Dr James McDougall: List of publications

The Third Edition of Brill's Encyclopaedia of Islam is an entirely new work, with new articles reflecting the great diversity of current scholarship. It appears in four substantial segments each year, both online and in print.

<p>The rupture of modernity in the nineteenth century, the ‘disembedding and recombination’ of social space and the new production of local place and global order that it occasioned, are perhaps nowhere more visible than in its most classic location, as expressed by Baudelaire and Benjamin, the city. The ‘city’, that is, both political and physical, the cité of the Enlightenment philosophes that had also belonged to a deep Mediterranean genealogy of political thought, back through the ‘umrān of Ibn Khaldun to the polis of Aristotle: the functional and ideological centre of governance, civility, law and learning, the local hub of far-flung patterns of production and exchange, the space in which public affairs could be transacted by those who recognised each other as equals. </p>

This book brings together contributors across the disciplines to examine the local, national, regional and global processes that have shaped Maghribi societies, economies and politics since the colonial period. Focusing equally on the local shape of global processes and on the broader significance of particular ‘ways of doing things’, these studies move beyond generalisations about globalisation and its impact on local societies, whether developmental or detrimental, of the ‘global in the local’, or of ‘glocalisation’. Cases range from the onset of the ‘first wave’ of globalisation in the colonial era to the most recent developments in identity politics, consumerism, and telecommunications. Contributors show how nationalising and globalising influences are seized, remade, and put to work in very different ways by High Atlas farmers or urban real estate speculators, human rights activists at the edge of the Sahara and amateur theatre actors in Mediterranean towns. Always located somewhere, these social actors nonetheless act in different ways, with different effects, at different levels of engagement, whether with each other, their own governments, or the wider world.

Studies of violence relating to the Middle East have sometimes done more harm than they have explained. Like the intended effects of the U.S. military's doctrine of “rapid dominance,” compared by its proponents to “tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes . . . famine and disease,” violence in the Middle East would appear to be “incomprehensible,” though less to “the people at large” who are affected by it than to its prolific theoreticians. Over the past two decades, much of the literature on the region as a “cauldron of war”—generating five times its share (by population size) of total global conflict since the mid-20th century—has tended to update and propagate well-known mythologies of primitivism, authoritarian personalities, and ancient hatreds. The significance of such mythopoeia has been its capacity to realize, at least in part, the conditions of its own truthfulness by shaping perception and policy, framing and enabling the infliction of a new wave of warfare on the region. Much contemporary writing on post–Cold War global crisis, the geopolitics of instability, regional conflict, and the future of warfare has not only signally failed to understand the dynamics of the Middle East but has actively contributed to the spread of violence in the region.

This article examines the role of the Ottoman state as a reference point in Maghrebi historiography through two works from each of Algeria and Tunisia and from two generations of historical writers. Ahmad al-Sharif al-Zahhar (1781–1872), naqib al-ashraf of Algiers at the end of the Ottoman regency, and the Tunisian historian and reformer Ahmad Ibn Abi Diyaf (ca. 1804–74) wrote in conditions of “crisis” in the nineteenth century; the Tunisian establishment intellectual and educator Hasan Husni Abd al-Wahhab (1884–1968) and the Algerian nationalist journalist and publicist Ahmad Tawfiq al-Madani (1899–1983) each sought in different ways to “recover” their countries' histories in the twentieth century. Comparisons and contrasts across these generations and in each country, with their different relationships to the memory of Ottoman rule and their different colonial experiences, illustrate the different ways in which the Ottoman period has been interpreted in the Maghreb. Assimilated as a “natural” aspect of the region's history in the nineteenth century, the Ottoman presence required more overt interpretive work by writers in the twentieth. Across generations, differing preoccupations about the formation of community and state determined how writers approached the Ottoman legacy, which in both cases has generally remained marginal to more widespread perceptions of history and national origins.

In an article published posthumously, in the Revue de la Me´diterrane´e in 1951, Augustin Berque, the intellectually accomplished but professionally somewhat unrecognized former Director of Native Affairs at the Government-General of Algeria, examined difficulties in the public management of religious affairs, and the failures of policy toward successive, competing spokesmen for Islam in France’s colonial possessions.1 In concluding his assessment of this thorny question, Berque addressed his reader as in an imaginary dialogue: “And so? Oh, I quite agree with you! The one great remedy is our laı¨cite´, which would leave to the Faith its secret oratory, intimate and inviolable. But [what are we to do] in the meantime?”2 There remained at the time a tenacious assumption that the empire, at least in Africa, might still endure into the unforeseeable future and that institution of a rational, public secularism as a lasting benefit of France’s rayonnement civilisationnel could still be anticipated as an ultimate goal. But, of course, “the meantime” was in fact all the time that Berque and his colleagues had, and it was running out much faster than they imagined. That as late as 1951 the well-informed, scholarly, and policymaking readers of the Revue could still be expected to imagine the relationship between imperial and Islamic authority in these terms suggests an extraordinary capacity for self-delusion, or a remarkable intractability in the terms of a debate that had been near the top of the colonial policy agenda for almost half a century.

Colonialism denied Algeria its own history; nationalism reinvented it. James McDougall charts the creation of that history through colonialism to independence, exploring the struggle to define Algeria's past and determine the meaning of its nationhood. Through local histories, he analyses the relationship between history, Islamic culture and nationalism in Algeria. He confronts prevailing notions that nationalism emancipated Algerian history, and that Algeria's past has somehow determined its present, violence breeding violence, tragedy repeating itself. Instead, he argues, nationalism was a new kind of domination, in which multiple memories and possible futures were effaced. But the histories hidden by nationalism remain below the surface, and can be recovered to create alternative visions for the future. This is an exceptional and engaging book, rich in analysis and documentation. It will be read by colonial historians and social theorists as well as by scholars of the Middle East and North Africa.

Political violence in Algeria has often been accounted for only by recourse to caricatures of a society supposedly 'intensely violent' by nature, or else rationalised as the product of a peculiar political culture and national historical experience. Departing from both approaches, this article suggests that different occurrences of both state and non-state violence must be understood as particular, distinct moments in both the recomposition and breakdown of inherently conflictual social relations. While Algerian history (including colonial history) provides many examples of the non-violent negotiation of social and political tensions, the social production and experience of violence have been written into dominant historiographies and public culture in complex ways. These complexities of the successive ways in which different moments of violence have been encoded belie both theories of the inescapable reproduction of cyclical violence as a pattern of political behaviour, and less sophisticated, but enduring, clichés of 'Algerian savagery'. © 2005 Third World Quarterly.

In an attempt to go beyond both colonial and nationalist narratives of the interwar period in the Maghreb, this paper presents a critical reading of one major, but frequently misrecognized, intellectual figure whose work (politics, journalism, writings on history and geography...) and self-representation (in his autobiography) provide valuable entry-points for analysis of the cultural and intellectual history of colonialism. A particular (salafi) type of nationalist discourse, of which al-Madanî makes himself in a sense the exemplar, is considered as stemming from the particular conditions of political, as well as intellectual and cultural, production obtaining in French North Africa. Breaking with the retranscription of nationalist discourse in its own terms as « historical recovery », I try to show how a strategy of historical invention, linked to the movement of Islamic reformism in Algeria andproduced in the intense « dialogic » of colonial domination, recast the conception of community as « nation ». This particular conception of the nation, and the role of al-Madanî as one of its significant producers, sits in a complex relationship, not only with the colonial situation from which it is born, but with the revolutionary nationalist movement which would eventually achieve independance.