A wide-ranging, critical reappraisal of the fundamental underpinnings of Berber identity, Ramzi Rouighi's Inventing the Berbers sets its sights on deconstructing a staple of the Middle East's ethnic makeup. Joining a now growing body of scholarship questioning long-held notions about pre-modern Middle Eastern ethnic categories, Rouighi's book underlines the importance of this work in the round: these are efforts to understand how identities were constructed and how they acquired meaning. And thus, as opposed to sending feelers into the past to alight on the “true whereabouts” of the first Berber people and attempting a new empirical history from that spot onwards, Rouighi's quarry is the more significant task of tracing the discourses about Berberness as an idea over time.
Rouighi reveals that “Berber” was not a social category in pre-Islamic North Africa, whereas early Muslim-era Arabic texts summoned the term barbar to label an array of peoples and categories of slaves, and, via an uneven process, “Berber” eventually became increasingly synonymous, but not entirely so, with non-Arabic North Africans. Then Berberness suffered the indignity of becoming “science,” i.e., a modern-era empirical label which poured all Berber speakers into one ethnic silo, classifying them as North Africa's “natives,” and creating the tremendous inertia of Berber racial/ethnic identity which Rouighi critiques. Rouighi maintains that “Berber” was not a clear-cut identity with a stable meaning, and hence is a misleading gentilic to label non-Arabic North Africans across time. The pertinent phenomena which Rouighi argues we should be studying instead is the history of “Berberization,” the processes by which disparate peoples were brought under a Berber umbrella (his rationale is clearly put in pages 44–49).
The Devil's advocate might contend that Rouighi's enterprise is a quibble, since North Africa has been inhabited by non-Arabic-speaking peoples for millennia, languages labeled “Berber” have existed for nearly as long, and thus why not keep the “Berber” ethnonym, common as it is in modern parlance, as the label-of-convenience for those populations from Late Antiquity to the present? But Rouighi has a cogent counter, which contains a key lesson for conceptualizing identity in the pre-modern Middle East: the questioning of ethnic labels is not merely a semantic exercise, but a necessary deconstruction that gives history back to pre-modern North Africans by freeing their pasts from an ahistorical, monolithic category (p.107).
Rouighi's logic is appealing since identity is a pluriform and performative affair, and traditional approaches that have privileged the search for Berbers as a people rather than Berberness as an idea have yielded misleading generalizations. The appearance of an express “Berber” in a historical record neither necessarily tells us much of importance about that person, nor about the meaning of that identity, and treating groups of Berber speakers across time as a demographic unit risks misinterpreting the identity's significance and function. Rouighi astutely treats Berberness as a hybrid idea and his questions about Berberization shine focus onto texts where concepts of Berberness are on display. This reveals historical polyvalence in discussions of Berber identity, the significations of being (or being labeled) Berber, and allows more sensitive appraisal of the relationship between Berberness and historical actors. Further application of such method on a wide front will greatly help bring the Academy's understanding of the Middle East's pre-modern ethnic identities up-to-date with contemporary critical scholarship on the historical peoplehoods of Europe and elsewhere.
Studying Berberization does come with particular challenges. There is a dearth of Berber-language texts, and, from the outset, citations about Berbers came exclusively from the perspective of outsiders. Some subsequent medieval writers considered themselves “Berber,” but the Arabic discourses in which they wrote would influence how they described Berberness, and Rouighi well-details the broad impact of French colonial-era Berber archetypes built upon reinterpretations of earlier Arabic sentiments. An “emic” view on medieval Berberness is therefore quite unattainable, and Rouighi is right to often take refuge in remarking upon the difficulty of ascertaining whether various pre-modern populations we would call Berbers today actually felt as such, or were aware of how such an identity might impact their sociopolitical alignments. Readers will therefore not find a “solution” to the Berber question: Inventing the Berbers’ contribution is in laying bare the complexities in which Berberness has been marshalled, and emphasizing the difficulties which a historian today assumes when summoning the term “Berber” to articulate a particular identity or to identify a tangible agent in the history of North Africa.
Given the sedimentary solidity of the several centuries’ worth of scholarship on “the Berbers,” Rouighi's deconstruction is necessarily macro: he must cover North African and Andalusian political and intellectual history from Late Antiquity to Postcolonialism. The book accordingly blazes very quickly over crucial and complex events (particularly in Chapter 2), and while Rouighi marshals a good array of Arabic texts and submits several to close reading, there is naturally wide scope for alternative interpretations and questions about the testimony from other sources.
Chapter 1 substantially replicates Rouighi's 2010 article “The Andalusi origins of the Berbers?” (Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 2, no. 1: 93–108), and thus unfortunately does not avail itself of the wider scope a book-length study affords to develop the article's open questions; particularly the dichotomy of Andalusian vs. Maghribi perspectives on Berberness, which, notwithstanding the scarcity of sources, deserves fresh light. And perhaps this could be impactfully augmented with more use of Arabic poetry: Rouighi does cite verses ascribed to Imruʾ al-Qays and ʿAdi ibn Zayd (not “ʿUdayy” as named p. 15) to estimate pre-Islamic Arabian notions of “Barbaria,” but these two poets are unfortunately amongst the most problematic pre-Islamic voices, since their oeuvres contain considerable Muslim-era forgeries, and reliance upon more secure pre-Islamic poetry would be helpful. For the Muslim-era, praise poems addressed to regional governors, and the wealth of Andalusian adab literature is not probed, and likewise, given that the early Fatimids relied upon support from the Kutama ‘Berbers’, it would be helpful to consider how they expressed Berberness in verse (the poetry of Ibn Haniʾ al-Andalusi particularly comes to mind). Similarly, North African prosopographical sources such as al-Maliki's Riyad al-Nufus (The Gardens of Souls) are not plumbed for their perspectives on Berbers in the biographies of local notables. Rouighi astutely engages Arabic terminology for clues about their concepts of peoplehood, but the survey of jins and umma (pp. 81–85) covers but two of some ten pre-modern Arabic peoplehood terms, and hence these conclusions can be developed too.
In sum, debating the particulars will keep Rouighi and interested scholars busy for the foreseeable future, as he has revealed the elephant in the room of Maghribi historiography, and any study of Muslim-era North Africa will need to take note.
