Inventing the Berbers: History and Ideology in the Maghrib

Before the Arabs conquered northwest Africa in the seventh century,
Ramzi Rouighi asserts, there were no Berbers. There were Moors (Mauri),
Mauretanians, Africans, and many tribes and tribal federations such as
the Leuathae or Musulami; and before the Arabs, no one thought that
these groups shared a common ancestry, culture, or language. Certainly,
there were groups considered barbarians by the Romans, but "Barbarian,"
or its cognate, "Berber" was not an ethnonym, nor was it exclusive to
North Africa. Yet today, it is common to see studies of the
Christianization or Romanization of the Berbers, or of their resistance
to foreign conquerors like the Carthaginians, Vandals, or Arabs.
Archaeologists and linguists routinely describe proto-Berber groups and
languages in even more ancient times, while biologists look for Berber
DNA markers that go back thousands of years. Taking the pervasiveness of
such anachronisms as a point of departure, Inventing the Berbers
examines the emergence of the Berbers as a distinct category in early
Arabic texts and probes the ways in which later Arabic sources, shaped
by contemporary events, imagined the Berbers as a people and the Maghrib
as their home.
Key both to Rouighi's understanding of the
medieval phenomenon of the "berberization" of North Africa and its
reverberations in the modern world is the Kitāb al-'ibar of Ibn Khaldūn
(d. 1406), the third book of which purports to provide the history of
the Berbers and the dynasties that ruled in the Maghrib. As translated
into French in 1858, Rouighi argues, the book served to establish a
racialized conception of Berber indigenousness for the French colonial
powers who erected a fundamental opposition between the two groups
thought to constitute the native populations of North Africa, Arabs and
Berbers. Inventing the Berbers thus demonstrates the ways in which the
nineteenth-century interpretation of a medieval text has not only served
as the basis for modern historical scholarship but also has had an
effect on colonial and postcolonial policies and communal identities
throughout Europe and North Africa.