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Tribute to Jacques Berque

by André Miquel

Jacques Berque (1910-1995)

Jacques Berque was born on June 4, 1910. His childhood and adolescence were linked, one might say viscerally, to Algeria and the Maghreb. Nourished by their culture, landscapes and dialects, he blended them with his classical studies at the universities of Algiers and Paris. From the outset, research seemed irreconcilable with what had always fascinated him: the field. He joined the colonial administration and found himself a civil controller in Morocco, where he got to know the towns and tribes, administering, judging and observing. He launched an agrarian reform project and began, in the High Atlas, to gather material for his monumental thesis on the social structures of the region, which he defended in 1955 and which earned him the general and profound esteem of historians and orientalists.

But Berque was questioning himself, confronting the Arab past with the long and sometimes painful path of colonization, then the struggle for independence. He broke his ties in 1953, leaving for Egypt as an international expert for UNESCO, from 1953 to 1955. From there, he moved to Lebanon, where for two years he founded and directed the Modern Arabic Learning Center in Bikfaya. Meanwhile, he was elected to the VI th section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études. He joined the school in 1956, where he held the chair of Social History of Contemporary Islam until 1981.

Jacques Berque's work, steeped in local experience, covers the whole of the Arab world, and is characterized by the constant dialogue between the past and greatness on the one hand, and the uncertainties of the present on the other, on the famous theme of the dispossession of the world. This theme has also opened up, along the way, to other cultural areas. In the same spirit, confrontation with history led Berque not only to scrutinize documentary texts, but also to read and translate the great books of Arabic literature in which he deciphered so many messages: poems from pre-Muslim Arabia or anthologies, such as the posthumous Book of Songs by Abû l-Faraj al-Isfahânî.

This work doubles as that of a writer. If style is a man's trade mark, there's no doubt that Berque fully illustrated the formula. It is the sense of metaphor that I shall retain here. Two examples, taken at random. Referring to the formidable structures of Arabic that have survived the centuries without flinching, Berque sees them as poles emerging on the sea of modernity, "where God may lodge". Elsewhere, on the subject of women, guardians of tradition in difficult times: "this long watchman of the colonial night".

It remains to be said that this man was also a "patron", who trained a host of Eastern and Western researchers, promoted dialogue in countless foreign countries, Arab and otherwise, constantly reminded us of the rights and duties of Mediterranean partners, and played a full part in political action, through his articles, his lectures, and the missions he led for the Ministries of Research and National Education.

This man of vitality and passion died, struck by lightning, one summer day in 1995, in his home in the Landes. He exemplified our house. But the duty of memory joins here with the emotion of friendship: whoever speaks to you will never forget that it was Jacques Berque who presented his lectures project to your Assembly on Sunday November 30, 1975. Among so many encounters, this one marks an essential date in the history of a friendship.

André Miquel, 1997.