From Béjaïa to Al-Quds, from Tlemcen to Algiers, Algeria has never bargained over its loyalty to the Ummah
From Béjaïa to Al-Quds, from Tlemcen to Algiers, Algeria has never bargained over its loyalty to the Ummah. Against it stand five centuries of alliances between the Sharifian throne and Madrid, Lisbon, Paris and Tel Aviv. This is the story some would rather we forgot.
Some peoples write their history in blood; some regimes rewrite it in press releases. The Moroccan throne today presents itself as the guardian of Al-Quds and the heir of Jerusalem's liberators. But history has a memory. It remembers those who answered the call, and those who looked away.
Let us be clear: this text is not aimed at the Moroccan people, a brotherly people who take to the streets for Gaza and share with us our faith, our language and a long common history. It is aimed at a power, the Makhzen, and at a constant in its policy.
Sidi Boumediene, son of Béjaïa and Tlemcen, in the service of Al-Quds
Abu Madyan Shu'ayb, whom our forefathers call Sidi Boumediene al-Ghawth, was born in 1126 in Cantillana, in al-Andalus. But it was Algeria that made him a giant. In Béjaïa, then one of the intellectual capitals of the Muslim world, he taught for many years and trained generations of disciples. Summoned by the caliph, he died on the road near Tlemcen. He rests at El Eubbad, on the heights above the city, where visitors have never ceased to come to his shrine. His living memory beats between Béjaïa and Tlemcen: it is Algerian.
Tradition holds that after his pilgrimage he joined Salah al-Din's army in Palestine and fought the Crusaders, losing his left hand. After Jerusalem was retaken in 1187, Salah al-Din granted his companions lands and quarters of the city. Linked to the name of Sidi Boumediene is the village of Ein Karem, at the gates of Jerusalem.
In 1320, a great-grandson of the saint recorded in a solemn deed the properties of this pious endowment: the Abu Madyan waqf. It became the beating heart of the Moroccan Quarter, or more accurately the Maghrebi Quarter, at the foot of Al-Aqsa Mosque. For more than six centuries, its revenues fed, cared for and sheltered North African pilgrims on their way to Mecca and Medina. When the scholar Louis Massignon studied the deed in 1949, he called it without hesitation the "Tlemcenian waqf." This was not a nationalist claim: it was the vocabulary of scholars.
Even in the twentieth century, France, then the colonial power, funded the quarter in Algeria's name. Massignon warned Paris that Algerian Islam would never forgive it for letting Sidi Boumediene's endowment perish. The bond between Jerusalem and Algeria was obvious to all, even to the occupier.
When Salah al-Din called, Marrakesh turned away
In 1189, the Crusaders besieged Acre, and the Third Crusade threatened to take back everything Islam had reconquered. Salah al-Din sent an ambassador, Ibn Munqidh, to the Almohad caliph Ya'qub al-Mansur in Marrakesh, asking for a fleet to break the blockade. According to the chroniclers, the caliph refused, offended that the letter did not address him as Commander of the Faithful. A question of protocol outweighed the fate of the Holy Land.
That was the first act of a long tradition: the calls of the Ummah have often run up against the pride and calculations of the throne of the West.
The Saadians, allies of Spain and Portugal
By the sixteenth century, the Reconquista had driven Islam out of al-Andalus. Algiers, under the Barbarossa brothers and then under the Ottoman banner, became the bulwark of the Maghreb. It took in the persecuted Moriscos and stood up to the Spanish fleets. Meanwhile, in Fez and Marrakesh, the Saadian sultans made a different choice.
Mohammed al-Shaykh negotiated an alliance with Spain against Algiers, through the Spanish governor of Oran, the occupier of Muslim land. In 1578, the pretender al-Mutawakkil brought in King Sebastian of Portugal and his crusading army to win back his throne. Ahmad al-Mansur, hailed as the greatest of the Saadians, offered a military alliance to Elizabethan England. In 1591, he sent his troops against the Songhai Empire, a Muslim kingdom, sacking Timbuktu and deporting its scholars.
In 1610, Sultan al-Ma'mun handed the town of Larache to Spain. No military defeat explains it: it was the price of Spanish support against his own brother. A land of Islam was offered to the enemy over a palace quarrel.
Emir Abdelkader, handed over by his neighbour
In the nineteenth century, France invaded Algeria. One man rose up: Emir Abdelkader, scholar, Sufi and commander, who held out for fifteen years against the foremost army in Europe. He naturally sought refuge and support from his Muslim neighbour to the west.
After the defeat at Isly in 1844, Sultan Moulay Abderrahmane signed the Treaty of Tangier, pledging to declare the Emir an outlaw. In 1847, Moroccan troops harried Abdelkader and trapped him between their forces and the French army until he surrendered. The Makhzen served as an auxiliary to the colonial conquest of Algeria. Our grandparents never forgot it.
1963: striking Algeria in its cradle
In 1962, Algeria won its independence at the cost of a million and a half martyrs. The country was exhausted, its villages burned, its institutions yet to be built. That was the moment the kingdom chose to launch the Sand War and lay claim to Tindouf and Béchar. Barely a year after liberation, a neighbour claiming brotherhood struck a people still in mourning.
Hassan II and Israel: the shadow alliance
From the 1960s, the throne built secret cooperation with Israel. The emigration of Moroccan Jews was negotiated in exchange for payments. Mossad is suspected of having lent a hand in the disappearance of opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka. Worse still, in 2016 a former head of Israeli military intelligence revealed that Israel had gained access to the deliberations of the 1965 Arab summit in Casablanca. Two years later, the Six-Day War broke out.
On the night of 10 to 11 June 1967, Israeli bulldozers razed the Maghrebi Quarter of Jerusalem. Eight centuries of history, the houses of Sidi Boumediene's waqf, families from all over the Maghreb: all vanished in a few hours beneath what would become the Western Wall plaza. Less than twenty years later, in 1986, Hassan II received Shimon Peres in Ifrane.
2020: Al-Quds traded for the Sahara
In December 2020, Rabat joined the Abraham Accords. In return, Washington recognised Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, a territory whose decolonisation the United Nations still awaits. A defence agreement followed, then drones and open security cooperation. The chair of the Al-Quds Committee bartered the Palestinian cause for a territory he himself occupies.
And now this same power wraps itself in the legacy of Bab al-Maghariba, the Gate of the Maghrebis, the last remnant of the razed quarter. It plays on a word: in Arabic, al-Maghrib means both the Maghreb and Morocco. "Al-Maghariba," the Maghrebis, thus become "the Moroccans" in its telling. But the waqf never belonged to a kingdom. It was meant for all the children of the Maghreb, from Tlemcen to Tunis, and its chief founder lies in Algerian soil. No one can claim the stones of a quarter while shaking hands with those who destroyed it.
Algeria, true to its word
Algeria has never needed to claim Jerusalem in order to defend it. It was in Algiers that the State of Palestine was proclaimed, on 15 November 1988. It was an Algerian president, Houari Boumediene, who summed up the stance of an entire people in one sentence: "We stand with Palestine, whether it is oppressor or oppressed." He bore the name of the saint of Tlemcen. Eight centuries separate them; the same loyalty unites them.
From the Saadians to today's Makhzen, the thread is unbroken: alliance with the foreigner first, brotherhood afterwards, so long as it costs nothing. From Sidi Boumediene to Emir Abdelkader, from the mujahideen of 1954 to the steadfast positions of independent Algeria, another thread runs through the centuries. Its name is loyalty. History will judge. It has already begun.
Belgacem MerbahFurther reading: Vincent Lemire, Au pied du Mur. Vie et mort du quartier maghrébin de Jérusalem (1187-1967), Seuil, 2022.
Comments
Post a Comment