ABSTRACT
Berber society, through its inability to construct lasting states and through the inertia with which it confronts those who would found new states within it, retains within itself an infinite capacity to endure. It accepts outwardly those forms of civilisation which come from the outside: Rome and Christianity, Arabia and Islam and now, in the twentieth century, France. The Berber heritage is too poor to lend itself to such a renaissance. Many Frenchmen have thought, for over a century, that it would be easy to assimilate the Berbers, because they were not Arabs; many Arabs have proclaimed the Berbers as their racial brothers, their comrades-in-arms in the struggle against the West because they were Muslims. Muslim communities seeking to achieve a synthesis of the different influences, and placing themselves between civilisations, in an intermediary position, just as they are situated geographically on the shores of the Mediterranean at the interface between Europe and Africa.
