Movement and Movements

This is also a story about various kinds of movement—physical displacements such as travel, migration, pilgrimage, flight—and social or spiritual journeys from one status to another. And movement of whatever sort

implies borders and boundaries, implicating those who either bridged frontiers or conversely kept them in place. By adhering to the nascent Rahmaniyya movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, clans of somewhat parochial saints in the Kabylia, Awras, and pre-Sahara achieved a remarkable degree of social mobility. Tariqa membership, along with popular cults celebrating the special piety of living and deceased holy persons, represented a lever for sociospiritual advancement.

If local saints served as the hinges of daily life between the natural and supernatural, saintly-sufi lineages also served as mediators between Islam as locally received and the wider Islamic ecumene. This mediation in turn was related to the kinds of movement associated with hajj , or pilgrimage, which is both physical and interior or spiritual. For Shaykh Muhammad b. 'Abd al-Rahman (c. 1715–1793/1794), founder of the Rahmaniyya order, the hajj to Mecca in 1740 brought an altered sense of Islamic community and, upon his return to Algeria, an utterly changed social standing vis-à-vis his own people. Sidi 'Abd al-Rahman's labors to effect reform and renewal in the Algerian Kabylia, his native land, ultimately gave birth to a new sufi order which by 1850 had expanded outward from its original nucleus to encompass followers in the Constantine, the Sahara, and neighboring Tunisia. After 1830 in Algeria, hajj to the East and permanent migration out of French-held lands were frequently combined as strategies for personal salvation or collective redemption. As significant as hijra, or migration, from the colony was inkimash , a form of inward religiospiritual movement or withdrawal employed by those Muslims who lacked the will or the means to depart from their homeland.

The movements of political or religious émigrés from Algeria to adjacent Islamic states—a form of self-imposed exile—were also critical to the construction of wider historical processes. I have deliberately chosen to cross back and forth between the shifting political limits separating Algeria from adjacent states because of their immense importance. In the course of the nineteenth century, the frontiers between the North African states were transformed into zones of exchange, compromise, and contest. Sufi shaykhs and their followers, merchants, recalcitrant tribes, and rebels ignored those borders, manipulating them to advantage as long as possible. In doing so, they inadvertently caused the borders to be ever more rigidly defined and carefully policed as frantic colonial officials sought to close Algeria off from external influences.

Paradoxically, the geospiritual hinterlands of some activist sufis, such as the Rahmaniyya Shaykh Mustafa b. 'Azzuz, may have been initially extended by the French inroads into the Algerian pre-Sahara. Driven into

southwestern Tunisia in 1844, 'Azzuz's relocation in the Jarid brought the turbulent frontier up to the beylik's borders. From the safety of his large, prosperous zawiya in Nafta, Sidi 'Azzuz sent out spiritual runners far and wide. By the eve of his death in 1866, he had become the focal point of a smaller movement, within the larger Rahmaniyya idiom, whose members referred to themselves as "'Azzuziyya." Functioning as a political haven and cultural redoubt for Algerians during much of the century, Tunisia (and Morocco) continued to serve as a religious and intellectual sanctuary for fellow Muslims even after 1881. Tunisia's open-door policy toward Algerian émigrés was one element, among several, that eventually brought its forced incorporation into France's expanding African empire.

Over-the-border migrations were intimately connected to the movement of information conveyed from place to place by myriad bearers and go-betweens. Access to news and rumors conferred a certain degree of mastery over events and their interpretation, even if those rumors deepened the collective sense of a topsy-turvy world. The endless cycle of rumors about revolt and imminent deliverance from the degradation of foreign rule may have contributed to outbursts of rebellious behavior in nineteenth-century North Africa. Yet they also betrayed a sense of injustice and moral uncertainty as North Africans strove to comprehend the incomprehensible.

Moreover, if improvised news and hearsay circulated far and wide among the humble and mighty alike, the information circuits came to include the doings of the French masters of Algeria or even events in Europe. 'Abd al-Qadir, the leader of initial Algerian Muslim resistance from 1832 to 1847, not only had an elaborate network of informants but also perused French newspapers to keep abreast of parliamentary debates in Paris. And Shaykh Mustafa b. 'Azzuz pressed the French explorer, Henri Duveyrier, during their 1860 meeting in the Tunisian Jarid to provide him with details about Western technology. The point is that information—like spiritual authority or political legitimacy—became, as will be argued, a commodity to be fought over and negotiated for. And in an age of intense uncertainty for both colonizer and colonized, access to news and information represented a contested arena for the powerless and empowered alike.

The biographies collected here demonstrate how people participated either willingly or unwittingly in, were buffeted by, or in some cases forged larger social processes. Indigenous political elites, religious notables, and simple folk were ensnared in translocal forces which at times gradually filtered down to the village, town, or tribe and at others burst precipitously upon them. Conversely, defiant groups on the margins of the state or just beyond the colonial state's grasp lured France into campaigns and conquests

which did not figure in imperial agendas haphazardly constructed in Paris. Thus, the European conquerors were frequently ensnared as well in regions and struggles for which they were ill prepared and for which they hastily devised solutions.

If policies and decisions made in the Métropole suffered endless permutations before reaching Algiers, grand schemes hammered out by governors-general in the capital of Algérie Française were deformed by the time they reached communities situated on the edges of the turbulent frontiers. And small-scale actions and hidden as well as explicit forms of contention contributed as much to the configurations of the colonial enterprise in the Maghrib as did large-scale movements or the decrees of those at the pinnacle of the imperial hierarchy.

My conclusions point to the need for rethinking or reimagining the constantly fluctuating dialogue between the local and the translocal; new borders and markers for recasting North African history during the past century are needed. For certain questions and certain periods, the nationstate as a unit of analysis does not suffice. Rather it camouflages or overlooks many of the significant forces and transformations occurring at the perimeters of the state or just beyond its unforeseen limits.