ABSTRACT
The study of the part played by religious forces in the resistance to colonisation in Algeria raises questions concerning religious movements with conspicuous political roles, in other words questions about the relation between the political and the religious spheres. In the nineteenth century, these movements consisted of marabouts holy men, dervishes and brotherhoods, and in the twentieth century, of Reformism, that is the Salafiyya movement. Since the days of Marx and Weber it surprises no one that every religious movement also fulfils social and political functions, that it expresses, as Engels said, very definite class interests. But the specific nature of these movements raises special difficulties:
