The Maghrib in the New Century

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The Maghrib in the New Century: Identity, Religion and Politics

Edited by Bruce Maddy-Weitzman & Daniel ZisenwineGainseville, FL: University Press of Florida, forthcoming, 2007Berber/Amazigh "Memory Work"Bruce Maddy-WeitzmanThe transnational Berber/Amazigh

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culture movement which emerged inrecent decades has been a multifaceted phenomenon. As is the case with all ethno-national projects, the elaboration and dissemination of modern Berber identity has been accompanied by the fashioning of a "memory community." This involved asearch for a useable past and, once found, enshrining it in new narratives, rituals andcollective commemorations. Shared memory, Anthony Smith tells us, is as essentialto the survival of a collective cultural identity as is the sense of a common destiny.

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Itgoes without saying that the greater the success of the process of "remembering,recovering and inventing" Berber history,

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the greater the influence it will have onAlgerian and Moroccan societies.

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Berber "memory work" is carried out in a variety of ways and on a number of different levels. In its more popular form, the promotion of Berber history andmemory involves a considerable degree of myth-making and essentializing of theBerber "spirit" (embodied in Jean Amrouche's memorable phrase, "the eternalJugurtha").

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In the realms of scholarship and journalism, the re-opening of NorthAfrican history to include the Berbers often poses real challenges to the "official"history propagated by contemporary North African states and the larger Arab-Islamic9595

milieu of which Berbers are a part. Related, but distinct from the work of historiansare acts of commemoration, namely, the creation, elaboration and vigilant protectionof "memory sites" (lieux de memoire) which enable groups to buttress their identitiesagainst the constant push and pull of historical currents that threaten to sweep themaway.

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Musicians, poets and writers have not only taken a preeminent role in thisregard, but some, such as Mouloud Mammeri and Matoub Lounes, have themselves become a kind of "memory site" themselves, as either cultural icons, martyrs to thecause, or both.The task of Berber memory work is formidable. From the beginning of recorded history in North Africa, the Berbers are depicted as semi-savage outsidersrequiring a civilizing hand. They have been especially burdened by the legacy of Islamic history, which provided them with an Eastern and Arab "origin myth" thatlegitimized their inclusion in the umma, albeit as a primitive community requiring theIslamic faith to justify their mission and assumption of power.

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Part of this istislam("submission") involved the seemingly natural superiority conferred on the Arabiclanguage, the language through which God's word was transmitted and subsequentlyinterpreted by the doctors of the holy law. Ironically, it was a non-Berber, the premier Maghribi historian Ibn Khaldun, writing nearly 700 years after the Islamic conquestof North Africa, who made the Berbers a "great nation" like others in the umma, evenas he used them to demonstrate historical laws of the rise and decline of societies.Up until recently, the essentially oral culture of the Berbers and the dearth of written texts in Tamazight placed Berber memory workers at a severe disadvantage.The steady political, social and cultural marginalization of Berber communities over the last 500 years made memory work even more difficult. Smith's description of thedifficulties confronting demotic and peripheral ethnies seems apt for the Berbers:9696

"...excluded from the instruments of political transmission and bereft of institutionalsupport, and sometimes without a class of specialists and developed codes of communication…. their memories tenuous, their heroes shadowy, and their traditions…patchy and poorly documented."

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Nonetheless, the threats posed to Berber language and identity by newlyindependent states' policies of centralization and Arabization, coming on top of themassive upheavals generated by European colonialism and imperialism, and toppedoff by the often pernicious homogenizing effects of globalization processes on localcultures, has also had a salutary effect. The quest for cultural authenticity, perceivedas the basis of collective dignity and hence freedom, is a world-wide contemporary phenomenon in which Berber intellectuals and activists actively participate. As Smithsays, if "the secret of identity is memory, the ethnic past must be salvaged and re-appropriated, so as to renew the present and build a common future in a world of competing national communities."

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No wonder, then, that the Amazigh movement places a premium on memory work.{A} The Pre-Modern PastMoroccan history, as it appears in the official education curriculum, isexplicitly "nationalist/dynastic," incorporating Islamic history into a specificMoroccan historical experience, beginning with the arrival of Islam, through theestablishment of the Idrisid dynasty in 788 A.D. by Idris I, a descendant of the familyof Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law. Although Berbers are subsumed in thishistory, they at least carry some implicit standing: the Idrisis are known to havemarried Berber women, and Moroccan dynasties between the 11

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-14

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centuries wereBerber-based.

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By contrast, narrative history as taught in independent Algeria'sschools has been strikingly lacking of any Algerian-centered orientation. As such,9797

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