Culture as war by other means: Community, conflict, and cultural revolution, 1967-1981 James McDougall idha-mā intaṣarnā bi-ḥarbi ’l-khilāṣ/ fa-thawratunā ’l-yawm ḥarb al-aṣāla If we have won victory in the war of deliverance, our revolution today is a war for authenticity. Mufdi Zakarya, Ilyādhat al-Jazā’ir, 1972 Il y a tant de marge entre un changement de souveraineté et la transformation de la société! What a difference there is between a change of sovereignty and the transformation of society! Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi, De la décolonisation à la révolution culturelle, 1973 Contemporary Algeria’s cultural production has been the focus of much insightful scholarship over the past three decades, but, for very practical reasons, especially during the 1990s, such work has not always been able to engage fully with the social and political realities of Algeria itself except at some distance. It might even be that studies focusing on memory and identity, near-ubiquitous terms in the recent literature on Algeria, have proliferated in proportion to the difficulty of closely situating such expressions of Algeria as a metonym for postcolonial cultural preoccupations within an understanding of Algerian history viewed ‘on the ground’. At the same time, studies of Algerian society and politics by political scientists, sociologists, and historians, concerned with ‘harder’ questions of oil rents, factional conflict, democratisation (or its failure), regional relations, and civil war have tended either to sideline culture, or to resort to somewhat clichéd images of it that, even when deployed in the course of otherwise excellent analyses, have sometimes reduced Algerian culture to being merely the expression—or, worse, itself a cause—of the conflict and violence that have so marked the country’s contemporary history. This chapter seeks to connect the field of cultural production and the cultural politics of post-independence Algeria, particularly in and after the ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1970s, to the ‘hard surfaces’ of political economy and state-formation, as a way of better framing the conditions of production of contemporary Algerian culture. This means examining the cultural field in terms of the role it has played relative to other fields of social action, namely political institutions (the state; the hegemonic struggle within the post-revolutionary polity; the role of cultural politics in expressing sectional and ideological interests) and political economy (the division of access to resources and to the means of distribution of resources). I don’t mean to suggest by this that culture is only epiphemomenal, only a superstructural expression of basic material interests; but rather that the significance of the cultural field can only properly be apprehended in relation to these other dimensions of social life, which it shapes while also being shaped by them. Gramsci, analysing the political situation of interwar Europe, wrote of the distinction and the transition between what he famously characterised as ‘war of position’, which in military science referred to siege or trench warfare, and in politics meant the long, attritional struggle of a revolutionary movement against entrenched class interests, and ‘war of manoeuvre’, which in the military sphere denoted frontal assault, and by analogy, in politics referred to the dynamic outbreak of collective action to seize physical territory and the apparatus of a state.1 In the Algerian case, as in other colonial and post-colonial contexts, we might say that culture has often been a central means of waging ‘war’, in this broad sense of underlying socio-political struggle that sometimes eventuates in armed conflict, between competing groups and interests within society, and between society and the state. Furthermore, since as we know ‘the state’ is never a monolith, but only ever, when at its most effective, a coherent façade for bundles of institutions, processes, and actors, with their often conflicting interests2, we need to see ‘the state’ too less as a single actor than as a site and a stake of these struggles, and cultural politics as a contested terrain on which they are played out. In colonial Algeria, political struggle was defined and waged primarily in culturalcommunitarian terms—and necessarily so, by all shades of political opinion including those who advocated a multi-confessional, democratic future for Algeria. That is, the struggle for liberation was conceived overwhelmingly in terms of a single cultural community as the political community to be emancipated.3 The anticolonial struggle was necessarily ‘communitarian’ in this sense, rather than a struggle waged simply along class lines or for ‘universal’ values, because the main lines of social subordination and conflict within the colonial order were drawn along ethno-cultural or religio-cultural divides. This was the abiding force of colonial practices of governance that, in Algeria as elsewhere, imprinted their organising categories of domination onto the ways in which that domination was eventually to be overthrown.4 Anticolonial struggle, both in the long ‘war of position’ after the conquest, throughout the colonial period from ca. the 1850s through to the Second World War, and in the dynamic war of independence that put an end to it, was a cultural/communitarian struggle because it had to be.5 As Gramsci also wrote, one does not choose the kind of war one fights; one fights the war that circumstances impose. This did not mean, however, that there was consensus within Algerian nationalism as to what the content of national culture or the meaning of community should be, nor over how the community’s relationship to ‘its own’ national state should be governed. In particular, within the wartime FLN there were inevitable major divergences over what both Islam and socialism should mean, who should articulate them, and what role they should play in the future regulation of society and state.6 The political culture of unanimisme that characterised the revolutionary FLN, and then the outward face of the one-party state, was rooted in ancient practices of village-level social solidarity and communal politics out of which the guerilla movement itself had grown. It also reflected more recent, religiously formulated norms of community cohesion and ideological conformity expounded by the Islamic reformist movement of the 1920s-1950s, and widely propagated by them in educational and cultural activities; and it was a practical necessity for an underground armed resistance movement that had, first, to overcome chronic divisions within and between different Algerian nationalist groups, and then survive the intense pressure of a counter-insurgency war.7 But behind the necessary fiction of unanimity lay not only rival personalities, loyalties and interests, but also sharply diverging views and aspirations for the shape of state and society, competing versions of what Malika Rahal, following anthropologist Françoise Héritier, has called entre-soi, ‘a definition of who “we” are [...] connected with a collective project of what togetherness is or should be.’ Each contending version of Algerian entre-soi ‘entailed a different form of polity, as well as a definition of who should—or should not—be Algerian, by defining the fundamental characteristics of shared identity and the basic rules of society.’8 After independence, as the political struggle between factions in the emerging polity developed behind the institutionalised facade of single-party unanimisme, the cultural field continued both to serve as a terrain of struggle in itself and to provide a register in which other conflicts could be expressed. Indeed, during the crucial period of state-building and regime consolidation between ca.1967 and 1979—that is, between the crises of the immediate post-independence years and those of the changing global, regional, and domestic scene in the 1980s, as the single-party system established and entrenched itself—cultural issues would provide the only open arena in which such conflicts could be played out.9 Now remembered as in many respects a ‘golden age’ of contemporary Algeria, the 1970s was a time of promises for industrial development and agrarian reform, educational opportunity and rising standards of living. This was the heyday of the regime’s domestic legitimacy and international influence, both incarnated in the popular and assertively Third Worldist revolutionary figure of Houari Boumedienne, before the years of economic crisis in the 1980s under his sucessor, Chadli Benjedid, and the crisis and coup d’état that, deposing the latter, plunged the country into the ‘dark decade’ of war in the 1990s. Views of the period in the context of what followed thus tend to paint a distinctly rosy picture of ‘the Boumedienne years’: as Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi puts it in his memoirs, this was simply and ‘incontestably the golden age of independent Algeria.’10 For many Algerians, and for influential scholarly analyses, the breakdown of state and society that followed is to be explained by the deliberate abandonment of Boumedienne’s project by Benjedid and those around him, the sudden irruption of Islamism onto the scene in the early 1980s, and the encouragement of the latter by the former.11 The death of Boumedienne and the reorientations of personnel, factional preponderance, and policy orientation that followed undoubtedly marked a major rupture. But the break was far from total; there were important continuities across this watershed, and much of the societal and ideological conflict that broke into the open in the early 1980s had developed long before. After the implosion of the single-party system in 1988-89, and the collapse of attempts to manage the transition to a more pluralistic political system in 1990-92, it was the long-incubated social stresses of this postindependence attritional struggle as well as conjunctural pressures that erupted, again, into an open war of movement. The 1970s was the decade of Algeria’s ‘cultural revolution’, a third pillar of the state’s social project alongside the industrialising and agrarian revolutions. Combined, the ambitious programs of heavy industrialisation and land reform were expected to transform Algeria’s economy and deliver on the promise of socialist state-building to create prosperity and welfare for all, especially the working and peasant masses who had suffered most during the war, and in whose interests the FLN’s authoritarian dirigisme was seen as working.12 As the decade opened, Boumedienne’s regime, brought to power by the coup d’état of 19 June 1965 that ousted the charismatic President Ahmed Ben Bella, was completing its consolidation. Left-wing opposition to the ‘putsch’ against Ben Bella by the Organisation of Popular Resistance (ORP) had been rapidly neutralised in 1965, and found echoes only among members and sympathisers of the underground Socialist Vanguard Party (PAGS), successor to the Algerian Communist Party, particularly among students and some labour organisers. An attempted coup in December 1967 by dissident army officers, led by one of Boumedienne’s erstwhile principal co-conspirators, Tahar Zbiri, was defeated; in April 1968, Boumedienne himself escaped, unscathed, from an assassination attempt presumed to have been organised by opponents in exile.13 Having thus established itself in power, in January 1970 the regime launched its first four-year development plan. The following year saw the dramatic conclusion to protracted negotiations with France over hydrocarbon resources, when in February 1971 the Algerian state nationalised oil and gas installations and took a controlling stake in French oil companies operating in the country. That November, the agrarian revolution was begun, and edicts on the socialist management of enterprises announced. These moves signalled the launch of the Boumedienne regime’s central development initiatives: hydrocarbon-driven, capital-intensive, heavy industrialisation, along with land redistribution, welfare measures, and infrastructure spending funded by oil and gas revenues, would permit the building of a socialist economy under the aegis of the state for the benefit of a collectivist, revolutionary society. This was the vision presented by Boumedienne, speaking on the fifth anniversary of the ‘revolutionary corrective movement’ of 19 June in a televised speech that, appropriately in terms both of the symbolism of national integration and of the regime’s developing control of social communication, was transmitted for the first time across the whole of Algerian territory. The third, cultural dimension of the revolution, he explained, was to consist of education and Arabisation.14 The cultural domain may have been ancillary to the economic dimensions of the regime’s project, but there can be no doubting the importance to Boumedienne and his planners of both expanding educational provision, and breaking with a system oriented towards training in French that was seen both as an unwelcome relic of colonialism and as a barrier to the genuine democratisation as well as the nationalisation of educational opportunity. While most ministerial budgets were increased by 3-4% in 1970, spending on education rose by 20%. When the National Commission for Educational Reform discussed the challenges of Arabisation in April, 1970, Boumedienne attended the meeting in person, and told the commissioners that this problem ‘represents a national imperative and a revolutionary goal. We can make no distinction between Arabisation and the objectives of the revolution in other areas.’15 The program of cultural revolution set Arabisation and education within a broader campaign of cultural decolonisation, a project for the recovery of ‘the components of our national personality and the factors that make up its authenticity’, as Boumedienne put it in 1972.16 Just as ‘the battle for oil’ signalled the ‘recuperation of national riches’ in the assertion of sovereignty over Algeria’s natural resources, the cultural revolution pursued the struggle to ‘restore our national culture’, to build the future ‘by reconnecting with the past and with our ancestors’, as Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi, as Minister of National Education, had told students in Algiers in September 1965.17 This aspect of state- and nation-building was placed particularly under the auspices of two institutions, the Ministry of National Education and the Ministry of Original Education and Religious Affairs, the latter created in July 197018. Envisaged as the necessary remedy for over a century of cultural alienation, as the means of returning Algerians to their ‘true selves’, it drew on the programme, inherited from the reformist ‘ulamā of the colonial period, of Arabism and Islam as the twin pillars of a true Algerian-ness, combined with the rationality of science invested in a moral universe of Islamic values for the articulation of an Arab-Islamic, ‘authentically Algerian’ modernity.19 The cultural revolution thus advanced a very specific vision of the Algerian past, one which informed a particular project for Algeria’s present and future, in which socialist progress was informed and legitimised by the state’s appropriation of strategic resources in the cultural field: the definition and promotion of Islam and of Muslim values, the ‘rediscovery’ and memorialisation of the national past, the codification and teaching of the national language. This meant adopting, co-opting, and taming, but also redeploying, officialising, and magnifying, the preoccupations and the rhetoric of an important constituency on the right of the FLN and outside it, in the conservative religious opinion that had, first, taken exception to the ascendancy of an avowedly Marxist tendency in Ben Bella’s regime and that, while welcoming Boumedienne’s seizure of power, had subsequently suffered in the regime’s clampdown on independent centres of political thought and activism, especially after the attempted coup of December 1967. Thus the Islamic Values Society, Jamʿiyat al-qiyam alislāmiyya, which had drawn attention to itself by publicly protesting the Egyptian regime’s execution of the Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb in August 1966, was first banned from operating in the wilāya (governorate) of Algiers and then, in March 1970, dissolved by the authorities. Also in 1970, shortly before an ill-defined oppositional group referred to as Junūd allāh, ‘the Soldiers of God’, was said to have been dismantled by the police, the Minister of Religious Affairs, Larbi Saaduni, denounced the corrupting influence of foreign religious missionaries; in a move that surely had only symbolic importance, several American methodists and French members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were expelled from the country. Later the same year, managers of restaurants and bars were called upon, for the first time since independence, to keep their premises closed in daytime during Ramadan, an annual campaign against the celebration of Christmas among Algerians denounced such practices as anti-revolutionary, and radio broadcasts of Catholic and Protestant services, which since independence had still been carried each Sunday on Radio Algiers, were ended. In December, a student protest about living conditions was turned into a students’ march—the first—in support of Arabisation, and the arrest of several students associated with the PAGS the following month provided the pretext for the dissolution of the independent Algerian National Students’ Union (UNEA), and its replacement with a students’ union subordinated to the FLN. This logic of incorporation would be followed in other domains too: workers’, women’s, peasants’ and youth organisations had been or would over the following years be folded into the single-party system.20 But the assertion of Islam as the state religion had, as Henri Sanson observed, a particular double edge: Islam was to be the state’s religion, articulated by state-appointed authorities in support of the goals, and sanctioning the legitimacy, of the regime; it was also the religion of the state, defining ‘national personality’ and cultural ‘authenticity’, a source of legislation and a model of social morality that remained, as it had inevitably been in the colonial period, heavily politicised.21 This was a balancing act. The regime’s denunciation of anti-revolutionary deviations, divisions, and ‘relics of colonialism’ was conventional enough for any Third World, antiimperialist nationalism. But its co-option of a conservative, religious, moralising language for advancing its goals of social mobilisation and solidarity also offered a bridge to the agenda of those on the religious right who might otherwise be potential opponents—troubled by the social effects of rapid and disorderly urbanisation, alarmed by demographic growth that saw a ballooning and unruly younger generation whose behaviour (as for social conservatives everywhere) seemed to portend moral dissipation and social breakdown, offended, above all, by the regime’s infringement of property rights in its redistributive and industrialising policies. The conservatives of Jamʿiyat al-qiyam had vituperated, in their periodical Humanisme musulman, ‘those who, defying our country’s official religion and, what is more, the deepest sentiments of our people, dare to invite foreigners and enemies of God to Algeria, to this country, home of the only great contemporary revolution made in the name of God’22; the true historical vocation of the revolution, for them, had been and remained to serve the cause of ‘our independence, our freedom, our own personality, and especially our Islam….’23 The equation of anti-colonial revolution and the FLN’s state-building project with a ‘war for Islam’ and the sovereignty of God was a minority position in the mid-1960s, and remained so until 1979, when the Iranian revolution provided a major boost to such ideas. But already, a current of Algerian ‘fundamentalist’ opinion existed, influenced by the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, by the Pakistani ideologist Abu ’l-Aʿla Mawdudi, and, at something of a tangent to these Islamist thinkers but sharing some of their preoccupations—with the primacy of reconstructing the sovereignty and integrity of a global Muslim community, and within that community, reasserting Islam as a total ethical system, a code of social solidarity, and a political and ‘civilisational’ force—by the Algerian writer and educator Malek Bennabi, who had spent the revolution in exile in Cairo, returned to Algeria in 1963, and was a leading member of al-Qiyam.24 This current had its influence within as well as outside the state.25 While for Boumedienne—as his speeches show—the cultural revolution was an auxiliary aspect of socioeconomic development, his Minister of Religious Affairs throughout the 1970s, Mouloud Qasim, expressed a divergent perspective in the very first edition of the ministry’s magazine, al-Aṣāla (‘Authenticity’): ‘The country is [today] undertaking an important, cultural and spiritual revolution, which will forever extirpate undesirable customs among us... If our people has accepted enormous sacrifices and struggled over years and years, it is not for luxuries and a life of superficiality. If we have struggled so, it has been for the recovery of our identity, our personality, and our authenticity.’ In pursuing this struggle, it would be necessary to fight ‘against those who stubbornly remain in error’: francophone ‘pseudo-intellectuals’, Sufi ‘obscurantist charlatans’, Marxists who promoted ‘ideologies that corrupt our Muslim society’. As Luc Deheuvels observes, Qasim’s position ‘subordinates the state, along with law, culture, religious observance, and science, to Islam, mobilising the whole in the service of re-establishing an Islamic ethics.’26 Or rather, the whole social project of the revolution is identified with a particular—modernist and neoreformist, fundamentalist and prescriptive, moralising and authoritarian—interpretation of Islam as a total social project, in which ‘authentic culture’ becomes both the means of a revolutionary ‘restoration’ of society to its ‘true self.’ The concern of those mobilised around the agenda of the cultural revolution understood in these terms, then, was to ‘re-Islamise’ the state, and through it, society, from above and from within. The logic of co-option, of bringing religion and culture, along with everything else, under the hegemony of the state apparatus, thus necessarily brought tensions over culture—and rivalries over position, access to resources, influence, and preferment within the priorities of the state, expressed through cultural issues—into the factional politics of the state. Over the course of the 1970s, and increasingly as the economic and social ambitions of the revolution ran into difficulties, and then began to stall, the uneasy balance that was present from the outset between the state’s hegemony over a religio-cultural agenda harnessed to its pragmatic ends, and the rightward pressure of those within and outside the state seeing themselves as committed to the pursuit of a ‘re-Islamising’ ideological agenda, tilted, albeit erratically, in favour of the latter. Already in the early 1970s, those responsible for the regime’s religio-cultural messages were sensitive to those aspects of state discourse that were less congenial to their agenda. Boumedienne’s famous speech at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference summit in Lahore in February 1974, in which he stressed the priority of economics and poverty alleviation over religious concerns (‘no-one wants to go to Paradise with an empty stomach... A hungry people does not need to hear verses sung’), and which provoked anti-regime protests in Algeria, was not mentioned in al-Aṣāla.27 Tensions mounted throughout the decade, in particular around central social and policy areas that were both important stakes in their own right, and that, increasingly as social change outran the regime’s capacity to manage it, became ‘lightning rods’ for underlying factional and ideological divergences: demographic change, urbanisation and youth culture; language policy and Arabisation; and gender relations and family policy. I shall focus here on the first of these, which (although perhaps less often examined in the literature than either language or family policy28) was perhaps the overriding challenge to the regime in the decades following independence. In 1972, the annual rate of demographic growth was reckoned at close to 3.5% (in 1979 it remained at 3.2%); sixty percent of the Algerian population—some eight and a half million individuals—was under twenty years of age. Despite the rapid expansion of education, only some two and a half million were in school, and with the massive rural-urban migration that marked the post-war years, and continued apace through the 1970s, several million young people were already reckoned to be out of school, out of work, and on the streets.29 This was the Algeria of Omar Gatlato, Merzak Allouache’s 1976 film masterpiece in which the war of independence is already a distant echo across the high-rise tenement blocks of a new, young, and profoundly transformed Algeria, where housing is already in short supply, where young men struggle with the ‘virility’ (al-rajūla) expected of them, expressed in slick haircuts and sharp suits, exorcised on the football terraces, frustrated in technicolour visions of courtship by the unconquerable distance across impassable streams of traffic that separate Omar from the girl in the final sequences of the film: Omar gatlātuh al-rajūla, ‘Omar Manliness-Kills-Him’. The complex, sensitive images of Algerian urban youth culture and masculinity in Allouache’s film – in dress, sport, music, pastimes, work and relationships - contrast sharply with the stark denunciations that, by the mid-1970s, had become a leitmotiv of the cultural revolution, beginning with a vigorous campaign ‘against the degradation of morals’ in the autumn of 1970 and particularly expressed thereafter in the annual Islamic Thought Seminars (formally ‘Seminars for the Propagation of Islamic Thought’) sponsored by the Ministry of Religious Affairs.30 The tone had already been set by the al-Qiyam group, as Mokhtar Aniba, the director of Humanisme musulman, wrote in 1965: ‘…anti-Islamic ideas have turned a great number of our young people of both sexes, supposedly “educated”, into a youth that is immoral, vicious, undisciplined,… renegades [to Islam] and unconscious of their liberty so dearly bought. … Our Muslim Algeria must not be contaminated, or serve as a breeding ground, for antiMuslim … ways of life. Let it be known that we are in favour of the natural health of our young people, a health in conformity with our personality.... The young Algerian Muslim, this young man who must be able to understand his country’s problems, and those of the Muslim world, so as to help his people, must be manly, turned to face in the right direction, healthy in mind and body. We must, as a matter of urgent necessity, concern ourselves with this moral bankruptcy of our young people…’31 In 1970, Mouloud Qasim echoed the same ideas in attacking ‘the wave of…sexuality, juvenile delinquence, and divorce’ threatening the country; the official newspaper El Moudjahid denounced he rise of alcoholism, prostitution, suicide and divorce, associating such dangers with ‘the signs of Western culture, carrying all the degenerate tendencies of that decadent civilisation.’32 Qasim’s keynote speech to the fourth Islamic Thought Seminar, held in Constantine in August, gave the remoralising campaign an important historical dimension. During the colonial occupation, he claimed, ‘… we never ceased to be ourselves, proudly attached to the values of religion, language and tradition which constitute our personality, opposed to anything which might damage them or bring them harm. We fought, at that time, all the imported social diseases which were foreign to us. We did so with the strength of self-defence for the safeguarding of [our] identity and authenticity, opposed to everything that might detach us from our natural environment and depersonalize us. Society was unanimous in rejecting such corrosive influences. This self-defence was… our first weapon for the protection of our personality, the guarantee of our survival through the ages and vicissitudes of history.’33 The colonial period is thus, somewhat paradoxically, seen almost as a ‘golden age’ of perfect unity and unanimity. After independence, however, the dangers appear: ‘We must recognize that, after the elimination of our [colonial] adversary, this immunity began to disappear, the feeling of authenticity and identity was weakened, and many people became indulgent towards things which ought not to be indulged, if disaster is to be avoided.’34 These dangers are purveyed by a host of internal enemies within Algerian society, corrupted by foreign influences: ‘depersonalized persons’ (afrād mamsūkhīn – transformed, or deformed individuals), ‘renegades’, ‘ “liberals” of all kinds.’35 And Algerian society faces these dangers at precisely the moment when ‘we have barely taken charge of our own affairs and recovered our liberty of action as a free people and a sovereign country.’36 The same theme was addressed two years later, in the sixth Islamic Thought Seminar, by no less a figure than Mufdi Zakarya, the eminent nationalist poet and pan-Maghribi cultural and political activist who had written Algeria’s national anthem. For the sixth seminar, held in Algiers in July and August 1972 under the theme of the rewriting and decolonisation of history, ‘so as to cleanse it from all conscious and premeditated impurities and falsifications’37, Mufdi was commissioned by Qasim to compose an epic poem, The Algerian Iliad, a panegyric for Algerian history ‘from the most ancient times to the present day’. The long poem—610 stanzas when published, and supposed to reach 1000 when complete—is pervaded by the same sense of threatened social virtue. On the one hand, the alienation experienced during the colonial period, and remedied by the salutary cultural mission of the reformist ʿulamā (to whose movement Mufdi was close, and who are said to have ‘planted in the people the roots of authenticity’38) is apparently overcome with the achievement of independence, the recovery of national sovereignty. At the same time, the entirety of the Algerian past is characterized by an inviolable moral, spiritual, and cultural purity, providing the unbreakable unity of the people in resistance to every foreign aggression and their unswerving faithfulness to an idealized national selfhood. This perennial integrity of a Muslim Algeria immune to assault, firmly rooted in its history of resistance and ArabIslamic civilisation, is contrasted sharply with the present dangers, in the decolonised society of the 1970s, of fragmentation, moral dissipation, and the ruin of the values which ensured, and enshrine, its ‘authenticity’: ‘Our manliness refuses what is base, refuses the lackeys of vulgarity and their long hair This age has become effeminate, the “hippies” are everywhere, spreading vice… Deviation has spread, like hashish, with powerful allurements to debauchery… Algeria was the land of men of strength, where then are departed bravery and virility? [...] This young generation is dissolute, its virtue ruined, a generation fallen to the dust Grief to Algeria and to the Muslims, if our young corrupt their souls This is the danger whose mounting tide threatens on all sides… Why should the colonialist be sad after our liberty, since he holds our moral strength as a captive in his hands? […] Come, then, O France, return in peace, your children fill the land Tomorrow, with cries of joy, they will bid you welcome on our soil…’39 In the face of such a prospect, the poet nonetheless sees hope in the ‘war for authenticity’, the ‘war for our innermost selves’ (ḥarb al-ḍamīr) to which he calls his compatriots: ‘When a people violates God’s covenant of and betrays its faith, prepare to see it disappear If we have won victory in the war of deliverance, our revolution today is a war for authenticity We have joined battle for the raising up of Algeria, educating souls and struggling against ignorance Our people will forge a just nation from which perversion will be banished .’40 And just as calls for social remoralisation framed the cultural revolutionaries’ views of youth in terms of a dissipated masculinity, threats to ‘proper’ femininity were no less grave. The fourth Islamic Thought Seminar seminar resolved that family law—the recodification of which was subject to a tussle within the regime throughout the decade— should be based exclusively on the prescriptions of Islamic jurisprudence. In his opening speech, already referred to, Mouloud Qasim presented a very conventionally conservative prescription for ‘complementary’ gender relations: ‘The woman is mistress of the home, the protector of the hearth and the guardian of tradition... We must teach her everything of which she has need for the accomplishment of her task, educating her according to feminine morality thanks to which a woman is a woman, and not half-woman, half-man! “To our eyes, a woman who gives birth to a child who becomes a pilot is preferable to a woman who becomes a pilot herself.” ... This importance... is an honour for her and a homage paid to her role, to her place in family, society and nation. […] [A] woman should [not] abjure her personality and become one of the deformed kind, that is to say, a mosaic and a mixture of diverse elements without homogeneity, thus becoming a curse on her milieu and an evil for her society.’41 If the particular target here is mixed marriage – women who marry foreign men being ‘though they be so few that one may count them on the fingers of one hand, nonetheless a disgrace to their family and to society as a whole’ – there is a more general anxiety, here, at cultural and historical mixity. Other speakers in the same forum expressed this notion succinctly: as one woman member of the seminar’s commission on national education, Oumissi Zemmour, declared ‘Western and Muslim man are two different species… The division of the world into nationalities and blocs, most of them atheistic… makes marriage to foreign men or women impossible.’42 For Mufdi and Qasim, what was at stake was not only the inheritance, and the historical meaning, of the war of liberation a decade after its end, but the necessity of renewing and perpetuating the revolution in the new social circumstances of independence; the cultural revolution was the means by which a ‘true’ national community must be ‘restored to itself’, not merely in the establishment of political sovereignty or the achievement of material wellbeing, but in the recovery of an imagined ancestral purity. This vision of the revolutionary vocation to be accomplished turned the nationalist struggle for liberation inward, against internal enemies seen as actual or potential corrupters and betrayers of the community. This was a view that would become entrenched and deepened through the later 1970s. An attempt to reverse sail somewhat in 1977—by appointing bilingual ministers of education and higher education, who sought to modify the pace of Arabisation and revalorise bilingual (not to say bicultural) competence, at the same time as the Islamic Thought Seminar was held in out-of-the-way, historic Saharan venues and opened up to a greater mix of ideological tendencies—was resoundingly defeated by conservative pressure. A sharp radicalisation came in 1979, when Abd al-Rahman Chibane, an inspector of Arabic in the education ministry known to be close to the fundamentalist current of thought, became Minister of Religious Affairs. By 1981, the exposition of Khomeini’s doctrine of vilayet-i faqih by an Iranian delegate to the fifteenth Islamic Thought Seminar was opposed among Algerian participants principally on the grounds, not that the state was legitimate on the nationalist and revolutionary grounds of popular sovereignty, but because ‘the state corrupts’, and the Islamic vocation transcended it.43 The cultural revolution had been intended by the regime to provide legitimation in the cultural and religious fields for its redistributive and technologically modernising social project, and at the same time, in the expansion and Arabisation of education, it was expected to bring the fruits of development to all the children of independence. But both the regime’s developmental project and its capacity to contain divergent social pressures and constituencies within itself first stalled, in the late 1970s, and then broke apart, in the earlymid 1980s, under the pressure of regional events (the Iranian revolution and the rise of a more radical Islamism; the reversal of fortunes of statist, planned development projects in global credit markets and domestic achievements) and internal changes (the realignment of policy and factional preponderance after the death of Boumedienne). And in these circumstances, the cultural revolution became more significant as the expression of an impulse of conservative reaction, in a context of rapid social, demographic, and cultural change, than as an aspect of the progressive ‘edification of a socialist Algeria’; less an ideological prop for the state’s more crucial preoccupations with development than a dimension of the ideological struggle within society and the state for the dominant definition of Algeria’s past, present and future. This was a struggle to construct a dominant worldview, a dominant legitimate language of politics and of development itself. Not merely ancillary to the more material domains of oil, gas, electricity, and steel, ‘culture’ proved to be the site of a struggle to assert the place within the new division of privilege of a particular group of actors – arabophone and religiously-minded intellectuals who had, since independence, been largely outweighed in the apparatus of the state by a francophone, state-bourgeois technocracy. It may not be surprising, but it is significant, that the means of struggle as well as its goal as envisaged by these actors should have centred, in the language they produced to wage it, on the nature of Algerian society and its legitimate national culture. ‘National identity’, as sameness, true to a putative original inviolability, was sought as the unifying force of community cohesion both across time and throughout society, a truth whose articulation in the present might enable the social position of particular actors as the legitimate guides of the community, the guardians of its law and of its conscience. Their vivid language of the threat to cultural authenticity as a foreign sickness, an imported social disease, the stress laid on ‘authentic’ masculinity and femininity, served to locate the challenges facing society in the sphere of individuals’ behaviour and morality, rather than in that of the closed and repressive political system, or in the realm of economics. This points to an important characteristic of the politics of independent Algeria under the single-party regime that held onto power until 1989, namely the extent to which struggles for ascendancy within the political system, unable to function through overt struggles between competing political platforms, were formulated in terms of culture, and in so doing, framed cultural politics in terms of moral prescriptions and exclusions, as conflicting visions of an Algerian entre-soi. The ‘rediscovery’ of the national past and the ‘restoration’ of society were particularly stressed, not because Algerians were suffering from a postcolonial ‘identity crisis’, but because these idioms provided readily available discursive space in which political contest could be articulated. When the single party and its fictions of unanimity came under stress, and then precipitately collapsed, in the 1980s, the cultural politics of exclusion and denunciation that had been incubated by this factional war of position during the 1970s all too readily provided the idioms for a sudden opening into mass politics articulated in sweeping, utopian, ‘identity’-laden terms. Already in 1980-81, arabophone student protestors, disadvantaged in education and the job market, demanding immediate and concrete action on the regime’s slogans of ‘authentic’ culture embodied in Arabic and Islam, were moving towards a more contestatory form of politics fusing the idea of a ‘true’ Arabic national culture with a more utopian and radical Islamism. At exactly the same time, the reaction to doctrinaire Arabisation among berberophones and francisants in Kabylia had produced the Berber cultural movement, the ‘Berber Spring’, and another set of politicised identity discourses.44 The ground was already laid, in the culturally-defined cleavages between Algerians and their conflicting conceptions of community, for the appalling war of movement that followed the collapse (or sabotage) of the attempt to manage a transition to political pluralism in 1989-92.45 Not that the discourse of the 1970s led necessarily or directly to the horrors of jihadist and counter-insurgency violence in the 1990s; but in the language they adopted for engaging in the contests of post-independence politics within the single-party state, the ‘cultural revolution’ current within the Algerian political establishment was already mapping out a dangerous road to the future. The prescriptions and proscriptions of national cultural politics articulated in these terms, and with this tone, would, ultimately, do more to turn culture into a war zone, fought over in terms of mutual exclusion, than to make it a site for the entre-soi, the nation as an everyday living-together, of all Algerians. Notes 1 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 229-39. 2 See, especially, Philip Abrams, ‘Notes on the difficulty of studying the state’, Journal of Historical Sociology 1,1 (Mar. 1988), 58-89; for incisive application to contemporary Algerian politics, Mohamed Hachemaoui, Clientélisme et patronage dans l’Algérie contemporaine (Paris, Karthala, 2013). 3 Amar Ouzegane, a leader of the Algerian Communist Party, for example, advocated ‘an effective Muslim solidarity’ as the basis of anticolonial struggle. (‘Pour un Islam libre dans une Algérie indépendante’, Le jeune musulman, 26 September 1952, emphasis added). For ‘communitarian’ politics among the francophone élus (often mislabelled ‘assimilationists’) in the 1930s, see Julien Fromage, ‘Innovation politique et mobilisation de masse en « situation coloniale »’, PhD diss., EHESS, Paris, 2012. There were notable exceptions, especially visible in the ‘querelle du M’ at the foundation (1955) of the Algerian students’ union, the Union générale des étudiants musulmans algériens (UGEMA), when a minority opposed the inclusion of the ‘M’ insisted upon by other young nationalist leaders. 4 Crawford Young, The African colonial state in comparative perspective (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994). 5 On the Islamist reappropriation of the revolution as a jihad for the constitution of an Islamic state, see Luc-Willy Deheuvels, Islam et Pensée Contemporaine en Algérie. La Revue alAçâla, 1971-1981 (Paris, CNRS, 1991), 111-130 and Jean-Claude Vatin, ‘Seduction and sedition: Islamic polemical discourses in the Maghreb’, in William R. Roff (ed.), Islam and the political economy of meaning: Comparative studies of Muslim discourse (London, 1987), ch.7. 6 In 1962, the Fédération de France of the FLN proposed a resolution advocating a secular republic at independence, a move that, as Mohamed Harbi points out, rang hollow in view of the instrumentalisation of Islam for enforcing discipline and solidarity throughout the revolution (interview with the author, 2004); the drafters of the Tripoli program in 1962, including Mostefa Lacheraf, also favoured a secular constitution, but were vetoed on this by Ben Bella. 7 For recent work on the cultural origins of ‘unanimism’, see Jane Goodman, ‘Acting with one voice: Producing unanimism in Algerian reformist theater’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 52,1 (2013), 167-97, and Neil Macmaster, ‘The roots of insurrection: The role of the Algerian village assembly (djemâa) in peasant resistance, 1863-1962’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 52,2 (2013), 419-47. 8 Malika Rahal, ‘Fused together and torn apart: Stories and violence in contemporary Algeria’, History and Memory 24,1 (Spring/Summer 2012), 118-51, quote at 128-9. See also Omar Carlier, ‘D’une guerre à l’autre, le redéploiement de la violence entre soi’, Confluences méditerranée 25 (Spring 1998), 123-37, and ‘Civil war, private violence, and cultural socialization: Political violence in Algeria, 1954-1988’, ch.4 in Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (ed.), Algeria in Others’ Languages (Ithaca, Cornell UP, 2002). 9 This choice of periodisation—between the domestic consolidation marked by the last coup attempt in the aftermath of independence, in December 1967, and the international watershed marked on one hand by the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, on the other by economic recession and the turn to neoliberalism in the global North—is deliberate; the near-congruence with the presidency of Boumedienne (June 1965-December 1978) is significant but also fortuitous. 10 Ibrahimi, Mémoires d’un Algérien, vol. 2, La passion de bâtir, 1965-1978 (Algiers, Casbah, 2008), 179. For the important contemporary role of social memories of this period, see Ed McAllister, ‘Yesterday’s tomorrow is not today: Memory and place in an Algiers neighbourhood’, DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2014. 11 See Mahfoud Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830-1987 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988). 12 On the developmental ambition of this period, its context, and its eventual shortcomings, see Jean-Claude Martens, Le modèle algérien de développement: Bilan d’une décennie, 19621972 (Algiers, SNED, 1973), Mohamed Benissad, Économie du développement de l'Algérie : 1962-78 : Sous-développement et socialisme (Paris, Economica, 1979), Bennoune, Making of Contemporary Algeria, Ghazi Hidouci, Algérie, la libération inachevée (Paris, La Découverte, 1995). 13 In October 1970, Belkacem Krim, one of the founding leaders of the wartime FLN and a principal opponent of Boumedienne, widely thought to have been responsible for the 1968 assassination attempt, was murdered in Frankfurt. 14 Account and extracts of Boumedienne’s speech, 19 June 1970, in Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (hereafter AAN) (1970), 252-3. 15 AAN (1970), 353-4. 16 Address to the nation, 1 November 1972, quoted in AAN (1972), 744-47 (from El Moudjahid, 1 November 1972). 17 Ibrahimi, De la décolonisation à la révolution culturelle, 1962-1972 (Algiers, SNED, 1973), 26. 18 After the absorption of the sector of ‘original education’ (al-ta‘līm al-aṣlī), a successor to the independent schools founded in the colonial period, into the orbit of National Education, it was reorganised as simply the Ministry of Religious Affairs in May 1977. 19 On the pre-independence Islamic reformist movement, see Ali Merad, Le réformisme musulman en Algérie, 1925-1940 (Paris, Mouton, 1967), Fanny Colonna, Les versets de l’invincibilité: Permanences et changements religieux dans l’Algérie contemporaine (Paris, FNSP, 1995), Kamel Chachoua, L’islam kabyle: Religion, état, et société en Algérie (Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001), and James McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge, CUP, 2006). 20 The Union générale des travailleurs algériens (UGTA, 1963—first created 1956), Union nationale des femmes algériennes (UNFA, 1963), Union nationale des paysans algériens (UNPA, 1973), and Union nationale de la jeunesse algérienne (UNJA, 1975), respectively. 21 Henri Sanson, Laïcité islamique en Algérie (Paris, CNRS, 1983). 22 Hachemi Tidjani, in Humanisme musulman no. 4 (April 1965), 53. Tidjani was commenting on lectures by Roger Garaudy and Maxime Rodinson in Algiers, but the group also denounced the presence of foreign technical advisors as new ‘native experts’. 23 Mokhtar Aniba, ‘L’Algérie musulmane’, in Humanisme musulman no. 5 (May 1965), 45. 24 For ‘fundamentalism’ in this period, see Deheuvels, Islam, 81-88. Bennabi wrote mainly in French, and had been a nationalist journalist before 1954. He produced a large number of works during and after the war of independence which remained mostly unpublished, except in Arabic translations printed in Cairo or Beirut, but French-language copies were distributed by sympathisers, especially from 1968 onwards, through the students’ mosque at Algiers University. Bennabi also wrote for the campus mosque’s bulletin, Que sais-je de l’Islam. His thought has proved sufficiently flexible that subsequent interpreters have seen in him both an Islamist and an anti-Islamist. See for example Allan Christelow, ‘An Islamic humanist in the twentieth century: Malik Bennabi’, The Maghreb Review 17,1-2 (1992), 69-83. 25 For the trajectory towards radicalisation, Deheuvels, Islam; his major source, al-Aṣāla, was closed down by the regime in 1981, a year after the UNJA launched a campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood, and as the regime made corresponding attempts (notably in accelerating Arabisation) to placate conservative opinion in cultural matters. Outside the system, the principal figures of Islamist opposition were the leading (and elderly) shaykhs Abd al-Latif Soltani and Ahmad Sahnun, both former members of the prewar reformist Association of ‘ulamā. On Islamism in this period, see Ahmed Rouadjia, Les frères et la mosquée (Paris, Karthala, 1990). 26 Quote from Qasim, ‘Hādhihi ’l-majalla’, al-Aṣāla no. 1 (March 1971), quoted in Deheuvels, Islam, 75-6. 27 Deheuvels, Islam, 237. 28 On these, see for example Mohamed Benrabah, Language Conflict in Algeria (Bristol, Multilingual Matters, 2013) and Khaoula Taleb-Ibrahimi, Les Algériens et leur(s) langue(s) (2nd ed., Algiers, Dar al-Hikma, 1997); Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence (London, Routledge, 1994) and Mounira Charrad, States and Women’s Rights (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001). 29 AAN 1972, 388 30 The Seminars too were ‘nationalised’, having originated in three modest meetings organised independently in 1969 by disciples of Bennabi in the Ministry of Religious Affairs, from the fourth seminar in1970 they were brought within the official program of the Ministry’s activities and thus both considerably expanded in scope and funding while also being brought firmly under control. 31 Aniba, ‘L’Algérie musulmane’, 47-49. 32 Quoted in AAN 1970, 360. 33 This speech was published in the inaugural edition of al-Aṣāla: Mouloud Qasim, ‘Inniya wa aṣāla/Identité et authenticité’, al-Aṣāla 1 (March 1971), 6-20 (Arabic text; French tr. pp. 3-8). Quote at p.4 (in the French). 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 4-5 (French), 11-12 (Arabic). 36 Ibid. 37 Qasim, Preface to Zakarya, Ilyādhat al-Jazā’ir. The Arabic text of the poem, with a French translation by Tahar Bouchouchi, was printed as a special supplement to al-Aṣāla no.11, under the title Hymn of Hymns: the Iliad of Algeria (Nashīd al-anāshīd aw ilyādhat alJazā’ir). 38 Zakarya, Ilyādha, 20 (in the French). 39 Ibid., 27-9, 32. 40 Ibid., 26. 41 Qasim, ‘Inniyya wa aṣāla’, 5-6 (p.14 in the Arabic). 42 Quoted in AAN (1976), 361. 43 AAN (1981), 710. 44 On the ‘Berber Spring’, the Berber cultural movement, and its subsequent political implications, see Hugh Roberts, ‘Towards an understanding of the Kabyle question in contemporary Algeria’, The Maghreb Review 5,5-6 (Sept.-Dec. 1980), 115-24, Salem Chaker, ‘L’émergence du fait berbère’, AAN (1980), 473-83, Gabi Kratochwil, Die Berber in der historischen Entwicklung Algeriens von 1949 bis 1990 : zur Konstruktion einer ethnischen Identität (Berlin, Schwarz Verlag, 1996), Paul Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2004), Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2011). 45 It should be noted here that anti-Islamist currents, too, while generally advocating a democratic and pluralist political community and a less prescriptive, less authoritarian, cultural politics, were also amenable, by the late 1980s, to a politics of exclusion that would lead to support for the ‘eradicationist’ tendency within the Algerian state during the 1990s. References Abrams, P., ‘Notes on the difficulty of studying the state’, Journal of Historical Sociology 1,1 (1988), pp.58-89. 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