Image: Frederick Arthur Bridgman (1847–1928), A Kabyle Beauty, Algeria, 1875. Oil on canvas, 72.5 × 58.5 cm. Private collection.
Volume I centres on Marrakesh. The city was founded in the 1060s, on the plain south of the High Atlas, by the Almoravid dynasty riding out of the western Sahara. Three and a half centuries before that founding, in the Aurès mountains of what is now north-eastern Algeria, an Amazigh queen named Dihya held those highlands against the Umayyad armies advancing westward across North Africa. She ruled a sovereign Amazigh state that stretched from her mountain stronghold to the oases beyond, and was defeated, around the year 703, by an empire whose advance into the western Maghreb she had delayed for five years.
Most of what comes down to us about her was written by the people whose conquest she resisted. The Arabs called her al-Kahina, which means the priestess or the seer, a name given for her reputed gift of foreknowledge. Her own people called her Dihya, a Tamazight name still preferred by the Amazigh tradition that has carried her memory across thirteen centuries. The historical record, transmitted through Arab chroniclers and elaborated by later writers, leaves much about her uncertain. Her religion has been variously described as Christian, Jewish, and tied to the older spiritual traditions of the Amazigh world. The exact circumstances of her final battle differ between accounts. What survives, in every account, is the figure of a woman who united the Amazigh confederations against the conquest and defeated the Umayyad general Hassan ibn al-Nu’man. She forced him to retreat to Cyrenaica for several years before reinforcements allowed his return.
What predated the conquest persists in the language itself. Dihya, the name her own people used, is Tamazight. So are the place names of the highlands she defended. This language, the oldest stratum of speech in North Africa, predates the Latin of Rome and the Arabic of the caliphates. Every empire that governed the Maghreb governed in its own administrative tongue, but Tamazight survived as the language of everyday life, transmitted from parent to child outside the structures of official record. In the High Atlas, these names remain: Imlil, Toubkal, Asni. These names predate the Arab conquest and have outlasted every dynasty that followed. The language remains a working system that continues to be spoken and continues to carry forward what the written chronicles never recorded.
Beyond the figure herself, the research surfaces a doubleness in how she has come down. The Arabic chronicles transmit her in a plain register: a name, a campaign, the legendary details that the recording tradition allowed to remain. The Amazigh memory transmits her in a richer register, dense with the particulars that the written chronicles did not hold. Both registers carry her, each preserving what the other leaves out, and the historical figure exists in the space between them.
What the jacket carries is the same doubleness. The body of the garment is plain, and the upper part of each sleeve is worked in braided embroidery, a lattice and floral motif in the same beige as the cloth. The lower sleeve is plain. Two registers occupy the one garment, plain alongside worked, as the chronicle and the oral memory each occupy their own place in the record of the same figure.
The Dihya Jacket
Selected Reading
- Brett, Michael, and Elizabeth Fentress. The Berbers. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
- Kennedy, Hugh. The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007.
- Ibn Khaldun. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Translated by Franz Rosenthal, abridged and edited by N.J. Dawood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.