John P. Entelis

Islam, democracy, and the state in North Africa

In the late 1980s Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia began to experience the trend toward economic liberalization and political democratization taking place at the time in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Misguided economic policies, bureaucratic mismanagement, political corruption, and cultural alienation combined to create a popular demand for change. It seemed for a time that a new and more open politics would transform the region. Instead, authoritarian states mobilized to repress the populist opposition led by politicized Islamist movements. Analyzing developments over the last two decades from the perspectives of political culture and political economy, Americas leading scholars of North Africa provide insights into the regions continuing political crisis. Contributors are Lisa Anderson, Dale F. Eickelman, John P. Entelis, Clement M. Henry, Mark Tessler, Susan Waltz, John Waterbury, John O. Voll, and I. William Zartman.

Islam, Democracy, and the State: The Reemergence of Authoritarian Politics in Algeria

On January 11, 1992, senior military officers forced President Ghadli Benjedid to resign, canceled the second round of legislative elections, and annulled the results of the first round, which saw the opposition Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) achieve a major electoral victory, and imposed a year-long state of siege. Constitutional government was replaced by an army-dominated so-called High Council of State responsive to no one but itself. In the weeks and months that followed further draconian measures were undertaken intended to subvert the incipient democratic process that Algeria had been experiencing in the several years following the deadly riots of October 1988. As part of the army’s effort to regain control of state and society, it reined in the freewheeling press, abolished the country’s most popular political party (FIS), dissolved the National Assembly, and reimposed on civil society the apparatus of the omnipresent state security system (mukhabarat).

Ideological change and an emerging counter-culture in Tunisian politics

Tunisia A has long been regarded as a model of political development and stability in the Third World. There is no doubt that the charismatic Habib Bourguiba, the aging (71) yet indefatigable leader of an effective nation-wide party apparatus, has helped ensure Tunisias development from the period of the pre-independence struggle until today. It is not unnatural, therefore, given the critical role of Bourguiba in the operation of the political system, to question the degree of institutionalisation, stability, modernity, and democracy that Tunisia could retain after the passing of its dynamic leader.

An Economic Indicator of Socio-Political Unrest

The relationship between economic phenomena and revolution has intrigued political scientists from Aristotle 2 to Zanzibar. 3 As usual in political science, however, most studies of the matter have been limited to intuitive hypotheses, without any attempt at comparative empirical verification. As a result, a number of such hypothetical explanations have been proposed, each showing the persuasiveness of its own internal logic (as if convincing observers were the same thing as comprehending – let alone controlling – events) but none with any better claim on reality than the other.

Islamist politics and the democratic imperative: comparative lessons from the algerian experience

Muslim politics or the politics of Islam has come to dominate much of the discourse regarding state–society relations in the Arab and Islamic worlds, as well as the relationship between Islam and the West. This dominance had never been so prevalent before the tragic events of 11 September 2001, which have come to accentuate rather than attenuate existing differences within and without the Arab-Islamic region. Alternative analytical and historical frameworks have been put forth that compete with deeply felt ideological assumptions in attempting to explain the enormous chasm operating on both sides of the ‘civilisational’ divide. In particular, two sets of relationships have taken centre stage in the debate about Islam, democracy and the state in the Arab world: the compatibility or incompatibility of Islam and democracy and the violent or nonviolent nature of Islamist politics. Those arguing against Islam’s compatibility with democracy point to absolutist commitments to religious text, historical precedent and cultural proclivities, including the lack of a separation between ‘church’ and state, to explain why democracy, if not modernity itself, is alien to the Arab-Islamic experience. Those who believe that Islam and democracy are not incompatible point to analogous principles, concepts, terms and practices within Islam to show that the spirit, if not the letter, of democratic life obtains within Islamic belief and practice, for example, shura (consultation), ijma‘ (consensus), ijtihad (independent analysis) and so on. While arriving at opposite conclusions, both perspectives begin with similar assumptions, namely that Islam as a religion is at the heart of explaining both its compatibility and incompatibility with democracy. The same can be said about Islam and violence, in which a concept such as jihad, for example, is used by critics to demonstrate the faith’s basic warlike qualities, while the same principle is interpreted by more sympathetic observers as

Libya and Its North African Policy

The initial orientation of postrevolutionary Libyan foreign policy ranked North Africa, with Egypt at its core, as the primary area of interest, followed by the rest of the Arab Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.1 The Islamic world held moderate interest, while the West was shunned altogether, save for the narrow instrumentalist benefits related to oil. The Communist bloc served more as an anti-Western agent than as a preferable region of association. Today, North Africa including Egypt, ranks last in the hierarchy of Libyan foreign policy concerns, with sub-Saharan Africa and, most recently, Europe and the United States emerging as the priority actors and preferable partners in foreign affairs. Why and how did this dramatic reversal take place? Given the physical proximity, common colonial legacies, cultural attachment, religious and linguistic affinity, and uniform identification with the Palestinian cause that the states of North Africa represent, one would have thought that deepening, rather than distancing, Libya from its Maghrebi neighbors would have characterized Libyan foreign policy in the last forty years. As with all things Libyan it is difficult to explain this contradictory, if not illogical and counter-productive, approach toward foreign affairs.

Religion and Politics in Algeria: Conflict or consensus?

Modern Algerian political culture is deeply rooted in religious identity. Inasmuch as scripturalist Islam fuses the sacred with the secular, the development of an Algerian political identity that is simultaneously Islamic, nationalist, modern and socialist constitutes no contradiction in either belief or practice. Given this legacy, what explains the current condition of political pathology in which the most extreme violent actions are justified in the name of Islam? Any attempt at explanation must begin with an understanding of Islams multiple faces in Algeria.

Comprendre la monarchie marocaine

inside and outside the country, the very significance of ‘Algerian cinema’ as a category of analysis. Part Three, ‘Remembering Algeria’, builds on the question of memory and identity introduced by the literary and cinematic analyses in Part Two, by focusing on the memory practices and politics of pied-noir groups in post-colonial France. Jennifer E. Sessions’ excellent study recounts the multiple symbolic values attributed to Marochetti’s equestrian statue of the Duc d’Orléans in its transfer from colonial Algiers to Neuilly-sur-Seine in metropolitan France, acquiring the ‘entangled’ memories of both twentieth century royalists in Neuilly and pieds-noirs in exile. Eldridge offers a novel perspective on the history of pieds-noirs in France by asking where next for pied-noir memory activism. While pied-noir activists have done much to shape public memory discussion, she analyses the challenges facing the transmission of pied-noir memory from one generation to the next in a rapidly evolving memory climate in France. The strength of this volume lies in its critical re-examination of a plurality of Algerian pasts across historical, cultural, and political discourses. If the volume aims to ‘revisit’ questions pertaining to Algeria, it does so successfully within an interdisciplinary framework. In the concluding chapter, James McDougall indeed provides a critique of the limited scholarly interaction between cultural production in Algeria and the question of state formation, by examining the ‘golden age’ of the cultural revolution of the 1970s through the lens of the period’s political economy. Above all, both scholars and students will appreciate the way Algeria revisited sensitively investigates diverse forms of liminality in colonial and postcolonial spaces and subjectivities, beyond familiar binary narratives in scholarship pertaining to postcolonial memory and history.

La Guerre du Rif: Maroc (1925–1926)

French military officers who led their troops against the insurgents: Bugeaud, Pélissier, Montagnac, and Saint-Arnaud. If this historical grounding is important in recreating the sociopolitical context in which the women found themselves, it also serves to counterbalance the tragic and tumultuous events that mark – and disrupt – their lives. It is important to note in this regard that although the succession of characters creates a great sweep of history – a dynamic and compelling fresco of the colonial period – the depiction of the women, with the exception of Zwina, may appear superficial to some readers. In a novel that is less than 200 pages in length, it is difficult to adequately depict the matriarch’s numerous descendants as well-developed characters. In this same vein, the trajectory leading to female agency and empowerment may not always be clear to the reader. Zwina’s lineage may indeed be descended from La Kahina, the legendary seventh-century Berber warrior queen who is thought to have lived and fought in the Aurès, but they have little, if any, of the queen’s power. As Belloula depicts women of uncommon courage who survive against great odds, she also reveals that their lives are limited by several factors: indigenous patriarchy, poverty, and a powerful French colonial army intent upon evicting the Chaouia from their land. Significantly, when Zwina travels through the countryside as a guide and interpreter to a Frenchmidwife, she feels ‘an immense force’ (56) that she equates with liberty, applying the term to the freedom experienced by an individual physically and psychologically separated from society’s constraints for a time. This form of liberty, however, remains short-lived and fleeting; it is not sustained. In conclusion, Belloula’s novel is informative, thought-provoking, and well written. If it leaves the reader with uncertainty regarding her characters’ sense of agency and empowerment, this ambiguity offers considerable food for thought, and hopefully leads to further exploration of Algerian woman’s changing – or unchanging? – role in past and present society.

L'État d'injustice au Maghreb: Maroc et Tunisie

the capital. The chapter on Libya makes for fascinating reading as the author has interviewed a wide range of participants and observers of the Libyan uprising. Khalil’s discussions with Libyan women and with Amazigh militants provide insights into these events that cannot easily be found in other sources. Her account also addresses the difficult situations involving crowds in post-revolutionary Libya, especially those protests that arose in response to the attack on the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Since early 2011, the events of the Arab Spring have obliged governments in the region to walk ‘a fine line between allowing public dissent and protest, and exerting some form of control over their newly freed societies in an attempt to avoid chaos’ (113). The focus of Khalil’s study addresses the question of how have the shared experiences of crowds in Tunisia, Algeria and Libya enacted change and how have the individual actors within the various types of crowds come to understand the consequences and objectives of their participation in these mass events? Khalil’s exploration of crowds in the events now known as the Arab Spring does not, of course, attempt to confine these testimonials into a fixed, historic narrative. Khalil concludes her study by acknowledging that there can be no single representation of the struggles for self-representation and empowerment of oppressed populations. Her objective in this work has been to provide an introduction to ‘as many crowd voices, as many close-up images of people in crowds as possible’ (123). Elusive and ever-expanding by nature, crowds as political and historical actors in the context of North Africa cannot be easily categorised. The present study by Andrea Khalil does, however, offer important insights into the origins and goals of a vast array of individuals who became powerful elements within a force for change.