Review of Islam, réforme et colonisation: une histoire de l'ibadisme en Algérie, 1882–1962

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Jul 25, 2022 Algeria
Review of Islam, réforme et colonisation: une histoire de l'ibadisme en Algérie, 1882–1962

Review of Islam, réforme et colonisation: une histoire de l'ibadisme en Algérie, 1882–1962

By : Benjamin Claude Brower

Augustin Jomier, Islam, réforme et colonisation: une histoire de l'ibadisme en Algérie, 1882–1962, (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020).

[This review was originally published in the Spring 2022 issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.]

This book shows how big histories occur in small places. It tells the story of the modernist Islamic reform movement in a compact Saharan society of Ibadiyya, a denomination dating to the early centuries of Islam. In the modern era, Ibadis live in Oman, Zanzibar, and in several places across northwestern Africa, namely, the island of Djerba in Tunisia, Libya’s Nafusa Mountains, and the Mzab Valley in the north-central Algerian Sahara. The Ibadis of the Mzab numbered only about thirty-to-forty thousand people in the first half of the twentieth century with their lives centered on several fortified oases, although a diaspora of thought and migration took them many other places. Using Berber as their vernacular, they enjoyed a hegemonic position in the Mzab Valley, which was also home to Arabic-speaking Maliki and Jewish minorities, along with Africans of color (including slaves), a handful of French colonial personnel, and Catholic missionaries. Until recently, historians had neglected the Ibadis of northern Africa, almost giving up on their story after the Rustamid dynasty that ruled in the central Maghrib from the eighth to the tenth centuries. (New publications, for example Paul M. Love Jr.’s Ibadi Muslims of North Africa: Manuscripts, Mobilization, and the Making of a Written Tradition, take Ibadi history up to the sixteenth century.) This historiographical silence left the impression that Ibadis after the tenth century lived in stasis and were no longer significant historical actors. During the War of National Liberation (1954–62), the Mzab saw few major events, and it entered the history of decolonization as a footnote, the birthplace of poet Mufdi Zakariya’ who drafted the lyrics of the “Qassaman,” Algeria’s national anthem. A few Algerian historians wrote histories of reforming Ibadi scholars in the founding fathers’ trope, which placed the Ibadiyya within the mainstream of Algeria’s Islamic reform movement (Muhammad ‘Ali Dabbuz, Nahdat al-Jaza’ir al-Haditha wa-Thawratuha al-Mubaraka, Algiers: al-Matba‘a al-Thaqafiyya, 1965–1979, 3 vols.).

A decade ago, the Ibadis were rescued from the historiographical doldrums with Amal Ghazal’s book on Ibadiyya globalization, Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (1880s–1930s). Ghazal revealed links between the Omani Ibadiyya of Zanzibar and Ibadiyya elsewhere, notably the Mzab and its widely respected scholar Muhammad b. Yusuf Atfayyish (1820–1914), whose specialized work in the Islamic sciences, as well as his popularly pitched appeals to Muslim unity across sectarian lines, served the Omanis in advancing their pan-Ibadi projects. This research showed the Ibadis as dynamic actors in the modern era.

Whereas Ghazal looks at the Ibadiyya transnationally and with an eye toward their role in anticolonial nationalism, Jomier tells a centripetal story of Ibadi reform in the Mzab, where colonialism, although figuring as an important catalyst, does not stand as the story’s telos. This is an intellectual history grounded in social history. Thus, while Jomier is attentive to ideas, his focus falls on economic transformations, print culture, education, and pedagogy, as well as on new transportation and communications technologies and forms of association. The colonial context amplified the cultural stakes of such new forms of living, making it difficult to disentangle what was simply “new” from what was alien and oppressive. Such ambiguity led to struggles over fundamental questions like modernity and authenticity. Jomier shows how local reformers invested themselves in these struggles with the discourses of Islamic reform to appropriate cultural influence and political power. Such discourses provided leverage in the reformers’ efforts to displace their rivals, scholars who described themselves as muhafizun, or “preservers” (174) of cultural and jurisprudential practices that they saw as threatened by modernist reform. The first reformers occasionally called themselves mujaddid (renewer) before the better-known terms islah (reform) and muslih (reformer) achieved semantic stability as polemical slogans in the 1930s, an evolution that Jomier carefully traces in the Ibadi press in chapter 2. Working within the Mzab as well as from privileged positions in Tunis and Cairo, where they had access to the latest ideas and printing presses, the reformers sought to discredit their rivals as retrograde. By the beginning of World War II, they had gained control in the Mzab, and they were well situated to participate in electoral politics when this opportunity opened to Muslims in Algeria after 1947. Reforming scholars like Ibrahim Bayyud (1899–1981) converted their cultural capital into political power and became the undisputed leaders of their community after independence.

The reformers also took aim at longstanding vernacular practices of common people. These included visits to tombs of venerated saints (ziyarat al-awliya’), an important popular form of religious practice wherein devotees appealed to saints to help with health, marriage, and reproduction, as well as to favorably balance the desert’s volatile water cycle. Jomier devotes a richly documented and argued chapter (chapter 6) to tracing the attacks made by Ibadi reformers on the ziyarat and the stakes involved. In their intellectual aspects, these struggles resembled non-Ibadi reformers’ attacks on popular religiosity elsewhere, with charges such as associationism and paganism leading the way, along with the general sense that the cult of the saints promoted superstition among the people they saw as ignorant masses. As in other places, Mzabi women and the nonliterate lost access to an important form of religious expression: reformers decided that they lacked the proper comportment (adab) for the visits, a decision that made ziyarat off limits to all but the most educated, who in turn disenchanted the ritual and let it wither. Along with the doctrinal stakes, the ziyarat in the Mzab were the site of entrenched economic interests. Unlike other parts of Algeria, the Mzab’s religious endowments known as habus and tinubawin (the latter being a Berber name for a type of Mzabi endowment) escaped confiscation by the French and they represented a significant economic resource. The fact that many of the endowments were tied to the cemeteries and tombs, and that local people directed alms (sadaqa) to the cemeteries to pay for graveside recitations and communal meals added to the economic dimension to Mzabi struggles over the cult of the saints. The ziyarat put wealth in motion, a process of redistribution that remained in the hands of conservatives. Thus, when reformers took aim at the cult of the saints, they targeted their rivals’ pocketbooks and relationships with their clients.

The book is the fruit of a 2015 doctoral thesis, and it includes an impressive amount of pioneering research in Mzabi archives and libraries. Jomier works primarily from periodical print sources, along with records of the colonial administration. The book draws heavily from three journals representing Ibadi reform that span the 1920s and 1930s: Al-Minhaj (printed in Cairo, 1924–32), Wadi Mizab (published in Tunis and Algiers, 1926–29), and Al-Umma (1933–38). For their part, conservatives eschewed print technology, meaning that their voices are less well represented in this book, although Jomier does go to manuscript sources, an effort that allows him to see the conservatives as dynamic and innovative in their own right. Finally, Jomier has uncovered a substantial archive of rare historical photographs from the Pères Blancs library in the Mzab, which his editors have wisely agreed to publish in the book. These include rare portraits of important notables, including a full-length, carefully staged studio photograph of Shaykh Bayyud taken about 1940, which shows up how reformers mastered modern visual media, reworked into their own idioms, to amplify their message, artifacts that can be read fruitfully alongside Leor Halevi’s Modern Things on Trial: Islam’s Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865–1935.

This book is a major accomplishment. Jomier sweeps aside the stagnancy trope for northern Africa’s Ibadiyya, but his argument’s significance is wider-ranging. For one, he shows up a much different type of “stasis,” one connected to the original Greek meaning of “faction” and “civil war.” The reform movement produced new social cleavages in Mzabi society and widened existing ones (including between Ibadiyya and the Mzab’s Malikiyya minority), and these played themselves out with agricultural sabotage, defamation, excommunications, physical assaults, and even assassination attempts (Bayyud survived five attempts on his life), all the stuff of the “contentious politics” studied in other places by Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow. The reader should not look to this book for major insights into the Algerian Revolution, however. Apart from showing that Mufdi Zakariya’ had an intellectual career that went well beyond the Qassaman lyrics, the book gives little attention to the 1954–62 period, perhaps a small sign of revolt on Jomier’s own part against the hegemonic position of these years in the current historiography. Within the field of Algerian and Islamic history, Jomier finds that Ibadi reformers’ goal of rapprochement (taqrib) with mainstream Sunnis was largely met at the national level, even if it proved impossible locally. The Ibadi reformers distanced themselves from their controversial Khawarij origins and formed common cause with mainstream reformism in Algeria (Association of Algerian Muslim ‘Ulama’) in adopting much of its thinking and applying the Islamic principle of unicity (tawhid) to make a place for Berberophones in the Algerian nation. Jomier’s book also has important insights for colonial historians. He seeks to understand the history of colonialism “from the inside,” using Arabic sources. In the process he successfully threads the needle of properly weighing the important and transformative impact of French colonialism on this society without seeing it as the be-all and end-all of modern Mzabi history. In sum, Jomier’s exhaustive research and sophisticated arguments have produced valuable new perspectives for northwest African history that historians in other fields will read fruitfully.
Jul 18, 2022 Lebanon
Natasha Marie Llorens By :
Natasha Marie Llorens

Review of Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École: Fabrications of Modernism, Gender, and Power

Jessica Gerschultz, Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École: Fabrications of Modernism, Gender, and Power (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019).

[This review was originally published in the Spring 2022 issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.]

Jessica Gerschultz’s meticulously researched and gorgeously illustrated volume on the decorative arts in mid-twentieth century Tunisia is torn between two intellectual desires. One is the desire to revalorize artistic practices too often dismissed as quotidian or feminine. The other aims to provide a detailed account of the institutions grappling with Tunisian aesthetic identity after the country’s independence in 1956. In the space between her epistemological and empirical arguments, Gerschultz proposes that artists and artisans in Tunisia imagined the decorative arts as an arena for integrating “indigenous” art with modernist avant-garde tendencies gleaned from elsewhere. She argues that this imaginative work was feminist because it granted women access to training and exhibition opportunities and—at a more profound level—because it undermined the supremacy of Eurocentric modernism as a masculinist discourse.

There is no question that Gerschultz’s work is groundbreaking, as little has been published on Tunisian modernism in the visual arts. Legendary Tunisian art critic Dorra Bouzid’s (b. 1933) Ecole de Tunis: Un âge d'or de la peinture tunisienne (1995) and painter and former director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis Naceur Ben Cheikh’s (b. 1943) Peindre à Tunis: pratique artistique maghrébine et histoire (2006) are two notable entries in what is otherwise an open field. The broader stakes of her contribution resonate with work being done across the discipline to de-center European aesthetic histories, such as Elizabeth Harney’s work on the Senegalese avant-garde and Iftikhar Dadi’s work on modernism in South Asia. Gerschultz’s volume is a milestone in this more expansive push to widen the geographic focus of art historical analyses, especially in the sense that she destabilizes the distinctions between tapestry, ceramics, and painting as these have been defined by a Eurocentric canon.

Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École is organized into six chapters, each devoted to an infrastructural aspect of the decorative arts. In the first, Gerschultz positions the décorative as part of Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba’s state feminism in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. The second argues that a percent-for-art initiative (programs in which a percentage of new public construction costs are devoted to the commission of artwork) launched before independence in 1950 and reinstated in 1962 provided crucial support for artists and artisans to rethink the hierarchical binary separating their own work from that of their peers and all their work together from the fabric of everyday Tunisian society. Safia Farhat’s life and career are, in the third chapter, the armature for Gerschultz’s analysis of the specific role elite women played as they began to be trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, while the fourth focuses on initiatives to enfranchise economically less advantaged women through weaving and textile production; her main examples are the Cité Artisanale in Den Den and the National Textile Office, which were organizations designated by the state to train and employ Tunisia’s rural and working-class female population during the country’s socialist period. This period is usually dated from the launch of major public works programs in 1961 through the early 1970s. The fifth chapter explores a range of commissioning bodies for the public installations of decorative arts in the early to mid-1960s including the Société Zin and the Tunisian Tourist Hotels Company, among others, and provides an evocative and formally rigorous survey of works produced to “occupy spaces of power” in Tunisia (189). In a sixth and final chapter, Gerschultz analyzes a series of monumental tapestries produced by Safia Farhat’s workshop. Her analysis crystallizes an argument about the contribution made by the decorative arts to the development of a Tunisian art scene. She also sees the diminished fate of these gorgeously executed large-scale works as symptomatic of the eventual marginalization of the more radical revision of the modernist canon proposed by the decorative arts in Tunisia.

The book’s empirical focus on institutions is its strength, as it allows Gerschultz to stay close to vivid historical and archival detail as she weaves a portrait of the place of the decorative arts in the fabric of Tunisia’s mid-century art scene. For example, her exposition of the pedagogical experiments designed by Farhat and Abdelaziz Gorgi throughout their tenure on the faculty of the École des Beaux Arts in Tunis offers a glimpse of how these two key figures actively created spaces in which to imagine the decorative arts as an expression of tunisianité—such as workshops in the southern interior of the country with seasoned weavers developed in collaboration with the National Office of Artisans. (103–104)

Yet her fidelity to historical minutiae also keeps Gerschultz from more thoroughly exploring political contradictions she notes repeatedly in passing. For example, Gerschultz lauds the decorative arts as an expression of contemporary tunisianité strong enough to counter Eurocentric formulations of modernism (chapter 1) and critiques them for their service to paternalistic policies aimed at fostering and protecting authentic (largely feminine) expressions of Tunisian cultural heritage (chapter 4). Both views have fascinating political implications, but Gerschultz fails to analyze the contradiction between them. A more specific example is the way Gerschultz positions French artist Jean Lurçat, recognized for his significant contribution to the revival of tapestry as an art form in the first half of the twentieth century, as a critical player in the elevation of the decorative arts in Tunisia. Lurçat was formally invited to help with the “reorganization of the national artisanat” by Bourguiba’s son and the Tunisian ambassador in Paris. Gerschultz also shows how Lurçat held on to Orientalist worldviews, evidenced clearly in his statement, “The art of Islam, whose place in the general history of art has not been contested, has evolved little since the time of its flowering. We must recognize that it tends to repeat itself indefinitely” (123). Gerschultz does not shy away from presenting the problematic aspect of Lurçat’s ideas, but neither does she elaborate on their impact on the scene at the time or on the development of tapestry and the École de Tunis over the long term. If the ambition of this volume is to challenge art history to “rethink the stakes of the decorative arts for modernism at large,” as Anneka Lenssen notes in her back-cover review, Gerschultz could grapple more thoroughly with the Orientalist ambivalence displayed by Lurçat as one the key architects of the revival of the decorative arts in Tunisia. Detailed formal analysis and lush illustrations of individual works by Farhat and others make clear that Gerschultz considers the decorative arts a robust field of aesthetic experimentation even when its large-scale works were commissioned to adorn the walls of tourist resorts. Gerschultz tracks a field of craft-based experimentation against several overlapping, problematic political backdrops, but takes no position on whether aesthetic production is compromised by the ideological positions represented by the scene’s architects.

The critical point here is not that the notion of the décorative in Tunisia must be shown to dismantle Orientalism, authoritarian tendencies in postcolonial nationalism, and class-based sexism to be valuable to the field of decolonial feminist art history. But Gerschultz positions the decorative arts in Tunisia at the center of debates about postcolonial aesthetics and competing articulations of modernism without a clear synthetic statement about the broader stakes of that position within critical craft studies or decolonial aesthetics. There is a bridge lacking between, on the one hand, formal analysis and archival documentation and, on the other, the argument that the Tunisian École contributed to decolonial feminism—feminism from the bottom up. This bridge requires a more consistent theoretical postcolonial or intersectional feminist framework. To take one example from an adjacent discipline, Manthia Diawara’s African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992) is also focused on the development of nationalist aesthetic programs in postcolonial contexts as infrastructure for the radical reimagination of the relationship between “local” and “international” formal codes, though decidedly not from a feminist perspective. His position is clear: nationalist cinema without infrastructure for local production and distribution is critically limited in its response to neocolonial interests. The example is not perfect, as Diawara’s aim was not to present a single nationalist scene or to trace the subtleties of its evolution as Gerschultz has done. But without a critical stance on the decorative arts’ interdependence and tension with Bourguibian nationalism and its instrumentalization of rural and working-class women, she runs the risk of diminishing the importance of the evidence she musters to make her argument about the crucial role of the decorative arts in the project of decolonizing the art historical canon.