Book Review

Methods/Theory

Historians of the Maghrib—the North African countries of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya—have since the 1960s been struggling to establish a distinct identity for their field within American universities. This volume, edited by Michel Le Gall and Kenneth Perkins, is a collaborative effort by both American and North African scholars to assess the progress made toward this goal.	1
Introductory essays, one by a pioneer in the field, Leon Carl Brown, the other by veteran scholar Wilfrid Rollman, pose a crucial question. What should be the "frame of reference" for the history of the Maghrib? The Maghrib is, for academics, a sort of loose puzzle piece that might be made a part of at least four larger regions: Mediterranean, Islamic, Arab, or African. But this search for the wider frame of reference seems to run at cross-purposes with another dominant item on the Maghrib history agenda since the 1950s, that of "decolonizing" history and building the identity of the now independent nations that compose the region. Most of the essays in this volume demonstrate that the limited frameworks of the Maghrib and its component national states continue to prevail in scholarship. Rollman and several other contributors express discontent with this state of affairs, but they find no simple formula to remedy the problem.	2
Some contributions point toward the possible reasons for and ramifications of the prevalence of the national frame of reference. In her survey of the last thirty years of study of the medieval Maghrib, Mounira Chapoutot-Remadi expresses regret at the lack of interchange among the academic centers in the different countries of the region. She observes that Maghrib historians tend to focus on those periods in their medieval history that most easily fit, in terms of cultural style and territorial scope, in to the vision of a national development process. A by-product of this tendency is that Maghrib historians pay little attention to Muslim Spain in spite of the myriad cultural, social, and political links that span the Straits of Gibraltar.	3
Several of the essays survey phases in the development of national histories from traditional chronicles to nationalist identity building to post-independence efforts to incorporate new methods, especially those of the Annales school. Omar Carlier reflects on rival secular nationalist and Islamic trends in Algerian history. He argues that the Algerian government, through its funding of education, research, and scholarly publications, established itself as the arbiter between these rivals. It might be argued, however, that until the rival camps negotiate a synthesis that accommodates all streams of the Algerian identity, this state of affairs is likely to prevail.	4
Le Gall's essay on Libya raises another dimension of the question. In Libya, as elsewhere in the Maghrib, large amounts of archival material remain inaccessible. Le Gall emphasizes the political element in this, the Qaddafi regime's fear that the archives might hold material that undercuts its own reading of history. Among Muammar al-Qaddafi's concerns are the rival source of legitimacy connected with the Sanusi monarchy overthrown in 1969 and the problems raised for Libya's image in Sub-Saharan Africa by the slave trade. The question of access to recent, postcolonial archival material in the Maghrib is not raised in this volume, and one wonders if serious research on postcolonial history will ever be possible unless there is a dramatic change in the political culture of the region.	. . .