North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

The conversion of a people to a new religion, notwithstanding the glory of apostolic legends, must have always been largely a nominal change. The victorious faith takes up into itself the customs and cardinal ideas, the habits of feeling and doing, the mental and moral leaf-mould, as it were, of the old, and it is often the old that survives in the growth under a new name and in a new social organization. It was thus that Catholicism re-embodied paganism, whether classical or heathen, without a violent disturbance of the primeval roots of old religion with its annual flowering of fêtes, its local worships, its sheltering thoughts of protection in the human task-work, its adumbrations of the world of spirits, its ritual toward the good and evil powers; and the religion of Mohammed, sweeping over Africa on the swords of Arab raiders and hordes, subdued the country to the only God, but the Berber soul remained much as it had been, a barbarian soul, still deeply engaged in fetichism, magic, diabolism, primitive emotions, and ancestral tribal practices—superstition; nor was this the first time that the Berber soul had encountered the religion of the foreigner, for pagan temples and Christian churches already stood upon the soil. The faith of Mohammed was more fiercely proselytizing; it was, moreover, of desert and tribal kin; and it imposed its formulas and exterior observance more widely and thoroughly than its predecessors.

The Berber race, nevertheless, was hard-bitted, obstinate, independent; it was scattered over deserts and in mountain fastnesses; its conversion was slow and remained imperfect in spite of much missionary work on the part of the pious proselytizers from the schools of Seville and Fez, who in later generations followed the fiery conquerors to “Koranize” the rude mountaineers, such as those of Kabylie, and settled beside them as daily guides and teachers. Long after the first conquest Christianized Berbers and other dissident groups were to be found here and there, and were tolerated. The elements of primitive savagery held their own in the life of the people at large, just as pagan practice and thought survived in southern Italy, and in the last century were easily to be observed there; the Riff, in particular, was a stronghold of magic; and everywhere beneath the thin Moslem veneer was the old substratum of superstition embedded in an unchanging savage heredity of mood, belief, and social custom. Fetichism persisted in the mental habit of the people, and still shows in their addiction to holy places, magical rites and modes of healing, charms and amulets, and the whole rosary of primitive superstition.

The Berbers were also by nature a Protestant race; their independent spirit quickly availed itself of every sectarian difference, reform or pretension, to make a core of revolt, inside the pale of the religion, against their foreign orthodox masters. It was their way of asserting their nationalism against the Arab domination; it was, essentially, a political manœuvre. The first great Moslem heresy, Kharedjism, instituted by the followers of Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed, found the Berber tribes an army flocking to its banners; and, afterward, wherever schism broke out or a pretender arose, there were the Berbers gathered together. In that world they were the opposition. Islam itself, by the example of Mohammed, had shown the way; every tribe had its inspired prophet, sooner or later; and one, at least, among them, the Berghouaia, once most powerful in this region, had its own Koran, specially received in the Berber tongue from the only God, whose prophet in this instance was Saleh. The expectation of the Mahdi, too—the last imam, who, having mysteriously disappeared, shall come again to bring justice on the earth—a tradition that mounted to Mohammed himself, was an incentive to his appearance; and inasmuch as the prediction circulated under the popular form—“the sun shall arise in the west”—the Berbers regarded themselves as the chosen people among whom the Mahdi should arise. Under these conditions there was no lack of Mahdis. One of them, the greatest, Obéïd Allah, the Fatémide, built that lonely seaport of Mahdia on the Tunisian coast, whence he extended his sovereignty over the Moslem dominions from the Egyptian border to the Atlantic, including Sicily, and warred on Genoa, Corsica, and Sardinia; but his son had to contend with a prophet pretender, “the man with the ass,” who with a great following from the tribes maintained himself for a while, until between his own new-found taste for fine horses and the desire of the tribesmen to return to their own country, his authority and the army melted away together, like snow in the desert. It was a characteristic incident in Berber history.

The natural and various course of such events had ample illustration in the Morocco country about Tlemcen. Edris, the last alleged descendant of Ali, found refuge in this quarter on the Atlantic edge of the Mohammedan world; the Berbers, after their custom of rallying about a promising dissenter, soon had him at their head; his son founded Fez, and the dynasty was prosperous and glorious. Then a cloud appeared in the far south, a cloud of horsemen with the veil—I suppose the blue veil that I associate with the Touaregs, themselves doubtless the best living type of that old horde of desert raiders. They mounted up from the borders of Senegal, gathering masses of foot-followers as they went, preaching a reform of faith and manners, breaking all musical instruments, and cleansing the land; they were fighting Puritans of their age and religion, establishing an austere life and a pure form of the faith. So the princely Edrisides gave place to the princely Almoravides, and their dynasty, too, was prosperous and glorious, and extended its realm into Spain. Then rose the Mahdi. In this instance he was Ibn Toumert, a Berber, lame and ugly, small, copper-colored, sunken-eyed, who had schooled himself at Cordova, and then, like Sidi bou-Médyen, warmed his enthusiastic and mystic temperament in the oriental fires of Baghdat and Mecca, and had returned along the cities of the African seaboard a reformer, breaking winecasks and violins, and publicly reproaching devout dignitaries for corruption of manners, even the reigning prince of the Almoravides. He was soon the Mahdi, with a new Koran, institutor of the sect of the Unity of God, which after his death came to the throne of the country in the dynasty of the princely Almohades. The students of Tlemcen had once sent one of their number to the prophet with an invitation to come and teach them; he, however, found himself ill at ease in the college, and soon went away into hermitage among the mountains; but the youth remained with him as his disciple and companion, and it was this youth, Abd el-Moumin, who founded the new dynasty, like its predecessors prosperous and glorious; and it was he who drove the Normans out of their last stronghold at Mahdia, having extended his power so far, and with his conquering arms brought the Andalusian arts to Tunis. In the four centuries of this brief historic survey—from the eighth to the twelfth—a sectary, a reformation, and a Mahdi were the initial points on which the great changes of the government of the country turned.

It might seem that in this civilization politics was only another form of religion; but, deeply engaged as political changes were in religious phenomena, this is perhaps a superficial view. It may also be maintained that the Berbers took no metaphysical interest in dogma, and found in divergent sects and the incessant agitation of unbridled religious enthusiasm only modes of partisanship and levers of political ambition; their religion was, at least, compatible with a vigorous secular life. On the theatre of history religious events gave to politics their dramatic form, at moments of crisis; but the religious life of the community is not to be found in them, but rather in facts of more usual nature and daily occurrence. The cardinal fact, and one that swallowed up all the others, from this point of view, was the extraordinary development of saint worship; its mortal efflorescence and fossilized deposit, so to speak, was this strata of tombs, koubbas, which cover the region. The Marabout, to give the saint his peculiar designation, was a man bound to religion, and was called the “friend of God”; he was revered in his life, and in his death he became the protector of the locality of his tomb, the intermediary of prayer to Allah, whose personality he obscured and tended to displace in practice. It was natural that the cult of saints should flourish in such a superstitious population; and the country itself, by its inaccessible character—desert and wilderness—lent itself to hermit lives, to types of the religious brooder and mystic, the solitary, with his dreams, illusions, and trances. Religious consecration was also a protection in a country of rapine and disorder, and a source of profit among a credulous people. There was, indeed, in the circumstances everything to favor such an order of men. It appears, also, that in the time of the great exodus of the Moors from Spain, a considerable body of fugitives, learned men, found refuge in the Zaouïa of Saguiet-el-Hamra, a famous monastery in Morocco; and the labor of these “men of God,” pious and ardent, who seemed to be almost of another order of beings between mankind and the divinity, is sometimes assigned as the original source of the magnitude of the development of saint worship in these regions. It was they who “Koranized” the tribes, a body of missionary monks, educated, devoted, with the traits of apostolic zeal and ascetic temperament. There were Marabouts long before their day, but to them and their example may be due the fact that the tombs, the holy koubbas, increase toward the west, beyond Algiers and in Morocco, where they “star” the earth.

The lives of the Algerian saints, of which many may be read, do not differ materially from that kind of biography in any religion. Every village has its patron saint, its “master of the country,” as he was called, and, as at Tlemcen, one may oust another with the lapse of time. The koubba was a shrine, a local hearth of religious life and practice, and the worship of the shrine was the near and warm fact in daily experience; the veneration of the Marabout appears to hold that place in the hearts of the people where religion is most human. The Marabout himself was of many types, ranging from plain idiocy, as was the case of Sidi bou-Djemaa on the hill above Mansourah, to the mystic height, the “pole of being,” as was the case of Sidi bou-Médyen on the hill above Agadir. He was miracle-worker, thaumaturgist, medicine-man, and might be consulted for all human events, from cattle disease to thief hunting; he was a preacher, a doctor of the law, an agitator, a recluse, a madman, anything out of the common; and the story of the legends runs the whole gamut of friar, anchorite, and fanatic in all religious history. Women, in particular, gathered about him and his shrine. In a region and civilization where there was no effective mastery of authority or reason, given over to individual initiative in a half-barbarized mental condition, such a development was entirely natural; and the landscape itself is the history and mark of it—there is a koubba on every hilltop, in the beds of the streams, on the slopes of the plains—sometimes clumps of them; in every prospect emerges the shining white cube of the holy tomb.

VI

The secular phase of Berber life in these ages is vividly illustrated in the person and career of Yarmorâsen Ben Zeiyân, the founder of the first kingdom of Tlemcen. He belonged to the tribe of Abd el-Wâd, who, with their cousins, the Beni-Mérin, under the pressure of the Arabs of the second invasion, came up from the desert and took possession of the coast, the former about Tlemcen and the latter in Morocco. For many years these tribes, under the Almohades, had exercised feudal rights over the country; they came north in the spring and summer, and collected tribute from the agriculturalists and townsmen, and returned in winter to their desert homes with the supplies they had thus obtained. Their rise has been termed, not inaptly, a renaissance of the Berber race power, as, indeed, the entire history of the Berbers was a series of explosions of national force, succeeding each other in one or another place at long intervals, but impotent to found a permanent political state. Yarmorâsen was of the type of Tamburlane; a simple Berber, he was unable to speak Arabic, but he had military and organizing genius, became chief and conqueror, and founded the dynasty with which the glory of Tlemcen began. At the moment the Almohades were nearing their fall. The country is described as in anarchy: everywhere the spirit of revolt broke out, the people refused to pay taxes, brigands infested the great routes, the officials were shut up in the towns, the country people were without protection; the region was at the mercy of its nomad masters. It was then that Yarmorâsen found his opportunity, seized independent power, and established order such as was known to that civilization. He was a great man of his race, brave, feared, honored, who understood the interests of his people, political administration, and the art and ends of rule. He reigned forty-four years, amid continuous war; he was defeated early in his career by the ruler of Tunis, but the victor could find no better man on whom to devolve the government than the foe he had overthrown; and it is an interesting point to observe that his ambassador of state, on this occasion, who made the treaty, was his mother. He was respectful of the rights of courtesy, at least, and won applause by his kind treatment of the sister and women of the Almohad prince he overthrew, sending them back to their own land under escort.

In the battle which marked the fall of the Almohades and the independence of Tlemcen there were characteristic incidents. The van of the march of the old princes was led by the Koran, one of the earliest and most famous copies, which the Almohades had captured from the Moors of Grenada and rebound and incrusted with jewels; it was borne on a dromedary, and enclosed in a silk-covered coffer surmounted by a beautiful palm; small flags fluttered from the corners, while before it floated a great white banner on a long staff. It was thus that the Almohades always went out to war. When the two armies stood in battle order, the women on both sides ran through the ranks with uncovered faces and by their cries, gestures, and looks animated their warriors to fight. A similar scene is described by a modern author in writing of a Kabyle village feud; the battle-field, he says, was the dry bed of a torrent, between two slopes; on the heights of the ravine on either side stood the women, barefooted, bare-armed, uttering sharp cries which crossed over the heads of the fighters. “They are all there, their mothers, their wives, their sisters, their daughters, serried one against another like the flowers of a crown; even the widows whose husbands were killed in the last spring combat, even the révoltées who had left their husbands declaring they would no longer serve them,—all adorned and painted for the battle. Rich or poor, young or old, beautiful as idols or disfigured by age and suffering, they are all together, their arms interlaced, their eyes wide and full of fire, at the foot of each village, a confused mass of ornaments, bright colors and miserable rags, lifted by one movement, erect with hate and terror.” The men charge, fire point-blank, engage hand to hand with their yatagans—“better a hundred times die here than go back to the village, because their women will that they should die.” It was such a scene when Yarmorâsen fought with the Almohad prince, Es-Saïd.

Yarmorâsen was more than a fighter; he was an enlightened governor. Tlemcen was then a double city—Agadir and Tagrart, not an arrow’s flight between them. Tagrart had been the “camp” of the invading Almoravides, who had taken Agadir, and as victor it was now the city of the functionaries and government, while the people—the old inhabitants—continued to live in Agadir. Yarmorâsen cared for both, and built the minaret of Agadir, and also that of the grand mosque of Tlemcen, but he declined to inscribe his name upon them, saying: “It is enough that God knows.” He built other public works and the city grew into a thriving capital, not only of war, but of residence and trade, and also became famous for its schools. Among other learned men whom his reputation as a protector of the liberal arts attracted to his court was one, brilliant in that century, Abou Bekr Mohammed Ibn Khattab, whose story especially interested me. He was a poet, and commanded not only a fine hand, but a beautiful epistolary style. Yarmorâsen made him the first secretary of state, and he wrote despatches to the lords of Morocco and Tunis so elegantly composed that, says the Arabian historian Tenesi, they were still learned by heart in his day; and he adds that with this poet the art of writing diplomatic despatches in rhymed prose ceased. The Berber prince deserves grateful memory among poets as the last patron of a lost grace of the art, not likely to find its renaissance ever; and they must read with pleasure the starry and flowery titles with which the chroniclers adorn his glory—the magnanimous, the lion-heart, the bounteous cloud, the shining rose, the kingliest of nobles, the noblest of kings, the well-beloved, the sword of destiny, the lieutenant of God, crown of the great, Emir of the Moslems, Yarmorâsen Ben Zeiyân.