II

A strange thing to me was the absence of any political state. There

has never been a political state, properly speaking, in the

desert. Such was the parcelling of the communities, so elementary the

governmental form, so feeble the impulse of political aggregation and

cohesion, that the general condition might seem to be an anarchy. In

the Kabyle villages of the mountains and among the Mzabites of the

Sahara the assemblies of the elders with the election and change

of head men present an aspect of such primitive simplicity and

independence that they might be thought freemen’s institutions of

an ideal purity; on the other hand, the absence of any political

centres of concentration forbade the formation of a nation. The

recognition of the tribal blood-tie conserved groups, smaller or

larger, with a greater or less sense of unity; but feud was the

natural condition of these units, extending to the smallest and

even into families, and in the larger world political history found

only hordes hastily massing for temporary ends and dissolving in

a night, or empires of facile conquest and loose tributary bonds,

of the nature of a primacy rather than a sovereignty, and without

long continuity of life. Public order, with its correlatives,

security and peace, was little realized, and, however ideal local

institutions might seem within the group, it was, viewed largely,

a barbaric world.

A very pure democracy in its primitive form prevailed. All men were

equal before Allah, and the condition of equality generally obtained

also between man and man. Inequality belongs to civilization; the

absence of that, and especially the lack of security for wealth

and its inheritance, of an official class of state functionaries

and a clerical hierarchy, and pre-eminently the lack of knowledge,

removed main sources of that differentiation which has stratified

modern society. There was a noblesse of the sword and also of

religion, grounded originally on descent from Mohammed or more

generally and powerfully here in the West from some Marabout,

but neither class was really separated from the people. The only

effective source of inequality was _virtù_—real ability. Tradition

made it the glory of the Arab noble to dissipate his patrimony in

gifts to his friends and to rely on the booty of his own hand for

himself. Ignorance, besides, is a great leveller, and poverty is the

best friend of fraternity; liberty was native to the soil. It was

a society where all men had substantially the same ideas, customs,

and desires, thought and acted, lived, in the same way. It was a

natural democracy, and inbred; and to-day this trait is one of the

most striking and refreshing that a sojourn among its people brings

to notice, for it is a real democracy, unconscious of itself, vital,

and admirable in its human results.

Race-consciousness found historic expression only in the religious

field. The spots where the faith first began on the soil, the

tombs of great leaders in the conquest, such as that of Sidi Okba

in the oasis not far away, the white domes of the Marabouts sown

like village spires through all this land, were places of sacred

memory, centres of race-consciousness, and here took the function of

integrating the common soul of the race, as, in other civilizations,

political memorials of great public events and famous men develop

national consciousness. In the desert patriotism and faith are

one emotion. The ideal Mohammedan state is a pure theocracy in

which the political and spiritual powers are one and inseparable;

where this condition prevails is the _dar el Islam_, the land of

Islam, the soil of the true faith; elsewhere, wherever the union

is imperfect or the faith must concede to the infidel, is the

_dar el harb_, or, as we should say, missionary countries. Neither

Turkey nor Egypt is _dar el Islam_; its narrow, though still vast,

realm is the Libyan sands, where it still refuges its people. It

is an arresting sight when religion goes into the desert to be

with God; the Pilgrims of the _Mayflower’s_ wake, the Mormons

of the sunflower trail fill the imagination with their willingness

to give up all, to go forth and plant a new state sacred to their

idea. It is always an heroic act. Such a coming out from among

the world, such a going forth into the inhospitable waste has been

characteristic of desert history. Solitude is the natural home of

orthodoxy, of the fanatic sect and the purist. Mohammedanism in

its primary stage was a particular religion of a desert people;

in its secondary stage, as a conquering faith, it had to develop

its capacity for internationalism, its powers of adaptation to

other breeds and of absorption of foreign moods and sentiments,

its fitness to become a world religion; in itself also there was

necessarily the play of human nature involving, as time went on,

a variation into sects, heresies, innovations; thus, for example,

it absorbed mysticism from the extreme East and whitened the West

with the worship of saints. The faith was purer and more rigid

in the desert, generally speaking, and was there more primitively

marked; there it was safest from contaminating contacts; and there

also Western civilization, closing round and penetrating its realm,

finds the most fanatic and obdurate resistance.

Race-resistance to the invasion of the modern world, naturally

following the lines of race-consciousness, notwithstanding the

aid it received in the beginning of the struggle from the old

feudality of the desert, had its stronghold in religion and

its organization; and, specifically, it found its practical

rallying-points and strongest alignment in the confraternities,

or secret orders, with their zaouias, analogous to mediæval abbeys

and monasteries, which had so great a development in North Africa in

the last century—some more enlightened in leadership and capable

of assimilating Western benefits in some degree, others stupidly

impervious to the new influences and events. These brotherhoods,

whose nomadic agents under the guise of every humble employment

course the land with great thoroughness, are ideal organizations

for agitation, collecting and disseminating news, preparing

insurrection, fomenting and perpetuating discontent and secret hope;

it is they and their machinations that are back of the Holy War,

as a race idea. They are all hearths of the faith; but some, such

as the Tidjaniya, recognizing both the fact of French power and

the reality of the benefits it confers, are committed to political

submission and peace; others are less placable, and nurse eternal

hate of the infidel, with a credulous hope of expelling him from

the land; and one, the most irreconcilable and the most powerful,

is an active foe. This fraternity is the Snoussiya, having its

seat at Djarbout, in the Libyan desert, where it has constituted

a veritable empire of the sands, a pure Mohammedan state; it has

divided with the neighboring empire of the Mahdi, and with that

of the Sultan of Morocco, the proud title of _dar el Islam_. Sidi

Snoussi, the founder, was a humble _taleb_ of Medjaher, in the

province of Oran. He preached the exodus, and led the recalcitrant

and irreconcilable into the Cyrenaica, and there by virtue of his

natural ability and enterprise built up a state, to which his sons

have succeeded, the eldest of them having been already designated

by his father as the promised Mahdi, the always expected Messiah

of Islam, who should restore its power as the true kingdom of God

on earth. It is this state which is the centre of Panislamism, the

hope of a reunion of the entire Mohammedan world after the fall of

the Sultan at Constantinople should be accomplished. The desert

round about owns its sovereignty from Egypt to Tunis, and it is

buttressed on the south by the negro states which it has joined in

proselytizing, converting them from their savage fetichism.

The spirit of proselytism has always been active in North Africa. The

story of its saints from early days contains a missionary element,

acting at first on the indigenous barbarism of the desert and

mountains and extending at a later period to the negro populations of

the Soudan. The Snoussiya, together with other Mohammedan agents,

has conducted a proselytism to the south which has been astonishing

in its success and has long arrested European attention. Islam is,

indeed, well adapted to convert inferior peoples, and adopts an

intelligent policy in practice. The simplicity of the faith, the

absence of any elaborate dogma or ritual, its slight demand on the

intellect, together with its avoidance of anything ascetic in its

rule of life, made it easily acceptable in itself; and its tolerant

advance, without pressure, on the imitative instincts, the ambitions

and interests of the savage populations with which it is in political

and commercial contact, secures its spread without irritation or

disturbance. It is the warrior race of the Foulbés in the Soudan

who have most carried forward this movement of mingled spiritual,

political, and commercial conquest; beside these, like the Jew by the

Arab, are the Haoussas, a black race, with a commercial instinct,

who established themselves under the protection of the Foulbés;

they, generally speaking, have the monopoly of instruction and are

the simple teachers of the region; the fetichistic tribes, coming

under the influence of these Moslem expansionists by conquest,

protectorate, marriage, in one and another way of the old and

universal methods of the transformation of a lower race by a higher,

are thus added to the domain of Islam. So important is this religious

change, and so striking is the event, that some Catholic bishops

have seen in it a providential preparation by an intermediate state

for a future evangelization. What is noteworthy is the active spread

of Mohammedanism contemporaneously in Central Africa and its close

connection with the power of the Snoussiya, the most energetic

and fanatic centre of Islam. The dream of the poor preacher of

Oran has come partly true: in leading the irreconcilable into the

Libyan desert and building a refuge for them in the most desolate

wastes of the eastern Sahara, in the _dar el Islam_, he established

a new centre for the faith in a region backed by populations where

its natural spread is great and its presence is likely to be long

continued, and he aroused through all the Mohammedan world the

spirit of Panislamism. It is in his work and the fruit of it that

race-resistance to the impact of the modern world on the old life

of the desert all along the African coasts of the Sahara finds its

climax, its centre, and its hope; elsewhere it has ebbed slowly away.

That retreat of the old faith into the desert out of whose immensity

it was born, to die if need were in its own cradling sands, far

from the pollutions of the modern and changed world, excites the

imagination and commands admiration. It might be the episode of an

epic, with its _mise en scène_, its protagonist, its atmosphere

of travel and assemblage, and the coloration of its auxiliary

tribes. It has classical poetic quality. But to the meditative mind

the fortunes of the _dar el harb_, the nearer land of the infidel,

is more profoundly impressive. It is a curious feeling that comes

over one at the thought that he is present at the death of a race

and has before his eyes the passing away of a civilization, and

that civilization a culture in its essential features once common to

the human family. That is the scene here—the passing of the early

world. It is like the passing of the Indian world of the wilderness

from America that our fathers saw, only in a more concentrated scene

and on a more impressive scale—the death of an ancient mode of life

in its home of centuries, full of memory going back to the dawn of

history. It is a solemn thing for the reflective mind to witness,

hard to realize adequately. Agriculture is gaining on the pastoral

state, supplanting it; the nomad is slowly becoming fixed to the

soil; the towns increase in number and population and in the variety

of their life; peace, order, security establish themselves; capital,

science arrive—companies, railways, telegraphs, communication,

and transportation—and the face of life is changed; in a few

years there will be no more caravans to Tougourt, to Tripoli,

to Ghadamès—they will be legends like the mule-trains and

prairie-schooners of the old emigrant West.

The economic change is most obvious, the inrush of the mechanical

and cosmopolitan, colonization and exploitation, public works and

private enterprise, securing and furnishing the territory for a

commercial tillage and use. Is it a dispossession of the native

from the soil or is it a means by which he may more justly enjoy

it? The people, in the old days, lived in a sort of serfage to

the nomads or the zaouias. The French régime put an end to desert

feudality, but treated the zaouias with more consideration, owing to

their religious character. The zaouias of Algeria, notwithstanding

some counter-currents among them, generally accepted French rule

and co-operated with it. The result, nevertheless, was largely a

lessening of the economic lordship of the religious families at the

head of these establishments and an enfranchisement of the people

from dependence upon them. The zaouias were sources of great communal

benefit; they practised especially the Moslem virtues of alms-giving

and hospitality; but they also took tithes and offerings. Their

social importance has diminished; and, in place of the old

half-patriarchal, half-feudal system, society takes on the modern

structure of economic individualism. The impersonal administrative

system, dealing with all in an individual way, shivered the primitive

economic collectivity of society at a stroke. The modern world

has come; capital, wages, earnings bring new arrangements and ways

of living; the economic career in a commercial world is open and

safe, wealth is its prize, competence is possible for those who can

maintain themselves in the way; the new dispensation—the future,

has begun. Life is more free, more just, fuller of opportunity,

and it is also more difficult; new desires, new temptations, and new

needs arise; the cost is greater. Civilization enforces the higher

standard of living even on the lowliest. This is the material fact

most powerful in transformation. It is a fact inherent in progress.

The change in manners is the superficial expression of economic

changes. There is an ingathering into the towns, and, as always, in

the first contacts of a comparatively primitive race with a luxurious

civilization the corruption of manners and morals is patent; the

weakening of the old fibre of life before the new fibre has time

to form occasions a moral displacement. This is most noticeable

in the cities of the coast, but in some degree is everywhere to be

seen. There is, as it were, a sifting of classes; the more advanced,

those who are most sensitive to the new and most free and bold,

begin an exodus from the _café Maure_ to the European restaurant;

they imitate the foreigner, ape his ways and take the mould of his

habits; the French _vie_ tends to establish itself as the ideal, to

a greater or less degree, among the forward spirits and the young;

old haunts and customs are left with the lower class in the _café

Maure_. The chief support of the general change, broadly speaking,

is the instruction in French schools throughout the provinces,

which reduces the old language to a country dialect and secures a

certain glamour for the new régime and naturalizes it as a _patrie_

familiar from childhood, protective, and opening the ways of life. A

vital point is the extent to which, in this change of manners and

ideals religion, the faith, is affected. It appears to be conceded

that the practice of the faith formally is weakened. It is a faith

in which the rite counts heavily; the doing of certain acts, as a

matter of observance, is a large part of its reality; but a default

in the practice of religion is never a sure index to a decline in

belief. Belief habitually outlives practice. It is certain that

no Christianizing takes place. The White Brothers, the Catholic

missionaries of the Sahara, have long confined their efforts to

works of humanity and simple helpfulness, abandoning attempts at

conversion. If the religion of Islam grows feebler in its hold,

it means that free thought, scepticism, and indifference come in

its place. Perhaps the fundamental fact is that the larger sphere

which existed for religion in the old days no longer exists. The

hermit is a holy man largely because he has nothing else to do

except to be holy; and religion fills the world of Islam partly, at

least, because of the absence of other elements in that primitive

monotonous life. The modern world has brought with it into the

desert a great variety of novel interests, a diversified life,

stimulating curiosity and attention and often absorbing practical

participation in the new movement on the part of the people in trade,

enterprise, amusement, information, news. It appears to be agreed

that in the parts of longest occupancy by the French there has been a

relaxation of religious practice and a softening of fanatic hatred,

concurrently with a corruption of morals and degeneracy of racial

vigor where European contact has been most close.

The final question is of the issue. The population has greatly

increased under French rule. The development of the country in a

material way goes on apace. The colonial empire of France in Africa

has a great commercial future. Will the native people in this new

economic civilization be able to hold fast and secure for its own

at least a share of the products of this great movement, or will

they be merely a servile race in the service of French proprietors

and over-lords, or in a condition of economic serfage to vast

accumulations of capital, analogous to that of industrial workers

in our capitalistic society? Will the moral decay, incident to the

change of civilizations, eat them up and destroy them, as has been

the luck of half-barbaric peoples elsewhere in their contact with

the modern world? In a word, is the Berber people, for that race

is here the general stock and stamina, capable of assimilating

this civilization and profiting by it? These are questions of a

far future. Meanwhile the best opinion is sharply divided upon

them. Historically, the Berber race has shown assimilative power

racially by its absorption of the foreign bloods that have crossed

it from the earliest days: the northern barbarians, the Arabs of

the great invasion, the negroes of the south have all mingled

with it freely; it has also shown power to take the impress of

foreign institutions from Roman and Christian days to the time

of its Islamization. Its resistant power, its vitality as a race,

is scarcely less noticeable. There are some who look to see real

assimilation, even to the extent of a miscegenation of the various

strains of foreign blood; there are others who expect at most only

a hegemony of civilization over a permanently inferior people;

and there are still others who hope for a true assimilation of

material civilization, with its blessings of science and order,

but see an impassable abyss between the old European and the soul of

the desert, inscrutable, mysterious, alien, which remains immutable

in the Berber race.