SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In an attempt to go beyond both colonial and nationalist narratives of the interwar period in the Maghreb, this paper presents a critical reading of one major, but frequently misrecognized, intellectual figure whose work (politics, journalism, writings on history and geography...) and self-representation (in his autobiography) provide valuable entry-points for analysis of the cultural and intellectual history of colonialism. A particular (salafi) type of nationalist discourse, of which al-Madami makes himself in a sense the exemplar, is considered as stemming from the particular conditions of political, as well as intellectual and cultural, production obtaining in French North Africa. Breaking with the retranscription of nationalist discourse in its own terms as "historical recovery", McDougall shows how a strategy of historical invention, linked to the movement of Islamic reformism in Algeria and produced in the intense "doalogic" of colonial domination, recast the conception of community as "nation". This particular conception of the nation, and the role of al-Madami as one of its significant producers, sits in a complex relationship, not only with the colonial situation from which it is born, but with the revolutionary nationalist movement which would eventually achieve independence.