Algeria Arabism
Algeria Arabism: What is the most famous Algerian national slogan? Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis said it in 1936: “Arabic is our language, Islam is our religion, and Algeria is our fatherland.” This quote was used as a rallying cry for the revolution that won Algeria’s freedom in 1962.
However, it is a problematic idea in some ways. It wasn’t until the Ottoman Empire got involved in the 1520s that Algeria became a separate government unit. Before that, eastern and western Algeria had different ways of running the government.
There were still two main resistance movements against French rule in the 1830s and 1840s: one in the west under the leadership of Abd al-Qadir, and one in the east under the leadership of Hajj Ahmad Bey. These two groups had their own unique traditions. French colonial forces drew the borders of the current Algerian state as they advanced far into the Sahara. This process didn’t end until the early 1900s.
There are different groups of people who speak different languages in Algeria. Some speak Tamazigh or Berber dialects in the Kabylia mountains near Algiers, the Aurès mountains south of Constantine, and among the Tuareg in the far south. Other people speak Arabic dialects.
A lot of Tamazigh people can also speak Arabic. French, Algeria’s colonial language, was and is still only used for formal speech or writing. As a cultural trend, Arabism has led to the growth of modern schools and print publications that use the modern written form of Arabic.
In the late 1800s, these things first started happening in the eastern Arab countries. They didn’t start to grow in Algeria until ten years before World War I. The clear anticolonial link to cultural Arabism didn’t appear until after World War I.
In Egypt and Tunisia, there were now fully formed national groups, and most of what they said in public was written in Arabic. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Algerians who had been living in exile and experiencing the modern cultural changes in the Middle East came back to Algeria to teach and write for newspapers.
While this was going on, Algerians were learning French through French schools, military training, and moving to France to work. People who lived and worked in France became friends with French people, and some of them even married French women.
People who were Algerian nationalists knew that the breaking down of culture and social barriers meant that steps needed to be taken to restore Algerian religious and linguistic identity. To start, they got together in their communities to fund Arabic and Islamic schools.
Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis (1889–1940), who led these organizations, brought them together in 1931 to form the Association of Algerian Ulama. The Association of Ulama supported the ideas of the Salafiyya, a reform movement that wanted to bring back the pure, unified Islam of the religion’s early days. They didn’t like the Sufis’ unconventional practices and thought it was wrong for them to work with colonial officials.
In the 1800s, however, the Sufi orders were a key part of organized opposition to the French takeover. In the 1930s and 1940s, some orders, like the Rahmaniyya, had ties to nationalist groups. They also set up their own network of modern Arabic Islamic schools. At times in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the nationalist movement had trouble coming together on a number of different topics.
The rivalry between Sufis and Salafis made it harder to come to an agreement. After Algeria became an independent country in 1962, Arabism and Islamism became even more important parts of the country’s character.
During the war, Algeria relied on the political and financial backing of other Arab countries, especially Egypt, where Arabism was a big part of the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser. It was the goal of Algeria’s new government to strengthen its ideas and institutions. While the war was going on, the French took all of the Association of Ulama’s land and shut down its schools.
So, they had two benefits: they had a single theory, and they didn’t have their own resources. People were wary of the Sufi orders because they were independent and had ties to colonial officials and traditional power holders in the past. From 1965 to 1977, when Houari Boumédienne was president, Ben Badis became a national hero, and the Salafi doctrine got strong government support.
But not a lot of money or time went into building churches or religious schools. Starting in the early 1970s, intermediate and higher education became more and more Arabized, making Arabism more useful to state policy.
This caused a lot of teachers from the Arab East to come to Algeria. Many of them came because they were having trouble with their own education departments because they were connected to the Society of Muslim Brothers. They helped get a new group of kids to believe in Islamist ideas.
At the start of the 1980s, President Chadeli Benjedid’s government tried to join this new wave of Islamism with help from the government. But by the middle of the 1980s, the government was no longer able to control the Islamist movement because it was growing faster than the regime could handle. At the same time, Arabism was losing its political attraction.
The defeat of Iraq in 1991 seemed to prove that Arabism was hopeless, while the victory of the rebels in Afghanistan supported the idea that Islamism was strong. But Algerian Islamism had a lot of different ideas about how to run the country’s government and how much other Algerians should follow their beliefs.
When the military government put down the Islamic Salvation Front in early 1992, it didn’t have many ideas to fight it with. Most Algerians were afraid that the more radical part of the front would win.
The violent actions of the Armed Islamic Groups (GIA) made these fears stronger and also made people less sure that the military government could protect Algerians. Most Algerians quit voting for Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the army’s presidential choice, in May 1999. This seemed to show that most Algerians were tired of the fighting between different parts of society.
Algerians may be ready to accept their differences now that they are fed up with religious and unitary patriots.
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