1
A Desert Civilization:
The Pre-Sahara of Algeria and Tunisia, c. 1800–1830

Many of the people of the Jarid are richer than the people of Ifriqiya because they possess remarkable and diverse varieties of dates.^{[ 1]}

Traveling south from the city of Constantine, one reaches the small oasis of al-Qantara, located in a narrow gorge at the western edge of the Awras mountains. Named for the Roman bridge still in existence near the village, al-Qantara spanned several ecological and sociopolitical zones. It was a transitional point between Tell and Sahara, extensive agriculture and intensive arboriculture, and—as the painter Eugène Fromentin described it in 1848—between winter and summer.^[2] Below al-Qantara sprawls the startling greenness of Biskra, the gateway to the Sahara. From Biskra going due east to the Gulf of Gabis (Gabès) in southern Tunisia stretches a vast and more or less unified geological subregion. Low and flat, it is composed of chains of sabkhas (salt marshes, often referred to incorrectly as shatts , or chotts), interspersed by oases devoted primarily to date-palm cultivation. The alternating pattern of dun-shaded sand and meager scrub, abruptly broken by the vivid color of the oases, inspired medieval Arab geographers to describe this part of the Sahara as "the skin of the leopard." Nevertheless, the region's other appellation—balad al-'atash , or "country of thirst"—was deemed equally appropriate.^[3]

Until beset by the grave socioeconomic crises of the present century, the North African oases represented a "civilisation du désert." This civilization elicited the admiration of travelers, geographers, and writers, both Arab and later European, who were struck by the ingenious irrigation networks, flourishing handicrafts, and complex web of commercial exchanges linking the Mediterranean with the desert and the Maghrib with sub-Saharan Africa.^[4]

Biskra has always been the political, administrative, and economic center of the Ziban (singular, Zab), an archipelago of oases that stretches as far east as the region of the Suf (Souf) adjacent to the Tunisian border. Biskra's

2.
Northern Algeria, physical features. Reproduced from John Ruedy, Modern Algeria 
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), by permission of Indiana University Press.

counterpart in Tunisia is the Jarid complex, with the villages of the Nafzawa (Nefzaoua) as an appendage. Conventional studies of the pre-Sahara in Algeria and Tunisia have, for the most part, treated these areas and their populations purely within the boundaries of the nation-state.^[5] It is contended here that the oases from Biskra to the Jarid formed not only a relatively uniform geographical entity but a unified economic and sociocultural domain as well.^[6] This remained true until the middle of the nineteenth century, when a series of dramatic political changes linked to anticolonial protest in Algeria, and to state-directed reforms in Tunisia, compromised that unity. Nevertheless, the activities of religious notables, pilgrims, and merchants, who moved constantly across the borders, served as a cultural bridge between the Tunisian and Algerian pre-Sahara until the early decades of the present century.

Biskra is located at the mouth of a large depression, the Wadi Biskra, which extends from the western edge of the Saharan Atlas range to the Awras. One of the most historically important passes in this part of the Sahara was the oasis of al-Qantara, where the high plateaus of the southern Constantine abruptly give way to the desert. Known as fumm al-Sahra' (mouth of the Sahara), al-Qantara was the shortest, most practicable route for caravans, missionaries, or military contingents moving between the Tell and the Ziban, Tuqqurt (Touggourt), and Warqala.^[7] Thus, the gorge, and others like it, have historically marked the shifting limits of central government authority in this part of North Africa.

In eastern Algeria, the Ziban historically represented a march or frontier zone, due to its location at the point of confluence between central government rule from the north and that of powerful nomadic chieftains or Saharan dynasties in the south.^[8] Theoretically, the authority of the bey of the Constantine extended as far as Tuqqurt; in reality, the territory of the Namamsha confederacy and the Awras mountains constituted the terminus of effective Turkish rule. Containing some of Algeria's highest peaks, the wild massifs of the Awras formed a barrier between the northern Constantine and the desert. Because of this, the inhabitants of the southern Awras were more deeply involved in the economic and religious rhythms of the Ziban and pre-Sahara and its political life than with the north.^[9] Indeed the Awras remained a haven for rebels and dissidents for most of the colonial period; it was no accident that the Algerian revolution first broke out there. Likewise the Bu Sa'ada region to the southwest of the Hodna chain enjoyed easy access to the Ziban's oases with which both the market town of Bu Sa'ada and the small nearby oasis of al-Hamil maintained intense spiritual, commercial, and other kinds of ties.^[10] These ties

also influenced the pattern of Rahmaniyya implantation from the late eighteenth century into the next.

By holding the post of shaykh al-'arab , who was confirmed to office by the bey of the Constantine, tribal strongmen mediated relations between central governments and local populations, whether sedentary oasis cultivators or pastoral nomads; a few Saharan dynasties, such as the Banu Jallab of Tuqqurt and the Wadi Righ (Oued Rir), succeeded in maintaining a jealously guarded semi-independence from Algiers until the nineteenth century. By controlling the passageways into Ifriqiya, the deep Sahara, or the Algerian Tell, elites such as the Banu 'Ukkaz or the Banu Jallab exerted considerable political and economic clout. This was true to a lesser extent of southwestern Tunisia. There the Jarid's leading oases, Nafta and Tuzar (Tozeur), located in a narrow corridor between the shatt al-Gharsa and the shatt al-Jarid, dominated east-west exchanges between the two countries. In contrast to the situation in the southern Constantine, the beys of Tunis exerted relatively more influence upon the peoples of the Jarid through the mechanism of the annual mahalla (tax-collecting expedition). Nevertheless, the mahalla constituted more an exercise in ritualized political negotiation than an unambiguous statement about sovereign relations between the Jarid and Tunis.^[11]

The prosperity and location of a particular group of oases determined the degree of interest in—or indifference to—them by central governments seeking to maximize tributary relations with an economy of means. For pre-Saharan peoples, who sought to minimize outside fiscal interference, the relative advantage that distance from the political center conferred was partially offset by the absolute necessity of trading with cities and entrepôts in the north, particularly to obtain grains. The oases in this part of the pre-Sahara ranged in size and function from modest villages or hamlets, like Za'atsha, to regional market towns, such as Bu Sa'ada, to large, bustling caravan centers, such as Biskra, Warqala, Tuzar, or Nafta. Propinquity to trade routes was the single most important factor shaping the degree of involvement in various types of exchanges—local, regional, interregional (Tell to desert), and international (either trans-Saharan or Mediterranean). These exchange networks, however, were not necessarily discrete but fed into one another. Moreover, the presence of prominent Islamic religious and cultural institutions—madrasas, zawaya, and shrine centers—enhanced the commercial attraction of oases like Biskra, Sidi 'Uqba, or Nafta.^[12] Ethnicity combined with membership in a lineage, the product of trade, migrations, and the historically fluid interchange between sedentary life and pastoralism, fashioned both collective loyalties and social cleavages.

The inhabitants of the Ziban, the Suf, and the Jarid were predominantly Arabic speakers; a good portion of the Wadi Righ (Warqala and Tuqqurt) were Berbers or Arabized Berbers. Due to the trans-Saharan trade in slaves and other commodities, blacks inhabited some oases in relatively large numbers; for example in southern Tunisia they formed as much as one-quarter of the total sedentary population.^[13] The vast majority of the pre-Sahara's populace was Sunni Muslim of the Maliki rite, although religious minorities existed. Both the Jews and Ibadiyya (Islamic schismatics) formed religiocommercial communities distinct from their neighbors. While the Ibadites were mainly concentrated in the Mzab's seven oasis cities, small diaspora communities were found in the Wadi Righ and the Ziban. Permanent settlements of Mzabis were not permitted in the Suf since the Suwafa (inhabitants of the Suf) rightfully feared them as formidable commercial competitors. Jewish communities were scattered about in the larger oasis towns and cities—in Biskra, Warqala, Tuqqurt, Tuzar, etc.—and even in some parts of the Mzab. Jewish traders often enjoyed ties of patronage with Muslim associates and were indispensable for economic and other sorts of exchanges. The same was true of the ubiquitous Kabyle colporteurs, who also traded extensively in the Sahara as far south as Tuqqurt.^[14]

Peasant Cultivators of the Pre-Sahara

The transition from desert to oasis signifies an abrupt socioecological change from extremely low to very high population densities, and from extensive to intensive modes of resource extraction.^[15] Thus, the oases represented "mediating centers" for different groups vying for control over resources, over other human groups, and over nature itself. Here animal husbandry, commerce, industrial activities, and agriculture were juxtaposed in a remarkably intricate system seeking to utilize the meager resources of an inhospitable environment through risk avoidance. From a material standpoint, risk avoidance meant that producers, whether sedentary or pastoral, attempted to diversify production, however minimally, and to construct patron-client networks to offset natural or man-made calamities and thus assure subsistence. Yet risk avoidance was a goal pursued in the realm of politics as well and was intimately related to the narrow range of options available in the pre-Saharan economy.

Since desert rainfall is infrequent and negligible, only irrigated agriculture can support large populations. The waters that flow from the mountains above Biskra have been organized into elaborate hydraulic systems for millennia. From Roman times, the region has been populated and farmed without interruption by peasant cultivators. Like the oases of

the Jarid, Biskra was composed of more or less contiguous palm groves covering some 1,300 hectares and enclosing 150,000 date palms as well as thousands of other fruit-bearing trees. An oft-cited proverb from the Sahara holds that the date palm "likes its head in the sun and its roots in the water." Certainly the Phoenix dactylifera was the most perfectly suited to climatic conditions in the oases. And the totality of oasis economy, society, and civilization was tied in one way or another to the date-palm gardens.^[16]

The more prosperous oases combined both cash-crop, market-oriented agriculture with subsistence farming, although in relative mixes that varied from place to place. This system brought integration into larger networks of exchange which worked against social and political closure. The two principal centers for the production and marketing of dates were the Ziban, which in the last century boasted some three million productive date palms, and the Jarid-Nafzawa complex, which counted almost two million trees. These were the only regions in North Africa that produced the daqala al-nur date in quantities large enough to stimulate a considerable export sector. This type of "luxury" date was mainly a cash crop produced for sale (or barter) in local, regional, or international markets; it was also collected as a tax in kind by traditional central authorities. Many of the more common varieties of dates—and they were legion until the twentieth century—belonged both to the subsistence and to the "barter" sectors; some were mainly for home consumption while others were sought by consumers outside of the oases.^[17]

Particularly in the Jarid and the Ziban, the peasants cultivated citrus and other types of fruit trees which flourished under the shade "umbrella" provided by the date palms. Underneath this second layer of vegetation grew yet another stratum of flora—vines, vegetables, and fodder; much of this was consumed by the garden owner or cultivator and represented a short-term insurance policy against natural or political disasters. If heavy autumn rains spoiled the date crop or tribal warfare disrupted the caravan traffic bringing grains from the north, then the garden could provide adequate nourishment. A few of the oases, notably Biskra, were able to produce grains (barley and wheat), although never in quantities to achieve self-sufficiency. The demand for grains grown elsewhere in North Africa and consumed by pastoral nomads and peasants in the Sahara was the flywheel of interregional commerce between Tell and the desert. And the need to procure grains from the outside also shaped the array of political choices available to desert rebels. Apart from dates, some cash or "industrial" crops were produced in the traditional oasis economy. The Suf has long cultivated an excellent tobacco, which was highly prized among North

Africans and mainly sent to Tunisia through the contraband trade.^[18] Attempts to grow Egyptian cotton in the Ziban in the middle of the past century failed, however, to yield satisfactory results. Henna, so important for ritual-ceremonial and medicinal purposes, could be grown only in limited quantities, and imported Egyptian henna met the remainder of local needs. In the nineteenth century, these industrial plants—henna, tobacco, and wars (a plant used in dying textiles)—were raised in small quantities and used by the peasant cultivators to pay taxes or to acquire a limited range of products not produced by the local economy, particularly raw or finished silk and cotton thread needed for weaving.^[19] Since these items appeared insignificant to the overall structure of production and exchange in the oases, they were frequently overlooked in colonial economic studies. Yet their importance to the precarious peasant household economy was considerable, above all in relation to textiles made on looms in the domestic compound.

As in Asia or preindustrial Europe, textile manufacture was the single most important handicraft activity until factory-made European commodities began to compete with indigenous products in the past century. Oasis cottage industries produced a wide variety of woven articles designed to meet domestic needs and to effect various kinds of exchanges.^[20] Weaving, whether in the village or tribe, was mainly a female activity organized along a gender-based division of labor (although there were some exceptions to this general rule). After meeting household demand, family looms turned out a surplus intended for exchange in local or even regional markets. While textile production did not give rise to an artisan "class" as such, it was relatively specialized since certain types of textiles were made by specific groups. The finished products were normally not marketed by female producers but reached consumers through a series of intermediaries formed by kinship or patron-client relations or both. Local or regional specialization as well as the distribution of cottage industry fabrics created extensive trade networks.^[21]

For example, Tuzar produced an especially fine woolen burnus (a hooded cloak), while Nafta was famous for its safsari (cloak) of silk mixed with high-grade wool. Both of these were exported not only to other parts of the Maghrib but also to the Mashriq and commanded hefty prices. Their consumers were mainly urban, oasis, and tribal elites or Tunisian court notables who collected these luxury garments annually as a tax in kind from Jaridi producers.^[22] Thus, in addition to the demand for cereals and dates, the marketing of finished textiles was an important component in regional and transregional commerce and linked the southern Constantine and Tunisian Jarid with northern cities and Mediterranean ports. Taken to-

gether these three commodities—dates, textiles, and grains—created a triangular system of exchange involving merchants, peasant cultivator-weavers, and pastoral nomads. Nevertheless, the most crucial item for the Sahara in that triangular trade was grain. The incessant demand for cereals grown in the Tell would place limits upon sustained political action by desert peoples, particularly during the revolt of 1851–1854.

Beside the peasantry, other social groups participated in the political economy of the Sahara—merchants or traders, privileged saintly lineages, and pastoralists. However, rigid distinctions did not necessarily exist between either pastoral nomads and oasis cultivators or between merchants and nomads. In times of crisis, sedentary oasis dwellers have abandoned their gardens for herding or stock breeding; throughout the centuries pastoral-nomadic peoples have settled to engage in agriculture, frequently in combination with animal husbandry. During certain moments in the date cultivation cycle, pastoralists gathered in large numbers in the oases to barter their products for dates, provide transportation and guides for caravans, or offer their labor for the harvest.

Yet the pastoral nomads were both friend and foe. While they supplied indispensable goods and services, tribal groups often exacted tribute from traders and oasis inhabitants. In years of drought or insufficient pasturage, nomads raided caravans and travelers, rendered trade routes insecure, or swarmed into the oases, much to the dismay of sedentary populations. Intertribal quarrels, one main source of political unrest in the Sahara, spilled over into the social life of desert towns and villages; the reverse was also true as oasis vendettas and struggles found a resonance among allied pastoral-nomadic groups. Thus, one of the most significant elements in the Sahara's political economy was sedentary-nomad mutualism which juxtaposed complementary modes of production, resulting in both cooperation and conflict.

Pastoral Nomads of the Pre-Sahara

The Desert is Our Father, Our Mother is the Tell.^[23]

Anthropologists have observed that the phenomenon of "vertical nomadism"—a fixed, annual migratory regime linking several different ecological niches—was more characteristic of Morocco and Algeria than Tunisia. Comparing North Africa with Southwest Asia, Donald Johnson also noted that the Maghribi pattern of "oscillating pastoral movement" resembles that of the mountain nomads of the Near East who take advantage of "altitudinal seasonal variations" to subsist.^[24] In Algeria, the nomads generally remained in the Sahara, their true home, for six to seven months,

depending upon conditions. Some pastoralists possessed date-palm gardens, invariably worked by khammas (roughly, peasant sharecroppers) who often enjoyed patron-client relations or kinship ties (or both) with pastoral owners.^[25] The rest of the year was spent in the Tell, where the pastoral nomads were an inconvenience as well as an economic asset to grain cultivators. The seasonal sojourn of the pastoralists in the north had political implications. It allowed the Turkish government and later colonial authorities to levy taxes on the tribes in state-controlled markets and meant that tribal leaders maintained ties with central authorities in the Constantine.

For example, the 'Arba'a (Larba'a) of al-Aghwat (Laghouat) and the Sa'id 'Atba of Warqala spent the summer months with their herds in the western Tell below the massifs of the Ouarsenis.^[26] To the east, the pastoralists located between Biskra and Tuqqurt—the Awlad Zakri, Awlad Mulat (Moulet), Bu 'Aziz, Sharaqa, Gharaba, etc.—set out at the end of spring for the cooler high plains adjacent to Sétif or to Suq Ahras on the northeastern border with Tunisia. Those found in the immediate region of the Ziban and Wadi Righ migrated north either by going around the Awras via al-Qantara or by passing through strategic valleys in the Awras mountains, such as the pass near the village of Khanqa Sidi Naji, home to a powerful saintly lineage and Rahmaniyya zawiya by the early nineteenth century.^[27]

The semiannual displacement of nomadic peoples in Algeria, a surprisingly regular, ordered process, was still partially operative in the south as late as the Second World War. Similar sorts of long-distance, desert-to-Tell migrations did not ordinarily take place in Tunisia, where pastoral displacements were much more restricted; nor did the Saharan tribes in Morocco cross the High Atlas mountains. For Algeria this pattern has historically meant that certain kinds of exchanges, particularly those involving bulk goods and food items, have tended to take place along a north-south axis; the international trade in luxury commodities and the pilgrimage traffic between Taza (in Morocco) and Ifriqiya moved along the transversal or east-west routes.^[28] The semiannual movement of peoples and herds from desert to Tell was, therefore, an important structural component of the political economy of both precolonial and colonial Algeria. It had an impact upon the shape of collective action and popular protest and upon religious alliances between tribal groups and various Rahmaniyya centers controlled by privileged saintly lineages.

Until the colonial regime sought to erect a political cordon de sécurité around Algeria during the past century, the frontiers between the two states, which had been more or less established since the eighteenth century, were relatively porous.^[29] Commercial exchanges between the Tuni-

sian beylik and eastern Algeria flourished and were subject less to state-imposed control than to the restrictions created by tribal politics at any given moment. The very fact that recalcitrant tribes regularly fled across the fluid borders to avoid taxation constitutes in itself an implicit recognition of the territorial limits between the two regencies.

The great Sha'amba confederation, which participated in the revolt led by the Sharif of Warqala, covered an immense area in the Algerian Sahara stretching from the Mzab to the Suf in the east and as far south as Tuareg territory.^[30] Depending upon the political situation in the Tunisian beylik, small groups of Sha'amba might move as far east as the Nafzawa in Tunisia to raid the local Ghrib tribe. In contrast, the pastoral nomads of the Suf did not normally cover the enormous distances of other Algerian tribes since they tended to follow an east-west axis which brought them at times into the Tunisian Jarid and Nafzawa.^[31] Once over the border, their migratory regime and opportunities for peaceful or forced exchanges, were determined by the relations with the Tunisian tribes—the Awlad Ya'qub, the Banu Zid, and the redoubtable Hammama. Another factor was the beylical mahalla, whose annual tax-collecting forays into southern Tunisia, aimed principally at the prosperous, yet refractory, sedentary inhabitants of the Jarid, also discouraged, momentarily at least, tribal conflicts.^[32]

The decision on the part of Saharan peoples either to take up arms or to delay collective action for a more propitious moment was often a function of the pastoralists' migratory regime. In many cases, the timing of a revolt was a function of the presence—or absence—of certain tribal groups in a particular region. Annual tribal movements were in turn dictated by the unremitting search for adequate pasturage and the agrarian cycles of the oases which demanded additional labor at specific times. Thus, an ecology of political action existed prior to 1830 and would determine the terms of the colonial encounter for decades after the French conquest.

While stock breeding and animal husbandry were the mainstays of the pastoral-nomadic economy, trade and commerce—and the closely related activity of raiding—were nearly of equal importance. Pastoralists actively participated in Saharan commerce in three basic ways: the provision of transport services, the furnishing of protection, and the distribution of their own products in markets through barter or sale. To these were added middleman functions since some of the tribes, such as the Awlad Amir of the Suf, acted as commercial intermediaries between desert and steppe economies.^[33] As was the case in the oasis agrarian economy, specialization and diversification marked pastoral-nomadic production, although in rather more restricted forms.^[34]

Finally, patterned economic behavior, structured by patron-client arrangements, assured the distribution of oasis surplus outside of the pre-Sahara and represented another dimension of sedentary-nomad mutualism. For example, the Sahari tribe traditionally transported dates produced in the northern wing of the Ziban to the city of Constantine for sale, while the Awlad Darraj moved oasis products to Sétif, Bu Sa'ada, Msila, and even Algiers for commercialization.^[35] After 1830, and particularly with the fall of Constantine to the French army in 1837, these complex networks would be profoundly disrupted, much to the temporary advantage of oases in the Tunisian Jarid.

Commodity transfers over a wide geographical and political space were facilitated by pacts establishing patronage ties between oasis producers, traders, and pastoralists. In some cases these ties spanned the borders between the two Turkish regencies. Merchants from the Suf, who habitually traded in the Tunisian Nafzawa, maintained protection agreements with specific tribal groups in southern Tunisia.^[36] As long as these pacts—a sort of "insurance" premium paid in cash or kind by the caravan traders—held, the price of commodity transport was relatively low and extralocal exchanges flourished. Yet whenever tribal warfare or excessive state fiscal pressures upon accessible nomadic groups rendered raiding more lucrative than protection, the price of transport would rise according to the dangers involved, thus wreaking havoc upon Saharan commerce.

In addition to offering security to sedentary clients, pastoral-nomadic peoples have long been pivotal in another related economic activity—smuggling and contraband. In the Maghrib as well as in parts of Iran, Anatolia, and elsewhere in the Near East, pastoralists have facilitated extralegal (from the political center's point of view) exchanges due to their involvement in transport at the margins of the state. Tribal smugglers in southern Algeria and Tunisia were inevitably associated in these enterprises with oasis merchants, port traders, and even local agents of the government. Some tribes, such as the Tunisian Ghrib and the Algerian Sha'amba, came to specialize in contraband by the middle of the nineteenth century when the booming demand for European firearms and gunpowder in Algeria encouraged the trade in these prohibited "luxury" items.^[37]

As was true in sedentary-pastoralist relations, the nomads were both foe and friend of the traditional political center. If some pastoral-nomadic groups defied central governments by raiding, smuggling, and fiscal evasion of various sorts, others offered their services as irregular makhzan (i.e., in the service of the state) troops, especially in Tunisia, and assisted in tax collection. As Nikki Keddie has pointed out, the histories of Iran and

the Maghrib are comparable in many respects, due to the predominant role played by the tribal semiperiphery in political, military, and economic relationships.^[38] Tribalism, in combination with varying forms of pastoral nomadism, forged to an extent the outlines of social organization and ultimately state formation in North Africa. Thus, while the tribes were often located at the fluctuating margins of the state, they were not marginal to that state since an uneasy form of mutualism existed between political center and pastoral-nomadic society.

"Water: The Friend of the Powerful"

The inhabitants of the oases, many of whom claimed pastoral-nomadic origins, were more often than not deeply divided; these divisions frequently played into the hands of central authorities in both the Turkish and colonial periods. Moreover, tribal alliance systems, or saffs , discussed in subsequent chapters, were recreated within sedentary oasis societies, thus involving settled communities in much larger political contests. At the local level, however, daily conflicts erupted from the endless struggles over land and above all water—the "friend of the powerful."^[39] As Valensi observed with regard to Gabis, "nothing is more complex than the system of property ownership in that oasis," an observation which applies to the vast majority of oasis societies, whether in the Maghrib or elsewhere.^[40] Generally, the more slender or insecure the resources, the more intricate were the social relations managing individual or collective rights to those resources.

Islamic law and 'urf (customary law) theoretically cede to property owners the rights to water flowing upon their land.^[41] And, for the most part, French colonial jurists followed Islamic practices in matters pertaining to oasis agriculture as long as the rights of indigenous Muslims did not contradict the claims of Europeans.^[42] Water, or more accurately rights to its use, however defined, enjoyed the status of mulk (or milk , roughly, private ownership) in most, but not all, cases. Water rights could be inherited and theoretically alienated—sold, lent, mortgaged, or established as hubus (waqf , or a pious endowment). Nevertheless, in some places in the pre-Sahara of Algeria, water belonged rather to the community and was collectively held.^[43] Finally, no matter what status water enjoyed in law or in practice, disputes over water and its management invariably demanded the intervention of local religious notables, usually privileged saintly lineages.

Therefore, water represented more than just a scarce resource, it constituted a bundle of symbols to be fought over. As such water rights were the stuff of oral traditions and folklore which accounted either for group identities or communal antagonisms. The discourse of water, and of rights

to it, constituted a language which gave expression to notions of kinship and was merged with the collective veneration of powerful saints who were the guarantors of fertility and of the social order.^[44] If traditionally rank was defined, to no small degree, by access to water rights, sharp social cleavages, based solely upon that access, were partially offset by relationships of patronage, by membership in the lineage, and by shared rituals and ceremonials, especially those in veneration of the saintly notables and sufi clans.

The crucial technical as well as social problem was water distribution, and this more than anything else was the root of quotidian strife. In the Suf, underground sources were normally held and exploited directly by the owner of a particular plot, and allocation posed fewer difficulties. Yet waters flowing through extensive, complex systems, like those in the Ziban or the Jarid, had to be meticulously allotted since they irrigated gardens with numerous contiguous owners and cultivators. The most common method of repartition was by measured units of time (as opposed to volume) or a combination of time and volume units. Here the water clock, or qadus (clepsydra ), played a pivotal role.^[45]

The control and distribution of water were solely the domain of the local group or more precisely of notables from a particular community. Central government authorities rarely interfered in the collective administration of water resources, nor did the state, in this part of the Maghrib, levy any sort of tax upon water.^[46] Responsibility for the allotment of water was frequently assigned to a committee of kibar (village elders), who also safeguarded the upkeep of irrigation networks by organizing village works projects. Moreover, water distribution and control were intimately associated with supernatural events and holy persons—local oasis saints, living and dead, and the organized cults honoring them.

In some parts of the Jarid and the Ziban were local elites who laid claim to vast gardens with thousands of date palms and extensive water rights. Secular oasis notables were mainly merchants, local representatives of the state, or sedentarized nomads who did not directly exploit their holdings but relied instead upon the khammas.^[47] This desert bourgeoisie—the khassa , or "people of distinction"—was usually found in caravan cities like Tuzar, Warqala, or Ghadamis (in Tripolitania), where merchants prospered from the trans-Saharan trade and subsequently invested in land and water. Sufi notables or members of saintly lineages might also hold in various ways or have access to large tracts of land and water rights.^[48] Such property rights were partially the result of saintly involvement in commerce but were more often a product of sociospiritual services and mediating functions. By the late nineteenth century, the Rahmaniyya and, in particular,

the Tijaniyya shaykhs of the Tunisian Jarid and of southeastern Algeria controlled a significant share of the means of oasis production, part of which were recycled into the local economy through social welfare activities. The process of accumulation by the major sufi orders occurred over several generations and may have been related to the gradual demise of traditional secular elites under the colonial regimes in both Algeria and Tunisia. And the increased material fortunes of some sufi shaykhs, notably the Tijaniyya, explains the gradual political neutralization of these privileged lineages vis-à-vis their colonial masters.^[49]

Thus, the real bases of power and wealth were land and, above all, water on the one hand and the social recognition of piety and religious learning on the other hand. Involvement in trade was important to social ranking mainly when the profits from commerce were used to acquire land and water (or more land and water).

The most equitable distribution of oasis resources was found once again in the Suf with its small family-owned and exploited gardens, a phenomenon probably related to the region's peculiar hydrology. In contrast, many of the Wadi Righ's gardens were owned by surrounding nomadic peoples, such as the Awlad Mulat who employed khammas to cultivate their holdings. Yet the sedentary populations of Tuqqurt and Warqala cannot be characterized as "serfs" (the term mistakenly used by nineteenth-century European accounts) since they were not tied to the land. Indeed, some of the Wadi Righ's cultivators periodically emigrated to more favorable parts of the Algerian southeast, particularly the Ziban, and in some cases to neighboring Tunisia. And relationships of production—or exploitation—between cultivator-sharecropper and nomadic landholders varied enormously from the somewhat subjugated peasantry of Tuqqurt to rather more equal partnerships between sedentary and pastoralist.^[50] Finally, given the demographic realities of the precolonial era, characterized as relentlessly subject to "calamités démographiques en chaîne," labor was frequently a scarce commodity which militated against the abuse of cultivators.^[51] In any case, if the demands upon the peasant farmer's labor became too burdensome, migration to other oases, where conditions were less unfavorable, was an option as was migration to the north.

What this imbrication of access to, and control over, resources meant was that struggles for power—local feuds, regional conflicts, or the more rare head-on confrontations with state authorities—involved both oasis sedentary populations and pastoralists. This involvement was related in part to the fact that while membership in a lineage, whether real or "fictive," was the taproot of common identities, rights, and mutual obli-

gations, dyadic ties between groups and individuals—acquired or contractual loyalties—were also important.

The Social Morphology of the Oases

The physical morphology of pre-Saharan cities and towns was, in large measure, a reflection of ethnicity, profession, or clan-based relations forged by the permutations of centuries of tribal settlements, of saintly inmigration from Morocco, and of the traffic in humans from the sub-Sahara.

Biskra furnishes a model for social arrangements in the pre-Sahara on the eve of the French conquest. The city was divided into five factions, each having its own quarter, mosque, and gates into the gardens. One of the five main residential sections was further divided into seven smaller neighborhoods, each housing a different socioethnic group: the dar al-'abid was inhabited by sub-Saharan Africans; the dar al-haddad was occupied only by ironsmiths, universally regarded as pariahs due to their profession; another subquarter housed kin groupings of holy men of Moroccan ancestry. A second principal quarter, bab al-khaukha , or "gate of the peach trees," was made up of yet another saintly lineage and their khammas; a third section of the city was inhabited exclusively by those of mixed Turco-Arab descent, the consequence of the Ottoman garrison established in Biskra. The secular shaykhs of Biskra were always chosen from the Turco-Arab families. Other neighborhoods were inhabited by lineages from the Suf or Warqala, or by religious minorities, mainly the Mzabis and Jews.^[52]

Nafta and Tuzar in the Tunisian Jarid displayed nearly identical patterns of ethnoresidential segregation which were not unlike those found in precolonial Tunis or Constantine. The basic unit within each quarter was the patrilineage, arranged according to households. In Tuzar, composed of seven village groupings in the past century, the main conglomeration, madina Tuzar , was again divided into nine distinct sections. These were separated from one another by streets and alleys that constituted veritable frontiers in times of social conflict.^[53] Indeed, the old town quarters of Tuzar and Nafta still bear today the names of these lineages.

In most, if not all of the oases, city quarters and factions were organized into two opposing leagues, sometimes called saffs. These leagues were "diffused and abstract organizations, systems of political and antagonistic alliances, which may divide the village, the clan or even the family and which have . . . a potential rather than an actual existence."^[54] While the operation of the saffs in the precolonial and early colonial eras is not completely understood, their contextual nature indicates that the leagues

represented calculated responses to momentary situational cues rather than rigidly defined entities. Thus, their function was to manage conflict and to equalize the balance of power or, more accurately, to minimize inequities in the exercise of force rather than to prevent the outbreak of strife per se.

In terms of their dynamic, the oasis saffs often resembled those dividing the surrounding pastoral-nomadic peoples. Indeed, some of the alliance systems grouped a particular city or village quarter in the same league with a specific tribal fraction (in some cases due to earlier patterns of nomadic settlement). For example, half of Tuzar's inhabitants were allied, together with the Banu Zid tribe, in the great Bashiyya league; while the city's other inhabitants were tied to the Hammama confederation and Husayniyya saff.^[55] In southeastern Algeria, these binary political alliances were invariably activated by bitter contests between the Banu Ghana (Ben Gana) and the Bu (Abu) 'Ukkaz (Bou Akkas) clans for the coveted post of shaykh al-'arab and thus for mastery of pre-Sahara. At times, these struggles spilled over into southern Tunisia as well.^[56] Moreover, in the Saharan political game, changing sides or saff affiliation under certain circumstance was not unheard of, nor did shared league membership necessarily spare sedentary peoples from tribal harassment.

Saff-based quarrels might erupt due to the weakness of central government authority. At other times the leagues were manipulated by central authorities, who used them as a lever to influence local or regional politics and thereby to enhance the state's tenuous fiscal hold over semiautonomous groups. Conversely, the complex political choreography of the alliance systems could mean that government domination was only partial or short-lived, such as in the oases of Warqala or Tuqqurt. On the eve of the French invasion of Algeria, it appears that saff conflict had increased in the Ziban and elsewhere in the pre-Sahara. The political uncertainties created by the early stages of colonial occupation only intensified the league struggles as new and old contenders for power attempted to move onto the political center stage—or at least prevent rivals from so doing.

These conflicts, which incorporated ancient divisions into newer political alignments, meant that the achievement of a lasting consensus was a daunting task. Nevertheless, while the divided nature of oasis society was naturally a significant factor in the shape assumed by collective action immediately prior to and after 1830, all was not flux and disorder. Markets, temporary migration northward, and pilgrimage cycles honoring holy persons attenuated those forces for conflict, provided social order, and offered safety valves—in the case of outward "sedentary migration"—for unfavorable land-man ratios in the oases. And market centers in North Africa were universally regarded as politically neutral terrain, although it

is argued here that suqs (market or bazaar), fairs, and markets were also highly charged political spaces. Thus, a distinct "market ethic" can be detected in the pre-Sahara which existed alongside the "subsistence ethic" of the cultivators and worked against what James C. Scott has wrongly called the "closed and autonomous peasant utopia."^[57]

Saharan Suqs and Marketing Systems: Exchange, Communication, and Coercion

Market centers or "nodes" such as Biskra, Tuqqurt, Tuzar, and Nafta dominated attached hinterlands, composed of smaller oases, villages, and tribes, and were arranged in a solar or wheel-shaped pattern. In turn these larger Saharan trading centers constituted satellites of the two dominant commercial, cultural, and political hubs in this part of the Maghrib—Constantine and Tunis. Places like Biskra and Tuzar collected pastoral, agrarian, and artisanal products from surrounding areas and moved them up and out of the region. Conversely, "imported" items, however defined, destined for consumption in the pre-Sahara or for transshipment farther south, flowed downward through the system through chains of intermediaries.

The towns of the Jarid were particularly well placed to profit from converging trade routes since they alone were situated astride both the north-south and east-west axes of exchange. However, even prior to Ahmad Bey's (1837–1855) decrees outlawing slavery and the slave trade in Tunisia, the trans-Saharan trade was clearly languishing; thus, the Jarid prospered more from the trans-Maghribi or desert-to-Mediterranean commerce than trans-Saharan exchanges. Through the Jarid, commodities either from the Tunisian Sahil (or Sahel, meaning "olive-growing coast") or from the Tunis region were channeled into southeastern Algeria; in addition, manufactured goods from the Mashriq or from Europe were imported through the Mediterranean ports of Sfax, Gabis, and Jirba, for transshipment to the Jarid from whence they were distributed to the Algerian pre-Sahara. In addition, the Jarid was located along one of several possible overland hajj or pilgrimage routes linking the far Maghrib with Egypt and the Hijaz.^[58]

The shifting importance of various trading centers and routes is difficult to assess for the precolonial and early colonial periods. The conquest of Algeria brought the demise of the trans-Saharan traffic through Algerian entrepôts since merchants and caravans avoided French-held territory, preferring to trade when possible with the other Maghribi states.^[59] However, the Algerian oases of the Zab Sharqi (eastern wing of the Ziban), and the Suf traded extensively with both the northern Constantine and south-

ern Tunisia. After 1837, and with the revolts led by Bu Ziyan and the Sharif of Warqala between 1849 and 1855, the transversal routes leading into the Jarid and the beylik increased in importance. Severed from traditional markets to the north, the inhabitants of the southeastern Algeria shifted their commercial activities to Tunisia which also allowed political protest to endure, for a time at least.

Saharan markets differed from those in the Tell or steppe regions in two related ways, both of which had political implications. First of all, they displayed the features of urban and tribal markets.^[60] Second, they departed from the customary norms regulating the temporal-spatial occurrence of regional markets elsewhere in Tunisia and Algeria. Laurence Michalak has shown that the rotating weekly market, an ancient institution in Tunisia, did not exist in the Jarid (although today Tuzar is the site of an animated Sunday market).^[61] And from the data available in Bureaux Arabes reports and travelers' accounts, it appears that some of the Ziban's markets were also daily affairs.^[62] Thus, instead of the periodic suq staggered over a seven-day cycle, the large oases boasted daily markets, although naturally the Friday market was the most active. Those held during the winter date harvest attracted the largest and most diverse clienteles resulting in the highest volume of exchanges.

In addition, annual fairs were as significant to the economy and sociocultural life of the oasis cities as they were in other regions of North Africa. In the pre-Sahara, the fairs normally coincided with the date harvest, although in Tuqqurt the salubrity of the climate played the most decisive role in timing. In all places, the annual mawsim (literally, season, festivity, or fair) was the occasion of a vast pilgrimage in honor of powerful saints and holy persons sometimes lasting for long periods of time. It also brought together the various fractions of a single tribe or confederacy or different tribal groups for purposes of trade and piety in a politically neutral space. Akin to the mawsim was the zarda , a solemn, ritualized gathering at the tomb of a powerful local saint either to call for armed insurrection or to conclude peace between two tribes after a long period of hostilities.^[63] Moreover, daily or periodic markets, pilgrimage cycles, and yearly fairs offered an opportunity for central governments or local "big men" to intervene in provincial society and economy.

While central place theory accounts for the material and spatial features of exchange and distribution, it tends to neglect the coercive and communicative aspects of market systems. Since both fairs and markets brought together large groups of people in a relatively circumscribed area at regular intervals, they were the favored haunts of state fiscal authorities (in the more accessible oases) or of the agents of semiautonomous princes, such

as the Banu Jallab, who exacted tribute from those trading in Tuqqurt's great winter market. And if outside interference in local affairs was sporadic prior to the 1840s, nevertheless central governments in both Tunisia and Algeria drained away considerable "surplus" from places like the Jarid and the Ziban. Thus, tribute collection was another mechanism for moving various kinds of surplus out of regional economies and into larger networks.^[64]

In addition, markets and fairs were major collectors of information and news, which was then redistributed in much the same way that goods were widely dispersed. Many of the participants in today's rural suqs in Tunisia gather not only to buy or sell but also to exchange gossip and reaffirm social ties or obligations.^[65] This was all the more true in the past century. Invariably present at the mawsims and markets were storytellers and bards (maddah ) who narrated folk ballads, songs, and poetry inspired by age-old legends as well as current events. Not surprisingly, spies, either in the service of the state or of dissident groups, also frequented trading centers. And edicts and pronouncements of concern to the local community were made public. Finally, rumors ran riot in the suqs and other gathering places and as such represented the major source of information regarding events from outside.^[66] Thus, the noncommercial dimensions of the market were as crucial, perhaps more so, than those strictly economic in nature. It was here that public opinion jelled; the collective sociomoral consensus regarding leaders and political circumstances formed and expressed itself in various ways. In short, the suqs represented ready-made forums for social protest under certain conditions.

The accumulation of news, rumors, and information in the oases sprang from their position as mediating centers; the presence of pilgrimage shrines and sufi zawaya also contributed to the store of information from far and wide. In addition, the dissemination of news was further tied to an older pattern of "sedentary migration" which predated the colonial era. Like the mountainous regions of the Mediterranean Basin, oases have always formed population reservoirs that exported labor either permanently or temporarily to the cities of the rain-fed coast. And rural-to-urban or interregional migrations are not only an ancient phenomenon in the Near East and North Africa but also a widespread response to adverse conditions.

The Politics of Migration

Today oasis agriculture cannot be expanded much beyond its present limits, and emigration from places like the Jarid and the Ziban is normally permanent. In past centuries, the outpouring of men from the pre-Sahara was largely, although not exclusively, a temporary survival strategy which

served to integrate the desert semiperiphery into extralocal networks of exchange and communication. Yet it was not only those at the bottom of the social heap who sought to better their lot in life through journeys to the north. Ambitious members of provincial religious families inevitably gravitated to the bigger, more prestigious centers of Islamic learning—to Constantine, Tunis, or Algiers. The continual movements of people between desert and Tell served to urbanize even relatively isolated oases in much the same way that the annual hajj integrated the Maghrib into the wider Dar al-Islam.

The push-pull factors that brought Biskris, Warqalis, and Suwafa to the coastal cities in the past century resembled those attracting the Mzabis to northern Algeria and Tunisia. Although most scholarly attention has focused upon emigration from the Mzabi oases—an extreme form of labor movement—it may be that there were actually more non-Mzabis than Ibadis in Algiers. Prior to the French occupation, and for a certain period after 1830, Saharan peoples constituted a not insignificant proportion of the population of the qasba (casbah) in the Algerian capital. Each community inhabited a specific quarter of Algiers, formed the nucleus of a corporation under the aegis of an amin (head or master of the group), and specialized in certain professions or tasks whose allocation was regulated by custom.^[67]

For example, emigrants from the small oasis of al-Burj (el-Borj) in the Ziban, which also boasted an important Rahmaniyya zawiya, claimed exclusive "rights" to the boatman profession in the port of Algiers. While the Mzabis traditionally monopolized the occupations of grocer, butcher, and cloth merchant, the Biskris were mainly porters or water vendors; the Suwafa inevitably were masons or dealers in whitewash. If some Saharan migrants always headed for Algiers, others (the Warqalis and Suwafa) preferred Constantine and Tunis as sites of temporary employment. In Tunis, they lived under conditions similar to those in the Algerian capital and joined other groups from the Tunisian south, like the Jaridis, in the popular Bab Swaika quarter. Some of the more enterprising Algerians in Tunis used their stays in the big city to organize contraband and smuggling operations.^[68]

There were three significant features of these interregional population movements in the precolonial and early colonial eras. First, the ambiguous social status of the Saharan workers in the two capitals was reflected in the indigenous nomenclature designating their communities—barranis , or "foreigners." Being both a part of, yet apart from, urban life meant that they were less amenable to certain kinds of social control. Second, several of the professions they monopolized—particularly those of water vendor, porter, and boatman—allowed some of the barranis access to information

not available to the ordinary citizen. Finally, under the colonial regime, which conferred roughly the same status to Saharan laborers in Algiers as under the deys, these "foreigners" acquired a distinctly political dimension because they served as a rustic press service, carrying news and rumors from the capital back to the Sahara.^[69]

In the precolonial era, however, temporary labor movements did not (as far as we know) create conditions leading to enhanced politicization but rather served to reinforce the traditional order of things in the oases. Upon returning to the pre-Sahara, where the more fortunate might acquire a small garden with the proceeds from their labor, the migrants were reinserted into a cultural world revolving around the lineage, date-palm cultivation cycle, and the local saint's shrine or sufi zawiya.^[70] During the past century, the oases teemed with the awliya '—"those close to God"—who were also termed the "friends of God" or less frequently murabit , (marabout; a saint or holy man).^[71] In the Jarid, for example, the saints, both living and dead, were legion and their ranks might also, but not always, include sufi shaykhs popularly regarded as holy persons, ulama, and mystics.^[72] Present as well in the larger oasis cities, such as Biskra and Tuzar, were institutions of Islamic jurisprudence, administered by prominent local ulama, which served to integrate the community into the wider Dar al-Islam and provincial religious scholars into an international moral confraternity of defenders of the holy law (shari'a ).

The relationship of the awliya' to water, to oasis agriculture, and to the political culture of the Sahara in general was intimate and as intricate as the irrigation systems. In most areas, the presence of springs, and thus the existence of the group and life itself, was credited to the miraculous powers of legendary holy persons, such as Sidi Bu 'Ali (Abu 'Ali) al-Nafti, the patron saint of Nafta.^[73] Saints or their living descendants invariably played some part in mediating or resolving the interminable disputes over water and its distribution. And as seen from the discussion of the saff quarrels, the possibilities for conflict—involving kinship groupings, village factions, or oasis-tribal struggles—were myriad. So too were the opportunities for privileged religious lineages to acquire control over water and land by virtue of their role as highly visible social intermediaries as well as their piety, baraka (supernatural blessings), Islamic learning and literacy, and, in some cases, their knowledge of hydraulics.^[74]

Therefore, the pre-Saharan communities of eastern Algeria and southwestern Tunisia were marked by a peculiar human and political ecology as well as a particular spiritual ecology. And saint maps in the Maghrib were dynamic rather than static, fluid rather than fixed. Because the south maintained an abundance of ties with the north, the rise of a new saint and

sufi in the Kabylia in the eighteenth century—Sidi Muhammad b. 'Abd al-Rahman—eventually transformed desert holy lineages into members of the nascent Rahmaniyya tariqa.

Oh Sidi 'Abd al-Rahman,
And you the saints whose tomb is decorated with ribbons!
My heart desires to visit you
But lacks a traveling companion.
Protect, have mercy upon, my children
And rescue me from the ocean into which I have fallen.^[75]