Mubarak El Mili and his book "History of Algeria"

A short life of no more than 47 years, lived by Sheikh Mubarak Al-Mili (1898-1945), during which he was able to transform the history of Algeria - which he was one of the pioneers of writing - into a driving force for the revolution for identity in the face of French colonialism, and his experience in this field needs a pause.

I got to know Sheikh during my work on the theory of the national struggle journalism to get closer to his journalistic experience, and I was faced with a young scientist who uses a science that is difficult to limit in the field of journalism, even if he practiced it, he was a preacher, a journalist, a scholar of faith, and one of the first historians who took the first steps to collect and write the history of Algeria, in an activity that was aimed at a clear goal, which is to resist French colonialism, and gather people around the identity of Muslim Algeria with its Arabs and Berbers, and he succeeded.

Al-Mili is one of the disciples of Sheikh Abdul Hamid bin Badis al-Nujaba, and the third of three who played the largest role in the activity and successes of the Association of Muslim Scholars, which was founded in the first decades of the last century, and whose goal was to revive the identity associated with religion and the Arabic language through an educational project that extends from the east to the west of the country.

Ibn Badis saw his genius, so he sent him to the Zitouna Mosque in Tunisia to obtain a certificate of "adaptation", the highest degree granted there, to return to Algeria again in 1925 to practice education and journalism and participate in the establishment of the Association of Muslim Scholars, and was among the newspapers in which he wrote the critic, the meteor, the Sunnah and insights, and the latter is the mouthpiece of the Association of Muslim Scholars and edited in 1935.

But the Sheikh was not just a teacher, journalist and preacher, he had a scientific project in the service of building the Algerian Muslim identity, and the most prominent achievement in this project was his book on the doctrine "polytheism and its manifestations" and its goal is to confront the superstitions that spread among the followers of the Sufi orders and those affected by them, and his book "The history of Algeria, ancient and modern", which finished writing two parts of it before his death and his son completed its third part, and his goal is what we have already referred to from gathering the nation around its identity.

The social context of the book "History of Algeria"

It is not possible to understand the value of the book, which came out in 1928 without knowing the context in which it was issued, and it coincided with the readiness of the French to celebrate the centenary of the occupation of Algeria (July 1830), and with that occasion rolled French books that rewrite the history of the country from a French point of view, a vision that establishes two eras, all that preceded the occupation is barbarism and darkness, and all that followed is the light that came at the hands of the French, and Algeria was also – according to that vision – a station for the occupiers to take turns Until it finally landed in the hands of France and made it a part of it.

An example of such a book is "The Islamization of North Africa... Émile Félix Gauthier's "The Dark Centuries of Morocco" and Georges Marset's "The Muslim Berber and the Levant in the Middle Ages", published in 1927, adopt a narrative that makes the Arabs, especially the crescents, invaders of the Maghreb or "Berber land" as they call it, and holds them responsible for backwardness and nomadism, depriving the Berbers of their rights, spreading chaos in Africa and destroying the civilization of the region inherited from the Romans and Byzantines.

Algerian officials at the time echoed these ideas, claiming that Algeria was nothing before the French entered it.

History at Mili is a mirror that reflects the genius of the nation, the greatness of its ancestors, and its function is to move the national feeling, "When the sons of a nation studied its history, they felt the pride of sovereignty and the pleasure of life, and they escaped from the control of tyrants."

Topics and Curriculum

In these circumstances, Sheikh Al-Mili's history writing project began and was distinguished by two aspects, the first is to link history with an Algerian national project that consolidates its Arab and Muslim identity, and the second is that it was as close as possible to modern approaches to writing history, away from selection or arbitrariness, and the titles under which he was written reveal how he was a pioneer in his treatment, which entrenches the idea of the Algerian homeland older than the colonial presence.

The first part of the book dedicated to Algeria before the entry of the Arabs, begins with a chapter explaining the geography of the country, its natural and animal resources, its weather and the professions of its people, then moves in its first chapter to discuss the history of the country in the Stone Age, and the traces left by the ancients and the beliefs they adopted, and then moves in the second chapter to the Berbers, addressing their migrations, descriptions, system of life, language and beliefs, and so on with all the people and occupiers who passed through it, and in such a pattern it goes in the second part, which monitors the development of The history of Algeria after the introduction of Islam and the accompanying Arab migrations, and the countries that took place there.

Al-Mili defines history as a mirror that reflects the genius of the nation, and the greatness of its ancestors, and its function is to move the national sense of belonging to a distinct nation, "When the sons of a nation studied its history, they felt the pride of sovereignty and the pleasure of life, and they escaped the control of tyrants." For him, history is "connecting the present with the past, knowing the glory and humiliation of that past, bliss and misery, civility and barbarism, sovereignty and slavery."

History has an educational function, as it illuminates the human thought by searching for the truth of things, so that it is not a narrative of dead events, and knowledge of human experiences through lessons and not stories, but rather a search movement to assert oneself by reference to the resurrection of the past.

This is in terms of content, but in terms of methodology, Al-Mili criticized most advanced historians who write everything they hear, and transmit everything they find without correcting the novel, nor scrutinizing thought, limiting themselves to narrating incidents without explanation or conclusion, and this neglects the spirit and secret of history.

In a research published in 2019, Dr. Rachid Mayad describes Sheikh Al-Mili's approach to writing history as relying on "the rule of all and part, or what is known as general history, which is the same approach adopted by many historical academic schools in the world, such as the former Soviet Union by Petrovsky and the United States by Charles Baird Austin", and the use of this rule was reflected in the title of the book "The History of Algeria in Ancient and Modern".

He also said that the writer adopted the method of induction, given the momentum of events and the different nature and dimension of time through investigation and scrutiny, and Mr. Tawfiq Al-Madani – who helped the Sheikh in translating the French texts – described the method of work: "We spent 20 days in continuous work, interrupted only for short periods, and we contrast between text and text, and we judge the various books in what we see of the contradiction or difference between the historians of the East and the historians of the West.

He also used a tight temporal structure in which the events were reported sequentially in an attempt to link them, and he also moved away from absolute judgments in dealing with the results of events, only giving some opinions away from the spirit of criticism, but this did not prevent him from accusing his contemporaries of (Western) historians of distorting historical facts because of their ethnic and national fanaticism.

The book and the identity of Algeria

The book was in this way part of an intellectual project aimed at preserving the Algerian Islamic identity, and resisting colonial attempts to obliterate it, and it was not just a theoretical effort, but rather has practical access and influence mechanisms, as it - the book - was linked to the project of the Association of Muslim Scholars, which aims to establish schools, and provide curricula that contribute to building the personality of students, and the Association of Muslim Scholars has adopted it as a curriculum for history in its schools.

When the book was released, Sheikh Abdelhamid Ben Badis, President of the Association of Muslim Scholars, expressed his happiness with it, and wished it would be called "the life of Algeria", as he considered it "the first book that portrayed Algeria as a complete picture, so he revived a nation, revived its past, present and future, and that generations should thank him."

But Mubarak Al-Mili died before completing the third part of the book, which was later completed by his son, but I was looking for the journalist in his biography, and I discovered the historian whose biography and scientific achievement we can be inspired by how to build the future by educating the nation about its history.