The Journal of North African Studies

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How and why to remember the Rif War

(1921–2021)

C.R. Pennell

To cite this article: C.R. Pennell (2017) How and why to remember the Rif War (1921–2021), The
Journal of North African Studies, 22:5, 798-820, DOI: 10.1080/13629387.2017.1361826

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2017.1361826

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 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES, 2017
VOL. 22, NO. 5, 798–820
https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2017.1361826

How and why to remember the Rif War (1921–2021)

C.R. Pennell
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia
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ABSTRACT
The centenary of the Rif War in Morocco (1921–1926) has nearly arrived. This
article considers how accounts of the war have been transmitted as acts of
memory. It surveys European and American publications on the war from the
early military histories through to political accounts explaining the war from
imperialist and anti-imperial perspectives. It then examines the first general
histories and academic accounts, by anthropologists and linguists, both
American and Moroccan. The release of the Spanish Army and French Foreign
Ministry archives opened discussion up to historians trained in the western
tradition. At the same time the first Arabic-language accounts were published
by Moroccan local historians. Finally, it discusses use of the Rif War in modern
Moroccan politics, particularly during the truth and reconciliation hearings at
the beginning of the 2000s, and later during popular protest movements in
the Rif. It concludes with an examination of how Islamists have used the war
and compares the Islamist foundation documents of Islamic State with those
of the Rifi state. When the centenary of the war comes round in 2021, the
commentators and historians and politicians and polemicists will have to
integrate all those perceptions.

KEYWORDS Rif War; historiography; politics of memory; ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Khat t ābī

It is often said that the war in the Rif is a forgotten war. ‘Not without reason,’
writes Mevliyar Er, ‘do Kunz and Müller refer to the Rif resistance as a war
which made history but failed to enter the books of history.’ (Er 2017, 2) In
1999, María Rosa de Madariaga, a Spanish historian, wrote a book about the
Rif war that she subtitled ‘crónica de una historia casi olvidada’ (the chronicle
of an almost forgotten story). A revised and enlarged edition came out the fol-
lowing year (de Madariaga 2000). It would be astonishing if this were true: the
military losses of the Spanish army in 1921, when Rifi forces organised on a
tribal basis killed more than 10,000 of their troops in a few weeks, were the
worst defeats of a colonial army in Africa in the twentieth century. Three
years later the Rifis, now organised into a proto-state, inflicted further huge
defeats on the Spanish army and then seemed to threaten French control
of their prized Moroccan protectorate, presided over by the guru of French
colonial policy, Marshal Lyautey.

CONTACT C.R. Pennell rpennell@unimelb.edu.au

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 799

The people of three countries, then, had good reason to remember this
conflict, although such a consideration does not always guarantee that it
will be. Yet the Rif war has remained alive and the centenary of its beginning
approaches. In 2021 there will doubtless be public occasions to mark it and
the trajectory of how and why it is has been remembered will progress to a
new stage. What follows examines how it has been remembered in the
past, how a picture of the Rif War has been built up and suggests that it
has repeatedly been recast as part of the wider experience of participants, wit-
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nesses and historians.

Certainly it is true that the roots of the conflict lie in one of the backwaters
of European imperialism, and on the eve of a much greater struggle, the First
World War. The colonial division of Morocco between France and Spain began
when the Protectorate was imposed in 1912. In the early twentieth century,
with the agreement of the British government in 1904, and the very grudging
acceptance of the German government in 1906, most of Morocco became
part of a French sphere of influence. The exception was the northern coast
and some regions in the far south, where the European powers recognised
the claims of the government in Madrid to particular interests. In 1912 a
Spanish zone of protectorate was established in northern and southern
Morocco. French control was recognised over the rest, including virtually all
the economically useful parts of the country and most cities except Tetuan
and Tangier (which partly in deference to German sensitivities became an
international city). The cities and the plains quickly fell under European rule,
but the mountains, forests and deserts had to be conquered. The French
army found this difficult but the Spanish army found it almost impossible.
In 1909 the Spanish army had tried to occupy the outlying edges of the Rif
Mountains, the great chain that runs along the Mediterranean coast, and
found it enormously difficult to overcome the opposition. It was not until
well after the end of the First World War that it slowly advanced towards
the central Rif massif. It used a mixture of political penetration and limited
military force, which had the effect of increasing the wealth of some local
notables who were willing to cooperate and inciting opposition elsewhere.
Confined to isolated outposts in a generally hostile countryside that it did
not control, the Spanish army was surrounded by danger. In the summer of
1921 opposition grew as the army in the east of the Spanish zone advanced
toward the territory of the Banu Waryaghal, the biggest tribe in the central Rif.
First at the fort of Igueriben, and then at the main Spanish base at Anual, Rifi
fighters surrounded and wiped out the garrisons. The rest of the army fled in
disorder back to the Spanish fortress-enclave of Melilla and lost perhaps
13,000 men on the way. In the aftermath, Muh ammad bin ‘Abd al-Karīm al-
Khaṭtạ̄ bī, a qadi from a notable family in the Banu Waryaghal took control
of the Rifi fighters. He consolidated them, for the first time in their history,
into a state with a centralised government.
 800 C. R. PENNELL

The Spanish government, meanwhile, virtually collapsed. The recrimina-

tions about the disaster were so strident that General Primo de Rivera installed
a military dictatorship, and considered abandoning the Protectorate
altogether. He did not do so, but in 1924 he withdrew the Spanish army
from most of the western part of the protectorate, losing more heavy casual-
ties in the process. The victorious Rifis then turned south to attack the French
troops advancing northwards across the Ouergha river. In 1925 they briefly
pushed the French army back towards Fez and Taza before its line held.
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The Rifi victories ended Lyautey’s career in Morocco but they were also fatal
to ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm. The Spanish and French governments pooled their mili-
tary resources and in the autumn of 1925 landed troops on the coast and
sealed the Rif off to the south. By the early summer of 1926, they had
starved and fought the Rifis into submission.
This was a spectacular story, and it would be astonishing if it really had
been forgotten, but that was not the case. It has been the subject of an enor-
mous number of books about the war and at least 20 feature films have been
at least partly set in the Rif war. Films and books began to appear even while
the war still in progress (Er and Rich 2015). Ever since, the war has been the
property of different interests: military historians, and soldiers, who wanted
to understand and explain the strategic questions raised by the war; colonial
historians, and colonialists, who wanted to discover why two colonial powers
had suffered such defeats; historians of nationalism and nationalists, who
wanted to record a great anti-imperial struggle, political historians; politicians
and political historians, who wrote about the ideologies of local nationalisms
and religion; journalists, participants and near-participants, who wanted to
relate their own involvement. And all these particular focuses, which over-
lapped, were consolidated and considered in books that tried to understand
the war as a whole.

The military accounts of the Rif War

The military accounts came first, of course. Senior officers sought to justify
their decisions; more junior soldiers described the experiences of fighting
the war; and there were those who sought to criticise the way the war was
fought. General Berenguer, the High Commissioner of the Spanish zone at
the time of Anual, wrote the first major published account in 1923 (Berenguer
y Fuste 1923), and not surprisingly tried to minimise his responsibility. Other
Spanish generals had similar motivations. General Goded, the Spanish com-
mander of the landings at Alhucemas in 1925, published his description of
the final stages of the war in 1932 (Goded 1932). The memoirs of the
Conde de Jordana, the overall commander of the Spanish protectorate
during and after the seaborne landings at Alhucemas in 1925, were published
posthumously as a self-exculpatory account in 1976 (Gómez-Jordana y Souza
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 801

1976). The generals had to defend themselves against highly critical inquiries,
first by General Juan Picasso, and then by a full commission of inquiry, the
Comisión de Responsibilidades which published a report in 1931. This so
damaged King Alfonso XIII, by demonstrating that he was complicit in the
military planning and organisation, that it contributed to his abdication
(Preston 2003, 12). Of course, criticism was muted by attempts to hush up
the extent of the commanders’ failings: the Picasso report was never released
in full in Spain although parts of it were published by Spanish republican
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exiles in Mexico 1976 (El Expediente Picasso, 1976) and more was revealed
in an edition published in Spain in 2003 (El Expediente Picasso, 2003). The offi-
cial military history of all the Spanish army’s campaigns in Morocco which
began in 1947 did not complete coverage of the Rif War until volume IV
was published in 1981 (Servicio Histórico Militar 1981). In the 1960s General
Carlos Martínez de Campos wrote a military history of Spanish Morocco that
was entirely focussed on the Spanish effort. (Martínez de Campos 1969).
All this provided a huge fund of information about the military course of
the war, but the real value of personal reminiscences about the war did not
come from the senior officers who oversaw its course, but from much more
junior ones who did the fighting. There was, for example, a memoir by the
only surviving Spanish officer from the battle for Igueriben just before the
main disaster at Anual in 1921, an account that 70 years later would
become charged with political meaning, as described below (Casado y Escu-
dero 1923). There were the accounts by two military political officers, one
Spanish and one French, of the final stages of the war. Andrés Sánchez-
Pérez who became a very experienced ethnographer of the Rif, published
his description of the last military actions in 1930 (Sánchez-Pérez 1930);
Léon Gabrielli, who was involved in the abortive peace negotiations of the
final months, published his account in 1950 (Gabrielli 1950). Interest in the
military history of the war never died: recent works include José Alvarez’s
book on the Spanish Foreign Legion in 2001 (Álvarez 2001), and Sebastian Bal-
four’s in 2002 (Balfour 2002), which among other things showed how the
Spanish used poison gas on the Rifis, were academic military histories. Sub-
sequently, Spanish publishers reprinted several earlier books on the war,
including Casado y Escudero’s, testimony that the history of the war as a mili-
tary adventure has never really been forgotten.

The Rif War in European politics

Nor was it forgotten as a political event. The effects of the war on the politics
of the European participants produced numerous books. The Spanish army’s
campaigns were so disastrously managed that they helped to bring down two
governments and the monarchy and to pave the way for the Civil War. After
the Civil War, republican exiles such as socialist leader Indalecio Prieto, and
 802 C. R. PENNELL

Alejandro Lerroux, the right-wing republican chieftain, gave accounts of the

war (La Porte 1997, 225). In France, the first accounts came from colonialists
who defended French colonial policy in Africa. Jacques Ladreit de Lacharrière,
who had close links to the French Protectorate’s administration, published a
book in 1925 that portrayed ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm as a rebel, who hoped to over-
turn the Sultanate and French rule in Morocco as a consequence (Ladreit de
Lacharrière 1925). It was French right-wing authors who first placed the Rifi
leader, Muh ammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Khaṭtạ̄ bī into a pantheon of revolu-
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tionary leaders that included Mao and Ho Chi Minh as well as the nationalist
movements of Asia and Africa after the Second Word War. Jean Renaud, a
leader of the extreme right La Solidarité Française party in the 1930s, talked
of ‘Ho-Chi-Minh, Abd-el-Krim et Cie’ and described him as the puppet of
those who sought to tear down the French Empire (Renaud and Ong-Chú
1949, 34). Pierre Fontaine, a right-wing journalist, explained the independence
movements of the 1950s in Morocco and North Africa and in Syria and
Vietnam as a continuation of the Rif war of the 1920s (Fontaine 1958, 11). It
is true that both Ho Chi Minh and Mao did cite the Rif War as an example
of guerrilla warfare although that is not the same as saying that he inspired
their struggles (Mao Tse Tung 1989, 49; Danigo 2010), but together all this
underpinned the rather deformed understanding of what people thought
they ‘knew’ about the Rif War. An American oral historian, Alison Baker,
reported in the 1990s that many of her women informants told her that
‘Mao Tse Tung knew of Abdelkrim and the Rif War, and that Mao himself cred-
ited Abdelkrim as the real originator of the people’s liberation war’ (Baker
1998, 306). A Moroccan tourist website, current in 2016, reported of the Rif
that the methods of its most famous son ‘have inspired other guerrilla strate-
gists such as Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh.’1 In 2015 a British (or at least
British-based author) credited ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm with inspiring Che Guevara
(Er 2017).

Outsiders & the Rif War

There were also the accounts of other witnesses, or near witnesses, at the
time. Some of these were journalists, particularly Walter Harris and Vincent
Sheean. Harris, the Tangier correspondent of The Times in Tangier, had lived
there for years and had close personal contacts among the Moroccans (he
had been captured and held to ransom by Ah mad al-Raysūlī, a prominent
bandit sharif in northern Morocco before the First World War). Harris held
the Spanish in contempt and had excellent links with the Rifis, though his poli-
tics were of the right-wing contrarian variety. His book appeared the year after
the war ended (Harris 1927). Sheean who travelled through the Rif at the
height of the war came from the American left, but like Harris greatly
admired ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm (‘Against his quality, the best of the pettifogging
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 803

politicians of Europe looked like so many puppets,’ he wrote) (Sheean 1940,

155). Years later, in 1969, another long-term resident of Tangier, David
Woolman, wrote the first serious European attempt at a history of the Rif
War, in which he relied heavily on local knowledge, although he had no
insight into the organisational side of the Rifi state because the archival
sources were still unavailable (Woolman 1969). Woolman was part of the
côterie of American writers who lived together in Tangier in the 1950s:
William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Allen Ginsberg and others (Edwards 2005,
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162–163).

Un-stifling the voice of Rifi witnesses

The voice of Rifi witnesses was not so loud. The supposed memoirs of ibn ‘Abd
al-Karīm himself, collected through interviews conducted by a French journal-
ist J. Roger Mathieu immediately after the war, have been widely criticised as
being inaccurate, or at best taken down in a hurry (Hart 1976, 542; Tahtah
2000, 35–37). Other participants had to wait. It was not until 2010 that the
manuscript of the memoirs of Muh ammad Azarqān, ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm’s min-
ister for foreign affairs, were published. Ahmad Sukayrij took down the
account while Azarqan was imprisoned in El Jadida in 1927. It was held
after that in the Bibliothèque Générale in Rabat (Sukayrij 2010; Hart 1976,
546; Tahtah 2000, 39–40). In 1974 Ah mad al-Bu-’Ayyāshī (a local historian of
the Rif who had previously written about the medieval history of the area,
and was the son of ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm’s minister for war) (Tahtah 2000, 70) pub-
lished a two-volume history in Tangier in 1974 (al-Bu ‘Ayyāshī 1975). This led
Muh ammad Amr al-Qadi, a minor official in the Rifi administration and a
cousin of ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm, to publish his own account in 1979, refuting
what he said were the inaccuracies of al-Bu ‘Ayyāshī (Peebles 2012, 3). All
these accounts were in French or Arabic, not the Berber of the inhabitants
of the Rif itself. What they, the non-elite, thought had happened in the war
was only revealed by anthropologists who retold their stories. The anthropol-
ogists in the early stage were often American, notably David Hart who began
collecting material for his deep study of ibn ‘Abd al-Karim’s tribe, the Aith War-
yaghar in the 1960s (Hart 1976). Hart’s life-work was set in motion by Carleton
Coon, another American who had studied the Rif in the late 1920s, but it drew
theoretically on the theories of segmentation advanced by the British anthro-
pologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard and in terms of sources on unpublished Spanish
military ethnographers such as Andrés Sánchez-Pérez (Sánchez-Pérez 1930)
and Emilio Blanco Izaga, whose papers Hart edited for publication (Izaga,
translated and Hart 1975; Moga Romero 2014). The Rif War made up no
more than a single chapter of Hart’s huge book (Hart 1976, 369–404), but it
was a long chapter and it was the first scholarship in a European language
to focus on the Rifi story. Titled ‘The reformer and the war on two fronts
 804 C. R. PENNELL

(1921–1926),’ the chapter focussed on the single overarching figure of

Muh ammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm and how he fitted into Rifi society. Hart’s theor-
etical basis in segmentarity has been much criticised, as has his minimisation
of the role of the Moroccan sultan in the Rif (Munson 1989, 386). But his depic-
tion of how ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm welded together a political unity by vigorously
putting an end to factional conflicts (which had been encouraged by the
Spanish) in order to fight the war is uncontested (Pennell 1982a, 1982b).
Hart’s syncretic history was based on his informants’ accounts. It revealed
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that the memory had remained loud enough to hear in the Rif itself, but it
needed the work of ethnographers and oral historians to reveal it.
Mohammed Chtatou, who came from the Gzennaya tribe in the central Rif,
published his own account of the memories of men from that tribe in 1991
based on material he had collected during the previous decade, when they
were already getting old. One of them was 97 years old in 1986 when he
related his version. Their disagreement over what they said happened (and
its significance) reflected the disagreements that took place during the war
itself. The songs of the Rif (izran) conserved the central issue of the war:
The Spanish, the enemy and the French the treacherous woke up
and they are fighting the holy fighter of the Rif with bullets and hands (Chtatou
1991, 207).

In the eyes of some nationalist politicians, at least, this Berber history of the
war raised political as well as theoretical problems. The doyen of nationalist
Moroccan history, Abdallah Laroui was a prominent representative of the
nationalist trend, when he consigned the war to the margins of Moroccan
history in his survey The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay:
For if we extend our perspective to the Maghrib as a whole, the war in the Rif
recedes into the past and takes its place beside numerous rural and mountai-
neer revolts … whereas the political phenomena … relate to the overall nation-
alist movement in the Maghreb and the Orient. In reality, initial resistance and
political nationalism are separated by far more than the lapse of a year’s time
(Laroui 1977, 350)

The war half a century after

The official Moroccan discourse, a history closely controlled by the palace
seemed that it did want to forget the war. Ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm highlighted a
tension between a monarchical model and a republican one (or at least an
Alaoui model and a non-Alaoui one). The problem was certainly lessened
by the deaths, two years apart, of Mohammed V and ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm in
1961 and 1963 respectively, so that the Rifi leader could be incorporated
into the pantheon of national heroes (Valensi 1990, 286, 290). But he was
somehow shorn of his Rifi context: the region was the scene of rebellions
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 805

and repression by the Moroccan state in 1958–59 and 1984 which left it side-
lined and punished.
By the mid-1970s, the various understandings of the Rif War were becom-
ing much more closely connected. In 1973 a conference held in Paris to mark
the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of the Rifi state brought together
scholars from European and American universities and published the
papers that they gave in a single volume. This Colloque (Colloque International
d’Études Historiques et Sociologiques [1973 1976]) included some contri-
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butions that linked the war to movements in Vietnam and elsewhere in the
Maghreb, others that portrayed the war as an attempt at modernising, creat-
ing a state of institutions that dragged the Rif towards modernity and yet
others that described the Rif in terms of other rural revolts in Morocco. As
Raymond Jamous pointed out in his review of the volume these approaches
robbed the war both of its historical specificity and of its Rifi content (‘Mais le
Rif et les Rifains dans tout cela? Et d’abord, pourquoi le Rif ?’) (Pouillon and
Jamous 1976).
At the time the Colloque took place, it still was not easy to get close to the
Rifi participants but within a few years some major archival collections were
opened up, and that started to wipe away that difficulty. As a result, the
first academic research on the war began. The way was led by Germain
Ayache, a Moroccan historian with strong communist and nationalist leanings.
He was a very meticulous researcher who wrote slowly, and the second of his
two books on the war had to be published posthumously. The first, published
in 1981, dealt with the period before the war and the political evolution of ibn
‘Abd al-Karīm and his father and brother and their relations with the Spanish.
In particular, it used the archives of the Spanish army, the Servicio Histórico
Militar in Madrid, to show how the family’s cooperation with the Spanish
during and after the First World War evolved into what he calls a Moroccan
patriotism based on a longstanding history of good relations between the
Rif and the Sultan (Ayache 1981). The second volume covered the first
phase of the history of the war down to 1922 (Ayache and Ayache 1996).

Stumbling into the archives

The Spanish military archives became generally available in the mid-1970s.
When I visited them, as a doctoral student, in the spring and summer of
1978, I found that a special file had been built up of documents copied by Pro-
fessor Ayache and his visit was still vivid in the memory of the personnel. I
understood that I was only the second foreign researcher to use the files on
the Rif war. This was a tense time in the military history of Spain: Franco
had died in 1975, and the government was moving tentatively towards demo-
cratisation. In the armed forces there were elements who strongly disap-
proved of how the country was changing and in February 1981 there was
 806 C. R. PENNELL

an attempted coup d’état. Of course, I saw no signs of subversion in the

archives, as I worked my way through an extraordinary amount of operational
material. Although this included uninteresting material such as the very exten-
sive veterinary records of the camel section, which mostly consisted of blank
pages, the real wealth of the archives lay in the detailed intelligence reports
collated from Spanish agents, Moroccan men and women who crossed, some-
times every day, from the Rifi-controlled areas into Spanish territory. They
brought news of political developments, the movements of Rif troops, the
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prices of food in the markets, how daily life was regulated by ibn ‘Abd al-
Karīm’s officials and the state of morale in the population. The Spanish
army intelligence was extremely well-informed about what was happening
in the Rif, although in the months leading up to the disaster at Anual their
superiors showed an extraordinary refusal to believe what they were told
(Pennell 1982a). One incident stuck out and reminded me about of the con-
temporary politics of post-Franco Spain. Among the extensive correspon-
dence from Rifi notables were letters that were at times very blunt about
what they thought of Spanish failures of policy. One caught my eye: shortly
after the Spanish paid four million pesetas in order to ransom their captured
troops, a group of Rifi shaykhs sent a furious and sarcastic letter of protest:
You have increased the importance of your beloved friend Wuld Abd al-Karim –
may God curse him and all his works: Four million: That money will be used
against you and against us.2

When I asked for permission to photograph this letter, I was told that I could
not, because it was insulting to the honour of Spain. Yet I was allowed to tran-
scribe it by hand.
I then moved to Paris, armed with letters of introduction from my university
in Britain. When I got to the Quai d’Orsay, a very polite but rather distant archi-
vist told me there were few files on Morocco in the 1920s. The archives of the
Protectorate were all in Aix-en-Provence, she said, but I was welcome of
course, to browse through what little they had. Files were produced, mostly
originating in the International Zone of Tangier and I spent a few days trawl-
ing through them. The archivist was right: there were some snippets of infor-
mation, some of it quite evocative, but very little that was crucially valuable for
my research. On Friday, she walked over to my table and asked whether I had
managed to find anything, and I agreed that indeed there was not much. She
gave me a look of the sort that says ‘I told you so.’ Then I said, in passing, that
she might find it useful, for sake of completeness, to record that a signature of
a Spanish official who had signed several of the letters was not really ‘illisible,’
as the translations into French recorded. I knew the signature quite well from
the archives in Madrid and it belonged to an officer named Miguel Civantos.
The archivist looked at the originals, agreed that I was right and thanked me
for being so helpful, as she put it. Then she turned away, but suddenly
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 807

stopped, and asked me again exactly what I was researching. I told her (as I
had done before) that the subject of my thesis was the Rif War. She looked
at me for a moment and said slowly that now that she thought about it
again, more carefully, there was some documentation, as yet un-entered in
the general catalogue, that might interest me. If I was to come the following
Monday, she would make it available. I had debated leaving for England at the
weekend, but decided to give it a few more days. On Monday I was shown to a
table with four volumes bound in a brownish-grey cloth. They contained
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about 400 documents that came from the archives of the Rifi state. How
these papers came into the possession of the French, and why they were in
the Quai d’Orsay is opaque (Tahtah 2000, 27–29). But their contents were
very interesting indeed. They included military dispositions, administrative
files, prison records, documents concerning internal security. Once again
the fates of ordinary Rifis became clearer. The biggest prize of all, was the
bay’a of Muh ammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Khaṭtạ̄ bī. This was the founding
document of the Rifi state, a statement (or contract) of allegiance by some
of the tribes of the central Rif that gave him authority.
In comparison, consulting the archives of the British Foreign Office in
London was much simpler. For the British, the Rif War was less contentious,
although it was copiously documented. But there were still some limitations:
I found a reference to a report by the Special Branch, a division of the Metro-
politan Police of London that provided political surveillance particularly of left-
wingers. The subject was the Riff Committee that was set up in London in l925
by a number of Englishmen who sympathised with the Rifi cause. Because
they included members of the British Communist Party, the Special Branch
watched them. When I asked how I could trace the report, I was told that I
could not: officially the Special Branch did not exist in the archives.
Since then more archival material has emerged, in fragments. Most notable
is a collection of six line-drawings of the Bay of Alhucemas done by an officer
who was one of the Spanish soldiers held captive by the Rifis between 1921
and 1923. They form a panorama from the eastern to the western side of the
Bay, which was reproduced in the artist’s book about his part in the defeats of
1921 (Casado y Escudero 1923). But the originals, which were bought from a
commercial dealer in 2016 by the University of Melbourne Library, tell their
own story: viewed up close, it is possible to make out the structure of the
graph-paper on which they were drawn with great accuracy.3 Casado y Escu-
dero’s own story in the Rif still reverberates in modern Spain. After his release
from captivity by the Rifis, the future caudillo Francisco Franco exerted himself
to ensure that he was denied service medals, apparently on the grounds that
he was the only officer to survive, with the implication that he had not acted
honourably. In July 1936, five days after the rising led by Franco that began
the Civil War, he was shot by a firing squad after a summary court-martial
found him guilty of ‘antipatriotic, anti-military and dissolute acts.’ Over 70
 808 C. R. PENNELL

years later, in July 2007 just as his book was republished in Spain (Casado y
Escudero 2007), the Spanish Supreme Court refused to overturn this verdict
on the grounds that, since the court martial had not been legally valid,
there was no verdict to overturn.4 The war’s memory still had the power to
perturb Spaniards two generations later.

Rewriting the Rif War and the Rifi state

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In 1986 I published a book based on my thesis (Pennell 1986), and in 1999 two
other researchers published books, also drawn from theses that had used the
Archives of the Quai d’Orsay. The first was María Rosa de Madariaga, whose
book, already cited, was based on a doctoral thesis she gained at the Sor-
bonne in 1987. The second, by Mohamed Tahtah was based on a thesis
gained at the University of Leiden in 1995. Although both used the Quai
d’Orsay, neither relied on the Servicio Histórico Militar. This may have been
because the military archives were for a time inaccessible. They were
packed up, transported to another archive in Segovia and then returned to
Madrid where they were left in its packaging for a long period.
These three books, as you would expect, had different approaches. My own
book and Tahtah’s resembled each other in explaining the Rif War in terms of
ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm’s state: The first was titled A Country with a Government and
a Flag, the second Entre pragmatisme, réformisme et modernisme: le rôle poli-
tico-religieux des Khattabi. Both identified a mixture of pragmatism, Islamic
reformism and modernisation that underlay the organisation of the Rifi
state. But A Country with a Government and a Flag paid more attention to
the course of the military campaigns and the administration of the Rif than
Tahtah’s book did and Tahtah emphasised ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm’s politically for-
mative years when he was studying in Fez (and absorbing Salafi ideas) and
working for the Spanish in Melilla (and absorbing the lessons of European
technological development and a fervent dislike for French colonialism in
Morocco). De Madariaga related the war in the context of Spanish financial
involvement in northern Morocco (mining concessions, agricultural colonisa-
tion) and of Moroccan resistance in earlier wars (Tetuan in 1859, Melilla in
1909) (de Madariaga 2000).

The war and the Moroccan opening of the past

The year 1999, when both Tahtah and de Madariaga published their books,
was one in which the Moroccan regime changed. In the final years of King
Hassan II’s reign, the regime had begun a tentative attempt at a political
opening. Old political opponents were allowed to return from exile, the con-
stitution was altered (not for the first time) and in 1998 a government headed
by a social democrat from the Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires (USFP)
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 809

took charge of the country. Even if there was no great change in the economic
structure of the country, and the poor remained poor, the formal control of
power had begun to shift, if only slightly, towards a freer environment
(Pennell 2001, 376–379). When King Hassan died that trend continued:
Mohammed VI made great efforts to ensure that he was perceived as a mod-
erniser. The elections of 2002 produced a parliament in which both Berberist
and Islamist parties were heavily represented, although the turnout was very
low. Growing Islamist violence was countered by stringent anti-terrorism laws
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while allowing the Islamist Parti de la Justice et du Développement (PJD) to

grow, to the extent that after the Arab Spring in 2011 its leader Abdelilah Ben-
kiran became Prime Minister. Growing Berberist pressure was countered by a
programme that aimed at preventing a cultural movement from becoming
too powerful.
But one of the most important political concessions of all was to the
pressure of the past. In 2004 the King created the Instance Équité et Réconci-
liation (IER) to investigate the human rights abuses of the previous reign with
the idea that this would lead to reconciliation. There were public hearings,
some of which were televised, but there was no confrontation of victims
and their abusers and no naming of the perpetrators of violence. The IER
determined how much should be paid in indemnities to the former victims
of state violence, but not every one of them was satisfied, to such an extent
that left-wing opposition parties set up their own parallel truth and reconcilia-
tion commission to provide an alternative forum.5 It was in this environment,
of Islamist activism and the re-examination of the Berber past in Morocco that
the war in the Rif sprung into contemporary relevance.
In 1998 Berber cultural activists in Spain set up the Fundación Mediterránea
Montgomery Hart de Estudios Amazighs y Magrebies in Granada6 to take pos-
session of David Hart’s enormous personal library. Its principal organiser
Rachid Ahmed Raha, later the President of the World Amazigh Assembly,
has carried on an intellectual and political struggle since then to re-insert
(as he sees it) the Rifi tribes into the historical discourse. The new inclusiveness
of Mohammed VI’s reign inaugurated an active competition over ibn ‘Abd al-
Karīm’s memory between Berber activists and the central government
(Maddy-Weitzman 2012, 147; Valensi 1990). The government might have
divorced Muh ammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm from any Amazigh or religious chal-
lenge as long ago as the 1960s, but government’s attempts to sanitise the vio-
lence of the repression in the Rif in 1958–59 and 1984 re-opened the question
in the new reign. A witness at the IER hearing in Al Hoceima in 2005 made it
clear that he wanted the government to acknowledge not only the historic
wrongs that had been done to the area but that putting them right would
require a recognition of the moral and political worth of the Rif War.
 810 C. R. PENNELL

I want the state to acknowledge the heroic fight of Mohand [Mohammed] Bin
Abdelkrim el Khattabi against French and Spanish colonialism. It [i.e. the Rif
Republic] was an experience of freedom and we have the right to be proud of
it. They [the regime] should let us be proud of it. They should let us teach it to
our children in history textbooks.7

The Rif War did not make much of an appearance in school textbooks, but a
Museum of the Rif was set in train in Al Hoceima.8 The IER’s cultural pro-
gramme organised a seminar in Nador in 2011 to discuss how it would be
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set up and talked about a series of focuses that would link the history of resist-
ance into other themes of the history of the Rif: ethnography, archaeology,
environmental history, migration and, very pointedly, human rights. This
was provocative political territory and it linked the history of ibn ‘Abd al-
Karīm’s state with the violent repression of the Rifi revolt against the newly
independent Moroccan state in 19589 Not all Rifis were won over and in
2012 there were demonstrations against the government in Al Hoceima
when the Rifi leader’s flag was unfurled; these were suppressed very
quickly.10 The Museum has not opened yet.
The suppression did not last. Political resentments continued to simmer in
the Rif. In late October and early November 2016 news spread outside
Morocco of what the Irish Times called ‘the grisly death of a fish seller,’ who
was crushed to death in a rubbish truck while trying to rescue fish that the
police had confiscated from him on the grounds that it was illegally
caught.11 In a way that resembled how the deaths of unimportant individuals
had set off the Arab Spring protests in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, protests
erupted across the Rif. They blew up again a few months later in February
2017, on 6 February, the anniversary of ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm’s death.12 By May
2017 al-H arak al-Sha’bī (Popular Movement) had emerged to lead protest
after protest about the economic deprivation of the Rif. Better employment,
communications, education and health were the demands of these protests,
which were nearly all perfectly peaceful. Al-H arak al-Sha’bī’s leader, Nasser
Zefzafi, denied that it sought independence for the Rif but the protesters
habitually carried two flags: the multi-coloured stripes of the Amazigh
banner and the flag of the Rif Republic. Zefzafi was arrested at the end of
the month.13

The Islamists and the Rif War

The Rif War was also incorporated into the struggle between the Islamists
and the government. The most important Islamist movement of all, the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, portrayed ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Khaṭtạ̄ bī as
an Islamic hero, carrying the banner of jihad.14 In Morocco itself, the main
Islamist party, the Parti de la Justice et du Développement (PJD) featured
him on its website in a section devoted to famous national figures of the
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 811

past. It also talked of him as carrying the banner of jihad, though it did not
actually use the word mujahid, preferring fighter (muqawim).15 The website
of Ila-al-amam, the more militant underground organisation founded by Abd
al-Rahman Yassine was much more emphatic: he was a mujahid and a leader
of jihad.16
Yet ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm himself denied that he led a jihad. In an exchange
with Léon Gabrielli, the French political officer with whom he had many nego-
tiations in the final months of the war, he said that
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I wish to state, since I am accused of leading a holy war, that this is incorrect to
say the least. We no longer live in the Middle Ages, nor at the times of the Cru-
sades. Quite simply we wish to be independent and to be governed only by God.
(Gabrielli 1950, 50, 85).17

This might have been to assuage French fears, but after the war was over, he
made much the same point in an interview with the Egyptian journal Al-
Manār. He explained that he had wanted to establish a republic (which he
called jumhurīya) ‘with a resolute government, firm sovereignty and a
strong national organisation,’ a modern ‘state’ like France or Spain. ‘In other
words, I wanted my people to know that they had a nation as well as a religion
(la-hum waṭ anan kama la-hum dīnan).’ He admitted that many (perhaps
most?) of his followers did not accept his nationalism mixed with Salafism.
They did agree that unity was needed to stave off the immediate threat
from the Spanish, but while ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm believed it should be perma-
nent and that the tribes should not be able to revert to anarchy once the
war was over, neither the tribes nor the fanatical (as he described them)
shaykhs of the religious brotherhoods and the sharifs wanted any such
thing. They would not fight for a waṭan, he complained, only for what they
called ‘the cause of faith’.
Al-Manār was edited by Rashīd Rid ā and was a beacon of Salafi thinking
and what ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm said was very much in line with that. Rid ā
himself dismissed the Sufi brotherhood (tarīqas) as making of their religion
‘a joke and a plaything’ (Hourani 1983, 225). And his rejection of tribal solidar-
ity coincided with Rid ā’s rejection of secular solidarity (asabiya) on the
grounds that it perverted the sharī’a.
The imposition of the sharī’a was central to ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm’s policy
during the war and from the beginning he made it made it clear that this
was his aim: not simply to resist the Spanish, but also to impose Islamic law
in full. Simultaneously, it served both ideological and political purposes. It
replaced the shaky alliance that underpinned the initial attack on the
Spanish in 1921 with a more stable unity, one that would end the chaos of
the time before the Rif War; it enabled the administration to centralise a
great deal of power in its hands, and it legitimised the new order. That was
the central message of the bay’a that legitimated his rule in February 1923
 812 C. R. PENNELL

and confirmed – or asserted – his role as leader of the Rif. It was a constitution,
an ideological statement and a piece of propaganda.
The bay’a had three main themes: the need to guarantee morality, right-
eousness and the sharī’a; the need for social order and unity; and the obli-
gation to oppose the Christians. All this could only be done if that the
leadership was in the hands of a just and righteous man who could unite
the tribes against the Christians. This was Muh ammad bin ‘Abd al-Karīm al-
Khaṭtạ̄ bí to whom ‘the caliphate came dragging its robe behind it, and he
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took it without wasting time.’ But the bay’a does not call ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm
a caliph: it asserts that he took up the functions of the caliphate. And it
does not call him amīr al-mu’minīn (commander of the faithful) either, even
though that title was commonly used to describe the effective or putatively
effective local authority in a particular area. An amīr al-mu’minīn had certain
specific functions and powers: to make agreements with foreign states, to
control the political activity at the centre of the province (as opposed to
the periphery), to maintain order and the shari’a, and to protect Islamic terri-
tory from invasion or occupation by non-believers. Even so, all of those func-
tions could be achieved without an amīr al-mu’minin: individuals could lead
armed groups, tribal structures and armed groups could impose the sharī’a
on a local scale and maintain order in a village or the quarter of a town
(Pennell 2016). The bay’a does not mention the word jihad.
Bin ‘Abd al-Karīm himself stated in the Al-Manār interview, ‘I do not deny
that sometimes I was obliged to make use of religious sensibility in (an
attempt) to win support,’ although it might have been more accurate to say
that men gripped by religious sensibility made use of him. Since the first vic-
tories of 1921 jihadist feeling had run high. Popular understanding had trans-
lated the bloodletting into a vision of an imminent apocalypse (Pennell 1986,
181–185, 87). While he was riding high militarily he was the victorious com-
mander, but if he faltered many of his supporters might leave him. Worse
still, from a strategic point of view, his supporters might drag him through
their enthusiasm into a military adventure that could lead to his defeat. This
is what happened when he invaded the French zone in early 1925.
Before and during the First World War, while he was working for the
Spanish in Melilla, ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm had written articles in Arabic for the
local Spanish newspaper there, El Telegrama del Rif, in which he linked a
concept of concepts of progress and patriotism with the triumph of Islamic
law and open opposition to the French Protectorate (Tahtah 2000, 145–
151). But he was very unwilling to be drawn into a war on two fronts.
Yet in the spring of 1925, he undertook a limited occupation of one large
tribe, the Banu Zarwal, which was just inside the borders of the French Zone. It
was a source of vital supplies of food, and French troops were moving into it
from the south, which threatened his hegemony over the Rif itself. The first Rifi
attacks were successful and they began a process that he could not control.
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 813

Many volunteers in his army came from deep inside the French zone, in the
Middle Atlas, for example, and he could not ignore their expectations and
the pleas from their tribes of origin for the Rifis to come to their aid. These
pressures went to the heart of his legitimacy as the leader of a state of resist-
ance. The first attacks drove French forces a long way back towards Taza and
Fez, but ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm’s fears were fully realised. In May and June 1925 the
French and Spanish governments made preparations for the joint attack on
the Rif that destroyed him the following year. Initial success had brought
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ruin in its train because, in the eyes of most of his followers, this war was a
jihad against the Christians.
This is quite far away from the way Salafist thinking evolved over the near-
century that followed. Rid ā himself did not reject jihad, which he thought of as
an absolute obligation for Muslims, one that required them to become strong
by studying and making use of western sciences and techniques. It was a train
of thought that was developed by the precursors of the modern jihadist
movement. H asan al-Bannā, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was
part of the circle around Rashīd Rid ā when he was young, and tried to carry
on al-Manār after Rid ā died. Both men attacked innovations in doctrine and
worship (such as the Sufi tarīqas) and both accepted the principle of jihad,
but with restrictions: a war to defend Islam was always licit, but Rid ā said a
war to spread Islam was only lawful if it was illegal to preach, or for
Muslims to live in accordance with the sharī’a (Hourani 1983, 236–237). Al-
Bannā went further, to say that jihad was a personal obligation, and by impli-
cation therefore had nothing to do with considerations of strategic strength.
But it was still essentially a defensive jihad when Islam was under attack
(Bonney 2004, 211–215; Levy 2014). Sayyid Qutb, another Egyptian, devel-
oped al-Bannā’s ideas in the 1950s (and was executed by Nasser) into a justi-
fication of jihad against existing Muslim rulers who refused to make way for a
true Islamic state. Because they would not give up their power, armed jihad
against them was necessary because truth and falsehood cannot coexist
(Soage 2009). His follower ‘Abd al-Salām al-Farāj, the ideologue of the organ-
isation that assassinated Anwār al-Sadat in 1981, wrote an extended pamphlet
The Neglected Duty (jihad that is) that became a founding text of the modern
Islamist movement. It called for this to be given immediate practical effect
(Jansen and Faraj 1986). He proposed to lay the foundations of a new
caliphate
Muslims are agreed on the obligatory character of the establishment of an
Islamic Caliphate. To announce a Caliphate must be based on the existence of
a (territorial) nucleus (from which it can grow). This (nucleus) is the Islamic
state (Jansen and Faraj 1986, 165).

This was the policy announced by Abū Bakr al-Baghdadī in Mosul in 2014
when announced the Islamic State with himself as the new caliph:
 814 C. R. PENNELL

Indeed, Allah (the Exalted) blessed you today with this victory, thus we
announced the khalifah in compliance with the order of Allah (the Exalted).
We announced it because – by Allah’s grace – we have its essentials. By
Allah’s permission, we are capable of establishing the khalifah.

From Rifi State to Islamic State

Al-Baghdadi’s pronouncement raises the rather obvious contemporary compari-
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son of the Rifi state with the Islamic State based in Raqqa and Mosul. In 1921,
Muh ammad bin ‘Abd al-Karīm founded a state that replaced a political entity
defined by and controlled by outsiders – the Spanish Protectorate (and by
extension the French one too) by one whose boundaries were defined locally
by jihad, legitimised at least formally by reliance on the sharī’a. In 2014, Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi founded a state in northern Iraq and Syria that he called a cali-
phate. It replaced political entities defined by boundaries imposed by outsiders,
ones that he re-defined in terms of jihad and legitimised by reference to the
sharī’a. The language used by both bay’as is strikingly similar. Where the Rifi
document refers to the savage fighting between the Rifi tribes, the Mosul
declaration talks of the savagery of Arab tribes before Islam:18
They were in dispute and broken up; they were dispersed and had infighting,
striking each other’s necks, suffering hunger, lack of unity, and capture. Then,
when Allah blessed them with Islam and they believed, Allah unified them,
united their ranks, honored them after their humiliation, enriched them after
their poverty, and brought their hearts together, all through Islam. Thus, by
the grace of Allah, they became brothers.

Both documents attack the worshipers of idols and crosses and both assert
the fundamental duty of Muslims to make a bay’a to an Islamic ruler. Accord-
ing to the Rifi document ‘(The Prophet) said: ‘A man who dies and has not
made a bay’a, has died in ignorance’.’ The Mosul document says ‘We clarify
to the Muslims that with this declaration of khalifah, it is incumbent upon
all Muslims to pledge allegiance to the khalifah Ibrahim and support him
(may Allah preserve him). Both quoted the same hadith from the traditions
of Bukhari:
Whoever obeys me has obeyed Allah, and whoever disobeys me has disobeyed
Allah. Whoever obeys the leader has obeyed me, and whoever disobeys the
leader has disobeyed me.

Yet there are some crucial differences: the absence of a call for jihad in the Rifi
document is one, the naming of the two men is another. The Rifi leader is
referred to as
He is the man who puts his trust in God, the one singled out (for this task). Our
Lord Muh ammad, son of our learned and distinguished Lord ‘Abd al-Karīm al-
Khattābī al-Waryaghlī al-Rīfī.
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 815

The caliph of the Islamic State is given a far more imposing genealogy, one
that links him directly to the Prophet:
the shaykh, the mujahid, the scholar who practices what he preaches, the wor-
shipper, the leader, the warrior, the reviver, descendent from the family of the
Prophet, the slave of Allah, Ibrahim Ibn ‘Awwad Ibn Ibrahim Ibn ‘Ali Ibn
Muh ammad al-Badri al-Hashimi al-Husayni al-Qurashi by lineage, as-Samurra’i
by birth and upbringing, al-Baghdadi by residence and scholarship.
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Finally, the Mosul bay’a removes all potential limits on the new Caliphate:
Accordingly, the ‘Iraq and Sham’ in the name of the Islamic State is henceforth
removed from all official deliberations and communications, and the official
name is the Islamic State from the date of this declaration.

Bin ‘Abd al-Karīm was proclaimed only by the tribes of the Rif and the tribes of
the Jibala.
Aside from the contents of the bay’as, there are of course some very impor-
tant fundamental differences between the two movements. The Rifis did not
engage in the sort of spectacular cruelty that Islamic State has engaged in;
they did not project their struggle beyond their own area into the far territory
of the enemy. The Islamic State scathingly rejected the international order
organised through the United Nations, but the Rifi Republic actively sought
the sympathy of the League of Nations. The differences between the two enti-
ties are very large, but what did they have in common? – The mobilisation of
opposition to the invaders that they then consolidated; the functional use of
jihadist imagery; the religious terms of reference of the founding documents
and above all the creation of states with regular armies and disciplined
societies, the foundation of unity upon the sharī’a, the flags that expressed
their statehood. At a time when Islamic State has dominated the struggle
for at least three years (when this was written), those commonalities give
the Rif war a contemporary relevance and revive its memory, just in case it
really had been forgotten.

Conclusion
If the Rif War continues to be a matter of immediate importance in the second
decade of the twentieth century it is because the historical questions it raises
resonate still. The arguments between historians and political analysts are
only one debate: whether the Rif War should be understood as a European
defeat or a Rifi victory, whether it was a regional and rural revolt or a
modern national movement, whether it was a revolt by Amazigh or by
Sunni Muslims. The other debate is about the same questions, except it is
not presented as a debate but as assertions or an assembly of memories
about the Rif War gathered to underpin contemporary political movements.
 816 C. R. PENNELL

But ‘contemporary’ is a misleading word, because it has two frames of refer-

ence. The first is contemporary to the moment in question, the Rif war as it
mattered to an individual historian or politician or propagandist. What a
Spanish veteran of the war wrote in the 1930s or a Rifi veteran remembered
in the 1980s, or what a French historian (or polemicist) of empire made of the
war in the 1950s, or an American anthropologist in the 1970s, were of course
guided by the ideological and political necessities of their moments. That has
been what this article has tried to unravel. The other, is the everyday usage,
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meaning contemporary to us, modern. When the centenary of the war

comes round in 2021, the commentators and historians and politicians and
polemicists will have to integrate all those perceptions.

Notes
1. Rif Planète Agence de voyages. http://www.rifplanete.com/?cat=1&lang=en.
Visited 22 August 2016.
2. Servicio Histórico Militar, Madrid, Spain. Melilla, Leg, Cartas Arabes, 2 Marnisa y
Wargha, ‘from the tribes of Matiwa, Banu Walid, Fannassa, Awlad Bu Salama,
Banu Wanjil, and Marnisa to the august nation of Spain and the governors of
Melilla and Tetuan’, II Jumada 2 1341 / 29 January 1923.
3. ‘Panorámica de la bahía de Alhucemas y cabila de Beni-Urriaguel, obtenido
desde la casa de Abd el Krim, en Axdir por Luis Casado y Escudero durante el
tiempo que estuvo prisionero en dicho poblado’ 8 drawings: watercolour and
ink on a faintly printed paper; 13×20-24 cm. 1923. University of Melbourne
Library.
4. ‘El doble agravio de Franco al teniente Casado,’ by Manuel Altozano, Madrid, El
País 3 August 2007. Visited http://elpais.com/diario/2007/08/03/espana/
1186092017_850215.html
5. (Sater 2010, 97–109); Najwa Belkziz a Phd student at the University of
Melbourne is currently completing a PhD thesis on the IER and its alternative
forum.
6. Orden de17 de junio de 1998, de la Consejería de Educación y Ciencia, por la que
se reconoce e inscribe en el Registro de Fundaciones Docentes Privadas, la Fun-
dación denominada “Mediterránea Montgomery Hart de Estudios Amazighs y
Magrebies” in [Spain] Boletín Oficial de España, 7 July 1998.
7. Hakim Benchemas, Instance Equité et Réconciliation, public hearings, Alho-
ceima, 2005. I am grateful to Najwa Belkziz for this quotation which will
appear in her doctoral thesis that is on the point of completion. The translation
is hers.
8. ‘Al Hoceima: Le Musée du Rif’ La Nouvelle Tribune 29 October 2011, http://lnt.ma/
al-hoceima-le-musee-du-rif/.
9. Conseil national des droits de l’Homme: Programme IER 2 ‘Déjeuner débat sous
le thème " Musée du Rif: rôle de la société civile ‘Rapport … 16 septembre 2011 à
Nador.’ This document was kindly passed to me by Bruce Maddy Weizmann of
Tel Aviv University.
10. ‘Noticias del Rif: Nuevas manifestaciones y altercados en las ciudades de
Bnibouayach, Imzouren y Alhucemas y donde los rifeños izaron la bandera de
la República Rifeña creada por Abdelkrim El Khattabi en el año 1921’ Diario
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 817

de Alhucemas 11 March 2012 online at http://www.alhucemas.net/index.php/

Nuevas-manifestaciones-y-altercados-en-las-ciudades-de-Bnibouayach-Imzouren-
y-Alhucemas-y-donde-los-rifenos-izaron-la-bandera-de-la-Republica-Rifena-
creada-por-Abdelkrim-El-khattabi-en-el-ano-1921.html. Visited 14 June 2016
11. ‘Protests over grisly death of fish seller remind Moroccans of Arab Spring; Protes-
ters blame police for death of Mouhcine Fikri in a rubbish compactor,’ by Guy
Hedgecoe, The Irish Times, 4 November 2016.
12. He died in Cairo on 6 February 1963.
13. ‘Anger brews in Morocco’s neglected Rif region.’ By Herve Bar. Agence France
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Presse. 5 May 2017;‘Thousands rally for release of protest leader Zefzafi.’ 31

May 2017, Al Jazeera English.
14. http://www.ikhwanwiki.com/index.php?title.= ‫ ﻋﺒﺪ ﺍﻟﻜﺮﻳﻢ ﺍﻟﺨﻄﺎﺑﻲ‬Visited 19 Septem-
ber 2016.
15. http://www.pjd.ma/. Visited 19/09/2016.
16. http://www.yassine.net/ar/2016/02/. Visited 19 Sept 2016.
17. ‘Je déclare que, lorsqu’on me reproche de faire la guerre sainte, on commet une
erreur, pour ne pas dire plus. Le temps des guerres saintes est passé; nous ne
sommes plus au moyen âge ou au temps des Croisades. Nous voulons simple-
ment être et vivre indépendants et n’être gouvernés que par Dieu’.
18. Quotations from bin ‘Abd al-Karīm’s bay‘a are taken from (Pennell, C. R. 1986,
246–251) and quotations from the 2014 caliphate declaration from (Cook
2015, 224–236).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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