When Ahmad Ben Bella, recently released from his six years’ captivity during the war of independence and soon-to-be victor in the struggle for ascendancy that marked Algeria's ecstatic and tumultuous summer of 1962, arrived in Tunis and resoundingly declared that “we are Arabs, Arabs, Arabs!” one of his aides is said to have quipped (in French, of course), “Ça va finir par être vrai” ([If he keeps on saying it], it'll end up being true). In Algeria, the official Arab-Islamic formulation of national identity has arguably been, in some respects, the most obviously artificial and imposed of all Arab nationalist rhetorics. Not only has it tended to suppress and delegitimize autochtonous and distinctive Amazigh (Berber) language and culture but official Arabo-Islamism has also been criticized as cut off from the country's own, distinctive, and local vernacular Arabic and popular religious patrimony. It has also, of course, served to delegitimize the undiminished (indeed, growing) importance of broader, Mediterranean, cosmopolitan, and predominantly, though not exclusively, francophone cultural, intellectual, and economic connections among much of the general population—and to mask their continuing predominance among the elite. A self-imposed peripheralization relative to the Mashriq, in official culture and political orientation, and even a certain element of “inferiority complex” or “self-loathing” are sometimes identified as factors in the cultural and ideological makeup of contemporary Algeria, though such observations have generally remained on the level of anecdote or have been deliberately polemical.Footnote ¹

These observations are important for an understanding of how official formulations of national culture have operated in Algeria—to the extent, that is, that they have been functions of class and factional conflict and instruments of an officialized, antidemocratic ideological apparatusFootnote ²—but they can be misleading. Misreading the “Arab” nationalist dimension of Algerian nationalism as merely an exogenous manipulation led the French government, in 1956, to the wildly mistaken belief that the insurgency of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) was entirely a creature of Nasirist machinations for regional hegemony. Notions of the “falsity” of Arabism in AlgeriaFootnote ³ can tend toward an ideology of a putative “underlying” Berberism just as essentialist, reductive, and ahistorical as the official narrative of Arab/Islamic “authenticity” it seeks to supplant, reiterating French colonial notions of Arabic and Islamic culture in the Maghrib as a superficial imposition on “native” culture as well as Mashriq-centrist perceptions of the Maghrib as a culturally unproductive, peripheral backwater of the Arab world (or as “not really Arab” at all).Footnote ⁴

Such views are also, of course, unable to explain the continued salience of Arabism, which has proved surprising to observers of North Africa, as it has to those of other parts of the region where the career of Arab nationalism was long ago declared “ended.”Footnote ⁵ The most striking instance of this in recent times was the sight of Ali Benhaj, the charismatic populist leader of Algeria's ascendant Islamist movement, leading a major demonstration in support of Iraq in Algiers as the 1991 Gulf War got under way. The elision of Islam with the defense of Arab soil against foreign aggression, both in Saddam's unlikely adoption of the rhetoric of jihad against unbelievers and in the FIS (Front Islamique du Salut/al-Jabha al-Islamiyya li-l-Inqadh) supporters’ slogans of “victory to the Muslims,” was perhaps less a sign of the displacement of Arabism by Islamism than an instance of one element of a potent ideological mix coming to the surface in the colors of the moment. The identification of the war against Iraq as an aggression against Arabs, of the illegitimacy of the participation of Arab forces in the coalition, and the converse legitimacy of the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait, illustrated a visceral, popular potential in the symbolic repertoire of Arabism that many had thought long since spent.Footnote ⁶ After the execution of Saddam Hussein in December 2006, the widely circulated and Islamist-leaning Algerian daily al-Shuruq issued poster portraits of Saddam “the martyr” that quickly became ubiquitous on Algerian newsstands. The popular conflation of Arabism with Islam, however, is only part of the picture. The strange career of Algeria's law on the Arabization of public institutions, passed in the same month (January 1991) that witnessed the FIS's pro-Iraq demonstrations, offers a different illustration of the continued significance of Arabism in this part of the region, one tied to the institutions, interests, and limits of the state. But while both religion and language have, since the 1920s, been central to the articulation of an Arabist nationalism in Algeria, their persistence, and the ways in which both official rhetoric and popular opposition have harnessed them, do not tell the whole story.

This article examines the place of Arabism in education, cultural expression, and language use among Algerians since the 1940s. My argument is that, beyond (or below) the impositions on, and dispossessions of, ordinary Algerians by state authorities and state-sanctioned ideology, identification with Arabism provided an important set of symbolic resources to Algerians throughout the second half of the 20th century. The salience of Arabism in Algeria points to important—affective, individually embodied and expressed—aspects of its lived reality that may prove elusive or invisible to a focus on political decision making, international relations, or regional conflict.Footnote ⁷ While Arabism has, in Algeria as elsewhere in the Arab world over this period, served as an increasingly vacuous official language of the state, its ability to create meaning for Algerians has never been confined either to the dull reproduction of officially sanctioned discourse or its subversive appropriation by Islamism. It has remained capable of expressing belonging and aspiration beyond these predictable parameters, sometimes in surprising ways.

The first part of the article focuses on a group of Algerian students at the Zaytuna mosque-university of Tunis in the late 1940s and the aspirations for cultural and political community articulated in their subaltern, arabophone milieu toward the end of the colonial period. Rather than being mere disciples of the Islamic reformist movement with which they have often been identified, young Algerians pursuing Arabic and Islamic education in the postwar, prerevolutionary decade articulated their own, radical and utopian, Arabism from below, both breaking with the politically cautious positions of the elder ʿulamaʾ and challenging the presumption of vanguard preeminence assumed by the emerging, technocratic nationalist elite trained in francophone institutions.

With the generalization of education after independence, the division between francophone and arabophone spheres in culture, the economy, and society was hardened, but Arabism itself, as a means of self-assertion, did not belong exclusively to one side of a sharp linguistic divide. The second part of the article considers the uses of Arabism as a state-sponsored project, and the limits of the state's ability to control an imposed Arabism as a vehicle of political legitimacy and to plan and direct language use, juxtaposed to the country's sociolinguistic landscape and literary self-expression since the war of independence. The perhaps predictable collapse of Arabism as an official project turns out, here, to have been bypassed by the resilience of Arabism as a form of self-expression outside the constraints of official ideology.

In conclusion, I suggest that, in contrast to what has often been seen as its “unreality” and failure, the significance of Arabism has largely lain precisely in its ability to evoke a “dream” or promise; it has been double-edged, nourishing aspirations, providing a powerful idiom of self-expression and political action, as well as serving to frustrate aspirations, attempting to enclose its own promised possibilities in the limiting power of the national state. In contrast to a frequent distinction in the literature between waṭan or quṭr (the local, territorially bounded homeland) and qawm (the translocal Arab nation), I suggest that this hegemonic quality of Arabism has been able to operate so effectively and for so long because of its location within particular, “local” (waṭan-centered) constructions of nationalism. Often created through the experience of diaspora or exile, such nationalisms have consistently and simultaneously both reached toward Arabism's transregional scope, beyond the immediate territorial state, and provided such states with Arabist languages of legitimacy. The exhaustion of the latter has not deprived the former of its aspirational value. In these respects, the article aims to suggest ways of moving beyond some of the impasses in which the study of Arab nationalism has sometimes been entrenched.

EXILE AND SALVATION: THE ALGERIAN ZAYTUNIS

In May 1934, a group of Algerian students at the Zaytuna mosque-university in Tunis requested, and received, official recognition of their society (which had existed in fact for two years already), the Association of Algerian Students of the Zaytuna (Jamʿiyat al-Talaba al-Jazaʾiriyyin al-Zaytuniyyin). Until at least 1949, except for the years during World War II, when its activities were suspended, this association provided a focal point of mutual assistance and associative life for the Algerian student population of Tunis.Footnote ⁸ In addition to arranging study circles and sermons, the association held a more wide-ranging cultural brief to encourage the students’ journalistic and literary activities. Having rented premises for its meetings and lodgings in 1946, the association eventually engaged in an ambitious project to build a substantial madrasa (college) for the Algerian Zaytunis, Dar al-Talib al-Jazaʾiri, plans for which, drawn up in September 1949, show a complex of forty cells for students along with a library and reading room, arranged around a large open-air courtyard.Footnote ⁹ One and a half million old francs were budgeted by the association for the initial building work, the remainder to be financed by public subscription and gifts.

The group, over the course of its life, also produced two issues of what was nominally its annual publication. Al-Thamara al-Ula (The First Fruit) was a collection of articles published in Tunis in 1937 and banned from circulating in Algeria.Footnote ¹⁰ It was another decade before the association produced the sequel, al-Thamara al-Thaniyya (The Second Fruit), which was printed in Tunis in the latter part of 1948, at a time of crisis in Algerian politics as in the region more generally, which was also, given its building plans of the following year, clearly a period of considerable activity for the association. The 1948 publication was a brochure of ninety-five pages, comprising a series of short articles, poetry, and a brief history of the association, written by the students and some of their professors.Footnote ¹¹ Before discussing this text in detail, it will be worthwhile situating it more fully within the social history of Maghribi nationalism at the time of its appearance. For this, it is necessary to say something about the relationship between migration, nationalism, intellectuals, and “the people.”

The importance of various forms of migration—travel for study, on pilgrimage, or into exile—in the formation of nationalist cultural and political imaginaries is familiar from Benedict Anderson's work. In the particular case of the Maghrib, and especially of Algeria, the political socialization and organization of migrant workers in France proved, as is well known, to be crucial. It was the popular and revolutionary current of Algerian politics first created in the 1920s among the migrant-labor community, especially in and around Paris, that founded the leading Algerian nationalist party, the PPA (Parti du Peuple Algérien/Hizb al-Shaʿb al-Jazaʾiri)–MTLD (Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques en Algérie), whose radical militants in turn produced the FLN.Footnote ¹² At the same time, the greater part of the young Algerian professional and political elite of the late colonial and early postindependence period—including those who, after 1945, became the young professional cadres of the PPA and then of the FLN—was trained and developed its political vocation primarily in French schools and, for an exceedingly small but not insignificant minority, universities. For those who, by different routes, traveled to France, the experience was decidedly formative, and studies have demonstrated the process in detail for both the workers and the francophone students.Footnote ¹³

The religiously trained, primarily arabophone students who came through local zawāyā and Qurʾanic schools or, from the 1920s onward, the independent “free schools”Footnote ¹⁴ run by the Islamic reformist movement and the nationalist parties, and who pursued their studies at institutions of higher Islamic learning, have sometimes been assumed not to have experienced the same kind of formative mental and cultural journeys that their francophone counterparts did. They did, however, for lack of a great seat of higher Islamic learning in Algeria, also generally leave the country, some to the Qarawiyyin in Fez and al-Azhar in Cairo, a handful to Baghdad, Damascus, and Kuwait, and a rather larger number to the Zaytuna. And in fact, although their itineraries were certainly different from those pursued by the francophones, it can be argued that the formative nature of the émigré milieux in which they found themselves was just as significant. Ironically, travel from one Arab country to another—from Algeria to Tunisia—had, in the case of these young activists, a formative effect on their self-consciousness as Arabs. A religious imagination of riḥla fī ṭalab al-ʿilm (travel in search of knowledge), reconceived as a hijra—as emigration across the colonial frontier, out of a land of oppression to a source of knowledge and empowerment, from which they might return to save their homeland—was combined in their experience with the radical political environment of Pan-Maghribi and Arabist activism in late 1940s Tunis.

According to official figures, by the end of the 1940s, Algerian students in French universities numbered only some 206 in the whole of metropolitan France and between 200 and 300 in Algiers.Footnote ¹⁵ The total number of Algerians pursuing higher study in any form at this time was a tiny minority—calculating from the numbers of those in the French system, Guy Pervillé notes that only 1 Algerian in 15,342 was a student in 1954 (compared to 1 in 227 French Algerians and 1 in 300 metropolitan French). Within this minority those students pursuing an Arabic and Islamic education were an even smaller band. Reliable figures are difficult to find, but in 1942 the Algerian contingent at the Zaytuna was reckoned to number “over one hundred”; in 1955 it was still estimated at around 120.Footnote ¹⁶ Among the francophone students, the experience of French education produced a specific ideological and practical political orientation, which the Algerian historian Mohamed Harbi (himself a nationalist activist at his lycée in Skikda and then as a student in Paris) summarizes in the notions of a necessary tutelage over the people by an enlightened vanguard, a faith in science and in their own mission as the promoters of progress, and a strictly mechanistic conception of modernization and politics, or what Harbi calls a “fetishism of the technical.”Footnote ¹⁷ Each of these convictions would play a significant role in the top-down dirigisme of the revolutionary FLN and in the construction of Algerian social, political, and economic life after independence.

The (largely middle-class and petit bourgeois) francophone intellectuals, and the activists of the popular nationalist movement to which they ultimately became subordinated,Footnote ¹⁸ then, considered themselves the people's “enlightened vanguard.” But this conception ran headlong into competition from the reformist ʿulamaʾ, a rival elite who conceived of their relationship to the people in a somewhat different register. The leaders of the salafiyya movement in Algeria, who had undergone their own education before World War I and who had come to prominence in the 1920s and 1930s,Footnote ¹⁹ conceived of themselves as the people's “natural guides,” as having a natural right and responsibility to determine the good of the community and to speak on its behalf. Their project was a gradualist social program of education and “moral improvement,” leading ultimately to a negotiated independence under their own auspices. Whether or not they can be judged a posteriori as having contributed to the revolutionary movement through the creation of a unitary and mobilizing active nationalist culture that would come to define legitimate Algerian “national identity” after independence, they, for the most part, certainly opposed revolutionary social change in general and armed insurrection in particular. Some of the senior figures in the movement hoped, certainly in November 1954 and through the first fifteen months of what would become the war of independence, that the FLN's insurrection would be only a brief affair that would force the colonial regime to the negotiating table in short order. It is at least possible to read even their declaration of January 1956, which has generally been taken to mark their rallying to the armed struggle, as an expression of this view.Footnote ²⁰

Those whom they might have supposed to be their younger acolytes in Tunis, however, had other ideas. By 1947, the French police observed that “the Algerian students at the Zaytuna, formerly enthusiastic adepts of the reformist movement, are now mainly interested in the PPA.”Footnote ²¹ The congress of the Association of ʿUlamaʾ scheduled to be held in September that year was delayed, apparently because of fears that the more radical students, back in Algeria for the vacation in September, were impatient with the moderation of the leadership and likely to vote against them.Footnote ²² ʿAbd al-Hamid Mehri, the son of a local imam at Oued Zenati in northeastern Algeria who arrived in Tunis to pursue his studies at the Zaytuna in 1946 and went on to a major political career during and after the revolution, affirms that during this period, the majority of Algerian students in Tunis were PPA supporters.Footnote ²³ Generally from poorer-to-middling and rural backgrounds, the young Algerian men who pursued their education and their political socialization in Arabic, and in the Islamic studies curriculum of the Zaytuna and the Pan-Maghribi intellectual and political milieu that thrived there, were by the postwar period disinclined to identify with the more politically moderate and socially respectable reformism of the elder ʿulamaʾ.Footnote ²⁴Al-Thamara al-Thaniyya gives some indication of the terms in which these young men, a frequently overlooked but eloquent group of subaltern popular activists, conceived of their community and their political identity as Arab and Muslim as the impasse of the colonial system in the region began to reach crisis point.

A robustly nationalistic text, the students’ 1948 brochure is imbued with an almost utopian, eschatological optimism. A typical article, entitled “The Extent of National Sentiment in Algeria,” celebrates the nation's unending resistance to occupation and the “continuous revolts” of the past century:

Beyond the conventional, Romantic nationalist rhetoric, which anticipates the terms in which Algeria's struggle would be celebrated across the Arab world a decade later, a number of key features and recurrent themes are striking. The first is a marked alignment with the populist, revolutionary movement of the PPA, almost to the exclusion of the Association of ʿUlamaʾ, whose figures had done the most to stake out a claim as the chief representatives of Arabism and Islam in Algeria. There is very little mention of the man who, by the time this booklet was published, had been the de facto leader of the ʿulamaʾ for almost eight years, shaykh Bashir al-Ibrahimi. It is worth noting that the Zaytunis’ first pamphlet, al-Thamara al-Ula (1937), had included a foreword by the founder, spiritual chief, and first president of the Association of ʿUlamaʾ, ʿAbd al-Hamid ben Badis. Ben Badis had died in April 1940, and the Zaytuna students had instituted an annual memorial event for him in 1946, but while their 1948 brochure carries an article in his memory (focusing on his work for “the unity of the Arab peoples”),Footnote ²⁶ it does not include a text by his successor. The students had turned instead to Messali Haj, the leader of the PPA and in a sense the chief rival of the ʿulamaʾ for the role of spokesman in chief for the Algerian nation. Messali is pictured in the brochure in a fairly unusual portrait that shows him in a long, white burnus, with his characteristic tarbush but without a tie, wearing traditional, flat-heeled slippers, sitting cross-legged on a chair, reading a Qurʾan. If this is a rather more overtly “Islamic” Messali than usually appears in nationalist iconography, it reflects the style adopted by Messali (and much criticized by PPA cadres) on his return from exile in Brazzaville in October 1946 as well as the piety of the students.Footnote ²⁷ The title that his own movement, against its more moderate rivals, had succeeded in bestowing upon him in 1945, that of “uncontested leader of the Algerian people,”Footnote ²⁸ is also the status accorded him by the Zaytunis, for whom he is al-zaʿīm al-abraz (the foremost leader). In the brochure, Ben Badis is already a mythical figure of memory, and his successors in the Association of ʿUlamaʾ clearly cannot compete with Messali in the eyes of their students.

This does not, however, simply indicate a generalized radicalization of Algerian nationalism.Footnote ²⁹ It suggests the effects of the radical milieu that existed at the Zaytuna already in the interwar years and more markedly reflects the generational shift in attitudes and alignments that was the most pronounced feature of postwar Algerian social and political life. The Algerian nahḍa, or what ʿAmmar al-Najjar, secretary general of the association and editor of al-Thamara al-Thaniyya, calls “the breaking forth of the sun of reform upon our beloved homeland,” appears to the students to have begun ex nihilo with the “resonant call” of Ben Badis and with those students of the reformist ʿulamaʾ who emigrated to the Zaytuna starting in the early 1930s.Footnote ³⁰ In this conception of their own place in history, the students display no awareness of any dynamic cultural history in Algeria prior to the founding of the Association of ʿUlamaʾ in 1931, of the presence of Algerians (and their radicalization) at the Zaytuna before that date,Footnote ³¹ or indeed of the various earlier figures of modernist or reformist Islam active in Algeria from the late 19th century.Footnote ³²

This disjuncture of the students of the 1940s from earlier generations of Algerian Islamic and Arabic scholarly culture, and their apparent ignorance of their own longer history, reflects the generational structure of the revolutionary movement as a whole. The younger PPA militants—and quintessentially the historic leaders of the insurrection of November 1954—were alienated both from the older generation of pre-1945 politicians and from a longer, complex history of political and cultural contest that would be effaced in official historical memory after 1962. Their own key experiences of political socialization occurred in the penury and hardships of the years of World War II, then in the spontaneous insurrection and subsequent massacres of May 1945 and the deadlock of colonial politics after that date. Although without a detailed compilation of biographies it is hard to be sure, it is likely that many of the Algerian Zaytunis of the generation with which we are concerned had their origins, as had historically been the case, in the rural peasantry of the Constantinois (eastern Algeria), which had suffered most through the war years and in May 1945.

The role and self-consciousness of this younger generation, which are the subject of Messali's article, are also a constant preoccupation of the student writers. They see themselves endowed with a genuinely salvific mission vis-à-vis their society, which, writes al-Najjar, “is eager for everything that the young produce, looks expectantly for everything new and original, thirsts to drink its fill from clear springs and not from turbid waters.”Footnote ³³ The students, according to Messali, “will in [the] future become the elite of the country,” and their duty will be “to carry on the struggle in schools and colleges, and to thwart once and for all this corrupted morality which imperialism has tried to nurture in its schools.” Messali also comments on the need to reduce what he calls “the distance and aversion” between intellectuals and the people, which he sees as a deliberate creation of colonialism and as a major cause of Algeria's political “backwardness.”Footnote ³⁴

The experience of emigration is seen as crucial to the students’ potential to fulfill this historic role. A classic itinerary of riḥla is reconceived here in the idiom of hijra experienced both on the model of the Prophet and as self-exile, in the sense in which this was a practice of resistance to colonial rule through the 19th century and up to 1911.Footnote ³⁵ No longer is the journey to the Zaytuna simply part of a well-established itinerary taking itinerant ṭullāb from eastern Algeria to one among several regional centers of higher Islamic learning. Colonial rule had established new kinds of frontiers between its territories, and crossing them was a newly significant act. The students’ emigration from a country made arid and thirsty by oppression to the Zaytuna, “that refuge of learning and abode of spirituality,”Footnote ³⁶ is understood in a register eliding the mission of religious purification with the service of the nation, as the president of the students’ association, Muhammad Mraziqa, describes in his article “Emigration and Its Benefits”:

Further on, Mraziqa asserts that what he and his fellow students are seeking, beyond the canonical disciplines dispensed at the Zaytuna, is “one thing only—spirit—which alone is the source of life, of power, of resolution, steadfastness, struggle, and resistance.”Footnote ³⁹ This notion of national empowerment through exile and sacrificial struggle is resonantly expressed by Messali in his foreword to the brochure:

This brings us to the principal point to make about the themes of the text – the role its authors understand and intend for the culture they came to Tunis to imbibe. In an article entitled “Culture and Its Influence in the Development of Nations,” ʿAbd al-Hamid al-Tijani writes that “culture is the only measure, the decisive proof, by which one can judge that a certain society is in the ascendant, and another in decline.”Footnote ⁴¹ Here, besides the internalization of a distinctly modern hierarchization of cultural forms, the sociopolitical value of cultural instruction for the students is apparent:

Similarly, Mraziqa writes:

The students, he says, are to concern themselves “with uniting what has been dispersed,” for the restoration of “our right religion and true Islam, purified of all flaws.”Footnote ⁴⁴ It is this search for cultural purity, through which social and political unity can be achieved, that is perhaps the overriding priority of the whole text—tawḥīd in Islam corresponds to waḥda in politics and culture,Footnote ⁴⁵ for “the general good and in the interests of the nation,”Footnote ⁴⁶ and it is above all this goal that the students see themselves as serving.

“Unity” here exists on three interrelated levels. Within Algeria, the people must unite in Islam and in the national struggle. In the wider Maghrib, all Muslims have a single struggle and a single destiny—indeed, the nation in this text is almost interchangeably Algerian or Maghribi (Messali's article evokes Tunisian as well as Algerian political leaders, and the students’ nationalist anthems extolled simultaneously “Allal, Messali, Bourguiba”Footnote ⁴⁷). Finally, Algerian and Maghribi unity can only be truly realized in common with that of the greater Arab world, whose original ethnocultural unity is seen as having enabled the astonishingly swift success of the early Islamic conquests.Footnote ⁴⁸

This fusion of Islam as the crucial foundation of “purified” social and cultural order with an Arabist sentiment of cultural and political solidarity emerges as the strongest defining feature of these students’ national imaginary, one that brings them close to the Youssefist tendency in Tunisian nationalist politics, feeds into the Pan-Maghribi and Arabist tone of the PPA at the time, and partakes in a wider symbolic universe of Arab nationalism looking beyond the Maghrib to a community of historic unity that must be revitalized in the present. Since the student strike of 1910, the Zaytuna had been a radical milieu for its student body.Footnote ⁴⁹ And despite the politically, as well as doctrinally and socially, conservative bent of much of its establishment, the university's role as a meeting point of young men from across the eastern Maghrib, and the location of the city as a node for transmitting news and ideas from further afield, especially from the Levant and Cairo,Footnote ⁵⁰ made the students’ milieu a fertile ground for nourishing a specifically Maghribi and Algerian nationalism with the transcendent qualities of Arabism and Islam.

BETWEEN THE STATE AND SELF-EXPRESSION: NATIONALISM, LANGUAGE, AND LITERATURE

In the longer term, this combination of conservative Islamic values as the foundation of community with the Arabist orientation of a populist-revolutionary political rhetoric was incorporated into the repertoire of an official nationalist culture that, after independence, built on the intellectual legacy of the prewar reformist ʿulamaʾ and produced the language of Algerian “national identity.” This language, however, remained marked by a certain ambivalence regarding the cultural space of Algeria itself and its irrevocably mixed, complex—official voices would say “corrupted”—history. Official Arab-Islamic ideology retained something of the exiled students’ notion of the homeland as a desert, whose people “thirsts to drink its fill from clear springs.” The younger generation, in the late colonial period, had to leave Algeria in order to imbibe their Arab culture and spirit, the source of life and resistance, and then return to “save” their compatriots.

In this sense, there is an important parallel, as well as a contrast, between the socialization of the Zaytunis and that of their peers among the “technicalized” elite of francophone students, who also saw themselves as invested with a mission to direct, develop, and lead their “ignorant” and “backward” brothers once independence was achieved. These contrasting but parallel itineraries prefigure the postindependence division of labor, and the competition for ascendancy, between arabophone representatives of legitimate national culture and the francophone technocratic bureaucracy, as well as suggesting something they had in common: a commitment to cultural as well as social and economic direction from above. The “salvific” cultural politics imagined from exile by the Arabist students of the 1940s, once institutionalized as state-sponsored national “authenticity,” did not suffice to liberate the cultural expression of new generations of Algerians, nor did it successfully monopolize the possible meanings of Arabism in the forms of cultural expression those new generations would produce. Arabism from above, as elsewhere in the region, would come to have an increasingly hollow ring; Arabism expressed outside the official rhetoric of the state would nonetheless retain its vitality, though not always in the ways, or even in the language, we might expect.

The hollowness that, in retrospect, has come to characterize officialized Arabism would be seen most clearly in 2007, Algiers’ year as Arab Capital of Culture (after Muscat in 2006 and before Damascus in 2008). Enormously ambitious plans were announced, especially regarding publishing, music, and the theater, and several hundred books, either reeditions or new translations, were produced in Arabic. Daring symbolic moves noted by observers at the “grandiose” opening ceremony included the use of colloquial Arabic, a fusion of orchestral music, Andalusi nuba, and rap, and contemporary choreography.Footnote ⁵¹ But the overall public response was one of indifference to what was perceived as an empty state spectacle, and several high-profile cultural figures, including rai star Cheb Khaled and novelist Ahlam Mostaghanemi, publicly criticized the event.Footnote ⁵² The mismanagement, mediocrity, and lack of transparency of what one well-informed observer referred to as “an affair of propaganda and big bucks”Footnote ⁵³ was remarked on in internet discussion fora,Footnote ⁵⁴ while internal disputes led to acrimonious resignations by two successive commissioners of the event. Accusations that the multibillion-dinar budget had become an opportunity for massive fraud and the quick personal enrichment of insiders and hangers-on were given wide credence, particularly through a text apparently produced by anonymous Ministry of Culture officials and published on the Internet.Footnote ⁵⁵

As with state spectacles of culture, state language politics have proven incapable over the long term of keeping their own ostensible promises and of keeping pace with unplanned aspects of social change. The law of 1991 on the Arabization of public institutions (the “law on the generalization of the use of the Arabic language”)Footnote ⁵⁶ was passed at the height of the Gulf War crisis, suspended in 1992, readopted in 1996, and officially came into force in 1998, when the political and practical agenda driving it had been completely overtaken by events. Finally applied as Algeria emerged from its decade-long crisis of the 1990s, the law officially established Arabic as the only language to be employed in any aspect of public life and administration and provided for penalties for the contravention of this regulation. In some respects this was a crowning of the process of Arabization in public institutions that had begun, at least in intention, in 1963 and that proceeded through the late 1970s and the 1980s through certain areas of the state: in the judicial system, frontline local government services, and some parts of the education system (in primary and secondary schools and in the humanities at the university level). But by 1998 the law appeared as an anachronistic throwback to an ideological agenda out of step with social realities.Footnote ⁵⁷

Indeed, the realities of language planning had long since been in marked contrast to its proclaimed intentions. In 1980 a major strike by arabophone students disadvantaged in the job market demanded “immediate and complete” Arabization of public life. Yet already in the 1970s, and whether deliberately or not, the actual effect of official Arabization was to produce a durable mechanism of “elite closure,” because the children of the country's ruling classes, including those ideologically committed to the intensive Arabization of national culture and education, were often educated at exclusive institutions and generally retained an advantageous fluency in French. More broadly, the division of language use, and of access to avenues of social promotion opened up through professional training, had produced a marked class differentiation in the trajectories of secondary school and university students. Khaoula Taleb-Ibrahimi's study of grammar teaching in Algiers’ secondary schools, carried out in 1976, revealed as much:

By the late 1990s, unplanned aspects of the country's language situation—the effects of demographic growth, urbanization, the rise of literacy rates, the proliferation of telecommunications media, emigration, the implosion of the single-party system, and economic liberalization—combined to frustrate the intentions and expectations of those who, after independence and up to the early 1980s, had foreseen the disappearance of French and the supersession of dialectal Berber and Arabic by a standardized, “H”-form of Arabic in all areas of life. What has happened instead is that Arabic and Tamazight (Berber) vernaculars have remained the major vehicles of daily life and social interaction as well as of popular culture, while “Standard Arabic” and French, according to sociolinguist Mohamed Benrabah, “are in complementary distribution: the former occupies functions related to cultural power and the latter to economic power.” Were French to lose its role, English rather than Arabic would most likely replace it.Footnote ⁵⁹ But despite its ascendancy elsewhere in the world, it seems that English, introduced in 1993 as a competitor to French as the mandatory foreign language in secondary education, has so far failed to attract Algerian high school students from the more immediate rewards of competence in French, since “between 1993 and 1997, out of two million schoolchildren in grade four [i.e., the fourth year of secondary education], the total number of those who chose English [over French] was insignificant—between 0.33 percent and 1.28 percent.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Since 1999, when ʿAbd Al-Aziz Bouteflika was brought to the presidency, only one year after the law of 1991 was finally brought into force, the anachronism of the legislation on Arabization has become apparent not only in the symbolic willingness of the president and certain of his ministers to use French in publicFootnote ⁶¹ but also, more significantly, in the uncontrollable proliferation of multiple languages and their mixing in everyday social interaction, cultural production, and, especially, economic life. Advertising, including by public authorities, is now routinely in French (a recent clean-up campaign in Algiers sported the catchy slogan “Retroussons les manches pour Alger la Blanche”Footnote ⁶²); a great many of the newer retail and other businesses in Algerian towns have their shop signs and notices (and restaurants routinely have their menus) in French. Nor is this trend limited to upscale consumer locations. The local appropriation of global consumer branding is a crucial element here; witness, for example, a pizzeria in the lower (new) town of Ghardaia, on the edge of the Sahara, whose owners opted to call their modest family business “McSud,” complete with the trademark “golden arches” accurately reproduced on their signboard.Footnote ⁶³ Private companies working in the more dynamic sectors of the economy also almost invariably demand some level of bilingualism, as young jobseekers, who are now usually monolingually educated, know all too well.

In the culture market, despite the early Arabization of the humanities and social sciences and the vitality of Algerian literature in Arabic (novels, poetry, and memoirs), the print market in Arabic appears today to consist overwhelmingly of school textbooks and popular religious works, while a large majority of literary work and humanities and social science scholarship, as well as advanced texts in, for example, law, seems to be in French.Footnote ⁶⁴ In popular cultural production, Algerian artists who have been successful both at home and abroad have not only continued above all to use Algeria's Arabic and Berber dialects—once guaranteed to attract criticism from the official cultural establishment—but have also mixed languages and write or sing in French.Footnote ⁶⁵ Most notable, perhaps, is Yasmina Khadra (pseudonym of Mohamed Moulessouhoul), the most widely translated contemporary Algerian writer, whose own education, at the military cadet school at El Kolea, was in French and whose crime thrillers and fictionalizations of the war in the 1990s have been especially well received in France. In November 2007, Moulessouhoul was appointed to the highly official post of director of the Algerian Cultural Center in Paris.

So it would be too simple to reduce the contemporary cultural field to a dichotomy between Arabic and French and the role of Arabism to an embattled defense of an outmoded cultural nationalism. The generalization of Arabic education followed more recently by the spread of Arabic satellite television and Arabic web design has produced a large and creative arabophone mass-media market. A proliferation of Arabic newspapers, including the country's most widely circulating daily, al-Khabar, has successfully challenged the francophone press that was largely dominant when the private press emerged in the early 1990s. It would be more accurate, then, to characterize the contemporary situation as one of increased fluidity in which the putatively “historic” roles of Algeria's languages in conflict has given way to constant crossovers in which multilingual language users express themselves in a variety of idioms (with greater or lesser competence and confidence).Footnote ⁶⁶

In this context, the use of Arabism in the self-expression of Algerians also occurs in a variety of idioms not captured by official ideology. It is not insignificant that a work like Le ravin de la femme sauvage, a Kafkaesque indictment of the state's bureaucratic corruption and moral bankruptcy by Waciny Laaredj (Wasini al-Aʿraj), was originally written in Arabic but has only yet been published in Algeria in a French translation.Footnote ⁶⁷ Laaredj is a genuinely proletarian intellectual, the son of an emigrant worker from the Tlemcen region who completed his education, after independence, in Arabic at the University of Damascus and wrote a doctorate (in Arabic) on social realism in Algerian literature. He has published in Arabic in Beirut and Damascus, and his best known text to date, Kitab al-Amir, a novel about the amir ʿAbd al-Qadir published in 2004, has been highly successful in Algeria. The preoccupations of his work echo a sentiment familiar to Arab intellectuals in the Mashriq: “what does it mean to be Arab, in a world turned in on itself, a world that turns itself into a stage for broadcasting only the discourse of demagogy and hegemony?”Footnote ⁶⁸ That Laaredj is bilingual and that the fortunes of his printed works reflect the vicissitudes and detours of the Algerian publishing market does nothing to diminish the acuity of his reflection on the meanings of “being Arab” and his self-identification with the ongoing struggles of an Arab world.

The point is perhaps even clearer in the case of the most successful Algerian novelist in the Arab world, Ahlam Mostaghanemi, who, unlike Laaredj, pursued her higher education in French—her Sorbonne thesis on women and literature in Algeria was published in 1985 with a preface by Jacques Berque.Footnote ⁶⁹ Mostaghanemi, who now lives in Beirut and writes only in Arabic, also expresses an Arabism shaped by cultural and geographical boundary crossings that have little to do with rhetorics of authenticity. Her work, crowned by the Naguib Mahfouz medal in 1998 for her novel of love and mourning, Dhakirat al-Jasad,Footnote ⁷⁰ is haunted by the broken promises of revolutionary nationalism. Her vision of homeland is expressed in references to her “Arab city” of Constantine, whose image is colored by the distance and the yearning of exile. In Dhakirat al-Jasad, this elegiac celebration of the promised/lost “Arab city” is eloquently embodied in the character of Khalid, the former FLN mujāhid who learns to paint as a therapy after losing an arm in the war of independence and who produces abstract landscapes of Constantine from his Paris apartment.

But the most insistent ghost in that novel, from the dedication to the constant references that recur through the text, is that of another Algerian writer, Malek Haddad, who famously gave up fiction after independence, unable to write in Arabic and experiencing the French language itself as an “exile.” Haddad's lyrical and brilliantly oblique novel Je t'offrirai une gazelle, written in the south of France in 1958, in the middle of the Algerian war, is nonetheless an expression as much of modern Arab as of “francophone” culture as, indeed, Mostaghanemi's Arabism is shaped by her experience of the French cultural scene. Haddad's dreamlike narration of a Saharan epic romance, constantly cut by scenes of the author's precarious existence as an Arab in the French imperial metropolis, makes this book an early diasporic intervention in the theme that is also Mostaghanemi's: Arab culture, space, and sovereignty as a promise of home dreamed in exile.

And it is clear from a later and less well-known work by Haddad that Arabism, rather than signaling only a personal tragedy in his self-imposed literary silence, also retained a politically aspirational content for the author, one for which his French “exile” could in fact be a highly effective vehicle. During the June war of 1967, Haddad, then responsible for the culture section of the Constantine newspaper al-Nasr, chose alexandrine verse, French literature's most perfectly classical idiom, as the form for his astonishing poem “Je suis chez moi en Palestine” (I am at home in Palestine), in which an unrepentantly Arabist political consciousness is framed through solidarity with the suffering of the Jews of Europe as well as with the land and people of Palestine:

Footnote ⁷¹