When Joel Gordon, the editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, asked me to reexamine a notable classic book in my field of North African history, I immediately thought of one that I had reviewed favorably forty-one years ago, Abdallah Laroui's The History of the Maghrib.Footnote 1 The book is a seminal work of historical synthesis, by one of the most eminent living Maghribi scholars. It remains relevant today.
In addressing this assignment I thought it worthwhile to use the task as a way to propose areas of Maghribi studies needing further research. Secondly, this review may serve as a way to examine Laroui's own evolution in recent years based on the analysis of some of his work, several of his interviews, recorded talks he has given, and his own recent reflections. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate how his choices reflect major transformations in Moroccan society and its current political culture.
Laroui, acknowledged as one of the leading intellectuals in the Arab world, is a prolific scholar who has written more than a dozen books in French and Arabic. Two of them have been translated into English, several others into Spanish.Footnote 2 He also has written two memoirs and five novels in Arabic. In 2017 he was awarded the Abu Dhabi Shaykh Zayed award for “Cultural Personality of the Year,” with a prize of one million dirhams. Recently Mohamed V University in Rabat established a named chair in his honor.
The grandson of a Berber qaid before the protectorate and the son of a man who served in the French army, he was born in Azzamour in 1933 under colonialism. He received an excellent Moroccan education and afterward in Paris attained intellectual honors, becoming an agrégé by passing a very tough examination, which would have allowed him to find a good job in France as a professor. Instead, from 1958 to 1960 Laroui worked for the Moroccan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1960 he was cultural attaché in Cairo, and from 1962 to 1963 served as the same in Paris. He taught history at UCLA from 1967 to 1971, then, after returning home, at Mohamed V University in Rabat. He subsequently joined the Institute of Translation and Arabization and trained high school teachers for the education ministry. He ended his academic career back at Mohammed V teaching graduate courses in historical methodology. He also ran unsuccessfully for parliament and carried out a number of diplomatic missions on behalf of King Hassan II.Footnote 3
Before writing his History, Laroui made his mark by publishing two books that criticized Arab intellectuals and, by extension, Arab society following the defeat by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. Basically, he argued that the Arabs had become derivative, depending on foreign technology, capital, and personnel for their development. Arab intellectuals practiced self-censorship on issues of minorities and democracy out of fear of disrupting national unity. Laroui challenged them to reject their fantasies and face the real world.
Laroui's History: An Indigenous Approach
Along with Laroui's work on Arab ideology, The History of the Maghrib represents a new indigenous approach to reinterpreting the region's past. Concentrating on the three states of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, from Carthaginian times to the then present, Laroui demonstrates how the history of a people can be reconstructed in a new synthesis, using primarily indigenous sources, while rejecting most of the colonial scholarship that denigrated native achievements. Laroui, of course, was not alone in this endeavor, since many African and Asian historians of this period, newly liberated from European control, also deconstructed their pasts and began writing decolonized histories.Footnote 4
There were three other synthetic histories of the Maghrib available in the early 1970s when Laroui's History first appeared in French. The most important was Charles André Julien's History of North Africa: Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, from the Arab Conquest to 1830, originally published in French in 1931 in a longer version going back to prehistoric times. A shorter version, from the Arab Conquest to 1830, appeared in an English translation in 1970, edited by the more conservative Roger Le Tourneau, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of North Africa and knew the Arab sources. Both Julien and Le Tourneau depended largely on French scholarship for their syntheses so that Laroui rejected many of their conclusions, while incorporating some of their work into his own history. The Swedish Muslim historian J. M. Abun-Nasr published A History of the Maghrib in 1971, which in its first edition presented an encyclopedic, detailed history of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, but was light on analysis. Later editions of the work incorporated more synthetic material. Finally, in 1965 Mohamed Chérif Salhi's Décoloniser l'histoire du Maghreb, an important polemic, called for rewriting the history of North Africa without colonial prejudices. The book must have contributed to Laroui's reevaluation of the Maghrib's history.Footnote 5
In rereading The History of the Maghrib I was stimulated to think of areas worthy of further study. They include more work on the Saharan gold trade, which Laroui repeatedly claims is significant in North African history, without, however, explaining in any detail its determining role in state building. Laroui states simply, “All the state structures we have discussed seem to have depended primarily on outside resources: gold from the Sahara, rents from Andalusia, Mediterranean piracy, and so forth” (p. 283). We know, however, that the Maghrib, through its control of the northern portions of the gold trade with West Africa, also played a vital role in European developments. These interactions need to be explored as important corollaries to North African history. Such interrelationships could help us understand better long-term historical trends in the Maghrib as well as in Western Europe.
Laroui pays scant attention to these interrelationships. He says, for example, “The Umayyads of Spain . . . seem to have been dependent on the mineral wealth of the western Maghrib and above all on the gold of the Sahara, which was minted in Sijilmasa, Aghmât and Fez and sent to Andalusia via Cueta or Tlemcen” (p. 135). Nor does he address the trade's implications for the supposed maintenance and building of parts of the Cluny Abbey and the possible financing of the Crusades. Even if we acknowledge the correctness of Laroui's emphasis on viewing history outside of colonial biases and as a Maghrib-centered project, there are certain long-term trends that developed elsewhere, which had a significant impact on North Africa, making a rigorous insular approach less valid. Morocco's involvement in Spain and the intertwined destinies of Muslim and Catholic states also deserve more attention in a history of the Maghrib. Likewise Laroui alludes to the growing backwardness of the Mediterranean region after the discovery of the Americas, but does not explore its causes or consequences. Laroui does not deal with the consequences of the exploitation of vast reserves of new world precious metals (silver and gold), which added to global inflation and significantly lessened the importance of the Saharan gold trade.
At the same time, North African ecological problems and the cumulative effects of the poor use of some of the land added to impoverishment of several regions in the Maghrib.Footnote 6 This happened at the moment when western Europeans exploited vast expanses of fertile territory using indentured and slave labor in the new world and expanded their food supplies from the Americas and Asia while incorporating newly discovered nutritious products into their diets. Bringing global history to bear on the region allows for broader views of North Africa's changing material culture, starting especially in the 16th century.
Laroui understands but downplays the significance of the expulsion of Jews and Moriscos (Muslims who converted to Catholicism) from Spain in 1492 and the early 17th century respectively, and the migration of nearly half of them to North Africa under horrendous circumstances. He writes in his History, “Morocco gained self-awareness in its struggles against the Iberians and the Turks, in the strivings of its religious brotherhoods and through its fidelity to the heritage of Andalusian Islam” (p. 283). But scholarly consensus now concludes that the Spanish expulsion edict was really aimed at having the Moriscos embrace Christianity with vigor and was not viewed by the Castilian crown at the time as a way to rid Spain of its Muslim population (this helps to explain why 30,000 of them returned to Spain). Clearly this population, as was the case with Sephardic Jews, did not mix well with the preexisting Muslim and Jewish populations in North Africa, especially in the Ottoman regency of Algiers and in the sultanate of Morocco. In Tunisia many of the Moriscos were given land in the north where they mostly settled as agriculturalists. The Rabat-Sale region and Tetuan in Morocco developed in the 17th century into pirate havens settled by Moriscos. Their presence especially in Morocco and Algeria caused tensions, a subject that needs to be explored in more detail.
Laroui pays much more attention to the Hilali Arab migration (originating in Arabia) into North Africa of about 240,000 nomads in the 11th century and rightfully demonstrates their lasting influence on the region. In contrast, he gives short shrift in chapter 10 of his book to the influx of some 180,000 Spanish Muslims. Both groups, not just the Hilalians, were responsible for intensifying Arabization among the populations of North Africa and both had lasting significant transformative effects on North African society. The towns of Qaalat al-Andalus in Tunisia and Shafshàwan (Chefchaouen) in the Rif mountains of Morocco, for example, were settled by Andalusian refugees and to this day maintain their Spanish allure.
There has been a long debate over the origins of the Berbers. Linguists have contributed a great deal to elucidate affinities to outside groups. Much work has been done on large-scale DNA analysis of prehistoric skeletal remains to discover origins. However, as a group of scholars working in this field recently concluded, “there is little consensus regarding the overall genetic background of North African populations or their origins and expansion.”Footnote 7 Further DNA investigations may provide greater insights.
Although a Berber himself, Laroui has not manifested Amazigh loyalties and has not joined political parties, such as the Popular Movement, which militates for greater rights for this constituency. If anything, he has increasingly become a Moroccan nationalist and disdains particularisms that weaken national solidarities. Accordingly, he paid little attention in his History to Berber origins.
When Laroui published his book in French in 1970 the field of oral history was just getting under way. My former colleague at the University of Wisconsin, Jan Vansina, taught a generation of Africanists how to collect, use, and preserve oral traditions in writing African history. If used wisely in North Africa, we might better understand the Maghrib's rural history, which until now, as Laroui pointed out, is largely a blank slate. Dale R. Lightfoot and James A. Miller have begun the process in their work on the southern Moroccan town of Sijilmassa, one of the major depots for the gold trade with West Africa. Likewise the Moroccan scholar Mohamed Chatou has used poetry and oral tradition from the Rif to elucidate the history of ‘Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi in the early 20th century, but more needs to be done to fill in major gaps in our knowledge.Footnote 8
In discussing French motives and actions in Algeria during the 19th century, Laroui wrote: “In 1830 the French had no intention of destroying the Algerian state, but intended merely to replace one sovereign by another. In 1847 they still had no intention of destroying Algerian society. Even in 1870 they had not thought of destroying the traditional ties between individuals. Yet all these things were done” (p. 306). Despite Laroui's contention, before 1871, a group of French army officers looked to the North American model wherein land hungry settlers moving south and west in tandem with federal military forces eradicated or forcibly removed native peoples from land that they coveted. During the early 1960s when I worked in the French military archives at Vincennes in Paris, the librarians there were not yet organized, so they let me sit one winter next to a pot-bellied stove near the shelves where the archives were stored. I was free to read any of the files that aroused my curiosity. One shelf particularly caught my attention. It contained about a dozen boxes labeled “genocide in Algeria.” Those archives spoke of the need to copy what the Americans did: including displacement of the population to barren lands—the so-called “long marches”—where the forces of nature would annihilate or contain those that survived. Fortunately, the French officers who thought up those schemes failed to gain political support.Footnote 9
I also was bothered by Laroui's treatment of the reforms of the Tunisian Bey Ahmad I ibn Mustafa (r.1837–55), which he attributes to imitation of Ottoman Tanzimat-style reforms. The Turkish example certainly was important as a stimulant to reform, but a little known major reform movement also was simultaneously taking place among some of the ‘ulama’ of Zaytuna University, which may have had even more profound effects on future reforms and transformations in Tunisia. This reform movement was led by brilliant men such as Shaykh Mahmud Qabadu (1815–71), who was enticed by Ahmad Bey to return to Tunisia to teach Arabic at the ruler's new military school, modeled on European academies, and also to translate French military manuals into Arabic. Qabadu made it possible for religious scholars to work with the state to bring about reform.Footnote 10
This ‘ālim's brilliance, recognized by his contemporaries, allowed him to break with old patterns and bring about changes in which a group of forward-looking religious scholars would help transform Tunisia dramatically. Their actions had a lasting positive effect on the future of the country. Qabadu and his disciples, always a minority of scholars at Zaytuna, trained a core of brilliant and worldly ‘ulama’, including Muhammad Bayram (1840–89), Muhammad al-Sanusi (1851–1900), and Salim Buhajib (b. 1827), all of whom, within a progressive Islamic tradition, made it easier for the urban population to accept the massive changes that were in store for them.
Understanding their role better would also allow us to reevaluate the importance of the Middle Eastern Nahda for Tunisian developments. Most Western scholars have attributed far too much significance to external influences on the Tunisian reform movement and have neglected to examine fundamental changes within the country, which were far more important for long-term trends. Habib Bourguiba (c. 1903–2000), the first president of independent Tunisia and a major reformer himself, would not have been possible without Qabadu and the Zaytuna protégés.Footnote 11
One of the students of Shaykh Salim Buhajib was ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Tha‘albi (1876–1944), the founder of the Old Destour political party.Footnote 12 He, in turn, trained the socially conscious Zaytuni, al-Tahir al-Haddad (1899–1935), who helped organize the first Tunisian labor movement and championed women's liberation, making him a hero for many Young Tunisians.
Many leaders in the Young Tunisian movement of the 1920s owed their nationalist fervor and activism to their enlightened teachers at Zaytuna, who outshone the majority teaching there and were closer to the general population than the elite products of the often acclaimed intellectuals at the French-inspired Sidiqi College. The efforts of the Young Tunisians reverberated through the urban society and sped up transformational processes exponentially. They put Tunisia way ahead of Maghrib's conservative ‘ulama’ neighbors and opened the way for that society to accept rapid and fundamental social changes.
Laroui correctly claims that 1960s studies of the Maghrib stressed the importance of 19th-century reforms for later developments in the society, during the 20th century. For example, he argues, “the most appreciable results in the right direction have been achieved in Tunisia, thanks to its nineteenth century experience” (p. 388). Accordingly, we need more studies of these 19th- and early 20th-century transformations if we ever hope to understand fully more recent realities.
Finally, as is the case with many older male North African historians, Laroui says little about gender and women's participation in nationalism. The field of Middle East and North African gender, queer, women's, masculinity, and family studies have mushroomed in the decades since Laroui wrote his book. Despite the existence of many recent excellent studies, lacunas in our knowledge still need to be rectified. Not enough work has been done allowing us to understand the significant role in North African history of rural and working class women and men—the bulk of the population before the mid-20th century—in shaping social change and nationalism. Since many subalterns have left few written records, oral traditions, poetry, songs, and even films may provide vital material to write this history.
For example, during the 1920s a free-spirited Jewish celebrity, Habiba Msika, a product of the French language World Jewish Alliance School in Tunis, frequented Young Tunisian social clubs and had romantic affairs with some of their Muslim members. She was a major singer, dancer, and actress whose talent induced Tunisian Muslim leaders to send her to Berlin to record nationalist songs, which were smuggled back to Tunisia and played clandestinely on middle class Victrolas in major cities. One of her spurned would-be older lovers spilled kerosene over both of them and lit a match. Tens of thousands of Tunisians, mostly Muslims, attended her funeral and she is remembered to this day as a nationalist heroine.Footnote 13 At the same time, al-Tha‘albi was trying to organize Tunisian Jews to join the nationalist movement.Footnote 14 His attempt failed because many in the Jewish community in the middle and late 1920s and thereafter opted for Zionism and refused to join the Old Destour Party in any significant numbers.Footnote 15 All of this needs deeper study.
Other women across class lines played significant roles in fomenting positive social and political change. Aristocratic Muslim women in late 19th- and early 20th-century Tunis formed a salon where they led political discussions with leading male nationalist figures, providing forums for discussion and veritable schools for political organizing. Algerian women joined in and at times staged mass nationalist demonstrations in coordination with the National Liberation Front during the country's long war against France beginning in 1958. Tunisian and Moroccan women likewise flocked to their respective nationalist movements en masse and actively supported liberation from French colonialism. Although we now have some excellent studies of activist women and their social and political movements, early Maghribi 20th-century magazines need to be studied in more detail by historians, as Beth Baron has done for Egypt, so that we can understand better their large-scale support for liberation.Footnote 16
Laroui as a Reflection of Changing Moroccan Realities
At this point I would like to examine Laroui's own transformation from a democratic socialist and nationalist to someone who now believes there is room in Moroccan politics for royalism and Islam. I will raise the question of whether, in so shifting ideologically, his evolution is symptomatic of larger trends in contemporary Moroccan society.
As a successful retired professor and a prolific author, Laroui does not face the material problems that many younger people in North Africa face: lack of good jobs for those without piston, that is, a powerful relative (usually a father or an uncle) who pulls out all stops to help young women or men obtain good jobs. If you are not scintillatingly brilliant and lack connections in today's Morocco, finding good employment is a difficult task. The demonstrations daily outside of the Parliament building in downtown Rabat of unemployed and underemployed school leavers attest to a severe crisis.
Second, secular ideology has lost much of its appeal among the intelligentsia as Islamism has spread among the North African population. Few intellectuals in Morocco any longer believe in socialism, and nationalism has become instrumental in little more than holding on to the ex-Spanish Sahara. The social democratic party, the USFP (Socialist Union of Popular Forces, which changed its name from the National Union of Popular Forces, or UNFP), the party of Mehdi Ben Barka (1920–65), ‘Abdallah Ibrahim (1918–2005), ‘Abd al-Rahman Yussefi (1924–2020) and ‘Abd al-Rahman Bouabid (1922–92), all of whom I knew well, is a mere shadow of what it was in the second half of the 20th century. I had many friends in the USFP/UNFP party who believed in democratic socialism and wanted to bring about meaningful change. They are mostly gone, either dead or retired. Most of its younger leaders (there are notable exceptions, of course, but they now stand out as mavericks) no longer espouse a socialist vision, but rather have become arrivistes, like so many young middle class Moroccans, who think only of maximizing their wealth, power, and social position. As a result of jettisoning their visions of positive change, they have lost elections and become a marginalized party.
In the early 1960s I drove around with Ben Barka as he was electioneering in the Rabat neighborhood of Yaqub al-Mansur. In several of his speeches to large crowds he called for abolishing the monarchy, and I remember telling him afterward that he was treading on dangerous territory since the audience contained police spies and his incendiary words would be reported to the king. He retorted that it was now the time to do so. From that point on, I feared for my friend's life.Footnote 17
By the end of his reign, with Hassan II being attacked in the French press for his maltreatment of Moroccan officers jailed after the foiled 1971 military coup, the king gradually softened toward the Left. In 1990, in France, Gilles Perrault had published his explosive book about the king, which made waves in French political circles and shook the monarchy.Footnote 18 Under siege, by the end of the 1990s the king handed the prime ministership to the then-leader of the USFP, ‘Abd al-Rahman Yussefi (he served Hassan and his son Muhammad VI from 1998–2002). In this way, the monarchy domesticated the USFP, and stalwarts in its ranks gradually became disillusioned with the alliance.Footnote 19
Like many on the Moroccan Left, Laroui became disillusioned with the USFP and moved away from his Marxist positions. In November 1975, the Green March of 250,000 Moroccans into the ex–Spanish Sahara and its subsequent annexation to Morocco rallied the population to the throne, reinvigorated the monarchy, and gave Hassan II new legitimacy. Laroui decided to serve the throne, agreeing to head the Royal Moroccan Academy of Arts and Sciences, “a well-paid government position.”Footnote 20
As most of the Left became domesticated and the legitimacy of the ‘Alawi dynasty became fortified, Laroui jettisoned his intellectual radicalism. His newly found fondness for the Moroccan monarchical system underlies his transformation into someone accepting reality as it is, not as it should be. Impatience of youth was replaced by middle- and old-age conservative acceptance of complexities and belief in a slower evolution. In this vein, he told Driss Ksikes, the well-known intellectual, that his position on women's veiling had changed: “At the beginning, I was outraged, I could not see a veil . . . on the face of a young woman . . . without feeling violently irritated. I thought that the state should at least adopt the attitude of the Tunisian authorities and forbid the veil in places where it put public security in danger—that would be the case of a women wearing a veil while driving. . . . Then I saw that it became less and less an issue of contestation. . . . [In the end, I concluded that] [t]he policy of benign neglect was probably the best response.”Footnote 21
His transformation on this issue conforms to trends in Moroccan urban society, where veiling is often a matter of style and individual choice rather than a product of government dictate. Few young women wear veils in cities such as Rabat, Casablanca, and Marrakech, but many wear kerchiefs to cover their hair. Laroui's current position certainly is not that of a committed leftist.
In the same 2008 interview he told Ksikes, who was fined $8,000 and given a suspended three-year sentence, while his publication, Nicham, was closed, that “we can't say all that we want to say,” which is a truism in today's Morocco, where self-censorship prevails. Laroui, as always, looks for historical roots for such reticence. In an interview he gave to Spanish historian Bernabé López Garcia in 2007, he explained, “in Moroccan families, sons don't say everything to their fathers, and in public life as well. A former minister or a former administrator thinks that he should not say what he saw during his career. It's a very old sort of reserve.”Footnote 22
In another break with his past views, Laroui has moved from believing in total secularism in government to a new position in which he accepts the role of religion in politics. ‘Ali Amouzla wrote in 2015: “Abdallah Laroui has always been one of the people who advocated a break with the spiritual heritage of the Arab world and saw values of Muslim modernity as the basis of a rational humanity. In a recent interview, however, he began defending theocracy, arguing that the Arab world had not succeeded in making a democratic system take root. He did this in . . . [the Arabic Moroccan daily newspaper] Al-Masaa [where he argued that] . . . it was possible for a religious state and a civil state to co-exist . . . a just sharia state . . . this kind of co-existence is possible. This new problem arises out of the failure of communism and capitalist globalization.”Footnote 23
The failure of the February 20 movement, as part of the 2011 Arab Spring, also must have added to his disillusion. In an interview that he gave to the Moroccan magazine Zamane in 2012, Laroui argued that “[only] the king in his role as ‘ruler of the faithful’ . . . is in a position to rule on religious questions. . . .To [avoid] popularism, when the majority is passive and has grown used to supplication, the only sure formula . . . is, therefore, a coming together of democracy and theocracy. . . . Honesty generally compels me to agree with the decision-makers, even when I know that people expect someone like me to go against them.”Footnote 24
Already in 1988 Leonard Binder argued that “Laroui seems to think that a traditional monarch can do a better job of completing the [petit] bourgeois revolution” and constructing a bourgeois state (a necessity at the time for Laroui) than could a Bonapartist ruler such as Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser. Mark N. Katz noted ten years later, in 1998, in reference to Binder's comment, “This . . . is a highly prudent point of view for a scholar making his career in the Kingdom of Morocco to espouse.”Footnote 25
Reacting to Laroui's shift from Marxism to liberalism and royalism, in a scathing attack, Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi (1956–2011), the late Marxist-leaning Palestinian-American scholar was “disappointed.” He expected Laroui “to expand Franz Fanon's work. . . . Instead he takes a rigid, unduly critical position without offering sound alternatives. He alienates himself not just from the intelligentsia but also from the masses. He ends up condemning Arab culture without offering practical solutions. In his earlier works, he invites the Arab intelligentsia to fully embrace critical Marxism. . . . Half way through his intellectual career, however, [he] disavows Marxism. . . . He turns away from his former focus on the role of the state and turns the heat up on the intelligentsia. . . . Laroui completely ignores increasing social and economic gaps in contemporary Moroccan society, the entrenchment of the old guard, and increasing corruption among the ruling elite. The result is that his analysis is highly flawed.”Footnote 26
Changing geopolitics in the Arab world also have contributed to Laroui's shift from democratic socialist to cautious royalist. That, combined with a resurgence of heightened traditionalism after independence, has moved the country to the right. He explained to Ksikes in 2008 that a great “danger for the [Moroccan] regime came from countries [of the Persian Gulf region that were] less advanced . . . but possessing infinitely greater means. . . . Think about their press, their television networks, their charitable organizations, etc. The national state, in Morocco and elsewhere, has no means to resist [such pressures] and has to come to terms with these states . . . it is when confronting this potential danger that the safeguarding of national cohesion becomes a priority.”
This trend became even clearer in 2012, when “Gulf state petro-monarchies, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait, pledged $5 billion to Morocco to help finance structural projects meant to shore up the economy and tourism.” In return, from 2015 to 2019 Morocco joined the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis in Yemen.Footnote 27
The Saudis and the Moroccans are doomed to maintain a strong alliance since doing so ensures Gulf financial support for the North African state and also shores up their mutual alliance with the United States, concretized under President Trump. Moroccan troops can always be called upon by Riyadh in case of internal threats to the Saudi dynasty. Getting close to the Gulf states also assures powerful support for the Moroccan position in its competition with Algeria over the Western Sahara, a critical issue for Muhammad VI and most other Moroccans. Laroui has left behind his old Marxism and idealism and has embraced the realities of regional and local transformations and their implications for Morocco, even while trying to maintain as much of his scholarly detachment and independence as possible. However, learning how to juggle at a late age, no matter how smart and accomplished the person, is always difficult.
