© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15700585-12341283

Arabica 60 (2013) 762-777 brill.com/arab

Senegalese, Gurkha, Sikh . . . : The French and British Colonial Troops in the

Eyes of the Arab Writers

Xavier Luffin Université libre de Bruxelles

AbstractThe former great European colonial empires had incorporated soldiers recruited in their colonies into their armies. Several Arab authors from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Morocco remember them through their novels and short stories, giving us an interesting perception of the “Other”: strang-ers brought into the Arab world by other strangers. They also represent different negative faces of the colonial period: the exploitation of the indigenous population, the dilemma of Muslims forced to fight their brothers . . .

KeywordsColonialism, war, Senegalese, Gurkha, Sikh, Spahis, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, Sudan

RésuméLes anciens grands empires coloniaux européens incorporèrent dans leurs armées des soldats recrutés au sein de leurs colonies. Plusieurs auteurs arabes—du Liban, de Syrie, d’Irak et du Maroc—les remémorent à travers leurs romans et nouvelles, nous livrant ainsi une perception intéressante de l’« Autre » : des étrangers amenés dans le monde arabe par d’autres étrangers. Ils représentent également différents aspects négatifs de la période coloniale : l’exploitation de la population indigène, le dilemme de musulmans forcés à combattre leurs frères . . .

Mots clésColonialisme, guerre, Sénégalais, Gurkha, Sikh, spahis, Irak, Liban, Syrie, Maroc, Soudan

Introduction

The Arabic novels dealing with the colonial period are a fertile field for analy-zing the image of the Other: the European is mainly depicted as a representa-tive of the occupation—a governor, an administrator, an army officer—who often despises the local population. But a more complex representation of the Other occurs too in this literature, a kind of Other’s Other—for both the Euro-peans and the Arabs: the colonial recruit.

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In fact, the former great European colonial empires like France and Great Britain, as well as Portugal and Belgium, incorporated into their armies sol-diers recruited in their colonies. Though these soldiers have been largely ignored for a long time by the official historiography, they tend to be more and more brought to light in the last two decades, through the claims of these soldiers themselves who demand a better war pension, as well as popular movies like Indigènes in France, studies1 and officers’ memoirs.2

Regarding the fiction, these soldiers have been the topic of many novels written in European languages since at least 1920 and up to today, in Europe as well as in Africa. See for instance Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier by Mohamed Ben Chérif in 1920, La légende du goumier Saïd by Joseph Peyré in 1950, La Ciociara by Alberto Moravia in 1957 or, more recently, Galadio by Didier Daeninckx, Burma Boy by Biyi Bandele as well as some chapters of Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed.3

In parallel, several Arab authors from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Morocco, Egypt and Sudan also remember them through their novels and short stories, attesting how their presence in their countries had struck, for various reasons, the collective imagination.

The British Colonial Troops in Iraq

Several Iraqi authors mention the presence of Indian recruits in the British army during the colonial period. Muhammad Hudayyir for instance mentions them in at least two of his short stories written in the seventies and published in his collection Fi darağat 45 miʾawī. In a beautiful short story entitled Sāʿāt ka-l-huyūl, the author describes how a young boy goes from Basra to Al-Faw, a small port near to Shatt al-Arab, in order to meet Marzūq, who will repair his watch. The boy goes first to a local hotel, where another boy who works there asks him if he is an Indian:

1 Malcolm Page, A History of the King’s African Rifles, London, Pen and Sword Books, 1998.2 See for instance John Nunneley, Tales from the King’s African Rifles, London, Phoenix, 1998;

Joao Paulo Borges Coelho, “African Troops in the Portuguese Colonial Army, 1961-1974”, Por-tuguese Studies Review, 10/1 (2002), p. 129-50.

3 Mohamed Ben Chérif, Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier, Paris, Payot, 1920; Joseph Peyré, La légende du goumier Saïd, Paris, Flammarion, 1950; Alberto Moravia, La Ciociara, Roma, Fabbri, 1957; Biyi Bandele, Burma Boy, London, Vintage, 2008; Didier Daeninckx, Galadio, Paris, Gal-limard, 2010; Nadifa Mohamed, Black Mamba Boy, London, Harper, 2010.

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I was surprised by this question, because he looked like an Indian more than I do, with his dark complexion, his abundant greasy hair and his shiny eyes. So I muttered:—Have you ever been told that Basra was called the vagina of India, and that before they arrived in Al-Faw the Indian warriors of the British army didn’t desire but women and girls from Basra?4

In Ihtisār al-rassām, the author describes the career of Mahmūd Afandī the painter. The reader learns that he has started to paint while he was jailed in Puna, India, after the British defeated the Ottomans in Iraq during World War I. He bought some pencils and notebooks from the prison store, and then “he obtained other pencils and notebooks from the city, with the help of the Mus-lim Indian guards.” These guards were among the first subjects he painted, along with the boat which had brought him and his mates from Basra to Bom-bay and the other prisoners.5

In his novel Yā kūktī, Ğanān Ğāsim Hillāwī also recalls the Indians at the service of the British during the First World War:

Escaping feet were leaving behind the green bridge, going towards the remains of the “Hindu” bridge. The elders are the only ones who still remember this bridge: The Sikhs and the Gurkha, they are the ones who built it and lift it with ropes before they headed to Qurna and al-Šuʿayba where they died under the bullets of the Šīšhāna and the Burnū.

A blond man with a white body and blue eyes, wearing a short, his name must be Jack, or Smith, or John or Clarke, is adorning his flat hat, this symbol of the Empire on which the sun never sets. He speaks nervously, giving short orders, brief and sure, looking towards the Iraqis wandering behind the palm-trees, and giving orders to the Gurkha: “build here, pull the ropes, move the pulleys, dig over there, make a dam!” White geography, the civilization of the blond men who set up their culture and then go away, leaving behind them traces of blood on the stones, skins stripped off on the ground, they move from place to place like an amoeba, through the swamp, the dunes, on the rivers, in the valleys (. . .).6

A footnote explains that “Gurkha” ‘was the name given by the Iraqis to the Indians recruited by the British army during the colonial period’,7 which means that the author doesn’t mean specifically the Gurkha here, but the Indi-ans as a whole. The passage itself shows how people are hierarchized in the colonial mind, the British officers giving orders to the Gurkha who do the harsh work. The Indians are not the enemy here; though they serve in

4 Muhammad Hudayyir, “Sāʿāt ka-l-huyūl”, in Fī darağat 45 miʾawī, Cologne, Manšūrāt al-Ïgamal, 2006, p. 57.

5 Muhammad Hudayyir, “Ihtisār al-rassām”, in Fī darağat, p. 77.6 Ğanān Ğāsim Hillāwī, Yā kūktī, London, Riyād al-Rayyis, 1991, p. 72.7 Ibid., p. 72, n. 1.

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the occupying army, they are themselves victims as a part of this “Empire on which the sun never sets”.

Al raÏgʿ al-baʿīd, by Fuʾād al-Takarlī, tells us the history of an Iraqi family in Baghdad in the beginning of the sixties. At the very end of the book, one of the family’s sons, Midhat, takes refuge in the Kurdish neighborhood of the capital, where an old man called al-Hāğğ remembers the days he served in the Turkish army, fighting the British at al-Kūt, during World War I. The old man divagates, mixing Arabic and Turkish in his long monologue describing the battle:

We were exhausted. I wrapped my head in my arms and I slept, my dear, like a donkey, in the middle of the street. Then horses came, they were about to run over me. Thank God. The guns fired for two hours, we were in the trench, and the guns fired for two hours. They attacked. With knives. We were shouting “God is Great” and we were striking. The bellies of the Englishmen. Then an Indian queer came and took his clothes off, saying “I am a Muslim, I am circumcised”. The queer, do we have the same father? We cut his belly, his belly and the one of his father!8

In this passage, the Indian seems to seek al-Hāğğ’s mercy, pointing to the fact that he is a Muslim too, but it doesn’t stop al-Hāğğ, who kills him. The old man doesn’t explain his gesture, but the reader can easily imagine that he doesn’t hesitate to kill the Indian, though he is a Muslim, because he considers him as a traitor serving the British.

But the image of the Indian soldiers continues to be used by the Iraqi authors today. In Bābā Sārtir, ʿAlī Badr describes the stay of a British officer in Baghdad during the World War I in such terms:

Rick Dowell crossed the bridge which would be later called Maude Bridge, fol-lowed by Sikh, Karka and Gurkha soldiers occupying Baghdad in 1917, then he went to the palace located in Mahallat Ğadīd Hasan Bāšā.9

Another author who mentions the Indian recruits is Samīr Naqqāš, an Israeli writer born in Iraq, who has written all of his works in Arabic. In Šlūmū l-kurdī wa-anā wa-l-zaman, a long novel tracing back the history of Shlomo, a 20th century Kurdish Jew who crossed from his ancestral village of Sablāh in Iranian Kurdistan to Ramat Gan in Israel, the narrator sometimes recalls the British colonial period in Baghdad, where he had to settle down with his family after having been forced to leave their village. Though he was a rich

8 Fuʾād al-Takarlī, al-Raïgʿ al-baʿīd, Damascus, Dār al-madā, 1993, p. 417.9 ʿAlī Badr, Bābā Sārtir, Beirut, Riyād al-Rayyis, 2001, p. 139.

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merchant in Kurdistan, he quickly became a poor man in the Iraqi capital, like all the other Kurdish refugees. In order to emphasize this poorness, he mentions several times that the only work he could find there was to clean the soldiers’ latrines:

Are you ready to work in the shit? That is what an honest Jew asked me in Baghdad—honest because he had asked me this, he did not order me to do so (. . .). Many other Jews from Sablāh did as I did, leaving behind their past and their easy life, coming in rows with the other poor people of Baghdad, waiting for the arrival of the English major or the Indian baboo [native clerk], by car, followed by a lorry. He was choosing the workers, giving them the worse tasks to do. Even Rabi Mihāʾīl, Rabi Nāhūm’s brother, the martyr of Sablāh, was there with his greyish beard, cleaning the dirtiness of these Barbarians—British, Gurkha and Sikhs.10

While writing about the Indian soldiers, the Iraqi authors often refer specifi-cally to the Gurkha and the Sikh, though other Indian populations were inte-grated in the British colonial troops. The Gurkha, originating from Nepal, were “discovered” by British troops during the Anglo-Nepal war of 1814-1816, and were quickly considered by the British officers as exceptional sol-diers. They were then enrolled in the British army and eventually constituted a service apart from the rest of the Indian army by the early 20th century. Many British writers, often former officers who had worked with them, have underlined their military qualities, an abundant literature which led to the birth of a consensus: the stereotype of the brave Gurkha.11 The Sikhs too are often considered as good warriors by British sources. For instance, J.P. Jones was highlighting the range of temperaments and qualities among the Indians in such terms:

The warlike Sikh, the defiant Pathan, the subtle and wily Mahratti, the suave and intellectual Baboo, the stolid and effeminate Dravidian, and the barbarous hill man—these and many other different races have to be yoked together in the great chariot of state.12

However, India was not an unknown world to the Arabs, who had been in contact with them since centuries: many Arab historians and geographers had

10 Samīr Naqqāš, Šlūmū l-kurdī wa-anā wa-l-zaman, Cologne, Manšūrāt al-Ïgamal, 2004, p. 37.

11 See Lionel Caplan, “Bravest of the Brave: Representations of ‘The Gurkha’ in British Mili-tary Writings”, Modern Asian Studies, 23/3 (1991), p. 571-97.

12 John P. Jones, “British Rule in India”, The North American Review, 168/508 (1899), p. 337.

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written about India, starting with the anonymous author of the Ahbār al-Hind wa-l-Sind as early as the 9th century. India was also well represented in literature, through the Tales of Kalīla wa-Dimna or popular books like One Thousand and One Nights. In the specific case of Iraq, traders and seamen knew India, and many Indians had settled down in Iraq too—seamen, work-ers, traders and so on—and this fact is also reflected by contemporary Iraqi literature.

So, the same authors who mention the Indian recruits in the British army often deal too with the Indian sailors of Southern Iraq as well as with their homeland. Muhammad Hudayyir for instance often refers to the Indian com-munity of Basra as well as to India itself—his work entitled Basrayātā is full of references about the “Indian souk” of Basra as well as about the porters (South Asian Jats, Asawira, Siyabaja and Arabs) and the Indian sailors or the trade with Bombay and Bengal13—and so does Ğanān Ğāsim Hillāwī in Yā kūktī.14 Samīr Naqqāš as well devoted some pages to the narrator’s journey to Bombay in 1924, describing on the same occasion the historical and personal links existing between the Jewish community of the city and Iraq.15

The French Colonial Troops in the Near East and North Africa

Several Syrian authors deal with the theme of the national resistance against the colonial occupation. In Dimašq, bāsimat al-huzn, Ulfa l-Idlibī describes how the Syrian tuwwār resist the French occupation in the thirties and the forties of the 20th century. Though she almost always writes about the French officers and soldiers, she mentions at least twice the presence of “foreign” sol-diers in their ranks. When the narrator, a young Damascene lady in love with ʿĀdil, an insurgent from her neighborhood, expresses her desire to take part to the revolutionary movement, her mother answers: “What are you talking about now? And what if a Senegalese or a Frenchman captured you, what should I say to your father?”16 Later on, the same narrator mentions the North African soldiers:

The attacks went on in the Gūta area, the French came with new contingents that they brought from North Africa after they had stopped Prince ʿAbd al-Qādir

13 Muhammad Hudayyir, Basrayātā, Baghdad, n.p., 1993, p. 33, 83.14 Ğanān Ğāsim Hillāwī, Yā kūktī, p. 32-3.15 Samīr Naqqāš, Šlūmū, p. 12 sq.16 Ulfa l-Idlibī, Dimašq, bāsimat al-huzn, Damascus, Sabriyya, 1980, p. 137.

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al-Hattābī’s rebellion. When we saw their soldiers walking on our land we were almost dying of sorrow and fury.17

The reader can imagine here that this fury comes from the presence of Arab and Muslim soldiers helping the French occupier, though it is not clearly expressed.

Two other Syrian novelists deal with the French occupation, this time giv-ing more attention to the African recruits. The first one is Fawwāz Haddād with Mūzāyīk, Dimašq 39 and the second is Mamdūh ʿAzzām with Qasr al-matar.18

In Mūzāyīk, Dimašq 39 by Fawwāz Haddād, the colonial troops are omni-present, from the second chapter up to the last one. The author mainly quotes the Senegalese and the Moroccans—al-sinigāl wa-l-magāriba, though he men-tions at least twice the Indochinese soldiers—al-ğunūd al-tūnkīniyyūn.19 They are often described in a folkloric way, with an emphasis on their particular dresses and weapons:

Two rows of Spahi horsemen [al-fursān al-sibāhiyyīn] were surrounding the mili-tary car, with their shining dark faces, their large burnooses and their red tar-booshes, they were slowly crossing the streets on their beautifully adorned horses.20

These soldiers are never considered negatively, though one of the Syrian characters overtly mocks the so-called “civilizing mission” of France through a description of its army:

—Could an army which is a mixture of Frenchmen, Africans, Tonkinese and even Muslim Arabs like us, helped by mercenaries and spies, could such an army be the messengers of civilization?21

In one passage, the Muslim identity of the North African soldiers is high-lighted by a Syrian doctor who collaborates with the French. He explains to one of his officers that the Moroccan soldiers save their salary as well as all that

17 Ulfa l-Idlibī, Dimašq, p. 172.18 Fawwāz Haddād, Mūzāyīk, Dimašq 39, Damas, al-Ahālī, 1991; Mamdūh ʿAzzām, Qasr

al-matar, Casablanca-Beirut, al-Markaz al-taqāfī l-ʿarabī, 1998.19 Fawwāz Haddād, Mūzāyīk, p. 19, 229.20 Ibid., p. 232.21 Ibid., p. 165. This depreciation of the French army due to its many foreign recruits—in the

eyes of the local population—is expressed in historical works too, like in Christian Destremeau, Le Moyen-Orient pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Paris, Perrin, 2011, p. 128.

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they have plundered in order to bribe an officer or a doctor who would agree to dismiss them for health reasons, in order

to spend the rest of their life close to the tomb of the Prophet, to be buried beside the mausoleum of Muhyī l-Dīn b. ʿArabī, or to make the pilgrimage to Mecca by foot (. . .). After all, have they not been preceded by the amīr ʿAbd al-Qādir the Algerian, who had chosen Damascus as refuge, where he became a sufi?22

In Qasr al-matar, Mamdūh ʿ Azzām also describes how the Syrians opposed the French occupation. The author often mentions the presence of soldiers coming from the French colonies—Senegalese, Vietnamese, Guyanese, Moroccans23—and insists on the cosmopolitan aspect of the French army, where “all the languages of the world are mixed up.”24

However, the Senegalese soldiers are more represented than the other groups, apparently because of their “exoticism” in the eyes of the Syrian spec-tator, as shown in the following passages:

These embroidered soldiers, blacks, whites and dark-skinned, were exposed to the bitter cold of midday (he became a bit distracted and thought: where did the Blacks come from?).25

Though the clamoring arrival [of the French army] was the event of the day in the city, the Negroes alone monopolized the attention of the majority, nobody could explain the presence of these black soldiers in the white army, though the fame of the Senegalese would spread in the mountain later on.26

Through the voices of the Syrian rebels who captured Senegalese soldiers, the author describes the contradictory attitudes of the local population towards the Africans: some of the rebels consider that they should use them as slaves—one for each rebel—or even propose to execute them one by one, but others feel pity for them and want to take them as mere prisoners of war. These contradictory attitudes are incarnated by Kanğ, brutal and unfair, who finally starts to shoot the prisoners, and Kāmil, who tries to save them. An important fact occurs in this episode: during the execution, one of the Senegalese starts praying, the rebels then hesitate to kill him, fearing God, and eventually let him go away.27

22 Ibid., p. 67.23 Mamdūh ʿAzzām, Qasr, p. 342, 453.24 Ibid., p. 388.25 Ibid., p. 205.26 Ibid., p. 215.27 Ibid., p. 508 sq.

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Elsewhere, the author brilliantly shows how the despising attitude of Kanğ and his companions towards the Senegalese is relative, the French officers con-sidering the Syrian peasants exactly the same way, naming them hamağ wa-barābira28—savages and barbarians—and considering that they came to bring them civilization.

A last Syrian writer who has dealt several times with the Senegalese in his works is Walīd Ihlāsī. In his collection of short stories entitled Dimāʾ fī l-subh al-agbar,29 three of his texts refer to the French occupation of Aleppo and mention the presence of the Senegalese soldiers, depicted as cruel and brutal, harassing the Arab women. In one of these short stories, Abū Satīf yuhriqu hān al-šarabğī, the French officers are even not mentioned, just as if the city was occupied by Senegal and not by France. They patrol in the streets at night, one of them even tries to rape a woman, but above all they are in charge of the prison where the patriots are jailed and tortured to death. The narrator names them al-sinigāl—the Senegalese—or, more often, the “black soldiers” (al-ğunūd al-sūd ), while the characters use the term ʿabīd, which means literally “slaves” but could be translated here as “negroes”.30

Another short story written by the same author, Mā hadata li-ʿAntara ?,31 tells us the story of a young black boy who terrorizes the children of the nar-rator’s neighborhood, in Aleppo, during the last years of the French occupa-tion. He is called ʿAntara, both because of his complexion and his strength. ʿAntara lives alone with his mother and is suspected to be the son of a Senega-lese soldier enrolled in the French army, “famous for raping women when they are drunk”. At the end, ʿAntara participates in a rally against the occupation, and is killed by a dum-dum bullet shot by . . . “African soldiers”, an event proving ʿ Antara’s patriotism as well as the brutality of the French army. Though very short, this text summarizes a lot of features attributed to the African recruits in the Arabic literature: the betrayal, the savagery, the rape . . .

The author was born in Iskenderun in 1935 and then grew up in Aleppo from 1939, and his father had been involved in the Syrian resistance against the French occupation,32 so this recurrent presence of the Senegalese in his works must reflect his own experience or events recollected by relatives or friends.

28 Ibid., p. 235.29 Walīd Ihlāsī, Dimāʾ fī l-subh al-agbar. Qisas halabiyya, Aleppo, Maktabat al-šahbāʾ, 1968.30 Ibid., p. 11 sq.31 Walīd Ihlāsī, Mā hadata li-ʿAntara?, Damascus, Manšūrāt Wizārat al-taqāfa, 1992.32 M.J.L. Young, “The Short-Stories of Walid Ikhlasi”, Journal of Arabic Literature, 12/1

(1981), p. 125.

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Two short stories from the Lebanese Ilyās Hūrī, both published in 1977, mention the presence of colonial recruits among the French troops during the period of the French Mandate, between 1918 and 1943. The first one, al-Kanīsa describes the beginning of the Lebanese civil war in the seventies. A French priest, Marcel, discusses with Lebanese soldiers occupying a church, remembering how he settled down in Lebanon: he had arrived as a French officer just after the First World War, and then he decided to stay in the coun-try to continue what he felt to be his duty to bring civilization, this time not with a gun, but through education. Among his recollections, he quotes the Senegalese and the Circassian soldiers around their French officer, speaking of heroism, civilization and women in French, with a strange accent.33 In the second short story, al-Gabal al-sagīr, the author mentions another category of recruits, this time during the Second World War:

The French soldiers were accompanied by soldiers. At first, I thought they were Chinese, but people said they came from Indochina. They were short, with yellow faces, almost naked, with rubber shoes which were not protecting them from the cold. They were like servants in the French army, preparing the meals and the cof-fee (. . .). Of course, Lebanon gained its Independence after the war, the French soldiers left the country, and these small soldiers too went back to their country. I think I saw them again on TV, when they showed some movies about the Vietnam War.34

The author seems to show here how the colonized people were themselves hierarchized—the Indochinese being considered as servants and not as war-riors. But in the end, they would fight back and defeat the French, and then the American army, as a kind of revenge to both colonialism and their repre-sentation as a people in the Western mind.

The Senegalese were also sent closer to their homeland, in North Africa, where they have been represented too in literature. In his famous autobio-graphical novel, al-hubz al-hāfī, Muhammad Šukrī remembers his childhood in the slums of Tangiers. He mentions how he was trying to trade with the travelers passing by the city, especially Jews who were transiting in the port before their departure for Palestine, as well as French and Senegalese soldiers—he calls them Dakāriyyūn, people from Dakar—on their way to Alge-ria.35 In this short passage, the mention of the Senegalese soldiers is completely

33 Ilyās Hūrī, “al-Kanīsa”, in al-Gabal al-sagīr, Beirut, Muʾassasat al-abhāt al-ʿarabiyya, 1977, p. 44.

34 Ilyās Hūrī, “al-Gabal al-sagīr”, in al-Gabal, p. 18.35 Muhammad Šukrī, al-hubz al-hāfī, Casablanca, al-Fanak, 2009, p. 204.

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neutral, the narrator doesn’t feel any hostility or particular closeness towards them, they are mere potential clients.

Another Moroccan writer, Mubārak Rabīʿ, has written a novel entitled al-Rīh al-šitwiyya where he depicts the situation of Morocco during the last years of WWII. He sometimes describes the black recruits of the French army, and the way the local population—especially the ladies—fears them or at least mistrusts them.36

In his short story entitled Lahn afrīqī, the Algerian writer Ahmad Munaw-war tells us about a lesser known episode of the French colonial campaigns: somewhere in the eighties, an Algerian visits the Comoro Islands, where he meets two local inhabitants, Mīdū and ʿUtmān. They explain to him that they know his country well, because they had been forced to serve in the French army there in the beginning of the sixties—the Comoro Islands obtained their Independence in 1975. They remember Algiers as a beautiful city, and they insist on saying that they never fired on Algerians: “How could I kill my brothers? It is a sin for a Muslim to kill his brother or even to harm him.”37

The Colonial Troops Seen from Inside

The participation of Moroccan recruits in the World Wars or the French colo-nial campaigns has of course also left some traces in the North African Arabic literature, where they are not represented as the “Other” but as the “Self ”.

Mubārak Rabīʿ mentions several times in his novel already quoted above the participation of Algerian and Moroccan soldiers to the WWII, like in this pas-sage, where a young Moroccan soldier explains his situation in a letter sent from a camp of the Red Cross in Switzerland:

My mother should not be concerned for me anymore, but inform her by now that I have lost my right leg as well as three fingers of my right hand, tell her that I am safe now (. . .). But it is not a shame anyway, there are thousands of soldiers with me here, who have lost their limbs or parts of their body. All this happened with God’s will.38

In a short story entitled al-Mīrāt, Muhammad Šukrī deals with the participa-tion of the colonial recruits in the French military adventure. He describes how ʿAllāl, a young and poor Moroccan, tries to prevent his widowed father,

36 Mubārak Rabīʿ, al-Rīh al-šitwiyya, Beyrouth, Maktabat al-maʿārif, 1979, p. 24 [1st ed.: Tunis, al-Dār al-tūnisiyya li-l-našr, 1977].

37 Ahmad Munawwar, Lahn afrīqī, Algiers, al-muʾassasa l-wataniyya li-l-kitāb, 1986, p. 50.38 Mubārak Rabīʿ, al-Rīh, p. 425.

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Hādī, from getting married again, fearing to lose his small heritage –the small pension paid by the French army because Hādī has fought in Indochina. The author insists on the fact that the father had no choice, that he had been forced to fight there, and that he had nothing to do with this war—“Hādī came back from the Indochina war with both of his arms amputated. He knew why he had to come back, but he didn’t know why he had to go there.”39 The father often tells his son the same stories about the war:

He was telling him his recollections from the French army and the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Very short stories: a comrade was at my side. A splinter destroyed his skull. His brain soiled my face. I don’t know how I collected the bowels of another comrade and how I fixed it back in his belly until a third one came and saved me. The ambulance arrived and the guy survived.40

The same author also refers to the Moroccan soldiers enrolled in the Spanish army in al-Hubz al-hāfī, for instance when the narrator explains to one of his friends that his father has deserted the Spanish army, where he served as a soldier, that he had spent two years in jail for this reason and that since he has been released he hasn’t done anything but wander the streets.41 Though this fact is mentioned in one short sentence, it plays a major role in the novel, since it may partly explain the violent behavior of the father, a central character of this autobiographical novel.

In Rifqat al-silāh wa-l-qamar, ʿAbd al-Karīm Gallāb tells us about the war memories of Moroccan soldiers in a very original way: a group of Moroccan soldiers assist Palestinian, Syrian and Egyptian brothers in arms during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war—called here the Ramadan war. Some of the Moroccan officers had previously served, together with Senegalese recruits, in the French colonial troops in Indochina and in Italy, and their recollections are mixed together with the events of 1973, as if they could use their former experience in a more legitimate war.

More recently, ʿAllāl Burqiyya also alludes in a short passage of his novel, Abadiyya hālisa, to the Moroccan soldiers enrolled in the French army in a quite original way: a Moroccan living in Belgium recalls his childhood spent in Morocco, and his conversations with his father who had served voluntarily in the French army: “In our big house, in Msalla, there was two timeworn portraits: De Gaulle and ʿAbd al-Nāsir, gazing each other like to idols of ice and fire.”42

39 Muhammad Šukrī, “al-Mīrāt”, in al-Wuğūh, London, al-Sāqī, 2000, p. 36.40 Ibid., p. 40.41 Šukrī, al-Hubz, p. 101.42 ʿAllāl Burqiyya, Abadiyya hālisa, Cairo, Dār al-ʿayn, p. 24.

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An Interesting Comparison: The Perception of the Ïgihādiyya in Sudan

The forced recruitment of soldiers by an alien power in the Arab world and in its margins has not been the deed of modern colonial powers alone: the forced recruitment of African slave soldiers is a very old phenomenon dating back to the pre-Islamic period in the Arabian peninsula, which has been used as well by the Aglabids in Tunis during the 9th century, the Almoravids during the 11th century or King Mūlāy Ismāʿīl in the 17th century, in Morocco.43 It has also been the case in Sudan, first in the pre-colonial kingdoms of Sinnār and Dār Fūr, and then with Muhammad ʿAlī’s occupation of the Sudan in 1821, when thousands of men from the Nuba Mountains, the Upper Blue Nile and the White Nile regions were sent to Southern Egypt in order to receive a mili-tary training. These slave soldiers, called Ïgihādiyya, were then stationed in Sudan but then sent to quell rebellions in Greece and in Arabia.44

Butayna Hidr Makkī mentions them in her novel, Sahīl al-nahr, where she describes the terror inspired by the Ïgihādiyya at the very end of the 19th cen-tury. According to the narrator’s grandmother, the young girls of an Arab vil-lage in Sudan decided to throw themselves in the river instead of being raped by these men:

My grandmother was telling me this story to illustrate the courage of the Ïgaʿaliyyīn young girls: when the men had been defeated by the soldiers, who had better weapons and equipment, the Ïgihādiyya invaded the place. They entered the houses in order to abduct the women, who had fled to the Nile in order to protect their honor. They were so seducing that their beauty was sung in every village of the country. And the invaders were known for their brutality and their taste for goods, gold and women. Yes, the young girls of the tribe had gone to the Nile river, pushed away by the older women who thought that they would be too weak to face the soldiers savagery and their desire for revenge.45

A similar representation of the Ïgihādiyya is given by the famous Egyptian writer Yūsuf Idrīs, in one of his first short stories, al-Hağğāna. The inhabitants of a small Egyptian village await with anxiety the arrival of the hağğāna, Nubian and Sudanese recruits of the Egyptian police, sent by the government to punish them. The author describes them as brutal and ugly men feared by

43 John Hunwick & Eve Troutt Powell, The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam, Princeton, Marcus Wiener, 2001, p. 139.

44 Ahmad Alawad Sikainga, “Military Slavery and the Emergence of a Southern Sudanese Diaspora in Sudan, 1884-1954”, in J. Spaulding & S. Beswick, White Nile, Black Blood, Law-renceville and Asmara, The Red Sea Press, 2000, p. 24 sq.

45 Butayna Hidr Makkī, Sahīl al-nahr, Khartoum, Sidra, 2000, p. 116.

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everyone, their terrifying aspect being highlighted by their very black com-plexion, their scarifications and their whips.46

In Ihdātiyyāt al-insān, Muhsin Hālid gives another perception of the Ïgihādiyya. This time, Santino, a Southerner, compares the Arab and Muslim power in Sudan with the European colonialism through the Ïgihādiyya institution:

When the White approached my ancestors, they thought that he wanted to per-form the fox dance with them, they did not understand that he was the fox, for whom they had been preparing their spears in the heart of the jungle for so many centuries. They implored their ancestors to make the rain fall for him, this stranger who had pushed the sons of the Nile to prepare their traps and their spears to capture them. They asked for rain, and the autumn just pissed on them! For what regards the Northerners . . . Ah! Yes, it’s true, al-Zubayr Bāšā has freed caravans of slaves, but not to make freemen of them, no his aim was to make out of them bāšbuzūq who would fight to the death for him.47

A last novel deals with these Sudanese soldiers, but in a very particular context: Kūkū Sūdān Kabāšī by the Egyptian Salwā Bakr. The plot of the novel is based on real historical facts: the participation of Sudanese Ïgihādiyya in the interna-tional force sent to Mexico by Napoleon III, in order to quell the Mexican revolt in the year 1860s.48 The Egyptian narrator, going back to Cairo after a business trip, meets a man in the plane who introduces himself as a “Mexican Egyptian”—his grand grandfather was one of Napoleon’s Egyptian officers who then married a local woman in Mexico. The man gives her notes written in Arabic, left by his ancestor, Šayh ʿŪtmān, which describe some episodes of Napoleon’s campaign, as well as details about the Sudanese recruits, like this passage:

The majority of the soldiers were Blacks who had been brought from Sudan, the lower Nile and the slave areas, most of them had been captured and then sold in the markets of Khartoum (. . .). The government had chosen me for this mission because of my own complexion and my Nubian Sudanese origins, I had been trained in the Ïgihādiyya, I had served in the army before I studied at al-Azhar.49

46 Yūsuf Idrīs, “al-Hağğāna”, in Arhas layālī, Cairo, Dār Misr, 1954, p. 49.47 Muhsin Hālid, Ihdātiyyāt al-insān, Beirut, al-muʾassasa l-ʿarabiyya li-l-dirāsāt wa-l-našr,

p. 37.48 For more information about this campaign, see Richard Hill & Peter Hogg, A Black Corps

d’élite: An Egyptian Sudanese Conscript Battalion with the French Army in Mexico, 1863-1867, East Lansing, Michigan University Press, 1995.

49 Salwā Bakr, Kūkū Sūdānī Kabbāšī, Cairo, Mīrīt, 2004, p. 77.

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Conclusion

Though the above mentioned authors describe recruits who came from very different cultural and linguistic backgrounds—Indians in Iraq, Senegalese and North Africans in Syria and so on—some similar features appear in their rep-resentations. They are sometimes depicted in a quite neutral manner, as being part of the military landscape, together with other elements like their Euro-pean officers. However, their “exotic” appearance, in the case of the Sikhs with their turbans or the Senegalese with their black complexion for instance, par-ticularly strikes the mind.

In other cases, they are perceived negatively by the characters—or at least a part of them—for different reasons, the most obvious one being their mem-bership in the occupying military forces: they are the enemy, and so they have to be feared and hated.

A specific representation of this fear is sexual harassment or even rape, which is evoked by authors like Ulfa l-Idlibī, Butayna Hidr Makkī, Yūsuf Idrīs and Walīd Ihlāsī, especially when the authors deal with the African recruits.

The second reason may be, in some cases, the fact that many soldiers belong to Muslim communities, like the Senegalese, the North Africans and some of the Indians, so their commitment to the colonial forces is seen as a betrayal, even if most of them had no choice. This issue may also explain the violent reaction of al-HāğÏg towards an Indian soldier telling him that he is a Muslim too, in al RaÏgʿ al-baʿīd by Fuʾād al-Takarlī.

Another theme, related to both the risk of rape and betrayal, is the sup-posed mixed blood of some individuals during or after the colonial period. It is expressed in the joke addressed to a young boy looking like an Indian in Muhammad Hudayyir’s short story, and it is the plot of Mā hadata li-ʿAntara?, by Walīd Ihlāsī.

A last reason for the negative perception of the colonial recruits may be the racism of the local population towards the Other, especially in the case of the African recruits. Think of the comments made by Kanğ in Qasr al-matar or the peasants in al-Hağğāna, as well as the mocking descriptions of the Senega-lese in Walīd Ihlāsī’s short stories. This goes back to older roots in the Arab culture, where Africans often suffer a negative representation, though it is not systematic.50

But these soldiers may have also been described with some empathy by the fictional Arab characters. In some specific cases, like in Ihtisār al-rassām by

50 See for instance Kāzim Nādir, Tamtīlāt al-āhar. Sūrat al-sūd fī l-mutahayyal al-ʿarabī l-wasīt, Beirut, al-Muʾassasa l-ʿarabiyya li-l-dirāsāt wa-l-našr, 2004.

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Muhammad Hudayyir, it may be due to their common religion, Islam. But most of the time, this empathy comes from their common fate: being occu-pied, colonized and forced to collaborate with the enemy. It is particularly obvious in Yā kūktī, when Ğanān Ğāsim Hillāwī describes how the British officers give orders and the Indian soldiers build the roads and the bridges. It can also be perceived in one of Ilyās Hūrī’s short stories, describing how the former Indochinese servants later on fought the West for their independence.

At last, another interesting field still to be explored is the comparison of this perception of the Other with the description of the Safar Barlik (the mobiliza-tion of recruits from the Bilād al-Šām sent to the Yemen war in the late 19th century and to the Balkan wars of 1912-1913) since these facts have been represented in numerous artistic representations such as novels, theatre plays and movies.51

51 See Abdallah Hanna, “The First World War According to the Memories of ‘Commoners’ in the Bilād al-Shām”, in Heike Liebau et alii, The World in World Wars, Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2010, p. 299 sq.