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Board of Trustees, Boston University L'Interieur du Maghreb: XVe-XIXe Siecle by Jacques Berque Review by: Peter Von Sivers The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1981), pp. 185-188 Published by: Boston University African Studies Center Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/218140 . Accessed: 08/05/2014 18:24 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Boston University African Studies Center and Board of Trustees, Boston University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International Journal of African Historical Studies. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 18:24:05 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

L'Interieur du Maghreb: XVe-XIXe Siecleby Jacques Berque

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Page 1: L'Interieur du Maghreb: XVe-XIXe Siecleby Jacques Berque

Board of Trustees, Boston University

L'Interieur du Maghreb: XVe-XIXe Siecle by Jacques BerqueReview by: Peter Von SiversThe International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1981), pp. 185-188Published by: Boston University African Studies CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/218140 .

Accessed: 08/05/2014 18:24

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Boston University African Studies Center and Board of Trustees, Boston University are collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International Journal of African Historical Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 18:24:05 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: L'Interieur du Maghreb: XVe-XIXe Siecleby Jacques Berque

BOOK REVIEWS 185

L'INTERIEUR DU MAGHREB: XVe-XIXe SIECLE. By Jacques Berque. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1978. Pp. 546. Paper.

This book is a true hapax-one of its kind, unique, Berquesque. It examines a dozen or so Arabic juridical, theological, biographical and mystical texts, but it is not a philosophical exegesis. It analyzes the social history of early modern North Africa, but it is not a history. Perhaps an approximate description of it would be that it resembles a series of running commentaries in concentric circles. Each series of circles begins with a sketch of the sociogeographic environment of the author and his text. Then follows the presen- tation of the text, through excerpts and paraphrases, accompanied by brief comments. Eventually the wider implications of the text are drawn out, usually in the form of tentative hypotheses rather than systematic analyses. Occasionally the concentric circles vary in content. At the beginning of the book we travel with Jacques Berque as the guide bleu through central Algeria and at the end Jacques Berque is our mystical guide as we climb the heights of Islamic gnosis. But no matter how far the circles are removed from the center, they remain faithful to the text at hand. Although the book is an unclassifiable study in which personal reminiscences, geo- graphical observations, social theorizing and historical explanation are interwoven seamlessly, textual concerns always remain central.

The fifteenth century, with which the book begins, is represented by a manuscript containing a collection of court cases (manazil) of the western Algerian jurist al-Maghili. The century was still domi- nated, as during the time of the great historian Ibn Khaldun a century earlier, by the clash between the North African Berber dynasties and the Arab immigrants from the east, the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym. Al-Maghili, in the same fashion as Ibn Khaldun, condemns the rapacity and destructiveness of the Arab nomads, and thereby testifies to the still incomplete process of their inte- gration into Maghribi society. On the other hand, since al-Maghili no longer uses the original tribal names but employs those of subtribes and fractions, the immigrants must be assumed to have broken up into smaller units-a breakup which implies agricultural sedentarization and thereby social integration to a certain degree, as Berque rightfully emphasizes. Thus the old cliche of nomadism versus settled life is brilliantly dissolved into the much more accurate contrast between urbanism and extensive agriculture which dominated North Africa from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

One of the legacies of the Berber dynasties was a strong support for religion. In urban centers a large juridico-theological estab- lishment emerged, while in the countryside the phenomenon of

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Islamic saints (murabitun) came into being. An appealing obser- vation made by Berque is that the saintly expansion, which started in the far west under the last great Berber dynasty of the Almohads, was a countermovement of sorts against the Arab immigrants from the east. By the sixteenth century the transformation of Maghribi society by both saints and Arabs was more or less complete and, as a result, new political, social and economic forms of organization began to appear. Berque takes three texts spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the biography of a saint and two juridical case studies-in order to illustrate some of the new forms.

The biography of the saint, Ahmad b. Yusuf, is a spirited defense of popular religion, complete with miracles and ecstasies traced affectionately by Berque, against denunciations by Muslim legal- ists. Such a defense would have been unthinkable two centuries later, but during his lifetime the saint seems to have been unrivaled in popularity: no fewer than eighty Algerian towns or tribal groups adopted the popular saint as their patron. The other two manu- scripts show Maghribi society from the perspective of Islamic law. Berque seems surprised that the Tunisian jurist cAzzum saw anarchy where political order was supposed to exist and conjugal and inheritance quarrels where family harmony was expected to reign. He concludes that in Tunisia the patriarchal family experi- enced "a certain fragility" during early modern times (p. 126). But is Berque here not the victim of a foreshortened perspective in which legal cases, treating by definition of the disorderly, are confused with a reality of possibly much sturdier structures? In other words, and this holds true also for other chapters where Berque tends to overrate the reality content of juridical documents, legal texts do not inform about the frequency of infractions. How sturdy, if not to say bellicose, social reality could be in early modern North Africa without necessarily disintegrating into anarchy Berque in fact tell us in the following text in which the legality and illegality of hunting, tribal violence, abduction, holy war and pillage are discussed. Its author, al-Ziyyathi, a tribesman from the fierce Ghumara in northern Morocco, was evidently made of tougher fiber than his more scrupulous urban colleague in Tunisia.

So far the book follows a chronological line which, however, is given up in Part II where four texts are investigated for "a certain number of invariances connected with the transcendental" (p. 289). The texts span the entire period under discussion and in themselves are highly attractive, dealing with a mystic seeking counsel from his master, the oneiric meanderings of another mystic, and the renewal of intellectual mysticism by Ahmad al-Tijani at the end of the eighteen century. How al-Tijani fits the bill of "invariances and incurrences" (so the heading of Part II) is not quite clear, since the

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brotherhood Islam which he represents is described in another passage of the book as one of the "new differentiations" in seventeenth and eighteenth century society (p. 543). Altogether Part II is rather opaque, and merely getting beyond the first two sentences is no mean task: "Invariations and recurrences: as much as saying in Arabic: dhikra. The dhikra of beings, landscapes, forms of behavior, this is the reference to the Absolute in the transitory, principally in the compromises of the concrete" (p. 193). In this book more than ever Berque yields to his predilection for verbal pyrotechnics and titillating allusions, all too often left without clarifying elaborations.

Fortunately the book returns to firmer ground in Part III, which is devoted to the "traditional system" of Maghribi society. An eighteenth-century anonymous text provides the foil for an original investigation of agricultural vocabularies and practices among the Chleuh in southeastern Morocco. Similarly remarkable is Berque's ability to squeeze out a full theory of parentage, even of tribal- segmentary structures, from a manuscript of sharifian genealogies, or to deliver a thorough critique of the traditional encyclopedia of knowledge taught in seventeenth-century Morocco. A truly mas- terly Berque reveals himself in Part IV in which a final batch of Arabic texts is presented so as to round off the portraiture of the traditional system, contemplated now in the setting of the eigh- teenth and nineteenth centuries under the emerging shadow of Europe. Algerian brotherhood Islam, Moroccan sharifianism under Sultan Hasan I, Tunisian juridico-religious groups and CAbd al- Qadir's outbursts of mystical passions in his Syrian exile pass review, full of color and lively immediacy-a review, however, which in the case of the contrast between CAbd al-Qadir's tradi- tional mystical flights with De Lesseps' contemporaneous modern feat of constructing the Suez canal appears a bit contrived and eccentric. But these intellectual extravagances notwithstanding, the "motive power of the concrete, the localised, the specific" takes the reader successfuly to "the system," which Berque wants him to distinguish in the interior of the Maghrib (p. 535).

The book is crammed with fascinating details, impossible to capture in a review. Sometimes these details are spun into out- rageously fanciful and obscure interpretive cocoons and the overall "system," even though reemphasized at the end in the form of twenty theses, emerges only partially and for the rest remains unintelligible to this sympathetic reader. But the wealth and pain- staking accuracy of this torrent of little stories, occurrences, and tidbits of useful knowledge, of which much of the book consists, create pure excitement. There are entire shelves of new Arabic materials for the historian or social scientist to investigate and apart from a few minor infelicities (Erewhon by Samuel Butler is

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rendered incorrectly, a few Arabic names are misspelled and the Bakriyya-descended Awlad Sidi Shaykh are questionably charac- terized as "marabutic") there are few facts for the scholars to contest. Jacques Berque, the great doyen of Islamic social studies, is to be admired for the sharply chiseled gems fashioned from his tireless research, perhaps also for his sheer intellectual audacity. I only wish he were less convoluted in his thoughts and more systematic in his approach.

PETER VON SIVERS

University of Utah

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