Traditions of governance in North Africa

Abstract

The recent political convulsions in North Africa have usually been analysed as a binary confrontation between universalist political Islam and secularist democracy, with violent chaos as the price of failure. To a very large extent, this has been a reflection of analytical templates derived, respectively, from the arguments of the Salafiyyist movement of the late nineteenth century or from the European experience of the Enlightenment, as mediated through the colonial moment in the region. Both approaches have denied ideological agency to North Africa and North Africans themselves; yet, there is a long tradition of indigenous principles of governance there, both formal and informal. This paper examines some of these mechanisms, from the Khaldunian argument of the circulation of tribal elites, Moroccan concepts of communal consent and contract alongside mediation and arbitration, to Tunisia's constitutional experiment, Malek Bennabi's vision of democratic governance in Algeria or the Sanusi experience in Libya. It also considers more informal practices – the Ripublik in the Rif or the political system of the Ait ‘Atta, based on egalitarian access to water. It concludes with some observations on the roles these experiences have played in establishing political cultures which informed the outcomes of recent political change in the region.

Keywords:

• Islamic governance
• tribal structures
• mediation
• consensus
• consent

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On the concept of a collective oath, see Hart (2000, 49–83). The collective oath was essentially a declaration of lineage solidarity in support of the innocence of a member of the lineage accused of a crime.

2. Political culture is usually taken to refer to ‘the set of discourses or symbolic practices by which  … [competing] claims [about politics] are made’ (Baker 1990, 19); culture itself is best captured for our purposes by Clifford Geertz's definition of it as ‘an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life’ (Geertz 1973, 89).

3. This is best symbolised by the principles of governance enshrined in the European Union's Copenhagen Criteria, which define the access requirements for states seeking to join the European Union – a market economy, democratic governance, respect for human rights and adoption of the European acquis – and in the political and social baskets of its Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (Joffé 2013b, 298 (fn 3); Joffé 2015)

4. It should be noted that shafa'a has another meaning in Morocco where it can also mean the alienation of a woman's share in an inheritance (particularly of land) by a male relative, typically her brother, in order to protect the family patrimony.

5. The bay'a was originally, in Mecca, a handshake to conclude a commercial deal. By extension, it came to denote the formal agreement between ruler and ruled whereby the latter accepted the former's authority in return for guarantees protecting social and political order (Schacht 1974, 56).

6. At the end of the colonial period, this tradition was seized upon to argue that the Moroccan sultanate – by now a monarchy in which primogeniture rather than an elective procedure decided the succession process – should become a constitutional monarchy (Lahbabi 1958), thus demonstrating its hierocratic nature (Munson 1993, 136). That is an objective that still remains to be achieved!

7. The Beys of Tunis suffered from a similar problem over tax collection in the Jirid in the south of the country (Henia 1980)

8. The murabit (man of the ribat – fortress) represented a melding of the qass tradition of popular missionary preachers from the very early days of Islam in Basra and Kufa and the warrior tradition of the ribat, committed to jihad, typical of the Almoravid (al-Murabitun) dynasty of tenth-century North Africa. The combination of piety and military commitment came to symbolise a ritual purity in the service of Islam and thus the possession of baraka which could pass to the murabit’s descendants and, by extension, to a frequent assumption of associated sharifian status. This composite figure was to become the image of the North African populist religious leader which paralleled the more austere figure of the ‘alim or fqih and who often lay at the origins of a religious order, a tariqa (Joffé 1997, 59–62; Brett 1977a, 115–21; Brett 1977b, 7–12).

9. Religious centres for sufi orders which also acquired independent status as political powers on occasion: an example is the Sanusi order in Libya in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was, of course, the source for the Libyan monarchy until it was overthrown in 1969. Another would be the zawiya of Dila in Morocco in the sixteenth century or the Wazzani zawiya in the nineteenth. Most of these Sufi orders, or tariqas, however, had been discredited by their later tendency to compound with the colonial authorities in order to preserve economic power.

10. Thus, escalating segmental hostility would neutralise threat along the lines of the apocryphal Arab proverb, ‘I and my brothers against our cousins, ourselves and our cousins against the rest of our clan, our clan against the other clans of our tribe and our tribe against the world' (Salzman 1978, 53–70).

11. Typically described as a chequer-board of interpenetrating alliances of tribal republics (Montagne 1930),

12. These are the liff and saff coalitions where moieties of tribes (and, within tribes, tribal factions and lineages) combine together against their opposing moieties (Naimi 1991, 214–215). The same features were found in Algeria in Kabyli villages and in Libya, particularly in the Jafara Plain, where two saff-s existed, the sall al-bahr (sea coalition) and the saff al-fawqi (upper coalition) existed (De Agostini 1917).

13. Henry Munson links this submissiveness to the principle of submission to divine authority innate in Islam (Munson 1984).

14. The khams khmas clan structure represented an intermediary division between the family segments and the tribe itself. It was frequently found in nomadic and transhumant tribes in Morocco and had a vestigial presence inside sedentary tribal populations as well. It often served an economic purpose (as was the case with the Ait ‘Atta) in providing a mechanism for dividing up the usufruct rights to agricultural and irrigable land held in indivision and for distributing, at weekly markets, fines and blood money (di'a) imposed for individual or collective misbehaviour (Hart 1981, 29–39).

15. Sayyid Muhammad bin'Ali al-Sanusi al-Khattabi al-Idrisi al-Hasani, the Grand Sanusi, a sharif according to his genealogy.