Language and Identity Between Oudghiri and Kateb Yacine

Dr Abdelali Oudghiri is a Moroccan writer, researcher and academic known for his fierce defense of the Arabic language and his strong opposition to the hegemony of French in Morocco. He is the author of many works on the Arabic language and its defense. As part of this defense of Arabic and opposition to Francophonie, Dr Oudghiri sharply criticizes the famous saying of the Francophone Algerian writer Kateb Yacine, in which he says that the French in which he writes is a “spoil of war”. He published this reply to Yacine in July 2022, on the website of the Ibn Ghazi Center for Strategic Research and Studies, in a two-part article (1, 2) titled: “Who Was Truly the Spoil, O Kateb Yacine?”

What holds for French holds all the more for Arabic:

In his critique of Kateb Yacine’s stance toward the French language, Professor Oudghiri tries to convince us that the latter, as the article’s title indicates, is not the one who took French as booty, as he put it when he called it a “spoil of war”, but that French took him as booty when he became a writer in it and its servant, enlisted by it to fight Arabic and Islam, as colonial France itself wanted and did in Algeria. That is why Kateb Yacine and his like are, as Mr Oudghiri says, “the keepers of the orthodox Francophone temple and its deacons, whose interests have become intertwined with its own, and whose existence and fate are tied to its existence”, living “their whole lives enlisted in its service and offering sacrifices at its threshold”. Because of the French language, as Professor Oudghiri explains, Yacine remained a bearer of “the culture of brandishing the sword against the common classical Arabic that France fought with all it had, […] especially after discovering the soft destructive machine known as ‘Francophonie’, the name of fame that French language and education policy later acquired”; “he spent the last third of his life stationed on the front line of the war against Arabic and the Arab-Islamic presence, reviving the spirit of racism and tearing the cohesion that Islamic values have long worked to strengthen between Arabs and Imazighen in the Maghreb region”. From which Professor Oudghiri concludes with this indignant question that he addresses to Yacine: “Who, then, deserves to be counted a spoil of war, O Kateb Yacine: you, or the foreign language in which you said you were exiled? And were you able to free your consciousness, your mind, your thought and your culture from this distant exile?”

If it were true (and it is not) that the French language made Yacine, as Professor Oudghiri wrote, a servant of this language, loyal to it and its defender, his conduct would be no different from what Mr Oudghiri himself does when the Arabic language made him its servant, its fierce defender, passionate and in love with it… And if it were true that Kateb Yacine and his like are “the keepers of the orthodox Francophone temple and its deacons”, living “their whole lives enlisted in its service and offering sacrifices at its threshold”, it would be true, by the same logic and practice, that Mr Oudghiri and his like are “the keepers of the orthodox Arabizing temple and its deacons”, living “their whole lives enlisted in its service and offering sacrifices at its threshold”. The proof is that he has written several books of apologia in which he sets out this service, loyalty, love and sacrifice…, whereas the services Yacine rendered to French (still by Dr Oudghiri’s logic) went no further than creative writings of poetry, novel and theater. Why does Mr Oudghiri permit himself what he forbids others, and allow Arabic what he denies French? Does this contradiction not express an inflated nationalist Arabist narcissism, which its swelling makes rise above logic and reality, seeing only itself as the center of the world?

But French did not make Yacine claim to be French:

And if it were also true (and it is not) that Kateb Yacine opposed Arabic to serve French, his conduct would be no different from what Mr Oudghiri himself does when he opposes Amazigh and Darija to serve Arabic, so that it has no competitor among the national languages. But Yacine rejected Arabic as an Algerian defending the language of the Algerian people, which is Amazigh and Darija, and not because he was “French” defending the French language of the French people of Algeria. As for Mr Oudghiri and the other Arabizers, they defend Arabic as the language of the Arab people, Moroccan and Algerian, using the Arabic language as a tool of national and identity Arabization, and of the “sex change” of Moroccans and Algerians from their African Amazigh gender to an Asian Arab one. That is why, in defending Arabic for this national Arabization and sex change, they practice not only the Arabization of the tongue but the Arabization of the human being, by changing his sex into a person of the Arab gender. This is a crime condemned by laws, ethics and Islam, which recurs eleven times in Professor Oudghiri’s article, but only for him to breach in the end his principles on respecting and preserving the languages and identities of non-Arab peoples.

Kateb Yacine did not use French to turn the Algerian people into a French people; he used it for a purpose he explained precisely and clearly when he said, while acknowledging that it is a colonial language: “Francophonie is a political machine of neocolonialism, which perpetuates our alienation. But using the French language does not mean that we are agents of a foreign power. I write in French to tell the French that I am not French.” As for you, the Arabizers, you use Arabic to tell the real Arabs that you are Arabs like them, expecting a reward from them for ridding yourselves of your “Berberness” and your true and original identity. But these real Arabs answer you that you are merely forged and forging Arabs, who usurp the title and practice imposture. That is the difference between you and Kateb Yacine: he uses French to affirm his African Amazigh identity and defend it against France, which sought to swallow it and dissolve it into its French belonging. As for you, the Arabizers, headed by Professor Oudghiri, you use Arabic to eliminate the African Amazigh identity of Moroccans and Algerians, and to attach them to a forged and usurped Arab identity. That is why, when Kateb Yacine says French is a spoil of war, he means that thanks to this language there formed in him the identity awareness of his original Amazigh belonging, and he realized he was neither French nor Arab. Without the French language, he would have continued to regard himself as “Arab”, as he believed because he belonged to an Arabophone family where the criterion distinguishing “Arab” from Amazigh was the criterion of language, as is the case with us in Morocco. As for the Arabic language, regarding the relation to identity awareness, and unlike French, it falsifies this awareness by making its holder believe he is “Arab”, and that he has a duty to fight Amazigh so that it does not disturb his false Arab identity awareness. Professor Oudghiri says Kateb Yacine died “on the testimony: ‘I am neither Arab nor Muslim, I am Algerian’”. He sees in it the result of “(Yacine’s) engagement in a ferocious war against classical Arabic, its culture, its people and the religious, civilizational and historical values tied to it”. Yet even if that were true, the cause of this “war” would be that the Arabic language and its culture are used in North Africa to eliminate Amazigh as the collective identity of the peoples of this region. He was not fighting them as a language and a culture, but fighting their use to fight the original collective identity of the North African countries. His dying on the testimony “I am neither Arab nor Muslim, I am Algerian” expresses a sound identity awareness, understanding that his identity is defined neither by religion nor by Arabness but by belonging to the Algerian land, which is an African Amazigh land. He reached this thanks to the French language, through which he became aware of his true identity and history, and not of the two ideologies that Arabization and its tool, the Arabic language, spread, without that meaning he was defending the Frenchification of Algeria as Mr Oudghiri and the rest of the Arabizers do who use Arabic to Arabize the countries of North Africa.

Which language made the Maghrebi tongueless: Arabic or French?

Mr Oudghiri asks Kateb Yacine indignantly: “Which language deserved to be counted a spoil and a treasure in your life? Is it the language of your nation and your Islamic civilization where your roots grew and on which your veins fed […], or the language that turned you into an eternal captive with a cut tongue?” Once again, owing to Arabizing alienation, ideological blindness and the dominance of Amazigh-phobic passion, Professor Oudghiri inverts the results of the relation that ties Arabic and French to the reality of using them and communicating in them in life. In his view, since Kateb Yacine is proficient only in French and ignorant of classical Arabic, he is thereby “tongue-cut”, which is represented, as one understands from Professor Oudghiri’s question, by classical Arabic, that is, the Arabic that is learned only at school or its equivalent.

If Mr Oudghiri means that someone who is proficient in French and ignorant of classical Arabic, like Kateb Yacine, remains “tongue-cut” because the French he is proficient in cannot be used to communicate, inside his Maghrebi country, in the street, the restaurant, the train station, the café, the market…, this is absolutely out of the question and will never happen. Why? Because he does not need to use French in these Maghrebi spaces, since he uses the language in circulation in his Maghrebi country, which is Darija (or Amazigh), which Kateb Yacine spoke as an innate mother tongue. The French he learned is thus a second tongue added to his innate and original Darija tongue, without it resulting in French “cutting” this Darija tongue. That is why he considered it a “spoil”, that is, an extra profit and gain. But someone who is proficient only in the classical Arabic he learned at school and ignorant of any other tongue, such as Amazigh and Darija, cannot communicate with it in the street, the restaurant, the train station, the café, the market… He indeed becomes “tongue-cut”, because the language he knows and masters, classical Arabic, does not exist in daily conversation in life, having lost, centuries ago, the function of oral conversation to become a language used for writing only. It is thus a half-dead or half-living language, given that a language lives first and fundamentally through oral circulation and then, second, through writing and school. Whereas Arabic lives only through the latter means.

The result is that whoever knows only classical Arabic is as though “tongue-cut”, because he is unable to use it in oral communication, since nobody uses Arabic to converse in life. And this is what Professor Oudghiri invites us to: to be “tongue-cut”.

In addition to this result to which classical Arabic leads, when it makes its holder “tongue-cut”, as I explained, it also cuts, as in the countries of North Africa, the original Amazigh tongue of these populations, by being adopted to spread the criminal Arabization aimed at exterminating the Amazigh language and identity and turning the Imazighen into counterfeit Arabs.

Unification and Arabization between Islam and colonialism:

Professor Oudghiri cites a set of popular opinions as a reference and “scientific” proof to explain his ready-made judgments, also popular, about Arabic, identity, colonialism and its French language… Among these popular opinions on which he relies in his reply to Kateb Yacine is his categorical judgment that Islam “gave to Algeria and the other states and peoples who had the honor of embracing it, and took nothing from them. It gave them everything and took nothing from them. It united them and gathered their internal and external divisions with their Muslim sisters.”

This unifying role of Islam is not an established and certain historical fact but merely a popular opinion widespread among Muslims of the Middle East and North Africa. It is a popular opinion because it rests on confusing the doctrinal unification of Islam, as a religion of monotheism opposed and contradictory to polytheistic beliefs, with the political unification that these Muslims, Mr Oudghiri among them, attribute to Islam. Yet the difference between doctrinal unification and political unification is great, and the first does not lead to the second nor contain it, for we may find non-Muslim peoples that are politically united, and Muslim peoples that are divided and in political conflict. This is what the history of Muslims proves, as shown by the existence of dozens of Islamic states separate from one another, besides the wars and conflicts between groups of Muslims, which have marked their history from the death of the Prophet (peace be upon him) to today, even though the same religion gathers them and unites them doctrinally.

If we take Morocco as an example, we observe that Moroccans have been Muslims for thirteen centuries. But that did not prevent political divisions among them, states and tribes, and Islam was unable to unite them and gather their internal ranks, as Professor Oudghiri claims. But the bitter truth that may shock him is that the first to unify the Moroccan state and the Moroccan tribes, gather them and integrate them under one authority was French colonialism and not the Islamic religion. This does not mean that Islam is a religion of political division and separation. It means that Islam is politically neutral, neither dividing nor uniting. It is its political use that can make it a religion that unites or divides politically. The source of the division and dispute, for example, between Shia and Sunni is each one’s political instrumentalization of Islam to serve its political goals and interests opposed to the goals and interests of the other side.

The Arabizers invoke the warning against division and the call for unity obsessively whenever it concerns Amazigh’s right to be qualified to become a language of education, administration, justice… as if the source of all the fragmentation, division and conflict that the so-called Arab world is living were Amazigh. Kateb Yacine, in the preface he wrote to Tassadit Yacine’s book “Aït Menguellet Sings”, described these Arabizers, who reject Amazigh on the pretext that it threatens national unity, as destroyers of unity. He says of them: “The gravediggers of unity (Les fossoyeurs de l’unité) warn us of the dangers threatening national unity. It is the trick of the thief who claims to have been robbed to cover up his crime — Le voleur qui crie au voleur.” And he says in one of his last interviews with the same author, Tassadit Yacine: “On what basis do they want us to unite and build this unity, on the basis of lies and falsification of history?”

As for the claim that Islam gave everything to Algeria and took nothing from it, this too is one of the widespread popular opinions that does not stand up to research and analysis. Even if we assume that Islam, in its teachings and principles, does not call for plundering the wealth of the countries where it spreads, it is in its name, that is, through its political instrumentalization, that great effort will be made to plunder the most precious wealth of the North African countries: their Amazigh identity. Islam was used to eliminate the collective identity of the peoples of North Africa and replace it with an Arab one, with many political Islamic justifications according to periods and political contexts: once under the pretext of eliminating paganism and the Jahiliyya, once under the pretext that the Prophet is Arab, once under the pretext that Arabic is the language of Paradise, once under the pretext of fighting division and racism, once under the pretext of foiling the colonial partition plan… Saying that Islam gave them everything and took nothing from them may hold for countries like Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia…, which preserved their original collective identities and national languages after Islam spread among them and where it was not used to turn them into “Arab” peoples, as the North African regimes tried to do by instrumentalizing Islam and using it for this purpose.

Admission that there was no Arab belonging before the French occupation:

The truest thing in Professor Oudghiri’s article is what he says about Algeria, which of course also holds for Morocco: “Nobody, before the era of the French occupation, attributed anything of it to the Arabs alone or to the Imazighen alone; it was attributed to the country that unites them.” This is very fine. So it is no longer Islam that unites peoples, but the land to which these peoples belong. But more important than this is that this land is the source of those peoples’ collective identity, regardless of their racial origins, Amazigh or Arab. And if we know that this land is an Amazigh land, that is, the “land of the Berbers”, as the Arabic history books say, then this collective identity of the peoples of these countries is Amazigh.

As for the strongest and most meaningful aspect of Professor Oudghiri’s words, it is his affirmation that before the French occupation nobody attributed himself to the Arabs or the Imazighen, but only to the land. So if there was no pure Arab belonging nor pure Amazigh belonging of Morocco and Algeria before the French occupation, how did these two countries turn, after this occupation, into an “Arab Maghreb”, and not an Amazigh Maghreb nor an Amazigh-Arab one if we suppose the existence of these two elements? I do not think Professor Oudghiri can, however much he tries to dodge by twisting and interpretation, deny that the term “Arab Maghreb”, which expressly attributes the North African countries to the Arabs, appeared only after France occupied Morocco. Which confirms that France is what carried out the biggest and gravest Arabization operation of Morocco and Algeria. Why the biggest and gravest? Because Arabization, in whose spread Islam was used, as we showed before, remained limited and confined to the ethnic, concerning a group of individuals who claimed to be of Arab descent or of “noble descent”. France, for its part, was not content with an ethnic Arabization of individuals by spreading the myth of “noble descent”; it carried out a political Arabization by which the Moroccan state became Arab, with the spill-over of this Arabization onto the whole of Morocco as an Arab country, which is expressed in the term “Arab Maghreb”, whose use began in the 1940s and which Maghrebis coined after the political Arabization carried out by France had borne fruit. And even the Arabic language, France did not fight, as Mr Oudghiri claims, but preserved it and made it a language in which laws, dahirs and decrees are published in the Official Bulletin alongside French, which gave it, for the first time in history, the status of an official language in the legal sense. Why did France preserve Arabic and make it an official language alongside French? Because Arabic is the only language that allows French to dominate and prevail, since it (Arabic) is a half-dead or half-living language used for writing only and not in daily circulation, as pointed out, which makes it unable to compete with French, unlike Amazigh and Darija, which could in a quarter of a century dislodge French from its throne in Morocco if there were political will to promote them, by qualifying them at school and raising them to the level of languages of writing and instruction. We have shown before, in earlier articles (see the article: “French as a Spreader of Arabism and an Opponent of Amazigh”, by clicking here), that the hegemony of French in Morocco is part of the Arabization policy, because the hegemony of French depends on keeping Arabic as a half-living language that can neither threaten nor compete with French as a living language.

These are truths that Mr Oudghiri does not believe and will not understand, because he approaches the question of language and identity from what is ideological, popular and widespread, and from the apparent and external datum. Whereas scientific truths are often hidden behind the apparent and sensory datum.

Why does Kateb Yacine bother Maghrebi intellectuals?

Kateb Yacine died a third of a century ago (in 1989), a period in which nationalist and Arabist ideology has declined greatly, and in which Amazigh has made remarkable progress as the Amazigh language has become constitutional and official in both Morocco and Algeria, accompanied and followed by a decline in the Amazigh-phobic tendency hostile to Amazigh, among the authorities as well as among Arabist intellectuals. But despite all these political and ideological shifts, Kateb Yacine still terrifies and frightens the Amazigh-phobes, who still fight him, as Professor Oudghiri does, with the same old rusty weapons (tearing the nation apart, serving the colonial plan, reviving tribal feuds and racial tendencies…) that were used, between the 1970s and 1990s, against the emerging Amazigh movement. Why does Kateb Yacine alone “enjoy” this exceptional attention?

Because Kateb Yacine did not come to Amazigh from Amazigh as Mouloud Mammeri, Ali Sadki Azaykou, Ahmed Assid, Mohamed Chami or Hassan Benakia did… For those, if they are activists for Amazigh, that may seem natural since they are originally Amazigh and Amazigh speakers. Kateb Yacine came to Amazigh from Arabness, to which he believed he belonged as an “Arab” speaking the Arabic (Darija) of his “Arab” family. And this “Arab” environment in which he lived his childhood implanted in him early a hatred and contempt for everything Amazigh. He says of this stage of his life: “What I knew about the Kabyles when I was little was entirely derogatory. The Kabyle is like the Jew, a strange being who does not resemble us. There were current phrases that defined his personality: Leqbayel, leqbayel / Tous, tous / Lgemla ged Ifellus!” (The Kabyles are all lousy, with lice the size of chicks). So it was to be expected, given the Amazigh-phobic “Arab” environment in which Kateb Yacine lived, that he would be an “Arab” man who looks at Amazigh with Arabist racial condescension and despises it as a backward dialect belonging to the “backward” “Berbers”, to whom he does not belong because he is of “Arab” origin. But on the contrary, he would become one of the most ardent defenders of Amazigh, and one of the fiercest opponents of the Arabist tendency, which he always considered, in all his writings, speeches and stances, an invasion, colonization and alienation of the worst and basest kind (see the article: “When Will Moroccan Intellectuals Do Like the Algerian Intellectual Kateb Yacine?”, in the book “On the Amazigh Identity of Morocco”, by clicking here or here). And this is what embarrasses Professor Oudghiri: how can an “Arab” defend Amazigh with such tenacity when someone who still bears an Amazigh name (“Oudghiri”, tied to the Amazigh tribe “Oudaghir”, famous and known in Figuig, in Amazigh Morocco) feels no affection for his Amazighness? This is what makes Kateb Yacine bother the Arabist intellectuals more than all the activists of the Amazigh movement. The Amazigh identity awareness awoke in him at a stage when there was no Amazigh movement and no Amazigh demands, and at the height of Arab nationalism’s hegemony. This early and advanced Amazigh identity awareness explains why he named his son “Amazigh” in 1972, at a time when Amazigh names were neither current nor used nor even banned by the authorities because nobody used them. Kateb Yacine was thus ahead of his time with regard to awareness of Amazigh identity as the collective identity of the North African countries. This stance does not only bother the Arabizing intellectuals, it may also shame them when they observe that an “Arab” intellectual managed to shed the false identity awareness and embrace the sound identity awareness in the 1970s, whereas they still live, in the twenty-first century, in the cave of the false identity awareness formed at the start of the twentieth.

That there are Amazigh activists who speak Amazigh is, for these intellectuals who reject Amazigh, something acceptable and ordinary that does not bother or worry them, because these activists are at least originally Amazigh, even if they are “misled”. But that there be an Amazigh activist of “Arab” origin, this they cannot bear or tolerate, because it proves to them that they too are Amazigh, but victims of a false awareness. Which embarrasses them, as I said, to the point of feeling ashamed of themselves. That is why they do not tire, as Professor Oudghiri does, of trying to ridicule Kateb Yacine’s positions so as to convince themselves that they were not wrong in rejecting Amazigh and defending the Arab character of the North African countries, and that the one in the wrong is Kateb Yacine, who rejects Arabness and defends Amazigh as the identity of Algeria and all the North African countries.

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