North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

II

A strange thing to me was the absence of any political state. There has never been a political state, properly speaking, in the desert. Such was the parcelling of the communities, so elementary the governmental form, so feeble the impulse of political aggregation and cohesion, that the general condition might seem to be an anarchy. In the Kabyle villages of the mountains and among the Mzabites of the Sahara the assemblies of the elders with the election and change of head men present an aspect of such primitive simplicity and independence that they might be thought freemen’s institutions of an ideal purity; on the other hand, the absence of any political centres of concentration forbade the formation of a nation. The recognition of the tribal blood-tie conserved groups, smaller or larger, with a greater or less sense of unity; but feud was the natural condition of these units, extending to the smallest and even into families, and in the larger world political history found only hordes hastily massing for temporary ends and dissolving in a night, or empires of facile conquest and loose tributary bonds, of the nature of a primacy rather than a sovereignty, and without long continuity of life. Public order, with its correlatives, security and peace, was little realized, and, however ideal local institutions might seem within the group, it was, viewed largely, a barbaric world.

A very pure democracy in its primitive form prevailed. All men were equal before Allah, and the condition of equality generally obtained also between man and man. Inequality belongs to civilization; the absence of that, and especially the lack of security for wealth and its inheritance, of an official class of state functionaries and a clerical hierarchy, and pre-eminently the lack of knowledge, removed main sources of that differentiation which has stratified modern society. There was a noblesse of the sword and also of religion, grounded originally on descent from Mohammed or more generally and powerfully here in the West from some Marabout, but neither class was really separated from the people. The only effective source of inequality was virtù—real ability. Tradition made it the glory of the Arab noble to dissipate his patrimony in gifts to his friends and to rely on the booty of his own hand for himself. Ignorance, besides, is a great leveller, and poverty is the best friend of fraternity; liberty was native to the soil. It was a society where all men had substantially the same ideas, customs, and desires, thought and acted, lived, in the same way. It was a natural democracy, and inbred; and to-day this trait is one of the most striking and refreshing that a sojourn among its people brings to notice, for it is a real democracy, unconscious of itself, vital, and admirable in its human results.

Race-consciousness found historic expression only in the religious field. The spots where the faith first began on the soil, the tombs of great leaders in the conquest, such as that of Sidi Okba in the oasis not far away, the white domes of the Marabouts sown like village spires through all this land, were places of sacred memory, centres of race-consciousness, and here took the function of integrating the common soul of the race, as, in other civilizations, political memorials of great public events and famous men develop national consciousness. In the desert patriotism and faith are one emotion. The ideal Mohammedan state is a pure theocracy in which the political and spiritual powers are one and inseparable; where this condition prevails is the dar el Islam, the land of Islam, the soil of the true faith; elsewhere, wherever the union is imperfect or the faith must concede to the infidel, is the dar el harb, or, as we should say, missionary countries. Neither Turkey nor Egypt is dar el Islam; its narrow, though still vast, realm is the Libyan sands, where it still refuges its people. It is an arresting sight when religion goes into the desert to be with God; the Pilgrims of the Mayflower’s wake, the Mormons of the sunflower trail fill the imagination with their willingness to give up all, to go forth and plant a new state sacred to their idea. It is always an heroic act. Such a coming out from among the world, such a going forth into the inhospitable waste has been characteristic of desert history. Solitude is the natural home of orthodoxy, of the fanatic sect and the purist. Mohammedanism in its primary stage was a particular religion of a desert people; in its secondary stage, as a conquering faith, it had to develop its capacity for internationalism, its powers of adaptation to other breeds and of absorption of foreign moods and sentiments, its fitness to become a world religion; in itself also there was necessarily the play of human nature involving, as time went on, a variation into sects, heresies, innovations; thus, for example, it absorbed mysticism from the extreme East and whitened the West with the worship of saints. The faith was purer and more rigid in the desert, generally speaking, and was there more primitively marked; there it was safest from contaminating contacts; and there also Western civilization, closing round and penetrating its realm, finds the most fanatic and obdurate resistance.

Race-resistance to the invasion of the modern world, naturally following the lines of race-consciousness, notwithstanding the aid it received in the beginning of the struggle from the old feudality of the desert, had its stronghold in religion and its organization; and, specifically, it found its practical rallying-points and strongest alignment in the confraternities, or secret orders, with their zaouias, analogous to mediæval abbeys and monasteries, which had so great a development in North Africa in the last century—some more enlightened in leadership and capable of assimilating Western benefits in some degree, others stupidly impervious to the new influences and events. These brotherhoods, whose nomadic agents under the guise of every humble employment course the land with great thoroughness, are ideal organizations for agitation, collecting and disseminating news, preparing insurrection, fomenting and perpetuating discontent and secret hope; it is they and their machinations that are back of the Holy War, as a race idea. They are all hearths of the faith; but some, such as the Tidjaniya, recognizing both the fact of French power and the reality of the benefits it confers, are committed to political submission and peace; others are less placable, and nurse eternal hate of the infidel, with a credulous hope of expelling him from the land; and one, the most irreconcilable and the most powerful, is an active foe. This fraternity is the Snoussiya, having its seat at Djarbout, in the Libyan desert, where it has constituted a veritable empire of the sands, a pure Mohammedan state; it has divided with the neighboring empire of the Mahdi, and with that of the Sultan of Morocco, the proud title of dar el Islam. Sidi Snoussi, the founder, was a humble taleb of Medjaher, in the province of Oran. He preached the exodus, and led the recalcitrant and irreconcilable into the Cyrenaica, and there by virtue of his natural ability and enterprise built up a state, to which his sons have succeeded, the eldest of them having been already designated by his father as the promised Mahdi, the always expected Messiah of Islam, who should restore its power as the true kingdom of God on earth. It is this state which is the centre of Panislamism, the hope of a reunion of the entire Mohammedan world after the fall of the Sultan at Constantinople should be accomplished. The desert round about owns its sovereignty from Egypt to Tunis, and it is buttressed on the south by the negro states which it has joined in proselytizing, converting them from their savage fetichism.

The spirit of proselytism has always been active in North Africa. The story of its saints from early days contains a missionary element, acting at first on the indigenous barbarism of the desert and mountains and extending at a later period to the negro populations of the Soudan. The Snoussiya, together with other Mohammedan agents, has conducted a proselytism to the south which has been astonishing in its success and has long arrested European attention. Islam is, indeed, well adapted to convert inferior peoples, and adopts an intelligent policy in practice. The simplicity of the faith, the absence of any elaborate dogma or ritual, its slight demand on the intellect, together with its avoidance of anything ascetic in its rule of life, made it easily acceptable in itself; and its tolerant advance, without pressure, on the imitative instincts, the ambitions and interests of the savage populations with which it is in political and commercial contact, secures its spread without irritation or disturbance. It is the warrior race of the Foulbés in the Soudan who have most carried forward this movement of mingled spiritual, political, and commercial conquest; beside these, like the Jew by the Arab, are the Haoussas, a black race, with a commercial instinct, who established themselves under the protection of the Foulbés; they, generally speaking, have the monopoly of instruction and are the simple teachers of the region; the fetichistic tribes, coming under the influence of these Moslem expansionists by conquest, protectorate, marriage, in one and another way of the old and universal methods of the transformation of a lower race by a higher, are thus added to the domain of Islam. So important is this religious change, and so striking is the event, that some Catholic bishops have seen in it a providential preparation by an intermediate state for a future evangelization. What is noteworthy is the active spread of Mohammedanism contemporaneously in Central Africa and its close connection with the power of the Snoussiya, the most energetic and fanatic centre of Islam. The dream of the poor preacher of Oran has come partly true: in leading the irreconcilable into the Libyan desert and building a refuge for them in the most desolate wastes of the eastern Sahara, in the dar el Islam, he established a new centre for the faith in a region backed by populations where its natural spread is great and its presence is likely to be long continued, and he aroused through all the Mohammedan world the spirit of Panislamism. It is in his work and the fruit of it that race-resistance to the impact of the modern world on the old life of the desert all along the African coasts of the Sahara finds its climax, its centre, and its hope; elsewhere it has ebbed slowly away.

That retreat of the old faith into the desert out of whose immensity it was born, to die if need were in its own cradling sands, far from the pollutions of the modern and changed world, excites the imagination and commands admiration. It might be the episode of an epic, with its mise en scène, its protagonist, its atmosphere of travel and assemblage, and the coloration of its auxiliary tribes. It has classical poetic quality. But to the meditative mind the fortunes of the dar el harb, the nearer land of the infidel, is more profoundly impressive. It is a curious feeling that comes over one at the thought that he is present at the death of a race and has before his eyes the passing away of a civilization, and that civilization a culture in its essential features once common to the human family. That is the scene here—the passing of the early world. It is like the passing of the Indian world of the wilderness from America that our fathers saw, only in a more concentrated scene and on a more impressive scale—the death of an ancient mode of life in its home of centuries, full of memory going back to the dawn of history. It is a solemn thing for the reflective mind to witness, hard to realize adequately. Agriculture is gaining on the pastoral state, supplanting it; the nomad is slowly becoming fixed to the soil; the towns increase in number and population and in the variety of their life; peace, order, security establish themselves; capital, science arrive—companies, railways, telegraphs, communication, and transportation—and the face of life is changed; in a few years there will be no more caravans to Tougourt, to Tripoli, to Ghadamès—they will be legends like the mule-trains and prairie-schooners of the old emigrant West.

The economic change is most obvious, the inrush of the mechanical and cosmopolitan, colonization and exploitation, public works and private enterprise, securing and furnishing the territory for a commercial tillage and use. Is it a dispossession of the native from the soil or is it a means by which he may more justly enjoy it? The people, in the old days, lived in a sort of serfage to the nomads or the zaouias. The French régime put an end to desert feudality, but treated the zaouias with more consideration, owing to their religious character. The zaouias of Algeria, notwithstanding some counter-currents among them, generally accepted French rule and co-operated with it. The result, nevertheless, was largely a lessening of the economic lordship of the religious families at the head of these establishments and an enfranchisement of the people from dependence upon them. The zaouias were sources of great communal benefit; they practised especially the Moslem virtues of alms-giving and hospitality; but they also took tithes and offerings. Their social importance has diminished; and, in place of the old half-patriarchal, half-feudal system, society takes on the modern structure of economic individualism. The impersonal administrative system, dealing with all in an individual way, shivered the primitive economic collectivity of society at a stroke. The modern world has come; capital, wages, earnings bring new arrangements and ways of living; the economic career in a commercial world is open and safe, wealth is its prize, competence is possible for those who can maintain themselves in the way; the new dispensation—the future, has begun. Life is more free, more just, fuller of opportunity, and it is also more difficult; new desires, new temptations, and new needs arise; the cost is greater. Civilization enforces the higher standard of living even on the lowliest. This is the material fact most powerful in transformation. It is a fact inherent in progress.

The change in manners is the superficial expression of economic changes. There is an ingathering into the towns, and, as always, in the first contacts of a comparatively primitive race with a luxurious civilization the corruption of manners and morals is patent; the weakening of the old fibre of life before the new fibre has time to form occasions a moral displacement. This is most noticeable in the cities of the coast, but in some degree is everywhere to be seen. There is, as it were, a sifting of classes; the more advanced, those who are most sensitive to the new and most free and bold, begin an exodus from the café Maure to the European restaurant; they imitate the foreigner, ape his ways and take the mould of his habits; the French vie tends to establish itself as the ideal, to a greater or less degree, among the forward spirits and the young; old haunts and customs are left with the lower class in the café Maure. The chief support of the general change, broadly speaking, is the instruction in French schools throughout the provinces, which reduces the old language to a country dialect and secures a certain glamour for the new régime and naturalizes it as a patrie familiar from childhood, protective, and opening the ways of life. A vital point is the extent to which, in this change of manners and ideals religion, the faith, is affected. It appears to be conceded that the practice of the faith formally is weakened. It is a faith in which the rite counts heavily; the doing of certain acts, as a matter of observance, is a large part of its reality; but a default in the practice of religion is never a sure index to a decline in belief. Belief habitually outlives practice. It is certain that no Christianizing takes place. The White Brothers, the Catholic missionaries of the Sahara, have long confined their efforts to works of humanity and simple helpfulness, abandoning attempts at conversion. If the religion of Islam grows feebler in its hold, it means that free thought, scepticism, and indifference come in its place. Perhaps the fundamental fact is that the larger sphere which existed for religion in the old days no longer exists. The hermit is a holy man largely because he has nothing else to do except to be holy; and religion fills the world of Islam partly, at least, because of the absence of other elements in that primitive monotonous life. The modern world has brought with it into the desert a great variety of novel interests, a diversified life, stimulating curiosity and attention and often absorbing practical participation in the new movement on the part of the people in trade, enterprise, amusement, information, news. It appears to be agreed that in the parts of longest occupancy by the French there has been a relaxation of religious practice and a softening of fanatic hatred, concurrently with a corruption of morals and degeneracy of racial vigor where European contact has been most close.

The final question is of the issue. The population has greatly increased under French rule. The development of the country in a material way goes on apace. The colonial empire of France in Africa has a great commercial future. Will the native people in this new economic civilization be able to hold fast and secure for its own at least a share of the products of this great movement, or will they be merely a servile race in the service of French proprietors and over-lords, or in a condition of economic serfage to vast accumulations of capital, analogous to that of industrial workers in our capitalistic society? Will the moral decay, incident to the change of civilizations, eat them up and destroy them, as has been the luck of half-barbaric peoples elsewhere in their contact with the modern world? In a word, is the Berber people, for that race is here the general stock and stamina, capable of assimilating this civilization and profiting by it? These are questions of a far future. Meanwhile the best opinion is sharply divided upon them. Historically, the Berber race has shown assimilative power racially by its absorption of the foreign bloods that have crossed it from the earliest days: the northern barbarians, the Arabs of the great invasion, the negroes of the south have all mingled with it freely; it has also shown power to take the impress of foreign institutions from Roman and Christian days to the time of its Islamization. Its resistant power, its vitality as a race, is scarcely less noticeable. There are some who look to see real assimilation, even to the extent of a miscegenation of the various strains of foreign blood; there are others who expect at most only a hegemony of civilization over a permanently inferior people; and there are still others who hope for a true assimilation of material civilization, with its blessings of science and order, but see an impassable abyss between the old European and the soul of the desert, inscrutable, mysterious, alien, which remains immutable in the Berber race.