Les montagnes et la montée des clercs dans l’Algérie coloniale. Viticulture, montagnes et réformisme (iṣlāḥ) aux xixe-xxe siècles

• Main Author: Kamel Chachoua
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Provence 2014-07-01
• Series: Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée
• Subjects: Algeria; colonialism; mountains; Muslim reformism; viticulture; East/West
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/remmm/8753
• ISSN: 0997-1327; 2105-2271

Studies of human and social sciences on religion in Algeria have always focused on the roles and functions of the iconic actors (saints, reformers) and ancient and modern institutions (brotherhoods , madrasas , public schools) in a sort of "functionalism the worst and/or the best". Using the example of the Algerian Muslim reformist movement , Iṣlāḥ (Renaissance Naḥḍa in Egypt), often described as a "city" movement, "petit-bourgeois" and essentially "Arabic", this paper shows, on the contrary, that large parts of the founding scholars and promoters of the Algerian reformist movement are almost all from the eastern mountains, Berber, modest social origin, early orphans. Also, and to account for these biogeographical and political characteristics of the Algerian reformist movement, this text reviews the history of viticulture in Algeria which since 1880 split Algeria in two. In the West, plains specialized in wine production, an Algeria called a "European province", and in the East, a mountainous Algeria, a Muslim Algeria who, by a sort of "revolutionary conservatism", became the ground of the Reformist movement (iṣlāḥ) and the struggle for independence.