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Reflections on North African History: Abdallah Laroui and his History of the Maghrib

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2021

Stuart Schaar
Stuart Schaar*
Affiliation:
History Department (Emeritus), Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, New York, USA
*
Corresponding author. Email: Sschaar@brooklyn.cuny.edu
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Extract

When Joel Gordon, the editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, asked me to reexamine a notable classic book in my field of North African history, I immediately thought of one that I had reviewed favorably forty-one years ago, Abdallah Laroui's The History of the Maghrib. The book is a seminal work of historical synthesis, by one of the most eminent living Maghribi scholars. It remains relevant today.

Type
Foundational Text
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 291 - 299
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Laroui, Abdallah, The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretative Essay, trans. Manheim, Richard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977)Google Scholar. The original publication was L'histoire du Maghreb: un essai de synthèse (Paris: François Maspero, 1970). My review appeared in the ASA (African Studies Association) Review of Books 5 (1979): 94–95.

2 His other books include L'Algérie et le Sahara marocain (Casablanca: Serrar, 1976); Les Origines sociales et culturelles du nationalisme marocain: 1830–1912 (Paris: La Decouverte, 1977); La Crise des intellectuels arabes: traditionalisme ou historicisme? (Paris: La Découverte, 1978); L'Idéologie arabe contemporaine (Paris: La Découverte, 1982); Islam et modernité, (Paris: La Découverte, 1986); Ibn Khaldun wa Makiyavilli (Dar al-Saqi, 1990); Islam et Histoire: essai d'épistémologie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999); Le Maroc et Hassan II (Quebec: Les Pressers Inter Universitaires, 2005); and Islamisme, modernisme, libéralisme: Esquisses critiques (Casablanca: Centre Cultural Arabe, 2009). For analysis of Laroui's work not cited in this review, see Aksikes, Jaafer, Arab Modernities: Islam, Nationalism, and Liberalism in the Postcolonial Arab World (Berne: Peter Lang, 2009)Google Scholar, esp. chs. 2 and 5.

3 Gallagher, Nancy, “Interview: The Life and Times of Abdallah Laroui, A Moroccan Intellectual,” Journal of North African Studies 3, no. 1 (1998): 132–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar (for the names of his Arabic novels see note 23, 151). Nils Riecken, “Abdallah Laroui and the Location of History: An Intellectual Biography” (PhD diss., Freie University, 2013); and “Modernity, Hadatha, and Modernité in the Works of ‘Abdallah Laroui: Conceptual Translation and the Politics of Historicity,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 14, no. 2 (2019): 67–90.

4 See Wainsborough, John, “The Decolonization of North African History,” Journal of African History 9, no. 4 (1968): 643–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Mohamed Chérif Salhi, Décoloniser l'histoire du Maghreb (Paris: Maspero, 1965); Charles André Julien, History of North Africa: Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco from the Arab Conquest to 1830 (New York: Praeger, 1970); Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

6 Much of the discourse on this topic comes from French protectorate scholars who generally disliked nomads and attributed desiccation to their “destructive” habits. We now know that certain regions of North Africa lent themselves splendidly to grazing, and nomads, knowing the ecology, adapted willingly to that reality. See Diana K. Davis, “Power, Knowledge, and Environmental History in the Middle East and North Africa,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 4 (2010): 657–59; and Faruk Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550–1870: A Geohistorical Approach (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.)

7 Brenna M. Henn, Laura R. Botigue, Simon Gravel, Wei Wang, Abra Brisbin, Jake K. Byrnes, Karima Fadhlaoui-Zid, et al., “Genomic Ancestry of North Africans Supports Back to Africa Migrations,” PLOS Genetics, 12 January 2012, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1002397.

8 Mohamed Chatou, “Bin ‘Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi in the Riffi Oral Tradition of Gzenneya,” in Tribe and State: Essays in Honour of David Montgomery Hart, ed. E. G. H. Joffe and C. R. Pennell (Cambridgeshire, UK: Middle East and North African Studies Press, 1991), 182–212; Dale R. Lightfoot and James A. Miller, “Sijilmasa: The Rise and Fall of a Walled Oasis in Medieval Morocco,” Annals of the Association of American Geography 86, no. 1 (1996): 78–101. Aomar Boum, in “From ‘Little Jerusalem’ to the Promised Land: Zionism, Moroccan Nationalism, and Rural Jewish Migration,” Journal of North African Studies 15, no. 1 (2010): 51–69, also used oral sources and speaks of one of his informants having a collection of Jewish oral testimony.

9 These Algerian documents at Vincennes (if they have been declassified) await the right person to conduct research on this planned, but aborted, 19th-century genocide.

10 See Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), for the relationship between Qabadu and Khayr al-Din Pasha.

11 Safran M. Masri, in Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 292, asserts: “Bourguiba stood on the shoulders of contemporary and past reformers.”

12 See the groundbreaking biography in Arabic by Ahmad Ben Milad and Muhamed Driss, Shaykh ‘Abd al-Aziz al-Tha'albi and the Tunisian National Movement (1892–1940), vol. 1, Introduction: The Politician, His Ideas, His Activities according to His Personnel Archives (Carthage: National Foundation of Carthage, 1991). Volume 2 was never completed. Dr. Ben Milad told me in the 1980s that he had purchased al-Tha‘albi's extensive archives from his family after the shaykh died in 1947 and hid them outside his house. President Bouguiba sent police officers to Ben Milad's home in Bardo to search for them unsuccessfully three times, hoping to destroy them and thereby eradicate al-Tha‘albi's memory. Julia Clancy-Smith reports that “after 1956, Bourguiba himself removed documents from the national archives pertaining to his arch rival, ‘Abd Al-‘Aziz Al-Tha‘albi.” According to Muhamed Driss, among al-Tha‘albi's papers belonging to Milad are files listing dues-paying members of the Old Destour party in the early 1920s, confirming that the party's roots reached deep into the countryside around the major cities.

13 YouTube has several films of her performing. See especially Salma Baccar's film, The Fire Dance. See also Jean Favra d'Arcue, Habiba Msika: la brulure du péché (Paris: Belford, 1998); and Ahmed Hemroun, Habiba Msika: artiste accomplice (Tunis: Univers du Livre, 2007).

14 “Tunisian Jews, though not very numerous, took part in the preparatory meetings that would lead to the creation of the Destour Party in June 1920”; Michael Abitbol, “From Coexistence to the Rise of Antagonism,” in A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day, ed. Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 318.

15 Al-Tha‘albi, as the Tunisian archives located in Nantes, France, demonstrate, initiated this participation of Jewish leaders in Tunisian nationalism and saw it as a prerequisite for national unity. In the 1930s, while living in the Middle East as an exile, he befriended Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem, and attacked Zionists for encroaching on Palestinian lands. The times and his own position as an exile had changed.

16 Beth Baron, The Women's Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

17 Stuart Schaar, “L'Affaire Ben Barka: The Kidnapping Casts Its Shadow,” Africa Report 11 (1966): 37–41.

18 Gilles Perrault, Notre ami le roi (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).

19 Matt Buehler, Why Alliances Fail: Islamists and Leftist Coalitions in North Africa (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018). The willingness of some political actors of the Left to enter into coalitions with the Islamists confused many. Mohamed Guessous (1938–2014), professor of sociology at Muhammad V University and a prominent member of the USFP's political bureau, with whom I did my graduate work at Princeton University, was my close friend in Morocco. He kept me informed of the party's internal dynamics.

20 Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘, “Abdallah Laroui: From Objective Marxism to Liberal Etatism,” in Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 368.

21 Driss Ksikes, “A. Laroui: serons nous, un jour, réelement inventif?” (Rabat: HEM Research Center Economia, [2008?]). See also Driss Ksikes and Fadma Ait Mous, Le métier d'intellectuel; dialogue avec quinze penseurs au Maroc (Casablanca: Collection les Presses de l'Université Citoyenne, 2014), and his interview with Laroui in it.

22 Garcia, Bernabé López, “Entrevista con Abdallah Laroui,” Revista de Estudios Internacionales Mediterráneos, no. 2 (2007): 2Google Scholar.

23 Ali Amouzla, “A Modernist Who Defends Theocracy,” trans. Ruth Martin, Qantara.de: Dialogue with the Islamic World, 4 May 2015, 1, https://en.qantara.de/content/the-moroccan-thinker-abdallah-laroui-a-modernist-who-defends-theocracy. For Laroui's liberal views of Islam see his “Western Orientalism and Liberal Islam: Mutual Distrust?” MESA Bulletin 31 (1997): 3–10.

24 “Entretien exclusive: Abdallah Laroui dit tout,” Zamane: L'Histoire du Maroc, no. 18 (2012).

25 Binder, Leonard, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 338Google Scholar; Katz, Mark N., “The Embourgeoisement of Revolutionary Regimes: Reflections on Abdallah Laroui,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 21, no. 3 (1998): 261–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Abu-Rabi‘, “Abdallah Laroui,” 368–69.

27 Aziz Chater, “Why Morocco's King Is Moving Close to Saudi Arabia's MBS,” Middle East Eye, 3 April 2020, https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/mohammed-vi-morocco-gives-ground-mbs.