Encyclopedia of African History

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Algeria, Colonial: Islamic Ideas and Movements in

The Algerian experience under French colonial rule (1830-1962) ranks as one of the most intense and difficult Muslim encounters with modern Europe. There were repeated rebellions and a large-scale influx of European settlers. Algerian Muslims were exposed to French schooling and compulsory military service, and large numbers of men traveled to France in search of work. The experience climaxed with a seven year revolutionary conflict. The development of Islamic thought and movements in colonial Algeria reflects broader trends in the contemporary Islamic world, but also needs to be considered within the context of the Algerian historical experience.

When the Ottoman administration collapsed with the French conquest of Algiers in 1830, Algerian Muslims were faced with three choices: armed resistance, emigration to a Muslim territory, or living under French rule and attempting to preserve their identity and promote their interests within a colonial framework.

The foremost resistance leader was Abd al-Qadir whose family had a tradition of attachment to the Qadiriyya Sufi order. Their base was in the Eghris Plain near Mascara in western Algeria.

Between 1832 and 1847, Abd al-Qadir used his religious prestige and organizational skill to lead sustained resistance to the French. After his surrender in 1847 he was, contrary to French promises, interred in France. During his five year captivity he entered into dialogue both with French Catholics and Saint Simonian apostles of a universal civilization based upon science and run by engineers.

In 1852, Abd al-Qadir went into exile in the East, first in Bursa, Turkey, then after 1854 in Damsacus. Through the colonial period until the First World War, many Islamic scholars chose not to live in Algeria under French rule and went into exile, some joining Abd al-Qadir in Damascus, others going to Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, or the Hijaz. Abd al-Qadir himself continued to cultivate an intense mysticism, but also kept up his ties to the Saint Simonians, helping to gain Ottoman consent to Saint Simonian Ferdinand De Lesseps project of building a canal through the isthmus of Suez. Politically Abd al-Qadir maintained a studied ambivalence toward both French and Ottoman authority. After his death in 1882 his sons and grandsons split, some affirming loyalty to France, others to the Ottoman sultan.

Within Algeria, many Islamic leaders continued to advocate armed resistance. Sufi orders played a key role in organizing rebellions. But as rebellions throughout the mid-nineteenth century met with failure, others counseled a realistic approach, urging co-operation in order to secure Muslim cultural, political, and economic rights within the colonial order. Some advocated reform and self-strengthening of Muslim society. Advocates of this approach included al-Makki Bin Badis, a Muslim judge in Constantine, who had a major role in creating a merit-based Islamic judicial bureaucracy in the 1860s, and Abd al-Qadir al-Majjawi, a leading Islamic educator who promoted scientific study and reminded Algerians that earlier Islamic scholars had excelled in the sciences.

In the 1890s, as the French sought to expand their influence in Muslim territories in north and west Africa and the Middle East, they took a more benevolent attitude toward Islam in Algeria. French Islamic specialists worked closely with Algerian scholars and helped them to publish their work and gain scholarly recognition, as did Muhammad Ben Cheneb at the International Congress of Orientalists, held at Algiers in 1905. But the passage by the French parliament that same year of a law separating religion and state crippled efforts to promote a loyal colonial Algerian Islamic religious establishment.

The decade before the First World War saw the emergence of voluntary associations among Algerian Muslims, some of them dedicated to promoting Arabic Islamic education in order to sustain the Algerian national identity in the face of assimilationist pressures. In the 1920s these efforts intensified with the return to Algeria of men who had studied in the Arab East, Abd al-Hamid Bin Badis, Tayyib al-Uqbi, and Bashir Ibrahimi. In 1931 they helped establish the Association of Algerian Ulama in order to coordinate promotion of efforts to provide modern style Arabic Islamic education at a national level. While Bin Badis and Uqbi were inspiring religious figures, it was Ibrahimi, with the most experience with modern intellectual developments in the East, who was the chief educational theorist and organizer.

By the 1930s, a number of Algerians with both French and Islamic educational backgrounds had gone to study in France. The best known of these is Malek Bennabi (1905-1973). His experience as an Algerian Islamic intellectual in France continued themes seen earlier in the case of Abd al-Qadir. He became involved in relations with French student members of the lay religious organization, Catholic Action, and he pursued a scientific education, studying electrical engineering. In the process, he developed a philosophy that emphasized the need for religious revitalization and the intellectual discipline of modern science. He spoke disparagingly of the secular political ideologies popular among many of his fellow Algerian students. These were the key themes in his best-known work, Vocation de l'Islam, published in 1954.

When the British and Americans pushed Axis forces out of North Africa in 1943, Bashir Ibrahimi (1890-1965) took the helm of the Association of Algerian Ulama. As nationalist leaders formulated Algerian grievances in a national charter, Ibrahimi contributed the document's religious plank. He called for the French government to compensate the Algerian Muslim community for the loss of religious endowment properties they had confiscated in the 1830s, and for scrupulous application of the law separating religion and state-thus allowing Muslims free religious expression without government intervention. Except for minor concessions, the French rejected these demands. Frustrated, Ibrahimi went into exile in Cairo in 1952. Bennabi also went to Cairo, in 1954. Both spent the revolutionary years (1954-62) in the Middle East where they were thoroughly exposed to the ideas of Arab nationalism and of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both men would return to Algeria after independence where they contributed to the complex task of articulating the role of Islam within post-colonial Algeria.

Allan Christelow

See also: Algeria: Arabism and Islamism; Algeria: Muslim Population, 1871-1954.

Further Reading

Christelow, Allan, Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985

Clancy-Smith, Julia, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994