Inventing the Berbers: History and Ideology in the Maghrib (The Middle Ages Series) - Hardcover

Rouighi, Ramzi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081225130X ISBN 13: 9780812251302

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

Synopsis

Before the Arabs conquered northwest Africa in the seventh century, Ramzi Rouighi asserts, there were no Berbers. There were Moors (Mauri), Mauretanians, Africans, and many tribes and tribal federations such as the Leuathae or Musulami; and before the Arabs, no one thought that these groups shared a common ancestry, culture, or language. Certainly, there were groups considered barbarians by the Romans, but "Barbarian," or its cognate, "Berber" was not an ethnonym, nor was it exclusive to North Africa. Yet today, it is common to see studies of the Christianization or Romanization of the Berbers, or of their resistance to foreign conquerors like the Carthaginians, Vandals, or Arabs. Archaeologists and linguists routinely describe proto-Berber groups and languages in even more ancient times, while biologists look for Berber DNA markers that go back thousands of years. Taking the pervasiveness of such anachronisms as a point of departure, Inventing the Berbers examines the emergence of the Berbers as a distinct category in early Arabic texts and probes the ways in which later Arabic sources, shaped by contemporary events, imagined the Berbers as a people and the Maghrib as their home.

Key both to Rouighi's understanding of the medieval phenomenon of the "berberization" of North Africa and its reverberations in the modern world is the Kitāb al-'ibar of Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), the third book of which purports to provide the history of the Berbers and the dynasties that ruled in the Maghrib. As translated into French in 1858, Rouighi argues, the book served to establish a racialized conception of Berber indigenousness for the French colonial powers who erected a fundamental opposition between the two groups thought to constitute the native populations of North Africa, Arabs and Berbers. Inventing the Berbers thus demonstrates the ways in which the nineteenth-century interpretation of a medieval text has not only served as the basis for modern historical scholarship but also has had an effect on colonial and postcolonial policies and communal identities throughout Europe and North Africa.

About this title

About the Author

Ramzi Rouighi is Associate Professor of Middle East Studies and History at the University of Southern California. He is author of The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate: Ifriqiya and Its Andalusis, 1200-1400, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Berbers, Maghrib: the people, their country. Everybody knows that, and that is what everybody knows. But it has not always been the case. Before Muslim Arab conquerors began using the word barbar to refer to people who lived in what they called "the West" (al-maghrib), both people and region were known by a host of other names. In fact, before Berber and Maghrib, no one thought that the inhabitants of northwest Africa belonged together or that the entire landmass represented a single unit. The first time anyone thought that was in Arabic. Trying to understand this shift from one set of names to another, one map to another, a historian faces a series of challenges that can be separated into two general kinds. First, there are challenges arising from the handling of the sources, which tend to be late and not written to address such a question. Second, there are hurdles pertaining to the assumptions of modern historians. These include deeply held notions about the relation between collective identity (nation), country, religion, and language; and a centuries-long history of interpreting medieval sources in a way that reinforces these assumptions.

If this were not enough, as modern academics conferred on the Berbers characteristics of prenational groups like the Franks and the Goths, they also envisaged their reduced nationhood. For under French colonial domination, a modern Berber nation-state was simply not in the cards. After the Second World War, the reaction against the devastations of nationalism and racism did not extend to the category Berbers, which did not benefit from the critical energy of that reaction. Instead, the category remained mired in discussions of cultural heritage, victimized ethnic identity, and national aspirations. The national independence of Morocco and Algeria, but not Berberia, situated Berber identity both at the infranational level and as a counter nationalism but with a sense of Berber temporal precedence (native, original, etc.) and medieval Arabization and Islamization through a mixing with Arabs. These processes are reflected in the predominant place that anthropology, together with linguistics, occupies in the study of Berbers. Unpacking the entanglements created by modern relations and forms of knowing helps identify defining modalities of what it means to be Berber.

Together, these issues have combined to produce a peculiar consensus: the Berbers are the indigenous inhabitants of the Maghrib, their homeland. The basic idea is that even if the categories shifted after the seventh century, the people still had the same ancestors. For many reasons, however, this is not an acceptable position. No one would equate, say, Roman and Italian or Hun and Hungarian. Doing so would banish what historians identify as the stuff of history, and replace it with the stuff of ideology. But that is exactly what the early Arabic authors did. They displaced the old categories by adding Berber to them, creating a de facto equivalency among all of them: the Hawwāra became Hawwāra Berbers; the Zanāta, Zanāta Berbers; and all became Berbers. They also projected all these categories back into a remote past. They did not think the Berbers were indigenous, as moderns do, but they made them the descendants of Noah or tied them to some other ancient story. But for the historian, the phenomenon is still the same: at a certain point in time, under conditions that need to be ascertained, the Arabs began to populate their Maghrib with Berbers. I call this process Berberization, and it is the subject of this book.

Berberization was slow, but it eventually made associating the Berbers with the Maghrib seem natural. Even today, stating that the Berbers came to be thought of as the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa under specific historical conditions elicits immediate puzzlement. Other than academic historians and a few historically minded others who would find the historicity of a social category banal, most people might consider that whether one calls them Berbers or something else, the people were the same. And since their ancestors lived in the area for the longest time, they were indigenous. In the words of an anthropologist of Morocco, scratch a Moroccan, find a Berber. Perhaps, but thinking in this particular way is not natural, either. Instead, thinking historically about social categories—how they become ordinary, and how people use them to order their world—situates them in relation to both modern and premodern ideologies and scholarly crochets.

Defining Origins

Many studies on the Maghrib and its history begin with an attempt to define the Berbers as a way of introducing subject matter and cast of characters. These introductions usually include a discussion of the etymology of the word, its ties to the word barbarian and perhaps to the memory of the collapse of the tower of Babel. While offering a few anecdotes on the subject may satisfy the requirements of an introduction, a proper definition requires a degree of accuracy and coherence that has usually led those historians who have tried to define the Berbers to consult experts in related fields, such as anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics.

For historical reasons, French has been the language of the most serious attempts to define the Berbers. The best available synthesis in English is the one co-authored by medievalist Michael Brett and archaeologist Elizabeth Fentress, which takes into account the most important statements in the field and gives an accurate representation of the state of the question. As they endeavored to formulate a coherent definition of the Berbers, Brett and Fentress sought to clear a series of obstacles. Because of its quality, their definitional effort is a convenient way to introduce the subject to nonspecialists and give a sense of what this study intends to overcome.

Who are the Berbers and who counts as a Berber, according to Brett and Fentress?

Just as the dialects are often mutually incomprehensible, so the people themselves are extremely heterogeneous: the existence of an ethnically unified "people" is no more demonstrable for the past than it is today. Indeed, there are a bewildering number of cultures, economies and physical characteristics. At best we can define Berbers as Mediterranean. In terms of their physical anthropology they are more closely related to Sicilians, Spaniards and Egyptians than to Nigerians, Saudi Arabians or Ethiopians: more precise characteristics are conspicuous by their absence, as a recent attempt at mapping a broad range of genetic traits has shown. We are thus immediately thrown into the problem of whom we are going to call a Berber and why.

Immediately, Brett and Fentress encounter the problem of the ethnic heterogeneity of the Berbers, which appears as a problem only because they assume that the Berbers formed a unit of some sort. If not ethnographic unity, however, then perhaps physical anthropology—in other words, bodies and their appearance—could deliver a unity of "looks." It does not. After physical anthropology, Brett and Fentress make a foray into linguistics bringing into focus another basis for a definition of the Berbers: "The most common response [to the problem of whom one calls a Berber and why] is linguistic: Berbers are defined as people speaking Berber languages.. . . Indeed, one of the things that sets the Berbers apart is their language.. . .This was often commented on in the past, and a common myth links the odd-sounding language to the name 'Berber.'. . . The Berber dialects are part of the language group, the Afro-Asiatic, which comprises the Semitic languages and Ancient Egyptian." Linguists use formal properties of living languages such as Sīwī and Arabic to classify them within language families like Berber and Semitic. The study of a number of related languages allows linguists to reconstruct the features of the parent language. So, although proto-Berber and proto-Semitic are not extant or attested, it is still possible for linguists to know enough to distinguish between them, even if, in the case of these two families, they share a great many features because both split from the same parent language known as Afroasiatic. Understandably, dating the differentiation of undocumented languages and situating their bifurcation geographically is complicated and involves a lot of guessing. Yet, there is a great deal of good science behind it. When it comes to proto-Berber, the consensus is that it split from northern Afroasiatic somewhere in eastern Africa and then spread westward from there. There is less of a consensus about the date of that event, or events, but it varies from around 9,000 to only 3,000 years ago—a staggering range. Even as they work to reach more precise estimations, however, for linguists the question of the origins of Berber is largely settled. Like Arabic and Punic, Berber came from the East, just earlier than they did.

Brett and Fentress repeat a statement that is very important among specialists: "What sets the Berbers apart is their language." That is a good basis for deciding whether an individual or group is Berber:

The ability to speak a Berber language gives us an objective basis for asserting that a given individual is Berber . . . but if we restrict ourselves to a linguistic definition of Berbers when discussing their history there will be few groups we can discuss with certainty. A cultural definition appears more promising, but when applied to the past becomes unsatisfactory. Unfortunately, this is a common procedure: perceptions of Berber culture derived from modern anthropology are often casually back-projected to antiquity. Worse, they are then used to justify a judgment that Berbers were culturally immobile.

Brett and Fentress are correct: until the seventeenth century, sources in Berber languages are relatively rare, fragmented, and not evenly distributed. They do not explain why they believe that the extremely heterogeneous Berbers and their bewildering number of cultures, economies, and physical characteristics have a single history. But they are right about the circularity involved in projecting modern representations into the distant past and then using them as evidence of cultural stasis. Surprisingly, the conclusion Brett and Fentress draw from this sensible observation takes them in an entirely different direction: "The least unsatisfactory solution seems to be to use the term 'Berber' in the broader sense of those groups who were perceived to be indigenous North Africans, both in antiquity and in the middle ages, as well as anyone who is still perceived that way today." More significant than the lack of sources to shed light on what people might have perceived in the past, let alone whether they could even have perceived someone to be an indigenous North African, the notion of indigeneity allows Brett and Fentress to tag those human beings for whom there are only archaeological artifacts as Berber or proto-Berber—not to be confused with the proto-Berber of linguists.

The notion that all prehistoric human settlements found in North Africa are related to the Berbers is not universally accepted, however. In her excellent presentation of the state of archaeological knowledge on the subject, Malika Hachid argues that Capsian and Mechtoid civilizations combined to form proto-Berbers at a particular time, between 11,000 and 10,000 BP. This is how she explains it: "If we have somewhat insisted on Capsian portable art and then on parietal art from the Saharan Atlas it is because we consider Capsian Protomediterraneans to be the artisans of Berber identity and culture to which the Mechtoids contributed as they integrated. When it comes to their language, if the Capsians brought with them the rudiments of the Berber language, they could not but absorb some aspects of the language of the Mechtoids." For Hachid, the Capsians "brought with them" the foundations of the Berber language from the East, which makes it, but not them, not indigenous. By absorbing some of the language of the Mechtoids, the Capsian Protomediterraneans indigenized Berber—at least in part. The total absence of evidence of Mechtoid or Capsian languages is not critical because Hachid's Berberness (Berberité) is as it turns out tied to art. In spite of Hachid's timorous statements about the lack of "a perfect homology between human type and culture," she uses categories such as "robust negroid" and "fine negroid" to discuss the geographic, ethnic, but not racial, origins of people who might have combined to form the proto-Berbers. More than how she arrived at her conclusion, however, the idea that proto-Berbers emerged only 10,000 years or so ago, or maybe only 7,000 years ago in the Sahara, leaves us with a very long time of non-Berber human presence in the area from the Atlantic to the Nile and from the Mediterranean to the Sahara. Likewise, without a linguistic definition, there is no reason why the proto-Berbers could not be proto-Algerians or proto-Maghribīs.

But obviously, as Brett and Fentress' definition illustrates, not everyone is willing to give up on the linguistic factor, "one of the things that set the Berbers apart." Naturally, the appearance of proto-Berbers is not innocuous. It is tied to the question of indigeneity, which has not been the friend of historicizing, at least when it comes to preventing anachronism. In any case, from the point of view of indigeneity, the word Berber is problematic: "Of course, even the use of the name 'Berber' is somewhat arbitrary: it is of external origin, and certainly not a Berber word.. . . The word for Berber today is either 'Tamazight' or 'Imazighen', the first referring to their language, the second to the people who use it." What is significant here, more than what category to use, is that Brett and Fentress deem the word Berber unsuitable, not because it lumps together a multitude of groups and occults the temporal specificity of documented collective categories and not because there is anything wrong with the linguistics behind it, but purely because it is an exonym.

They contrast the foreignness of the category with the indigeneity of the people. This too is critical. For behind the act of defining is the discourse on the indigenous origins of the Berbers. But since each discipline produces its own timeline for the "emergence of the Berbers," definitions that incorporate all these timelines have a hard time reconciling them. If there is a consensus among archaeologists, linguists, and biologists, however, it is for dating the origin of Berber long before "the term [was] first recorded in Arab authors." What should stand out here is the reliance on philology (etymology), physical anthropology and archaeology, cultural anthropology, and linguistics—in short, everything but history—for a definition of the Berbers.

Since Brett and Fentress mention genetics and since that subfield of biology has been completely transformed following the sequencing of the human genome in 2000, it may be useful to highlight the contribution of biology to the Berberization of the remote past. When it comes to biology, however, the word origin does not always refer to the same event. On the one hand, there are the origins of all ...

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 081225130X
• ISBN 13: 9780812251302
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 312