Crisis and Recovery Narratives in Maghrebi Histories of The Ottoman Empire

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Crisis and Recovery Narratives

in Maghrebi Histories of the Ottoman Period
(ca. 18701970)
James McDougall
he Ottoman Empires westernmost provinces, the regencies of Tunis and Algiers, have
frequently been detached from mainstream narratives of Ottoman history. If the extension of the empire into North Africa is routinely included in narratives of the rise
of Ottoman power, these provinces seem to fade into obscurity after the golden age of the
corsair frontier in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Correspondingly, North Africa
rarely features in discussions of the often-fraught relationship between Ottoman and Arab
histories in later nineteenth-and twentieth-century Middle Eastern historiography. The early
development and longevity of a stable local dynasty in Tunis from the beginning of the eighteenth century and, conversely, the relative local instability of the frontier regime in Algiers
from the mid-seventeenth century followed by its early loss to European invasion (in 1830,
at the same time as the independence of Greece and well before the formal and permanent
loss of any other Muslim protected domain) have served in each case to foreground North
Africas significant autonomy from Istanbul, emphasizing the merely nominal sovereignty
exercised over it from the Ottoman center from well before the nineteenth century. Thus
Ottoman history seems peripheral to the major dynamics of Maghrebi history, just as the
of
Maghreb seems a periphery of the Ottoman world. At the same time, of course, the most
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salient experiences of the late Ottoman period that have so deeply shaped perceptions of the
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Ottoman past and its inherited legacy in the contemporary Mashriq were never shared by the
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Maghreb. With the partial (though important) exception of the reoccupation of Tripolitania
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from 1837 to 1911, North Africa saw no late-Ottoman modernizing tanzimat (reforming) state,
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no Young Turk revolution, and no second constitutional period in the prelude to the
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World War. North Africans experiences of the hardships of 191418 were frequently severe,
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but they unfolded in a completely different context to those of the remaining Arab provinces
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of the empire: North Africans were very distant from seferberlik, the Arab revolt, and Hashems s
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ite dynastic designs for an Arab state. The meaning of the Ottoman legacy has therefore
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necessarily been shaped quite differently in the Maghreb, and the usual preoccupations at-
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tending discussions of the question do not apply here in the same way as they do for the core
1
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ex-provinces of the Arab East.
All translations from Arabic and French are mine.

1. Seferberlik refers to the conscription, famine, and associated
sufferings of the First World War in Syria and Mount Lebanon.
Published by Duke University Press
137
138
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Nonet heless, a s scholarship on t he

nineteenth-century Tunisian state and the lateOttoman Algerian elite has suggested, the empire did remain symbolically important in the
Maghreb.2 Distant and largely self-governing it
may have been, but North Africa did not simply
fall off the map of the Ottoman world in the
eighteenth century, nor did the empire cease to
exist in the minds and worldviews of Maghrebis.
Given North Africas distinct experiences in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relative to the Arab East, then, as well as the later
close connections between Maghrebi anticolonial movements and the Arab nationalisms of
Egypt and the Levant, Algerian and Tunisian
narratives of Ottoman times might be expected
to provide a useful comparison to the betterknown and more often discussed cases of Egypt
and the Syrian lands, bilad al-Sham. We might
schematically consider such narratives as falling into two successive phases: first, those produced at the end of the Ottoman period itself,
in the long nineteenth century marked by crisis
in North Africa and the Ottoman Mediterranean as a whole, and, second, in the twentieth
century, in the age of a recovery of autonomous
historical narratives as part of the project of creating national histories against and out of European colonialism.
To investigate this pattern, this article
considers four historiographical texts, two from
each of Algeria and Tunisia and from two generations of historical writerst wo sets of near
contemporaries in each of the two generations
of crisis and recovery. The untitled memorial chronicle of Ahmad al-Sharif al-Z ahhar
(17811872), naqib al-a shraf (syndic of the descendents of the Prophet) of Algiers at the end
of the Ottoman regency, and the Ithaf ahl alzaman of Ahmad Ibn Abi Diyaf (ca.180474)
are reective works produced late in life by
writers who had witnessed, or who were living through, acute conditions of crisis in the
nineteenth century, works that have something

of the status of testimonies to a vanished or
threatened anc ien rgime from a generation
passing away. The Khulasat tarikh Tunis of Hasan
Husni Abd al-Wahhab (18841968) and Harb althalathamiata sana bayna l-Jazair wa-Isbanya by
Ahmad Tawfiq al-Madani (18991983) are pedagogical, didactic texts written by elite intellectuals who, having grown up under colonialism,
sought to recover their countries histories in
the twentieth century and to pass on a reinvigorated nationalist past to the rising generation of
a revolutionary age. To what extent and in what
ways is the Ottoman period reflected in these
histories? What is the Ottoman legacy for the
Maghrebif there is oneand how is it understood? Do the moments of crisis on one hand
and of recovery on the other make for radically different conceptions of the Ottoman past?
How, in these different moments, did Maghrebi
historiography narrate the relationship of the
empire to its westernmost periphery? Is the
imperial center important, or is it itself marginal? Is it an expression of foreign domination, obstructing the autonomous development
of internal historical dynamics (the accusation
often made against the Ottoman period by Arab
nationalist writers farther east in the twentieth
century, but also a familiar theme for African
histories more generally)? Or is it recognized as
an integral part of national development?
In contrast to the Mashriq, no single dominant narrative of an Ottoman legacy is clearly
evident, either in Maghrebi popular memory
or in the intellectual culture evidenced by
these writers: no political doctrine of al-ihtilal
al-uthmani, the Ottoman occupation, as the
Arab nations age of darkness; no social trauma
like the famine, conscription, and executions
of Syria in 191517; no intellectual controversy
over the role of the nineteenth-century empire
in the founding of modern Egypt, predominates in either Algeria or Tunisia. Instead, while
2. See, e.g., Kenneth J. Perkins, The Masses Look
Ardently to Istanbul: Tunisia, Islam, and the Ottoman Empire, 18371931, in Islamism and Secularism
in North Africa, ed. John Ruedy (London: Macmillan,
1994), chap. 2; Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and
Tal Shuval, The Ottoman Algerian lite and Its Ideology, International Journal of Middle East Studies 32
(2000): 3234 4.
3. Isabelle Grangaud, La ville imprenable: Une histoire sociale de Constantine au 18me sicle (Paris:
cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales [EHESS],
2002), 11.
4. Lemnouar Merouche, Recherches sur lAlgrie
lpoque ottomane, vol. 1, Monnaies, prix et revenus, 15201830, and vol. 2, La course, mythe et ralits (Paris: Bouchne, 2002) . For a cultural history
of the regions interior in the seventeenth century,
see Houari Touati, Entre Dieu et les hommes: Lettrs, saints et sorciers aux Maghreb (17 sicle) (Paris:
EHESS, 2004). Jacques Berque, Lintrieur du Maghreb, XV-XIX sicles (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), was and
remains exceptional for its inventive use of fragmentary source material from within Algerian society
in the early modern period. One of the major sources
of this work has recently been reexamined in Elise
Voguet, Entre ralits sociales et construction juridique: Le monde rural du Maghreb central daprs
les nawazil Mazuna (IX-X V sicles), 2 vols. (PhD
thesis, Universit Paris 1, 2005). Most scholarship, including much important work done by Algerian historians (e.g., Nasreddine Saidouni, La vie rurale dans
lAlgrois de 1791 1830, 2 vols. [PhD thesis, Universit Aix-Marseille 1, 1988]) has continued to rely on
European, especially French and Spanish, sourceson

which, of course, much interesting work also remains
to be done. More recently, a new generation of Algerian and French researchers working in Ottoman-era
sources has begun to produce new work especially
on social and urban history. See, e.g., Grangaud, La
ville imprenable; Grangaud, Masking and Unmasking the Historic Quarters of Algiers: The Reassessment of an Archive, in Walls of Algiers: Narratives
of the City through Text and Image, ed. Zeynep elik,
Julia Clancy-Smith, and Frances Terpak (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), chap. 6; Fatma
Zohra Guechi, Qsantina fi ahd Salah, bay al-b ayat
(Constantine, Algeria: Media-P lus, 2005); Fatiha
Loualich, Al-hayat al-hadariyya fi beylik al-gharb
al-jazairi hawl al-qarn al-thaman ashara (magister
thesis, University of Algiers, 1994); and Loualich, Les
esclaves noirs Alger (fin du XVIII-dbut du XIX
sicle): De lesclave laffranchi, vers une relation
dallgeance, Mlanges de lcole franaise de Rome
115 (2003): 51322.
5. First published in 1954, this work went through
several further editions in Algiers and Beirut, the latest I have found being the seventh edition (1994).
Maghrebi Histories of the Ottoman Period (ca. 18701970)
The Ottoman period in Algeria has often been

ignored or at best has seemed unloved in the
countrys historiography, whether French or Arabic.3 The leading Algerian Ottomanist, Lemnouar Merouche, whose recent and ongoing work
has provided the first really detailed account of
the social and economic history of the regency
to appear since independence, points out that
the distant echoes of imperial sovereignty persisted surprisingly long in Algerian cultural
memory and quotidian practice: as late as the
mid-t wentieth century, the Friday prayer in rural
mosques in the east of the country was still said
in the name of the last-reigning Ottoman sultan.4 But earlier historians had tended to look
to earlier centuries for an Algerian history,
139
Crisis and Recovery Narratives in
Algeria: The Forgotten Frontier?
seeing the Ottoman period as one of merely foreign intrusions. Abd al-R ahman ibn Muhammad al-Djilali, a leading scholar and teacher of
history associated with Islamic reformist free
schools in Algiers, placed the focus in his Tarikh
al-jazair al-amm on the indigenous dynasties
of the medieval period and on the west-central
Maghreb, ending his account of a henceforward
embattled Algeria in 1554 with the Ottoman
forces occupation of Tlemcen and the end
of the citys Ziyanid dynasty that had resisted
them.5 In more popular perceptions, the (limited and anecdotal) evidence seems to suggest
that, when remembered at all, the Ottoman
period seems an unimportant parenthesis or an
oppressive alien overlay.6 In more expanded accounts, the Ottoman presence is held to have
developed a regional incapacity for resistance,
which in the last analysis objectively prepared
the ground for colonialism.7 The most liberal
of colonial-era French writers, Charles-A ndr
Julien had already made a similar judgment in
the 1960s: Algeria in 1830 remained, in law, a
province of the Ottoman empire; in fact, it was
a colony of exploitation run by a minority of
Turks with the aid of indigenous notables.8
Such views were not simply the effects of
lingering orientalist prejudice or of nationalist
preoccupation with explaining the absence of a
national Algerian state that might have been
capable of resisting the conquest. Much of the
James McDougall
for different reasons in each case, the Ottoman

past has generally remained marginal to more
widespread, contemporary popular perceptions
of history and the national past, Maghrebi historians have taken a variety of approaches to the
Ottoman state as part of, or as standing outside,
the past of their community/nation. For these
North African writers, differing preoccupations
about the formation of community and state in
their own times have, since the last quarter of
the nineteenth century, largely determined the
significance of the Ottoman period in the longer span of Maghrebi historical narratives.
6. Anecdotally, outside the self-consciously patrician

circles of certain urban centers, most Algerians today
seem to view the Ottoman period as unimportant. Its
monuments have not generally received significant
attention and have only recently, in some places,
been subject to conservation measures (which have
not always been consistently pursued). Recounting a
childhood encounter with a woodsman in the mountains south of Blida in the late 1930s or early 1940s,
Sadek Hadjers (later leader of the Algerian Communist Party) tells how the mountain folk referred
jokingly to Algerians from the lowlands as Turks
(Ana jabaili wa antum al-turk! [I am a mountain
man and you are the Turks!]) and retailed gruesome
stories of the tortures inflicted by Ottoman tax collectors on recalcitrant populations in the old days
(interview with the author, Paris, June 2009).
7. Mohsen Toumi, Le Maghreb (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France [PUF], 1982), 27, quoted in Grangaud, La ville imprenable, 11.
8. Charles-Andr Julien, Histoire de lAlgrie contemporaine: La conqute et les dbuts de le colonisation
(Paris: PUF, 1964), 1.
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negative perception of the regency that became

entrenched in subsequent accounts seems to
stem from the serious crisis that afflicted the
state in the early nineteenth century. The popular oral histories of the mid-nineteenth century
that lamented Ottoman corruption, oppression,
and treachery as the cause of the countrys collapse to the power of the Rumis (Christians/
French) expressed the crisis of legitimacy in
popular perceptions into which the Ottoman
beylik (regency ) had fallen during the economic
and political instability of the early 1800s.9 The
emir Abd al-Q adir ibn Muhyi al-Din, hero of
Algerian resistance to the midcentury French
conquest, himself inherited a recent, local, familial, and religious tradition of revolt against
the regency in the west, where his own statebuilding experiment was based. His bitterest enemies during his wars with the French were the
formerly Ottoman-loyalist makhzen families
of the beylik al-gharb (the Oranais) who largely
rallied to the new French sultans in the course
of the conquest. As with much elsei n land
tenure and social structuredominant perceptions recorded at the time of the conquest were
frozen in later accounts of Ottoman Algeria and
have tended to obscure other realities.
A very different picture is painted in the
memoirs of al-Zahhar. Al-Zahhar, the son of
a saintly, scholarly, and aristocratic family that
traced its descent from the Prophet through
the Idrissids and al-A ndalus, held office as naqib
al-ashraf of Algiers at the end of the Ottoman
regency, witnessed the instability of the early
1800s, and lived through the conquest, serving
both the emir Abd al-Q adir in the west and
his rival, Ahmad Bey, the last governor of Constantine, in the east before going into exile in
Morocco.10 He spent time in French captivity on
the Ile Sainte-Marguerite, anda stonishingly,
but in the context of a certain aristocratic rallying to the new regime under Louis-Napoleons
Second Empirereturned to Algiers and re-
covered a position of social distinction that the

family sustained until after the First World War.
The memoirs (in fact only partly dealing with
the events of the authors own time) are drawn
from the surviving part of a manuscript written
at the end of his life, apparently as a chronicle
of the Ottoman Regency, which was reportedly
hidden from the French authorities and published only after independence.
Al-Zahhars narrative, though manifestly
produced from a firsthand experience of crisis,
is not one of crisis. Rather, it is the normality
and normative nature of rule in the Ottoman
state that is uppermost; while the empire itself
is not a prime focus of attention, the emphasis is
placed on the legitimacy and good order of the
regency as seen by a major notable whose family has been neart hough hardly part ofits
centers of power since the sixteenth century.
Organized as a classic regnal chronicle, with
portraits of successive deys (rulers), accounts of
their actions, wars, building works, and so on,
the text chronicles the proper functioning of
the state under properly invested rulers. The
investiture in 1766 of Mehmet Osman Pasha as
new dey of Algiers is emblematic of the presentation of a well-ordered state:
The nadi wuzara [circle of ministers] met and entrusted Mehmed Osman Pasha with rulership,
and the following day the agha [commander] of
the soldiers, with his deputy, the whole council
and the two muftis [chief religious officials], the
judges, the naqib al-a shraf, and the notables of
the people, gathered at the residence of the sovereign. Mehmed Pasha sat down on the throne
of the ruler, and the ulema [religious scholars]
first gave him the baya [oath of investiture], followed by the naqib al-a shraf, the ministers, the
whole council and all the people, and he put on
the robe of office. Then the cannon were fired
and the procession set out, and he went up to
his house with his escort ... and he appointed
to office those who merited appointment, and
dismissed those who merited dismissal.11
9. See, e.g., the lament on the fall of Algiers attributed to the poet el-Haj Abd al-Qadir and translated
in Alf Andrew Heggoy, The French Conquest of Algiers:
An Algerian Oral Tradition (Athens: Ohio University
Center for International Studies, 1986); and the meddah (popular folksinger) repertoire collected circa
1905 and published by Joseph Desparmet, La Conqute raconte par les indigenes, Bulletin de la Socit de Gographie dAlger 130 (1932): 44456.
10. The dates for al-Z ahhar are those given in the
published version of the memoirs, Mudhakkirat
al-hajj Ahmad al-Sharif al-Zahhar naqib al-ashraf alJazair (Algiers: Socit Nationale dEdition et de Diffusion [SNED], 1974). According to Marthe Gouvion
and Edmond Gouvion, he was born in 1796. Gouvion
and Gouvion, Kitaab ayane al-m arhariba (Algiers:
Fontana, 1920), 177.
11. Al-Zahhar, Mudhakkirat, 23.
12. Ibid., 13137. Another, possibly less reliable, contemporary source, that of William Shaler, the U.S.
consul in Algiers, gives a very different account of
Ali Khodja as an unbalanced despot. Shaler, Sketches
of Algiers (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard and Company,
1826).
If this is an old mans lament for a time

passing away, a moving illumination of what
one might call the end of a world, it is also
an expression of a recognizably canonical and
long-established idiom of historical sensibility.14
The Ottoman order is not to be judged by the
standards of its progress toward (so-called) rational statehood or even its ability to resist foreign invasion: it is simply part of the natural
13. Al-Zahhar, Mudhakkirat, 141.

14. Berque, Intrieur du Maghreb, 398.
its affairs tended toward a disturbance of their

proper order and the waning of Islamic civilization, and the dominion of war over most of it,
and the departure of its people into the open
desert, seeking aid for themselves against the
enemy, until they came to beg among the tents
of the Arabs, and they tasted suffering, and hunger, and fear, and the signs [of their city] were
obliterated and its symbols struck out, and all
that was good about it vanished. Its notables perished, its scholars dwindled away, its poets fell silent. Its writers and public speakers were struck
dumb. And such is the way with countries, when
the course of their civilization is run, and thus they
come to a halt, according to the will of God most high,
and they retreat, falling into decline until their
condition arrives at the point that we have described. Perhaps they are completely destroyed,
and become entirely desolate. (178; emphasis
added)
141
fairs [qaimun bi-anfusihim] as the Algerians are

(14647). Thus the autonomy of the regency is
complementary to, indeed underwritten by, the
higher sovereignty of the sultan.
There is therefore no sense of Ottoman
culpability for the fall of Algiers or of Ottoman
decline more generally. Rather, for al-Zahhar,
the fall of the well-ordered state into disorder
and conquest is accounted for in recognizably
Khaldunian terms of the cyclical rise and fall
of umran (settled civilization) (178). In its age
of glory, Algiers was the capital of the central
Maghreb, unfurled on the winds of victory, its
f leet arrayed in line, its arsenal made great;
the affluence of its inhabitants multiplied, its
scholars and poets increased in number, but
subsequently
James McDougall
A similarly positive picture is given of the later

(and all-too-short-lived) attempt by Ali Khoja
Dey, in 1817, to suppress the factional politics of
the Janissaries in Algiers and recenter the failing state around a strengthened central government: For the benefit of all the people ... the
fires of fitna [dissension] were extinguished
and a properly canonical order enforced on the
city: obligatory attendance at communal prayer,
the suppression of alcohol and fornication,
and the application of al-h add al-shari [Koranic criminal penalties].12 Husayn Dey, the last
ruler of the regency before the conquest, was a
man of reason and religion, who had consideration for the ulema, the ashraf, and the salihin
[scholars, descendents of the Prophet, and holy
men].13
The extent to which al-Z ahhars beylik
is a specifically Ottoman state is not made explicitindeed, it seems not to be an issue requiring attention. Although the broader imperial context is clearly assumedthe importance
accorded in the text to the Greek war of independence is an indication of thist he Turkish
rulers in this account are legitimate primarily
by virtue of their respect for Islamic norms and
are part of an urban oligarchy responsible to,
and supported by, the Arab notability of the city.
The sultan in Istanbul, referred to as mawlayna
(our lord), nonetheless only really appears
in the narrative when he is called upon in 1821
as arbiter of the conflict between the warring
neighbors of Algiers and Tunis, and tellingly,
the account of the negotiations is a diatribe
against the Algerian envoy, a violent man without eloquence; it would have been better to send
a madman from the maristan [asylum] at Algiers
rather than that ass, who boasts to the sultans
ministers that the Tunisians are our raaya
[subjects] like the Greeks are yours, and we
take from them like you take from the Greeks.
In reply, a wise Ottoman minister explains to
the ass that the land is the Sultans land and
no enmity should arise between Muslims... .
The Tunisians are entrusted with their own af-
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and divinely arranged order of things, with its

appointed time to flourish and to diminish.
For the texts editor, the journalist and
historian al-M adani, the publication, in the
1970s, of al-Zahhars manuscript that had been
entrusted to him in the 1930s obeyed a very
different logic and historical worldview: it was
avowedly part of a project of national recovery. Al-Madani was the most prolific of a small
group of Algerian nationalist intellectuals writing in Arabic from the 1920s through to the
postindependence period.15 A sometime director of newspapers and theater companies, he
was a spokesman for the Algerian revolution in
Arab countries, served as minister of culture in
the first provisional government of 1958, and was
independent Algerias first minister of religious
affairs before retiring from politics to direct the
professionalized National Center for Historical
Studies in Algiers in the 1970s and its journal,
Majallat al-tarikh. He had already extensively
used al-Zahhars text as a source for his Muhammad Uthman Pasha (1937), a biographical paean
to the stable and prosperous reign of Mehmet
Osman Dey at the end of the eighteenth century,
and referred to it (among many other sources)
under the title of History of the Last Eighty Years
of Ottoman Algeria in his most substantial work,
Harb al-thalathamiata sana bayna l-Jazair waIsbanya.16 In this text, a celebration of Algerias
three hundred years war in defense of Islam
against the crusading prolongation of the Spanish reconquista, beginning with the fall of Granada and ending with the recapture of Oran
(the Spanish presidio in western Algeria finally
retaken by Ottoman forces in 1792), a much
firmer and explicit connection than that visible
in al-Zahhars chronicle is drawn between the
Ottoman state-a s-caliphate and the regency as
simultaneously an independent, internally unified, protonational state and as an integral part
of a sovereign Muslim empire.
In part this is because, by the 1960s, the
rehabilitation of the Ottoman periodignored
15. Al-Madani was a prominent middle-class intellectual and cultural-political activist, first in the Tunisian Destour and then in the Algerian Islamic reformist movement. See James McDougall, Soi-m me
comme un autre: Les histoires coloniales dAhmad
Tawfiq al-Madani, Revue des mondes musulmans et
de la Mditerrane, nos. 9598 (2002): 95110. For the
or, as in the Mashriq, cast as an impediment to

national revivalwas, to an explicitly Islamic
nationalist writer, long overdue. French narratives of Ottoman despotism and early Algerian
histories that referred to the regency as an alien
predation seemed to the current of thought
represented by al-Madani to have served a nefarious colonial agenda of cutting Arab-Muslim
Algeria off from its historical moorings in the
cultural and spiritual centers of the eastern
Mediterranean, and the Maghrebs true history
and destiny could only be properly understood
if these were restored.17 More than this, however,
and far from having been an alien domination
that prepared the ground for colonialism, the
Ottoman era stands in this work as a golden
age of the Muslim Maghreb, when Algeria had
fought victoriously as dar al-jihad, the bastion
of struggle, on the front line of Islam against
the crusading enemy. This is a nationalist history in which Arab and Muslim are synonymous and in which an overarching Islamic historythough one conceived in terms of secular
geopolitics rather than in al-Zahhars cyclical
moral economyprovides the framework of the
narrative: Just as the vicious catastrophe [alnakba al-arima, i.e., the reconquista] struck the
Muslims of al-A ndalus ... , and as the star of
Islam set in the European lands of the Muslim
west, a radiant Islamic star began to spread its
light over the lands of the Muslim east; the star
of the Ottoman Turkish dynasty.18
The Ottoman intervention in North Africa, by the agency of the two heroes Aruj and
Khayr al-Din Barbarossa (15562), therefore
comes as the regions salvation from an implacable Spanish aggression: the brothers follow an
Islamic policy of allegiance to the Ottoman
sultan and their war in the central Maghreb is a
tenacious struggle for the salvation of the land
of Islam from the claws of Spanish crusaderism (jihad marir fi sabil inqadh watan al-islam min
bayna barathin al-salibiyya l-isbaniyya) (17172).19
The internal opposition they face from rival
larger context, see James McDougall, History and the

Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
16. Ahmad Tawfiq al-Madani, Harb al-thalathamiata
sana bayna l-Jazair wa-Isbanya, 14921792 (Algiers:
SNED, [1972?]).
17. See, e.g., Si Amar ou Sad Boulifa, Le Djurdjura

travers lhistoire (Algiers, 1925).
18. Al-Madani, Harb al-thalathamiata sana, 56.
19. The Arabic rendering of their names is retained
for simplicity; properly speaking only Aruj was surnamed Barbarossa.
In general, modern Tunisian perceptions of

the Ottoman era have tended to be considerably more positive, though not necessarily any
more central to conceptions of the national past,
than those prevalent across the border in Algeria. Unlike the inheritors of the history of the
Algerian Regency, whose rulers remained an
ethnically and ideologically distinct oligarchy,
Tunisians have been able to look back more
straightforwardly to an autochthonous dynasty,
the successful local indigenization of the Ottoman state, a longer established and effective
sovereign independence that survived almost to
the end of the nineteenth century in conditions
of relative reciprocal equality with its European
homologues, and the experience of a significant,
if only partially successful, local tanzimat.21 The
great reforming minister of the late nineteenth
century, Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi, although he
20. Republic of Algeria, Ministry of National Education, Kitab al-tarikh li l-sana l-ula min al-talim althanawi, 1st ed. (Algiers: Office nationale des publications scolaires, 20056), 24.
21. Tunisian research on the Ottoman period has been
particularly encouraged by the work of Abd al-Jalil
Temimi and the Fondation Temimi (Zaghouan), responsible for numerous conferences and publications
on the subject. Recent work on early modern-e ra
sources has especially focused on urban, social, and
family history. See, e.g., Abdelhamid Larguche, Les
ombres de la ville: Pauvres, marginaux et minorits
Tunis (XVIII et XIX sicles), 2nd ed. (Tunis: Centre de

publications universitaires, 2002); Lela Blili, Parent
et pouvoir dans la Tunisie houssaynite, 17051957
(PhD thesis, University of Tunis 1, 2004); Sami Bergaoui, Des Turcs aux Hanafiyya: La construction
dune catgorie mtisse Tunis aux XVII et XVIII
sicles, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 60 (2005):
20928; and the several Tunisian contributions in
Odile Moreau, ed., Rforme de ltat et rformismes
auMaghreb, XIXme-X Xme sicles (Paris: LHarmattan, 2009). I am grateful to Muhammad Oualdi for
discussion of Tunisian Ottomanist research.
143
Tunisia: Provincial Nation-State
had a very classical and very Ottoman-imperial

biographyarriving in North Africa from the
Mashriq as a Mamluk and returning to Istanbul
at the end of his careeris the greatest of a series of recognizable, perfectly legitimate ancestors for the contemporary Tunisian state, society, and intellectual culture.22 It is noteworthy
that the Husaynid monarchy itself, whose servant he was, plays no such role and that there
are no equivalent figures to be found in Algeria.
Tunisia as nation-state emerges directlya nd
unproblematically, it seemsfrom Tunis as imperial province. Unlike Algeria, again, in Tunisia the Ottoman aspect of the states lineage has
no particular need of explicit justification in the
contemporary period. The envisaged recovery
of Tunisian sovereignty in the colonial period
has a more recent set of symbolic references
of its own to which it can cling. Interestingly
enough, it is in the earlier period, during the
crisis of the state-strengthening reformist project in the second half of the nineteenth century,
when those referencest he 1857 ahd al-aman
(security covenant/fundamental pact) that laid
the ground for the 1861 constitution and the
constitution itselfwere fragile and under attack, that the explicit connection to the Ottoman state seemed to need underlining.
Our third text is a product of precisely this
moment of crisis. The Ithaf ahl al-zaman fi akhbar
muluk Tunis wa-ahd al-aman of the scholar and
minister Ibn Abi Diyaf is, unlike al-Z ahhars
brief and only partially surviving chronicle, a
massive, multivolume work that has become a
classic reference point in Tunisian historiography. Like al-Zahhars text, though, it seems to
be the product of a personal and political crisis, written at the end of a long and eventful life
spent observing and participating in the political travails of a region facing quickly changing
James McDougall
Algerian notables is intrigues and deceptions

(174)the young Algerian state they create by
uniting the disparate regions of central North
Africa becomes a part of the Ottoman imperium, the furthest edge of its glorious vastness
(197). At the conclusion of the three hundred
years war thus begun, the final peace with
the Spaniards is signaled by sending two jars of
water from the wells of Oran aboard a Spanish
ship to Istanbul as an announcement of the
conquest to the Ottoman sultan-caliph and as
confirmation of the connection [of the regency]
to the caliphal state (526).
Algerian school texts today, in the first
year of the secondary school history course,
begin the modern history of the Maghreb by explaining the regions place in the wider Muslim
world under the rule of the Ottoman Islamic
caliphate.20
22. Born probably sometime between 1820 and 1825,

he arrived in Tunis in 1846, spent the years 185357
in Paris on government business during which time
he gathered material for his important treatise on
government, Aqwam al-masalik fi marifat ahwal almamalik (1867); his tanzimat ministry lasted from
1873 to 1877 and was responsible for several major
initiatives including the foundation in 1875 of the
leading educational institution, the Sadiqi College.
After the fall of his ministry, he served as vezir-i azam
(prime minister) in Istanbul, where he died in 1889.
144
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and challenging times. Begun in 1862, the book

was completed ten years later, in the year of alZahhars death and only two years before Ibn
Abi Diyaf would himself pass away. Thus it was
mostly written, as Khalifa Chater points out in
his introduction to the recent reedition of the
text, after [Ibn Abi Diyafs] gradual distancing from the palace, immediately after the 1864
rebellion and Muhammad al-Sadiq Beys [shift
of] support to Mustafa Khaznadar against the
reformist party [rijal al-islah]: that is, after the
great rural insurrection of 1864 that triggered
a retreat from the program of reform espoused
by Ibn Abi Diyaf and other officials, the suspension of the constitution, and the ascendency of
the conservative party around Khaznadar.23
Thus the completion of the text emerges from
the beginning of the great crisis of Tunisian
sovereignty that would lead to the imposition of
the French protectorate only nine years later.
The Ithaf ahl al-z aman is principally interesting for its two-part introduction, the first
section of which contains Ibn Abi Diyafs constitutional treatise on the three forms of rule
found in the world, with their respective merit
and faults: absolute monarchy, republic, and
the preferred form of rule bound by law. The
second part gives an outline of the princes of
Ifriqiya, from the Companions and Successors of the Prophet in the age of the Arab conquests through the medieval dynastic rulers of
Qayrawan, Mahdia, and finally Tunis. The subsequent body of the work is a chronicle of the
rulers of the Husaynid dynasty established in
1705 by Husayn Bey ibn Ali al-Turki. The state
in which Ibn Abi Diyaf is mainly interested, and
which provides the focal point of his narrative,
is therefore that of the princes of Ifriqiya. References to Turks mainly indicate the Janissaries of the garrison at Tunis (not usually positive
actors in the story), and the Ottoman state itself
is not a focus of particularly sustained inter-
est. Nonetheless, in following the history of the

Husaynid dynasty, Ibn Abi Diyaf is at pains to
illustrate its proper position within the empire:
he gives an in extenso reproduction of correspondence between the reforming ruler Ahmad
Bey (183755) and the Porte, emphasizing the
loyalty of the regency and its ties to the imperial center and the impossibility of Tunisian
independence from the Ottoman state: The
maintenance of the peace of Tunis and its felicity is dependent upon the confirmation of its
connection to the sublime state; its necessity is
obvious and to deny it would fly in the face of
self-evident truth.24
The text cited here is, of course, itself part
of a larger story: that of the Tunisian diplomatic
balancing act that sought in the mid-1800s to
play off rival French and British powers with subtle and selective use of Tunisias simultaneous
de facto foreign policy autonomy and de jure
status as vassal state to the sultan in Istanbul.
But abstracted from this context of pragmatic
government, the argument about the imperial
connection as constitutive of the peace and felicity of the (effectively autonomous) state of
the princes of Ifriqiya also has a function within
Ibn Abi Diyafs own theory of the state and of
properly constituted sovereignty (a theme very
much shared with al-Z ahhar), and a certain
representation of the Ottoman state plays a crucial role in this theory. Although he says (in the
course of his discussion of republicanism and
its incompatibility with the principles of the
Islamic community [milla]) that the office of
the imamate is duty for the community by law
(1:28), this theory is not simply one of divinely
instituted rule, that is, of the caliphate. Indeed,
the empire is not referred to as a caliphate,
and in the first part of the work Ibn Abi Diyaf
refers specifically to the caliphate as such as
having lasted only the classically canonical
thirty years predicted by Prophet (1:7). This pe-
23. The 1864 uprising was largely a response to excessive taxation in the countryside, itself the desperate
response of the state to the burdens of debt-service
contracted through foreign loans, the first of which
had been contracted in 1863 (against the counsel of
the reformists, notably Khayr al-Din, who left office
over the question in 1862 and would live abroad until
1873). The loans would lead in 1869 to the states
bankruptcy and the establishment of the International Financial Commission to control Tunisian revenues. Al-Sadiq reigned 185982.
24. Ahmad Ibn Abi Diyaf, Ithaf ahl al-zaman fi akhbar

muluk Tunis wa-ahd al-aman, 9 vols. (Tunis: Al-dar
al-arabiyya li l-kitab, 2001), 4:125.
25. The letter cited dates from October 1849.

26. Ibn Abi Diyaf, Ithaf ahl al-zaman, 1:31.
27. Established in 1896, the Khalduniyya operated a

reading room and library where classes in the secular
disciplines were held. Its premises were nearby the
Zaytuna, Tuniss great teaching mosque, and it was
praised by Muhammad Abduh on his visit to Tunis
in 1903 for the necessary supplement to the ulum
al-din (religious sciences) available there for the Zaytunas students.
145
graphical nature; its master is independent

of action by virtue of a delegation of authority
from the sultan, and in this his condition differs
from the nature of kings.26 Since the promulgation of the constitution on 25 April 1861, then,
Tunisia can properly be regarded as possessing
government bound by (its own) law, which is legitimate by virtue both of the local allegiance
and the delegation of sultanic authority that the
state enjoys.
So although the empire is not the focus of
his attentionin a sense, the Ithaf is a justification of the Husaynid dynasty and a plea for the
continuation of its project for a reformed Tunisian statehe clearly sees this as falling within,
indeed as only being possible within, the imperial framework that confers the proper legitimacy of rule bound by law: the larger theme
of the work is the celebration of the achievement
of this in his own Tunisia. As with the memoirs of al-Zahhar, then, although produced in a
time of crisis, this is in no respect a narrative of
crisis. It is, rather, an elaboration of the role of
the Ottoman imperial center in the proper ordering of the provincial (protonational?) state.
Born in Tunis ten years after the death of
Ibn Abi Diyaf, Abd al-Wahhab grew up under
the protectorate regime that succeeded to the
crisis of the Husaynids stalled reform process.
A student at the Sadiqi College in Tunis and
then at the cole dtudes politiques in Paris,
Abd al-Wahhab moved in both European and
Middle Eastern intellectual circles, belonging
to academies of both Arabic and French letters,
and succeeded the pioneering Young Tunisian writer and orator, Bashir Sfar, as professor of history at the Khalduniyya Association in
Tunis in 1908 before going on to a career in the
bureaucracy as a provincial governor, president
of the habus (awqaf) administration in 1942,
and, finally, minister of the pen in 194547.27
His interests and writings took in archaeology, art, poetry, and theatrical criticism, but
he would be remembered as having lived in
James McDougall
riod is followed by various types of kingship in

which rule tends over time to become more and
more unaccountable, with the kings interpretation of the law degenerating over time so that
ultimately it is guided only by his own whim and
absolutism ensues: then the Muslims are surrounded by woe, since there is no foundation
for his interpretation [ijtihad] save his saying, It
seems thus to me, and the reason for this is his
seeing in the mirror of [his own] desires, and
not in that of reason. This is true of most of the
kings of Islamic history, save those few who accept God and are not fooled; these, he says, are
of the party of God, such as the glory of the
sultans of the House of Osman, Suleyman Khan
ibn Sultan Selim [i.e., Suleyman Qanuni/the
Magnificent] (1:35).25
Unsurprisingly perhaps, then, it is Suleyman the Lawgiver who serves as a primary
model of the good king. Rule bound by law,
he says, is the best kind of government after
the caliphate; its master is truly the shadow
of God on earth: thus Suleyman Qanuni is referred to as an exceptional ruler of the Party of
God, not dazzled by his own passions and able
to rule justly. It is by delegation of this proper
authority that the properly constituted state of
Tunis enjoys rule-bound government. As for alZahhar, though with a much fuller elaboration,
the principle of the proper investiture of authority is central: on the one hand, this is enacted
through the baya (oath of allegiance) offered
by the notables and the ulema to the sovereign,
and on the other, by the delegation of power to
the prince from his own legitimate sovereign,
the sultan. Arguing against the designation (by
French writers) of the Tunisian state as a republic (which is based on an erroneous understanding of the Ottoman military establishment
and its powers of deliberation [mushawwara]), he
says instead that, having been in the past merely
an eyalet (province), today (to be precise, since
1794), Tunis is properly one of the Ottoman
kingdoms [distinct] by virtue of its [own] geo-
146
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the service of Tunisian history.28 His Khulasat

tarikh Tunis, first published in 1918, was approvingly considered by the leading reformist intellectual and scholar of modern Tunisian cultural
history, Muhammad al-Fadil Ben Ashur, as the
first work to meet the needs of those who desired to know the history of Tunisia, written
in a simple and precise style and according to
a method informed by modern practices and
contemporary tastes.29 The work was intended
for a general readership and for wide diffusion,
was eventually used as a school text in Tunisia
until the 1960s, and is still widely available in
a cheap paperback edition. The simplicity of
narrative and didacticism bring it closer to alM adanis Harb al-thalathamiata sana than to
the Ithaf ahl al-zaman: it tells a straightforward
national narrative modeled on the French textbook style of histoire-go, opening with a section
titled Al-t arif bi-Tunis (Introduction to Tunisia) that describes the countrys geographical location and inhabitants and the periodical
divisions of its history; each chronological section ends with a celebration of the periods famous Tunisians. Its central organizing theme,
howevert he genesis and consolidation of the
autonomous Tunisian stateis much the same
as that of the Ithaf, although without Ibn Abi Diyafs developed theory of sovereignty. The monarchy again plays a central role, with chapters
organized by the reign of each bey; the third
(1953) edition is dedicated to Muhammad alA min Bey, whose official portrait appears inside
the flyleaf. Tunisias past is recounted over four
major erast he Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamicw ith the Islamic era subdivided into four periods: that of the first Islamic
state (from the conquest of North Africa to the
Aghlabid dynasty, which establishes internal
independence,30 closing in the fifth century
AH), the second Islamic state of the AraboB
erber dynasties of the medieval period, from
the Fatimids to the Ottoman conquest, and the
Tunisian Islamic state of the Ottomans and

Husaynids. For Abd al-Wahhab, the properly
Ottoman period is thus the turning point
between Muslim Tunisias formative history, in
the medieval period, and its full consolidation
as a territorial-national entity. The organization of the eyalet by Sinan Pasha after the 1574
reconquest of Tunis from the Hapsburg-backed
Hafsid dynasty is seen as laying the groundwork
for a modern state, which comes to full fruition with the establishment of a local dynasty
by Husayn ibn Ali after he receives the baya in
1705 (133, 14950).
While extolling the past of Tunisia and
the specifically Tunisian state, however, Abd
al-Wahhab, a decidedly establishment figure,
eschews overtly nationalist and anticolonialist
themes. The early modern Spanish presence
overthrown by the Ottomans in this text is not
a crusade but a protectorate (129), and the
Ottomans achievement is to have founded
a modern state on the ruins of the medieval
Hafsid dynasty, which had been under Spanish dominion until 1574. Sinan Pasha, having
organized the state, promptly returns to Istanbul, and eventually power passes from the Jan
issaries to Husayn ibn Ali, who receives the
baya from the ahl al-hall wal-aqd (those who
loosen and bind, i.e., the qualified leaders of
the community) and so is properly invested as
ruler (147). The final indigenization of the regime occurs with the suppression by Hamuda
Pasha of a revolt by the Janissaries (illuminatingly referred to as the sons of the Turks) in
1811, by which the flames of the fire of sedition
were extinguished and proper order guaranteed (15859). The parallel with al-Z ahhars
account of Ali Khoja Dey is clear enough. And
again, although Abd al-Wahhab mentions the
ritual investiture of each bey by the Porte, uses
eyalat more commonly than mamlaka (kingdom)
to denote the Tunisian state, and refers to the
empire as dawlat al-khilafa (the caliphal state),
28. Muhammad al-Fadil Ben Ashur, Le mouvement littraire et intellectuel en Tunisie au XIV sicle de lhgire, trans. Noureddine Sraieb (Tunis: Alif, 1998), 108.
additional chapters added after Abd al-Wahhabs

death by the editor, Hammadi al-Sahili, covering the
protectorate and the nationalist movement.
29. Ibid., 109. The work has gone through several

reeditions; those referred to here are the third edition
(1953), which ends with the Second World War and
the accession of Muhammad al-Amin Bey, and a new
edition of 2001. The later updated editions include
30. Hasan Husni Abd al-Wahhab, Khulasat tarikh

Tunis, 3rd ed. (Tunis: Dar al-kutub al-arabiyya alsharqiyya, [1953]), 64.
No single predominant image of the Ottoman

period, no generally widespread convention
as to its legacy, can be pinpointed in these
Maghrebi narratives or (it seems likely) in more
widespread perceptions of the history they relate. Rather, comparisons and contrasts across
generations and in each country, with their different relationships to the memory of Ottoman
rule and their different later nineteenth-century
experiences, illustrate the different ways in
which the Ottoman period has been interpreted
in the Maghreb. While by no means universally
central to historical narratives, in at least some
historiography, Ottoman rule serves as an important frame of reference for locating ideas of
legitimate government, narrating greatness
and decline. In its corruption or decadence
(particularly in those popular Algerian perceptions inherited from the earlier nineteenth
century but also, differently, in the Khaldunian account of al-Zahhar), it explains the onset
of colonialism; conversely, in its legitimacy as
guarantor of the rule of law (for Ibn Abi Diyaf)
or the defense of the umma (for al-M adani) it
serves as the foundation of the national state.
For al-Zahhar, the imperial center only marginally intrudes into the peripheral vision of an
account centered on the good order and later
travails of an effectively autonomous regency,
but at the same time there is no sense of foreignness to Turkish rule. The regency falls not
because of internal failings or stagnation but
simply as part of the natural (and God-g iven)
order of things. There seems to be no need for
him to stress the connection to Istanbul, which
is mentioned barely in passing but clearly plays
a role in the whole system as the ultimate, albeit
distant, guarantor of the moral economy of the
type of rule locally embodied in the election of
the deys. For Ibn Abi Diyaf, by contrast, there is
a much clearer sense in which Ottoman rule is
the foundation of the legitimate rule of law that
is his exemplary form of proper government
(although this was being undermined at the
very moment that he was finishing his account).
Again, the empire itself is less important than
the chronicle of provincial kings and their
own development of good government in their
own domains (of which the fullest expression is
found in the ahd al-aman and the 1861 consti-
147
Conclusion
James McDougall
the empire is not an explicit focus in itself. The

narrative is concerned instead with each ruler
and the major events of each reign, especially
the narrative of Tunisias independent conduct
of foreign relations with other powers such as
France and America. The Ottoman states role
is subsumed within this theme of international
relations in which Tunis appears as fully sovereign: thus the conclusion of peace with Algeria
(in AH 1236/1821), in what might be read as a
subtly different account to that of al-Z ahhar,
merits attention as a major event that brings
great happiness to all the inhabitants of
North Africa through the efforts of the Ottoman state, which established reconciliation
[sulh] between the two sides. Similarly, Abd
al-Wahhab briefly narrates the assistance rendered to the Ottoman state during the Greek
war of independence by Mahmud Bey, who
sends a squadron from the Tunisian fleet ... to
aid the caliphal state ... And these ships played
a fine role in extinguishing the Greek revolt
(161). There is little or no explicit sense that the
aid furnished by the Tunisian fleet at Navarino
was owed particularly as to a sovereign. Thereafter, the Ottomans fade from the horizon of
reference. In relating the First World War, Turkey is mentioned only in the list of (enemy)
Central Powers, without any further discussion. No reference is made, unsurprisingly no
doubt, to the caliphal declaration of jihad, but
nor is there any mention of the Arab revolt. The
narrative of the 1920s discusses the visit of the
French president Alexandre Millerand to Tunis
and the protectorate reforms that established
consultative councils in 1922, without a word on
the abolition of the caliphate.
The role of the empire here, then, is limited to its crucial intervention at a central point
in the unfolding of the narrative, at the inception of the Tunisian Islamic period, but it is
not, except as a distant mediator in a regional
conflict or an ally on occasion, important thereafter. From the early nineteenth century, the
main focus is firmly on the internal integrity
of the state, its difficulties and its reform: the
French protectorate is merely a continuation of
this, an element of the story of national recovery
from the vicissitudes of the nineteenth century,
not itself the foreign invasion from which the
nation must recover (17779).
148
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tution). But these kings place in a proper constitutional order, which is the central point of
interest of the expository opening discussion of
the forms of rule, is guaranteed by their relationship to the empire and its properly invested
sultan. For al-M adani, the empire itself, seen
as a guarantor of Islamic sovereignty against
continuous crusader aggression, is much more
central to the narrative, whereas for Abd alWahhab, its importance is limited to a pivotal
moment in the narrative, with the transition
from a medieval to a modern state, one that
quickly assumes autonomy and is already implicitly the national state of his young, earlyt wentieth-century Tunisian readers.
While it is perhaps unsurprising that narratives seeking to recover or restore the Ottoman past as part of national history lay out
a clear role for the empire as an agent of history within North Africa (even if, as with Abd
al-Wahhab, this role is very limited in time, and
only in al-Madani is it the clear sovereign superstructure within which Maghrebi history proper
unfolds),31 it is perhaps more surprising that in
al-Zahhar, for example, the empire is taken so
much for granted. Its crisis is not perceived as
such, and Ottoman decline is not a feature of
either of the nineteenth-century narratives any
more than it is of the later accounts, either as
a frame of reference or as an explicit theme. It
does not appear to be an element of the historical consciousness of the writers examined here.
In broad terms, we might draw a contrast
with the Mashriq, where national(ist) narratives
have more generally, from the later nineteenth
or early twentieth century onward, rested on a
conception of the Ottoman period as their antithesis. In the Maghreb, however, prenationalist
narratives of the legitimate state written in the
mid-to-late nineteenth century easily absorb the
Turkish presence and the imperial relationship
into their (different) visions of properly constituted local sovereignty, without needing either
to insist on it or to refute it. Their successors, by

contrast, make the Ottoman state foundational,
either over the whole three centuries span of
15001800 or merely at a crucial moment (1574)
of state foundation, for their connection of
their present societies with their longer historical past.
At the same time, however, and for different reasons in each case, it also needs to be
borne in mind that reference to the empire has
remained marginal to more widespread, public
perceptions of history and national origins. In
Tunisia, the nineteenth-century, late-Ottoman
reformers like Khayr al-Din, who were in fact
very much cosmopolitan men of the empire,
can be celebrated simply as Tunisian while
being (ironically) separated from the now generally disregarded institutions both of the wider
empire and the local monarchy they served. In
Algeria, while the only specifically Ottoman
images of the period are, in public imagination, perhaps reduced to those of swashbuckling corsairs and the delicate pastries much
appreciated in the formerly Ottoman cities of
Algiers and Constantine, the empire is recast
in schoolbooks as the Ottoman Islamic caliphate, rediscovering its particular legitimacy only
by being dissolved into a more general history
of the Islamic world.
31. It is worth noting again here, as mentioned above,

that al-Madani was also in this respect very unusual
among his generation of Algerian historians writing
in Arabic. The only other writers of history in the late
colonial and immediate postindependence period
to devote serious attention to the Ottoman period
wrote in French. See especially Mahfoud Kaddache,
LAlgrie durant la priode ottomane (Algiers: Office
des publications universitaires, 1991).

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Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East