It has long been recognised that ʿAbd al-Qādir stood on the cusp of two worlds, that of the Maghribī past and its modern colonial future. His jihād responded to both and can be seen, rather like a coin, as possessing two faces: one which would have been comprehensible to Muslims in the area for many centuries and one which reflected the dilemmas facing many Muslims in the dār al-Islām in their ambiguous encounter with western modernity. Since writing my doctoral dissertation on interpretations of jihād in nineteenth century Morocco over a decade ago, a project to which ʿAbd al-Qādir’s jihād was central, my exploration of modes of legitimacy in al-Andalus and the western Maghrib has only confirmed the deep-rooted importance of jihād in this corner of the Islamic world and emphasised the extent to which ʿAbd al-Qādir’s actions developed out of a rich and varied regional tradition. In this paper, I shall therefore reflect upon the ways in which ʿAbd al-Qādir’s jihād grew out of this regional heritage upheld most evidently in the ʿAlawī sultanate of Morocco in the nineteenth century. This is not to deny ʿAbd al-Qādir’s largely ex post facto role in the development of Algerian nationalism or the importance of other aspects of his multi-facetted life, in particular his life-long commitment to Ṣūfism, but rather to emphasis again how he manipulated a central tenet of Moroccan religio-political discourse in his struggle, not only to resist French domination but also to create a rival sultanate to that of the ʿAlawīs in Morocco.1
The Western Maghribī Jihād Tradition
While it is important to be wary of essentialising a complex and contantly mutating discourse, jihād and its synonym ghazāh appear in western Islamic political discourse from the Umayyad period (757-1031 ce) onwards. Most extant Umayyad chronicles date to the era of the Cordoban caliphate (929-1031), a period in which the more temporal ethos of the emirate was replaced by a heightened religio- political sensibility which conceptualised the Umayyad caliph as Islam’s champion not only against Christianity but also against the deviation represented by Fāṭimid Shīʿism. It was thus natural for historians of the period such as Ibn al-Qūṭīya and Ibn Ḥayyān to praise the Umayyads retrospectively for their diligent attention to prosecuting the holy war against the ‘infidel enemy’ (al-ʿaduw al-kāfir) in the northern Iberian section of the dār al-ḥarb. Ibn al-Qūṭīya praises successive rulers for their dedication to such military campaigns while Ibn Ḥayyān’s lengthier narrative is punctuated by regular and sometimes formulaic reports about their progress.2
However, these sources also introduce a feature of paramount importance to later Maghribi religio-political discourse, the concept of jihād against internal dissention, bids for autonomy and rebellion against God’s appointed ruler. This strand appears most clearly in relation to the historical depiction of the long rebellion of ʿUmar b. Ḥafṣūn and his sons in what is now Andalucía. While Ibn Ḥayyān, for instance, shies away from placing a value-judgement on the numerous other insurgents (thuwwār) of the late ninth to early tenth centuries, he uses comparable terminology for Ibn Ḥafṣūn to that later used by Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān against ʿAbd al-Qādir, such as corrupter of the body politic (mufsid), accursed (al-laʿīn),3 degenerate ( fāsiq),4 apostate (māriq, murtadd),5 and even anti-christ (dajjāl) for his refusal to accept Umayyad authority. It was not coincidental that it was only with the defeat of Ibn Ḥafṣūn’s sons in 316/928 that ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III felt able to reclaim the caliphate and challenge the Fāṭimids for control of the western Maghrib.
The identification of opponents as apostates due to their resistance to divinely constituted authority had already appeared in Syrian Umayyad political discourse which relied upon the so-called ḥirāba verse in the Qurʾān to justify punishment of all kinds of opposition and public disorder:
The reward of those who wage war against God and his messenger, and strive to spread corruption ( fasād) through the land is that they shall be killed or crucified, or their hands and feet cut off on opposite sides, or they shall be exiled from the land. That is their reward on earth and they shall receive great punishment in the afterlife.6
It is therefore unsurprising that their descendants, the Umayyads of Cordoba, should have maintained this paradigm and generalised it in the Islamic west when they reasserted their caliphal, and thus divinely sanctioned, status. The middle decades of the tenth century saw extensive Umayyad activity in the Maghrib against the spread of Fāṭimid influence and thus the potential spread of their religio-political constructs into the Berber hinterland. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III’s chief commander, the fatā Ghālib, campaigned ceaselessly in the region well into the reign of al-Ḥakam II and Berber chiefs came to Cordoba on several occasions to make their obeisance to the Umayyad caliph.7 As Safran indicates, one such Berber chief, Ḥasan b. Gannūn of the line of Idrīs, was described using almost the same vocabulary as that applied to Ibn Ḥafṣūn implying that his eventual submission was likewise the fruit of an internal jihād.8 Simultaneously the Fāṭimid mission continued to promote its own mahdistic vision, ensuring that military activities across the Maghrib from Morocco to Egypt came to be seen as jihāds. This layered perception of jihād as a response to opposition and sectarian conflict as well as warfare against the non-Muslim other found repeated expression in the western Maghrib over the succeeding centuries in the Almoravid (al-Murābiṭūn) and Almohad (al-Muwaḥḥidūn) movements.
These movements have also been described as processes of islamisation in areas where the profession of Islam remained superficial, and thus the start of a repetitive process of rural islamisation and the promotion of urban-defined orthodoxies which was also present in the reformist dimensions of ʿAbd al-Qādir’s jihād. Just as importantly, Ibn Khaldūn understood both the Ṣanhāja Almoravid jihād and that of the predominantly Maṣmūda Almohads as empire-building enterprises. The Almoravid championing of the Mālikī Sunnism of Qayrawān and Almohad mahdism served the same religio-political function of channelling tribal ‘aṣabiyya into a wider jihād against those Muslims who failed to subscribe to the same version of the faith, the emergence of the Ṣanhāja and the Maṣmūda from their desert and mountain fastnesses, their capture of the key urban centres of ancien regimes, and their construction of new empires.
While often categorised as ‘Moroccan’, both these empires extended into what was later western Algeria reinforcing a cultural and political connection which Ibn Abī Zarʿ (d. 741/1340-1) dated back to the Idrīsī era in his fourteenth century history of Fes, al-Anīs al-Muṭrib bi-Rawḍ al-Qirṭās fī akhbār mulūk al-Maghrib wa-Taʾrīkh Madīnat Fās. He noted that Idrīs I’s capture of Tlemsen from its ruler, Muḥammad b. Khazar of the Zanāta, and his (re)building of its great mosque in Ṣafar 174/June 790 was the signal to the ‘Abbasid caliph of his pretensions to power (sulṭān).9 After his foundation of Fes, Idrīs II marched to Tlemsen and resided there for three years during which he repaired its walls and great mosque in Muḥarram 199/August 814, an act supposedly commemorated by a plaque on the minbar observed by ʿAbd al-Malik al-Warrāq in 555/1160.10 These stories flagged up the long-standing interest of the rulers of Fes in Tlemsen and the common Idrīsī heritage of an area also encompassing Gharīs, the location of ʿAbd al-Qādir’s family zāwiya.
By the end of the Almohad period much of the western Maghrib had been exposed to a series of spectacular jihāds which self-consciously sought to reform the Muslim community, destroy aberrant forms of the faith, and wage war against non-Muslims who threatened the western dār al-islām, the Normans, the Aragonese, the Castilians and the Portuguese. It is generally accepted that a significant factor in the rapid demise of both the Almoravid and Almohad empires was their failure to maintain their respective jihāds in al-Andalus. As a result the Muslim-Christian frontier moved rapidly southwards in the 1230s and 1240s putting the Muslims of North Africa in the frontline as never before. Regimes such as the Naṣrids in Granada, the Marīnids in Fes and the Zayyānids of Tlemsen thus felt increasing pressure to demonstrate commitment to some form of jihād.
However, this era also demonstrated the possible co-existence of jihadist language and realpolitik. Castilians, Aragonese, Naṣrids, Marīnids and Zayyānids made alliances which cut across religious lines as often as following them and employed Christian and Muslim mercenaries indiscriminately. Ibn Khaldūn excused the Muslim employment of ‘Frankish’ infantry as an essential complement to the cavalry skills of tribesmen, an argument military reformers in the nineteenth century Maghrib were keen to quote but which was not totally convincing to Muslims in either era.11 While the Marīnids may have put forward their ancestor Maḥyū as a jihād martyr in al-Andalus and promoted also the concept that their dawla was a religious mission to overthrow the Almohads and reestablish the Sharīʿa, observers could be forgiven for seeing Muslim political disunity as a major factor in the Christian advance southwards.12 In this respect a pivotal text is that of Ibn ʿIdhārī (d. c. 1295) whose Bayān al-Mughrib fī akhbār mulūk al-Andalus wa’l-Maghrib projects a late thirteenth century view of jihād back onto the Umayyads as well as their Almoravid and Almohad successors.
The importance of this to the present article is the evidence of such a religio-political construct in the Maghrib by the late thirteenth century. Ibn ʿIdhārī makes extensive use of the works of al-Rāzī and Ibn Ḥayyān in his history of al-Andalus but his vision of the Umayyad period puts much greater stress on jihād/ghazāh than they do. His work is chronological and for several years, the only information he gives is the military campaigns which took place, both against rebels and against the ‘infidel’. He also makes explicit the deleterious effect of internal dissention for adequate defence of the Muslim frontier in a manner echoed centuries later by both ʿAbd al-Qadir and Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān in their respective efforts to quell opposition to their rule. In his comments on the reign of the amīr ʿAbd Allāh (r. 275-300/888-912), he describes al-Andalus as ruled by the ‘party of Satan’ (ḥizb al-shayṭān) as a result of which ‘the jihād to the dār al-ḥarb ceased and the lands of Islam in al-Andalus became a dangerous frontier (al-thughr al-makhūf )’.13 He also maintained Ibn Ḥayyān/al-Rāzī’s description of the Ḥafṣūnids as equivalent to unbelievers for their resistance to Umayyad authority.
A similar historiographical framework was adopted by al-Maqqarī (c. 986-1041/1577-1632), a native of Tlemsen of Andalusi origin, in the third volume of his huge literary masterpiece the Nafḥ al-Ṭīb which deals with the chronological history of the Iberian peninsula and is called, ‘A history of jihād against the enemy in al-Andalus’. Like Ibn ʿIdhārī, al-Maqqarī took the opportunity presented by his writing to express the Maghribī political truism that political disunity opens the way for infidel attack. The historical sections of his work are about the rise and fall of al-Andalus and while he celebrates the Umayyad period as one of unity, he describes the ensuing period as disastrous due to the lack of an imām al-jamāʿa and a united system of government (niẓām wāḥid). Instead dissention (ikhtilāf ) and civil strife (fitna) enabled the Christian kings to steadily conquer Muslim territory.14 A Muslim ruler’s first responsibility was therefore to preserve internal unity in order to maintain a strong Muslim defence against external aggressors.
The fact that al-Maqqarī understood the political history of the period as a history of jihād is significant in itself and demonstrates the impact of the notion of jihād which had developed with the rise of the Saʿdī sulṭans in the Wād Darʿa en route to Marrakesh which they captured in 1525. By this time, the Portuguese had occupied several settlements on the Atlantic coast and the Spanish controlled Melilla, Oran and other places on the Mediterranean littoral making jihād an immediate concern rather than a distant reality for the inhabitants of the Maghrib. In response, the Saʿdīs judiciously promoted the idea that effective jihād required the leadership of a ruler, rather than a plethora of local independent mujāhidīn, and that this ruler should be a descendant of the Prophet, a sharīf. Sharifian religio-political theory thus blended contemporary concepts of the inherent baraka of the shurafāʾ, popularised by the spread of Ṣufism throughout the rural Maghrib, with the idea that in the case of a sulṭān that baraka should be proven through performance in the jihād against the ‘infidel’. The transfer of baraka from the religious to the political spheres was facilitated by the mahdistic claim cultivated by various Saʿdī rulers.
This construct gained support in southern Morocco and eventually in Fes, where the Saʿdī sulṭāns dislodged the Waṭṭāsids, partly as a result of their poor showing in the jihād and partly due to their lack of sharifian ancestry. However, the Saʿdī assertion of their right to rule and lead the jihād as shurafāʾ was not uncontested in Fes where the Idrīsī shurafāʾ had themselves been manoevering to take over from the Waṭṭāsids.15 The jihadist aspect of political culture was reinforced in the late Saʿdī period, when Spain expelled around a quarter of a million Moriscos by royal decree in 1609-10.16 Their expulsion was undertaken with brutal vigor and much cruelty ensuring that the Moriscos who resettled in the northern Maghrib had an avid attachment to waging war on Iberian Christians.17 It should, of course, be noted that Ottoman concepts of ghazāh were also important throughout the Muslim Mediterranean in the sixteenth century, reinforcing local ideologies and giving them a maritime dimension whilst also competing with them. This was the political and religious world of which al-Maqqarī was part when he began writing about the cultural heritage of al-Andalus.
His biography further testifies to the broader geo-political context in which Maghribīs functioned prior to the imposition of modern state boundaries which began in the case of Algeria and Morocco with the Treaty of Lalla Maghnia in 1845 signed by the French government and the ʿAlawī makhzan. Al-Maqqarī’s nisba refers to the small village of Maqqara in the hinterland of Tlemsen but his distant ancestors hailed from al-Andalus and in more recent times had participated in the scholarly elite of both Tlemsen and Fes. One of his ancestors was chief qāḍī of Fes and a teacher of the famous Granadan minister Ibn al-Khaṭīb. Al-Maqqarī himself was imām and muftī of the Qarawiyyīn between 1613 and 1617 before the turbulent politics of late Saʿdī Fes led to his hasty departure for Ottoman Egypt and Syria, ostensibly to perform the pilgrimage.18 Among many others things, al-Maqqarī exemplifies the importance of jihād to political discourse in an area rather larger than contemporary Morocco and the persistent intellectual and cultural connections which linked Fes and Tlemsen, despite the latter’s incorporation into the Ottoman Regency of Algiers.
Despite some Saʿdī successes against the Portuguese enclaves, most famously Santa Cruz de Agadīr in 1541, it proved impossible for them to completely dislodge the Iberian powers, as the continued Spanish possession of Ceuta and Melilla underlines. The ʿAlawī sulṭāns who came to power in the 1660s therefore constructed their legitimacy on a rather similar platform to their Saʿdī predecessors, sharifism and jihād, although the mahdistic element was absent. Each sulṭān in turn proved his right to rule by demonstrating his devotion to the jihād which had the simultaneous effect of proving his martial prowess to his often recalcitrant tribal subjects.19 This took a variety of forms from Mawlay Ismāʿīl’s sabre rattled outside various enclaves including Tangiers which was fortuitously evacuated by the English (who had inherited it from the Portuguese) in 1684 to Sīdī Muḥammad and Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s maritime jihād, the local euphemism for corsairing but also its use to secure treaties depicted as advantageous to Muslims.
The perpetual problems associated with creating a centralised state in a tribal region also nurtured the ongoing elaboration of the concept of jihād against fasād, the corruption of the body politic, by tribes who failed to pay their taxes or demonstrated opposition of any other kind to the ʿAlawī sulṭān. This became most pronounced during the troubled reign of Mawlay Sulaymān, a sulṭān whose martial abilities were questioned from the beginning and who endured not only the total breakdown of his authority but also his own ignominious capture by the Berbers of the Middle Atlas in 1819. In such circumstances, he pronounced not only that tribesmen who acted thus were apostates, but that jihād against them was more meritorious than jihād against the ‘infidel’.20 This was the religio-political context in which the French conquest of Algiers and dismantling of the Ottoman administration occurred in 1830, an event which was reported to the ʿAlawī sulṭān a month after it happened and which immediately stirred up a mixture of jihādist sentiment and political opportunism across the region.21
ʿAbd al-Qādir’s Jihad
When the French conquered Algiers, ʿAbd al-Qādir was a relatively young man of twenty two or three still under the shadow of his father, the famous Qādirī marabout Muḥyī al-Dīn whose zāwiya was located on the Gharīs plain outside Mascara. Much of our information about the response of Muḥyī al-Dīn to the fall of Algiers and ʿAbd al-Qādir’s subsequent religio-political activities was actually composed later in Damascus. This applies both to European-authored biographies such as that of Alexandre Bellemare and Charles Henry Churchill published in 1863 and 1867 respectively, and that penned by ʿAbd al-Qādir’s son, Muḥammad, after his death in 1883. For all these authors, Algeria or more precisely l’Algérie française had come into existence but whether an Algerian national identity predated the 1830 watershed or not remains a moot point.22 ʿAbd al-Qādir’s own understanding of the notion, even late in his life, was vague at best and subsisted with his commitment to Islamic reformism of a univeralist colour, and his geo-political engagement in an area which frequently encompassed the Rīf mountains and other parts of the ʿAlawī sultanate but only rarely included eastern Algeria, previously the eastern beylik of Constantine.
Moreover, although convenient to speak of his tribal following as ‘western Algerian’ and ‘Moroccan’, to categorise them in this way obfuscates their own layered identities as Arabic or Berber speakers and members of particular religious brotherhoods in which their loyalty and recognition of a sulṭān was often of secondary importance, registered most evidently in their willingness to pay taxes and to provide military assistance. Their political loyalties could also change with the season: several tribes moved between the territories of the Ottoman regency and the ʿAlawī sultanate on an annual basis, a fact which bedevilled the drawing up of the treaty of Lalla Maghnia. ʿAbd al-Qādir’s frequent description by Europeans such as Churchill as ‘Sultan of the Arabs’ rather than the ‘Algerians’ and Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Qādir’s tendency to speak of ‘Arabs’, ‘Berbers’ and ‘Turks’ within the central Maghrib (al-maghrib al-awsaṭ) confirms that even in the 1860s ʿAbd al-Qādir was not unambiguously identified with Algeria.23
What is particularly interesting about these biographies is the tension they exhibit between what might be called the ‘Moroccan’ and ‘Algerian’ dimensions of ʿAbd al-Qādir’s project which suggests that they were a stage in the gradual delinking of ʿAbd al-Qādir from his pre-colonial western Maghribī context and his insertion into the nascent Algerian national narrative. Many traces of a pre-national paradigm intimately connected to ʿAlawī religio-political discourse remain both in his biographies and in archival documents relating to the period. These fall into two interwoven categories: firstly, the ideological positioning of the amīr within a double-pronged jihād discourse familiar for centuries in the western Maghrib and upheld strongly by the ʿAlawī sulṭāns and, secondly, the actual playing out of ʿAbd al-Qādir’s jihād in a geographical area that cut across the later national frontier.
When Algiers first fell to the French and Damremont’s expeditionary force sailed to Oran, the first reaction of many in the beylik was to look to Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, the ʿAlawī sulṭān, for assistance. This was the reaction of the civilian population of Tlemsen, popularly known as the ḥaḍar who appealed to the hesitant sulṭān in a famous letter carried to Fes by a delegation loaded with gifts.24 It was also the response of ʿAbd al-Qādir’s father, Muḥyī al-Dīn, who initially championed the acknowledgement of Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān across the region and offered his personal oath (bayʿa) to the sulṭān’s representative and cousin, ‘Alī b. Sulaymān, when he arrived in Tlemsen shortly afterwards in October 1830.25 The sources claim that this was because Muḥyī al-Dīn felt that he was too old to accept the proffered bayʿa of the tribes of Gharīs but it also indicates the widespread legitimacy of the ʿAlawīs in the western beylik of the regency of Algiers at this point.26
The political choice appeared to be between Ottoman sovereignty rendered void by incapacity in the face of the French invasion and ʿAlawī authority which seemed to promise a more realistic chance of military assistance. The ʿAlawī attempt at direct rule from Tlemsen which entailed efforts to secure full allegiance from the population for jihād against the French in Oran was an unmitigated disaster. The Ottoman garrison refused to surrender the citadel to ʿAlī b. Sulaymān and it proved impossible for his advisors and commanders to surmount tribal differences except for short periods. When the ʿAlawī troops in Tlemsen mutinied after six months it was the last straw: Mawlay ʿAlī withdrew to Fes in disorder supposedly passing leadership of the jihād to none other than Muḥyī al-Dīn.27 This placed the marabouts of Gharīs in a unique position to explore the possibilities provided for them by the sharifian model of rule in the context of colonialism.
The right to rule as a mujāhid-sulṭān in the ʿAlawī mould required sharifian, preferably Ḥasanī, ancestry, which both the Saʿdī and ʿAlawī lineages claimed. However it had always been a disadvantage to them that they were not descendants of Idrīs, the most prestigious Ḥasanī shurafāʾ across the north. In contrast, the marabouts of Gharīs not only claimed a sharifian lineage, they also claimed an Idrīsī one. ʿAbd al-Qādir’s uncle had even written a defence of true sharifian lineages against the mutasharrifūn, marabouts who claimed to be shurafāʾ as a result of their learning or charisma.28 This placed them in the same category as the scholarly and saintly Idrīsī shurafāʾ of Wazzān, Shafshāwan, Fes, Tlemsen and other northern towns of whom every dynasty from the Marīnids onwards had been wary, given the popular recognition of Idrīs I and Idrīs II as holy men as well as early rulers of the Meknes-Fes-Tlemsen corridor. Although Idrīsī lineage did not automatically engender a claim to political power, it made such a claim conceivable and it does not seem an accident that in his very brief history of the Maghrib, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Qādir finds space to mention the trips of both Idrīs I and Idrīs II from Fes to Tlemsen, a journey ʿAbd al-Qādir would reverse, as well as detailing the Idrīsī credentials of his own family.29
In 1832 Muḥyī al-Dīn passed the mantle of leadership to ʿAbd al-Qādir, who was reported to have shown considerable and rather reckless bravery in a series of sorties against the French in Oran.30 His stated reason was again his old age but he also seems to have wished to create a distinction between the mujāhid path upon which ʿAbd al-Qadir had embarked and the way of the marabout followed by his older brother, Muḥammad, who later became head of the family zāwiya. The lengthy description of his bayʿa in the Tuḥfat al-Zāʾir implies that Muḥyī al-Dīn constructed a scenario which deliberately evoked the precedent of the Prophet and presented ʿAbd al-Qādir to the Gharīs tribes as the commander of the faithful (amīr al-muʾminīn) whose mission was both to restore true Islam and repel the French threat to the integrity of the dār al-islām.31 This use of the prophetic model echoed the Almohad mission in the twelfth century but Muḥyī al-Dīn eschewed mahdism, perhaps as a result of the failed mahdistic revolt of Muḥammad b. al-Sharīf in the beylik of Oran some years before, in favour of a distinctly ʿAlawī paradigm.32
The honorific which Muḥyī al-Dīn gave his son was Nāṣir al-Dīn, a title of particular resonance in the Maghribī political past, associated as it was with both ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III of Cordoba and with Yūsuf b. Tāshfīn, the founder of the Almoravid empire, who were depicted in the historical record as champions of Mālikī Sunnism as well as warriors against the ‘infidel’.33 This concatenation of monarchical attributes—Idrīsi lineage, caliphal titulature, military performance in the jihād—could have made ʿAbd al-Qādir an immediate threat to the ʿAlawī sulṭān but it was only deployed in certain contexts, among the Qādirī tribes affiliated to Muḥyī al-Dīn’s zāwiya and in correspondence with non-Muslim rulers and government officials.34
Moreover the implications of the title amīr al-muʾminīn were not necessarily universalist in the nineteenth century. Muḥyī al-Dīn knew perfectly well that the Ottoman and ʿAlawī sulṭāns used the title and on some occasions ʿAbd al-Qādir’s use of it was qualified: in a letter to the British consul in Tangiers he described himself as ‘The commander of the faithful, sulṭān of the districts of Algiers, Oran and Tlemsen’ while describing Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān as ‘commander of the faithful’ too.35 Ironically, in non-Qādirī circles in the ex-Regency, ʿAbd al-Qādir’s legitimacy depended to a large extent on his inheritance of his father’s position as deputy (nāʾib, khalīfa) of Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, the ʿAlawī sulṭān and imām. In the ʿAlawī sultanate too, the widespead popularity of ʿAbd al-Qādir rested in part on the assumption that he was waging jihād on behalf of the sulṭān whose reputation among his subjects was enhanced by the moral support he offered.
This created a situation of mutual dependency between Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān and ʿAbd al-Qādir which only seemed contrived with hindsight. While Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān addressed ʿAbd al-Qādir as his ‘most revered son’, the latter proclaimed his intention to retire to Marrakesh when a lack of enthusiasm among his tribal supporters enabled General Clauzel to occupy and burn his seat of operations, Mascara, in 1835.36 ʿAbd al-Qādir also benefitted from being able to request scholarly approval for his own jihād against fasād from the prestigious ʿulamāʾ of Fes. The well-known fatwa of al-Tasūlī, dated to late 1836, specifically empowered ʿAbd al-Qādir as the representative of the ʿAlawī sulṭān to wage war on Muslims who aided the French or simply refused to assist in the jihād effort.37 Both al-Tasūlī’s fatwa, and the less favourable one issued by the ʿAlawī chief qāḍī of Fes, ʿAbd al-Ḥādī, in 1839, drew on a range of Andalusī-Maghribī legal precedents including responses to Yūsuf b. Tāshfīn’s questions concerning Ibn ‘Abbād’s assistance to Christians in al-Andalus signalling the ideological location of ʿAbd al-Qādir in the western Maghribi religio-political sphere and the resonance of this to his domestic audience.38
At the same time, ʿAbd al-Qadir infused the ʿAlawī notion of jihād with new content that responded to the exigences of the nineteenth century and Muslims’ encounter with both modernity in the abstract sense and the practical reality of modern European military superiority. He was the first in the Maghrib to understand the importance of the military ‘new order’ (al-niẓām al-jadīd) and made strenuous efforts not only to create a modern army but to endow it with an industrial infrastructure. Most later commentators attributed this to his observation of developments in the Egypt of Muḥammad ʿAlī Pasha which is a logical assumption but Leon Roches, who was with ʿAbd al-Qadir from 1837 to 1839, also reports his avid questioning about European technology, organisation and government.39 In creating his niẓāmī army, however, ʿAbd al-Qādir also appreciated better than most of his contemporaries the need to make it an Islamic institution by stressing its role as the only effective means to wage jihād. The idea that military modernisation along European lines might constitute jihād was exported back into the ʿAlawī sultanate a decade later.40
In addition to the moral and religious backing ʿAbd al-Qādir drew from the ʿAlawī sultanate, it also proved to be a vital source of men and munitions as his relationship with the French soured and war became unavoidable. The easiest way to acquire military supplies was via Gibraltar and the northern Gharb port of Tetuan, a route followed by Colonel Scott who spent time with ʿAbd al-Qādir in 1841.41 The supply of munitions to ʿAbd al-Qādir was one way for Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān to indicate the paternalistic relationship which existed between them. His permission to thousands of Rīf tribesmen to join the jihād and authorisation of public celebrations in Fes for ʿAbd al-Qādir’s ‘victories’ functioned in the same way.
The strenuous French protests which this aroused are not the topic of this article but they were instrumental in fracturing the tenuous alliance which existed between ʿAbd al-Qādir and Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān in the 1830s. During the 1840s, the relationship between the two men changed to open antagonism as Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ceased to see ʿAbd al-Qadir as his deputy in the central Maghrib and began to view him as a dangerous rebel and rival for power in his own territory. The tensions between them were exacerbated by the direction of the French advance south and west in the area controlled by ʿAbd al-Qādir which ultimately forced him to use the sultanate as a refuge. Concurrently, ʿAbd al-Qādir’s desperate situation in Algeria force him to make ever more strident demands for assistance from Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān and his subjects and to begin a publicity campaign castigating the sulṭān for failing to fulfill the obligations of a sharifian mujāhid ruler.
With the benefit of hindsight the sources from his Damascene period deny that ʿAbd al-Qādir had any intention to overthrow Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān and become sulṭān of the west in his place but that was not the ʿAlawī perspective in the 1840s. In September 1843 ʿAbd al-Qadir’s camp, known as the Dāʾira, moved into the Rīf mountains. Although not its direct catalyst, this formed the background to the well-known Battle of Isly in 1844, the first major defeat of the ʿAlawī army at French hands, and the ensuing Treaty of Lalla Maghnia in 1845 defining the border between the sultanate and French Algeria. Although this period saw ʿAbd al-Qadir’s last great campaign in Algeria during 1845 it was also the time of his most intense involvement in ʿAlawī politics and engagement with the subjects of the sulṭān both of which were framed by regional notions of sharifian rule and jihād.
As the possibility of resisting the French pacification of the Algerian interior receded, ʿAbd al-Qādir became an ever more ‘Moroccan’ figure, manoeuvering among the tribes of the Rīf, the Idrīsī shurafāʾ of Fes and the ʿAlawī makhzan. Although he repeatedly insisted that his bayʿa to Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān was intact and presented his criticism as naṣīḥa, this period culminated in his 1847 attempt to join up with resettled Algerian tribes and march on Fes. It is not clear whether he wished to establish a new Idrīsī sultanate, or engineer the replacement of Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān with an ʿAlawī more amenable to supporting him, possibly the elusive Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Sulaymān who was in communication with him from Tafilalt, the home of the dynasty but also a place of internal exile well-away from the political centres of Marrakesh and Fes.42 While the reports reaching Drummond Hay, the British consul in Tangiers, were contradictory in late August 1846 he reported to London ‘the manifest desire shown by the inhabitants of both the northern and southern districts that Abd-el-Kader should overthrow the sultan and place himself or some other person whom he may elect on the throne of Morocco.’43
Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān took the threat very seriously and the episode triggered the activation of a vitriolic makhzan denunciation of the rebel (mufsid) disguised as a holy warrior (mujāhid) to counteract ʿAbd al-Qādir’s argument that Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s failure to wage jihād rendered him illegitimate and his subjects’ oath to obey him void. In a strong reprise of the vocabulary used to such effect by earlier chroniclers for Ibn Ḥafṣūn and Ḥasan b. Gannūn, ʿAlawī correspondence asserted that ʿAbd al-Qādir was not simply a rebel ( fattān), but a devil (shayṭān) and a false prophet (dajjāl) leading Muslims to perdition.44 This justified the makhzan’s military action to chase him out of the sultanate as a jihād. Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān also employed the new argument, shared by the head of the Wazzāniyya-Ṭayyibiyya brotherhood, that the viciousness of the French onslaught rendered jihād against the ‘infidel’ too dangerous to be permissible.45 Therefore the decision of the sulṭān to withdraw from direct fighting was the religiously correct one, not ʿAbd al-Qādir’s insistance on actions that amounted to communal suicide. ʿAbd al-Qādir’s departure from the sultanate in December 1847 and his subsequent surrender to the French provided Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān with the proof he needed: ʿAbd al-Qādir had been in league with the French ‘infidel’ to destabilise the sultanate and destroy the community.46 This partisan view was not, however, as important as the impetus which ʿAbd al-Qadir’s jihād/fasād had given to religio-political discourse in the sultanate. As a potential ruler in the ʿAlawī mould, whether as a neighbour or as a rival, he contributed to ʿAlawī religio-political debates in a way which a purely Algerian figure could not have done. Although there was a distinction between al-Maghrib al-Aqṣā and al-Maghrib al-Awsaṭ, there was no watertight national division. While there was certainly a hint of the national identities soon to develop, the subjects of the ʿAlawī sultanate responded to ʿAbd al-Qadir as an Idrīsī sharīf and mujāhid, forcing the makhzan to refine its own understanding of jihād and take a centuries-old discourse in new directions.
ʿAbd al-Qādir’s Contribution to Maghribī Jihād Discourse in the Colonial Era
Despite the obviously ʿAlawī religio-political constructs which ʿAbd al-Qādir used to such effect during the 1830s and 1840s, religious imagery may be imaginary and conceal quite new social and political configurations.47 Christelow suggests that this was indeed the case in the Mascara region in 1830 where a new horizontal ‘class’ of shurafāʾ was in the process of emerging and thus the moment ripe for the implementation of a political model akin to that of the ʿAlawī sultanate.48 However, ʿAbd al-Qādir’s jihād was also new in other ways of greater impact in the ʿAlawī sultanate. Bellemare and Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Qādir both approvingly cited Maréchal Soult’s comparison of ʿAbd al-Qādir with Muḥammad ʿAlī Pasha of Egypt and Shāmil, the Naqshbandī leader of Muslim resistance to Russian colonisation in the Caucausus.49 All three appeared outstanding for their commitment not simply to resistance but also to modernisation. Both ʿAbd al-Qādir and Shāmil emerged from the reformed Ṣufī milieu and combined the introduction of a modern niẓāmī army and small-scale industrialisation with the promotion of a pietistic but orthodox Islamic education beyond urban confines to a rural tribal population.50 ʿAbd al-Qādir’s vision of the jihād a sharifian sulṭān should undertake was therefore rather different to earlier understandings of the concept. While rejecting ʿAbd al-Qadir’s pretensions to power, the ʿAlawīs picked up the concept of the niẓāmī army and made that the next stage in their own reconfigured jihād to restore public confidence in their regime and defend their frontiers against the constant threat now posed by the European powers. More obliquely, ʿAbd al-Qādir also generated a public debate which made popular consensus essential to a ruler or mujāhid’s legitimacy. While a degree of popular acceptance had always been necessary, the challenge ʿAbd al-Qādir presented was a vocal one declaimed in the streets of Fes which explored not simply the rights but also the duties of a mujāhid-sulṭān faced with a colonial threat. Although Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān succeeded in depicting ʿAbd al-Qādir as the anti-christ whose honeyed words seduced the believers and split the staff of Islamic unity, the subjects of the sultanate spent the rest of the pre-colonial period striving to find a ruler who could adequately wage a jihād encompassing modernisation and anti-colonial resistance. He can thus be seen not only as a man inspired by the western Maghribī jihād tradition but also one who imbued it with new dynamism at the dawn of the colonial period. He thus contributed to Moroccan as much as to Algerian nationalism.
1 This article distills much of my earlier work on jihād in Morocco and on ʿAbd al-Qādir. Rather than repeat material, I have directed the reader to these publications in the footnotes.
2 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Taʾrīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, edited by Ibrāhīm al-Ibyārī, Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Maṣrī and Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Lubnānī (1982) e.g. pp. 64, 75; The extant parts of Ibn Ḥayyān’s Muqtabis or Muqtabas are available in a bewildering number of Arabic editions and Spanish translations. Some examples of Ibn Ḥayyān’s treatment of campaigns can be found in J. Vallvé and F. Ruiz Girela, La primera década del reinado de Al-Ḥakam I, según el Muqtabis II, 1 de Ben Ḥayyān de Córdoba (m. 496 h./1076 J.C.), Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia (2003).
3 Ibn Ḥayyān, Muqtabas V, edited by P. Chalmeta, F. Corriente, and M. Ṣubḥ, Madrid: Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura (1978) p. 219.
5 Ibn Ḥayyān, Muqtabas V, pp. 112, 168.The sources assert that this was not merely an insult in the case of Ibn Ḥafṣūn but an actual return to Christianity, the faith of his ancestors.
6 Qurʾān 5 (Sūrat al-Māʾida): 33. I am grateful to Andrew Marsham for drawing my attention to this Syrian Umayyad precedent.
7 Two such missions are described in immense detail by by Ibn Ḥayyān quoting from al-Rāzī. Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis fī akhbār balad al-Andalus, edited by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ḥajjī Beirut: Dār al-Thaqāfa (1965) pp. 44-53, 193-202. They have both been analysed for their religio-political content by Janina Safran in a series of articles and book chapters. J. Safran, ‘The Command of the Faithful in al-Andalus: A Study in the Articulation of Caliphal Legitimacy’, IJMES 30 (1998), 183-198; J. Safran, ‘Ceremony and Submission: The symbolic representation and recognition of legitimacy in tenth-century al-Andalus’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 58:3 (1999) 191-201. J. Safran, The Second Umayyad Caliphate, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (2000) pp. 70-97.
9 Ibn Abī Zarʿ also provides a link between the Idrīsī shurafāʾ and those of Tlemsen, whom he states were the descendants of Idrīs’s brother, Sulayman, who came to the town as a dāʿī of their brother, Muḥammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya. Ibn Abī Zarʿ, Rawḍ al-Qirṭās, p. 18.
11 Muḥammad al-Kardūdī, Kashf al-ghumma bi-bayān inna ḥarb al-niẓām ḥaqq ‘alā al-umma, MS D1281 Bibliothèque Générale, Rabat.
12 Shatzmiller shows that the Marīnids were not simply tribal war lords whose political discourse was devoid of religious content but that they portrayed themselves as men with a religious mission which endowed them not just with legitimacy but also baraka. Maya Shatzmiller, The Berbers and the Islamic State: the Marīnid experience in pre-protectorate Morocco, Princeton: Marcus Wiener (2000) pp. 48-51.
13 Muḥammad Ibn ʿIdhārī al-Marrākushī, Bayān al-Mughrib fī akhbār mulūk al-Andalus wa’l-Maghrib, edited by G.S. Colin and E. Levi-Provençal, Leiden: Brill (1948-51) vol. 2, p. 121.
15 For insight into the political and religious culture of Fes at this time, see: Scott Kugle, Rebel between Spirit and Law: Ahmad Zarruq, Sainthood and Authority in Islam, Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press (2006).
16 Although legally Catholic, the Spanish government considered the Moriscos to be crypto-Muslims and therefore unassimilable to early modern Spanish society.
17 See M. Brett, Introduction p. xvii in Ahmed ibn Mohammed al-Makkari, History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, translated and abridged by Pascual de Gayangos, London: RoutledgeCurzon (2002) first published 1840-43 (582:25.b.200.1-2).
18 E. Levi-Provençal, ‘al-Makkarī’, Encyclopedia of Islam, second edition, Brillonline, <http://www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_SIM-4832> accessed 11/09/09 (print version: vol. 6, p. 187).
19 For a much fuller analysis of this religio-political construct see A.K. Bennison, Jihad and its Interpretations in pre-colonial Morocco: state-society relations during the French conquest of Algeria, London: RoutledgeCurzon (2002) pp. 15-41.
20 Direction des Archives Royales, Rabat, File: Tetuan I. Mawlay Sulaymān to ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ashʿāsh, 2 Muḥarram 1235 (21/10/1819); Bennison, Jihād and its interpretations, p. 32.
21 Les Archives des Affaires Etrangères. Correspondance Politique Maroc 3. Delaporte to Solignac, 13 July 1930.
22 Alexandre Bellemare, Abd el-Kader, sa vie politique et militaire, Paris (1963); Charles Henry Churchill, History of Abdel Kader, ex-sultan of the Arabs of Algeria, London: Chapman and Hall (1867); Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Qādir, Tuḥfat al-Zāʾir fī Taʾrīkh al-Jazāʾir wa’l-Amīr ʿAbd al-Qādir, edited by Mamdūḥ Ḥaqqī, Beirut: Dār al-Yaqẓa al-ʿArabiyya (1964).
23 John King explores the historiographical background to this issue. J. King, ʿAbd el-Kader and Arab Nationalism’ in John Spagnolo (ed.), Problems of the Modern Middle East in Perspective: Essays in Honour of Albert Hourani, Oxford: Ithaca Press (1996), pp. 133-168.
28 Houari Touati, ‘Prestige ancestrale et système symbolique sharifien dans le Maghreb centrale du XVIIème siècle, Arabica 39 (1992) 1-24, p. 7.
32 The trajectory of Ibn al-Sharīf ’s revolt confirms the western-looking tendencies of elements within the scholarly and maraboutic strata in the beylik of Oran. He studied in Fes and joined the Darqāwa brotherhood before returning to launch his rebellion against the Ottomans in Oran. During the rebellion, Tlemsen and several rebel tribes offered their bayʿa to the ʿAlawī sulṭān, Mawlay Sulaymān, and when it faltered Ibn al-Sharīf withdrew to Tlemsen and then into the mountains of the Banū Yznāsen which straddled the border zone. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Qādir, Tuḥfat al-Zāʾir, p. 115; Bennison, Jihād and its interpretations, p. 44.
33 The association of the name with both rulers was known in the Maghrib as the anonymous al-Ḥulal al-Mawshiyya written in the post-Almohad era demonstrates. al-Ḥulal al-Mawshiyya, edited by Bashīr al-Fawratī and wrongly attributed to Ibn al-Khaṭīb, Tunis: al-Taqqadum al-Islāmiyya (1329/1911) pp. 16-19.
34 Letters from ʿAbd al-Qādir to the British monarch and prime minister used amīr al-muʾminīn in an attempt to elevate his status in the realm of international diplomacy. A. Temimi, Recherches et Documents de Histoire Maghrebine: L’Algerie, la Tunisie et la Tripolitaine, Tunis: University of Tunis publications (1980) pp. 131, 132, 134. The same terminology was later used to address the Spanish monarch.
40 See A.K. Bennison, ‘The “New Order” and Islamic Order: the introduction of the Niẓāmī Army in the Western Maghrib and its legitimation, 1830-1873’. International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36: 4 (2004) pp. 591-612.
42 A.K. Bennison, ‘The 1847 Revolt of ʿAbd al-Qadir and the Algerians against Mawlay ʿAbd al-Rahman, Sultan of Morocco’, Maghreb Review 22, 1-2 (1997) pp. 109-123.
44 Direction des Archives Royales, Rabat. al-Tartīb al-ʿĀmm. Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān to Sīdī Muḥammad, 2 Shawwāl 1262 (23 September 1846); File ʿAbd al-Qādir. Sīdī Muḥammad to Wuld Ab(u) Muḥammad, 29 Dhu’l-Qaʿda 1262 (18 November 1846) et al.
45 Archives des Affaires Etrangères, Nantes. Correspondance Politique Maroc 18 De Chasteau a Guizot, 15 May 1847.
46 Direction des Archives Royales, Rabat. al-Tartīb al-ʿĀmm. Mawlay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān to ʿAbd al-Qādir Ashʿāsh, 22 Muḥarram 1264 (30 December 1847).
47 An observation made by Fanny Colonna cited in Allan Christelow, Muslim Law courts and the French colonial state in Algeria, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1985) p. 47.
50 For a summary of Shāmil’s career see Alexander Knysh, ‘Shāmil’, Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, Brillonline, 11 September 2009 <http://www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_COM-1032> (Print version: vol. 9, p. 283).
- 18
E. Levi-Provençal, ‘al-Makkarī’, Encyclopedia of Islam, second edition, Brillonline, <http://www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_SIM-4832> accessed 11/09/09 (print version: vol. 6, p. 187).
- 42
A.K. Bennison, ‘The 1847 Revolt of ʿAbd al-Qadir and the Algerians against Mawlay ʿAbd al-Rahman, Sultan of Morocco’, Maghreb Review 22, 1-2 (1997) pp. 109-123.
- 49
Bellemare, Abd-el-Kader, p. 3 and Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Qādir, Tuḥfat al-Zāʾir, p. 8.
