Arabophone

The French, however, were unsuccessful in their attempt to exploit the Berber-Arab dichotomy. For this failure a French Berberologist blames General Lyautey: “. . . under the impulse of Lyautey, the French succeeded in accomplishing what the Sultan had attempted without success. This was the unification of arabophone and berberophone Morocco.[…]”

The Mzāb area is well-known as the home of a berberophone khāridjite community. It is, however, also the domain of arabophone nomads, members of the Shanba, a tribe of Hilālī origin.

The second consideration is that since the Jews of Muslim Spain, like all other arabophone Jews, distinguished צ from ס (Garbell 1954a:669), one would not expect to find them confused in Toldedo until a generation or two after it was reconquered by the Christians (1085 c.e.).

Whatever its origins, the procedure quickly became part of the standard apologetic arsenal of arabophone Christians of every confessional community, as we see from its use in the writings of Abū Qurrah’s contemporaries Ḥabīb b. Ḫidmah Abū Rā’iṭah, a Jacobite, and ‘Ammār al-Baṣrī, a Nestorian.

There was equal frustration in the ranks of arabophone writers such as Abdelhamid Ben Hadouga and Tahar Ouettar. At the core of their work was the issue of Arab identity and they felt that the regime was not doing enough to hasten the whole Arabization process, preferring instead to indulge a narrow francophone intelligentsia.

The association serves to portray her as less of a francophone, in the eyes of her colleagues, and she goes rounding up people like me, simply because we are arabophone.

My use of qabīla in this paper refers specifically to the social relations in this ethnographic setting (and not to a notion of arabophone ‘tribes’ in general).

There were insufficient numbers of arabophone instructors, and although a number of Arab states, most notably Egypt, supplied teachers, the Algerians’ memories of them suggest that they were hardly the best and the brightest available.