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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 November 1999 Issue No. 454 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 November 1999 Issue No. 454
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Between two worlds
By Dalal Abu GhazalehLong ago, in the heart of Morocco's Atlas Mountains, a young man, Isli, and a young woman, Tislit, from two rival Berber tribes, fell in love. Forbidden to marry by their relations, the lovers fled to neutral ground, and there they wept until a lake formed from their tears. Convinced that their love was hopeless, the two eventually threw themselves into the lake and drowned. The sheikhs of the two tribes vowed never to allow such a tragedy to happen again, and thus a ceremony originated in the region during which young people can meet freely and choose their future spouses without threat of parental interference.
This colourful social gathering at Emilshil in the Atlas, which has become a major attraction for travellers in the area, is called the Mawsem or "Engagement Festival", and is today a major expression of the specific cultural identity of the Berber tribes in this region of Morocco. Increasingly, the Berbers are calling for official recognition to be given to their language, culture and distinct identity. Some even say that the state itself should adopt a Berber, rather than an Arab, identity. They also criticise government policies that have encouraged the use of Arabic throughout the kingdom since its independence from the former colonial power France in 1956.
The trip to Emilshil takes 12 hours from the capital Rabat by bus up treacherous narrow mountain roads. We stopped at Rashidieh, a town that received international attention following the 1991 arrest of three Berber activists there. Although the three spent only three months in prison, this was the first time that the world had heard of the "Amazigh Cultural Movement", which campaigns to incorporate the Amazigh language, Tifinagh, into education, media and the law.
The Amazigh bus driver was among the very few who spoke Arabic in the area. People there dislike the term Berber, which for them has bad connotations, since originally it was a negative term, the classical Greeks having used it to describe those who did not speak their language. Instead these Berber people prefer to be called by a term from their own language -- 'Amazigh' -- which means "free man".
Ait Hadido tribal tradition decrees that there shall be no marriages, divorces or large gatherings except during the period of the Mawsem, which occurs at the end of each September. By this time of the year the snow has melted on the Atlas Mountains, and tribesmen and mules are able to make the difficult journey.
During the Mawsem, the kind of traditional barriers between the sexes that exist in many parts of the Arab world melt away as hundreds of girls, aged between 15 and 18, put on their best clothes and colourful make-up made from herbs and plants and set out in search of a partner. The luckier ones immediately walk away hand-in-hand with their chosen future husband, while their parents approvingly look on.
From the main social area, the young couples, still accompanied by their parents, then enter a large tent where a local sheikh awaits them to perform a simple marriage ceremony. They will then join the tens of others at the bigger festival on the banks of the Isli and Tislit Lake.
Sheikh Hassan Jerki, who performs these marriages, smiles broadly. During his duties at the festival, he says, he has married 50 couples and divorced only two. Aysha, who speaks no Arabic like all her peers in the area, shakes her head to indicate that on this occasion she has not found a partner. Isli, meanwhile, quickly lets go of her lover's hand and pulls her laizar (headscarf) over her face. Apparently her shyness is due to our presence, for we are definitely strangers in this remote region.
Little has changed in these mountains for generations. Many believe that Mohamed V, the grandfather of the present king, is still monarch. Television is virtually non-existent, and life is simple. However the local people have remained proudly Amazigh, though their understanding of their identity has little in common with that of the Amazigh independence activists in Morocco's big cities.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Amazigh urban intellectuals "used only to debate their separate language and cultural identity," said Dris Al-Kitani, a former leader of Morocco's most Arab nationalist party, Al-Istiqlal. However more recently their aims have changed, he says, and they have now gone beyond cultural demands and seek instead to diminish the national role of Arabic, claming that it undermines their language.
"They even want us to consider the Amazigh as a nation along with or against the Arab nation," he added.
While Ahmed Al-Marini, a prominent figure in the Amazigh Cultural Movement, calls only for equality between Tifinagh and Arabic, Mohamed Shafiq, a militant activist, has written instead that "Amazigh culture has suffered dearly from state policies of Arabisation." And Ozin Ahridan, another activist, goes further, saying that "Arab nationalism is a bomb planted by the Muslim world in order to disintegrate Amazigh culture."
Although more than 60 per cent of Morocco's 29 million inhabitants are Berber, Arabic has been the country's only official language since independence. Tifinagh, by contrast, consists of several unwritten dialects, three of which are used in Morocco: Tarefit in the north, Tamazight in the central Atlas Mountains and Teshlahit in the south. And while the Amazigh insist that theirs is a proper language, Arabists like Al-Kitani say that it cannot be properly written, and even if it could, there would still be the problem of which dialect to choose.
In 1993, at the height of this heated cultural debate, Moroccan state-run television started to broadcast the news in all three Tifinagh dialects. The late King Hassan II said that Tifinagh might be taught in schools, though such a policy was never in fact carried out, a fact that has caused some activists to accuse the "anti-Amazigh lobby" in the government of creating obstacles.
Critics of the Berber language and cultural identity, such as Al-Kitani, have attacked Amazigh activists for what they consider to be an attempt to take Morocco back to a 'pre-Islamic' period. "They have even started giving their children Amazigh names," he says. Ozin, on the other hand, attacks Arabists such as Al-Kitani and comments that the anti-Amazigh lobby is "trying to bury our roots, traditions and social structure, which have been maintained over thousands of years, and replace them with imports from the Middle East and from Europe."
No one denies that the Amazigh are the original inhabitants of North Africa. When the three tribes of the Bani Hilal, Bani Salim and Bani Miaal arrived in the area and introduced Islam, they opened up the area to outside influence, mixed with the native Berbers and taught them Arabic. Historians insist that until the colonial period there was no friction between the older inhabitants and the newcomers.
Some attempts were made at cultural assertion after independence, but these were few until the early 1990s, when the Amazigh movement increased to no fewer than 25 associations. In 1991, these issued a statement called the "Agadir Covenant" which demanded that Tifinagh be recognised in the country's constitution as a national language and that Moroccan history be "correctly reread".
"Gradually, the enthusiasm of the extremists rose, especially within the framework of the decade's International Amazigh Congress in France. After that, we started hearing things about 'Amazigh Nationalism' and 'the suppressed Amazigh people'," Al-Kitani comments.
While most agree that many nations have witnessed conflicts over national identity at some point in their history, they point to the peaceful coexistence that has been the norm between Arabs and the Amazigh over the past 12 centuries. The question then is why Amazigh nationalism has only now begun to assert itself. Arab nationalists in Morocco see European involvement in this cultural conflict, saying that its roots can be traced back to the "Berber Decree" enforced by the French colonial administration in 1930.
"The French pinned their hopes on the Amazigh tribes, thinking that they would back their colonialist policies," says Alal Al-Azhar, an Istiqlal Party leader. "But they failed, because they were rejected by both Arabs and Berbers."
"This was the first seed planted in the conflict," he says, commenting that the "Berber Decree" gave the Amazigh the right to practice their Berber tribal norms and traditions instead of the Islamic Shari'a.
For his part, Mukhlis Moha of the Amazigh National Youth Association, says that the establishment of an Amazigh Academy in Paris has had a major impact on reviving Amazigh culture. But "we shouldn't forget that the main reason for the development of the Amazigh cultural movement in Morocco is the parallel emergence of the Amazigh cultural movement in Algeria," he adds.
For this young activist, Islam and socialism are both "imported ideologies". Rejecting them, "in the early nineties, we started going back to our roots. West or East can no longer be our example, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the string of defeats to Arab nationalism in the East," he says. "These started with the 1967 catastrophe and lead up to the Gulf War. They prove that there is no such thing as Arab unity."
