The Algerian Army has deployed in the Mzab Oasis towns pf Ghardaïa, Guerara, and Berriane following renewed ethno-sectarian violence between the Arab Sunni and Amazigh Ibadi communities. At least 22 people died in violent clashes over the past week. President Bouteflika ordered the Army in and Prime Minister Sallal has visited the troubled region
Ironically, in my first week or two of writing this blog back in 2009, I was reporting on clashes in Berriane. (Kal at The Moor Next Door wrote a detailed response to that post, from which I learned much.) In late 2013, violence was renewed after desecration of a cemetery, and has broken out sporadically sense. What were once mostly Amazigh towns are now mixed, and the language split (which as Kal noted is not like in the Kabyle, where French was more entrenched in colonial times) is reinforced by the fact the Arabs are Sunni and the Berbers Ibadi. As Lemeen Souag pointed out in 2014, even the etymology and spelling of Ghardaïa are matters of dispute.
The government is apparently blaming the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), a Berber-based opposition party whose main strength is in the Kabyle, and has arrested a local FFS activist in the Mzab, Kameleddine Fekhar,
Showing posts with label Ibadis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ibadis. Show all posts
Friday, July 10, 2015
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Fall of Border Post Highlights Unseen War in Nafusa
The border post of Wazin, on the Libyan-Tunisian border south of the Tunisaian town of Dehiba, has been taken by Libyan rebel forces.
View Larger Map
This is a spillover from the somewhat shadowy fighting going on in the Jabal Nafusa, the highland area of western Libya. Unlike Misrata and other coastal towns, where the world media are present in force (at some risk to themselves, as we are learning), the war for the Nafusa has been conducted largely offstage. Earlier this month I noted that there were reports of a scorched-earth campaign in the area, I also linked last month to a video of a town in the Nafusa proclaiming allegiance to the rebels, in which, after the proclamation in Arabic, they added a summary in Tamazight ("Berber"). The region has complained of forced Arabization and a ban on teaching Tamazight. In addition, like their fellow Berbers in the Algerian Mzab, many Nafusis adhere to the Ibadi sect (the link is to some 2009 Sunni-Ibadi clashes in Algeria). Ibadis are genertally found only in North Africa, Oman, and Zanzibar.
If the rebels can hold on to the border, we may learn more about what has been going on in the Nafusa.
View Larger Map
This is a spillover from the somewhat shadowy fighting going on in the Jabal Nafusa, the highland area of western Libya. Unlike Misrata and other coastal towns, where the world media are present in force (at some risk to themselves, as we are learning), the war for the Nafusa has been conducted largely offstage. Earlier this month I noted that there were reports of a scorched-earth campaign in the area, I also linked last month to a video of a town in the Nafusa proclaiming allegiance to the rebels, in which, after the proclamation in Arabic, they added a summary in Tamazight ("Berber"). The region has complained of forced Arabization and a ban on teaching Tamazight. In addition, like their fellow Berbers in the Algerian Mzab, many Nafusis adhere to the Ibadi sect (the link is to some 2009 Sunni-Ibadi clashes in Algeria). Ibadis are genertally found only in North Africa, Oman, and Zanzibar.
If the rebels can hold on to the border, we may learn more about what has been going on in the Nafusa.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
A response on the Berriane Post
This doesn't count as a weekend posting, but Kal at The Moor Next Door has noted and replied online at length to my post on Berriane, Ibadis, Berbers, etc. Admittedly, after the flattering "Michael Collins Dunn, Editor of the prestigious Middle East Journal, wrote an interesting "Backgrounder" on the Berriane violence..." he proceeds to detail what I left out, got wrong, or should have said. I thank him for that since I make no claim to be an Algeria specialist* and the only Ibadis I've ever had contact with (unless some Algerian friends were and I didn't know it) were Omanis. But I'm pleased to learn from him and delighted that the conversation is starting: that ought to be what blogging is about. I'm never too old to learn...
[*Though the man who introduced me to Middle East studies as an undergraduate, and was my primary advisor as a doctoral candidate as well, Professor John D. Ruedy, most definitely is, and is the author of Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation.]
Kal also posted a comment on my original post, but do go read the longer critique on the blog. I learned from it and you will too. I'll be setting up a blogroll sometime soon, and I'm just getting to know The Moor Next Door, but if you're interested in the Maghreb, and Algeria in particular, it is more than worthy of your attention.
And as the old saying goes, as long as they spell your name right ...
One item I want to throw in since I've actually had two posts up on Algeria: on those posts I linked to English-language stories on Algerian press websites that have English pages. Of course the most extensive literature on Algeria is French and Arabic. I don't yet know the audience for this blog, and may post a poll sometime soon to find out if people will be annoyed/or overjoyed if I post links to articles in other languages. I did consult French and Arabic articles on those posts but didn't link to them, assuming many readers would not have an interest. This is an area I'll explore further, especially once more people know the blog is here and thus there's hope for a decent polling sample.
[*Though the man who introduced me to Middle East studies as an undergraduate, and was my primary advisor as a doctoral candidate as well, Professor John D. Ruedy, most definitely is, and is the author of Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation.]
Kal also posted a comment on my original post, but do go read the longer critique on the blog. I learned from it and you will too. I'll be setting up a blogroll sometime soon, and I'm just getting to know The Moor Next Door, but if you're interested in the Maghreb, and Algeria in particular, it is more than worthy of your attention.
And as the old saying goes, as long as they spell your name right ...
One item I want to throw in since I've actually had two posts up on Algeria: on those posts I linked to English-language stories on Algerian press websites that have English pages. Of course the most extensive literature on Algeria is French and Arabic. I don't yet know the audience for this blog, and may post a poll sometime soon to find out if people will be annoyed/or overjoyed if I post links to articles in other languages. I did consult French and Arabic articles on those posts but didn't link to them, assuming many readers would not have an interest. This is an area I'll explore further, especially once more people know the blog is here and thus there's hope for a decent polling sample.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Backgrounder: Ibadi-Sunni Violence in Algeria
Okay, I said I won't normally post weekends, and now I've gone and done it both days. But when something catches my interest, I may decide to get my ideas down while they're fresh. While the Iraqi elections seem (on first report) to have gone off fairly well, with decent turnout, there's been an outbreak of violence in the Algerian Saharan Mzab Valley. It's a bit hard to tell from some of the reports what exactly started the trouble, but it seems to have both ethnic and sectarian content. The Mzab area includes one of Algeria's concentrations of Berbers, but the Berbers of Mzab, unlike those of the Kabyle region, are Ibadi rather than Sunni Muslims.
A few of the current reports can be found here, here, and here, to provide some links in English. The troubles have been concentrated so far in the town of Berriane, and there were similar outbreaks there last year, as noted here.
There would seem to be two aspects to the tensions: one an ethno-linguistic one, between Berbers speaking the Mzabi Berber language and Arabs speaking Arabic; and the Ibadi-Sunni religious division. (The "Malekites" referred to in some of the linked articles are followers of the Maliki madhhab or legal rite of Sunnism; Maliki Islam is the dominant form in much of North Africa west of Egypt and, at least formerly, in parts of Upper Egypt.)
The Ibadis are an interesting survival in their own right: they are the only Islamic sect left over from the Khariji (Kharijite) movement of the first century of Islam. The Kharijis broke with both the Sunni and emerging Shi'i groups, insisting that the Imam of the community could come from any background so long as he was pious. At a time when most Muslims were debating whether the Imam had to be a direct descendant of Muhammad or merely o the tribe of Quraysh, the Khariji said the Imam could be any, Muslim, "even an African slave." If that were not politically incorrect enough for the first Islamic century, there are claims that some Kharijis were (according to their enemies, who wrote most of the history) that even woman could serve as Caliph. Today they may seem modern and politically correct, but their tactics and approach to their fellow Muslims made them the radical jihadis of their day.
I must note, at this point, that the Ibadis themselves reject the name "Khariji" because they do not see themselves as outside the greater Muslim umma, and do not share with the mainstream Kharijis (all dead centuries ago) the idea that non-Kharijis are kuffar or unbelievers and must have war waged against them. "Khariji" means "those who withdraw, or go out" and does not apply to the Ibadis, who are prepared to live with non-Ibadi Muslims, whereas other Khariji sects preached jihad against both the Sunni and Shi'a. This is one of those positions that, whatever its religious base, doesn't work well in the real world: all the hard-core Khariji sects, being minorities, fought to the death and, being outnumbered vastly, are no longer out there.
Kharijism started as a sort of "third way" movement in a sense, but like absolutist minority groups anywhere, they vanished. The Ibadi variety (and again they don't call themswelves Khariji) was the only one to survive into our time.
Kharijism in its Ibadi form lasted longest on the peripheries of the Caliphate, particularly in Oman and the Maghreb. Ibadis are still found in both places: Ibadism is the majority faith among Omanis, though the expatriate population and the fact that the Sunnis are concentrated in the cities means that Sunnism is also important there today. In North Africa, Ibadism was once dominant, under the Rustamid dynasty and some earlier Khariji/Berber mountain kingdoms, and there are islands of Ibadis scattered about the Maghreb today: in the Mzab and Ouargla oases of Algeria (these troubles are in Mzab) , the island of Djerba in Tunisia, and the Jabal Nafusa in Libya. They are found virtually nowhere else besides Oman and the former Omani empire, such as Zanzibar and other Indian Ocean ports where Omanis long traded.
The Omani and North African Ibadi groups were out of touch with each other for 1000 years or so, but I understand Oman has sought to create links in the late 20th century and beyond. Today, Ibadism isn't that distinguishable, for most adherents who aren't clerics or theology professors, from Sunnism except in some obscure theological points (such as whether the Qur'an/Koran is created or existed from eternity), and thus doesn't make a lot of difference in most people's day-to-day practice of the faith. In Oman both Ibadis and Sunnis are Arabic speaking (with some asterisks about minor language groups), but in Algeria the split is along the Berber/Arabic line.
Berber-Arab troubles are hardly new in Algeria, where the government's post-independence Arabization program, aimed at eradicating the dominant cultural role of French, was seen as eroding Berber-speaking elements. Ironically, the Berbers, resisting Arabization, became the great defenders of French, and the government became insistent on the dominance of Arabic: in the past Berber radio broadcasts, publications etc. were banned or strictly regulated, though much has been liberalized in recent years under President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. (And of course most educated Algerians, Arab or Berber, are still very comfortable in French. And Arabic is essential for Berbers if they're going to be anything other than rural peasants. But there's also a revival (or first blossoming) of Berber literature, both in Algeria and in France. Trouble in the Kabyle -- or Kabylie, as the area is called in French -- area erupts from time to time, but there there is no added sectarian element, except that most of the Berber population are a bit more secular than their Arab neighbors.
If you want more background, just Google "Tamazight" and follow on from there. "Berber" being just the French variant of the Arabic form (barbar) of the Greek barbaros (non-Greek people all of whose language sounds -- to Greeks -- like bar-bar) and thus related to our "barbarian," the Imazighen peoples would rather not be called Berber, or have their Tamazight language called that, but then it's going to take a long time for the man in the street to start using "Imazighen," or the various tribal/linguistic names, or "Tamazight," even among Arab Algerians (though I think the word "Tamazight" appears in the new Constitution's discussion of national languages).
The Algerian media are not very clear on what started the latest round of troubles in Berriane ("troublemakers" have been mentioned), and there have been allusions to gang elements in both ethnic groups, but I've also seen press reports of attacks on the party headquarters of the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), which is essentially a Berber political party, so the ethnic element may be more important here than the sectarian one.
And a caveat: it's always a little unclear in these incidents whether the rivalry is purely ethnic/religious or something else, and since this seems to involve young men attacking other young men, it may be little more than plain old street gangs that happen to divide along linguistic lines. I know there were cases during the troubles in Upper Egypt in the 1990s where the fighting between the police and the Islamists happened to divide along tribal or family lines and sometimes reflected old vendettas. I don't intend to overemphasize ethnosectarian violence in the region: there is no need to throw oil on already troubled waters, or to encourage ethnic and religious rivalries. But some of these issues, especially those involving Berber-Arab issues, are little known in the West, or at least the English-speaking West. (France, with its large population of Algerian-origin residents, is more familiar with them.)
An Aside on the "Plague" Story
As an aside: there is probably no connection, but the odd story that made the rounds a week or so ago about an alleged "biological warfare" incident which supposedly killed some 40 members of Al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) due to an accident (here's one account from Stratfor here or Google will turn up many more), supposedly took place in the Tizi-Ouzo area. Though as far as I know AQIM is almost entirely an Arab organization (the Berbers tend to be more secular), Tizi-Ouzo is also the heart of the Berber Kabylie. (It's also a mountainous region and thus a good place for radical movements to hide.) I have no reason to believe there is any connection, but there are two stories out of two rather different Berber regions of Algeria in a short time.
On the plague story let me empathize, at least for now, with those who think there is something fishy about the story. Though first reported in some (non-government) Algerian papers, it was broken in the West by Britain's The Sun, usually better known for its Page Three Girls (and no, I won't link) than its intelligence connections. The Washington Times claimed to have a confirmation from the US intelligence community, but the original reportage was from unusual sources and the international health organizations have said they've had no reports of an outbreak of plague. And plague, I'm told by those who know something about biological weapons, isn't easy to weaponize. Bubonic plague needs rats or fleas to spread, and pneumonic plague usually requires close personal contact. Plague is native to Algeria though, and a localized outbreak that had nothing to do with weaponization might be more credible than the "experiment gone wrong" version that's making the rounds. But the story may prove to have more to it.
A few of the current reports can be found here, here, and here, to provide some links in English. The troubles have been concentrated so far in the town of Berriane, and there were similar outbreaks there last year, as noted here.
There would seem to be two aspects to the tensions: one an ethno-linguistic one, between Berbers speaking the Mzabi Berber language and Arabs speaking Arabic; and the Ibadi-Sunni religious division. (The "Malekites" referred to in some of the linked articles are followers of the Maliki madhhab or legal rite of Sunnism; Maliki Islam is the dominant form in much of North Africa west of Egypt and, at least formerly, in parts of Upper Egypt.)
The Ibadis are an interesting survival in their own right: they are the only Islamic sect left over from the Khariji (Kharijite) movement of the first century of Islam. The Kharijis broke with both the Sunni and emerging Shi'i groups, insisting that the Imam of the community could come from any background so long as he was pious. At a time when most Muslims were debating whether the Imam had to be a direct descendant of Muhammad or merely o the tribe of Quraysh, the Khariji said the Imam could be any, Muslim, "even an African slave." If that were not politically incorrect enough for the first Islamic century, there are claims that some Kharijis were (according to their enemies, who wrote most of the history) that even woman could serve as Caliph. Today they may seem modern and politically correct, but their tactics and approach to their fellow Muslims made them the radical jihadis of their day.
I must note, at this point, that the Ibadis themselves reject the name "Khariji" because they do not see themselves as outside the greater Muslim umma, and do not share with the mainstream Kharijis (all dead centuries ago) the idea that non-Kharijis are kuffar or unbelievers and must have war waged against them. "Khariji" means "those who withdraw, or go out" and does not apply to the Ibadis, who are prepared to live with non-Ibadi Muslims, whereas other Khariji sects preached jihad against both the Sunni and Shi'a. This is one of those positions that, whatever its religious base, doesn't work well in the real world: all the hard-core Khariji sects, being minorities, fought to the death and, being outnumbered vastly, are no longer out there.
Kharijism started as a sort of "third way" movement in a sense, but like absolutist minority groups anywhere, they vanished. The Ibadi variety (and again they don't call themswelves Khariji) was the only one to survive into our time.
Kharijism in its Ibadi form lasted longest on the peripheries of the Caliphate, particularly in Oman and the Maghreb. Ibadis are still found in both places: Ibadism is the majority faith among Omanis, though the expatriate population and the fact that the Sunnis are concentrated in the cities means that Sunnism is also important there today. In North Africa, Ibadism was once dominant, under the Rustamid dynasty and some earlier Khariji/Berber mountain kingdoms, and there are islands of Ibadis scattered about the Maghreb today: in the Mzab and Ouargla oases of Algeria (these troubles are in Mzab) , the island of Djerba in Tunisia, and the Jabal Nafusa in Libya. They are found virtually nowhere else besides Oman and the former Omani empire, such as Zanzibar and other Indian Ocean ports where Omanis long traded.
The Omani and North African Ibadi groups were out of touch with each other for 1000 years or so, but I understand Oman has sought to create links in the late 20th century and beyond. Today, Ibadism isn't that distinguishable, for most adherents who aren't clerics or theology professors, from Sunnism except in some obscure theological points (such as whether the Qur'an/Koran is created or existed from eternity), and thus doesn't make a lot of difference in most people's day-to-day practice of the faith. In Oman both Ibadis and Sunnis are Arabic speaking (with some asterisks about minor language groups), but in Algeria the split is along the Berber/Arabic line.
Berber-Arab troubles are hardly new in Algeria, where the government's post-independence Arabization program, aimed at eradicating the dominant cultural role of French, was seen as eroding Berber-speaking elements. Ironically, the Berbers, resisting Arabization, became the great defenders of French, and the government became insistent on the dominance of Arabic: in the past Berber radio broadcasts, publications etc. were banned or strictly regulated, though much has been liberalized in recent years under President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. (And of course most educated Algerians, Arab or Berber, are still very comfortable in French. And Arabic is essential for Berbers if they're going to be anything other than rural peasants. But there's also a revival (or first blossoming) of Berber literature, both in Algeria and in France. Trouble in the Kabyle -- or Kabylie, as the area is called in French -- area erupts from time to time, but there there is no added sectarian element, except that most of the Berber population are a bit more secular than their Arab neighbors.
If you want more background, just Google "Tamazight" and follow on from there. "Berber" being just the French variant of the Arabic form (barbar) of the Greek barbaros (non-Greek people all of whose language sounds -- to Greeks -- like bar-bar) and thus related to our "barbarian," the Imazighen peoples would rather not be called Berber, or have their Tamazight language called that, but then it's going to take a long time for the man in the street to start using "Imazighen," or the various tribal/linguistic names, or "Tamazight," even among Arab Algerians (though I think the word "Tamazight" appears in the new Constitution's discussion of national languages).
The Algerian media are not very clear on what started the latest round of troubles in Berriane ("troublemakers" have been mentioned), and there have been allusions to gang elements in both ethnic groups, but I've also seen press reports of attacks on the party headquarters of the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), which is essentially a Berber political party, so the ethnic element may be more important here than the sectarian one.
And a caveat: it's always a little unclear in these incidents whether the rivalry is purely ethnic/religious or something else, and since this seems to involve young men attacking other young men, it may be little more than plain old street gangs that happen to divide along linguistic lines. I know there were cases during the troubles in Upper Egypt in the 1990s where the fighting between the police and the Islamists happened to divide along tribal or family lines and sometimes reflected old vendettas. I don't intend to overemphasize ethnosectarian violence in the region: there is no need to throw oil on already troubled waters, or to encourage ethnic and religious rivalries. But some of these issues, especially those involving Berber-Arab issues, are little known in the West, or at least the English-speaking West. (France, with its large population of Algerian-origin residents, is more familiar with them.)
An Aside on the "Plague" Story
As an aside: there is probably no connection, but the odd story that made the rounds a week or so ago about an alleged "biological warfare" incident which supposedly killed some 40 members of Al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) due to an accident (here's one account from Stratfor here or Google will turn up many more), supposedly took place in the Tizi-Ouzo area. Though as far as I know AQIM is almost entirely an Arab organization (the Berbers tend to be more secular), Tizi-Ouzo is also the heart of the Berber Kabylie. (It's also a mountainous region and thus a good place for radical movements to hide.) I have no reason to believe there is any connection, but there are two stories out of two rather different Berber regions of Algeria in a short time.
On the plague story let me empathize, at least for now, with those who think there is something fishy about the story. Though first reported in some (non-government) Algerian papers, it was broken in the West by Britain's The Sun, usually better known for its Page Three Girls (and no, I won't link) than its intelligence connections. The Washington Times claimed to have a confirmation from the US intelligence community, but the original reportage was from unusual sources and the international health organizations have said they've had no reports of an outbreak of plague. And plague, I'm told by those who know something about biological weapons, isn't easy to weaponize. Bubonic plague needs rats or fleas to spread, and pneumonic plague usually requires close personal contact. Plague is native to Algeria though, and a localized outbreak that had nothing to do with weaponization might be more credible than the "experiment gone wrong" version that's making the rounds. But the story may prove to have more to it.
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