Inventing the Berbers: History and Ideology in the Maghrib by Ramzi Roughi (review)

Inventing the Berbers is a suggestive title, to say the least. In fact, "no one was a Berber in northwest Africa before the seventh century" (8), when the Arab raids in the Maghrib started. Arab sources after the conquest of the territory are the first to refer to the Berbers as the inhabitants of the Maghrib.

This process, which Ramzi Roughi refers to as "Berberization"—a term for which the very title is a synonym—is therefore the main subject of this historical and ethno-anthropological study, which unfolds almost in parallel to the phenomena of Arabization and Islamization, being practically a product of them. From the first narratives of the Arab-Islamic conquest to the colonial rule in Algeria and Morocco and to the present day, the work becomes somewhat thorny, considering, in line with Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, that "Berbers had been silenced by Pan-Islamic sentiments, French colonial policies, and the political Left's tendency to 'suppress ethnic differences'" (The Berbers [Oxford 1998] 8).

Ramzi Roughi is Associate Professor of Middle East Studies and History at the University of Southern California. He is also the author of The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate: Ifrīqiyā and Its Andalusis, 1200–1400, where he discusses the significant role played by Andalusian emigrants, following the decisive advances of the armies of Castile and Aragon in Iberia, who joined the Ḥafṣid court, supporting economic arrangements and political relationships. As in this work, he stands out for his mastery of the handling of written sources, being aware of all the historiography built from the moment of its writing until the present day.

Thus, while European historiography seems to glimpse the replacement of concepts such as invasions by migrations, and the barbarian peoples begin to define and differentiate themselves ("Burgundians," "Ostrogoths," "Francs"), in the scope of North Africa, Berber maintains the meaning that medieval sources gave it at the time: the one who babbles, the one who, in this case, speaks not Latin but Arabic.

This issue is accentuated by the "Khaldunization" of knowledge about the Maghrib initiated in the nineteenth century, when the Histoire des Berbères by Ibn Khaldūn was translated into French by William McGuckin de Slane, giving language and structure to modern studies about the medieval Maghrib. As Roughi explains, the quality of Ibn Khaldūn's thinking and the breadth of his work gave the text almost immediate authority, as did the fact that he is considered the last proper medieval author, especially since many other medieval texts were not yet known nor easily accessible, and because those who studied his work preferred the French translation to the original Arabic (10–11).

Focusing now on the object of our review, the study is preceded by an introduction and followed by a masterful conclusion and is divided into three parts, each with two chapters. Part 1—"Medieval Origins"—covers the question of the Berbers' origin from a historical perspective. Part 2—"Genealogy and Homeland"—shifts the focus to how medieval authors imagined Berbers as a people and the Maghrib as their homeland. Finally, Part 3—"Modern Medieval Berbers"—deals with modern Berberization, focusing on French colonial rule in Algeria and demonstrating the centrality of Slane's French translation of Ibn Khaldūn.

Part 1 includes chapter 1—"Berberization and Its Origins"—and chapter 2—"Making Berbers." On the one hand, the first chapter "treats the question of origins as one about chronology and tries to ascertain the historical conditions that best illuminate the earliest references to the Berbers in Arabic" (11). Special attention is therefore paid to futūḥ, or chronicles of conquests, such as those by al-Wāqidī, al-Balādhurī, or Ibn-'Abd al-Ḥakam, in which Berbers appear as "an essential ingredient and a vital catalyst enabling and ordering the narration" (24). But these are not to be understood as "a conquest of the Berbers," only as raids on particular tribes...