Ideology and Practical Politics: A Case Study of the Rif War in Morocco, 1921–1926

Abstract

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were a number of armed attempts by people in the Arab world, and particularly in the Maghrib countries, to resist European penetration and colonialism. Historians have made considerable efforts to categorize these attempts as being either examples of ‘primary’ resistance or of ‘modern nationalist’ resistance, a distinction based largely on the presence or absence in the movement concerned of an ideological content making reference to the various Islamic reform movements or to European-style nationalism. Thus Edmund Burke can write of the rebellion in the Moroccan countryside around Fez in 1911, which finally ushered in the French and Spanish Protectorates: “One looks in vain, for example, for evidence of the influence of reformism, Pan-Islam or Islamic modernism upon the movement.”