Certainly an Israeli Orientalist, no matter how secular, might be expected to sympathize with the reformist vision of the Salafia, which sought to return Islam to its pristine origins by purging the dross from its monotheistic core. Nor could an enlightened or rational person fail to be repelled by the pilgrims’ superstitious revels and commerce in amulets and holy water. Even though, as the latest studies showed, the reformists too had their fanatical side, their leaders’ high intellectual level, rhetorical gifts, and staunch defense of Algerian nativism against French military brutality and colonial rapacity had to appeal to a liberal observer like the Orientalist.
In the course of the Constantine riots, two men were killed, and many more wounded. Based on the assumption that the reformists were waging a moral and spiritual war against the pilgrims’ paganlike practices, which distracted the faithful from the struggle for individual and communal self-betterment, it seemed natural to blame the violence on primitive Berbers clinging to otherworldly beliefs. And yet, surprisingly, this was not the picture painted by the French officer summoned to restore order between the warring parties. It was the Berbers, he reported, who were attacked first, the opening shots having been fired from the ranks of the reformists, who were led by prominent clerics and intellectuals. The shots were aimed at a slender, white-cloaked Sufi monk capering by a sacred tomb.
Was this an early warning, subtle but unmistakable, of the ruthless Terror that would come sixty years later? Could the reformists’ descendants, the supporters of the Islamic Front, be venting their wrath not only on their traditional enemies — heretics, Westernizers, corrupt army officers, writers and journalists — but also on innocent villagers who, rather than joining the political struggle, remained benightedly mired in pilgrimages, amulet peddling, and necromancy? Did the fundamentalists, in the chaos following the cancellation of the elections, turn on their own illiterate brethren as if to say: “So it’s graves, saints, and holy men that you want? Be our guests! We’ll fill your villages with the graves of so many old men, women, and children that you’ll never have to flock to a saint’s tomb again, since you’ll have plenty of your own.”
Or take this forgotten item, found in a transcript of court proceedings from the Eyn-Sifra district bordering on the Sahara: perhaps it, too, was an early warning of the senseless brutality now taking place. In 1953, inspired by a recently published story by Albert Camus, three French students from the University of Marseilles, two young men and a woman, set out with an experienced local guide named Hamid el-Kadr to get a sunset view of the Sahara. Camus’s story concerned a depressed Frenchwoman named Jeannine who accompanies her husband, a traveling salesman, on his rounds in the Algerian countryside. One day the childless couple find themselves in a small town at the desert’s edge, where they climb to a hilltop fort with a view. So shattered are the remote, frozen depths of Jeannine’s being by the vast empty spaces she sees that she undergoes an inner revolution. In the middle of the night she awakes with an unsettled feeling, leaves her hotel room, and climbs back to the fort, from which she stares longingly at the Bedouin tents in the distance, her unfulfilled femininity thirsting for the infinite freedom of the Sahara.
It was under the influence of this story that the three French students decided to spend their Christmas vacation on a quest for Camus’s heroine, hoping to relive her experience. Their guide even managed to find a hilltop fort and brought them to its panoramic vista. There they saw, like the childless Jeannine, the black tents of nomads and the silent camels nibbling at the edge of infinity. Unwilling to make do with mere longing, they asked their guide to take them to the encampment. Having reached the edge of the desert, why not push a bit farther into the cold night for a meatier taste of its eternal essence?
Hamid el-Kadr was agreeable and took them to the encampment, where their unexpected appearance met with a warm welcome. They were fed and given a place to sleep under the desert sky, huddled beneath layers of blankets. Yet in the morning, when they awoke, the Bedouin had vanished, tents, camels, flocks, and all. Going to wake their guide, asleep in his blanket roll, they discovered to their consternation that the Bedouin had made off with his head.
The three terrified tourists ran for their lives, uncertain whether to report the brutal murder to the local Berber gendarme or to go straight to the French garrison in the district capital. In the end, duty prevailed over fear, and they went to the gendarme, who did not seem overly surprised. To ensure their personal safety, he locked them in his house until a French officer arrived.
It took three months to find the murderer, who was caught when he returned with his family and livestock to the foot of the fort, confident that all was forgotten and perhaps even hoping to attract new tourists. When asked by the French judge what his motives had been, he answered that the guide’s French was too good for a believing Muslim and Algerian patriot like himself, and that not knowing to what lengths such a treacherous tongue might go, he had cut it off with the rest of the head. And in reply to the judge’s astonished query as to how someone ignorant of French could assess its fluency, the Bedouin pointed to the freedom of the young Frenchwoman’s laugh when Hamid el-Kadr spoke to her.
AND PERHAPS HE, Professor Rivlin, had found another harbinger of the Terror now rampant in Algeria. To be sure, one had to be careful about going all the way back to the 1850s, when the French, having commenced their colonial administration, disbanded the guilds known as the jama’at. Yet having recently supervised a doctoral dissertation on the subject that suggested some curious conclusions, he decided to return to it.
During the long period of Turkish rule in North Africa, many Algerian villagers, especially in times of drought or economic hardship, migrated to the cities for their livelihood. They did not settle in them permanently, however, or mingle with the urban population. Rather, organizing themselves by place of origin and occupation — that is, flour miller, butcher, perfume merchant, bathhouse keeper, and so on — they formed cooperative guilds, each led by an elected official, recognized by the Turkish authorities, called the amin. Each amin was empowered to judge and discipline the members of his jama’a, bachelors unwilling to marry out of their tribe or village who accepted his decisions without challenge. This arrangement officially ended in 1868, when the French government, after considerable debate, revoked the autonomy of the jama’at and the authority of the amins.
At first the jama’at refused to accept the French decree. Particularly angered were the now unemployed amins, who had derived many benefits from their position. For years the guilds struggled to maintain themselves on an unofficial basis, the members continuing to obey the amins despite their unrecognized status. Not until the early twentieth century did these voluntary cooperatives lapse completely, leaving the French exclusively in control.
And yet the ancient memory of these independent guilds stayed with the villagers from the desert, who were now an urban proletariat dependent on French colonial rule. The longing for the little jama’a with its strongman was passed down. From time to time, it even induced certain simple villagers to imagine that they were the new amins and to blame the failure of their dreams not on the authorities but on their illiterate neighbors, whom they accused of refusing to submit to them. This situation culminated in 1927, in a bizarre incident that took place in the village of Mezabis, on the fringe of the desert, 560 kilometers from the capital. There, a local resident, in a throwback to Turkish times, gathered a small jama’a that appointed him its amin and launched a punitive campaign that only came to an end when the French caught him and put him to death.