Table Of ContentInventing the Berbers
THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES
Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor
Edward Peters, Founding Editor
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
INVENTING
THE BERBERS
History and Ideology in the Maghrib
RAMZI ROUIGHI
university of pennsylvania press
philadelphia
Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for
purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book
may be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www . upenn . edu / pennpress
Printed in the United States of Ameri ca on acid- free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Rouighi, Ramzi, author.
Title: Inventing the Berbers: history and ideology in the Maghrib /
Ramzi Rouighi.
Other titles: Middle Ages series.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
[2019] | Series: The Middle Ages series | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018051027 | ISBN 9780812251302 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Berbers—H istoriography. | Berbers—H istory—S ources. |
Berbers—A frica, North—H istory. | Africa, North—H istory—647-1517. |
Berbers— Ethnic identity.
Classification: LCC DT193.5.B45 R68 2019 | DDC 961/.004933—d c23
LC rec ord available at https://l ccn. loc . gov/ 2018051027
Contents
Introduction 1
PART I. MEDIEVAL ORIGINS
Chapter 1. Berberization and Its Origins 15
Chapter 2. Making Berbers 44
PART II. GENEALOGY AND HOMELAND
Chapter 3. The Berber P eople 77
Chapter 4. The Maghrib and the Land of the Berbers 105
PART III. MODERN MEDIEVAL BERBERS
Chapter 5. Modern Origins 133
Chapter 6. Beacons, Guides, and Marked Paths 164
Conclusion 192
Notes 199
Bibliography 239
Index 259
Introduction
Berbers, Maghrib: the p eople, their country. Every body knows that, and that
is what every body knows. But it has not always been the case. Before Mus-
lim Arab conquerors began using the word ربرب (barbar) to refer to people
who lived in what they called “the West” (al-maghrib), both people and
region were known by a host of other names. In fact, before Berber and
Maghrib, no one thought that the inhabitants of northwest Africa belonged
together or that the entire landmass represented a single unit. The first time
anyone thought that was in Arabic. Trying to understand this shift from one
set of names to another, one map to another, a historian f aces a series of chal-
lenges that can be separated into two general kinds. First, t here are challenges
arising from the h andling of the sources, which tend to be late and not writ-
ten to address such a question. Second, there are hurdles pertaining to the
assumptions of modern historians. These include deeply held notions about
the relation between collective identity (nation), country, religion, and lan-
guage; and a centuries- long history of interpreting medieval sources in a way
that reinforces t hese assumptions.1
If this w ere not enough, as modern academics conferred on the Berbers
characteristics of prenational groups like the Franks and the Goths, they also
envisaged their reduced nationhood. For under French colonial domination,
a modern Berber nation- state was simply not in the cards. After the Second
World War, the reaction against the devastations of nationalism and racism
did not extend to the category Berbers, which did not benefit from the critical
energy of that reaction. Instead, the category remained mired in discussions
of cultural heritage, victimized ethnic identity, and national aspirations. The
national in de pen dence of Morocco and Algeria, but not Berberia, situated
Berber identity both at the infranational level and as a counter nationalism
but with a sense of Berber temporal prec e dence (native, original, etc.) and me-
dieval Arabization and Islamization through a mixing with Arabs.2 These
pro cesses are reflected in the predominant place that anthropology, together
2 Introduction
with linguistics, occupies in the study of Berbers. Unpacking the entangle-
ments created by modern relations and forms of knowing helps identify de-
fining modalities of what it means to be Berber.
Together, t hese issues have combined to produce a peculiar consensus: the
Berbers are the indigenous inhabitants of the Maghrib, their homeland.
The basic idea is that even if the categories shifted after the seventh century,
the people still had the same ancestors. For many reasons, however, this is not
an acceptable position. No one would equate, say, Roman and Italian or Hun
and Hungarian. Doing so would banish what historians identify as the stuff of
history, and replace it with the stuff of ideology. But that is exactly what the
early Arabic authors did. They displaced the old categories by adding Berber to
them, creating a de facto equivalency among all of them: the Hawwāra became
Hawwāra Berbers; the Zanāta, Zanāta Berbers; and all became Berbers. They
also projected all t hese categories back into a remote past. They did not think
the Berbers w ere indigenous, as moderns do, but they made them the descen-
dants of Noah or tied them to some other ancient story. But for the historian,
the phenomenon is still the same: at a certain point in time, u nder conditions
that need to be ascertained, the Arabs began to populate their Maghrib with
Berbers. I call this pro cess Berberization, and it is the subject of this book.
Berberization was slow, but it eventually made associating the Berbers
with the Maghrib seem natu ral. Even today, stating that the Berbers came to
be thought of as the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa under specific
historical conditions elicits immediate puzzlement. Other than academic his-
torians and a few historically minded o thers who would find the historicity of
a social category banal, most p eople might consider that w hether one calls
them Berbers or something e lse, the p eople w ere the same. And since their
ancestors lived in the area for the longest time, they were indigenous. In the
words of an anthropologist of Morocco, scratch a Moroccan, find a Berber.3
Perhaps, but thinking in this par tic u lar way is not natu ral, e ither. Instead,
thinking historically about social categories— how they become ordinary, and
how p eople use them to order their world— situates them in relation to both
modern and premodern ideologies and scholarly crochets.
Defining Origins
Many studies on the Maghrib and its history begin with an attempt to de-
fine the Berbers as a way of introducing subject matter and cast of charac-
Introduction 3
ters.4 These introductions usually include a discussion of the etymology of
the word, its ties to the word barbarian and perhaps to the memory of the
collapse of the tower of Babel. While offering a few anecdotes on the subject
may satisfy the requirements of an introduction, a proper definition requires
a degree of accuracy and coherence that has usually led those historians who
have tried to define the Berbers to consult experts in related fields, such as
anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics.
For historical reasons, French has been the language of the most serious
attempts to define the Berbers. The best available synthesis in En glish is the
one co- authored by medievalist Michael Brett and archaeologist Elizabeth
Fentress, which takes into account the most impor tant statements in the field
and gives an accurate repre sen ta tion of the state of the question.5 As they
endeavored to formulate a coherent definition of the Berbers, Brett and Fen-
tress sought to clear a series of obstacles. Because of its quality, their defini-
tional effort is a con ve nient way to introduce the subject to nonspecialists and
give a sense of what this study intends to overcome.
Who are the Berbers and who counts as a Berber, according to Brett and
Fentress?
Just as the dialects are often mutually incomprehensible, so the
people themselves are extremely heterogeneous: the existence of
an ethnically unified “ people” is no more demonstrable for the
past than it is today. Indeed, t here are a bewildering number of
cultures, economies and physical characteristics. At best we can
define Berbers as Mediterranean. In terms of their physical
anthropology they are more closely related to Sicilians, Spaniards
and Egyptians than to Nigerians, Saudi Arabians or Ethiopians:
more precise characteristics are con spic u ous by their absence, as a
recent attempt at mapping a broad range of ge ne tic traits has
shown. We are thus immediately thrown into the prob lem of
whom we are going to call a Berber and why.6
Immediately, Brett and Fentress encounter the prob lem of the ethnic het-
erogeneity of the Berbers, which appears as a prob lem only b ecause they as-
sume that the Berbers formed a unit of some sort. If not ethnographic
unity, however, then perhaps physical anthropology—in other words, bodies
and their appearance— could deliver a unity of “looks.” It does not. A fter phys-
ical anthropology, Brett and Fentress make a foray into linguistics bringing
4 Introduction
into focus another basis for a definition of the Berbers: “The most common
response [to the prob lem of whom one calls a Berber and why] is linguistic:
Berbers are defined as people speaking Berber languages. . . . I ndeed, one of
the things that sets the Berbers apart is their language. . . . T his was often
commented on in the past, and a common myth links the odd- sounding lan-
guage to the name ‘Berber.’ . . . The Berber dialects are part of the language
group, the Afro- Asiatic, which comprises the Semitic languages and Ancient
Egyptian.”7 Linguists use formal properties of living languages such as Sīwī
and Arabic to classify them within language families like Berber and Semitic.
The study of a number of related languages allows linguists to reconstruct
the features of the parent language.8 So, although proto- Berber and proto-
Semitic are not extant or attested, it is still pos si ble for linguists to know
enough to distinguish between them, even if, in the case of t hese two families,
they share a great many features because both split from the same parent
language known as Afroasiatic. Understandably, dating the differentiation of
undocumented languages and situating their bifurcation geo graph i cally is
complicated and involves a lot of guessing. Yet, there is a great deal of good
science behind it. When it comes to proto- Berber, the consensus is that it
split from northern Afroasiatic somewhere in eastern Africa and then spread
westward from t here. T here is less of a consensus about the date of that event,
or events, but it varies from around 9,000 to only 3,000 years ago— a stagger-
ing range. Even as they work to reach more precise estimations, however, for
linguists the question of the origins of Berber is largely settled. Like Arabic
and Punic, Berber came from the East, just earlier than they did.
Brett and Fentress repeat a statement that is very impor tant among spe-
cialists: “What sets the Berbers apart is their language.” That is a good basis
for deciding whether an individual or group is Berber:
The ability to speak a Berber language gives us an objective basis
for asserting that a given individual is Berber . . . b ut if we restrict
ourselves to a linguistic definition of Berbers when discussing
their history there will be few groups we can discuss with cer-
tainty. A cultural definition appears more promising, but when
applied to the past becomes unsatisfactory. Unfortunately, this is a
common procedure: perceptions of Berber culture derived from
modern anthropology are often casually back- projected to antiq-
uity. Worse, they are then used to justify a judgment that Berbers
were culturally immobile.9
