajma‘at, commonly translated by the French as the “assemblée du village” (village assembly),Footnote ⁵⁶ was an all-male body that met regularly (typically weekly, on Fridays or on the day following the regional market) to discuss matters of importance to the collective life of a village, ranging from the upkeep and development of public space to the issuing of fines for transgressions of social mores or violations of established rules (al-qanūn). Decision-making in the tajma‘at typically operated via consensus: all able-bodied men of the village had to assent to the group's decisions before they could take effect.

In situating consensual decision-making practices in relation to the social organization of Berber villages, I follow William Murphy (Reference Murphy1990) in adopting a Goffmanian rather than a Durkheimian lens.Footnote ⁵⁷ Consensual practices need not be interpreted, Murphy argues, as a communitas-like occasion to display solidarity or as “a mirror of social cohesion” (32). Instead, consensus-based decision-making may be more productively viewed in dramaturgical terms, as a strategy for building a “front stage” that appears consensual through “back stage” practices that might be anything but (ibid.: 25). From a dramaturgical perspective, the apparent equality of all voices present at the tajma‘at can be seen as a strategic means of obscuring very real differences in power and status. For if in theory all voices were equal, in practice this was not the case. Historically, most tajma‘ats had an amīn (president), a wakīl (adjunct), and various tamen who were appointed by and represented the patrilineages that made up the village (Mahé Reference Mahé2001: 80). This small group could act as a village council; they would set the agenda for the larger tajma‘at, represent the village to outside authorities, and could come together outside of the weekly tajma‘at meetings if there were urgent matters to discuss. As Mahé notes, some analysts have concluded that the true power in the village was located in this smaller group, with the full tajma‘at acting merely as “a registration chamber or a solemn proclamation through which the citizen body unanimously ratified a decision that was already made” (ibid.: 81). Yet on the ground, things were not so straightforward: the tamen patrilineage representatives would have had to be able to garner the support of their respective kin groups. Moreover, “the restricted assembly [village council], like the plenary, was obliged to … achieve strict unanimity” (ibid.: 82). The achievement of unanimity in what Mahé calls the “plenary” tajma‘at could thus be hard-won, the product of long negotiations among multiple parties and competing interests. Moreover, many tajma‘ats anticipated the possibility of secession—that is, the constitution of a parallel village assembly—and would levy high fines on anyone suspected of or engaged in such a dissident action (ibid.: 84). The tajma‘at also established fines for breaching codes of public conduct at the meeting, thereby preventing the kinds of fights that might otherwise break out during heated discussions (ibid.: 86).Footnote ⁵⁸

Because consensus was the expected outcome, the tajma‘at had no need to follow the kinds of voting procedures that have been associated with democratic practice since the advent of the secret ballot (see Bertrand, Briquet, and Pels Reference Bertrand, Briquet and Pels2006). It was governed not by a principle of majority rule, but by something closer to the Islamic tawḥīd, in practice if not in name. In the cultural associations of the 1930s to 1950s, however, the apparatus of voting had become increasingly familiar to members from the political elections that surrounded them, even as their participation in those elections was limited. Electoral practices seem to have taken hold in the artistic associations, where—as in the scenes of voting represented in Messaoud Salhi's play—a voting procedure appears to have been laminated into a consensus-based participation structure.

Consider, for instance, the election held by Chabab El Fenni at its general assembly of 21 October 1940. The society had apparently been in some disarray, the former president was resigning, and there was a budget shortfall. The purpose of the meeting was to regroup and start afresh. After the “moral” and “financial” reports had been given, those present “participated in an exchange of views.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Only after this were new elections held. At the same meeting there was also an “exchange of views” concerning artistic activities, which culminated in a consensus decision to organize a concert for the upcoming holiday Aid al-Saghir. Another “exchange of views” took place at a meeting later that fall, where “each one gave his opinion about the play they were preparing.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The “exchange of views,” as the French termed it, seems to have been a key speech genre that would have documented the labor entailed in achieving unanimity; unfortunately, it is not elaborated in the archival records.

In noting resemblances between the decision-making structures at work in the tajma‘at and the Constantine artistic associations, I am not suggesting that the tajma‘at functioned as a self-conscious political model that the associations sought to imitate, as, decades later, the Berber ‘arūsh movement of the early 2000s tried to do.Footnote ⁶¹ Nor am I arguing that Algerians were somehow mired in vernacular forms of social interaction and unable to adopt other forms of civic practice. It is plausible, however, that association members were familiar with tajma‘at-style modes of collective decision-making and that they turned them to new uses. Omar Carlier, for instance, has shown how older social bodies (such as the kinship faction known as sof) and their associated styles of interaction can inhabit newer kinds of civic association (Reference Carlier1995: 151–62): “born of what already exists,” associations can go on “to initiate another cultural practice” (ibid.: 159).

While the tajma‘at is generally associated with rural, primarily Berber areas rather than urban, predominantly Arab environments, “rural” and “urban” were fluid categories in Constantine during the 1930s. The city of Constantine is located between the large Kabyle Berber region to its northwest and the Aurès Berber region to its south. The global depression that began in the late 1920s was by the early 1930s severely impacting Algerian agriculture, forcing rural residents to the cities.Footnote ⁶² Between 1931 and 1936, the indigenous Algerian urban population grew by over six hundred thousand people, or almost 11 percent, and during the same period, the indigenous population in Constantine increased by almost eight thousand, or 15 percent. The figures are even more dramatic if we take into account the previous five years: from 1926 to 1936 the indigenous Algerian urban population expanded by nearly 20 percent.Footnote ⁶³ Yet in the tajma‘at institution, strong familism and vertical ties extending from a patriarch down to his sons and nephews help to ensure continuity over time. When this kind of model was laminated onto artistic associations that lacked the tajma‘at's perduring familial relationships and vertical ties, it faced new challenges.

Unanimous votes in artistic associations may also have had to do with the large size of the elected committees, which resembled a community of participants more than a small number of electoral representatives. Mouhibbi El Fen's first administrative council (conseil d'administration), selected in 1933, had twenty-two members (Merdaci Reference Merdaci2008: 212). Similarly, in October of 1940, the newspaper Dépêche de Constantine reported that El Chabab El Fenni unanimously elected a slate of twenty-two officers.Footnote ⁶⁴ Only thirty people attended El Chabab El Fenni's meeting,Footnote ⁶⁵ meaning that more than two-thirds of those present became part of the governing body and thus were assured of having at least some voice in future decision-making. El Hilal Ettemthili elected a twenty-one-member administrative council, out of some forty total members, in 1939.Footnote ⁶⁶ Records indicate a proliferation of titles and positions: president, vice president and four designates; treasurer and one adjunct; secretary, one designate and one adjunct; a theater director; and nine assessors.Footnote ⁶⁷ It seems that whoever wanted a say in the association's operations could probably secure himself a position.

A related avenue to consider is what Liverani calls “associative familism” (2008: 62), the tendency of civic associations in the Middle East and North Africa to be built around a core of individuals from the same family. Liverani is concerned primarily with contemporary, post-independence associations, and my work with theatrical associations from 2008 to 2011 is consonant with his argument. By far the most stable troupe I worked with, the thirty-year-old El Moudja Theater of Mostaganem, is built around a core of five people from the same family—the director and four of his children (his wife and two other sons had previously acted as well). Three of the other four troupes I followed each had two active family members. Was this also the case in earlier decades? For Salhi's troupe Al-Malhat Al-Jazā‘rīyya, three of the seven members (including the director) lived at the same address and two of those three shared the same last name.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet not all associations displayed this tendency. Chabab El Fenni had two members of the same last name, but other associations showed few or no family connections.

Colonial Discourses and Practices

Finally, the aspiration toward unanimity may have been in part a response to particular aspects of the French colonial apparatus. Police decided what plays these associations could and could not stage. They were present at every play, every concert, and even many meetings, looking for lurking nationalists who, the French feared, were using theatrical scripts and performances to advance an anticolonial agenda. The enveloping presence of the colonial state worked paradoxically. On one hand, by accentuating differences between reformists and sufis, it drove a sharp wedge between Algerians who might otherwise have found ways to work together. On the other, it grouped all Algerians into a monolithic category of “Muslims,” thus making Islam emerge as the single factor around which the indigenous population could unite (McDougall Reference McDougall2006). This “rule of colonial difference” (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1993) was mapped onto and conjoined with the Islamic principle of tawḥīd, which came, in the Algerian case, to signify an expectation of sociocultural singularity that continues to exert force to this day.

As we have seen, when the first theatrical troupes formed in the early 1930s, it was common for them to include members of both reform and sufi persuasion, and even some who affiliated unproblematically with both. For instance, Brahim Mamouchi, one of Mouhibbi El Fen's founding members, reported that in 1932 he was both active in the Hansaliya sufi order and a member of the reformist madrasa Jām‘īyat al-tarbīya wa ‘l-talīm.Footnote ⁶⁹ What happened during the 1930s that might have made it more difficult for reformists and sufis to occupy the same social space? The decade was problematic for many Algerian Muslims from its inception: in 1930, gala centenary festivities were held around the country to mark one hundred years of French colonial rule. While Algerian Muslims hoped that the French government would use the occasion of the centenary to announce new rights for the indigenous population, this did not transpire. A list of eleven desired changes drawn up by the Muslim Elected Officials of Algeria (Élus des musulmans d'Algérie) in 1931 went nowhere.Footnote ⁷⁰ Meanwhile, as already described, Ben Badis began to tour the Algerian countryside in 1932 disseminating reformist ideas (Merad Reference Merad1999: 127). The colonial administration took note, and in 1933 issued two decrees to isolate so-called “agents of reformist propaganda”: they were forbidden to preach in the official state mosques, and they were put under surveillance (ibid.: 132).Footnote ⁷¹ On the ground, these measures entailed “numerous closings of Arab schools, refusal to open new schools, limits on freedom of movement, and even jail time” (ibid.: 132).

As the decade wore on, the French did everything they could to accentuate divisions between the reformists, who were generally seen as threatening to the colonial state, and the sufi organizations, perceived largely as supporters if not collaborators. French police records insistently drew a sharp dividing line between reformists and sufis. Indeed, all members of theatrical or musical associations were repeatedly noted as being either one or the other: along with their names and addresses, the police would typically record each member's sufi (“marabout”) or salafi (“ulama”) affiliation. Moreover, local disputes between reformists and sufis may have taken on larger significance by the very fact that they were mediated through the French police system. McDougall describes how what began as a relatively minor scuffle between salafis and ikhwān (brothers of a sufi order) in the town of Mila in 1936 was amplified by French administrators and through local rumors into a wider conflict between two opposing ideologies (2006: 116–20). This and other “small symbolic spectacles” (ibid.: 120) helped to produce what became, as the 1930s wore on, an intractable dividing line between salafism and sufism.

In this climate, one can imagine that it might have been difficult for someone like Ahmed Bouchemal—a frequent figure in police reports who was simultaneously a founding member of Mouhibbi El Fen, a director of Chabab El Fenni, the president of the administrative council of the madrasa Al-tarbīya wa ‘l-talīm (ibid.: 132), and a founder of the important Algerian Muslim press (Merdaci Reference Merdaci2007: 102)—to stay on good terms with Mouhibbi El Fen's first president, Si Abdelmadjid Rahmouni, himself a sufi and thus not subject to the same level of surveillance. How could a theatrical association sustain internal diversity when everything surrounding it, from the reformists’ own emphasis on uniformity to colonial police practices, reinforced and polarized members’ differences? Could Ahmed Bouchemal and Si Abdelmadjid Rahmouni have managed to relate to each other outside the intersecting salafi and colonial logics in which their lives were inscribed? If in the early years it was still possible for sufi adepts and reformists to work together in the same social space, it had now become far more challenging.

The colonial context also opened a symbolic and political space in which the principle of tawḥīd was able to take hold in the imaginations of Algerians (see McDougall Reference McDougall2006). Like all late colonial democracies, France faced the predicament of how to minimize the tension between its own republican proclamation of equality among all citizens with the imperial requirement to maintain the colonized population in a state of subordination (see e.g., Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1993; Cooper and Stoler Reference Cooper and Stoler1997). This was not, of course, solely a colonial problematic: the liberal state itself was developed on a foundation of difference (Mehta Reference Mehta1999). As Immanuel Wallerstein has shown for the case of post-revolutionary France, although “the concept of citizen was intended to be inclusive … the other face … was exclusion.… The way to define citizenship narrowly in practice, while retaining the principle in theory, is to create two categories of citizens” (Reference Wallerstein2003: 651). While in France the division between “active” and “passive” citizens had been constructed around property ownership, in Algeria the line was drawn differently. In 1848, with the advent of the Second Republic, Algeria's status had changed from a colony to an overseas extension of France itself.Footnote ⁷² As I have already noted, following the 1865 Senatus-Consulte decree, Algerians were accorded French nationality but were not granted citizenship; instead, they were considered “French subjects.”Footnote ⁷³ Although the Senatus-Consulte put in place a procedure through which Algerian Muslims could attain full citizenship, few sought to do so, largely because it meant relinquishing their civil status under Muslim law (Brett Reference Brett1988: 453; Ruedy Reference Ruedy1992: 76). In 1870, Algerian Jews were “naturalized” as French citizens (via the Crémieux Decree), but Algerian Muslims who refused to give up their “personal status” continued to be excluded from citizenship.Footnote ⁷⁴ The French tinkered with this status over the decades and eventually accorded limited political rights to a handful of Muslim Algerians through mechanisms such as the Jonnart law, but these mechanisms ensured that the indigenous population would remain a political minority until very late in the game.

As McDougall has persuasively argued, the reformists entered into the space opened up by the personal status laws by the “recuperation and reformulation of the statut personnel as the key signifier of ‘Algerian-ness’” (2006: 94). This, McDougall contends, “constituted a kind of discursive tawḥīd: the multiplicity of Algerian religious and cultural realities were […] reduced to a single sign of ‘authentic’ selfhood” (ibid.: 94). The ‘ulamā essentially appropriated the Jacobin language of singularity that the French had been imposing on them for decades, and seized for their self-definition the very category—Islam—into which they had already been uniformly slotted. By appropriating the French colonial category of the statut personnel, the ‘ulamā were able to “construct new claims to unitary, sacred authority” built on “an exclusive conception of national community reduced to a unitary and unanimist ‘essence’” (ibid.: 96). The colonial power itself, in other words, helped to generate the very category that Algerians would later embrace as their common rallying cry. The statut personnel became the symbolic space that was at once “the key site of exclusion from French citizenship” and “the key space in which an alternative, Algerian citizenship would be created” (ibid.: 92).

The reformist plays were among the cultural products that populated this alternative space. They constitute one of the media in which tawḥīd was discursively and performatively enacted. In this regard, Messaoud Salhi's play is of particular interest. Many aspects of the play represent the reformist message and invite spectators into the fold: from the conversion story to the portrayal of the muḥtadā's practices of spiritual discipline to the project to create an institution with education and social mores as its twin concerns. Yet at the same time, tawḥīd was viscerally embodied in this play as a social practice of unanimous decision-making: on four occasions, the actors are enjoined to perform their collective assent via a voice vote or a showing of hands.

Other plays of the period likewise represent the singularity of behavior, mores, and thought that Algerians were expected to embrace. Scripts regularly singled out two groups of Algerians for critique or comic ridicule: those who had pretentiously embraced European habits (such as the maḡrūr or “deluded youth” in Salhi's play), and those who were seen as mindlessly following traditional or “backward” practices and were thus consigned to the realm of ignorance (jāhiliyya) that the reformists sought to combat (such as the sufis and their followers). Indeed, the plays may have provided a vocabulary in which these practices could be evaluated and critiqued in relation to the goals of tawḥīd. Some plays—among them, “The Story of Ignorants Who Call on Science: Bring the Flame,”Footnote ⁷⁵ staged by the troupe “La Chabiba” (The Youth), also referred to as the “Jeunesse Musulmane d'Education Sociale” (Muslim Youth of Social Education) in the central Algerian city of Blida in 1938—revolved around an exaggerated portrayal of a battle between modern, scientific knowledge and the kind of practical knowledge associated with rural folk practice. Those on the side of tradition are invariably depicted as ignoramuses or buffoons, out of touch with the modern world.Footnote ⁷⁶ La Chabiba's play invites rural sages who claim to have scientific knowledge to submit to a series of tests imposed by a Western-educated professor. If they fail, they agree to be burned on the forehead. Needless to say, the sages fail each test and must subsequently bear the sign of their ignorance. Clearly, only one kind of knowledge was to be valorized. Other plays were based on well-known stories from the Islamic tradition, such as the frequently performed Bilal Ibn Rabah, in which the protagonist, a slave named Bilal, initially hides his Muslim faith from his idolatrous Abyssinian masters. He is found out and tortured, but refuses to renounce his beliefs, instead uttering: “I believe in God alone … Allah is my destination, my refuge, my path, my source … the one I lean on.” When Bilal, chained to a rock, is close to death, he continues to praise God, punctuating each line with “the only,” “the unique.” This phrase is then detached from its surrounds, echoing alone, repeatedly, as the scene ends.