Elaboración del PCB

During the past decade, the Mouvement Culturel Amazigh has developed a cultural discourse with an emphasis on ‘Western’ secularity and historical connections with Europe, while faced with a growing interest from second-generation youth neither willing to adhere and participate in an exclu-sively secular ideology nor to forego their observance of Islam in order to bring about social, cultural and political change in the Netherlands and in Morocco. In fact, as culture makers, these intelligentsia function altogether as ‘gatekeepers’ (Hoffman & Gilson Miller 2010: 10) to what is ‘accept-ably Amazigh’, by not only seeking inclusion in Western history but also by drawing on comparisons with 19th-century European Enlightenment and radical secularism, and a Marxist conception of religion in particular. The latter two ideas are contested by those born in the diaspora and explain the reluctance of Moroccan youth who wish to associate with the Move-ment. For them, Islam is equally constitutive of their identity and if it is not, they still would not wish to dismiss the participation of religious youth as yet another ‘divide and rule’ tactic because it would split up the migrant community and lessen its impact, as a grassroots movement, on Dutch and Moroccan politics. They prefer connecting with the Amazigh heritage as citizens of a global community, with roots that are as Amazigh and ‘historic’

as they are Islamic and thus religious, being equally at ‘home’ in, and belong-ing to, both Dutch and Moroccan society.

The embodied memory of the first Berber activists, embodied within one generation, has failed to transform itself into a disembodied and re-embodied memory that cuts across generational differences (Assmann 2008: 56), pre-cisely because mnemonic practices differ greatly from those of the second generation who do not share the grievances against Morocco based on a shared memory in the Rif. Moreover, though the second generation is more highly educated than the first generation of guest labourers, the level of education and employment, and the number of changed life trajectories, do not merely seem to indicate a rise in ethnic attachment on the one hand, and adherence to secularist ideals on the other—on the contrary (Maliepaard, Lubbers & Gijsberts 2009). Shared memories do unite Amazigh activists in the Netherlands. Where in Morocco they have adapted their discourses according to local political and cultural vagaries (Silverstein 2011), will activists in the Netherlands do the same? They themselves have acknow-ledged the disunity of the Movement and their inability to mobilise large masses with clear political demands.

At the same time, in both Morocco and the Netherlands, Berberité is becoming a mainstream idea. At a time when Morocco has almost ‘solved’

the Berber issue, Islamist threats (Howe 2005) to the throne are on the increase. The initiation of IRCAM, the incorporation of Berber language in school curricula and structural regional economic reforms, seem to some Amazigh voices no more than an effort to incorporate a Berberist element

in Morocco’s fight against Islamism (Maddy-Weitzman 2006), which could equally pose a threat to the Moroccan monarchy. An application for funding submitted by Syphax at the IRCAM in support of a language programme in the city of Utrecht was not welcomed by all Amazigh sections. In the Nether-lands, umbrella organisations such as SMN and SMDN have acknowledged the Amazigh Movement by using Tifinagh and Tarifit in addition to Arabic and Dutch in communication towards member associations and their pub-lic, and the Dutch-Moroccan Women’s Association provides translation and legal advice regarding the Moudawana in Tamazight, and many translation bureaus in Dutch cities have picked up on this need and demand.

At the same time, and in view of the recent popular uprisings against undemocratic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, the Ber-ber Movement is searching for a new political purpose and relevance in Morocco, as it has always associated itself with other grassroots movements aimed at bringing about democratic and multicultural North African societ-ies where human rights and freedom of religion are respected and women’s rights promoted. At gatherings organised by the so-called Twenty February Movement in the Netherlands in early 2011, Berber flags were omnipresent.

Last, the parallels drawn between the European Enlightenment and North Africa’s lack thereof by the Amazigh intelligentsia and founding members of Dutch-Berber associations, highlights their observation that 19th-century European nationalisms were secular ideologies, which acted as counterparts to religion. But even though, as an ideology, nationalism could relate to the core themes present in religious representations of origins, death, salvation and continuity, by sharing a past, present and future as an—imagined—

community, it did not replace religiosity but rather extended it (Anderson 1991). For a non-Western cultural activism in a Western, postcolonial con-text, this seems very much to be the case too. Debates between secular and Islamic voices within the Mouvement Culturel Amazigh have not subsided and often revolve around the ‘incompatibility’ of Islamic and Berber identi-ties precisely because of the latter’s affinity with ‘Western’ values, culture, and history, and the Arab-Islamic lack thereof. By claiming that North Africa cannot be viewed historically and culturally as an extension of the Middle East, the Berber Movement in the Netherlands, which is exclusively made up of Moroccan-Berber migrants, states that by implication neither can the Moroccan diasporas be regarded as such.

The histoire croisée of Moroccan-Berber migrations and associations in the Netherlands on the one hand, and colonial politics and myth making on the other, have shown how the objectification of the Berber in current cul-tural Berberist discourse has given rise to a particular Amazigh and Rifian memory politics within the global Mouvement Culturel Amazigh. Despite efforts to ‘decolonise’ Moroccan history, colonial ‘divide and rule’ politics are present throughout the memories, narratives and cultural production of the first Amazigh activists in the Netherlands. What is needed, according to second-generation activists and critics, is a uniting factor and not a divisive

one. Given the focus of the Dutch integration debate on ‘Muslim identity’, radical secularism, like radical Islam, would only work to their collective disadvantage and deny an equally important part of the second-generation’s multiple ‘identities’ and rich heritage.

NOTES

1. ‘Amazigh’ (pl. ‘Imazighen’: ‘free people’) is often preferred because ‘Berber’

has a derogatory (‘barbarous’) connotation. I use both terms interchangeably.

2. ‘Histoire croisée’ (Werner & Zimmermann 2006) analyses connections between ‘various historically constituted formations’. Closely related to the methodology of comparative and shared history; ‘histoire croisée’ draws on pragmatic induction: synchronic and diachronic intercrossings between objects of research, ways of looking at the object, and the intercrossing between researcher and object (reflexivity).

3. This chapter is based on qualitative research conducted between 2008 and 2011 in the Netherlands, Belgium and Morocco (Rabat). In the diaspora, I drew on the life stories of Berber activists, observations at Berber cultural festivals and debates organised by Berber associations, private and associa-tional archival records, as well as public, cultural and historical productions of knowledge. In Morocco, my inquiry was limited to archival research and interviews with Rabat-based activists.

4. In the post-WOII-era, most Moroccan guest workers left for Germany, Bel-gium and the Netherlands. In France, Maghrebi migrant communities origi-nated mostly from the Algerian Kabyle and Moroccan Souss region. See De Haas (2007) and Silverstein (2004).

5. After Abdelkrim’s departure from the Rif, and when Franco launched his rebellion from Northern Morocco, a ‘historical solidarity’ between the Ber-bers and the Spanish was invoked, proclaiming a common history in Moorish Spain (Gross & McMurray 1993).

6. Hereafter referred to as ‘MRE’.

7. ‘Amazigh Beweging in Nederland’ or ‘Amazigh Movement in the Nether-lands’.

8. See Abttoy (2008) Cartoons van een Berber, Amsterdam: XTRA, in particu-lar.

9. Penninx–Schrover (2001) take the opportunity structure of the receiving soci-ety, internal dynamics, and the migration process into account.

10. ‘Komitee Marokkaanse Arbeiders in Nederland’ or ‘Committee of Moroccan Labourers in the Netherlands’.

11. ‘Stem Marokkaanse Democraten in Nederland’ or ‘Voice of Moroccan Dem-ocrats in the Netherlands’.

12. Royal Institute of Berber Culture in Morocco, hereafter referred to as IRCAM.

Le vrai martyr attend la mort, l’enthousiaste y court

Denis Diderot, Pensées philosophiques (1746), XXXIX

Suicide attacks have become one of the most important and emblematic forms of violence of today, particularly since 11 September 2001. These acts of self-sacrifice are often constructed as forms of religious martyrdom, and they therefore require an investigation in terms of the role of religion in world politics and, especially, in terrorism.

This chapter aims to examine the growing role of religious factors in self-sacrifice and martyrdom in modern terrorism. This evolution is out of line with a classical vision of modernity as shaped by linear processes of rationalisation and secularisation (cf. Smith 2008). By contrast, acts of self-sacrifice and martyrdom in terrorist violence represent a dramatic sign of the (complex) revival of religion in our age.

Suicide attacks are acts of organised violence in which the perpetrators deliberately sacrifice their own lives (see Moghadam 2006a). The willing-ness to die is combined with the willingwilling-ness to kill simultaneously in the same act (Gambetta 2006a; Merari 1990): the goal is therefore ‘dying to kill’ (Bloom 2004). Moreover, in suicide attacks, the ‘martyr’s death is a necessary requisite of the mission because it is self-inflicted, frequently by means of explosive devices. Consequently, the expression suicide attacks is not inappropriate even if it is usually rejected by supporters of this form of violence.

Suicide attacks can be part of a strategy of terror. Despite its popularity,