‘Faut-Il Brûler L’Orientalisme?’

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2004 16: 71Cultural DynamicsAbdelmajid Hannoum

'Faut-Il Brûler L'Orientalisme?': On French Scholarship of North Africa

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‘ FAU T- I L B R Û L E R L’ O R I E N TA L I S M E ? ’

On French Scholarship of North Africa

ABDELMAJID HANNOUMSimon’s Rock College of Bard

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ABSTRACT

This article discusses the specificity of French Orientalism on North Africaand shows how in its divide and rule policy, French colonialism constructed adiscourse that opposes the Oriental Arab to the European Berber. It arguesthat French Orientalism, the bulk of knowledge that has been built in thecontext of colonization, though it has changed through time, continues tooperate today both in the discourse of the former colonized and that of theformer colonizer. In addition, the article draws the attention to the importantfact that knowledge is not only a means of control and governance for thecolonial machine, but it also contains categories by which imaginaries areshaped and colonial relations and attitudes are perpetuated.

Key Words � Algeria � French colonialism � knowledge � Middle East �Orientalism

On ne peut se mesurer avec l’image qu’autrui se fait de nous, l’analogie se perdrait.1

Introduction

Knowledge has often been seen as a representation of objects (even whenobjects are subjects), and representations have always been considered areplica of reality, and often even as a substitute for it. In post-colonialtheory, knowledge is not objective data about objects and subjects, but it isa form of social relations, a form of power by which and through whichdomination is assured and guaranteed (Foucault, 1978, 1995). Colonialismand its forms of knowledge have recently been abundantly studied from thisperspective. Studies have drawn attention to the importance of knowledgein the complex processes of subjugation and control. Archaeologies have

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been undertaken to examine the construction of cognitive categories, ofstereotypes, of discourses, through various colonial institutions (Cohen,1996; Dirks, 2001; Mitchell, 1990; Said, 1979; Stoler, 2002).

It should be noted, however, that despite the abundance of studies onOrientalism, and despite the fact that French Orientalism is at the base ofall Orientalisms, and although North Africa is an important aspect ofFrench Orientalism, this area is little explored. The study of Orientalismlacks thus one of its most important components. Orientalism, in this articletoo, is a body of knowledge whose object is the Orient, with a mainepistemological assumption that opposes the Orient to the Occident.2

This body of knowledge took shape in 19th-century France, and morespecifically Paris, known, then, as the capital of Orientalism, the Mecca forEuropean scholars to learn about the Orient (Reig, 1988). However, thoughOrientalism developed in France, it was only in the context of Frenchcolonization of North Africa that it fully developed into an important insti-tution whose role in the colonial enterprise was central and never really indoubt. It is only after colonialism that the importance of Orientalism wasquestioned. This article presents a series of reflections on the developmentof French academic Orientalism, its specificity in North Africa, and its fateand survival today. The point I shall make is that, while Orientalism is achild of colonialism, and that in a post-colonial world, its discourse hasundoubtedly changed, it still generates objects and concepts. In fact, Orien-talist categories still permeate, in subtle and not so subtle forms, the Frenchdiscourse on North Africa in social science as well as in the public media.It still ties the former colonizer and colonized to a system of representationrooted in a period of domination, and thus perpetuates colonial attitudesand relations. This article has also a theoretical dimension in that it asks thefollowing question: how can Orientalist discourse survive in the absence ofthe colonial institutions that made it possible? In fact, if knowledge is regu-lated by power, and if one of its functions is to assure domination andcontrol, what happens when the goal is either achieved or fails? Or to putit concretely: what has happened to colonial knowledge now that it seemsthat colonialism and its mechanisms of power are things of the past? I willfirst describe the formation of a French Orientalist tradition from which acolonial discourse on North Africa developed. I will then show the speci-ficity of this discourse and how it has become regulated by the oppositionBerber versus Arabs, a result of a divide and rule policy whose effects arevisible today in both North African societies and the discourse about them.

Orientalism and Humanism

European knowledge of the Orient, or what is usually called ‘Orientalism’,fully developed in the Paris of the 19th century. Prior to this date, the Orient

72 Cultural Dynamics 16(1)



had been the object of an abundant literature by diplomats, travelers, andprisoners. Though these writings have an individual character, they allarticulate a widely shared image, or rather a set of ideas, about Muslims ingeneral (Daniel, 1960). As a result of the great fear of Muslims generatedby Ottoman incursion into Christian lands, an entire mythology, or systemof representation, concerning Muslims had been constructed by the 16thcentury and was commonly shared in Christian Europe (Delumeau, 1973;Rodinson, 1974). Scholars such as Guillaume Postel emerged from time totime, like prophets, eager to save the world from Muslims, scrutinizing boththeir strength and their evil in order to possess the strength and fight theevil.

Guillaume Postel, who, as it happens, came to the conviction later in hislife that he really was a prophet, was obsessed, as were his contemporaries,with the Muslims, whom he called the Turks (Bowsma, 1957). But Postel,unlike his contemporaries, made considerable efforts to understand andcomprehend the world of the Muslims. He undertook several trips to thatworld—Constantinople, Anatolia, and the Maghreb—immersing himself inthe knowledge of the languages of the ‘Oriental’ (Arabic and Turkish), andobserving the Turks and Moors in their daily life. Further, by his ownpersonal effort and at his own expense, Postel undertook to create a wholescholarship about the Orient, by buying, translating, and commenting onmanuscripts about the Muslims, to the point of bankrupting himself.Postel’s effort, considerable as it was, nevertheless remained limited forreasons which had to do both with his eccentric personality and with theconcerns of his time. His interest in the Orient grew out of his own obses-sive fear of Islam and his own preoccupation with Christianity. Postel, likehis contemporaries, was concerned with the idea of world unity—basicallythe establishment of a Christian kingdom on earth (De Gandillac, 1985;Dubois, 1968). But Postel also developed novel approaches as well. In hisfirst book Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium alphabetumintroductio (Introduction to Twelve Languages with Different AlphabetCharacters, 1538), Postel founded what would later be the strongest tool ofOrientalism, and one of its fundamental characteristics—the philologicalmethod. In this book, he sets forth the central ideas for his work as a whole:‘The derivation of all languages from Hebrew, the urgency of the Muslimperil, the importance of languages as an instrument of world unity, and theneed for sending missionaries to the Mohammedans’ (Bowsma, 1957: 7).But it is in his most Orientalist book, the one devoted entirely to makingthe Muslim known, La République des Turks (Postel, 1560), that he soughtto understand the secret of the strength of the Turks, not only by studyingthe Quran, and translating some of its suras into French, but especially byundertaking an ethnography of the Turks and the Moors (i.e. the NorthAfricans), collecting information about their army, their ‘minorities’, theirdifferent social groups, their customs, their marriages, and so forth. In this

Hannoum: ‘Faut-il Brûler l’Orientalisme?’ 73



work, the Turk is not only the Evil; he is also the instrument of God sentto lead the Christians astray. Yet the Turks are also the instrument ofsalvation because it is through them that world unity will be achieved.

So Postel pioneered a form of Orientalist study and its method, philol-ogy (Bowsma, 1957: 7). Postel’s individual enterprise would be continuedthree centuries later by Silvestre de Sacy in conditions that gave rise to afurther elaboration of Orientalism. The 19th century not only marked thebirth of Orientalism, but it can also be called the ‘Orientalist Century’.Victor Hugo summarizes the state of things in a concise and yet powerfulway. In his anthology, Les Orientales, a collection of poems inspired not bythe Orient that he had never visited, but by the imagined Orient of theOrientalists, he writes:

We are more interested in the Orient today than ever before. The Oriental studies havenever advanced this far. In the century of Louis XIV we were Hellenistic, we are nowOrientalists. Never have so many intelligent minds dug into the great abyss of Asia.This entire continent [Europe] is looking towards the Orient. (Hugo, 1964: 580–1)

Europe’s interest in the Orient is a culmination of that of the late 18thcentury, the age of Romanticism. The Orient was not really a chief aim ofscholarship then, in spite of Volney’s major contribution,3 but it was rathera source of inspiration for writers and artists. Nerval, Chateaubriand,Lamartine, Flaubert, among the writers, as well as Chasseriau, Delacroix,Decamps, Vernet, and Fromentin among the painters, were all inspired bythe exoticism of the Orient. This was the exotic humanism Claude Lévi-Strauss saw as tied ‘to the industrial and commercial interests whichsupported it and to which it owed its existence’ (1976: 274). The image ofthe Muslim was wrapped in an exotic, seemingly positive form. In LesOrientales, for instance, Victor Hugo depicts the Muslims in familiarterms—they were religious men, not spiritual, but rather warriors who werealso polygamous (signaling ultimate masculinity, and thus the ultimateobjectification of women). In his poem ‘le cri du Mufti’ one reads:

Ecrasez, O croyants du Prophète divinCes chancelants soldats qui s’enivrent de vin,Ces hommes qui n’ont qu’une seule femme

(Crush, O believers of the divine ProphetThese stumbling soldiers, drunk on wineThese men who have only one wife).

However, Europe was also interested in another Orient, not of the exoticmasculine, but rather spiritual and intellectual. It was the Orient regardedas the origin not of humanity as such, but of Christian Europe (when thereference is to the Holy Land), or the original site of Hellenism (when thereference is to Egypt). For Lévi-Strauss, this constituted the same ‘human-istic movement, only encroaching a new territory’ (1976: 273). Lévi-Straussmight have productively added that these ‘new’ territories were believed to




be its old or rather original ones. No doubt the humanistic movementencroached on new places, but in search of its true self, not in search ofothers.

It was only in the 19th century that all the necessary conditions werecombined to bring about the emergence of Orientalism as an institution.In addition to the dominant intellectual trends of humanism and Roman-ticism, colonialism, a political enterprise, was a major factor securing thefoundation of Orientalism. Indeed colonialism allowed the Orientalists tobuild whole Oriental libraries, by helping to acquire, gather, and catalogueOriental manuscripts, and to organize the study of the Orient in insti-tutions founded and totally devoted to this purpose. It was in this centurythat two major Orientalist institutions were founded: the Ecole desLangues Orientales Vivantes (1795), and the Société Asiatique (1 April1822); the first trained Orientalists, while the second diffused knowledgeabout the Orient.

De Sacy undoubtedly carried out the task of building Orientalism withan uncanny vitality and vigor (Reig, 1988: 101–10; Said, 1979: 123). Hestarted his career as a classicist, studying Latin and Greek, but was soondriven by the interests of the time to the study of Oriental languages: Syriac,Chaldean, Hebrew, and later on Arabic and Persian in the Collège deFrance. De Sacy’s Orientalism was deeply humanist, marked by the broaderudition that seemed to be the concern of the scholars of the time.

Unlike Postel, de Sacy was not motivated by theology, and his impressiveencyclopedic knowledge acquired in classrooms and libraries was not forany political or religious use. Arabic, to which de Sacy devoted most of hismonumental work, was only one of his numerous concerns. De Sacy nevervisited the Orient, but he did transport a whole world to Europe throughhis astonishing activity in acquiring Oriental manuscripts, establishingtranslations, and writing language manuals. Furthermore, de Sacy traineda whole generation of Orientalists who would carry the enterprise muchfurther. Indeed, de Sacy made Paris the capital of Orientalism:

In Calcutta as well as in London, in Istanbul, in Syria, in Egypt as well as in learnedGermany, in Petersburg as well as in Paris, one counts among his disciples a crowd ofprominent intellectuals. Better yet, [his disciples included] all the people who, foralmost a half century, participated in that, deal with the ancient and the modern Orient.(Jaubert, 1838)

Moreover, de Sacy’s influence as the founder of a field extends even to the20th century. Daniel Reig, a contemporary French Arabist, writes:

Beyond the nineteenth century, and throughout the course of the first half of the twen-tieth century, this savant continued to exert a diffuse influence on the French school ofOrientalism, and more specifically on the arabisants, not only on their theoretical reflec-tion, but also in their existential relation with Arabic language. (Reig, 1988: 102)

The achievement of de Sacy in building the Orientalist enterprise, through




collecting, translating, and editing canonical texts, manuals of grammar andlanguage, as well as training a whole generation of Orientalists, turned outto be of crucial importance to the establishment of French rule in Algeria.Significantly enough, when the French took over Algiers (1830), it was deSacy himself who translated the declaration to the population.

In the declaration one cannot determine who is speaking, the general deBourmont or the Orientalist de Sacy (De Sacy, 1862: 105–56). But one cancertainly see the birth of the colonial relation, in the case of Algeria,between the French and their new subjects. The declaration is written onthe model of Napoleon’s declaration to the Egyptians. The French, orrather the ‘Sultan of the French’ as the letter has it, presents himself as theliberator of the Algerians from the yoke of the Dey (the Turkish ruler);indeed the memory of Napoleon claiming to be the savior of the Egyptiansfrom the Mamelouks was only few decades old. It is echoed throughout theAlgeria declaration. The rhetoric of the declaration is intended to beIslamic. The French, or rather the ‘Sultan of the French’, is there by the willof Allah, to do the work of Allah, and to watch over the well-being of thepeople. There is almost a conception of Islamic justice in the declaration.However, it is still unmistakably colonial. The population is given thechoice, in the end, between the complete submission that guarantees their‘security’ or the resistance that annihilates them ‘to the last one’. In short,from the first day of the conquest of Algiers, Orientalist knowledge wascombined with colonial power.

De Sacy had an important role in the occupation of Algeria. It was hewho was in charge of hiring interpreters, his own students, for the Frencharmy. He also determined the most important text for knowledge of NorthAfrica, a book by Ibn Khaldûn, a universal history, whose section on thehistory of North Africa has become a central text for Orientalists. It was deSacy’s student, William de Slane, who translated it (De Slane, 1852–6). Thistext, with its colonial categories and objects, still conditions French writingon North Africa.

Knowledge and Colonial Interest

It is at the early colonial stage, immediately after the conquest of Algiersin 1830, that Orientalism was most active, and emerged as an importantintellectual enterprise. By the same token, however, it condemned itself bybecoming the tool of French colonialism—both enterprises linked togetherwould have the same fate. The conquest of a new land and the contact withnew people forced the French not only to communicate with the popu-lation, but more importantly, to study them, to analyze them, and, in short,to know them in order to rule them effectively. The Orientalist productionof this period is too prolific, too abundant, to deal with in this article. I will




rather show, in this short space, how French Orientalism provided a wholeideology to serve as the support of the colonial enterprise.

Little was known about Algeria at that time. The Algerians were referredto as Arabs, and Algeria, taken to be an Arab land, was, up to 1847, onlypartly conquered.4 A military unit called the Bureau Arabe was immedi-ately created. It was composed of military men, most of them trained in theEcole des Langues Orientales, that is, in the very tradition of French Orien-talism. These soldiers had a better understanding of the population than didthe settlers who were only eager to exploit them and deny them any kindof rights. The Bureau Arabe was established to serve as an intermediarybetween the French and the Arab tribes, and served to restrain the exces-sive enthusiasm and the avidity of French settlers. As a consequence, theBureau Arabe was soon regarded as favoring the Arabs (Hannoum, 2001b).Tension increased and reached its peak when in September 1860, after athree-day visit to Algeria, Napoleon III declared that Algeria was ‘unroyaume arabe’, not to be confused with a colony. He then announced apolicy in favor of the population, a policy which tends to ‘perfect equalitybetween the indigenous populations and the Europeans’ (quoted in Julien,1964: 425). As a result, a decree issued on 22 April 1863 declared that ‘thetribes of Algeria are declared to be the owners of the lands that they hadpermanent and traditional right of use’. But for Napoleon, the issue was notso much equality as ruling with less cost and integrating Algeria into theFrench economy.

The officers of the Arab Bureau were also scholars, mainly militaryethnographers, whose task was not only to maintain order, by force of arms,but also to record Algeria, by providing reports about its cities, populations,tribes, politics, and even its natural resources. In nearly two decades, theArab Bureau built an impressive scholarship about Algeria, in which thesame Orientalist dichotomy of Orient versus Occident was articulated insuch a way that a new object emerged. The Berber emerged as a focal pointin that discourse, represented mainly as a European, as opposed to theArab, who had conquered him and who, in the present, continues toexercise domination (Hannoum, 2001b). Seeing that a historical narrativeis in the final analysis about the present, Ernest Mercier (1875) points tothe important fact that French conquest of Algeria came to redress this situ-ation.

The discourse of the Arab Bureau was itself heterogeneous, made up ofvarious, even conflicting interpretations. Although dominant until at least1871, the equality discourse of the Arab Bureau was contested by thepolitical force of the European settlers. They believed in the right ofconquest, and the total occupation of native lands by Europeans. Inaddition to creating a Parliament, they also established other colonial insti-tutions. One of the most important was La Société Archéologique deConstantine whose motto was Collecter, Préserver, Décrire (Collect,




Preserve, Describe). But what the society intended to collect, preserve, anddescribe were the Roman characteristics of North Africa. Its project was acolonial one: it intended to make North Africa a European territory. AsBernard Cohen put it: ‘The establishment and maintenance of these[colonial] nation states depended upon determining, codifying, controlling,and representing the past’ (1996: 3). After the collapse of the Arab Bureauand the triumph of the civil regime,5 it gained a larger significance andbecame principally a civil institution whose president, Ernest Mercier, wasnone other than the mayor of Constantine, a major Algerian city, and theauthor of the first most significant historic narrative produced by the civilregime. The duality of Arab and Berber would no longer be only ethno-graphic, but was now established historically as well. Indeed, in his workMercier intends to show:

. . . the transformation of North Africa from a Berber land into an Arab land. To thisend, one has to specify the period or the periods when the Arab entered the country,one has to follow the trajectory of the invaders, one has to indicate the resistance theyhave faced from the indigenous populations and finally one has to recognize how they[the Arabs] have been grouped, in what proportions they have intermingled with theindigenous populations and (note) the places that they occupy today. (1875: ii)

However, Mercier’s enterprise itself was made possible by the ArabBureau. His analysis of North Africa, or rather about what he calls the Arabdomination of North Africa, already existed in 1852, in another colonialtext, The History of the Berber, a translation of a portion of the `Ibar, auniversal history written in the 14th century by Ibn Khaldûn. William DeSlane, an Irish student of de Sacy, later a naturalized Frenchman,converted, in the process of translation, the Arabic text into a colonial one,regulated by the racial categories of the 19th century (Hannoum, 2003). Yetthe French text kept the narrative structure of the original, a fact that madethe translation difficult to access by unqualified scholars of North Africa. Itis the task of (re)writing this history and of providing it with a familiarnarrative structure, with an emplotment, that Mercier undertook in his ownhistory of North Africa. The framework was then established: North Africa,once a Roman territory, was invaded by the Arabs in the late part of the7th century, and then populated by a massive emigration in the 11thcentury. Yet, his book did more than that: it solidified the discourse of thecivilian regime and made it the official, and of course the most credible,interpretation of North Africa history. Henceforth, the history of NorthAfrica is a history not only of a ferocious opposition between two races,Arabs and Berbers, but also, equally importantly, the history of an Arabdomination of Berbers. It is this domination that French occupation wouldend. After all, for the civilian regime, as well as for the Arab Bureau, theBerber is originally European, hence also his opposition to the Arab, anenemy of civilization.

Knowledge is a representation, not a substitute of its referents. Further,




it is a representation of its agents, not of the people it represents. This iswhy things were not simple for French scholars and the colonial adminis-tration. For the Berber populations of that time, because colonial represen-tation did not touch them, it was of no concern. Soon, the colonial rulerswere revealed to be as jealous of the Berber identity as the Arab, as militantfor his rights as any colonized population, and as eager to see his land freedas any other people under a colonialist rule. In the field, not in discourse,the Berber populations demonstrated the discrepancy within colonialrepresentation. The Berber was considered brave when he fought the Arabinvader, insensible to the appeal of the Jihad against the French, and yetthe same Berber would in 1871 jeopardize, and then in 1954 actively partici-pate in the downfall of, the French colonial enterprise. The Berber wassupposed to be close to the French, yet he was not immune to the appealof the Arab nationalism of the East. The Berber was seen as artificiallyIslamized and thus easy to assimilate to French culture, and yet a numberof the Algerian Salafists (Muslim reformers), at their head Ben Badis, wereBerbers. However, all of these events were not rendered unknown as inother cases, rather, it is the known event that confirms the discourse(Trouillot, 1996). If there is an insurrection, it is not a Berber one, even ifit is led in Berber land, it is rather an Arab, nomadic revolt. Such was thecase of the uprising of 1871.6 Or, if the uprising is overwhelming, andunquestionably led by men believed to be Berbers, it is simply because theyare instruments in the hands of Arab nationalism.7 According to colonialdiscourse, the Berber does not revolt against the French, so if he does, itmust not be him.

Still, it is possible to say that, in colonial representation, the objects ofdiscourse, mainly the colonized, disrupted colonial representation, and inso doing, participated in changing or even constructing it. But the objectswere resistant to representation mainly because they were not yet subjectto it; they did not have access to it yet. At this point, colonial categoriesremained where they belonged: in the minds of the colonizer and in theintricacies of their own discourse. Let me give one more example, that ofthe origin of the Berbers, to show how the objects of discourse change,while remaining the same.

Until 1930, when the colonial regime was sure of its foundation and opti-mistic about its future in Algeria, it was confident in the role that the Berberwould play in making Algeria French. Accordingly, official colonialdiscourse seemed sure about the origins of the Berbers. Emile-FélixGautier maintained that: ‘Anthropologists agree that the Berbers, in bodilystructure and the shape of their skull, are connected with Southern Italiansand Southern Spaniards rather than with African and Oriental races’(Gautier, 1923: 29).

In the 1930s, with the increased influence and adherence of Muslims tothe political trends of the Middle East (in the guise of religious reformism




and/or Arab nationalism), a sense of a failure arose from a situation thatthe French colonialist knew would get out of his control. At this point,colonial discourse changed with respect to the origins of the Berbers.Having failed to win the Berber over, the Berber construct of colonialdiscourse was slightly modified to emphasize not his relation to Europe,but his opposition to the Arab. Instead of the theory of the Europeanorigin of the Berber, colonial discourse stressed rather the particularity ofthe Berbers, meaning that the Berbers had an identity of their own.Colonial scholars such as Augustin Bernard, as well as Gautier, main-tained henceforth the complexity of the Berber origins, a complexitywhich made them neither European nor Oriental in origin. Hence, theyare different. Desparmet, for instance, writes: ‘Our Berbers are not onlyimpermeable to French influence; their indestructible personality guardsthem from the ascendant of the Orient as well as that of the Occident’(1938: 199).

The particularity of the Berbers would not have a better fate than thetheory of their European origin. By the late 1940s, on the eve of the longand bloody anti-colonial war, the symptoms of French colonial failure werethere to be read. The honor of European origins was taken away from theBerber. Lionel Balout, the highest authority in Roman North Africa afterStephen Gsell, announced the verdict almost sadly: ‘It would have been,then, that from the obscure millenaries of prehistory the countries of theMaghreb were tied to Africa and to the Orient’ (Balout, 1948: 262). TheBerber should then be left to Africa and to the Orient. So what makes thescholarship of the colonial period different from that of the pre-colonialone?

French knowledge of North Africa remains astonishingly diverse. Butbehind this diversity one can find a shared unity. As Ernest Cassirer put it,‘no matter how heterogeneous the objects of human knowledge may be, theforms of knowledge always show an inner unity and a logical homogeneity’(Cassirer, 1944: 176). To venture a brief description of its diversity, colonialknowledge of North Africa is marked by a philological style. The philo-logical method, the tool with which Orientalism (and not only the Frenchversion) is henceforth identified, was adopted as its main form of exegesis.But the scholarship of the time was not only philological. It had beenenriched, because of a broader political context, by a considerable ethno-graphic literature, a literature produced mostly but not exclusively by menwho never thought to make a career in academia. Soldiers, administrators,and agents of colonialism were transformed into ethnographers observingthe local populations, and producing theories about their worldview, theirrites, their customs and manners. But the ethnographer did not replace thephilologist. Most colonial ethnographers were also philologists. Or to bemore precise, colonial scholars of the time broadened their horizon,becoming archaeologists, ethnographers, philologists, and translators.




Behind this diversity, colonial knowledge shows its own logic. Thedichotomy of West versus East was mediated in the North African casethrough a new category—the Berber. Colonial scholarship of North Africahad as its focal point the Berber defined in total opposition to the Arabs.Both stood in a differential relation to Europe, the Berber in a relation ofrelative inferiority despite the myth of his European origin, and the Arabin a relation of negation to Europe. In a sense, the colonial scholarship ofNorth Africa seemed to be marked by a trichotomy: Berber versus Arabversus Europe. However, given the Berber’s European origins, in the finalanalysis, it ultimately still reproduces the familiar Orientalist dichotomy:West versus East.

The Berber became, then, the focal point of French colonial discourse ofNorth Africa, and any attempt at dissolving the object was relegated to themargins, to soon disappear as inaccurate or mediocre. For instance,Edmond Doutté wrote in 1901:

In Morocco as well as in Algeria the ethnic division within the indigenous populationsbetween ‘Arabs’ and ‘Berbers’ is a useless division. For there is no criterion found inthis division. First of all, it is very doubtful that there is a Berber race. The ethnographicresearch accomplished in this direction has revealed that there are among the so-called‘Berbers’ a great variety of types . . . These types that are all considered entirely Berbersare no more similar to each other than each of them to the so-called ‘Arab type’.(Doutté, 1901: 166)

Such a discourse, which had already been attempted by previous unortho-dox Orientalists, could not find a place within the discursive formation ofthe school of Algiers (Hannoum, 2001b). As I demonstrated earlier, theconstruct of the Berber was the fundamental key to the colonial discursiveformation. It served to justify the colonial enterprise and provided anideology that made of North Africa a European and more specificallyFrench territory on historical grounds. To deny the ‘factuality’ of theBerbers was ultimately to shake the foundations of the French Orientalismof North Africa, and by the same token to strip colonial ideology of its legit-imacy. In 1901, French colonialism was triumphant, but it had not reachedits zenith. The ‘Europeanness of the Berbers’, which of course implied theopposition of Occident to Orient, was the Trojan horse of the French Orien-talism of North Africa. Doutté did not produce acceptable difference, butrather an unthinkable set of conditions or diversity that should becontrolled, eliminated. Doutté’s work was deemed mediocre, a judgmentthat is still maintained by historians today (Burke, 1973; Garcia-Arenal,1999) and prevents scholars from paying attention to this tirelessresearcher, whose intensive ethnographic fieldwork predated BronislawMalinowski and Franz Boas by decades.8

Be that as it may, it is Robert Montagne, a military man by training, anda protégé of Lyautey, who emerged as the most authoritative scholar ofNorth Africa. Ernest Gellner goes as far as to compare him to Ibn Khaldûn,




and considers the work of both to be major contributions to modern socialscience (Gellner, 1981: 187). One can understand why Gellner would putMontagne next to Ibn Khaldûn. Prior to the occupation of Morocco in 1912,the country was already perceived, thanks to the work of Charles deFoucauld, as divided not only racially, but territorially as well. ForFoucauld, Morocco was not united as a country. It was rather made of twoparts. The territory under the Sultan’s control was known as the bled al-Makhzen and another territory outside of the Sultan’s control, the bled al-Siba, the land of dissidence. The first is mostly Arab territory, the secondis inhabited mostly by Berbers (Foucauld, 1888).

Montagne first links his project to Ibn Khaldûn whom he considers ahistorian of the Makhzen. Second, he brings to light a concept that wouldcreate a new way of writing about Morocco. Montagne not only opposesthe Makhzen and the Siba, but he creates a number of oppositions withinthe Siba itself. The leff is a concept that refers to the fact that each tribe isin a relation of alliance with one tribe and in a relation of opposition toanother one in such a way that the whole Siba is maintained in ‘order’. Inother words, Montagne sought to understand how a land without govern-ment, without law, or rule did not plunge into chaos (Montagne, 1930). Inother terms, if Ibn Khaldûn’s major concept was the `asabiya (tribal soli-darity) whose function is to show how a tribe becomes a dynasty, Montagneelaborated the theory of leff whose function was precisely to show how thetribe failed to become a dynasty (Hannoum, 2000).

Montagne deepened the chasm created by the school of Algiers, byopposing the Berbers and the Arabs not as personality types, as is the casein Algeria (the Arab is fanatic/the Berber is tolerant), but by making theirhistory one of permanent military conflict. The Berbers were fundamentallyopposed to the Makhzen, that is, the central government, which was Arab.They have always been a part of what Montagne called bled al-Siba, thecountry of dissidence. Thus, Montagne affirmed and exacerbated the dualityon the basis of culture and history, and also on the basis of geography as well.If, in Algeria, the French maintained that Algeria had never been a nationbecause it had always been successfully conquered by others, in the case ofMorocco, Montagne’s thesis held that Morocco had never been unified, buthad always constituted two parts, and it was only thanks to the French thatMorocco was unified. Montagne’s ideas inspired a whole Berber policy.Given the independence of the Berbers from the central government (theMakhzen), they should be ruled differently—according to their own customs,and not according to Islamic law, which represents the more hegemonic lawof the Arabs. As a result, the French created, as they had in Algeria, Frenchschools in the Atlas Mountains to initiate the Berber youth into Frenchcivilization. Ironically, it was in these same schools that Moroccan national-ism, influenced by the Arab ideologues of the Middle East, flourished andproduced many of its most fervent followers to fight for independence.




In his polemic against Edward Said, Ernest Gellner makes Montagne oneof the Orientalists who does not fit Said’s model without, however, sayinghow (Gellner, 1993: 3–4). Yet, when one looks at Montagne’s work, it isclearly Orientalist in its assumptions despite its ethnographic character. Forit too is regulated by the opposition of Arab versus Berber, behind the firstis the Orient, and behind the second is the Occident. The opposition isclearer when one looks at Montagne’s political writings. One of his essaysis titled: ‘The Orient against the Occident’, in which he sees nationalistmovements, not as movements of liberation, but as weapons of the Eastagainst the West (Montagne, 1953).

Orientalism and Post-Colonial Power

Prior to the end of the colonial period, a whole generation of Arab intel-lectuals, mostly but not exclusively North Africans, were completelyeducated in the French system. They had acquired the tools of modernity,and were immersed in the French intellectual tradition. But they were notunfamiliar with political and literary trends of Middle Eastern countries,especially Egypt. It was this generation that questioned the Orientalistenterprise. As Kateb Yacine, a member of this generation, put it, ‘youtaught me your language and you took me to your world, now that I knowit, let me take you to my world’ (Yacine, 1994). Already by the early 1960s,that is, after Algerian independence (1962), an attempt to decolonizehistory was made. Mohammed Sahli was without a doubt the first to examineOrientalist writings critically (Sahli, 1965). The North African responses, inthe Salafi and nationalist forms, were negative, created diametrically tooppose French narratives. When the French created the European originof the Berber, they simply agreed on the opposition and sustained the Araborigins of the Berbers. When the French claimed the Roman character ofNorth Africa, they espoused the idea of the Phoenician origin of NorthAfrica (Hannoum, 2001a: 111–60). Sahli’s approach, however, broke withthis tradition. Writing in French, he examined the ideological presupposi-tions of the French historians. However, this approach, of great heuristicvalue, was not considered of much use for a younger generation ofhistorians. To show the ideological presuppositions was not enough and didnot advance scholarship. The field thus remained totally occupied by theFrench. It was to remedy this situation that Abdallah Laroui wrote his TheHistory of the Maghreb (1973). Instead of the analytical approach used bySahli, Abdallah Laroui proposed a historicist approach which provided anationalist interpretation of the history of North Africa. However differentthis nationalist history is from the colonial one, it still owes its very exist-ence to colonial historiography, for it was written within it, as a reaction toit, and even with its own language—French. The nationalist historian




learned the language after he was taken to the colonial world; now that heknows it, he takes us to his own world. But the road to his own world is onlypossible by the vehicle of the colonizer.

However, both Sahli’s and Laroui’s attempts were considered more acriticism of certain colonial writings than a genuine critique of Orientalismas a total institution, regulated by a specific episteme. Indeed, in both booksthe aim seems to be the interpretation of particular events. But Oriental-ism as a field, as an organized body of discourses, was not questioned.

Yet, such a critique had been undertaken, years earlier, in the spring of1963, by the Egyptian sociologist Anouar Abdel-Malek. Abdel-Malek wasnot concerned with particular writings, but with the entire field of know-ledge production about the Orient, born and developed in a period ofEuropean hegemony. Abdel-Malek examined how the Orientalist studiedthe Orient, showing how he presupposed as a fundamental epistemologicalstep the complete and total opposition of the Orient and the West, and how,according to the same epistemology, he reduced his object—the Oriental—to an essence, regardless of the historical development of the object studied,and in complete indifference to any kind of social theory. For the Orien-talist, the Oriental is a type. He is the same in all periods and in allgeographical areas (Abdel-Malek, 1963: 107–8).

Abdel-Malek’s article is of enormous importance not only because heprovided a sharp critique of Orientalist epistemology, and gave a sounddiagnosis of a situation of crisis, but also, and more importantly, because hepioneered the critique of Orientalism and opened the door for an entiresubfield that went far beyond Orientalist scholarship of Islam and theMiddle East.9 At the time of his publication, his article, in spite of its greatimportance, had little effect on Orientalism as such. Orientalists kept doingwhat they liked to do and what they did best—political history in a positiveway, editing and translating texts. It is the sociological situation in Francethat has greatly changed the field, making Orientalists feel uncomfortable,even awkward.

Orientalism was damaged when France lost its Empire, namely most ofthe territories that constituted its object of study. In addition, Orientalismfound little favor in a post-war France clearly marked by leftist ideologiesand by a radical change in the social sciences. It thus returned where it camefrom, the universities. However, the conditions under which Orientalismflourished in the time of de Sacy had gone. The public of Orientalism wasno longer the learned, soldiers, administrators, or agents of colonialismeager to be initiated into Arabic to facilitate their work in the Frenchcolonies; it was a larger audience made up mostly, but not exclusively, ofNorth African students. Most of them came to France seeking new researchmethods, especially because of the prestige of French scholarship in the1960s and the 1970s. The field also attracted some French students who




tended to opt for a career in journalism or politics but seldom in academia(Reig, 1988: 186–94).

Orientalism was unable to carry out its task in the new situation evenwhile remaining faithful to itself in both method and aims. In its method,post-colonial Orientalism was still, with few exceptions, philological. In itsaims, it was still chiefly concerned with the past, considered richer and moreuniversal than the present which was seen to be backward and unworthy ofstudy. In short, Orientalism remained in its original world of the 19thcentury while the world changed around it. Most of the students came toFrance to study the contemporary Middle East, a period mainly ignoredand thus unknown to the classical Orientalist in spite of its great richness(Reig, 1988: 192). Orientalism was indeed in crisis. The expression wasAbdel-Malek’s, but by the early 1980s, even the French Orientalists arrivedat this conclusion. In a chapter entitled ‘Orientalism without a project’,Daniel Reig writes:

The waves created by the cultural revolution that have erupted in the world around theend of the 1960s and the beginning of 1970s, came to pollute with their spittle the stepsof the temple. The sanctuaries of Orientalism saw their borders turned upside downand attacked. (1988: 178)

If the situation was no longer colonial, it was also definitively not that of19th-century humanism. And as the latter needed a man like de Sacy tocreate the field, in the post-colonial period it needed a similar and yetdifferent kind of man to save it, or recreate it. But recreation presupposesdestruction. The 20th century found its de Sacy in Jacques Berque.

Jacques Berque (1910–95) is a central figure in post-war French Orien-talism, not only for his impressive contribution to the field,10 but also forwhat he represents to a whole generation of scholars of the Orient. One istempted to draw the comparison between Jacques Berque and de Sacy notonly because of what makes them similar, but also by what separates them.The first man opened the field; the second man closed it. The first mannever lived in the area he studied; the second was born and grew up amongthe populations he analyzed. The first does not seem to have any feelingwhatsoever towards the populations of North Africa (actually they didn’texist for him since he dealt exclusively with texts). By contrast, the secondis considered even by the Arabs to be one of them, and he demonstratedhis strong identification with them (particularly to the Maghreb) even whenhe became a philologist and worked with the texts of the Mu`allaqât (pre-Islamic poetry) or the Maghrebi Nawâzil (jurisprudence literature). In hisinaugural lecture at the College de France, Berque noted:

For he who wants to reach my subject needs not only the usual ransom of study: longyears of dusty readings, long fieldwork—but also a pact of sympathy, of commitment.I have subscribed to this pact, a long time ago as a son, and I would even say as a citizenof the Maghreb. (Berque, 1957: 123)




The comparison does not end there, but becomes more significant whenone looks at the changes that both have made in the field. De Sacy rootedthe philological method in the field, making it one of its fundamentalcharacteristics, as philology becomes the method par excellence of theOrientalist. Berque rooted not the philological method, but the methods ofthe social sciences in the field, thus giving it a fatal blow. De Sacy was theprototype of the 19th-century scholar; Berque, who like de Sacy started asa classicist, was the prototype of the 20th-century scholar. De Sacy was atranslator, a teacher, a philologist; Berque was an anthropologist, a soci-ologist, an historian, a translator, a literary critic, a semiologist, a writer,and even a poet. De Sacy laid the foundations of the field; Berque disturbedand upset its paradigms. How?

Orientalism has always been considered a field concerned with all aspectsof the Orient, and the Orientalist has always been the specialist of theOrient, in spite of the diverse and even broad dimensions of the area. TheOrientalist is the one who looks at and indeed judges any cultural, political,or ideological aspect of the Orient, present, future, and especially past.Orientalism is a western paternalistic appropriation of the Orient. De Sacyinstigated this attitude, and trained a whole generation. In addition, byrooting the philological approach in the field, he fashioned the style ofOrientalism. Berque is also a specialist of the Orient, the Maghreb as wellas the Mashriq, the pre-Islamic and the Islamic periods, as well as themodern and contemporary periods. But unlike de Sacy, Berque engagedOrientalism with the social sciences, and thus deprived the discipline of oneof its paradigms (the exclusive use of philology). Like de Sacy, Berquetrained a whole generation of students, but unlike de Sacy, Berque’sstudents were not only Europeans, but a whole generation of Arabstudents—mostly North Africans. In de Sacy’s time, no Orientalist escapedhis influence; in our contemporary time, no scholar of the Orient escapedBerque’s influence. As an Orientalist, Jacques Berque formed specialists inthe field. Whether one was a historian, literary critic, anthropologist or soci-ologist, s/he was indebted to the teaching of Jacques Berque. Further,Jacques Berque engaged Orientalism in the epistemological revolution ofthe 1960s, becoming the first Orientalist to be invited by Marc Bloch tocontribute to the Annales, thus connecting Orientalism with that inter-disciplinary enterprise. With Berque, the Orientalist sanctuary seemed tobe destroyed.

By 1980, that is, by the end of the academic career of Jacques Berque, anissue of the Annales was devoted to Orientalism. The issue was publishedthe same year as the French publication of Said’s Orientalism and as suchit was inscribed in the same debate that this book has generated. From theoutset, the Annales editor asks: ‘Faut-il brûler l’Orientalisme?’ (Shall weburn Orientalism?) (Annales, 1980: 416). The answer was: ‘L’Orientalismeest le fils de son temps’ (Orientalism is the child of its time), meaning that




Orientalism existed only once. This may have been an answer to the implicitquestion (are we Orientalists?) but not to the question that was actuallyasked. By 1992, the Centre Nationale du Recherche Scientifique (CNRS),the leading institution for scholarship, had issued a decree abolishing‘Orientalism’. Appropriate departments were assigned to the scholars whohad been working in the division of Orientalism. The sanctuary was thusdestroyed, but what happened to the doctrine?

Indeed, the question of the Annales still remains unanswered. Faut-ilbrûler l’Orientalisme? To make sense of it, the question should be askeddifferently: what should happen to this gigantic body of knowledge that hasbeen accumulated throughout the centuries? Or to put the question ingeneral terms: can a discourse exist without an institution that made itpossible? Is the end of an institution the end of its discourse?

Orientalism is undoubtedly a historical individual, a child of its timeindeed. However, as such, ‘it bears witness to the present’, to paraphraseGramsci (1971: 267).11 As a system of knowledge, it has a number of charac-teristics. It is a body of organized texts, a discursive formation which stillgenerates a number of its concepts, objects, and continues while it changes.To quote Michel Foucault:

To say that one discursive formation is substituted for another is not to say that a wholeworld of absolutely new objects, enunciations, concepts, and theoretical choicesemerges fully armed and fully organized in a text that will place that world once andfor all; it is to say that a general transformation of relations has occurred, but it doesnot necessarily alter all the elements; it is to say that statements are governed by newrules of formation, it is not to say that all objects or concepts, all enunciations or alltheoretical choices disappear. On the contrary, one can, on the basis of these new rules,describe and analyze phenomena of continuity, return, and repetition. (Foucault, 1972:173)

Colonial knowledge thus continues in post-colonial institutions, in theuniversities, journals, magazines, research centers built and founded duringthe colonial period and inherited as a colonial legacy in the former colonies,even when some of them appear most genuinely ‘traditional’ and ‘authen-tic’. For knowledge constructs its new objects out of its old ones, from sitesof power that have changed, though they themselves have not disappeared.How, then, can one burn Orientalism without burning oneself?

The second characteristic of knowledge is that it is not only a means bywhich and through which domination is assured and guaranteed, but it isalso made of images, of ideas, stereotypes, that take the form of ‘reality’.Colonial knowledge does not only express a power relation betweencolonizers and colonized, but it also provides them with a vision of who theyare, and what their lives, words, relations, are about. It convinces them ofthe naturalness of power relations and establishes in their minds a structureof domination. In short, colonial knowledge provides or rather is a ‘worldof significations’, in the terms of Castoriadis, which holds society together,




or better yet, which is society itself (Castoriadis, 1984, 1998). For as adiscourse of power, colonial knowledge shapes the imaginary, determinesrelations, and perpetuates attitudes. This is why anthropology of knowledgeis necessary to unearth colonial categories in the discourse of the colonizedto show its dynamics and its politics in a post-colonial area, in both themetropole and the former colonies.12 However, the impact of colonialismin the former colonies, in local cultures, has not been given the attention itdeserves.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A version of this article was first presented at the Institute for Advanced Studies atPrinceton University in November 1996. I thank the members of the seminar ‘SocialSciences in the Last Twenty-Five Years’ for their criticism and suggestions. Mythanks to Kamala Visweswaran and Guha Shankar for their very numerouscomments that helped shaped the present version.

NOTES

1. ‘We cannot measure up with the image that the other has made of us, theanalogy would get lost’ (Char, 1998).

2. For more about this definition see Said (1979). Also, Abdel-Malek (1963).3. Volney (1757–1820) was the author of a major book about the Orient, Voyage

en Syrie et en Egypte (1787); his influence on Napoleon was enormous. Volney’swork was carried out after a close observation of institutions and populations.Volney’s book was immediately translated into English, given the importanceof Egypt and the intense rivalry between England and France to control it. Hisideas are in general insightful, even about Islam. See for a brief view Djait(1985).

4. Already in 1837, Tocqueville mentions them in his political writings (1991: III,129–39).

5. The French defeat by Prussia in 1871 was blamed on the army and thus causedthe downfall of the military regime in Algeria.

6. In 1870, as France entered the war against Prussia, the Kabyles of Algeriarevolted en masse in an attempt that seriously threatened to turn the entirecolonial enterprise upside down. The term ‘Kabyle’ almost disappeared duringand immediately after the crushing of the uprising, to be replaced by the term‘Arab’. See the major colonial book on this uprising by Louis Rinn (1901).

7. That was the thesis of Robert Montagne (1930).8. Among his ethnographic works see Doutté (1905, 1908, 1914); none has been

thoroughly studied.9. Indeed, the article has had a different and better fortune in the English-

speaking world, namely in Said (1979) and Chatterejee (1986).10. Among his numerous publications, Berque, 1936, 1944, 1949, 1955, 1957, 1958,

1960, 1962, 1974, 1978a, 1978b, 1978c, 1982, 1984, 1967, 1979 (with an essay




about pre-Islamic poetry), a translation of the Quran (Paris, 1991), and so forth.For Berque’s life and career see his autobiography (1989).

11. History, Gramsci writes, ‘bears witness to the present’ (1971: 267).12. An example of how colonial categories can still be found intact, even in the

work of prominent contemporary social scientists, is exemplified by PierreBourdieu (1998). In the colonial discourse, the Berber has always main-tained primitive forms of European culture: primitive democracy, architec-ture, early forms of Christianity. Bourdieu maintains that the Kabyle stillpreserves an old andocentric structure that was once shared in the Mediter-ranean.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Address: Simon’s Rock College of Bard, Faculty of Social Sciences, Hall CollegeCenter, 2nd floor (Room 2B), 84 Alford Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230,USA.




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