Hassan Benakia and the Sufi relationship with the Amazigh

On January 19, 2019, death claimed the eminent Dr. Hassan Benakia, a professor of French literature and the Amazigh language at the Multidisciplinary Faculty of Nador. Beyond his official profession, Hassan — as I used to call him — was a tireless researcher and a prolific writer, as Professor Maimoun Amsbrid described him in the condolence message he sent me following our late friend’s passing. Considering that he wrote more than twenty books, including monumental, large-format tomes of 670 pages, one can truly gauge how indefatigable and tireless he was.

A Man of Action and Practice

My first encounter with Hassan dates back to 1996, when a cultural association from the town of Aith Nsar (Beni Ansar) — where Hassan was originally from — invited me to attend a lecture he was giving on Amazigh poetry in the Rif region. From that very moment, he became a friend and a traveling companion until his final departure. What immediately caught my attention and aroused my deepest admiration during this presentation was the fact that he delivered it in the Amazigh language, addressing a theme for which the language did not yet possess critical and analytical concepts or notions. Why did this mark and impress me so much? Quite simply because I had never before attended an academic presentation conducted with rigorous scientific analysis in Amazigh. Before that date, during cultural symposiums organized by Amazigh associations on issues related to the Amazigh cause, speakers systematically used Arabic, French, or Spanish when dealing with academic subjects, relegating Amazigh at best to the question-and-answer session during the debate. This was a radical novelty and a considerable step forward. I then said to myself: “Although my generation of early activists in the Amazigh movement is about fifteen years older than Hassan, he has an ‘Amazigh’ lead over us that is equivalent, if not superior. Indeed, what we aspired to achieve — namely, making Amazigh a language of transmission, dissemination, and sharing of knowledge — he was already putting into practice.”

The first impression that this lecture on Hassan left me with was that he prioritized action and practice over the sterile waiting for ideal conditions to act. Throughout our long friendship, I would find that this primacy granted to action and practice constituted an inseparable trait of his commitment to the Amazigh cause. He constantly hammered home the point that just because our legitimate and just demands — requiring the state to teach Amazigh to elevate it to the rank of a written language, a language of science and knowledge — are slow to materialize, we must not sit idly by, waiting for the state to grant these requests while continuing our activism. On the contrary, we must begin by making concrete use of Amazigh in writing, within the limits of the possible, despite the shortcomings, errors, and lack of readers of Amazigh texts inherent to the status of an untaught language. If the state justifies the hesitations in teaching Amazigh by the absence of the required conditions — whether financial, pedagogical, or linguistic (with the diversity of Amazigh dialects) —, refraining from using Amazigh only worsens this lack of conditions invoked by the authorities, thus giving their pretext a false credibility. On the other hand, if we assert, as Hassan maintained, that Amazigh is a language capable of being written, it is up to us to provide proof of this. Now, there is no other proof than its written use itself.

Prolific Writing in the Monthly Tawiza

When I told him, after this first meeting, about my project to found a monthly magazine dedicated to Amazigh that I had named Tawiza, he replied that he was ready to sign a contribution in every issue, even if it were a weekly. He indicated to me that he had a collection of studies on Amazigh that were still unpublished and that Tawiza would constitute the ideal setting for them. This is precisely what Professor Hassan did, maintaining unwavering regularity in publishing in all editions of the magazine until its publication ceased in August 2012. If readers of Tawiza know me as the founder and director of this platform, Professor Hassan was indeed its second founder and co-director. If we compare the volume of my publications to that of Hassan’s texts in Tawiza, there is no doubt that his surpass mine both in number and in volume.

The articles that Hassan signed in Tawiza were not mere opinion pieces, but in-depth studies supported by an analysis that shook up false certainties on themes as varied as language, identity, culture, national unity, patriotism, Arabization, colonialism, the National Charter for Education and Training (then at the heart of current events when promulgated in 1999), and even the teaching of Amazigh. While some of these subjects were known and had already been addressed by other writers, the author renewed them through an unprecedented approach that pulverized established “truths.” As an example, we can cite his study on Hubert Lyautey, the first resident general of Morocco after the signing of the Protectorate Treaty in 1912. This colonial figure is widely known, like a beacon in the night, so much has been written about him. Yet, Professor Hassan was to shed light, relying on documents, correspondence, and testimonies from those close to him, on an unknown facet of Hubert Lyautey: his intimate (sexual) deviant inclinations. And this is not the only contribution that interests us in the professor’s analysis of Hubert Lyautey’s personality, but rather the impact of these “deviant” inclinations on his political choices applied in Morocco. Thus, Professor Benakia managed to deconstruct the traditional image we had of Hubert Lyautey by revealing the anomalies of his sexual behavior, which had a striking impact on the management of Protectorate policy in Morocco. This is precisely Hassan’s method in all his writings: he surprises us with documented counter-truths that sweep away our previous certainties on the subject treated.

Forging Original Concepts as Analytical Tools

Because he cast a fresh eye on sometimes ancient problems, he continually forged original concepts that he established as innovative analytical tools. This is how he conceived and used the term “self-hatred” and its counterpart “the proper.” The former designates the paroxysm of identity alienation suffered by the Imazighen who, under the effect of Arabization, turned into the worst enemies of Amazigh, denying, rejecting, and fighting it. As for the second concept, “the proper,” Professor Hassan understood it, in accordance with its linguistic polysemy, as original, local, African identity, namely Amazigh — the authentic identity of Moroccans and of all the peoples (and states) of North Africa.

Deeply aware of the repercussions of the absence of a written memory among the Imazighen, Professor Benakia invented and exploited the notion of “the written trace,” which he considered the sine qua non condition for the existence of such a memory. It is precisely this lack of writing that has long kept the Imazighen away from history, insofar as, as he repeatedly demonstrated, the written word is the sesame by which a people accesses history and takes its place in it. This absence of a written trace, that is to say, the non-existence of a scriptural use of the language, reduced the latter to a “corporeal” state, meaning confined to a body whose organs (the tongue, for example) it solicited to exist and survive. Amazigh thus remained rived to the throat as a physical organ of speech, as well as to song and dance, activities executed by the members of the body. It follows that if this body were to disappear, die, or adopt another language, Amazigh would extinguish with it. This is what pushed Professor Benakia to examine with acuity the question of the teaching of Amazigh, essential to bring it to the written stage, free it from carnal guardianship, and make it a language capable of self-reproduction through the pen, without needing the mediation of a body which, for centuries, was its only receptacle in the absence of writing.

When the royal commission in charge in 2001 of appointing the members of the board of directors of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) with a view to their appointment by the Sovereign cast its choice on Professor Hassan Benakia, it was because it had discovered him through his writings in the monthly Tawiza. Its members from the Amazigh movement, like Professor Mohamed Chafik and Professor Hassan Aourid, had known how to recognize in him a brilliant mind and an intellectual capable of carrying out the projects of valorization and rehabilitation of Amazigh.

While Professor Benakia’s writings were not mere opinion platforms, but rigorous academic studies and analyses, it was because he wrote each contribution relating to the Amazigh cause as a chapter or a component of a global work. Consequently, his publications in Tawiza constituted the matrix of many books that he would publish later, like his monumental sum (676 quarto pages) published by the French publishing house L’Harmattan in 2016. All the studies gathered in this work had previously been published in Tawiza, before being revised and amended by the author. He thus signed more than twenty books, embracing essays, novels, and theater, using French or Amazigh interchangeably in his recent novelistic and dramatic productions. He also conducted lexicographical work in Spanish and Catalan during the short period when he practiced as a teacher in Barcelona.

An Exceptional Mastery of Living Languages

If Professor Benakia produced so much despite a relatively brief existence, asserting himself as a relentless writer in the words of Professor Amsbrid, it was because he read tirelessly, forming by himself a veritable reading machine. He was greatly helped in this by his mastery, in addition to Amazigh, Darija, and Arabic, of English, French, Spanish, and Catalan. Holder of an English-type baccalaureate according to the old system in force in Morocco, he then obtained a bachelor’s degree in French literature at the Faculty of Oujda, then a third-cycle doctorate in France in the same discipline, before earning a state doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Oujda, where he occupied professorial functions. As for Spanish, both orally and in writing, he tamed and mastered it, using it for his research, given that he resided a few dozen meters from occupied Melilla. He likewise learned Catalan during his stay in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia. By browsing the bibliography that he mobilizes in his studies and monographs, one notes that he relies primarily on English-speaking sources rather than French-speaking ones. His state doctorate thesis in French literature was moreover devoted to the Irish writer James Joyce, compared with certain French novelists. I remember that a member of the jury had underlined during his defense that the majority of the researcher’s references were in the English language, alongside Spanish and Catalan — while confessing his inability to read these three languages. The co-director of the thesis, a Spanish academic teaching in prestigious world universities in English, French, and Spanish, retorted for his part, while implicitly criticizing the remark of the Moroccan member of the jury, that during his long professorial career, he had supervised dozens of doctoral theses, but that among all of them, he retained only the best ones, and that Mr. Benakia’s would remain engraved in his memory for the rest of his life as one of the most remarkable he had been given to direct.

A Mystical Bond with the Amazigh Language

I have previously emphasized that Professor Benakia’s defining characteristic was his profound dedication to action and practical application. He applied this rigorous standard scrupulously to his writings on the Amazigh language and the Imazighen. Rather than limiting himself to cataloging the literary heritage of North African authors from antiquity and the Middle Ages who wrote in Greek and Latin—work recorded in his book Histoire de la pensée nord-africaine (History of North African Thought)—he transformed the substance of that research into a genuine academic discipline, which he taught within the Amazigh language and culture departments at the universities of Oujda and Nador. He approached the urgent need to move beyond institutional waiting and toward the actual, practical writing of Amazigh with whatever resources were available in the same spirit. Thus, in 2020, he published an extensive novel in Amazigh written in the Latin alphabet, entitled Jar ticri d wttu (Between the Ascent and the Fall), alongside two plays, Amuddu n hullic (The Journey of Houlich) and Tagharct d tbqct (The Staff and the Clay Bowl). Anyone who has attempted to write in Amazigh knows how arduous it is to compose in a language that has not enjoyed a standard place in schools. It is worth recalling that he was a pioneer in the rural area of Nador for introducing writing in the Latin alphabet—as Tifinagh was not yet widely used for general writing before 2003—when he undertook to correct and reissue numerous poetry collections that had originally appeared in the Arabic alphabet marred by spelling and syntactic errors. At the request of their authors, he revised and transcribed into the Latin alphabet, strictly adhering to the grammatical and orthographic rules of the Amazigh language, collections by the late Ahmed Zayani, Karim Kenouf, and Fadma El Ouariachi, as well as a novel by Samira El Maraki, among others. He also translated the “Amazigh Alternative” platform, published on the Tawiza website, into Amazigh.

This relentless commitment to practice and prolific output concerning the Amazigh language reveals, as I have already noted, a deeply bonded relationship uniting our author with Amazigh culture. This connection transcends the loyalty and allegiance that every Moroccan owes to their identity, and goes beyond the simple emotional and visceral attachment that every human being feels toward their mother tongue. In Benakia’s case, it rose to the level of mysticism, as Professor Amsbrid described in his previously cited condolences. In his engagement with the Amazigh language, he acted like a “mystic” aspiring to “union” and “annihilation” within it, to use the terminology by which Sufis describe their spiritual state and station. Professor Amsbrid perfectly captured Professor Amsbrid’s state and station regarding the Amazigh language by describing him as a “Sufi of Amazigh” (a mystic of the Amazigh cause)—a formulation I have chosen as the title of this article because it faithfully captures the truth, meaning, and reality of his life.

Combining Scientific Research and Ideological Activism

Far from confining himself, as his writings and positions attest, solely to ideological activism—which constantly recalls from every platform the political injustice suffered by Amazigh and pleads for a corrective political decision—Professor Benakia paired this traditional struggle with cutting-edge scientific research in the service of Amazigh. This included the study of its dialectal varieties, lexicon, grammar, and the processes of its standardization and normalization, as well as the history and civilization of the Imazighen, their social and political structures, and the collection and codification of their oral and cultural heritage. Considering essays such as Les envers de l’amazighité (The Flip Side of Amazighness), L’enseignement de tamazight (The Teaching of Tamazight), or L’amazighité en questions (Amazighness in Question), one notices that they carry a strong political, ideological, and critical weight, while rising well above the classic list of demands put forward by the Amazigh movement. A similar imprint is found, to varying degrees, in his novels and plays, whether written in French or Amazigh. Conversely, when examining titles such as Histoire de la pensée nord-africaine (History of North African Thought), La littérature de voyage en Afrique du Nord (Travel Literature in North Africa), La littérature rifaine, de la tradition orale à aujourd’hui (Rifian Literature: From Oral Tradition to the Present Day), La traduction poétique amazighe (Amazigh Poetic Translation), Tutlayt tarifit, grammatica y lexic (Rifian Language: Grammar and Lexicon, co-authored in Catalan), Distique de la poésie rifaine (Couplets of Rifian Poetry), or Amawl arifi n usughel (Rifian-French and French-Rifian Translation Lexicon), we encounter scholarly monographs rooted in investigation and research. These works explore ancient Amazigh thought, the historical and contemporary Western perception of the Imazighen, translation studies, Rifian literature, and the Rifian vernacular. These books are the fruit of scientific research unburdened by political and ideological controversies—though this does not imply the total absence of ideological undercurrents in these studies, nor the exclusion of rigorous scientific methodology in works with a strong political charge. In the humanities, particularly concerning language, identity, history, and culture, it is difficult to completely eliminate ideology to varying degrees, despite a researcher’s strict adherence to scientific methods, because the subject matter deals with phenomena connected to consciousness, will, and choice, rather than inert matter as in physics.

Another illustration of the paramount importance Professor Benakia attached to the scientific study of Amazigh, alongside the fight for its official recognition, is that during our first meeting in 1996, I discovered he owned every single Amazigh dictionary published since the 19th century, whether general or specialized, whereas I, despite being his senior, possessed only three. He kindly provided me with reproductions of all these reference works, including the monumental lexicographical work of Charles de Foucauld, which was not yet accessible on the internet.

Within the Multidisciplinary Faculty where he worked, he spared no effort to secure the creation of an Amazigh studies degree program, a request ultimately approved by the Ministry of Higher Education. He subsequently continued his fight to elevate this program into a fully fledged department featuring an independent master’s degree, which was achieved for the start of the 2021–2022 academic year. Despite failing health, he insisted on personally overseeing the inauguration of this master’s program on November 19, 2021. He insisted that I deliver the inaugural lecture launching the curriculum, for which I had chosen the topic: “The Choice of Tifinagh Between Ideological Motives and Scientific Considerations.” Although this assignment felt like a heavy responsibility, it was an inestimable honor for me. The inauguration of this new department dedicated to Amazigh studies would remain his very last academic activity before his final farewell.

Continuing to Receive from Him Rather Than Giving to Him

Such was Professor Benakia: an exceptional thinker, a talented writer, an encyclopedic intellectual, an innovative researcher, and an activist who fought with mystical fervor for the Amazigh language, culture, identity, and history. He dedicated his professional and academic life to serving it and to struggling, on both the scientific and ideological fronts, for its advancement and rehabilitation. These qualities make him an essential reference point in both militant activism and scientific research. He embodies a source of pride for Morocco, for the Amazigh people, for the Rif region, and for his hometown of Aith Nsar, even though many fellow citizens remain unaware of him and may never have heard his name. He cultivated a legendary reserve and modesty, shunning praise, the spotlight, and cheap glory. Yet in reality, he was a beacon of light and inspiration. That inspiration lives on through his output, his writings, his ideas, and his spiritual union with the Amazigh language. Today, though he has physically left us, he remains ever-present among us through his thought, his writings, and his prolific body of work in which he defended Amazigh on both scientific and ideological grounds. This is what makes him immortal, a timeless figure who will never fade away. He gave immensely to the Amazigh cause in a relatively short span of time. If we wish to honor his memory and his legacy, we should not do so by offering a reciprocal gift in return, but rather by continuing to drink from his spring and gather his teachings—by drawing inspiration from his thought, reading his books, and following his scientific and militant path, in accordance with the words of Gibran Khalil Gibran at the funeral of the writer Jurji Zaydan: “If you want to honor a great man for his generosity and good deeds after his death, take from him and do not give to him.”

Arabic version | French version