ABSTRACT
If we have entitled this study “Islam in the Maghreb” rather than “Maghrebi Islam,” it is because, for many Muslims, Islam is one, with its creed, its observance and its ethics, in spite of major cleavages like the one that divides Sunni and Shi‛a Muslims, which at a certain time engendered reciprocal exclusion. For Muslims, in fact, as for Western experts moreover, the term “islam”—with a small “i” when transcribed in European languages—is applicable only to the religion and to religious matters. This explains the fact that the orientalists distinguished between islam as a religion, and Islam as a state, civilization or culture, that is, a vast historical complex whose starting point was the Revelation, directed originally towards religious concerns, which still remain, but going far beyond them. Hegel called this Islam “the revolution of the Orient.” Maurice Lombard has displayed its ecological, economic and communicational continuity, whilst revealing the immense role, at least for four centuries, that this Islam played in the dynamics of mediaeval history. It was Hodgson who invented the concept Islamicate to emphasize its role as integrator, at the double level of civilization and culture, of the societies that had preceded it, unifying them at the same time as it absorbed their various characteristics. However, as it is inconceivable that that there could be a separation between religious experience, cultural specificities and the historical impetus, it is permissible to talk, with regard to the Maghreb, both of islam in the Maghreb and of a Maghrebi brand of Islam, both being interconnected. But it is true that islam-as-religion is less affected by evolution than Islam in its global acceptation, the first being attached to the timeless quality of a 188sacred text (Max Weber has demonstrated the extreme difficulty of approaching it), and the second being carried away by the maelstrom of history, as by human passions. The relationship between them remains, nevertheless, and we shall therefore attempt a study of Islam in the Maghreb, placing it within the context of historicity; in short, we shall try to sketch a dialectics between these two islams, in order to bring out essentially Maghrebi characteristics.
