Arabs (23 page)

The Algerian population was made up of fiercely independent Arabs and Berbers, a non-Arab ethnic community that converted to Islam after the seventh-century Islamic conquests. With their own language and customs, the Berber population is spread across North Africa, particularly in Algeria and Morocco. The Arabs and Berbers had preserved their independence from the deys of Algiers and resisted every attempt by the Turkish garrison to tax them or impose Ottoman rule outside the major cities of Algiers, Constantine, and Oran. Thus, they shed no tears over the fall of the Regency. Even so, the Berbers and Arabs in the Algerian countryside were no more amenable to the French than they had been to Turkish rule.

As the French began to colonize Algeria’s coastal plains, the local tribes organized a resistance movement, beginning in the west of the country near Oran. The Arabs and Berbers turned to the charismatic leaders of their Sufi orders (mystical Muslim brotherhoods), which often combined religious legitimacy with a noble genealogy linking order members to the family of the Prophet Muhammad. The Sufi orders were organized into networks of lodges that spanned Algeria and commanded the loyalty of the leading men of the community. It was a natural framework within which to mount an opposition movement.

Among the most powerful Sufi communities in western Algeria was the Qadiriyya order. The head of the order was a wise old man named Muhi al-Din. Several of the leading tribes of the region petitioned Muhi al-Din to accept the title of sultan and lead the Arabs of western Algeria in a holy war against the French. When he refused, pleading age and infirmity, the tribes nominated his son Abd al-Qadir, who had already demonstrated courage in attacks on the French.

Abd al-Qadir (1808–1883) was acclaimed as amir, or leader of the tribes allied against French rule, in November 1832, at the age of twenty-four. It was the beginning of one of the most remarkable careers in the modern history of the Middle East. Over the next fifteen years, Abd al-Qadir united the people of Algeria in a sustained resistance movement against the French occupation of their country. It is no exaggeration to say he was a legend in his own lifetime—in the West and the Arab world alike.

To the French, Abd al-Qadir was the ultimate “noble Arab,” a Saladin figure whose religious convictions and personal integrity placed his motives—defending his country against foreign military occupation—beyond reproach. He was bold and audacious
in battle, pursuing a guerrilla style of warfare that brought his small forces victories against French armies more advanced than those that had routed Egypt’s Mamluks. His exploits were captured in luscious oils by the Romantic artist Horace Vernet (1789–1863), the official recorder of the French conquest of Algeria. Victor Hugo eulogized Abd al-Qadir in verse as
le beau soldat, le beau prêtre—
literally, “the handsome soldier, the handsome priest.”

To his Arab followers, Abd al-Qadir enjoyed religious legitimacy as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad (a sharif) and as the son of one of the most respected heads of a leading Sufi order. They vowed their loyalty to him and were rewarded with victories against superior forces. Abd al-Qadir’s exploits thrilled contemporaries across the Arab and Islamic world, as a “Commander of the Faithful” defending Muslim lands against foreign invaders.

Abd al-Qadir pursued a remarkably intelligent war. At one point, upon capturing some of his papers, the French were astonished to discover that he had obtained very reliable information on debates in the French Chamber of Deputies relating to the war in Algeria. He knew how unpopular the war was in French public opinion and was aware of the pressures on the government to come to terms with the Algerian insurgents.
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Armed with this intelligence, Abd al-Qadir pursued a war designed to drive the French to seek peace.

Twice he forced French generals to conclude peace treaties on his terms, granting recognition of his sovereignty and clear limits to the territory that would remain under French control. The first treaty was agreed to in February 1834 with General Louis Desmichels, and the second—the Tafna Treaty of mutual recognition—was concluded in May 1837 with General Robert Bugeaud. The latter treaty granted Abd al-Qadir sovereignty over two-thirds of the land mass of Algeria.
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Both treaties proved short-lived in the face of expansionist ambitions on both sides.

Abd al-Qadir and the French each sought to extend their authority over the eastern city of Constantine. The French argued that Constantine fell well outside the territories recognized in the 1837 treaty as part of Abd al-Qadir’s state. The Algerians retorted that the treaty set clear boundaries on French territory, which the French had violated in the conquest of Constantine. Once again, the French and Algerian positions were irreconcilable. Abd al-Qadir accused the French of breaking their word and resumed his war. On November 3, 1839, he wrote to the French governor-general:

Abd al-Qadir’s forces descended on the vulnerable French agricultural colonies in the Mitija Plain, located east of Algiers. Provoking widespread panic, they killed and wounded hundreds of settlers, putting their homes to the torch. The government in Paris was faced with a clear choice: withdraw, or commit to a complete occupation of Algeria. It opted for the latter and dispatched General Bugeaud at the head of a massive campaign force to achieve the final “submission” of the Algerian resistance to French rule.

Bugeaud faced a daunting task in his attempt to achieve total victory in Algeria. The Algerians were well organized and highly motivated. Abd al-Qadir had organized his government in Algeria into eight provinces, each headed by a governor whose administration reached down to the tribal level. These governors were paid regular salaries and were charged with maintaining law and order and collecting taxes for the state. Judges were appointed to enforce Islamic law. Government was unobtrusive, operating within the constraints of Islamic law, which encouraged farmers and tribesmen to pay their taxes.

The Algerian government raised enough funds from taxes to support a volunteer army that proved highly effective in the field. By Abd al-Qadir’s own estimate, his forces numbered 8,000 regular infantry, 2,000 cavalry, and 240 artillerymen with 20 cannons, spread equally across the eight governorates. These mobile forces were able to harass the French and withdraw from combat whenever French numbers threatened to overwhelm them in classic guerrilla war tactics.

Abd al-Qadir had also created a string of fortress towns along the ridge of the high plateau to provide his armies safe havens to escape French counterattacks. Speaking to his French captors in Toulon in 1848, Abd al-Qadir explained his strategy: “I was convinced, war having resumed, that I would be forced to abandon to you [i.e., the French] all of central inland towns, but that it would be impossible for you to reach the Sahara because the means of transport that encumbered your armies would prevent you from advancing so far.”
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The Algerian leader’s strategy was to draw the French into the interior, where the invaders would be overextended, isolated, and easier to defeat. Speaking with a French prisoner at the fortress town of Tagdemt, Abd al-Qadir warned: “You will die with disease in our mountains, and those whom sickness shall not carry off, my horsemen will send death with their bullets.”
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With both his government and his defenses better organized than ever, Abd al-Qadir was confident he would prevail once again over the French.

Abd al-Qadir did not anticipate, however, the extraordinary violence that the French would unleash on the Algerian people. General Bugeaud pursued a scorched-earth policy in the Algerian interior, designed to undermine popular support for Abd al-Qadir’s resistance—burning villages, driving away cattle, destroying harvests, and uprooting orchards. Men, women, and children were killed, and officers were told to
take no prisoners. Any of Abd al-Qadir’s men who tried to surrender were simply cut down. Tribes and villages began to turn against Abd al-Qadir to avoid suffering the fate of his supporters. The measures also devastated the rural economy, cutting Abd al-Qadir’s tax receipts.

The Algerians reeled under the French onslaught, and public support for Abd al-Qadir’s resistance movement began to crumble. As the families of his soldiers came to fear attack by fellow Algerians, Abd al-Qadir brought all of their dependents—wives, children, and elderly folk—into a massive encampment called a
zimala
. By his own description, Abd al-Qadir’s zimala was a mobile city of no less than 60,000. To give some sense of the size of the zimala, he claimed that “when an Arab lost track of his family, it sometimes took him two days to find them [within the crowd].” The zimala served as a mobile support unit for Abd al-Qadir’s army, with armorers, saddle-makers, tailors, and all the workers needed for his organization.

Not surprisingly, Abd al-Qadir’s zimala became a prime target of the French forces, keen to strike a blow against his soldiers’ morale and the support base of the Algerian army. Through good intelligence on the position of the French army and knowledge of the terrain, Abd al-Qadir was able to keep the zimala safe for the first three years of the conflict. In May 1843, however, the location of the encampment was betrayed and the French army attacked the zimala. Abd al-Qadir and his men learned of the attack too late to intervene. “Had I been there,” he reflected to his French captors, “we would have fought for our wives and our children and would have shown you a great day, no doubt. But God did not want it; I only learned of this misfortune three days later. It was too late!”
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The French attack on the zimala had the desired effect. By Abd al-Qadir’s own estimate, the French killed one-tenth of the population of the mobile encampment. The loss of their elders, wives, and children dealt a severe blow to his troops’ morale. The attack also dealt a severe material blow to Abd al-Qadir’s war effort, as he lost most of his property and the wealth of his treasury. It was the beginning of the end of his war against the French. Abd al-Qadir and his forces went on the retreat, and in November 1843, the Algerian commander led his followers into exile in Morocco.

Over the next four years, Abd al-Qadir rallied his troops to attack the French in Algeria, falling back to Moroccan territory to elude capture. The sultan of Morocco, Moulay Abd al-Rahman, had no wish to be drawn into the Algerian conflict. However, for harboring their enemy, the French attacked the Moroccan town of Oujda near the Algerian border and sent their navy to shell the ports of Tangiers and Mo-gadir. In September 1844, the French and Moroccan governments signed a treaty to restore friendly relations, which explicitly declared Abd al-Qadir outlawed throughout the empire of Morocco.
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Denied a safe haven and cut off from his resource base, Abd al-Qadir found it ever harder to fight the French, and in December 1847, he surrendered his sword to the French.

France celebrated the defeat of Abd al-Qadir as a triumph over a major adversary. One of the Algerian leader’s biographers (and admirers) reflected ironically: “The mind boggles when we think that it took seven years of combat and 100,000 men of the greatest army in the world to destroy that which the emir [prince] built in two years and five months.”
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The impact of the war on the people of Algeria was devastating. Estimates of Algerian civilian casualties number in the hundreds of thousands.

The French transported Abd al-Qadir back to France where he was imprisoned with his family. Abd al-Qadir was something of a celebrity, and the government of King Louis Philippe wanted to benefit from its prisoner’s popularity to bestow a high-profile pardon on him. These plans were disrupted by the 1848 Revolution and Louis Philippe’s overthrow. The Algerian leader was forgotten in the political turmoil of regime change in Paris. It was not until 1852 that the new president, Louis Napoleon (later crowned Emperor Napoleon III), restored Abd al-Qadir’s freedom. The Algerian leader was invited as Louis Napoleon’s guest of honor to tour Paris on a white charger and review the French troops with the president. Though he was never allowed to return to Algeria, the French gave him a pension for life and a steamship to take him to the place of exile of his choice. Abd al-Qadir set sail for Ottoman domains and settled in Damascus, where he was given a hero’s welcome. He and his family were accepted into the circle of elite families of Damascus, where he was to play an important role in communal politics. In later life Abd al-Qadir dedicated himself to a life of scholarship and Islamic mysticism. He died in Damascus in 1883.

Victory over Abd al-Qadir was only the beginning of the French conquest of Algeria. Over the next decades France continued to extend its colonial sovereignty southward. By 1847, nearly 110,000 Europeans had settled in Algeria. The next year, the settler community won the right to elect deputies to the French parliament. In 1870, with nearly 250,000 French settlers, Algeria was formally annexed to France, its non-European residents made subjects (
not
citizens) of the French state. Aside from the Zionist colonization of Palestine, there was to be no settler-colonialism in all the Middle East to match what the French achieved in Algeria.