Judith Scheele

Recycling Baraka: Knowledge, Politics, and Religion in Contemporary Algeria

Since the overwhelming electoral victory of Algerias main Islamist party, the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), in 1990 and 1991, the annulment of the elections by the Algerian army in 1992, and a decade of apparently random killings that followed throughout the country, religion has been at stake in most contemporary debates on Algeria. Algeria has thereby entered the field of larger debates within the Western world about radical Islam, the rise of religion, the rejection of “Western models,” and other expressions of the putative “clash of civilizations.” At the same time, relatively little has been said about what “Islam” actually means in the Algerian context, even by more perspicacious authors and analysts who are keen to stress the economic and social causes for the success of political Islam in Algeria (e.g., Burgat 1988; 1995; Charef 1994; Martinez 1998). This is not to say that the variety of religious practices in Algeria has attracted no attention from researchers. Rather, it means that those writers who focus on ‘local’ religion, such as Andezian (1993; 2001) and Hadibi (1999; 2002), tend to produce local accounts of the veneration of saints and pilgrimages, without referring to broader cultural dynamics and political struggles, and without attempting to link their findings in more than superficial ways to the emergence of modern Islamism.

Traders, saints, and irrigation: reflections on Saharan connectivity

Studies of trans-Saharan trade have recently been revitalized, mainly through an exploration of local archives. These archives offer a further possibility: to investigate the link between local settlement and wider patterns of exchange. Material from southern Algeria and northern Mali suggests that oases were not viable without outside investment, that pastoral eocnomies needed storage space and agricultural produce, and that intra-Saharan and trans-Saharan trade relied on each other. Hence, regional mobility and outside connections were not subsidiary but constitutive of the local, and local patterns of production and trans-Saharan commerce were aspects of the same system.

GEORG KLUTE, Tuareg-Aufstand in der Wüste. Ein Beitrag zur Anthropologie der Gewalt und des Krieges . Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag (hb €68 – 978 3 89645 732 5). 2013, 696 pp.

detail to the narrative, but little in the way of argument. Finally, a concluding chapter reiterates the global ramifications of insecurity in Somalia, before making a series of policy recommendations. Given the short shelf life of such recommendations in the ever-changing context of policy making, it is odd to see them in a hard cover monograph. This is a slim volume, with about half of its pages given over to a series of appendices, including a discussion of other ‘Further reading’ –much of which is not specific to Somalia or to the Horn of Africa but to terrorism studies or state failure – and a number of international agreements and UN resolutions. These add little value to the work, either as a reference or as a policy tool – except perhaps pedagogically, should the text be used in a course. However, even for teaching purposes, the intense focus on terrorism and the dearth of material from political scientists, historians or anthropologists of Somalia is disheartening. It is telling that the volume already feels dated, the narrative at times seeming to be rooted in the late 2000s, rather than 2011 or 2012, when it was published. Moreover, the narrative appears overly influenced by US and Israeli terrorism analysis – some academic, but mainly from conservative policy institutes or media outlets. Such analysis starts from an assumption, captured in the label ‘terrorist’, that does not allow for an exploration of al-Shabaab or other violent militia groups in Somalia as political actors in the context of an ongoing civil war. Rather, al-Shabaab’s leaders and fighters are portrayed in two-dimensional, emotive terms, with a focus on the heinous nature of some of their attacks. The reality of al-Shabaab’s continued existence and military capacity despite almost a decade of external military intervention suggests that – in order to understand the dynamics of the civil conflict – an analysis of al-Shabaab as a political movement is needed. Indeed, given the ‘link’ between piracy and terrorism in Somalia that the book purports to make – i.e. that both stem from the lack of law and order in the country, and the failure to restore a functioning central government (which is not a difficult or original conclusion to have drawn, even for a casual observer) – a policy-relevant study would presumably aim to tackle this question with urgency. Given these factors, I can find little to recommend this volume.

Shurafā’ as Cosmopolitans: Islam, Genealogy and Hierarchy in the Central Sahara

Scheele’s study focuses on Muslims in southern Algeria and northern Mali. People in this part of the Islamic world underpin notions of difference and value with respect to social status through the writing, recitation, and display of geographically expansive tawârikh (histories). Such notions and practices however have recently been challenged by the establishment of modern nation-states in the area. Scheele’s paper charts the ways in which state policies have gone to reshape traditional understandings of personal worth and to impede the use of ‘histories’ in the pursuit of cross-border connections.