Julia A. Clancy-Smith's Rebel and Saint was published by the University of California press in cloth in 1994 and in paperback in 1997. This highly detailed study of several nineteenth-century scholars and resistance leaders in Algeria and Tunisia has already received several excellent reviews, and deservedly so. Its availability in paperback renders it a potential book for assignment in graduate or undergraduate courses, so this review will analyze its strengths and weaknesses to determine its usefulness in courses on the history of North Africa, Islam and colonialism.

Rebel and Saint is a well-researched book which makes an important contribution to the history of colonialism and resistance, and the role of Islam in both. Rebel and Saint follows what Clancy-Smith describes as "a biographical case study approach" (p.5). It focuses on "religious notables" such as Bu Ziyan (d. 1849), Muhammad ibn Abd Allah (d. 1863), Mustafa ibn 'Azzuz (c. 1800-1866), Muhammad Ibn Abi al-Qasim (1823-97) and his daughter Lalla Zaynab (c. 1850 -1904), as well as the key figures associated with these individuals. The quality of these narratives makes Rebel and Saint a very useful resource for any historian of Islamic Africa, and the Maghrib in particular.

Clancy-Smith's text contrasts two anti-colonial rebels, Bu Ziyan and Muhammad ibn Abd Allah, with later, more circumspect religious leaders from the same region. Bu Ziyan led a small and ill-fated rebellion that ended when the French executed him and his family in a Saharan oasis named Za'atsha in 1849. Muhammad ibn Abd Allah, who also claimed to be the Mahdi, led a rebellion from Warqala, attacking the French and their supporters at Tuqqurt, Zab Qibli, Wadi Righ and al-Aghwat between 1851 and the end of 1854. In 1855 Muhammad ibn Abd Allah took refuge in Tunisia. Later he retreated into the central Sahara, and was eventually captured by the French in 1861 after moving north again to Warqala (176-212). Clancy-Smith compared these rebellions with the subsequent, non-violent "resistance" of Mustafa ibn 'Azzuz, Muhammad Ibn Abi al-Qasim and his daughter Lalla Zaynab. In this regard Clancy-Smith's analysis is informed by the work of E. P. Thompson, James C. Scott and the other scholars of subtle resistance. Rebel and Saint makes an important contribution to this growing body of literature, which seeks to reevaluate the political behavior of colonized peoples who apparently accommodated or collaborated with their colonizers.

Although Rebel and Saint achieves very much, it does suffer from two main limitations. The first is that Clancy-Smith relied almost exclusively on French sources. She was keenly aware that her reliance on colonial sources did not allow her to do a "history from below", so she compensated by working very hard to read these sources from a North African point of view. The second limitation derives from one of the book's strengths. Clancy-Smith included so much narrative detail for so many cases that she left herself little space to deal with the complexities of any particular case. While Rebel and Saint is innovative and imaginative on several fronts, it is nevertheless a somewhat "traditional" historical narrative.

Clancy-Smith does manage to weave into her stories elements of rumor, collective memory, and gender (p. 9), but these issues are largely tangential to her main argument, and become lost in the broader narrative. Indeed, in regard to a succession dispute between Muhammad Ibn Abi al-Qasim's daughter and nephew, Clancy-Smith argues that gender was irrelevant for the Algerians, although extremely relevant for the French (pp. 235-40). This unpersuasive argument seems to result from her reliance on French sources and her understandable sympathy for the colonized. Similarly, Rebel andSaint does not explore the other social variables that complicated resistance and collaboration in the nineteenth-century Maghrib. In particular, it does not examine the politics of ethnicity between Berber and Arab North Africans, which the French colonial policy tried to exploit. Nor does it examine race, slavery, or servility-- all of which were important aspects of Saharan and North African societies, and all of which received colonial attention. Finally,although most of the stories that Rebel and Saint recounts take place in the Sahara, Clancy-Smith does not give serious attention to the relationship between settled and nomadic peoples. In fact, she generally uses the word "tribes" to refer to Saharan nomads, a word that obscures more than it reveals.

The principal contribution of Clancy-Smith's work is in the history of culture and resistance. Rebel and Saint also challenges the "conventional periodization" of Algerian history by dating the beginning of non-violent protest to the 1849 revolt in Za'atsha, rather than to the 1870s-- but this is a relatively minor argument (pp. 248-60). By contrast, the phenomenon of non-violent cultural resistance is relevant to the history of every place and time. The colonial sources hint at the power of Islamic ideas and symbols, and the informal and formal ways that non-elites used Islam to influence the local elite, as well as the French. But colonial sources are inadequate to elaborate these processes, and as Clancy-Smith points out, the indigenous sources that are readily available in state archives do not reveal much about these subtle politics either. Thus Rebel and Saint indirectly suggests the necessity of using other sources to elaborate this history, in particular local oral literature and family libraries. Oral history will provide clues, if not specific evidence, about the intimate politics of Islam and resistance. Much of the poetry and song mentioned in Clancy-Smith's colonial sources are no doubt still remembered and performed today, and often by women. A potentially richer source will be found in the family libraries of descendants of the nineteenth-century resisters, many still living in the region. If the libraries in the northern Sahara are like those that I know in the southern Sahara, they will often be disorganized, stored in trunks, or the corners of storerooms. And the owners will be protective of them, not just against the intrusion of foreigners, but also of local people. It certainly will not be easy to win the trust of family archivists and local poets, but the potential reward is great.

Rebel and Saint is an important contribution to the history of Northwest Africa, and I recommend it to all scholars interested in Islamic, Saharan, or North African history. It would also be appropriate for assignment in graduate courses, although it is too detailed and narrow for most undergraduate courses.

Timothy Cleaveland
Department of History
University of Florida