Since its first publication in French translation under the title Chronique d’Abou Zakaria in 1878, the Arabic text known as the Kitāb al-sīra wa-akhbār al-aʾimma (Book of the Lives and Accounts of the Imams) has served as an important source for writing the history of medieval northern Africa.Footnote 1 In particular, historians have treated this text as an indispensable guide to understanding the history of minority Ibadi Muslim communities in the early medieval period, the rise of the Fatimid Empire, and the early medieval history of Saharan trade connecting northern and western Africa.Footnote 2 Yet the medieval contents of the printed text and its translations belie the much more recent colonial context that produced them. The two French translations of this text, published in 1878 and 1960–2, appeared at key moments in the history of the French colonial project in Algeria: the first was published only five years before the French took control of the Mzab valley and southern Algeria and the second appeared on the eve of Algerian independence.Footnote 3 Not until more than a century after the publication of the first French translation did a full printed Arabic edition of the work appear in 1985.Footnote 4
In this article, I follow the publication history of the Kitāb al-sīra and its French translations as a way of demonstrating that medieval Arabic texts that were edited and published in colonial northern Africa constitute as much a part of the history of colonialism and its legacy in the region as that of the medieval centuries in which they were written.Footnote 5 In the process of being collected in manuscript form, edited, translated, and published, ‘medieval’ Arabic texts like the Kitāb al-sīra took on new meanings in each iteration of their publication history in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Algeria. In short, I use the example of the various publications and forms of the Kitāb al-sīra and its French translations to shed light on the colonial pasts of medieval texts in northern Africa.
THE KITĀB AL-SĪRA WA-AKHBĀR AL-AʾIMMA
For the seven centuries prior to the publication of the Chronique d’Abou Zakaria, the Ibadi Muslim scholars of medieval and early modern northern Africa knew this text in its original Arabic form as the Kitāb al-sīra wa-akhbār al-aʾimma (The Book of the Lives and Accounts of the Imams). Although the oldest cataloged manuscript copy of the work dates to the fifteenth century, the Ibadi communities of the Maghrib have long attributed it to an eleventh-century scholar named Abū Zakarīyāʾ Yaḥyā b. Abī Bakr al-Wārjalānī (d. 1078 ce), whose name suggests he spent a significant amount of time in the medieval city of Wārjalān near the modern city of Ouargla in Algeria.Footnote 6
The Kitāb al-sīra comprises two distinct parts, which may or may not have been compiled in the same period. Based on the date of scholars mentioned in the text, both halves appear to date to the mid-to-late eleventh century.Footnote 7 The first relates the early history of Ibadi communities in the Maghrib, including an invaluable description of the history of the Ibadi Rustamid dynasty (748–909 ce) that ruled the city of Tāhart.Footnote 8 Also crucial for historians of medieval northern Africa, the text provides an account of the Fatimid conquest of the Maghrib in the early tenth century and the subsequent revolt of the famous mid-tenth century apocalyptic Ibadi figure of the ‘Man on the Donkey’, Abū Yazīd ‘al-Nukkārī.’Footnote 9 The second part of the work offers biographical sketches and legal, moral, or miraculous anecdotes about Ibadi scholars and pious figures in the century and a half following the Fatimid conquest.Footnote 10 These anecdotes also contain a wealth of information about the Zirid dynasty that succeeded the Fatimids, the beginnings of the spread of Arabic as a spoken language in the Maghrib, and the history of Saharan trade.
As a valuable historical source for the study of Ibadi history and the broader history of medieval northern Africa and the Sahara, the Kitāb al-sīra attracted the attention of colonial-era French historians already by the end of the nineteenth century. But the appearance of this work in translation owed its publication to something more than the utility of its content to historians of the medieval Maghrib.
EMILE MASQUERAY AND THE CHRONIQUE D'ABOU ZAKARIA
In his study of the misadventures of French ethnographer and linguist Emile Masqueray (d. 1894), Ouahmi Ould-Braham offers a detailed account of the steps that led to the Ibadi text known as the Kitāb al-sīra being edited, translated, and published as the Chronique d'Abou Zakaria. Footnote 11 In 1875, Masqueray traveled to the Aurès and Mzab valley under the auspices of a mission financed by the minister of Public Instruction and the Governor General of Algeria ‘to collect archaeological, linguistic, and ethnographic documents’.Footnote 12 From the moment of his arrival in the Mzab valley and in the years following his time there, he relentlessly petitioned the French government and other potential sources of funding for financial support of his quest to gather and publish Ibadi texts from the area.Footnote 13
Masqueray initially encountered opposition in his efforts to access these texts from the Ibadi scholars in the towns of Ghardaia and Beni Isguen. At one point, he was told frankly by the Ibadi community in the latter town, ‘Our history books are our private property.’Footnote 14 He nevertheless succeeded in obtaining several manuscripts. Some of these, as he proudly explained in a letter to his superior, he acquired through ‘several ruses’ and by capitalizing on the antagonistic relationship between the Ibadi scholars and students in the towns of Malika and Ghardaia.Footnote 15 In other cases, accounts of Ibadi history were related to him by Ibadi scholars themselves. No less a figure than Amuḥammad b. Yūsuf Aṭfayyish (d. 1914) – among the most influential Ibadi figures of the nineteenth century and known as al-Quṭb (‘the pole’ of knowledge) – met with Masqueray and composed a text on Ibadi history for him.Footnote 16 Likewise, he acquired a copy of the Kitāb al-sīra by enlisting the help of an unidentified ‘young man, [a] fugitive thief but talented calligrapher’ to copy it for him.Footnote 17 Ultimately, Masqueray came away with several manuscripts, which included the Kitāb al-sīra and several other important medieval and modern Ibadi works of history, jurisprudence, and theology.Footnote 18
The story of Masqueray's acquisition of the Kitāb al-sīra and his publication of its translation, the Chronique d'Abou Zakaria, belongs to the broader history of the production of knowledge and its relationship to the exercise of colonial power in nineteenth-century northern Africa.Footnote 19 In the decades following the 1830 French invasion of Algiers, a military administration governed this new colony. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the work of French ethnographers and linguists proved crucial to the production of knowledge about colonial subjects in Algeria. Abdelmajid Hannoum has highlighted the important role played by the Arab Bureau, an office of the military-run colonial administration in the nineteenth century, in producing linguistic and ethnographic studies to aid in the exercise of power in this early stage of French colonialism in the region.Footnote 20 Hannoum's study echoes the earlier work of Bernard Cohn, whose Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge argued that the production of knowledge was crucial for the exercise of British colonial power in India. ‘Knowledge’, Cohn wrote,
enable[d] the British to classify, categorize, and bound the vast social world that was India so that it could be controlled. These imperatives, elements in the larger colonial project, shaped the ‘investigative modalities’ devised by the British to collect the facts.Footnote 21
As with the ‘investigative modalities’ of British-controlled India, French administrators and academics applied their own methods of collecting and organizing information about their colony in northern Africa. These data would then be ‘transformed into usable forms such as published reports, statistical returns, histories, gazetteers, legal codes, and encyclopedias’.Footnote 22 Applying this idea to colonial Algeria, George Trumbull IV has demonstrated how nineteenth-century ethnographic work cumulatively constructed an ‘Empire of Facts’, which produced ‘cultural representations enforced through assertions of authenticity, generating “facts” [and] descriptions with the force of claims of truth.’Footnote 23 In this kind of ‘ethnographic state’, Trumbull argued, ‘colonial ethnography served … to produce usable texts’.Footnote 24
Ethnography and history also worked hand in hand with colonial administration in neighboring Tunisia and Morocco, where the French established protectorates in 1881 and 1912, respectively. Although the French did not attempt to apply the same model of settler colonialism in these two regions as they did in Algeria, the production of knowledge about the history and cultures of their peoples followed similar patterns of fact-gathering established in that French ‘colonial laboratory par excellence’.Footnote 25 This was especially the case with French colonial historiography, which maintained an interest in premodern Arabic chronicles and histories.Footnote 26 In describing French historiography in Morocco after 1912, for example, Mohamed El Mansour wrote that it
clearly reflected a specific ideological orientation. Its purpose was to justify French colonial designs in the region … This was made clear by French officials who, by creating ‘academic’ institutions such as the Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines, wanted above all to better know ‘l’âme marocaine’ (the Moroccan soul) as a first step toward the installation of a Western order in place of the sterile Islamic one.Footnote 27
Mansour added that as in Algeria, the interest of colonial academics and officials in Morocco extended to other domains such as archeology and ethnography. Edmund Burke III has recently offered a detailed study of the latter, demonstrating the ways in which the category of ‘Moroccan Islam’ was carefully constructed by ethnographers in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century.Footnote 28
Like the work of earlier French ethnographers and the Arab Bureau in Algeria and later French and Italian historians in Morocco and Libya, Masqueray's journey to the Mzab in search of manuscripts was an exercise in the production of ‘useful’ knowledge, financed by a government that had a vested interest in gathering information about peoples under its control.Footnote 29 Alongside the government, numerous ‘colonial societies’ and organizations in Algeria financed the work of ethnographers and linguists like Masqueray.Footnote 30 As Ould-Braham has demonstrated, Masqueray's correspondence with government officials constantly reiterated the importance of his work and the need for it to be financed. Masqueray's translation of the Kitāb al-sīra was part of a much larger series of studies he carried out with state funding. As Patricia Lorcin wrote, the ‘academic perspective’ that Masqueray brought to his other work on Berber villages in the Aurès and Mzab belongs to the broader context of the colonial state's goal of ‘shed[ding] light on the institutional origins of Western civilization’.Footnote 31
Indeed, as both Lorcin and Trumbull demonstrate, academics worked in tandem with colonial administrators to produce similar kinds of useful knowledge. For example, writing just after the occupation of the Mzab valley in 1882, French colonial administrator and military interpreter Adolphe Motylinski published an annotated list of Ibadi manuscripts that he introduced by noting his debt to Masqueray's translation of the Kitāb al-sīra. In addition, he specifically pointed out the link between the recent military occupation and the ability of the French to gather more information:
The Chronique d'Abou Zakaria, published in 1878 by M. Masqueray, drew attention to the books of the Beni Mzab. In the erudite notes appended to his translation, M. Masqueray had already pointed to other works of biography and jurisprudence. The annexation of the Mzab and the permanent occupation of the post of Ghardaia allowed for a continuation of bibliographic research so well begun [by Masqueray].Footnote 32
But Masqueray's translation of the Kitāb al-sīra came at the end of the period of the ethnographic state. In 1871, the colonial rule of Algeria changed from a military to civilian administration. Knowledge produced about Algeria and its peoples changed with it, moving toward what Abdelmajid Hannoum has called the ‘historiographic state’. For Hannoum, the change to civilian administration in Algeria was accompanied by a shift in interest to the accumulation of historical data and the production of historiography that justified the colonial project.Footnote 33 This took the form of societies and publications like Masqueray's Chronique d'Abou Zakaria, which uses a medieval text as a centerpiece of a study prefaced by an extended introduction on the importance of understanding a people's history and culture to rule them. For example, in discussing the stories of medieval texts of the Ibadis, Masqueray wrote:
These pious legends fill large volumes. They are neglected today and I know an interpreter [for the French military] who, having been asked to translate one of these books, responded that it contained nothing but silliness. This is, I think, to speak too lightly. In our opinion, to this ‘silliness’ are tied a thousand serious matters, decisions of religious jurisprudence, historical and geographic information, and diverse customs. Moreover, if we want to understand a people in order to govern them, we must take them as they are, excluding nothing.Footnote 34
For Masqueray, the value of understanding the Ibadi past was inextricably linked with the usefulness of this knowledge in the present.
Although a clear example of the relationship between historiography of medieval texts and the production of useful knowledge in colonial northern Africa, Masqueray's Chronique is far from unique in this regard. For example, Abdelmajid Hannoum has demonstrated the tremendous impact of Baron de Slane's translation of fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun's (d. 1406) famous Kitāb al-ʿibar under the title Histoire des Berbères in 1856.Footnote 35 Indeed, it is fitting that the footnotes to Masqueray's translation are complemented throughout by reference to de Slane's. As Hannoum has argued, translations like those by Masqueray and de Slane effectively created new texts, rewritten in the idiom of French colonial discourse and made accessible to the great synthesizers of Maghrib history whose work shaped generations of historiographical conversations on the region. In other words, just as had been the case with ethnography in an earlier period, studies and translations of medieval texts like Masqueray's or de Slane's were as much political as academic enterprises that served the colonial government's interest, helping to create and to maintain ‘French conceptions of Algerian identity.’Footnote 36
The French did not produce colonial historiography on their own, however. Just as Trumbull noted regarding the informants and subjects for ethnographic studies in an earlier period, northern Africans themselves had a role in the formation of historiography on the medieval Maghrib in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The account Masqueray relates of his acquisition of Ibadi manuscripts in the Mzab demonstrates that translations and editions of medieval texts were often based upon manuscripts of very recent production, provided to researchers by local actors. The Kitāb al-sīra may have been an eleventh-century composition, but the manuscript upon which Masqueray produced his Chronique was the product of a student in the Mzab valley in the 1870s who copied it for him. Moreover, the broader historical narrative offered in his introduction was presented to him by Shaykh Amuḥummad Aṭfayyish. In this way, Ibadis themselves had an active role in shaping French historiography and in controlling the texts to which researchers had access.
Other studies of Ibadi texts and history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries follow similar patterns. For example, the collection of Ibadi manuscripts from the Mzab valley and other parts of northern Africa upon which Polish Orientalist Tadeauz Lewicki (1906–92) published dozens of studies on Ibadis includes manuscripts commissioned by Lewicki and his mentor, Zygmunt Smogorzewski (1884–1931) while in the Mzab valley.Footnote 37 Although they had little power to determine what was later done with the information acquired from these texts, by attempting to control which texts were available to colonial-era researchers Ibadis played a role in shaping colonial historiography.Footnote 38
One of the clearest indications of the long-term ‘usefulness’ and impact of Masqueray's translation of the Kitāb al-sīra is the number and variety of studies that referenced it. References to the Chronique appear not only in the specialized literature on Ibadi history by Tadeausz Lewicki, Adolphe Motylinksi, and others, but also in synthetic studies of Maghribi history from the twentieth century. These include popular titles that went through multiple editions like George Marçais's La Berbérie musulmane et l'orient au moyen âge, Charles Andres-Julien's Histoire de l'Afrique du Nord, and Jamil Abu-Nasr's A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period.Footnote 39 References to the translation also appear in articles on Ibadi history in the widely-used first and second editions of the Encyclopedia of Islam as well as the French compendium of primary sources on northern and western Africa by J. M. Cuoq, Recueil des sources arabes concernant l'Afrique occidentale du VIIIe au XVIe siècle.Footnote 40
LETOURNEAU, IDRIS, AND THE UNIVERSITY OF ALGIERS
Although Masqueray's translation of the Kitāb al-sīra was widely used in studies from the time of its publication through the mid-twentieth century, French and francophone historians of the Maghrib regularly noted its poor quality and incompleteness. Perhaps the most prolific writer on Ibadi communities in medieval northern Africa, Tadeusz Lewicki, referred to Masqueray's translation as ‘very mediocre and incomplete’.Footnote 41 In the 1950s a group of historians and philologists at the University of Algiers responded by making use of several manuscript copies of the Kitāb al-sīra to prepare a revised edition. The new translation of the text appeared in four installments from 1960–2 in Revue Africaine under the editorship of French Orientalists Roger LeTourneau (1907–71) and Hady Roger Idris (1912–78), both of whom taught at the University of Algiers in the 1950s.Footnote 42 The introduction to the first part of the translation (under the slightly modified title ‘La Chronique’ d'Abû Zakariyyâ’) explains the circumstances of its publication:
The Chronique d'Abû Zakariyyâ’ was unknown other than the partial translation given by Emile Masqueray in 1878 … Since 1930, new manuscripts – some fragmentary, others complete – were discovered. A team of Arabists and historians has taken up the task of publishing the Arabic text and its annotated translation. The Revue Africaine is delighted to be able to offer in this volume the first part of this Chronique, the translation of which is due to Professor Roger Le Tourneau based on the text established by Mr. Charles Dalet, honorary professor of the Lycée Bugeaud d'Alger.Footnote 43
In the preface to the same volume of Revue Africaine, the notes from the General Assembly of the Société Historique Algérienne on future publications clarify that the text was to be published as the ‘translation of Messrs. Le Tourneau and Idris based on the Arabic text established by Messrs. E. Dalet [sic] and H[enri] Pérès’.Footnote 44 As early as 1958, this ‘team of Arabists and historians’ had planned a publication of the Arabic text to accompany the translation but political events in Algeria led to its delay and eventual abandonment. In light of the deteriorating political situation, LeTourneau had decided to leave Algeria in 1957 and take up a post at the University of Aix-en-Provence in France.Footnote 45 After defending his thesis, his colleague Hady Idris stayed behind in Algiers until his own departure in 1961 for Bordeaux.Footnote 46 Thanks to LeTourneau's correspondence with Idris and others held in the Archives nationales d'outre-mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence, the history of the publication of the second translation of the Kitāb al-sīra survives.Footnote 47
Like the introduction to the first part of the Chronique, the notes and letters of LeTourneau's private archive suggest that he intended to publish the Arabic text along with a translation. As early as 17 April 1958,Footnote 48 Marius Canard from the University of Algiers wrote to LeTourneau to tell him about a young Tunisian scholar, Farhat Dachraoui, who had recently obtained a microfilm of the Kitāb al-sīra from Lewicki. Dachraoui was hoping to see the University of Algiers manuscript for comparison and eventual publication.Footnote 49 Canard wanted to alert LeTourneau ahead of time because the latter was planning to publish the text himself. Foreshadowing events to come, Canard ended his letter with a remark on recent ‘provocations’ by the Algerian nationalist movement, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN).Footnote 50
Later correspondence confirms these plans for an Arabic publication. In a letter dated 13 December 1958, retired lycée professor Charles Dalet wrote from Algiers to LeTourneau in Aix-en-Provence, requesting that the latter complete his project to publish the Chronique d'Abû Zakariyyâ’.Footnote 51 A letter dated a few days later from Henri Pérès suggests that LeTourneau had already been working with Dalet on the project and had been responsible for the translation. Pérès requested that LeTourneau send the first half of the Arabic text for publication with annotations.Footnote 52 The archival folder containing the correspondence also includes a handwritten copy of the Kitāb al-sīra in Arabic, with notations for printing and corresponding folios from the manuscript exemplar.Footnote 53
Original plans to publish the Arabic text, probably in the Bulletin Arabe-Français, did not come to fruition. A letter from the University of Algiers library dated 9 May 1959 thanked LeTourneau for returning three items, including two manuscripts for Pérès and one additional photograph of a manuscript belonging to the library.Footnote 54 LeTourneau had apparently used these manuscripts to complete his translation. In a letter dated 18 May, Pérès suggested publishing the translation in Revue Africaine, with no further mention of the Arabic text.Footnote 55
Soon thereafter, LeTourneau departed Provence for, among other places, Madagascar and then Princeton University, where he took up a visiting professorship. He did not intend to finish either the Arabic text or the translation of the second part of the Kitāb al-sīra.Footnote 56 Instead, Pérès suggested that LeTourneau's younger colleague and friend in Tunisia, Hady Roger Idris, complete the second half.Footnote 57 Idris had exchanged letters with LeTourneau in the past.Footnote 58 Not until January 1959, however, did Idris first mention the translation project.Footnote 59 In a letter from Gammart (Tunisia) Idris asked LeTourneau how the Arabic text had been established. He doubted the accuracy of some of the orthography and suggested, as he would do in latter letters, using a manuscript copy of thirteenth-century Ibadi historian Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad al-Darjīnī’s Kitāb al-ṭabaqāt held at the University of Algiers Library and the Egyptian lithograph of late fifteenth-century historian Abū l-ʿAbbās al-Shammākhī’s Kitāb al-siyar to corroborate the Arabic text.Footnote 60
The first half of the translation, attributed to LeTourneau, appeared in Revue Africaine in 1960.Footnote 61 During that same period, Idris began working on the second half of the translation in Algiers. In a letter dated 10 May, Idris informed LeTourneau that he had established the text by comparing it with additional manuscripts of Abū Zakarīyāʾ and al-Darjīnī at the University of Algiers.Footnote 62 The manuscripts upon which they based the new translation may have been among those donated to the university by French colonial military interpreter Adolphe Motylinski in the late 1880s,Footnote 63 although without a catalog of the university's manuscript holdings from that time it is impossible to know for certain.Footnote 64 Ultimately, the two-part translation of the second half of the Kitāb al-sīra based on these manuscripts appeared in the 1961 and 1962 volumes of Revue Africaine, this time attributed to Idris.Footnote 65
Even at this late date, however, efforts to publish an Arabic version of the texts had not yet been abandoned entirely. In a letter dated 10 December 1961, Henri Pérès requested that LeTourneau send along an introduction to the ‘the text’ by January to follow his own preface about the manuscript copies of ‘La Chronique’. Meanwhile, however, the political climate was changing in Algeria. Tellingly, Pérès added that he was in a hurry to finish with the Arabic text and be done with it – especially since he was not sure he would be returning to Algiers in light of recent political changes and the escalation of violence.Footnote 66 Earlier that year LeTourneau had received a letter from the Swiss archeologist and art historian Marguerite van Berchem, who wrote to say how much she looked forward to his new translation of the Chronique. Van Berchem, preparing her own study of the medieval Ibadi city of Sedrata discussed in the book, added that LeTourneau's former colleague in Algiers Marius Canard had promised to share the text with her ‘but with these events in Algeria, I am afraid he will have had other preoccupations!’Footnote 67
The conclusion of the Évian accords in March 1962 brought an end to eight years of bloody war between France and the FLN, setting the stage for independence later that year. This sign of hope for Algeria's future was followed by a tragedy tied directly to history of the Kitāb al-sīra. On 7 June, the militant, pro-French Algeria group ‘L'organisation Armée secrète’ (OAS) set fire to the University of Algiers library and the ensuing flames devoured almost all the manuscript holdings.Footnote 68 Among the many works lost were the manuscript copies of several Ibadi texts in Arabic, including the Kitāb al-sīra. The only surviving traces of these and the hundreds of other lost manuscripts were the French translation of the Kitāb al-sīra in Revue Africaine and the new manuscript copy of the Arabic text in LeTourneau's private archive dating to the 1950s.Footnote 69
Like Masqueray's Chronique d'Abou Zakaria, this new translation of the Kitāb al-sīra and the story of its publication belong to the history of French colonialism in northern Africa. But unlike Masqueray's text, which represented a transition from an ‘ethnographic’ to a ‘historiographic’ state in the late nineteenth century, LeTourneau and Idris's translation marked the end of the French colonial enterprise in the region in the mid-twentieth century. Over the 130 years of French colonization in Algeria, historiography changed with the political circumstances that helped shape its production. The University of Algiers in 1960 represented a very different kind of institution for the production of knowledge than had the Arab Bureau in the nineteenth century.
The manuscripts upon which this new translation of the Kitāb al-sīra was based did not require any misadventures to the Mzab valley or any clever ‘ruses’ by ethnographers. That is, the production of colonial knowledge was a civilian rather than a military-led effort by the mid-twentieth century: the site of production for this new translation was the city of Algiers and the library of the University of Algiers. On the surface, this serialized translation was an exercise in philology seemingly divorced from the late colonial context that produced it. Only hints in the correspondence behind its publication suggest that this new translation was prepared and published during such a tumultuous moment in Algerian history. The destruction of the library housing the manuscripts by the OAS serves as a jolting reminder of material entanglements of the publication history of the Kitāb al-sīra and the reality of colonialism in Algeria.
In addition to the site of its production, the medium of its publication also connects this new translation of the Kitāb al-sīra to the late colonial context of the twentieth century that produced it. Revue Africaine was one of several publications by societies and institutions that since the late nineteenth century served as media for the production and dissemination of knowledge about northern Africa. Established in 1856 by and for the Société Historique Algérienne, Revue Africaine was designed – as the introduction to its first volume announced – as ‘an organ dedicated to the publication of [the society's] works’.Footnote 70 And for a century, Revue Africaine served faithfully as the mouthpiece for the systematic production of knowledge about French colonial Algeria and northern Africa.
This remained the case all the way up until the appearance of its final volume in 1962, as the French prepared their final exit from Algeria. At 10 am on 28 January 1960, the General Assembly of the Société was held at Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines in Algiers.Footnote 71 Its proceedings give virtually no indication of the tumult occurring throughout the country (or just outside on the streets of Algiers) and certainly no sign that the end was coming. The president's address began with the obituaries and tributes to recently deceased members of the Société. A telling sign of events to come, however, was the lamented departure of two individuals – not to the afterlife, but to the metropole. Former Société president George Marçais and Professor Marius Canard, ‘two of our distinguished university confreres … have left us definitively to enjoy a well-earned sojourn in the metropole’.Footnote 72 The departure of Canard, portended in the correspondence regarding the publication of the translation of the Kitāb al-sīra, followed LeTourneau's as the faculty of the University of Algiers gradually abandoned ship. LeTourneau went to Aix, Canard to Paris, and Idris to Bordeaux.
The publication of the last installment of the Chronique d'Abû Zakariyyâ’ in the final volume of Revue Africaine had brought the history of the translation of the Kitāb al-sīra full circle from its first translation by Masqueray at the close of the nineteenth century. That first translation marked the beginning of the French domination of the Sahara, the end of the ethnographic state, and the beginnings of civilian rule in Algeria. The content, editors, site of production, and medium of publication for this second translation in Revue Africaine – collectively symbolizing the power and longevity of the production of colonial knowledge about northern Africa – marked the final moment of the historiographic state in Algeria in 1962.
THE POST-INDEPENDENCE KITĀB AL-SĪRA
Nearly a century after its first publication in French translation as the Chronique d'Abou Zakaria, an Arabic edition of Kitāb al-sīra made its way to the press in 1979. If previous publications of the text in translation mirror the colonial context out of which they emerged, the subsequent editions in Arabic in 1979 and 1985 reflect the legacy of colonialism in northern Africa and the efforts of post-independence historiography to decolonize the history of the region and recast it in a nationalist framework.Footnote 73 More specific to Algeria, the post-independence publications of the Kitāb al-sīra offer further examples in support of James McDougall's argument that historiography in an independent Algeria reshaped the region's past with new framings of historical narratives that responded to and replaced those written in the colonial era.Footnote 74
The first printed edition of the Kitāb al-sīra, appearing under the title Kitāb siyar al-aʾimma wa-akhbārihim, included only the first half of the text. It was edited by Algerian historian Ismāʿīl al-ʿArabī, who relied on manuscript copies he obtained in the Mzab valley in Algeria.Footnote 75 In his introduction, al-ʿArabī reviewed the previous editions of the text that had appeared in French translation. Regarding Masqueray's edition, he expressed dissatisfaction with both the incompleteness of the manuscript and the translator's lack of what he perceived as the proper level of competency in Arabic:
[A]t the time in which [Masqueray undertook his translation], his level of Arabic did not exceed that of a French teacher in a secondary school in this language during the colonial period. In this context, we observe that the method followed by the translator was one in which he simply ignored the sentence[s] in which he found difficulty reading one of the words.Footnote 76
Without comparing Masqueray's translation with the original manuscript copy with which he was working, it is not possible to argue for or against al-ʿArabī’s judgment of his translation. But this technical critique, which as al-ʿArabī pointed out had already been made earlier by European Orientalists including George Marçais and Tadeusz Lewicki, preceded a much harsher critique of Masqueray and the French colonial project his work represented. In addition to what he perceived as the uselessness of most of Masqueray's footnotes (which together amounted to a much longer subtext than the Chronique itself), al-ʿArabī wrote that the tone and purpose of the text spoke to the violence it did to Algeria:
Worse than all of the preceding is the blatant colonial spirit (al-rūḥ al-istiʿmāriyya al-fijja) that blackens the footnotes of the translator and his introduction, the likes of which we only find in the first generation of colonizers … . The translator strikes us with this inclination, bringing it to the fore at both appropriate and inappropriate times, especially in his use of terms like: ‘our possessions’, ‘our Algeria’, ‘our Shāwiyya’, and ‘our Mzab’. All of this is repeated in the introduction and the footnotes with the pride and honor with which a feudal lord speaks of his lands and slaves. In the mind of the translator, the entire process [of translation] is not limited to [the] transmission of information and the presentation of a service to researchers and scholars. Rather, [the translation] aims to provide a background in which the colonizers can understand the ‘mentality of the people whom they rule: for if we desire to understand a people so that we may rule them, it is necessary that we take them as they are.’Footnote 77
Likewise, al-ʿArabī criticized the later translation in Revue Africaine by LeTourneau and Idris, noting not only various errors and the oddness of yet another French translation appearing instead of an Arabic printed edition, but also that the unnamed team of Arabists at the University of Algiers neglected to provide any information on the manuscript(s) used for their translation.Footnote 78
In his criticisms of these colonial-era translations of the text, al-ʿArabī represents an early polemical trend in post-independence Maghribi historiography advocating for the decolonization of Islamic history in northern Africa that initially seemed intent on replacing it with a nationalist ideological framework.Footnote 79 As Houari Touati has argued, post-independence historiography in Algeria ‘operated as the inverse of colonial historiography’.Footnote 80 A period of nationalist historiography that situated even ancient Roman to medieval periods into a nationalist framework provided a kind of counterbalance to a long-standing colonial tradition of history writing. Many of the same periods and personages that served as the focus of colonial historiography were repurposed in the post-independence period to produce very different readings of the past, more in line with – and ‘useful’ to – the nationalist visions of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, or Libya.Footnote 81
The publication of the first full Arabic edition of the Kitāb al-sīra in 1985 likewise emerged out of the region's colonial past, although under very different circumstances. While studying in Paris in 1976, Tunisian historian ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ayyūb received a phone call from a friend about a collection of manuscripts belonging to the late Jean-Auguste Bossoutrot (d. 1937).Footnote 82 Bossoutrot, who had worked with the French military in southern Algeria and Tunisia, had himself been working on a translation of the text based on a manuscript in his possession although he never published it.Footnote 83 Using this copy along with another from the Dār al-Kutub library in Cairo, Egypt, Ayyūb edited a new Arabic edition under the slightly modified title Kitāb al-sīra wa-akhbār al-aʾimma.Footnote 84
Ayyūb was keenly aware of the political nature of this work and its publication history. While discussing previous editions of the Kitāb al-sīra, he continually raised the question as to why this work had appeared in French three times before appearing in Arabic (his bibliography suggests Ayyūb was unaware of al-ʿArabī’s earlier edition), adding sardonically, ‘It was as if Abū Zakarīyāʾ wrote the Kitāb al-sīra only so that it might be translated into French.’Footnote 85 Like al-ʿArabī’s, Ayyūb's edition emerged from colonial legacy of the French in the post-independence period. His chance encounter with a colonial official's private archive had led him – a Tunisian historian educated and living in Paris – to undertake the edition in the first place. In many ways, this speaks to the decidedly different reality of French colonialism in Tunisia and the different body of historiographical material that was produced there. Rather than erase or conquer the production of knowledge on premodern history, as had been the case in Algeria, the French colonial project in Tunisia had produced a generation of historians who participated in the production of knowledge about the region's past.Footnote 86 While Ayyūb's edition of the Kitāb al-sīra made sarcastic reference to the French translations that preceded his Arabic edition, there was comparatively little sense of polemical tone of Maghribi history and colonialism that had characterized al-ʿArabī’s edition.
Finally, just as the Chronique d'Abou Zakaria was not the only ‘useful’ translation of a medieval work edited and published in the colonial period, the Kitāb al-sīra was not the only medieval Ibadi text published and recast in a nationalist framework in the post-independence period. For example, in his introduction to the 1974 edition of the thirteenth-century work the Kitāb al-ṭabaqāt, Algerian historian Ibrāhīm Ṭallāy wrote:
What pushed me to carry out this illuminating task and encouraged me in it was none other than what we in our Maghrib need in the way of reviving our heritage and the most prominent of our historical personalities and linking our illuminated present to our glorious past – and this so that we might build our renaissance (nahḍatanā) upon both the pillars of authenticity and openness, … that cultural renaissance which Algeria and the rest of the countries of the Arab Maghrib are living.Footnote 87
Like the Kitāb al-sīra, the publication of this medieval text contributed to the construction of a nationalist (in this case both Algerian and pan-Maghribi) historical narrative. It offers a useful addition to an authentic past, one (re)built in the new context of an independent Algeria.
CONCLUSION
I have focused here on the publication history of the Kitāb al-sīra in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the aim of demonstrating that it constitutes as much a part of the history of colonialism in northern Africa as that of the medieval period out of which it emerged. In following the history of its publication, I have argued that the Kitāb al-sīra and its various forms and translations did not appear in print and become available to historians for academic purposes alone. Rather, each stage in this story is connected to the history of colonialism in Algeria and its legacy in the historiography of northern Africa.
The first two publications of the Kitāb al-sīra in French translation as the Chronique d'Abou Zakaria and the Chronique d'Abû Zakariyyâ’ neatly bookend the French colonial project in southern Algeria. Emile Masqueray's printed edition appeared in 1878, framed with an introduction and footnotes that reflect French colonial aspirations in the Mzab valley and the Sahara. These aspirations would be actualized with the region's occupation only five years later, giving rise to a large literature by francophone Orientalists on the Mzab valley and its Ibadi inhabitants. Masqueray's single manuscript copy of the Kitāb al-sīra, acquired through clandestine means despite the initial wishes of the Ibadi scholars of the Mzab and translated into French, became a window for academics and colonial officials alike into the history and culture of the Mzab. Straddling the eras of the ethnographic and historiographic states, the Chronique exemplified the production of ‘useful’ colonial knowledge at the end of the nineteenth century.
By contrast, the second, serialized translation of the Kitāb al-sīra in Revue Africaine from 1960 to 1962 marked the end of French colonial power in both the Mzab and northern Africa. The Chronique d'Abû Zakariyyâ’ appeared thanks to the resources of the University of Algiers, including its rich manuscript collection at the disposal of French historians LeTourneau and Idris. Nevertheless, its publication coincided with the final days of French occupation. The publication of this second translation mirrors the coming change to the political landscape through both the flight of its editors to France as the country moved toward independence and the tragic loss of the manuscript materials upon which it was based in a fire set by the OAS – an organization determined not to see the end of l'Algérie française. Moreover, the surviving correspondence relating to its publication also suggests that the political climate of late 1950s Algeria prevented the appearance of an Arabic edition of the Kitāb al-sīra in that period.
When such an edition appeared in 1979, its editor Ismāʿīl al-ʿArabī framed his Arabic text as a response to the violence inflicted on it by his French predecessors. In al-ʿArabī’s eyes, Masqueray and the team of Arabists at the University of Algiers had been possessed by a ‘colonial spirit’ that rendered them incapable of understanding the text properly. Finally, the second published Arabic edition of the Kitāb al-sīra in 1985 speaks to the aftermath of the French colonial project in different ways. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ayyūb framed his edition with an admonishment of the text's publication history in French for more than a century. However, his own project to edit the Arabic text was made possible by a chance encounter with a French colonial official's private archive while he himself was studying in France. At the same time, the tone of his edition of the text speaks to the very different reality and legacy of the colonial project in Tunisia than in Algeria.
The Kitāb al-sīra preserves a medieval textual tradition about the Ibadi Muslim communities of the Maghrib. But as its publication history demonstrates, when medieval Arabic texts or their translations appeared in print in northern Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they carried with them much more recent colonial histories. Historians using either Arabic editions or translations of medieval texts published in the colonial-era must recognise and address this history. Abdelmajid Hannoum has demonstrated that in translating medieval Arabic texts, colonial-era historiography in the Maghrib created new works that were repurposed to justify the colonial project and its epistemology. I have argued here that like the translation, the publication of these texts must be also situated historically in the context of colonialism. As the example of the Kitāb al-sīra demonstrates, it was as part of the process of colonial knowledge in Algerian production that the manuscripts of medieval texts like it were commissioned, seized, or purchased before then being translated and published in the form of useful knowledge. Histories drawing from these medieval texts in northern Africa must engage with their colonial pasts and grapple with the reality that they were not merely published in the colonial period but were themselves products and tools of colonial knowledge production.
