Nûl Lamta: THE FORGOTTEN CITY, Ahmed JOUMI
The following text is excerpted from the book ‘L’Oasis d’Asrir’ by Ahmed JOUMANI, shedding light on the author’s efforts to uncover the lost history of the city Nûl Lamta in the Oued Noun region of Morocco. The author embarks on consulting written sources and oral histories to reconstruct a historical account of the rise and fall of the city, only to quickly discover that the local memory of the inhabitants of Asrir, the presumed core of the city, does not align with historical records. The author reflects on the challenges of reconciling written history with local memories and the limitations of their approach.
The oldest historical mention of the village Asrir can be found in at-Tashawwûf, a corpus of the great medieval Moroccan hagiographer (at-Tadili) (60). This passage, though brief, is of immense importance as it sheds light on the decline and disappearance of the city Nûl Lamta (61) as the radiant capital of Oued Noun, with its hard core likely being the village pair Asrir/Tighmert, as most researchers have supported who have worked on the past of this city (62). Geographical literature and medieval chronicles provide a basis for situating and describing the past of Nûl Lamta, but their statements are constantly vague and less precise.
In an attempt to complement the elements of this puzzle and fill the gaps that have plagued the medieval history of Oued Noun, we endeavored to conduct research, initially with the naive belief that where the written word was lacking, oral tradition would surely assist us and that “if the memories were there, they surely had to emerge.” (63).”
Gradually, I realized that my horizon of expectations was narrowing and that the historical portrait I was sketching of the Oued Noun through Nûl Lama, as it appeared in my reading, did not resonate with the collective memory of the village Asrir. I had anticipated that the written history of the city would have a glorious and radiant aura, and that Oued Noun held a special place in the Middle Ages. But paradoxically, the memory was scarcely rooted in this period to amplify it and make it an element of historical identity and a site of memory. Between the written and the oral, it became evident that the nostalgic phenomenon was alien to the functioning of this memory.
[60] • At-TADILI: At-taschawwûf ila rijali at-tasawwûf, available. A. Tawfig, Pub. Univ. Med V, Rabat, 1984, p. 344. French translation by M. Fennoyl, Regards sur le temps des soufis: vie des saints du sud marocain des veme, vime, vime siècles de l’hégire, Eddif, 1995, p. 246.
[61] • See among others: Al-IDRISSI: Le Maghreb au Vime siècle de l’hégire, Transl. M.H. Sadoq, Publisud, Paris 1984, p.66. HAWQAL: sûratû al ard, Pub, Al-Hayat, Beyrouth, 1997, P. 91. Himyari: Ar-Rawd al-mi’atâr, available. Ihsan Abbas, Ed. Naser pour la culture, Beyrouth, 1980, p. 548.
[62] • F. de LACHAPELLE: “Esquisse…”, Op. cit, p. 59 and for the same author: “Les Tekna du Sud-Ouest marocain, étude géographique, historique et sociologique”, Bul. Du Comité de l’Afrique Française, 1934, p. 31.
[63] • M. HALLBWACHS: Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire collective, Ed, Alcan, Paris, 1925, p. 88.
[64] • Lucette VALENSI: Les fables de la mémoire, la glorieuse bataille des trois Rois, Ed, Seuil, Paris 1992, p. 8.
[P 91]
My method was to emphasize the chronological dimension of the facts in order to classify them and better guide memory. However, the indigenous conception of history clearly rejected this element, and as a result, my approach lost its relevance. My informants found it interesting to hear what historians and travelers said about Nûl Lama, but their amazement quickly turned into clear disinterest, even if my scholarly credibility was present to support the reliability of these details in our encounter. “Was all of this in Asrir leqdim (the old time)?” they responded.
The shock of the researcher in such cases is disappointing; where silence emerges, we are faced with a common dilemma in ethnographic research.
By reversing the rule and inviting memory to search history, I realized that the desertion of the former was evident. And if “history is defined as research: one seeks information that would otherwise be lost in oblivion. So it is about saving memory whose carrier that ensures survival, is faulty, fragile, and offers no guarantees of durability,” then one must admit that “the search for memory” is not easy and turns out to be rather difficult, because its formation is identified with selection, omission, forgetting, and censorship. Transmission is not guaranteed, and everything that is supposed to be communicable belongs to the isolated, the unspoken, that is, to oblivion. “Everything happened from this perspective as if a fate were operating in the dark to erase the remnants and cast a veil of forgetfulness over the past.
[65] • “It was an illusion,” writes N. Lapierre, “which seemed all the more attractive to me because it seemed to bring the completeness of a missing history within my reach. A perspective illusion linked to the initial enthusiasm for life history.” See N. LAPIERRE: Le silence de la mémoire, à la recherche des juifs de Plock, Ed. Le livre de Poche, Paris, 2001, p. 47.
[66] • Abdesselam CHEDDADI: “At the beginning of Arabic-Islamic historiography: Islamic memory.” In Studia Islamica, LXXIV, p. 30.
N. Lapierre adds in the same vein: “At the edge of the abyss, history is called upon to assist memory, a necessary means for restructuring before the human chain of memories breaks.” Op. cit, p. 54.
L. Febvre dedicates this supremacy of history which “unmasks the inertia of memory, the illusions that a society must maintain and perpetuate itself.” Quoted in “history in a world in ruins.” In Revue de synthèse historique, T. XXX. No. 88, 1920.
[67] • René REMOND: “The transmission of memory,” In, Pourquoi se souvenir ?, Ed, Grasset, Paris, 1999, P 88.
[P 92]
The economy of storytelling (68A) that my interlocutors shared about Nûl Lamta suppresses and neglects details. The only form of memory remains confined to myths, as if narrating and discussing from a lack of information. Timelines linger in this frustrating void of village memory. In the village of Minot, F. Zonabend describes her encounter with such silence and states that “among those distant origins, no event ‘holds the saying’, no historical fact supports tradition.” She concludes that “the time of the community ignores history” (68).
As if memory is reluctant and non-inclusive, the method of description is from absence. It exists but only offers its outstanding peaks. Remarks about the history of Nûl Lama are astonishingly vague as long as one does not take into account history as my book knowledge suggests and proposes. M. Kilani, in turn, is intrigued by this symptom of memory in the oasis of El Ksar, where storytellers do not attach importance to “faithfulness to a specific historical content, (…) as if they cared little about verifying or discussing the arguments of such content” (69). There is almost no obligation to carry memory into the depths of “historical time,” and there is no desire to delve deeply into memory.
Despite the series of events that characterize the past period of Nûl Lama, amnesia turns out to be total, and there were no answers to the questions, and the answers themselves did not meet the expectations of a thirsty researcher. One feels the seeds of malaise, of an anomaly in transmission, when the links of the chain fall apart, “in this case, the researcher is faced with a secret, a lie, or forgetfulness” (70).
In Asrir, one does not integrate the past of this city as one’s own, one does not truly identify with its history. It is constantly assimilated with another population. The narrative distance works as an extension of the founding story. The city is not the center of the world, nor the center of the universe.
[68A] * The economy of storytelling refers to the way people selectively handle information and details in their stories. Often, certain details are omitted or neglected because they are considered less important or because they do not fit within the narrative someone wants to tell. This can lead to mythical memories and a lack of historical facts supporting tradition.
In the case of Núl Lamta, the author describes how the economy of storytelling stifles and neglects details, and how this has led to a lack of concrete information about the city’s history. This underscores the challenges of reconstructing history based on both written sources and oral tradition and the need to understand the limitations of both approaches.
[68] • Francoise ZONABEND: La mémoire longue: temps et histoire dans un village, Editions PUF, Paris 1980, p. 15.
[69] • Mondher KILANI: Construire la mémoire: parenté et sainteté dans une oasis du Sud tunisien, Editions Labor et Fides, Genève, 1992, p. 39.
[70] • Fanny COLONNA: “Oubli, reconstruction, censure: à propos d’une enquête dans l’Aurès”, In, Enseigner l’histoire, des manuels à la mémoire. Textes réunis par H. Moniot, éditions Peter Lang, Berne. 1984, p. 289.
[P 93]
The only tale universally known is that Noul was regarded as one of the seven cities (al mudoun as-sab’a). This designation is less about the moment when the city was cataloged in the urban register of Maghrib al-aqsã, but rather about the sacred resonance of the number seven, which was deemed to carry this quality. Myths and heroic additions ensured the perpetuation of these motifs. The essential reference to the past is that of a mythical time, akin to creation and the golden age, where the time elapsed between this creation and the present is generally very flat. The seeker is tormented by the impossibility of understanding temporal continuity and guaranteeing the purity of transmission and clearing up the slightest remnants of events. Between the foundational tale and the ancient history sought, there looms the specter of blasphemy and the peril of identity formation, presenting Núl Lama’s past as “radically different” without depth or measure. Time is not presented as a continuum but as a constant structural relation. Massive remnants of ancient and colossal Almoravid constructions now stand at the entrance of the village of Asrir, overcoming hills of various sizes where the houses and monuments of the city of Nûl Lama lie buried; a material testimony of a bygone era when Oued-Noun was one of the most prosperous regions of the Almoravid empire.
[71]. CHEVALIER and A. GHEERBRANT: Dictionary of Symbols, Vol, IV, Ed, Seghers, 1974, Pp. 170 – 178. Ec-Chenguiti notes the same narrative structure, saying: “they say that Chenguitt belongs to the seven cities, and I do not know the meaning of the seven cities, and why they are so qualified from the rest of the cities”.
See Al-Wasit fi taräjim udabâ’ chenguîtt, Pub, maktabat al wahda, Casablanca, 1961, P 426.
[72] J. Le GOFF, cited, P 40.
J. VANSINA confirms this idea and reminds that “where a mythical period stands opposite a historical period, the duration of the first is reduced to a moment and each chronology becomes impossible. »
See for him: Oral Tradition. Essay on Historical Method. Tervuren, Royal Museum for Central Africa, 1961, P 87.
[73] • E. E. EVANS-PRICHARD: The Nuer. Description of the Lifestyle and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Gallimard, Paris, 1968, P 132.
[74] • Since 1994, a Spanish archaeological mission had started combing and cataloging operations in the village of Asrir to commence excavations at sites deemed interesting.
[P 113]
I have endeavored, based on this collection, to create a dataset with my informants to guide and steer their memory in deciphering the past. This stems from the simple belief that the past does not exist without a collective memory unfolding within a spatial framework. And that space is a reality that persists (…) And we would not understand how to grasp the past if it were not actually preserved in the material environment.”
However, instead of forming a basis for history and producing testimonies to complement written history, the stock of monuments will be absorbed by memory and converge with the rejection patterns described earlier. Here, “forgetfulness embraces the past and devours it,” as Candau says. Thus, we complete the separation between physical space and represented space.
People in the village of Asrir like to tell that: “in the past (bekri), there was always war between the Christians (Ibertqîz) and the Berbers (echlüha), and all the ruins we see today in El Kherba and Agwaydìr are the result of this warlike society.” The ruins certainly become the basis of a possible narrative, but it is limited to a “Berber” or at most Christian influence. In other words, two elements that are the antithesis of the identity desired by the tribe in the village.
They also tell me that: “in the past (bekri), Asrir was large and populated. To support the number of horses that passed through it daily, the central gate, pulled by a hundred slaves, had to be fitted with metal plates on the lower threshold. But because the people were unbelievers, they were swallowed by the flood, as El Kherba bears witness.”
Religious temporality weighs on the story, and the ruins allow us to narrate in its aftermath. The remnants are the work of the godless; they reflect the struggle between the will of the “omnipresent Creator and the free will of man, a dialectical tension between obedience and rebellion.
The grandeur of the city is merely a harbinger of punishment; it does not presuppose prosperity in the past but the manifestation of divine will and then a demarcation of that time. It is a phenomenon, a common topos in the representation of ruins; “these wonders that lead to God, through various paths: if the mysteries of nature invite meditation on the works of divine power and the omnipresence of the Creator, then monumental remains from another time lead to reflection on the vanity of the greatest glories and the devouring hunger of history.
The story presents the past as a matter of course and attributes to the ruins the particularity of becoming a lesson in visual script, “where to say is to show and to read is to see.
Moreover, it is not only time that changes and takes on a new form, but space undergoes the same transformation, both components are inextricably linked. In space, the vicissitudes related to time manifest themselves, and upon it, the twists and turns of history are drawn, and vice versa; time carries stories about space.
An elderly man from the village shared the following remarkable testimony with me: “take note that the village of Asrir is built on a cemetery, and every time we dig the earth, skulls emerge and skeletons are excavated. But they are the remains of Christians and slaves who once lived in this place, in long bygone times.” The denial of the past is overwhelming, especially when all these ruins are located in the district of the Amazigh, who themselves are already the object and holder of all stereotypes of otherness.
(79) A. Miquel: La géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du XIe siècle, Tome I, Publisher: EHESS, Paris, 1988, p. 95.
An Islamic scholar reminds us that “God has given us food for thought with the remnants left by [ancient peoples] on earth, the citadels they built, the passages they carved into the heart of the mountains.” See Ibn Qutayba: Mukhtalaf-al-Hadith, Beirut, n.d., p. 314.
(80) H. Touati: Op. cit., p. 207.
[P 115]
Thus, we comprehend the madness of forgetfulness, which liberates them from the burden of the past and the guilt of a problematic history, continually opening the path to rejection (81).
The flow of the past is therefore fragmented and presents history as layered, considering the heterogeneity of the ethnic formations in the village where “it is fashionable to come from elsewhere and not be native, with the risk of being Berber” (82). Forgetting has been deeply rooted in this society for a long time, and it is suspected that this “hack” of memory gradually occurred in a movement whose direction is currently unknown in our research. The formation of the Tekna confederation, which spanned centuries, significantly contributed to establishing new identity structures where the Arab element merged with a Berber ethnic entity. This led to the dissemination of new norms and values, practically resulting in a reinterpretation of the past. The dual vision of the early history of Asrir, between the old factions and the new genealogies, likely stems from this slow, progressive cultural Arabization.
During his 19th-century journey to southern Morocco, Segonzac observed that “the Sousi are very ignorant of their history; their distant memories only go back to the conquest of the land by Moulay er-Rachid (1670)” (83). Most travelers and subsequent passionate researchers were not without preconceptions; they based their research on written traditions and directed their methods according to the knowledge acquired from books about the region. The significance attributed to the information was often mediated by these mechanisms of “already-read” knowledge. R. Montagne’s surprise is instructive as he asks: “What place do the great historical memories from the time of the Almohad Mahdi in the 18th century occupy in these mountains [High Atlas], which were the cradle of the great religious and military movement whose influence on all of North Africa and Spain was so profound and lasting?”
(81) This stereotype is certainly not isolated. We find echoes of this confusion in a response from Ibn Nasr ad-Dar’i, a famous jurist from southern Morocco (the sheikh of the zaouia of Tamgrout in the 17th century), when consulted about a village built, including a mosque, on the site of an old cemetery where human bones appeared on the walls. Is it permissible to live there or not? The faqih-jurist-mufti responded: “If the cemetery is Muslim, it is forbidden to live there, just as it is forbidden to pray in the mosque. The village must be demolished (yajibu hadmuhâ)” (Ajwiba, cited by Hassan El Baz: “al figh wal muitama’a min khilal al Ajwiba an-nasiriya fi ba’di masaili al badiya” in Le bassin de Draa, Pub. Univ. Ibnou Zohr, faculté des lettres, Agadir, 1996, p. 157).
Odette de Puigaudeau, aiming to draw an analogy between two different fields of knowledge with different symmetries, notes this elegant religious connotation of the ruins: “What do you seek in these old ruins?” said Miloud. “Their inhabitants are dead and the Prophet did not mention them” (La route de l’Ouest: Maroc-Mauritanie, Ed. J. Susse, 1945, p. 36).
(82) F. Colonna: Op. cit., p. 290.
(83) Count R. de Bordon de Segonzac: Excursion au Sous, avec quelques considérations préliminaires sur la question marocaine, Augustin Challamel, Paris, 1901, p. 305.
[P 116]
The collective memory has thus been notably unfaithful and indifferent on this point (84). This fact leads to considerable disappointment for the author, who declares in another text: “Up until the end of the 18th century, the furthest boundary we can reach through oral tradition, we have no precise information anymore” (85).
Obsessed with the disgraceful destruction of the “independent republics” by the “drama of the formation of the Sherifian empire,” Montagne considered this sparseness and scarcity of historical information in the oral tradition as a saturation point, a morphological change where domination was the sole pivot of a transmission he experienced bitterly.
He is not interested in forgetting as a sociological phenomenon where memory must essentially be treated as “a continuous evolution, open to the dialectic of memory and amnesia (…) vulnerable to all forms of use and manipulation (…) There is no spontaneous memory” (86). To counteract this decline in memory, Montagne invokes the remnants and the image as visual supports for the memory of “internal struggles” and “political organization of the tribes,” as he believes the ruins “revive a drama in which the political history of Berberia has been exhausted for centuries (…) eternally rebellious against unity” (87).
When we step outside our village, we are greeted by another memory, that of the scholars, those who have internalized part of the historical tradition in its written form, those who value the written word and boast of representing a model of knowledge, an incarnation of the Word that makes them excessive in their “word” about history. De Lachapelle understood this when he wrote about Nûl Lamta: “It is known among scholars as medinatou lamta” (88).
The concept of scholars is very interesting because they will manipulate the discourse and use all data about the past to adapt it in favor of a tribal identity built on a segmentary architecture. This makes Nûl Lamta a privileged hunting ground to reinforce themselves by incorporating it into the wake of their respective tribal territories.
(84) R. Montagne: “An Episode of Berber Siba in the 17th Century.” In Hespéris, Vol. XXVII, 1941, p. 89.
(85) R. Montagne: “Massat,” In Hespéris, 1924, p. 365.
In Nefzawa, in southern Tunisia, “the preference for forgetfulness comes into play on every occasion, whether it concerns land, water rights, or the origins of groups.” See G. Bedoucha: “Memory and Forgetfulness: The Stakes of the Name in an Oasis Society.” In Annales E.S.C. May-August 1980, p. 731.
(86) P. Nora: “Between Memory and History. The Problematic of Places.” In Les lieux de la mémoire, Vol. I, Gallimard, 1984, pp. XIX-XXIV.
(87) Montagne: Villages and Kasbahs… op. cit., p. IX.
(88) F. de Lachapelle: Les Tekna… op. cit., p.
[P 117]
The Avt Ba’amrân scholars draw comparisons between Bujrayf and Noul Lamta, even asserting that the Oued Noun described by historians and geographers is, in fact, the Oued Bujrayf located within their territory. Ultimately, leveraging their arguments, the scholars of Ayt ‘Athman assertively identify their village area, Asrir-Tighmert-Wa’rûn, as the rightful heir to the ancient ghost town.
Naimi observes that “within this framework, the tension remains confined to the scholarly realm. In reality, we witness the emergence of a boundary between two worlds. The scholars’ perspective focuses on the triumph of symbolism over imagination; their original curiosity is sparked by their evaluation of the socio-historical situation, projected based on prevailing knowledge and value systems” (89).
Moreover, despite this particular tendency to appropriate the medieval city, it must be noted that this does not translate into an engagement with its history. This new memory neither forms a bridge nor serves as a means of transmission between the present of the tribe, the leff, and the “glorious” yet forgotten and neglected past. Everything is compensated by focusing on the history of each tribe, whose exploits are mythologized by the journey and the exodus: it is perpetually claimed to be “Arab” and from elsewhere. There is no evidence that these scholars, through their work, will consistently serve as a barrier against forgetfulness, “the preservation of oneself over time,” as Ricoeur states (90).
Throughout our analysis, we have sought to expose the categories underlying the discourse on the shared past and the ways and formulations that frame the “tribal unthought” through the rejection and exclusion of common history.
Profound changes have thus influenced this collective identity of the village, with the dissemination of elements of a dominant cultural model being central to this transformation.
(89A) This is the city that will later surpass Nûl, visited by Leo Africanus (Al Ouazzan) in the 16th century. We will return to these details later.
(89) M. Naimi: “Nul Lamta or the Awakening of Etiological Meaning: Contributions of Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Geographical Names.” In.
See also the same author: “Nul Lamta, Illuminating Tables.” In, Hespéris – Tamuda, Vol. XXXIII, pp. 83-84-85.
(90) P. Ricoeur: “Between Memory and History.” In, Projet, no. 248, 1996-1997, pp. 11-12.
[P 118]
The Arabization of memory coincides with the spread of cultural Islamization, which extends like an oil slick. This mechanism is primarily evident in the “whitening of the Berber past” and the stratification of history into successive “races”; the sharp overlap between these layers forms the foundation of this temporal architecture. Indeed, “every classification is the result of a choice that reflects a value system and gives it meaning” (91).
The process of memory proves to be vulnerable and alienating, leading to the disarray of time; the “mnemonists” no longer jealously guard their memories. We quickly realize the complexity of the alphabet the group has used to “erase” the past. Time is experienced as a source of anxiety and an object of feverish speculation, directly referring to collective rhythms “which, in turn, open the way to the domain of values, common values, not as the result of individual or immaterial speculative production, but because this production is linked to a dynamic of social frameworks within which it takes place” (92).
There was a preference for collecting historical data within the group’s memory, but this effort encountered the extent of its gradual erosion and persistent silence. An academic framework internalized a complete alignment between the group, the community, and its oral tradition, which was considered a fixed structure. A leading Durkheimian vision played with our naive minds, as if the discourse each individual should produce projected the scent of harmony far beyond the intrinsic division and fragmentation within the group/subject (93), and that memory stemmed from the affirmation of the group’s homogeneity, its willpower, and its unity as a research paradigm. This coherence is quickly refuted because “this conception can largely be explained as a methodological legacy, of an essentially affective memory serving to bind the group in its integrity, to defend and legitimize it against the outside world” (94).
The collective memory is multifaceted, composed of intertwined elements and representations. While it is predominantly a mnemonic fact, it is also framed by forgetfulness and the mingling of endogenous and exogenous memories. Under the influence of the sacred, the structure of narratives merges with the absolutism of myth and the metaphor of the legendary. The capital of memories that the community possesses is a combination of fragments of the past, their reinterpretation, and collective amnesia determined and imposed by a prolonged process of ideological hegemony with all its forms of censorship—religious, political, and economic. As Dakhlia aptly points out: “The forgetting we became aware of was no longer merely the process of selecting memories typically studied as a strategy within the framework of legitimation. There were forgotten aspects that, far from serving the group’s interests, actually threatened its integrity” (95).
It is, however, still a question whether the researcher’s position in the field can remain untainted by the complexity of approaching a past in which the ego inevitably finds its place in the puzzle. The unravelling of languages and the retrieval of the past from oblivion are determined by the position assigned to us in the group’s hierarchy. The difficulty of maintaining both familial ties and research conditions has troubled many researchers. Such opacity restores kinship and tribal language as the only dialogical and confrontational modes between the researcher and the field, with the social conditions pre-established. This “embedding, as Kilani writes, independent of my will, in the local classification system, and what I wanted to avoid due to scientific neutrality—a position that proves difficult and untenable—was decisive in guiding my research. Thanks to this inclusion, I realized the strategic significance of the kinship system in the oasis society and its analytical value for my research program” (96).
It is not only forgetfulness that affects time; numerous factors contribute to this presentation of the past with significant fractures and immense shadowy areas, and likely “the collective memory itself is a myth, devised to reconstruct a continuous evolution in the discontinuity that governs the spread of societies over time” (97).
The neutrality of memory is, however, impossible, if not unthinkable. It is simultaneously a goal and a means to classify and organize the “pearls in the thread,” and it is clear that “in a segmentary society, the reproduction of historical discourse must also be segmentary” (98).
References
(91) Roger Sue: Time and Social Order, P.U.F. Publishing, Paris, 1994, p. 218.
(92) F. Farrugia: “A Concise History of Social Times: Durkheim, Halbwachs, Gurvitch.” In Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, Vol. CVI, 1999, p. 107.
(93) “For Durkheim, society always takes precedence over necessarily secondary individualities and imposes a rhythm and framework of time on its members that is both total and unique, bringing the particular under the general by way of Kantian subsumption, and reducing the diversity of individual temporalities to the unity of a single social temporality.” Ibid. p. 96.
(94) J. Dakhlia: op. cit., p. 8. Also by the same author: “History Awaits.” In Cahiers d’études africaines (Maghreb, Stories, Traces, Forgetfulness), No. 119, XXX – 3, 1990, pp. 251 – 278.
(95) Dakhlia: Forgetfulness… as mentioned, p. 10.
(96) M. Kilani: The Invention of the Other: Essays on Anthropological Discourse, Payot Publishing, Lausanne, 2000, p. 241. See also: “Local Knowledge, Global Knowledge. On the Concept of ‘Crovance’ in Anthropology.” In Social Sciences, Moral Sciences. Routes and Research Practices. Alif – IRMC Publishing, Tunis, 1995, pp. 65-86. The same phenomenon of fracture and shifting boundaries is also confirmed by Mamadou Diawara: “Research on Oral History Conducted by a Local Resident, or the Disadvantage of Being on Site.” In Cahiers d’études africaines, Vol. 97, XXV – 1, 1985, pp. 5-19.
(97) J. Duvignaud: The Gift of Nothing, Stock Publishing, Paris, 1977, p. 100.
(98) R. Boubrik: Saints and Society in Islam: The West Saharan Fâdiliyya Brotherhood, CNRS Editions, Paris, 1999, p. 18.