North Africa: Changes and Challenges

...They went on to occupy Tunisia in 1882 and, with Spain, Morocco in 1912...

...As such they are permitted to practice their religion, although their failure to recognize SUMMER • 1996 • 113 North Africa Muhammad's prophecy exacts some penalties, usually including extraordinary taxes...

...The principal political oppositionists, the Islamist movements, have not exhibited much sympathy for minorities...

...Estimates of the Berber population, which stretches from the Siwa oasis of Egypt to the Rif mountains of Morocco, vary considerably...

...After World War II, there were about 100,000 Jews in Tunisia, 175,000 in Algeria and 275,000 in Morocco...

...Berbers fled to the mountain redoubts and distant southern deserts where they remain concentrated today, leaving the Arab conquerors in control of the coastal plains and river valleys...

...For Habib Bourguiba, leader of the nationalist movement and president of Tunisia from 1956 until his deposition in 1987, the capacity to accommodate Jews symbolized his government's enlightenment and modernity...

...The French had more success with the Jewish minorities of North Africa, who prospered under French colonialism...

...At independence, the countries of the region all declared Islam the state religion, but Tunisia and Morocco declared that the Jews would be protected as national minorities...

...As their fifth decade of independence approaches, the governments of North Africa face economic and political challenges that will severely test their commitments to—even their definitions of—minority communities...

...As the "Commander of the Faithful," the Moroccan king is obliged to protect the "People of the Book" in his realm...

...They permitted the dwindling Jewish communities to retain property, hold religious services, and reside as full citizens in their countries, and the Moroccan king repeatedly invited Jewish emigrants to return to Morocco...

...By 1870 nearly all Algerian Jews had been accorded French citizenship, and Jewish children had been granted privileged access to French-run schools throughout North Africa...

...If Islamists come to power in North Africa, it will spell the end of the remaining Jewish communities in the region, but those communities may be fast disappearing remnants of another age in any event...

...Everywhere the French occupiers met resistance, and everywhere they attempted to find and cultivate sympathizers in the indigenous populations...

...Changes in their legal status and social roles reveal broader changes in a society...

...Berbers participated in the nationalist movements of both Morocco and Algeria...

...As a result, although there are Berbers among the Islamists, there are many more who oppose the Islamist agenda and support the governments' crackdown...

...Having maintained the Muslim religious court system for questions of personal status, the Moroccan Ministry of Justice also kept rabbinical courts in operation...

...The histories of the Jewish communities of Morocco and Tunisia after independence also demonstrated the sometimes ironic dilemmas facing minorities in North Africa...

...after the Spanish Inquisition, Jewish refugees settled with their co-religionists under Muslim protection in the cities and along the coasts of North Africa...

...The regimes are pursuing economic privatization policies that will deprive them of some of their official and informal capacity to counter discrimination, since neither regulation nor patronage will be as easily available to ensure equitable distribution of resources...

...The need for economic restructuring after years of overspending has created fiscal crises that even the oil producers cannot solve...

...Although the nationalist movements of North Africa included prominent Jewish individuals, Jews as a whole did not join the struggle...

...Although the party, the Front des Forces Socialistes (FFS), aimed to challenge the ruling Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), its constituency remained largely confined to Ait Ahmed's followers in the Kabyle...

...The ensuing protest created the framework for the nationalist movement and ensured that national unity would be equated with the defense of Islam...

...Moreover, through their ties with their co-religionists, North African Jews enjoyed far better commercial relations with Europe than did the Muslims...

...Islamic Legacies Berbers are descendants of the pre-Islamic inhabitants of North Africa...

...Independence: From Patronage to Protest Independence brought new challenges for the minorities in North Africa...

...the Berber regions in Morocco and Algeria were among the most important military strongholds in the independence struggles...

...He exhorted his citizens to forgo fasting during Ramadhan, one of the five major obligations of observant Muslims, in favor of hard work in the service of development...

...Unlike the Arab East, where the Christian churches coincided with ethnic communities, ethnicity in North Africa did not give rise to national or community self-consciousness...

...In North Africa the shrinking role of the Jewish communities and the new assertiveness of Berbers suggests that even as Islamist movements attempt to stem the tide, a profound shift is taking place in popular conceptions of politics and rights...

...Many Jews from rural areas emigated to Israel...

...Islam does not formally recognize ethnic distinctions among believers, and although Arabic is accorded pride of place as the language in which God chose to reveal his message to the Prophet, all believers—no matter their native tongue—are thought to be equal in his eyes...

...The trust the Moroccan Jewish community has placed in King Hassan is intimately tied to the king's personal commitment to an anachronistic patrimonial style of rule...

...To the king, the health of the Moroccan Jewish community confirms his legitimacy as patron and protector of his subjects...

...Perhaps less self-evident are the challenges to an Islamist government that would come from a Berber community no longer content to participate through patronage networks but committed to recognition of group rights in a pluralistic society...

...Thus, although some of the most notorious opponents of the Moroccan kings have been Berbers—including the foiled plotters of several coup attempts in the early 1970s—so have some of their closest associates, including much of the officer corps...

...Berber politics remained embedded in the patronage systems of both Morocco and Algeria until the 1970s...

...The vast majority of North Africans are Muslim Arabs...

...There are no more than a hundred thousand Berbers among Tunisia's eight million people and, apart from small ethnographic curiosities like the archaic villages of the South, they are almost completely assimilated...

...Thus he abolished all religious courts, Muslim and Jewish SUMMER • 1996 • 115 North Africa alike...

...In Morocco, the early years of independence were marked by competition for leadership between the monarch—Muhammad V, father of the current King Hassan II—and the nationalist Istiqlal party...

...The decree—known as the Berber dahir—was greeted with unanimous condemnation, and the effort to remove the Berbers from the jurisdiction of Islamic law courts was seen by Arab and Berber alike as a device to divide them and undermine Islam...

...Now tensions among secular and religious, pluralist and nationalist conceptions of society came to the fore...

...Indeed, some of the most illustrious eras in the history of Muslim North Africa are associated with Berber dynasties...

...Many had become French citizens, and many more had profited from the colonial regime and were loath to contribute to its demise...

...About 20 percent of Algeria's twenty-seven million people are Berbers, and they too are concentrated in mountainous regions...

...European Legacies The French invaded Algeria in 1830...

...By the late 1970s, the Jewish community ofAlgeria had all but disappeared, while only five thousand Jews still lived in Tunisia and twenty thousand in Morocco...

...None of the countries of the region report ethnic breakdown in their population statistics, and there is even dispute about how to define a Berber...

...when multiparty politics were authorized in 1989, it created the Rassemblement pour la Culture et la Democratie (RCD), to advocate both "la berberite" and liberal politics...

...Similarly, few Islamist leaders have adopted King Hassan's view of the responsibility of the Commander of the Faithful for protecting the People of the Book...

...Thus, virtually from the outset of the colonial period, Jews were far more likely than Muslims to be well-educated, conversant with European languages, and familiar with European political and cultural developments...

...The size of the Jewish communities of the Maghrib has declined dramatically during the twentieth century...

...It was, however, precisely their base among the Berbers that animated their interest in securing cultural pluralism through a secular state and liberal democracy, and that ultimately risked tarnishing the broader agenda with the appearance of parochialism...

...In Algeria, revolutionary fervor quickly deteriorated into the "luttes de clans...

...Hoping to further their influence among the Berbers of Morocco, in 1930 the French declared their intention to formally recognize Berber "customary law...

...If Jews were a distinct social category, Berbers were not...

...Among the politically progressive, many Jews were active in North African labor movements during the interwar period, but they found the Islamic cast of the nationalist movements both exclusionary and reactionary...

...Although the official religion of Tunisia was Islam, Bourguiba himself was a secularist to the core, and he used every opportunity to advance the cause of secular enlightenment...

...By 1980, discontent with the Arabization campaigns erupted in demonstrations inAlgeria's Kabyle, in what came to be known as the "Berber spring...

...No longer are minority status and rights defined simply by the patrimonially based protections embedded in religion, particularly Islam, or personal relationships...

...Although both Berbers and Jews have been important critics of the governments and advocates of human rights, when faced with the choice between the governments and their often extremist opponents, they have thus far cast their lot with the governments...

...If all this were not enough to discourage Jewish participation in the anticolonial movements, the triumph of the Zionist cause in Palestine soon after the end of World War II provided yet another disincentive...

...The king's widespread popularity, particularly in predominantly Berber rural areas, contributed to his victory over the urban-based nationalists...

...They are vocal supporters ofArabization, both because Arabic is Islam's sacred language and because many of their followers are relatively poorly educated Arabic speakers who stand to gain if job placements favor Arabic literacy...

...Berbers from both Algeria and Morocco were disproportionately represented among the migrants to France and overrepresented among the educated elite, particularly the Francophone elite, during the interwar period...

...Most Berbers in Morocco and Algeria, particularly well-educated Berbers, are Francophone...

...For Bourguiba, the continued presence of the Jewish community confirmed his secularist vision of Tunisia...

...In part this attention to the Jewish minority reflected government interest in its disproportionately prosperous, well-educated and wellconnected members—precisely the sort of citizens all developing countries need...

...For nearly a thousand years, the only significant indigenous minorities have been non-Arabic speaking Berbers and non-Muslim Jews...

...Morocco 114 • DISSENT North Africa and Tunisia were accorded independence in 1956 and, after a revolutionary war that cost more than a million lives, Algeria won its independence in 1962...

...Berbêre, appeared to safeguard Berber cultural heritage...

...Perhaps more important, however, "protection" of the Jewish community was part of the image the governments wished to project to their own citizens and to the outside world...

...wealthier urban Jews, who saw their property threatened in anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish disturbances, left for France, Italy, and Canada as well as the new Jewish state...

...For the Moroccan kings, protection of the Jewish community served a different but equally important purpose...

...Indeed, King Hassan interpreted his obligation to his Jewish subjects to mean that he had an interest in the well-being of Israelis of Moroccan origin, and this interest was an important element in his special relationship with Israel during the 1960s and 1970s...

...The migrants in France provided essential funding and logistical support...

...Whether construed loosely as ethnic self-identification or more restrictively by mother tongue, Berbers constitute between 35 percent and 50 percent of Morocco's twenty-seven million people, most of them in rural areas, particularly the Atlas mountains...

...far more frequent are expressions of the sort of overt anti-Semitism more conventionally associated with European than with North African history...

...however laudable the motives of the Arabization campaigns from the vantage point of anticolonialism and national unity, the Berbers found them discriminatory...

...He was an early proponent of accommodation with Israel, arguing in the mid-1960s that Arab opposition to Israel was self-defeating...

...Local minorities were obvious candidates...

...Jewish settlements also predated the Arab invasions...

...The French colonial administrations in North Africa made much of the differences between Arabs and Berbers, persuading themselves that Berber tribal councils exhibited a primitive democracy that predisposed them to European influence...

...ci 116 • DISSENT...

...Nonetheless, French colonial infatuation with the Berbers was largely unrequited...

...By the time King Hassan acceded to the throne in 1961, the monarchy had established its primacy over the Istiqlal—in part by encouraging competing parties, such as the loyalist Mouvement Populaire, a party best known for its ties to elite Berber families...

...North African governments in the twenty-first century will have to face questions of cultural rights and linguistic recognition for which neither Islam nor secular Western liberalism have clear-cut answers...

...Under Islamic law, Jews (and Christians) constitute a distinct social category, the ahl al-kitab, or "People of the Book...

...A semi-clandestine organization, the Mouvement Culture...

...At that time, the governments attempted to impose stricter standards for the use of Arabic in place of French in government and education...

...Perhaps ironically, of the several dozen political parties that appeared during Algeria's short-lived democratic experiment, AitAhmed's FFS and the RCD were probably the most seriously committed to democratic politics, refusing the "Berber party" label and attempting to foster support for human rights and the rule of law...

...Several of the "historic leaders" of the revolution were Berbers and one, Hocine Ait Ahmed, started his own underground party when he fell out with President Ahmed Ben Bella shortly after independence...

...Arab penetration of North Africa began shortly after the death of Muhammad in the seventh century, when many Berbers adopted Islam, but it was not until the eleventh century that the Hilalian invasion ensured Muslim dominance and introduced large numbers of Arabs into the region...