Politics and the Limits of Pluralism in Mohamed Arkoun and Abdenour Bidar

Abstract

One of the striking features of the literary culture of the modern Maghreb is the profusion of works that undertake to identify the essential features of the region – exercises in definition that almost always emphasize plurality. Philosophers, social scientists, and literary writers have highlighted the Maghreb's multilingualism – the coexistence of different forms of Arabic, Tamazight, French, and Spanish – the varied and hybrid cultural legacies of conquest and colonialism, and the effects of the region's geographical proximity to other parts of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. It would be hard to find a more ubiquitous theme of francophone Maghrebi literature than cultural diversity, and the subject is by no means absent from Arabic-language literature. This preoccupation with plurality can be seen as a response to a history of colonization and decolonization with particular ideological features. In their efforts to build “l'Algérie française,” the French colonial authorities suppressed Arabic as a language of culture and government. In response, anticolonial nationalists called for the replacement of French with Arabic. “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my nation” – the catchphrase of Abdelhamid Ben Badis's Jam'iyat al-'Ulama [Association of Muslim Ulema], an Islamic reform movement of the 1930s and 1940s – later became a slogan of the nationalist movement, the Front de libération nationale (FLN) [National Liberation Front]. Since the 1980s, a similar call to restore Arabic and eliminate French has been issued by the Islamist opposition to the corrupt and undemocratic FLN government and at times by officials in that same government seeking to restore their legitimacy. In emphasizing linguistic and cultural diversity, writers and scholars have tried to tender an alternative to these recurrent efforts to delimit the region's identity.