21 Islam in North Africa

Μ. Brett

North Africa is formed by the bloc of the Atlas mountains between the Sahara and the Mediterranean. The ranges, 4,000, 8,000 and 12,000 feet high, run parallel to the desert and the sea, enclosing a great upland stretching from Morocco across Algeria to Tunisia.

At its introduction into North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries, Islam was the faith of foreign conquerors, the Arabs. These conquerors found a region which was politically divided between the Byzantine Empire in the east and native peoples in the west. The Byzantine province of Africa, comprising Tunisia, Tripolitania and eastern Algeria, was ruled from Carthage near Tunis. In the towns and the more settled regions on the coast and inland, the population spoke Latin, and was Chris­tian. In the mountains and deserts, on the other hand, the population was Berber, that is, speaking the indigenous language of North Africa called after the Latin barbarus, barbarian.

The Arabs were an army of the faithful, muminun, men who had put their faith, iman, in God, his Prophet, and his Prophet’s successors as Commanders of the Faithful, or caliphs. This faith, in the old English sense of a promise to be kept by both parties to an agreement, separated them from the rest of humanity, whom it was their mission to subjugate. As a militant community of the faithful, they were physically set apart in the misr (pl. amsar), the garrison city set up by the Arabs as a base camp at each stage of their advance, which then developed into the capital of each region. Beginning with Fustat in Egypt, on the site of Cairo, these garrison cities were first Barqa (Barce) in Cyrenaica, then Tripoli, Qayrawan (Kairouan) in Tunisia, Tlemcen, Tangier and finally Cordoba in Spain. Those whom they conquered became tax-paying subjects. In Egypt this was simple. As Christians the inhabitants were declared to be ‘People of the Book’, believers in God under the dhimma or protection of the faithful who believed in his final message: in return for this protection they paid a special poll-tax in addition to their other dues.

The problem arose after the conquest of Spain, when the horizon of the conquest was far away on the Pyrenees, and the Umayyad caliphs at Damascus endeavoured to bring North Africa under regular administration by insisting on the tribute due from conquered Berber peoples who had identified themselves with the conquerors. The rebellion which broke out at Tangier in 739 was intended as a revolution to replace the caliph of the Umayyad dynasty at Damascus with a new Commander of the Faithful. Its leaders were Kharijites, from kharaja, to go out, who believed that the bad ruler was a sinner who had ‘gone out’ of the community, and should be replaced by the best believer, not necessarily an Arab. But the Kharijites in North Africa were divided between the Sufrites (Yellows), at Tangier and Tlemcen, and the Ibadites (Whites), at Tripoli and Qayrawan, and the revolution they planned was accomplished instead by a different movement based on a different principle, the exclusive right of members of the Prophet’s family to succeed to the Caliphate.

The burning question of the right to lead the com­munity of the faithful and to rule its empire, which resulted in the breaking-up of both in North Africa, was symptomatic of the rapid growth of the community and the development of its ideas. By the eighth century, the community of the faithful was ceasing to be identical either with the Arabs or even with the army. Continuous recruitment from outside and natural growth from within was turning it into a cross-section of the popula­tion in all the lands it had conquered. One result was that the distinction between muminun and muslimun, Arabs and clients, lost its force; islam (sub­mission), became Islam, the proper name of the true religion, and Muslims that of the true believers. A second result was that the army, became profes­sional, and sometimes not even Muslim; it was segregated along with the ruler, his household and his ministers in great fortified palaces built outside or apart from the original garrison cities.

With the government of the community thus physi­cally removed from the old garrison cities, these became populated by civilian subjects whose life revolved around the Great Mosque in the middle. This served all the purposes of the Roman forum as a place of meeting, assembly, administration, justice, marketing and even defence, as well as worship, with this difference, that by the ninth century the seat of govern­ment had been moved away; the market area was in the surrounding streets; and the central enclosure had been built and rebuilt as a single edifice whose prime function was communal worship. The Great Mosque of Qayrawan, the greatest of its kind in North Africa, was finally completed in 864; it consisted of a vast prayer-hall, a huge court surrounded by colonnades, and a fortified tower. In and around this building, Islam developed in important ways.

Collective worship, resembling a military drill, had always been central to the life of the militant community, whose zeal had been further stimulated by preachers whose sermons, based on parables, had conveyed the exciting message of the holy war. The growth of the commu­nity turned the prayer at midday on Friday into a more stately occasion, when prayer was offered in the name of the reigning monarch. Meanwhile the simple preacher was displaced as the keeper of the community’s conscience by the jurist orfaqih (pi.fuqaha). Thefaqih was the scholar of the Holy Law, a concept fully formulated by the middle of the ninth century on the basis of scripture. This scripture was not only the Qur’an, the Book of God, but the record of the Sunna, the divinely-inspired practice of the Prophet and his four immediate successors, provided by traditions of their words and deeds which had been progressively reduced to writing.

Their supremacy affected the government of the community by the sultan or man of power, such as the Aghlabid emir in his palace city. As leader of the community, the sultan was required to uphold the Law which he could neither make (since that was for God), nor define (since that was for the alim, the man of wisdom), but only enforce. In fulfilment of his narrow duty, therefore, he appointed to each main city a. qadi or judge from among the ranks of the jurists to decide in accordance with the Law. In fulfilment of his wider duty to govern, however, he heard com­plaints and gave judgement himself. Moreover, he reserved the right to police and tax his subjects as he thought fit, thus restricting the jurisdiction of the qadi to public morality and personal or ‘civil’ matters such as contracts, marriage, inheritance and so forth. The qadi stood in an equally odd relation­ship to his fellow jurists, who in principle shunned his job as one entailing mortal sin: error was inevitable when a human being made binding judge­ments on behalf of God. Both he and they endeavoured to mitigate the offence by consultation: they gave him their opinion as to what the Law should be in any particular case, and he acted upon it in good faith. On the other hand he was a person of immense prestige, representing the justice of God on earth; without such an authority to lay down the Law and see that it was obeyed, the community itself would perish. Through him, the Great Mosque with which he was especially associated became not only a centre of scholarship, where thejurists studied and taught. It continued to play a major role in government.

Militancy and zeal were not dead, but became associ­ated with a different building, theri&ai. This was originally a frontier fortress garrisoned against the infidel—in Ifriqiya, a castle on the coast for defence against Byzantine Christian raids from Sicily. But in the ninth century Sicily was conquered by the Aghlabids in a fresh holy war, and the ribats of Ifriqiya became the home of ascetics shut off from the world. The term murabit, man of the ribat, the acquired two meanings, on the one hand the dedicated holy warrior, on the other the hermit. At the same time it began to acquire a third, that of the man of God who called the people to the holy war. Such a person carried on the tradition of the popular preacher of the original armies of the original community. His target was the same—enmity to God and his Prophet. Enmity was above all the condition of unbelievers who had not yet submitted to the rule of the faithful, so that the message in its simplest form was an exhortation to continue the fight against the infidel beyond the pale of Islam. But enmity was also present in sin, and then the message was turned in upon the community of believers. In fulfilment of his pious duty to ‘com­mand the right and forbid the wrong’, the zealous murabit became a prophet who denounced iniquity and summoned the people to hear and obey the orders of God. Such a call was revolutionary, and politically threatening. Where the more sophisticated jurists regretfully accepted the fact that the emir or sultan ruled with wide discretion, and often tyrannously, the murabit was ready to condemn and oppose the monarch. People were only too liable to listen.

By the end of the ninth century, this was the situa­tion in Ifriqiya, at the capital Qayrawan and in the surrounding region of Tunisia which was the heart of the Aghlabid dominion. There, the native Christian population was probably already in a minority, doomed to dis­appear entirely within the next two hundred years as the Muslim community grew demographically as well as by conversion. Outside this very limited area, Islam was evolving in the same way, but in the different context of a largely tribal society. The Ibadites, for example, had shared in the original rising of believers against a sinful ruler in the middle of the eighth century. Defeated and expelled from Qayrawan, they developed their own doctrine of the Law, separate from but comparable to those of the Malikites and other Sunnite schools. As this doctrine failed to win acceptance from the majority ofthew/enw as an orthodox variant of the Shari‘a, so the Ibadites became a sect apart from the rest of the community. Nevertheless in their new capital city of Tahart in western Algeria they produced a dynasty of rulers, a body of scholarly jurists and a class of dissenters who objected to the monarchy. Tahart, however, was no more than a city-state, and the bulk of the Ibadites who recognised its authority were not under its jurisdiction but as far away as the Fezzan. They were tribal Berbers among whom the jurists of the sect had only a moral authority which they used sometimes to judge in accordance with the holy Law, but more often to arbitrate in disputes in accordance with tribal custom.

Custom implies a stability which did not exist. Not only was tribal custom founded in violence, upon the need to repay killing with killing, in the first or the last resort. The peoples themselves were under pressure. In the desert, trans-Saharan trade affected their society and economy. In the mountains and oases surrounding Qayrawan and its terri­tory, they were repressed by the military expeditions of the Aghlabids and their governors to collect taxes and ensure safe travel. At the same time they were required to be Muslim, at the very least to profess the faith as a sign of obedience to the dominant order. They were thus peculiarly susceptible to the appeal of the Muslim zealot preaching both for and against that order— for the right which it represented and against the wrong which it did. Such preachers might be Sunnite or Ibadite; but the critical prophecy when it came was that of Abu Abd Allah, a missionary from the Middle East who preached the coming of the Mahdi, the Muslim Messiah. He belonged to the Ismaili sect of the Shi'ite branch of Islam, hitherto (and subsequently) unrepresented in North Africa; his success came in the first place, however, from the universal attraction of that kind of message to peoples under the long­standing influence of the biblical tradition ofjudaism, Christianity and Islam. It lent urgency to the demand to root out iniquity and gave it point—the overthrow of the Aghlabids in readiness for the Lord. Accordingly, the Kutama peoples of the mountains of the Petite Kabylie in eastern Algeria responded to the preacher’s summons to make a new islam for a new com­munity of the faithful under his command. Paradoxically, then, they were transformed, from a stateless society without rulers into an embryonic state under the absolute dictation of a single man. In that state, they were primarily soldiers, providing an army which drove out the Aghlabids in 909, and installed the Mahdi whom Abu Abd Allah introduced as the new ruler of Ifriqiya, the first of the Fatimid dynasty.

The Fatimids came, and in 972 went, moving to Egypt in pursuit of their claim (never realised) to rule the entire Muslim world. Their importance for North African Islam lay partly in their failure. They changed neither the nature of the state, nor the nature of the Law, nor the nature of tribal society. The Malikite school of Qayrawan was streng­thened by its opposition to their doctrines; the Kutama reverted to their old ways. But they had popularised the notion of the Mahdi as a saviour in times of distress. More importantly, their prophet Abu Abd Allah had set an example of revolution which was swiftly followed, with or without the justification of Mahdism. The Fatimids themselves were almost overthrown in the 940s by Abu Yazid, an Ibadite leader who imitated their movement among the tribes of the Aures mountains. Morocco proved still more susceptible.

Central government had disappeared from North Africa to the west of Ifriqiya with the break-up of the Arab empire in the Maghrib in the eighth century. Small cities served as the capitals of petty dynasties in western Algeria and northern Morocco, and as markets for local tribes. In central and southern Morocco, a chain of ports and caravan cities ran down the Atlantic coast and to the south and east of the High Atlas, forming a pattern of Muslim settlement and trade in a huge region which had escaped the Arab conquest almost as much as the Roman. Here, Muslims in their townships and along their caravan trails confronted more or less pagan Berbers in the plains, mountains and deserts. These Berbers were neverthe­less influenced by the Muslim presence and by the idea of Islam; in the ninth century an imitation Prophet with an imitation Qur’an, in Berber, created an imitation Muslim community called the Barghawata on the Atlantic plains, which lived by holy war upon its neighbours. Again we see the force of prophetic appeal to tribesmen on the margins of civilised Islam, and also its result: in the absence ofa Muslim state to overthrow, the Barghawata created a state of their own. Thereby they anticipated the still more striking achieve­ment of Ibn Yasin and his mission to the Berber tribes of the western Sahara.

Ibn Yasin was the murabitpar excellence, a prophet of sternly orthodox conviction inspired by the Malikite opposition to the Fatimids, who set out to compel the tribesmen to obey the Law, and in so doing formed them like the Kutama and the Barghawata into an army and a state. His followers were called al-Murabitun, the Murabits or Almoravids, because they had joined together to live by the Law and to fight for it. A formidable army, between 1050 and 1100 they conquered the whole of Morocco, western Algeria and Muslim Spain, ruling an empire with its capital at Marrakesh. Fifty years later the Almoravids were themselves overthrown by the movement of yet another prophet, Ibn Tumart, who preached to the tribes of the High Atlas. Ibn Tumart claimed to be the Mahdi, come to insist on the unity of God; therefore his followers were called al-Muwahhidun, the Unitarians or Almohads. Once again they formed an army under a statesmanlike commander, which not only took over the Almoravid empire, but added Ifriqiya as well. Thus the whole of North Africa was politically united by the energies of peoples naturally without rulers, but transformed by the preaching of Islam.

As with the Fatimids, it is important to realise what the Almoravids and Almohads did not do. The empire they created was cumbersome, and in the thirteenth century broke up into four dynastic states in Ifriqiya, western Algeria, Morocco and Granada in southern Spain. Like the Kutama in Ifriqiya, the tribes which composed the two movements first became closed military aristocracies, and then reverted to their tribal ways of life. Despite the Mahdism of the Almohads, the Malikite orthodoxy upheld by the Almoravids became still more firmly established. Nevertheless, for the first time in history, they incorporated the whole of Morocco into a state. That state survived the break-up of the empire, to become an essential part of the Muslim state system which then covered the entire region. That system in turn provided a framework for the uneasy relationship between royal gov­ernment, city and tribe which now became typical of the whole of the Maghrib. The principle of the system was the need for a sultan to uphold the Law without which the community would perish in sin. In practice the framework was sufficiently flexible to avoid further overthrow by the revolutionary preacher and prophet. That was partly because it allowed for the development of new forms of religion.

Behind any new forms lay the development of Islam as a way of life. In the cities, the accent fell on respectability and decency, privacy at home and seemliness abroad. For those who practised it, such a lifestyle was the proof of their Islam. It was structured by religion in all kinds of ways—by the Islamic observances of prayers, fasting and feasts; by Islamic rules of marriage and inheritance which governed the patriarchal family; and by the Islamic character of the administration. This was the responsibility of the three officers required by Law: the wali or governor on behalf of the sultan; the qadi or judge; and the muhtasib or market inspector on behalf of the qadi. Their duties were minimal rather than maximal: to keep the peace and collect taxes; to give judgement in court; and to ensure fair trading. The onus of the Law was upon the individual to behave properly, not upon the city to tell him what to do. The individual in question was pre-eminently the sane adult Muslim male, who had the greatest legal capacity, over and above women, children, slaves and of course non-Muslims like Jews. He was nevertheless under heavy social constraint, in which Islam came once again into play, not as a form of legislation, but as an element in the social order. The city was ruled by its governor, a military man as a rule appointed by the monarch; but its society was dominated by its bourgeoisie, whose wealth came from trade and property, and its prestige from religious learning. Typically, the chief families would provide the principal merchants, the principal landlords, and the principal ulema, including the qadi. Divided by faction, allied or opposed to the wait, the members of this class formed an influential elite respected for its tradition of Islamic scholarship and largely hereditary monopoly of office as imams or prayer-leaders, khatibs or preachers, judges and notaries (udul, sing, adl), and muftis or jurists.

The equivalent of this scholarly, sociable Islam in the tribal countryside was provided by the shaykhs of the Ibadites in the oases and villages of the Sahara and its Ifriqiyan borders. But from the tenth century the Ibadites dwindled into a minority even in their own region, and orthodox Islam had no ready substitute. The sense of mission to the tribes which provoked the great revolutions more often led to ignorant prac­titioners, with little knowledge of the Law, who relied more upon the mystique of Islam to find their niche in tribal society. Affected by the animism underlying the beliefs of the people, who saw the supernatural in trees, stones, springs and so forth, they were likely to resort to what the more educated called conjuring tricks and witchcraft to satisfy their clients. Nevertheless, in the course of time, such figures were drawn into a reputable tradition.

The origins of that tradition lay in zuhd, asceticism. In the ninth century asceticism had produced a person in strong contrast to the scholarly jurist who set out to direct the community, or the ardent preacher who set out to inflame it. This was the hermit or recluse who took the name ofmurabit from the ribats in which he took refuge after they had been abandoned as fortresses in the holy war. This was a form of the religious life which the jurists in principle condemned as antisocial, against the proper life of the community according to the Law. Certainly it led to extremes of austerity and emaciation among individuals apparently obsessed with mortification. On the other hand, asceticism retained its appeal and its justification as a form of godliness, and continued to be practised in varying degrees by educated and uneducated alike. The pious ascetic, sometimes a man of great learning, became a familiar figure, typically occupying a small abandoned mosque or shrine, a ribat or other building, inside or outside the city. Such a person had a reputation for saintliness, evidenced by the gift of second sight and other miraculous powers. Thus blessed by God, his baraka or power of blessing benefited those who came into contact with him before and after his death, when his residence became his tomb and a place of sanctity for those who lived nearby or came as visitors. Thereby his contem­plative style of holiness took on considerable social significance. Meanwhile the term ‘murabit’, while keeping its association with the holy war and militant righteousness, extended its meaning of hermit to a rather broader type of holy man.

Against this background, then, we see by the Almohad period in the twelfth century the beginning of two important and interconnected tendencies—the acquisition of disciples by some at least of these murabitic holy men, and the introduction of Sufism. The one gave asceticism its own tradition in the Islamic manner ofpassing on wisdom from master to pupil, the other reinforced that tradition with new beliefs and new insistence upon a communal mode of living. Tasawwuf, the profession of wool or Sufism, from the woollen robe of the ascetic, came from the Mashriq, the Muslim East, where it had already developed into mysticism associated with brotherhood and devotion. For the greatest adepts, the mysticism was of a high intellectual order; taken up in the twelfth century by students of philosophy as well as theology in Muslim Spain, it gave rise to one of the great mystics of all time, Ibn al-Arabi. But Ibn al-Arabi left Spain for the Mashriq at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and North Africa owed much more to his fellow-countryman Abu Madyan, who lived at Fes and Bejaia (Bougie), and died at Tlemcen in 1198. As a pupil of Moroccan holy men (one apparently unlettered) he stood at the beginning of the tradition of instruction. As a teacher himself, he added to the piety of his masters a measure of formal learning in theology and meditation. His teach­ing was followed by his disciples, notably Ibn Mashish in Morocco and al-Dahmani in Ifriqiya, so that it became the intellectual foundation of the ascetic, Sufi tradition in the Maghrib. In the course of the thirteenth century this tradition developed rapidly, producing another of the great figures of Sufism, the Moroccan al-Shadhili. Although Al-Shadhili and many of his fellows removed themselves like Ibn al-Arabi to the Mashriq, by the end of the century the tradition was not only well established in North Africa. Despite the hostility of the purists among the Malikite ulema, it was winning acceptance as a supplementary rather than an alternative form of Islam, to be followed alongside, in addition, to the orthodox tradition of the Shari'a.

Ideally, the holy man lived on charity, giving nothing but his blessing in return. But, again during the thirteenth century, he began to make his mark as a colonist, cultivating land which he had reclaimed from the waste, or which had been given to him. He might live there alone, or at the head of a colony of disciples. Equally, he became associated with travel and trade. His residence then was the zawiya, literally ‘niche’ or ‘corner’, but meaning when it was first introduced into North Africa a hostel giving food and shelter to poor travellers. As the residence of a holy man, the zawiya was naturally a sanctuary protecting its visitors from brigands and marauding nomads; its protection followed them on their way, giving them safe conduct across the surrounding territory. It might easily attract a market where trade could be carried on in peace maintained by the sanctity of the holy man who lived there. For the zawiya to operate in this way, its saintly occupant clearly required not only the respect of the local population, but a measure of obedience. Certainly in Ifriqiya, this was

obtained in a time of troubles begun by war and continued by the presence of warlike Arab nomads, when people looked to the haraka of the man of God to establish some kind oforder. In the course of the fourteenth century, both as a colonist of the land and as a colonist of the caravan trails, the holy man who had originated as an ascetic recluse became a familiar figure in a very different capacity, more or less actively engaged in the regulation of rural, largely tribal, society. This murabit, as he was generally known, differed not only from the hermit of the same name, but also from the militant prophet personified by Ibn Yasin. Whereas that murabit had set out drastically to change the way of life of his audience, the purpose of this one, as perceived by his parishioners, was to moderate and sanctify an existing, customary man­ner of living which may or may not have been strictly in accordance with the Law. For this reason it is useful to distinguish him by a different name, not murabit, the classical Arabic term applied to him in the literature, but the colloquial version with which Europeans eventually became familiar, and rendered into French as marabout.

The marabout effectively put an end to the great days of the prophet, to whose disturbing message he offered a more reassuring alternative. Militancy and zeal were by no means dead, but expressed within a new framework. That framework was the rural equivalent of Islam in the social order of the city, where a scholarly class set the tone of society, and that tone was the faith. Maraboutism in the countryside gathered up all previous beliefs and practices into a form of religion increasingly identical to the social structure of the countryside and its traditional outlook. Within the long­standing animist tradition, for example, the marabout became a legendary figure associated with the supernatural quality of nature located in places and things. Likewise he became a miracle worker, with second sight, the ability to be in two places at once, to alter the reality of the material world, and to command the jinn or spirits who, for good or evil, inhabited the earth. Upon his reputation as a virtuous master of the occult depended much of his authority in practical matters, the righting of wrongs and the arbitration of disputes, in which his word might well be law. For such services to the community, essential to the peace of a largely self-governing society, he would receive gifts. He himself might decline them, to the benefit of his reputation, but take the wealth nevertheless for redistribution to those who sought his charity and protection. As a patron, then, he became a centre of attraction in another way, drawing a following which formed part of his wider clientele. Over time, his central position in the neighbourhood would be confirmed by heredity. His holiness would remain in the place where he was buried, which would become a shrine and a place of pilgrimage, while it reappeared in his offspring, who would form a holy lineage. More than that, he might well become the ancestor of an entire tribe of people who claimed descent from him as his disciples or his proteges. Over the centuries, whole populations were restructured in this way, regrouped as nomads or cul­tivators around some maraboutic settlement, and reassorted into kindreds which were largely fictitious, but served the important purpose of identify­ing each group and its rights in relation to its neighbours. Such maraboutic tribes were often in contrast to more warlike peoples who lived by the sword and claimed a more heroic ancestry; but these too had their patron saints, and came within the scope of the holy men and their operations. In all this, there may have been little of formal Islam, but Islam it essentially was for the peoples concerned.

Formality itself, however, was not lacking. While many marabouts were doubtless ignorant, and undoubtedly rustic, as a class they were increasingly informed by the growing tradition of education in the concepts and practices of Sufism. That in turn involved a certain education in the basic sciences of the Law. The marabout was first a pupil who learned his texts, and at the same time acquired the techniques of abstinence, worship, prayer and meditation which might one day qualify him as a saint. Texts varied, and so did the techniques, but typically consisted in the endless repetition of prayers to induce a state of trance, or in pondering on the allegorical meaning of the Qur’an and the writings of the great masters. The pupil himself was likely to be a wanderer from place to place and teacher to teacher, as far away as Mecca and Medina; he might establish himself in the end very far from his birthplace. When at last he did so, however, he too was likely to be a teacher, passing on what he had learned and what he himself had come to think and do. This might be highly intellectual and deeply spiritual; the new master might be a scholar to rank with any alitn as well as a mystic of great subtlety and difficulty. Even those of less exalted attainments were often distinguishable from the ulema of the cities only in their choice of the maraboutic profession. For by the fifteenth century it had become normal for anyone who aspired to education to train himself as a Sufi as well as an exponent of the Law, and at the higher levels of scholarship and saintliness the learned elite was becoming one and the same.

This was most evident in the development of the zawiya from a wayside hostel to an institution which met the spiritual needs of the marabout as well as the requirements of his social role. At its most elaborate, it contained within itself every kind of building associated with the practice of Islam, from the mosque downwards. It was a complex at whose heart was the tomb of the founder, which hallowed the place, and brought the visitor as nearly as possible into the presence of the other world. With the tomb, typically enclosed by a railing in the centre of a domed chamber, went a mosque with its prayer-hall, and with the mosque a madrasah or school with its reading-room. The hospice remained, offering food and lodging, perhaps with special accommodation for the sick. In and around was the housing for the permanent residents—the holy man and his family; his students; his staff; and his servants. Somewhere there was a library; a reception room where the master would give audience; and a refectory. This last was central to the whole. Materially and spiritually the master or shaykh ‘spread a table’: his earthly hospitality expressed his heavenly welcome: the flock was fed. Nour­ishment depended upon the head of the house. But for the disciple it was likely to be arduous—long hours of readings, recitations and prayers which either began, completed or carried on his education in Sufism. For him, the zawiya was an institution to match and complement the great mosque of the city, traditionally associated with the sciences of religion, above all with jurisprudence. For others, the zawiya met other needs, economic, social and political, according to circumstance, but all within the general meaning of Islam for those concerned.

The zawiya naturally varied in size and importance, and by no means all were so complete and self-contained. But by the fifteenth or sixteenth century, earlier in Ifriqiya, later in Morocco, the full-blown zawiya in town as well as countryside represented the climax of a cumulative process which had brought the murabit, the holy man, in from the margin to the midst of North African society. As the marabout, he spanned the gulf between the literate scholar of the city and the rustic saint. Moreover, as he closed with his baraka the wide gap between the Law of God and the custom of the people, so too he stretched across the deep divide between the state and its subjects. That divide was a major feature of the society. The Muslim state in the Maghrib was an historic achievement, the product of the Arab con­quest and the three great prophetic revolutions which had brought the whole of North Africa within the one system. Despite the determination of an Ibn Yasin to ‘command the right and forbid the wrong’, however, the mechan­ism of government not only remained far from the religious ideal of confor­mity to the Law, but also limited in scope. On the one hand the sultan, the man of power or ruler, was the shepherd of his sheep, his raiya or flock, as his subjects were known. On the other, his majesty as defender of the faith and pillar of justice was upheld in the post-Almohad era by the Marinids of Fes, the Ziyanids of Tlemcen and the Hafsids of Tunis through the collection of taxes and tributes to support a royal household and army. This kind of government is defined by the name which it eventually acquired in Morocco, that is makhzan or treasury. It lived largely for itself, taking its dues and exacting obedience while leaving the various communities of its subjects, even in the cities, as far as possible to govern themselves. The marabout in consequence was called upon to play a vital political and administrative role.

When the state was strong, as in Ifriqiya under the Hafsids in the fifteenth century, the marabout kept the peace on behalf of the sultan by his authority in local disputes. At the same time he protected the local population from the excesses of the tax-collector and the army. Receiv­ing pious gifts from the men of power, he was able to distribute that much more to his own people, and so increase his standing even further. With his fellow heads ofzawiyas and the ulema who were his cousins in the same milieu of piety and learning, he was a member of a class of religious notables highly influential in the counsels of the monarch. When the state was weak, on the other hand, as it was throughout the Maghrib in the first half of the sixteenth century, the marabout might join the struggle for power, on behalf of some claimant to the throne or in his own right. The Saadian dynasty came to power in Morocco in the sixteenth century with the help of the marabouts and the tribesmen they controlled. At the same time in western Algeria, another such holy man acquired the aura of the expected Mahdi, come to restore the reign ofjustice and righteousness. His cause came to nothing, but in what is now Tunisia, a marabout with a tribal following founded at Qayrawan (Kairouan) a short-lived dynasty, the Shabbiya. Much more spectacular, although equally short-lived, were the maraboutic principalities which ruled Morocco in the middle of the seventeenth century, most notably that of the zawiya of Dila in the Middle Atlas, which at its height covered two-thirds of the country and was on the point of establishing a permanent monarchy. These great adventures show the extent to which the marabout had taken over from the murabit as holy warrior and as statesman. Unlike the prophet who came from outside, he was already integrated into tribal society on the strength of his baraka, his all-purpose holiness. From that baraka, rather than any prophetic mission, came the ability to turn on occasion from an authority in tribal affairs into a ruler equipped with the state’s apparatus of coercion, tax-gathering and repression. Nevertheless, by comparison with the achievements of the prophets of the three great revolutions of the Fatimids, the Almoravids and the Almohads, the marabouts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries failed to make good their power. New dynasties of warriors forced them back into their customary role.

Politically, the eighteenth century saw the modem states of North Africa take shape within their present boundaries. In Morocco, the Alawite dynasty which overthrew the zawiya of Dila in the 1660s established itself as the ruling house to which the present king belongs. Like the Saadians before them in the sixteenth century, the Alawites claimed the throne as shartfs (Arabic pl. shurafa) or descendants of the Prophet. Sharifianism in the Maghrib dated from at least the fourteenth century, but only became widespread when it became royal. Sharifian lineages then proliferated, creating an elite of no particular profession but high esteem, which overlapped the ulema and marabouts who formed the religious aristoc­racy. Still greater emphasis was thus placed upon hereditary holiness, upon the notion of families in whose blood ran a godliness which showed itself from generation to generation in gifted individuals. But although the holy men aspired to royalty as the royal family became holy, the division between the two remained hard and fast. The traditional relationship between the sultan and the alim, the man of power and the man of wisdom, was not destroyed.

To the east of Morocco, political and religious change was of a different kind. Provinces of the Ottoman Empire since the sixteenth century, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya became independent in all but name by the eighteenth century, but still under the government of Turks or rulers of Turkish descent. These formed in each country a small but powerful ruling class, distinguished from their North African subjects by, among other things, their Islam. The Turks belonged to the Hanafite rather than the Malikite school of the Law, equally orthodox, but characterised by its own mosques and its own ulema. These came in the main from learned families of Turkish origin, who because of their association with the state exercised a disproportionate influence. More important was the principle which they represented, of political and administrative distinctions on the grounds of religion. This dated from the Arab conquests, which had divided the faithful from their non-Muslim subjects, but had almost vanished in practice from North Africa, whose native Christian population had disappeared, leaving only the Jews. Nor had there been much need to distinguish, as in the Middle East, between different kinds of Muslims with their own doctrines and religious leaders. Malikism had eliminated all formal differences between Muslims in the Maghrib except for the Ibadites, whose communities were now small and scattered, and as far as the state was concerned, on the same footing as tribes. But the introduction of the Hanafite school by the Turks was a reminder of how important a difference of religion could still be to the Muslim community and its government.

Formal differences had nevertheless entered into North African Islam, although because they did not affect the Law they did not fall into the same category as the Malikite-Hanafite divide. These differ­ences turned on points of Sufi teaching rather than legal doctrine, on the so-called tariqas (Ar. pl. turuq) or spiritual ‘ways’ of the Sufi masters which their disciples followed. Those who followed a particular tariqa were likely to form a particular group or brotherhood. The older the tariqa, the larger and more diffuse the brotherhood was likely to be, stretching across the Muslim world with no particular organisation. But within such tariqas new masters could arise, and other masters could break away to establish their own. The newer the tariqa thus revived or created, the more likely it was to generate a closer and more active community, very often centred upon some parent zawiya. That was especially so in the Maghrib, where the notions of tariqa and brotherhood readily coincided with and reinforced the relationship between a marabout and his clients in tribal society. From the fifteenth century onwards, therefore, and certainly by the eighteenth, we find a proliferation of names of brotherhoods covering the whole range of maraboutism, and to some extent scholarship as well. Some of these names went back for cen­turies, notably Qadiriyya to the Iraqi Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani in the twelfth cen­tury, and Shadhiliyya to the Moroccan al-Shadhili in the thirteenth. Others were more recent, and their brotherhoods much more closely associated with their founders. Some were distinctly local, reflecting the position of the founder and his successors in the locality. Others had a more general appeal.

Sometimes this was a matter of lifestyle. The Isawiyya (Aissaoua) were exhibitionists, eating fire and cutting themselves in ecstasy, the most extravagant of those who lived in holy beggary on the fringe of society, the successors of the murabit in his extreme repudiation of the world. Much more respectable, the Qadiriyya traded on the immense reputation of its eponymous founder, one of the great saints of Islam. In between, however, was the holy man who attracted not only disciples, and not merely the allegiance of peoples in the vicinity, but a wide and popular following which cut across community and class. The first conspicuous example of such a person was al-Jazuli in Morocco in the fifteenth century, who ranged the country at the head of an itinerant horde drawn by his promise of immediate entry into his ‘way’ and subsequent salvation. After his death and burial in the western High Atlas, his Jazuliyya order settled into a normal maraboutic practice in the region. But there were others, and at the end of the eighteenth century appeared a whole set of shaykhs whose tariqas and confraternities were as much revivalist movements as the routine opera­tion of Sufism within the maraboutic system. In eastern Algeria and southern Tunisia sprang up the Rahmaniyya in the belief that reverence for the foun­der, his tomb and his tariqa was security against damnation. In western Algeria the Qadiriyya was reintroduced by a sharif with a commission from the order in Baghdad and Cairo; his zawiya near Mascara rapidly became a focus for the whole Turkish province of Oran. From western Algeria also came al-Tijani, who considered himself directly inspired by the Prophet to establish the one true brotherhood which everyone should join, but join to the exclusion of all others. His centre was in Morocco, where his puritanical message, which disapproved of the more extravagant forms of piety, con­trasted with the tariqa of al-Darqawi, which emphasised holy poverty and ecstasy. The Tijaniyya was for a while in favour at court, while the more popular Darqawiyya became associated with rebellion. In Algeria likewise the new orders were of political importance in the last days of Turkish rule. In both countries they were associated with conflicts of ideas and discontents with established order which threatened a century of revolution.

In the event, the revolution of the nineteenth century in North Africa was brought about by European intervention. The French conquest of Algeria from 1830 onwards was contested by the brotherhoods down to the Margueritte affair in 1903. In Abdelkader (Abd al-Qadir) the Qadiriyya produced Algeria’s national hero, who between 1832 and 1847 briefly created his own state to replace that of the Turks and defy the French. For this he drew upon the influence of his marabout father over the tribes to make himself emir, on the one hand a ruler, on the other a leader of the holy way against the infidel. He was doomed: he needed to fight the French to keep the loyalty of his followers, but peace with them to organise his power. In the end he lost both. Subsequently it was the turn of the Rahmaniyya in eastern Algeria, then of the maraboutic families and tribes of the Awlad Sidi Shaykh in the south and south-west. When all else failed, prophets and mahdis made their appearance to call for a general rising—Bu Maza, Man with a Goat; Bu Baghla, Man with a Mule; Bu Amama, Man with a Turban; and others. Later still, in the twentieth century, the Fadiliyya under the great marabout Ma al-Aynayn and his sons resisted the French and the Spanish in the Moroccan Sahara down to 1934. In Libya from 1911, the Italians encoun­tered the Sanusiyya, a brotherhood which survived the destruction of its zawiyas to organise a guerrilla war and finally to provide the newly indepen­dent state of Libya with its first head, King Idris.

The Sanusiyya was unique in its ability to transform itself from a traditional religious into a modern political movement, and to found a modern state instead of a traditional sultanate. It did so in unique circumstances, largely because of British support. All other orders which opposed the European conquest succumbed to military defeat before either their appeal or their leadership, wide as these might be, could develop into nationalism and national government. Some, like the Tijaniyya in Algeria, collaborated from the first. Once subdued, the brotherhoods were first patronised by the European administration as traditional agents for the control of traditional society, then attacked by Muslim reformers for their backwardness and compliance. French ethnography, which was employed as a tool by French government to create a detailed picture of North African society for the purpose of surveillance, gave substance to a pejorative image of maraboutism as a highly unorthodox form of Islam, riddled with supersti­tion and verging on paganism, which on the one hand justified a managerial approach to a primitive culture, and on the other, sharp criticism of the degradation encouraged by colonial rule. Both positions were theoretical. North African society was changing rapidly, causing the marabouts and their brotherhoods to lose many of their old functions as tribal life lost much of its independence or simply ceased to exist. The corresponding growth of a population either dislocated or restructured by the colonial economy created a new constituency, but one in which maraboutism began to contrast and conflict with the Islam of the Law.

Both the Law and its guardians, the ulema, were fundamentally affected by the French conquest and annexation of Algeria from 1830, the establishment of the French Protectorates of Tunisia in 1881 and Morocco in 1912, and the Italian conquest and annexation of Libya between 1911 and 1940. In each case, a powerful European type of state, based on legislation, working through bureaucracy and regulating sphere after sphere of activity, took the place of the previous makhzan type of government based on tax-collection and the army. In each, the maintenance of the Islamic Law became only one among other purposes of government; the Law itself depended on legislation rather than divinity to have any legal force; its administration was incorporated into the bureaucracy; and its application was much more strictly limited, for the most part to family matters. Thus reduced as far as possible to what the French in Algeria called a statut personnel or personal statute, the Law nevertheless served an important administrative purpose as the definition of a Muslim as distinct from a Frenchman or an Italian. This use of Islam, which recalls the traditional use of religion in a Muslim state to separate Muslims from non-Muslims, and to some extent Muslims from Muslims, excluded the bulk of the Muslim population of Algeria from French citizenship, and everywhere meant the application of different laws of other kinds to the native as opposed to the immigrant European population.

The ulema who administered the Law in the courts, who taught it especially in the university mosques of the Zaytuna (Zitouna) at Tunis and the Qarawiyyin (Karaouiyine) at Fes, and who staffed the mosques with prayer-leaders and preachers, reluctantly accepted the need to serve under the new regimes. Willingly or unwillingly they then co-operated with the European authorities, either because it was profitable to do so, or because of an even stronger dislike for the new generation of Westernised North Africans whose secular attitudes seemed to threaten their traditional values. To such as these they preferred colonial governments which for their own good reasons gave their approval to traditional Islam as a defence against modem twentieth century agitation for national independence. In this posi­tion the ulema came to resemble the marabouts as clients of the colonial state which provided them with a niche of their own. A vocal minority neverthe­less continued to protest at such an unnatural state of affairs, in which Islam was not free and not supreme. From 1900 onwards these belonged broadly to the Salafiyya, the movement for Islamic reform associated with the name of the Egyptian alim (scholar), Muhammed Abduh (d. 1905). The Salafiyya called for the aggiornamento or updating of Islam to meet the exigencies of the modem world, by a return to the religion of the salaf, the ancestors, to the original principles of the faith. Once the accumulation of traditional interpre­tations had been removed, Islam could once again become the principle of human progress. In the pre-colonial period, those who thought in this way had looked to Muslim rulers to introduce the necessary reforms, but in the colonial period the task fell to the people. How it was to be accomplished was a problem. Some thought that Islam should be simply a personal faith and a moral standard, others that immediate political independence was required to reintroduce Islam into the structure of government and society. The main line from Muhammad Abduh held that the faith should be inculcated and the Law reinterpreted before the community was ready for independence and the final triumph of religion.

Despite opposition from the conservative ulema, who feared that the Salafiyya was blasphemous in the revisions of the faith which it contemplated, the demand for independence was pressed in Tunisia by the Cheikh Taalbi (Shaykh al-Thaalibi) and in Morocco by Allal el-Fassi, both men of religious training and conviction who became leaders of nationalist parties. In Algeria, where the demand for independence was tantamount to treason in a country which was officially part of France, the Cheikh (Shaykh) Ben Badis formed an association of reforming ulema to campaign for equal rights for Muslims with Europeans, and in particular for the right to be educated in classical Arabic and the sciences of Islam. His campaign was combined with a strong attack upon maraboutism and its Sufi practices as representative of the very worst in traditional Islam, keeping the people in ignorance and subjection. In this way he sought to raise the level of Muslim consciousness to a new standard of literacy and faith.

As a result of the preaching, teaching and campaign­ing of these leaders and their associates, their ideas were doubly effective. On the one hand they helped to identify the old concept of the Muslim commun­ity with the new principle of the nation, and to assign a role to Islam in national culture. On the other, they served to discredit the more conservative ulema, but most especially the marabouts and their confraternities, as poor Muslims and bad patriots. This was a considerable achievement on the part of a movement which depended very much upon individual effort to accom­plish the dual task of presenting an Islamic alternative to Western secularism, and at the same time bringing Islam up to date in the modem world. It was not, however, enough to form an effective nationalist movement for political independence, or to provide North African states which had just achieved independence with a comprehensive programme of government. This was because the means which religious leaders had traditionally employed to organise a wider following—tribe, zawiya, brotherhood and mosque—had lost their old political efficacy; and religion was not the only criterion for the modem alternative, the political party. Still less were the reformers in a position to capture the bureaucracy that was the modern alternative to the makhzan; the hope of Muhammad Abduh that a new doctrine of the Law could be devised to replace the old was far from realisation.

In Tunisia the Cheikh Taalbi was the most popular leader of the Old Destour, the first nationalist party, founded in 1920, which stood for constitutional rights including the rights of Islam as the national religion. But from 1934 the Old Destour was eclipsed by the Neo-Destour of Bourguiba, a Westernised leader who relied on the appeal of Islam but opposed its representatives. In Morocco Allal el-Fassi remained at the head of the Istiqlal, easily the largest nationalist party, which he founded in 1944. But in his case, the cause of the party was subordinated to the cause of the Sultan, who became the focus of religious sentiment for political purposes. In Algeria the successors of Ben Badis turned away from self-government as an immediate objective, with the result that they played a very limited part in the Algerian revolution. Their choice is nicely illustrated by the publication in 1954 of Malek Bennabi’s La vocation de I’Islam, a book which argued that Muslims must purify their inner faith before taking political action, in the year when the Algerian war was begun by militants who would wait no longer. In terms of Islam, the war was ambiguous. The newspaper of the FLN (Front de Liberation National) was called El Moudjahid (Al-Mujahid), the fighter in the holy war; guerrillas were called fidain, self-sacrificers, and tnusabbilin, the dedicated, both terms with religious connotations; the obser­vance of Islamic prohibitions upon drinking and smoking was brutally enforced to solidarise the Muslim population. On the other hand, the war was never declared to be a jihad, a holy war upon the infidel; down to the end in 1962, Algerian citizenship was to be irrespective of religion; and many Muslims fought for the French.

This ambiguity survived the independence of Tunisia and Morocco in 1956, and of Algeria in 1962. It led in 1965 to an article by the American scholar Leon Carl Brown which is almost an histori­cal document of the 1960s, recording the impression created in the period immediately after the end of French rule. Brown observed a sharp contrast between a Muslim past and a largely non-Muslim present. The pervasive maraboutism of the old Maghrib had, he said, been supplanted by the radicalism of Islamic reform, which had inspired the struggle for indepen­dence; but with independence, it seemed that Islam had been put aside, having served its historical purpose. He noted the non-Islamic forms of government inherited from the French, and the secular objectives of the new regimes, which in the case of Bourguiba’s Tunisia were positively anti- Islamic; a Westernised lifestyle was in demand. At the same time, anti­Islamism had its limits. Islam was in all cases the state religion; there was no anti-clericalism directed at theulema·, and while the mosques were emptying, Bourguiba had been obliged to abandon his attempt to abolish the fast of Ramadan. Although the future seemed to lie with secularism, its triumph was not quite certain.

The history of the twenty years since Brown wrote has seen the situation develop while the question remains. In 1965 the populist president of Algeria, Ben Bella, was overthrown by the puritanical commander of the army, Boumedienne; a radical modernist who seemed to flout Islam in the name of Marxism was replaced by a leader of good Muslim education and profound conviction who had named himself after the great saint Abu Madyan. In the novel circumstances of the twentieth century, Boumedienne was almost a murabit, a man with a self-appointed mission to establish an Islamic government. But as in the empire of the Almoravids, this commitment did not radically alter the character of the state, which followed the standard practice of the twentieth century as a bureaucratic insitution in pursuit of its citizens’ welfare, in this case by state socialism. Public obser­vance of Ramadan, for example, was compulsory, as befitted one of the most important duties imposed upon the community by the Law; it constituted a form of national discipline. In most respects, however, the state religion was confined to the sphere of cult and culture under a minister appointed for the purpose. Islam, in other words, achieved the position sought for it in the French state by Ben Badis, along with classical Arabic, which became the language of education. But there was little or no attempt to rethink the structure of government and administration, or its legislative foundation, and thus to achieve the ultimate aim of the Salafiyya.

Much the same could be said of Tunisia and Morocco. Islam has been a principle of legitimacy in whose name govern­ments have felt justified in keeping power and ruling in the national interest. All three regimes have accordingly attracted opposition from Muslims who have felt that the anti-colonial revolution has been betrayed to the advantage of privileged classes and to the detriment of Islamic justice. This opposition has found expression in Islamic fundamentalism, the call for a return to the elementary letter of the Law as stated above all in the Qur’an, disregarding both traditional legal doctrine and the arguments of the Salafiyya for reform and reinterpretation. Such fundamentalism has been linked with the name of the Muslim Brethren, the Islamic radicals and revolutionaries of Egypt, and seemed especially alarming after the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, when crowds in Tunisia listened to popular preachers, and mosques in Algeria filled with stern young men. But any threat has so far been stifled by governments which continue to enjoy large measures of support and good­will, and extensive powers of repression. Westernisation has maintained its force, even if religion may have inhibited overt secularism.

From the point of view of Islam, however, the most dramatic political event in the Maghrib since Brown wrote in the mid-1960s was the revolution in Libya in 1969 which substituted Colonel Gadaffi (Qadhdhafi) for King Idris, a radical anti-Western regime for one denounced as a pro-Western clique. The revolution itself, in a country made unex­pectedly rich by oil, was more political than religious, despite the religious origins of the monarchy. Nevertheless Gadaffi has been truly radical in religion as well as politics. Opposed to government by elected representa­tives of the people and by man-made laws, he has introduced a scheme of government by popular committees. These, composed of the people them­selves, will take decisions in accordance with ‘the law of society’, which for Muslims is the Law of God. This should mean that they will be the interpret­ers of the Law in accordance with the old legal maxim: ‘my people (i.e. God’s) will never agree upon an error’. Thus the Law is not only to be taken out of the hands of the ulema, but introducted at every point into government, in place of bureaucracy and its norms. The theory is sketched in Gadaffi’s tract The Green Book, but in practice it has taken years to organise the committees, and meanwhile Gadaffi has remained a dictator. In that capacity it is he, rather than the people in committee, who has become the national authority for the Law, declaring that the Qur’an alone, rather than the whole corpus of scripture and commentary upon which Sunnite jurisprudence rests, is its source. Not only, then, does he provide a second example of an individual inspired to lead a modern community in the path of righteousness, but the sole example in North Africa of a fundamentalist in power. While Gadaffi’s policies may have been inconsistent and changeable, they have in conse­quence been vigorous, and often violent. From the Qur’an he has taken the moral authority for a continuous revolution which is only Islamic by his definition, but socialist in its redistribution of wealth and more dubiously in its committee system. Meanwhile his definition of Islam makes an important addition to the scope of religion in North Africa today.

Where, then, does Brown’s case for secularisation now stand? Reports are conflicting. From Tunisia we hear that traditional Islamic attitudes gained strength at a time (1967-73), when the regime had ceased to be so openly secularist, and from Morocco that secularism has flourished under a government which has been notably tolerant in religious matters. Morocco will probably strike the visitor as more, Tunisia as less, traditionally Islamic. In Algeria, the country which may seem most like Europe, the zawiyas denounced by Ben Badis have been criticised for their continued hold upon the upper as well as lower levels of society. Religious observances like prayer of course continue, and religious institutions like mosques naturally remain. The pilgrimage to Mecca, which the French once sought to prevent, is still popular and respectable. Mosques are places for men to meet or pass the time as well as pray—though prayer is a ritual which must be learnt by imitation, by praying ‘behind’ one who knows; and not all Muslims have done so. The countryside is covered with the domed tombs of holy men which are themselves called marabouts, some ruined, some well maintained, visited mainly by women. The zawiyas are still centres of brotherhoods frequented by their khouan (ikhwan, brothers); the tombs of their founders are equally sought by supplicants, both men and women. The wilder, more ecstatic orders survive, though do not noticeably prosper. Festivals are celebrated, either nationally, like the canonical feasts of sacrifice and breaking the fast at the end of Ramadan, or locally, like the moussems (mawsims, seasons, sc. monsoon), annual gatherings at a shrine. The Mawlid or Prophet’s birthday is a popular occasion. The ban on pork is almost universally observed, the fast of Ramadan fairly generally; but alcohol is drunk, and smoking common.

Change, on the whole, is in the direction favoured by the state. With the spread of education, the movement of people into and out of the countryside, and the development of mass communications, the tendency is towards a standard of religion set by reformers, basic learning in place of popular belief. Approximation to this standard goes with the development of the national community, just as conformity to it is an element in national consciousness. Conformity may often be conventional, with little conviction; but it may equally be intensified by nationalism. From this point of view the national society is taking over from the traditional, and Islam is acquiring a new social and political function in place of all those it has lost to the state. To a greater extent than Brown anticipated, therefore, modern Islam has counterbalanced the continuing growth of secular attitudes to match the growth of secular society and institutions. From another point of view, however, this is misleading; the problem itself is different, and must be rephrased—not secularism versus Islam, but modernity, religious or otherwise, versus tradition which is still far from done.

This, the original problem of the Salafiyya, has remained despite the achievement of independence, which for others beside Brown should have completed the transformation of traditional values in the course of the battle for freedom. Another American scholar, David C. Gordon, writing at the same time as Brown, saw tradition rather as a lingering obstacle to be overcome only by a long struggle in which the state would play a crucial role. Tradition in this sense clearly does not mean the way of life of pre-colonial North Africa, but those elements which have endured, either because they are associated with poverty and backwardness, or because they have in fact proved useful in the competition to survive, or because they are so basic that they have remained when so much else has gone. In all three categories we find the Muslim family.

Islamic Law does not recognise the family, only the rights and duties of its members, giving more to adult males and fewer to women and children. These rights and duties, however, govern the tradi­tional Muslim family, which is recognised by custom as part of the Muslim way of fife. Custom has varied from country to city, where the Law is most in evidence, and where women have been most secluded. In general, however, it has confirmed the father as the head of the household and the elder brother as the head of the line. Women have belonged in principle inside the house, with a separate sphere of activity from the men; this separation extends to religion, where women worship at the shrines of saints while men worship in the mosques, and where they have a reputation for magic, white and black. Modern city life has reduced the barriers, and for many women has brought extensive Westernisation; but the tradition remains extremely strong. Inde­pendence brought no sudden change, as Frantz Fanon, the writer of the Algerian revolution, predicted; the veil is still much in evidence, and the sexes widely segregated.

The problem about the position of women is one of attitudes to the subject as much as facts. In the colonial period, Europeans were accustomed to consider Muslim women as degraded, and their degrada­tion as the result of Islam. Even the sympathetic Budgett Meakin in Morocco about 1900 quoted the North African adage, ‘a donkey by day and a darling by night’, to epitomise their servitude. Since then, the association of inferior­ity and oppression with Islam has produced a corresponding identification of emancipation with Westernisation. As a result, an argument about modernis­ation has been confused with the argument over secularisation. The Salafiyya has concerned itself with women’s rights, but its most celebrated attack on tradition in this matter, that by Tahar Haddad in Tunisia in the 1930s, led to his disqualification as a teacher. Approaching the question from a different angle, Germaine Tillion has tried to take the subject out of religion by demonstrating that the position of Muslim women in North Africa is only a variation of that of women in Mediterranean Europe as well as the Middle East. But the most celebrated piece of legislation in favour of women, the prohibition of polygamy in Tunisia, was enacted by Bourguiba in his most defiantly secularist vein. Polygamy in fact is not a great problem, since few can afford it, or wish to do so; and the slave concubine disappeared with slavery itself, prohibited and abolished from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Traditional views are nevertheless firmly held not only in the population at large, but by many who feel that the Muslim family is of the essence of the nation. Non-Muslims, on the other hand, are generally critical. The argument is not very well informed, and only recently have good descriptions begun to appear to clarify the issues. Eventually it may be possible to distinguish between what women have, what they want and what they are entitled to. Meanwhile an emotive subject continues to involve Islam in principle and in practice in the battle for the future.

Further Reading

Berque, J. French North Africa. The Maghrib between two World Wars (London, 1967) Brett, M. and Forman, W. The Moors. Islam in the West (Orbis, London, 1980) ‘Islam in the Maghreb’, The Maghreb Review, II, 3 (1977), pp. 18-22; II, 4 (1977),

pp. 14-18; III, 5-6 (1978), pp. 6-9

----- ‘Mufti, Murabit, Marabout and Mahdi: four types in the Islamic history of North Africa’, Ëåãèå del’Occident Musulman et de la Mediterranee, XXXI (1980), pp. 5-15

Brown, K.L. People of Sale. Tradition and change in a Moroccan city, 1830-1930 (Man­chester Univesity Press, Manchester, 1976)

Cambridge History of Africa, 8 vols. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975-86)

Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1st edn (Leiden and London, 1913-38); 2nd edn (Leiden and London, 1954, in progress); Shorter Encyclopaedia (Leiden and London, 1961)

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Oxford, 1949)

Geertz, C. Islam Observed. Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (New Haven,

1968; University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1971)

Gellner, E. Saints of the Atlas (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1969)

Jenkins, R.G. ‘The Evolution of Religious Brotherhoods in North and Northwest

Africa, 1523-1900’, inJ.R. Willis (ed.), Studies in West African Islamic History, I, The Cultivators of Islam (Cassell & Co., London, 1979), pp. 40-77

Julien, Ch.-A. History of North Africa: from the Arab conquest to 1830 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1970)

Keddie, N.R. (ed.) Scholars, Saints and Sufis. Muslim religious institutions in the Middle East since 1500 (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1972)

Le Tourneau, R. Fez in the Age of the Marinids (Norman, Oklahoma, 1961)

Martin, B.G. Muslim Brotherhoods in Nineteenth-Century Africa (Cambridge Univer­sity Press, Cambridge, 1976)

Mernissi, F. Beyond the Veil. Male-female dynamics in a modern Muslim society (Halsted Press, New York, 1975)

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