DIALECTICS OF POLITICAL ISLAM IN NORTH AFRICA, THE

Middle East Policy, Winter 2007 by Henry, Clement M

As the most intensively colonized region of the Muslim world for the longest periods of time North Africa deserves special attention from U.S. policy makers and analysts concerned with the evolution of political Islam. Indeed, policy-making circles in the Pentagon were reported to be viewing "The Battle of Algiers" (1965) as the situation in Baghdad worsened.2 American policy makers need to understand the colonial and postcolonial dialectics of political Islam, now that the United States has become the principal imperial power. The film, however, gave them the wrong message - that one can beat down an urban insurgency - because the French could not win the war. Like our "global war on terror" (GWOT), it was essentially a political rather than a military contest.

In all of its many forms, ranging from reformist movements to transnational jihad, against "far" as well "near" enemies,3 political Islam must be viewed as a series of responses to the penetration of Western ideas and practices into Muslim societies; and North Africa, geographically closest to the European imperial powers, suffered the most penetration and has exhibited the greatest variety of responses over the past century. Now that the United States has replaced the Europeans as the principal hegemon and foil for political Islam, it is especially instructive to review its evolution in North Africa over the past half century and the mutation of some of its elements into "al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghrib."

This paper will argue that transnational movements, however nebulous their online presences, need local roots in the existing international order of states if they are to survive.4 Consequently, the best way to combat violent transnational self-proclaimed enemies, such as al-Qaeda, is to isolate them politically in their home states, so that their respective populations, not just governments, perceive them to be criminal elements. Postcolonial North Africa offers an interesting laboratory, and the four contrasting national experiences suggest alternative strategies for criminalizing them. The stronger the legacy of Islamic reform, the more favorable the prospects will be of submerging violent new elements in a relatively tranquil, but unforgiving, sea of law-abiding political Islam. Conversely, the weaker the legacy, the easier it may be for violent groups to use Islam in distorted ways to legitimate opposition to an incumbent regime - or even against an entire society.5 Yet an undiscriminating repression of Islamist oppositions may spark more violence and weaken moderate reformists, thereby further strengthening the hand of hardliners in the government. Massive repression and more discriminating strategies have all been attempted in North Africa, with mixed results. Morocco had the most successful strategy of selective cooptation and repression, while Libya succeeded best with a repressive strategy.

It will be shown here that Morocco and Tunisia had greater potential than Algeria or Libya for a successful discriminating political strategy. Better preserved Islamic legacies offered more opportunities for dividing and controlling the oppositions, but strategies are matters of political choice that are not predetermined. Each postcolonial regime provoked new Islamist oppositions and essayed a variety of strategies to contain them. It will be seen that one set of Algerian reformers (the Hamrouche government, 1989-91) attempted to defy the odds but was prevented from sustaining simultaneous economic and political reform. By contrast, an authoritarian regime in Tunisia consolidated power by taking a violent path and polarizing the political community into fearful Westernized elites and resentful counter elites. Morocco was better able to contain its postcolonial oppositions by judicious use of pre-colonial institutions and a multiparty system inherited from colonial times. It can credibly criminalize transnational al-Qaeda while coexisting with tamer varieties of homegrown Islamism.

This paper unfortunately cannot examine the new local roots of violent transnational Islam being cultivated in Iraq under the American occupation or in various EU countries, where North African as well as other Muslims are recruited for Iraq and other transnational causes. More political beachheads and recruiting grounds for al-Qaeda are opening up in the Paris suburbs and provincial cities like Montpelier than in any of the North African states. The "near enemy" of apostate or infidel rule may be merging in the perceptions of some North African immigrant communities with al-Qaeda's "far enemy" (Sarkozy's France, backed by the United States). But North African immigrants and their second- or third-generation offspring will be less vulnerable to such propaganda to the extent that al-Qaeda is effectively criminalized in the eyes of public opinion in the home countries.

COLONIAL LEGACIES

French colonial rule gave rise to the Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian nationalisms that in turn activated "political" Islam as they sought roots in Islamic as well as national identities. Political Islam in turn shaped the nationalist movements against the French presence in all three of its North African possessions, but the contexts of anti-colonial struggle varied, depending on the extent and longevity of colonial rule. These were greatest in Algeria, and greater in Tunisia than Morocco. France assimilated Algeria (1830-1962), eradicating its ruling Ottoman infrastructure, populating it with French citizens and assimilating native Jews, expropriating much of the best land for the settlers and marginalizing the bulk of the Muslim populations. In the protectorates of Morocco (1912-56) and Tunisia (1882-1956), by contrast, the French deliberately preserved the precolonial political orders, even while repopulating them with French settlers -not so many as in Algeria but more, as a percentage of the respective populations, in the older protectorate of Tunisia than in Morocco. The French virtually destroyed Algeria's Muslim social infrastructures, such as schools, courts, tribes and religious orders, while trying to preserve them in Tunisia and especially Morocco, the last territory to be colonized, after learning expensive military lessons in Algeria about how not to pacify a Muslim country. The religious centers of learning in Fez (Qarawiyin) and Tunis (Zitouna) also survived, whereas the French invasion of Algeria "ruined charitable institutions, dropped the schools, and dispersed the seminaries," as Alexis de Tocqueville lamented in 1847.6 So also in Libya, Mussolini's conquest in the 1920s virtually decimated the population, but Italian colonization (1911-42) was briefer, leaving the Sanussi religious order intact with help from the British.