North Africa en marche

Abstract

‘La Frange ignorait dans ces pays qu’elle était mortelle’, wrote Jacques Berque of the inter-war period in the Maghrib. The shock of the fall of France in 1940 was to bring the fact home to North African nationalists, even if the French themselves found it a harder lesson to assimilate. In North Africa, as elsewhere in the Arab world, there had been a confusion of aims and ideals. There was no Maghribi nationalist movement, only isolated groups of people protesting against French rule. In 1927 the Moroccan nationalist Allal al-Fassi organised an Association des Etudiants musulmans d’Afrique du Nord in Paris, which for a few years held annual congresses.¹ Later its members became absorbed in their own growing national parties. The visit of Sheikh Arslan, the Lebanese apostle of Islamic reform, to the North African countries in 1930 raised the hope of the Muslim nationalists who saw the road to independence through unity with the international Islamic movement.² Although it became clear in the post-war period that the nationalist parties were taking most of their political arguments from the West, Islam remained an important factor.