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Women and Resistance to Colonialism in Morocco: the Rif 1916–1926

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

C. R. Pennell
C. R. Pennell
Affiliation:
University of Nairobi
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Extract

This article attempts to investigate the role of women in rural society in Morocco, and by extension in the Muslim world of the Near and Middle East. It does so by examining the evidence thrown up by a major crisis, the Rif war of the 1920s. The mobilization and organization of tribal society by Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Karī;m (Abdelkrim) to fight the war against the Spanish and the French extended to women as well as men, involving them in new tasks under new laws. In the end, however, the evidence points not so much to a revolution in women's lives as to the activation for the purposes of war of a traditional ‘female space’. In so doing, it points to the real importance of the women's sphere in a society which was sexually strongly segregated, confirming the impression derived from studies of more literate, urban and aristocratic Muslim societies of North Africa and the Middle East.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 1987 , pp. 107 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1 I wish to thank my friends Dr Marion Farouk Sluglett and Dr Peter Sluglett for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. I should also like to thank my friends and former colleagues at the National University of Singapore, Drs Daniel Turnbull, Andrew Major and Ng Chin Keong for their comments on a later version which was presented to the Third Annual Conference of the Australasian Middle East Studies Association in Sydney, September 1984. The abbreviations used for archival sources in this article are: FO, Archives of the British Foreign Oulice, Kew, London. MAEF, Archives of the French Ministry of Exterior Relations, Paris. SHM, Archives of the Spanish Army, Servicio Histórico Militar, Madrid.Google Scholar

2 Keddie, N. R., ‘Problems in the study of Middle Eastern women’, Int. J. Middle East Studies (1979), 225–240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Ibid.

4 Dengler, Ian C., ‘Turkish women in the Ottoman Empire: the classical age’, in Beck, L. and Keddie, N. R. (eds.), Women in the Middle East (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1978), 229–44; reference here to 236–7.Google Scholar

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6 Ibid., 245.

7 A. Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, ‘The revolutionary gentlewoman in Egypt’, ibid., 261–76.

8 Ibid., 268.

9 Hart, D. M., The Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif, an Ethnography and History (Tucson, 1976), 13.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 105.

11 Ibid., 86–8.

12 Ibid., 48.

13 The memoirs of Muāammad Azarqãn, bin ‘Abd al-Karīm's ‘Minister of Foreign Affairs’, are contained in the manuscript dictated by him to Ahmad Skiraj, ‘al-zill al-wārif fi'I-muhābarat al-rīf’ in the Bibliothèque Générale in Rabat. The list of Spanish and French participants' contributions is very long indeed, and mostly concerned with the military action (as was the majority of intelligence work, of course).Google Scholar Among the foreign journalists the most interesting for the purposes of this article are the books of Sheean, Vincent, Adventures among the Rifi (London, 1926) and Personal History (New York, 1935).Google Scholar

14 Hart, Aith Waryaghar, 277–88, 292.Google Scholar

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18 For a full account of the war see Pennell, C. R., A country with a government and a flag: the Rif War in Morocco, 1921–1926 (London, 1986).Google Scholar

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25 Ibid., list dated 27 Ramadan 1342/2 May 1924.

26 Ibid.

27 SHM Melilla 18, Información Agosto, 21 and 29 August 1921.Google Scholar

28 Oficina de Intervención de B. Said, Hojas Diarias, 28 June 1925.Google Scholar

29 SHM Melilla 30, Oficina de Intervención de Beni Ulichek, Hojas de Confidentes, 4 May 1926; Oficina de Intervención de Metalsa, Oficina de Drius, Hojas de Confidentes, 7 March 1926.Google Scholar

30 SHM Ceuta, 25 PolItica Abril, nota, 25 April 1925.Google Scholar

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32 SHM Melilla 18, Información Agosto, Captain of 2nd Mia, 3 September 1921.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., Sīdī ‘Alī al-Hīhī, 16 August 1921; Fā;ttima bint Hammū, 29 August 1921.

34 Personal information, Idrīs al-Khattābī, Rabat, 20 September 1977.Google Scholar

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39 Ibid.

40 SHM Melilla 27, Información de Aihucemas, Telegram Comandante Jefe Centro Intervención Ajdir to Coronel Inspector General Intervenciónes, Ajdir, 23 December 1925, ‘Urgentisimo’.Google Scholar

41 Forbes, R., El Raisuli, Sultan of the Mountains (London, 1924), 231.Google Scholar

42 Ibid., 281–2.

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44 Personal information, Idrīs aI-Khattābī, 20 September 1977.Google Scholar

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47 Ibid., Mamat bent Hammu [sic], 14 March 1926.

48 Ibid., Faqīr Qaddūr Azugāj, 20 March 1926.

49 Rowbottom, S., Women, Resistance and Revolution (London 1972).Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 239.

51 Ibid., 210 ff., 220 ff.

52 Ibid., 205.

53 Interview in al-Manar, pt 8, vol. XXVII, 1344–5/1926–7, 630–634, entitled ‘jahl zu'amā’ al-Muslimīn wa mafāsid ahl al-turuq wa'l-shurafā’ wa kawnuhum sababan Ii fashal za īm al-Rīf al Maghribī.Google Scholar