Kabyle myth

rdf:langString Kabyle myth

rdf:langString The Kabyle myth is a colonial trope that was propagated by French colonists based on a supposed binary between Arab and Kabyle people in French Algeria, consisting of a set of stereotypes of supposed differences between them. The myth posited that Kabyle people are more predisposed than Arabs to assimilate into "French civilization." While elements can be traced to the writings of Abbé Raynal and precolonial travelers, the myth was seriously elaborated between 1840 and 1857 and diffused between 1860 and 1871, reaching its climax between 1871 and 1892 before finally being abandoned in 1915. The French colony came to consider the Kabyle population more prepared to assimilate into French civilization "by virtue of the supposed democratic nature of their society, their superficial Islamicization, and the higher status of Kabyle women," as well as the belief that they were ancient Christians, of Celtic origin, who could easily be re-Christianized. Among the proponents of this myth was the French officer , who claimed: "In one hundred years, the Kabyles will be French!" , a colonist theorist of "Berber separatism" and racist, claimed that the qanuns (customary laws) of the Kabyles came from someone who was "not of the family of Mohamed and Moses but of that of Montesquieu and Condorcet." Eugène Daumas and published in 1847: ‘‘Beneath the Muslim peel, one finds a Christian seed. We recognize now that the Kabyle people, partly autochtonous, partly German in origin, previously entirely Christian, did not completely transform itself with its new religion. . . [The Kabyle] re-dressed himself in a burnous, but he kept underneath his anterior social form, and it is not only with his facial tattoos that he displays before us, unbeknownst to him, the symbol of the Cross’’ (Daumas and Fabar 1847: I, 77). Edmund Burke III described it as "one of the most enduring aspects of the French sociology of Islam."