Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi

c. 1880 - 1963

Moroccan leader of resistance to Spanish and French colonial conquest.

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi was born in the Rif mountains, a Berber region of northern Morocco, sometime in the 1880s. His father was appointed qadi of the largest and most powerful tribe of the central Rif, the Banu Waryaghal (Aith Waryaghar in Berber) by sultans Hassan I and Mulay Abd al-Aziz, although neither had much influence over day-to-day affairs in the region. His father, like many other people in the area, also had an association with the Spanish military in the enclaves of Melilla and Alhucemas island, the latter immediately offshore from the village of Ajdir, where the Khattabi family lived. The Spanish authorities hoped to use their influence with him, and with other local notables, to ease their path in occupying the northern zone of Morocco.

Abd al-Karim's early life was a mixture of Moroccan and Spanish influences. He studied at the Qarawiyyin University in Fez, where he was influenced by teachers of the Salafiyya movement. In 1907 he went to Melilla where he became, in rapid succession, teacher, military interpreter, and qadi, and finally qadi qudat (chief judge) of the Moroccan community in the Spanish enclave. He also wrote and translated articles for El Telegrama del Rif, the local newspaper. In 1913, the year after the joint Franco - Spanish protectorate was declared over Morocco, he was decorated for his services to Spain.

During World War I, this relationship with the Spanish authorities broke down because of Abd alKarim's impatience with Spanish cooperation with France and his corresponding sympathy for Germany, despite his desire to marry the benefits of European technical modernization with Islamic reform. In 1915 he was arrested and imprisoned in Melilla on suspicion that his German sympathies had taken the form of subversive activities. Although he was released quite quickly, the Spanish authorities never regained his trust or sympathy.

In 1919, as the Spanish army began a slow march westward from Melilla toward the central Rif, his father broke relations with the Spanish garrison in Alhucemas island and joined a slowly growing resistance movement centered in the Banu Waryaghal. At the same time, Abd al-Karim left Melilla and returned to Ajdir. This resistance movement was based upon an unstable unity between the various tribal subdivisions and depended on the continued functioning of customary legal and political systems. When his father died - or was murdered - in 1920, Abd al-Karim succeeded in taking the leadership of the resistance and secured a more stable unity by insisting on the imposition of the shariʿa. At the same time he trained a military nucleus using European methods and weapons.

This military nucleus enabled him to defeat the Spanish forces in the eastern part of the Spanish protectorate in July 1921. He went on to set up a government in the central Rif that united his two aims of modernization and Islamic reform. In February 1923 he received bayʿas (formal declarations of allegiance) from various central Rifi tribes that justified his leadership in terms of fulfilling requirements for the caliphate - justice, unity, order, and the preservation of shariʿa - and referred to him as imam. On other occasions he referred to himself as amir al-muʾminin, a title that, despite its caliphal connotations, reflected not so much a claim to universal leadership as a statement of the religious nature of his movement. The official title of the Rif state was al-Dawla al-Jumhuriyya al-Rifiyya (State of the Rifi Republic), although the Rifis themselves referred to it as al-jabha al-rifiyya (the Rifi front) reflecting its temporary nature. The confusion of titles reflected the fluidity of the political structures in the Rif. Nevertheless, they were strong enough for Rifi forces to again defeat the Spanish in northwestern Morocco in 1924 and the French in 1925, before the combined strength of the two European armies put an end to his state.

After his surrender in May 1926, Abd al-Karim was exiled on the French island of Réunion, where
he stayed until 1947. In that year he escaped from a ship taking him back to France while it was traveling through the Suez Canal. He spent the rest of his life in Egypt, where he became the titular leader of the North African Defense League, the umbrella organization for Maghribi nationalists. He refused to return to Morocco at independence in 1956 saying that, since there were still foreign (American) troops on Moroccan soil, the country was not truly independent. He died in Cairo in 1963.

Abd al-Karim has been described by both French colonialist and modern Moroccan nationalist writers as a typical example of Berber resistance to outside authority. But others have seen him as a great guerrilla leader, part of a tradition including China's Mao Tse-tung and North Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh. Abd al-Karim himself situated his ideological stance in religious and nationalist terms. Despite the clear religious feeling of his followers, he told Léon Gabrielli, a French intelligence officer, that he specifically rejected the label of a jihad, saying that such medieval concepts were not relevant to the modern world. In an interview in the Egyptian Islamic journal al-Manar after the war, however, he admitted that he had made use of religious sensibilities as a rallying cry, although he presented himself in the context of the Salafiyya movement and modern Moroccan and Arab nationalism, and blamed his defeat on the opposition of the tariqas (Sufi religious brotherhoods), particularly the Darqawiyya, which was one of the biggest in the Rif, and on the failure of many of his supporters to accept his long-term political objective of replacing tribal systems with central government control and the absolute rule of the shariʿa. It is true, however, that other tariqas did support him, and in fact, the Rif was too small and too poor to resist the combined force of two European armies.

Bibliography

Hart, David M. The Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif: AnEthnography and History. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, for Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1976.

Pennell, C. R. Morocco since 1830. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

— C. R. PENNELL