The Marseille museum highlights the course of the emir, hero of resistance to French occupation.
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As soon as an independent state in 1962, the Algerian Republic applied itself to the writing of a national history and elected it as the founding figure that of the Emir Abdelkader (1808-1883), hero of the Resistance to French colonization, whose spiritual dimension doubles that of the heroic strategist. Before forgetting it or denigrating your modernism. So we will be delighted with the initiative of the Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean (MUCEM) which highlights the figure of the emir without sacrificing anything of its complexity and a fascination that does not weaken not.
Because sixty years later, on both sides of the Mediterranean, the hero disturbs. The Algerian government had obtained, in July 1966, that the body of the emir, buried in Damascus to Master Soufi Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), be repatriated to Algiers and transferred to the square of the martyrs of the Revolution. Constantly recovered on the profession, the project of cinematographic fresco intended to offer an exemplary vision of Abdelkader, which began in the 1970s, always stuck as the complexity of the character, strategist, literate, humanist and modernist, disqualifies the partisan reductions and divides deeply historians and entrepreneurs of official memory. Some even hold it for a “traitor”, radical ideologues do not admit the modernism of the humanist.
Interference with the vision of France do not work. Benjamin Stora’s report published in January 2021, roadmap for the memory repair policy wanted by Emmanuel Macron, advocated the erection of a stele representing the emir in Amboise, where he had been selected captive under the II E Republic. But, a few hours before its inauguration, on February 5, the work was vandalized, denouncing the memory of a pioneer of interreligious dialogue capable of reconciling the old opponents.
The Mucem exhibition plan, arrested by commissioners Camille Faucourt and Florence Hudowicz, is very clarity, anxious to avoid imbalances likely to simplify the image of a man with a thousand facets. Advised by the priest Christian Delorme and the historian Ahmed Bouyerdene, fine connoisseurs of the emir who hold him as a rampart necessary for identity tensions in vogue, they opted for a declination in five acts, which does not intend to favor or the Military aspect or the “national” identity of the hero.
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