Counter-currents: Mzabi independence, pan-Ottomanism and WWI in the Maghrib
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper focuses on the impact of the First World War (WWI) and its aftermath on the political activism of the Mzabi community in the Algerian desert. Following the French annexation of the Mzab Valley in 1882 and the military draft imposed on Mzabis in 1912 and again in 1918, Mzabis, who are Amazighen (sing. Amazigh, also known as Berbers) and Ibadis (members of minority sect in Islam), felt more and more threatened by French policies towards the Mzab and its inhabitants. This paper shows how the events of WWI and the hope in a French defeat and an Ottoman victory provided Mzabis with the opportunity to link to trans-border anti-colonial movements, especially in Tripolitania and Tunisia, and to promote their case for Mzab's independence from French Algeria. Those movements, tied to Istanbul, had emerged earlier during the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911 and were reinvigorated during WWI and the Ottoman efforts of mass mobilization. Mzabis were linked to resistance groups in Tripolitania and thus were able to easily integrate themselves during WWI into cross-border anti-colonial movements. They perceived themselves as part of a pro-Ottoman North African movement opposed to European colonial projects and not part of an Algeria they considered to be 'French.' In particular, given their strong connections to Tripolitanian activists who were also Ibadis and connected to Istanbul, they believed that they were better positioned to negotiate their independence from France than the Maliki (followers of the Maliki religious school of jurisprudence) majority of Algeria. Their activism during and shortly after WWI and struggle for their own independence as 'Mzabis,' distinguishing themselves from the rest of Maliki Algerians, highlight three important themes. The first is the need to create one uninterrupted narrative linking the Italian invasion of Tripolitania in 1911 to WWI in terms of shaping cross-border alliances and political strategies in the Maghrib towards the Allies. The second is the significance and continuous relevance of the Ottoman context for North African and Saharan communities in the definition of their political allegiances during WWI. Third are the alternative political imaginations Mzabi activism during WWI presents us. Rather than the usual perception of WWI as being the catalyst for nationalist stirrings in the region, the case of the Mzabis provides a counter-narrative to nationalist historiographies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".