Amazigh literature refers to the literary tradition of Amazigh-speaking populations. Imazighen or Amazigh speakers are the Indigenous people of Tamazgha. Described as the Amazigh homeland, Tamazgha encompasses the territory extending from the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean to the oasis of Siwa in southwest Egypt, including Morocco, Algeria, Niger, Mauritania, Chad, Mali, Libya, Burkina Faso, and Tunisia. The countries composing this vast territory of indigenous populations have historically spoken a variety of “awāl Amazigh” (Amazigh language). Although the current varieties of Tamazight spoken nowadays in these places may not be fully intelligible, they are descendant of a common language that was shared by the different people of Tamazgha. This linguistic kinship is what cements the different trends that compose the expansive territory of Tamazgha. Because of long historical processes beyond their control, the inhabitants of Tamazgha speak a variety of non-Indigenous languages, including Arabic, French, and Spanish. Since their advent at different historical periods, these non-Indigenous languages have shaped the cultural and social landscape in Tamazgha in ways that suppressed the indigenous language and prevented it from fully achieving its literary and intellectual potential. These non-indigenous languages have also been used to produce literature and thought, furthering complicating the very notion of Amazigh literature and its contours.

Since the end of World War I, the people of the Middle East have lived – from Turkey to Iraq – in a world created by Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau. From the outset, the victorious powers of the War, especially Wilson, paid lip service to the principle of self-determination in addressing various nationalities, but they soon realized this great principle can be a double-edged sword whose use could cost them dearly – in casualties as well as capital. Western and regional powers resolved this dilemma by installing a system of states in the Middle East, in the name of self-determination, which was in fact appallingly unfair and feeble. Implementation of this policy in the face of multi-ethnic milieus and complexities, where the dominant group constituted no more than 50 percent of the population, had disastrous consequences and fractured the social landscape of the region into distinct camps of winners and losers.

On April 4th, 1980, Saddam Hussein's government initiated a mass deportation of Iraqi citizens to Iran. In total, an estimated one million people were deported between 1980 and 1990. At the same time, thousands of the relatives of these deportees were detained as hostages, an estimated 4,000 of whom are still missing. This is considered the first Anfal operation undertaken by the Baʿthist regime against the Kurds.

Racism is a scourge that has not spared any society or community. Moroccan society is not different in its grappling with the legacy of the complex history of slavery and racialization in North Africa. Although social scientists have dedicated much scholarly attention to the study of race in Morocco, they have not accounted for Amazigh language's rich documentation of and grappling with race and racism. Ethnographic work has emerged to explain racial dynamics between Imazighen and isuqiyn (Blacks) or Haratines, but these crucial interventions fall short of examining primary sources in Tamazight to explain how Amazigh communities negotiated racism openly in the public sphere. This article draws on the experience of the Black Amazigh poet Mbark u-Ms‘ud Ben Zayda to demonstrate that racism was not, and is not, entirely silenced in Amazigh-speaking Morocco. In fact, Amazigh sources and terminology reveal that poetic performances in this social environment have not only unsilenced racism but actively grappled with its multilayered dimensions. Adopting a close reading methodology, the article interprets portions of Ben Zayda's poetry and its response to the explicitly racializing compositions of his contemporaries.

Writing about Kabyle literary history today is a difficult task, considering the very nature of this literature. It is fundamentally oral and did not take its first steps toward a written form until the mid-1940s. There is a considerable lack of works dedicated to Kabyle literature, and those that do exist have primarily focused on poetry, due to the characteristics inherent to this genre. Indeed, unlike prose, poetry includes temporal markers since it accompanies or relays easily identifiable historical events, whereas the narrative genres (legends, fables, and tales) are difficult to date, at least in the case of these last two. For this reason, undertaking more work in this area seems to be a matter of urgency. It is therefore necessary, as required by any work on literary history, to start with periodization; this consists of dividing the historical continuum into linear segments. This work should be based on the establishment of literary facts (e.g., authors, publication dates, etc.) as relevant elements, as well as on the socio-historical events that have marked literary production. By examining the textuality of some poetic works produced at different times by different Kabyle poets (e.g., Youcef Oukaci, Si Mohand Ou Mohand, Ben Mohammed, Idir, Matoub, Ferhat, etc.), I will attempt to propose a historical periodization that will account for the development of the theme of identity in Kabyle poetry.

In the twentieth century, totalitarianism emerged as a new phenomenon, with powerful new regimes sweeping to power on the backs of the ideologies of National Socialism, Bolshevism, and Baʿthism. Armed with these ideologies, and in their names, such regimes committed murder at a mass scale previously unknown to world history. Among the victims of this historical process were the Kurds in Iraq, who were subjected to genocide at the hands of the Baʿthist regime. This article addresses the relationship between totalitarianism and genocide, and specifically how the Baʿthist regime justified genocide against the Kurds. It argues that three elements in Hannah Arendt's theory of totalitarianism –ideology, terror, and total domination – explain why every totalitarian regime in history has wound up resorting to genocidal programs. Using the 1980s Anfal campaign by the Baʿthist regime against the Kurds as a case study, this article elucidates the relationship between totalitarianism and genocide. This analysis will lead to a better understanding of the justifications, features, and motivations of the Baʿthist regime's genocide against Kurds.

Traditional oral poetry in Takbaylit, Tachelhit, Central Moroccan Tamazight, and Tarafit dialects has been the subject of numerous studies ranging from ethnographic to linguistic. Rather than duplicate what is already widely available, the following brings together comments on a number of representative poems from across the Maghreb to give the reader an idea of the variety of types, styles, and themes of Tamazight poetic tradition. The selections, which are translated into English here for the first time, range from the moving devotional poem in Tachelhit “Like the Beads of a Rosary” to the beautiful love poem in Takbaylit “To Whom Should I Complain.” Among the poets whose works are included are Mririda n'Ait Attik (Tachelhit), Al Hadj Ammar ou al Hadj (Takbaylit), and Taougrat Oult Aissa (Central Moroccan Tamazigt).

“Transitional justice” refers to a set of strategies for promoting reconciliation in societies that have been ravaged by conflict and human rights abuses in the recent past. In some cases, however, the political leaders of post-conflict societies choose not to pursue transitional justice, instead preferring to keep the status-quo peace. This essay explores the situation in the Kurdistan region of Iraq after the genocidal Anfal campaign of the late 1980s. The Kurdish political authorities at the time did not use any transitional justice measure against the Kurds who collaborated in the persecution and killing of their fellow Kurds. Instead, they declared a unilateral amnesty for all collaborators, without the consent of the victims’ families. This paper argues that this grant of “blanket amnesty,” which protected the accused from legal liability at the expense of victims’ right to justice, brought neither justice nor peace. Conversely, it negatively affected the process of democratization, rule of law, and social reconciliation in the region. The paper concludes that justice and lasting peace will not be realized in the region if the abuses of the past are left unaddressed.

Under the leadership of the Baʿthists, in 1983, the Iraqi state arrested some 5,000-8,000 members, all male, of the Barzani tribe of Kurds and subsequently killed them. The mothers, wives, and children of these men were put into compounds controlled by Iraqi security forces. As a result, thousands of children were left without their fathers and hundreds of wives were suddenly left widowed. In a society where patriarchy dominates the homelife, single mothers were left with the challenges of taking up the role of their male partners. The very definition of motherhood transformed as they rose to meet the incredible tasks ahead of them, and indeed, the experience dismantled stereotypical images of motherhood, but not without untold pain and suffering. In this study, an attempt is made to shed light on the experiences of these lonely Barzani mothers and how they were affected by their altered gender roles.

The nineteenth-century Kabyle poet Si Mohand U'Mhand is often celebrated as an icon of freedom and unconventionality. Questioning this myth, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate that this bard was rather a liminal figure that oscillated between iconoclasm and conservatism. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus and Mikhaïl Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque, the article argues that despite Si Mohand's being a notorious wanderer, he was not a nomad in that his poetry betrays a longing for the “State.” Indeed, the poet lamented his nomadic and unconventional lifestyle as the mark of a social and moral decline forced on him by the colonial intrusion, which stripped his family of their lands following his father's execution. In addition, the poet perpetuates the hierarchized and prejudiced traditional representations of his society's different social classes and racial components.

A pioneer of the Amazigh Cultural Movement and modern Amazigh poetics, and one of the first intellectuals to interrogate – from the margin – Moroccan official historiography, Ali Sidki Azaykou has produced two collections of poetry, Timitar (Signs) and Izmuln (Scars), in addition to a posthumous collection, Indguiguen Aghaman (“Eternal Sparks”), appearing in 2019. The present article examines “Taketbiyt” (1971), a poem about the Koutoubia Tower in Marrakesh. While considering the poem, I use Pierre Nora's notion of “site[s] of memory” and Paul Ricœur's “trace of memory” to probe the significance of this centuries-old tower in Azaykou's poetry. I argue that Taketbiyt is evoked as a “site of memory” or a “trace of memory” to both remember and celebrate the forgotten Amazigh ancestry and history. I demonstrate that Azaykou's central concern, through such an act of remembrance, is to interrogate the biased representation of the Moroccan past in the present. As such, the poem complicates Amazigh cultural identity vis-à-vis the hegemony of Moroccan official historiography. Along with an abundance of metaphors, the poem displays an unparalleled allusive diction and a copious array of historical and geographical symbols. I conclude that, with its intellectually-informed theme and its self-consciously weaved form, “Taketbiyt” is a quintessential architype of modern Amazigh poetry.

This article investigates the collective memory that occurred as a result of the chemical attack on Halabja, on March 16, 1988. In light of discussions that deal with memory and reconciliation in post-genocide societies, we look at how collective memory and “postmemory” are formed among the survivors and their descendants. The merit of the article is that it brings together the victim's accounts and creates a bottom-up perspective that challenges the official accounts created by Kurdish and non-Kurdish elites as part of top-down narratives on what happened that day in Halabja and how it should be commemorated. The interviewee narratives illustrate that people of Halabja consider the memory of the chemical attack as an enduring trauma that creates a shared rendering of the past and continues to shape their collective identity. While each generation transfers this collective memory to the next, they also seek justice via shared commemoration practices outside official discourses. In their narratives, reprobation is not directed solely toward the Saddam Hussein regime, but also toward the current rulers of the Kurdistan Region as well.

The phenomenon of “political Islam” has been explored in several social theories. These accounts have mainly concentrated on the forms of violence that Islamists have instigated, but the racist drive that is often embedded within political Islam has remined overlooked and unexplored, that is, at least until recently when the brutal crimes by ISIS against Yazidis and Christians in northern Iraq were widely documented and broadcasted. Even so, this tendency has only been attributed to ISIS and extreme Jihadi groups, while states infused with Islamist ideology have remained relatively untouched by such critical analyses.

This article argues that most extant theoretical frameworks on political Islam do not adequately explain the often-latent racist trend in Islamist political ideology. By building off of Foucault's theory of biopolitics and genealogy of racism, it takes the Islamic Republic of Iran's policy against the Kurds as a case study to demonstrate how power shifts in favor of Islamist factions in early-1980s Iran legitimized a racist policy toward minorities in general and the Kurds in particular.

The celebrated Kabyle singer Slimane Azem is known as a poet of exile due to his expatriation in France. His mastery of the mother tongue is inherited from both the Kabyle oral tradition and great poets such as Si Moh Oumhand. His repertoire tackles a variety of themes such as freedom, exile, culture and identity, in songs that celebrate peace and tolerance. His poems “Syadi L3uqal,” “Si Moh Yenna-d” and “A Yul-iw Utub” are calls for self salvation through reliance on both God and origins. Others such as “A Taqbaylit a Tigejdit” and “Ssut n Tsekrin” reconsider the status of women in Kabyle society, and “A Wid Ijebden Leqlam” vindicates the Kabyle identity. Though Azem is an engaged poet, his texts are devoid of provocative language, and this is what distinguishes him from many other Kabyle singers. This article aims to study Azem's transcendence of violent language in songs that convey revolt against entrenched social, cultural and political issues. In particular, it analyzes his work in reference to Paul Baltes's psychological implicit theory of wisdom, distills seven properties of wisdom. His principles are prominent in Azem's songs which venerate ancestral values of respect, peace and equality on all levels.

Mohammed Rouicha is an Amazigh musical legend. Rouicha came to prominence in his teenage years in the mid-sixties in Morocco and continued to evolve and rise internationally until his death in 2012. An artist and a musician, he was ahead of his time in that he believed that people and communities should connect with one another through music, regardless of ethnicity or language. Rouicha appreciated art in all its shapes and forms and was fascinated by Amazigh, Arab, and Hindi Music. He sang in both Tamazight (the language of the Indigenous Amazigh) and Arabic, winning him accolades among listeners in both languages. In this article, I draw on Rouicha's biography and artistic repertoire in Tamazight to analyze his lyrical and musical style. Rouicha's songs revolved around three primary themes: love, struggle, and resistance, and he painted his lyrics with the beauty and imagery of Tamazgha (Amazigh lands), giving a voice to Moroccans’ embodied experiences. His songs represent an imagined Morocco: a place where Amazigh identity is an integral part of the national identity. I argue that Rouicha represented the hope that an imagined linguistic and cross-cultural interconnectedness would unite all of Morocco within their differences.

This article explores the ideological motivations for ISIS's prejudice against the Kurds. From the group's inception, ISIS has rejected any kind of understanding of Islam but its own. However, its animosity toward Kurds has its own purpose and foundations, separate from its religious dogmas. The aim of this article is to study the reasons behind its fundamental aversion toward the Kurds. An analysis of the literature of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and particularly their interpretation of the Qurʾan and of Islamic prophetic traditions and history, demonstrates such a clear prejudice toward the Kurds, that no honest researcher can deny the vehemence of the group's hatred of the Kurds and their nationalist ideology. This animus explains, at least in part, why ISIS promulgated such a virulent anti-Kurdish ideology and recruited fighters to invade Kurdish lands. This study examines the ideological motives behind the group's behavior toward the Kurds. The article's hypothesis is that the Arab extremists that filled the ranks of ISIS, whether they came from secular nationalist, jihadist, or even moderate Islamist backgrounds, shared an antipathy against the Kurdish people that was deeply rooted in pro-Arab nationalistic sentiment. Below, the article looks at the deadly combination of Baʿthist ideology, which had previously led to genocidal campaigns against Kurds under Saddam Hussein, with the religious extremism of ISIS. A qualitative research method of discourse analysis is used to shed light on the ideological roots of ISIS's antagonism against Kurds. Kurdish-studies researchers will benefit from this study, as well as security, counter-terrorism, and Middle Eastern researchers and students.

A very significant sub-version that derives from Tirruyssa (ⵜⵉⵔⴻⵢⵙⴰ) is called Tanddamt (ⵜⴰⵏⴹⴰⵎⵜ), which refers to musical jousting between two seemingly opponent Rways and/or Raysat. Each singer attempts to address convincing and satirical chants to the opponent singer. Tanddamt is rich of social topoi such as race and gender. This chapter aims to deconstruct the discursive contexts that gave rise to the derivative form of tanddamt, and provide an in-depth analysis of the assorted images of eloquence and satire in the discourse of this melodious genre of contest. A close reading of the conversational poetics of tanddamt shall provide us with profound insight into individual as well as social worries and memories as expressed in the art of Tirruyssa. While the black-versus-white tanddamt triggers an historical debate of racial discourse, blackness, negritude, and slavery, the male-versus-female tanddamt revisits an everlasting discourse of gender discontentment. These binaries are an inherent subject in Amazigh music and constitute a source of acoustic pleasure for the audience. I argue that Tanddamt, as a refined art of lyrical opponency provides a considerable space for ‘subaltern’ expression in the public sphere, which sets it as a propitious canonical genre, amply instrumental in the enrichment of world literature.

When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) emerged from the ashes of unsolved political, religious, and sectarian conflicts in the Middle East, it became one of the greatest threats to global order in recent years. It invaded and occupied a large swath of territory in Iraq and Syria, leaving a trail of bloodshed in its wake. ISIS fighters carried out a deliberate campaign of annihilation against the religious Yazidi community, which is officially recognized as a protected group under the UN Genocide Convention. ISIS identified them as an “unbeliever community” and proceeded to embark on an eliminationist campaign against the group, including deliberate killing, destruction of the conditions of their life, and the capture and transference of Yazidi children.