THE COLONIAL PASTS OF MEDIEVAL TEXTS IN NORTHERN AFRICA: USEFUL KNOWLEDGE, PUBLICATION HISTORY, AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN COLONIAL AND POST-INDEPENDENCE ALGERIA*

Abstract This article argues that medieval Arabic texts that were published in colonial northern Africa constitute as much a part of the history of colonialism and its legacy as that of the medieval centuries in which they were written. Using the publication history of a medieval Ibadi text and its French translations, I demonstrate how texts like it were edited, translated, and published not only for academic purposes, but also as contributions to the production of ‘useful’ colonial knowledge in Algeria. I begin with the first translation, published in 1878 alongside other ethnographic and historical studies funded by the colonial state. I then turn to the second translation, serially published between 1960–2 as its editors abandoned the country at the violent end of the colonial period. Finally, I address the Arabic editions published after independence, which recast it within a nationalist framework. Overall, I argue for the importance of addressing the colonial pasts of medieval texts in northern Africa.

medieval period, the rise of the Fatimid Empire, and the early medieval history of Saharan trade connecting northern and western Africa.  Yet the medieval contents of the printed text and its translations belie the much more recent colonial context that produced them. The two French translations of this text, published in  and -, appeared at key moments in the history of the French colonial project in Algeria: the first was published only five years before the French took control of the Mzab valley and southern Algeria and the second appeared on the eve of Algerian independence.  Not until more than a century after the publication of the first French translation did a full printed Arabic edition of the work appear in .  In this article, I follow the publication history of the Kitab al-sıra and its French translations as a way of demonstrating that medieval Arabic texts that were edited and published in colonial northern Africa constitute as much a part of the history of colonialism and its legacy in the region as that of the medieval centuries in which they were written.  In the process of being collected in manuscript form, edited, translated, and published, 'medieval' Arabic texts like the Kitab al-sıra took on new meanings in each iteration of their publication history in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Algeria. In short, I use the example of the various publications and forms of the Kitab al-sıra and its French translations to shed light on the colonial pasts of medieval texts in northern Africa.

THE KITĀB AL-SIRA WA-AKHBĀR AL-AʾIMMA
For the seven centuries prior to the publication of the Chronique d'Abou Zakaria, the Ibadi Muslim scholars of medieval and early modern northern Africa knew this text in its original Arabic form as the Kitab al-sıra wa-akhbar al-aʾimma (The Book of the Lives and Accounts of the Imams). Although the oldest cataloged manuscript copy of the work dates to the fifteenth century, the Ibadi communities of the Maghrib have long attributed it to an eleventh-century scholar named Abū Zakarıȳaʾ Yaḥ yab . Abı̄Bakr al-Warjalanı̄(d.  CE), whose name suggests he spent a significant amount of time in the medieval city of Warjalan near the modern city of Ouargla in Algeria.  The Kitab al-sıra comprises two distinct parts, which may or may not have been compiled in the same period. Based on the date of scholars mentioned in the text, both halves appear to date to the mid-to-late eleventh century.  The first relates the early history of Ibadi communities in the Maghrib, including an invaluable description of the history of the Ibadi Rustamid dynasty (- CE) that ruled the city of Tahart.  Also crucial for historians of medieval northern Africa, the text provides an account of the Fatimid conquest of the Maghrib in the early tenth century and the subsequent revolt of the famous mid-tenth century apocalyptic Ibadi figure of the 'Man on the Donkey', Abū Yazıd 'al-Nukkarı.'  The second part of the work offers biographical sketches and legal, moral, or miraculous anecdotes about Ibadi scholars and pious figures in the century and a half following the Fatimid conquest.  These anecdotes also contain a wealth of information about the Zirid dynasty that succeeded the  Based on a database of Ibadi prosopographical manuscripts in P. M. Love Jr, 'Writing a network, constructing a tradition: Ibaḍ ı̄prosopography in medieval northern Africa' (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, ). Of the  copies of the Kitab al-sıra in the database (as of January ), the earliest dated copy is a fragment in the Āl Faḍ l library in Benisguen, Algeria, dated  Dhū al-qaʿda / January . Fatimids, the beginnings of the spread of Arabic as a spoken language in the Maghrib, and the history of Saharan trade.
As a valuable historical source for the study of Ibadi history and the broader history of medieval northern Africa and the Sahara, the Kitab al-sıra attracted the attention of colonial-era French historians already by the end of the nineteenth century. But the appearance of this work in translation owed its publication to something more than the utility of its content to historians of the medieval Maghrib.

EMILE MASQUERAY AND THE CHRONIQUE D'ABOU ZAKARIA
In his study of the misadventures of French ethnographer and linguist Emile Masqueray (d. ), Ouahmi Ould-Braham offers a detailed account of the steps that led to the Ibadi text known as the Kitab al-sıra being edited, translated, and published as the Chronique d'Abou Zakaria.  In , Masqueray traveled to the Aurès and Mzab valley under the auspices of a mission financed by the minister of Public Instruction and the Governor General of Algeria 'to collect archaeological, linguistic, and ethnographic documents'.  From the moment of his arrival in the Mzab valley and in the years following his time there, he relentlessly petitioned the French government and other potential sources of funding for financial support of his quest to gather and publish Ibadi texts from the area.  Masqueray initially encountered opposition in his efforts to access these texts from the Ibadi scholars in the towns of Ghardaia and Beni Isguen. At one point, he was told frankly by the Ibadi community in the latter town, 'Our history books are our private property.'  He nevertheless succeeded in obtaining several manuscripts. Some of these, as he proudly explained in a letter to his superior, he acquired through 'several ruses' and by capitalizing on the antagonistic relationship between the Ibadi scholars and students in the towns of Malika and Ghardaia.  In other cases, accounts of Ibadi history were related to him by Ibadi scholars themselves. No less a figure than Amuḥ ammad b. Yū suf Aṭ fayyish (d. )among the most influential Ibadi figures of the nineteenth century and known as al-Quṭ b ('the pole' of knowledge)met with Masqueray and composed a text on Ibadi history for him.  Likewise, he acquired a copy of the Kitab al-sıra by enlisting the help of an unidentified 'young man, [a]  The story of Masqueray's acquisition of the Kitab al-sıra and his publication of its translation, the Chronique d'Abou Zakaria, belongs to the broader history of the production of knowledge and its relationship to the exercise of colonial power in nineteenth-century northern Africa.  In the decades following the  French invasion of Algiers, a military administration governed this new colony. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the work of French ethnographers and linguists proved crucial to the production of knowledge about colonial subjects in Algeria. Abdelmajid Hannoum has highlighted the important role played by the Arab Bureau, an office of the military-run colonial administration in the nineteenth century, in producing linguistic and ethnographic studies to aid in the exercise of power in this early stage of French colonialism in the region.  Hannoum's study echoes the earlier work of Bernard Cohn, whose Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge argued that the production of knowledge was crucial for the exercise of British colonial power in India. 'Knowledge', Cohn wrote, enable[d] the British to classify, categorize, and bound the vast social world that was India so that it could be controlled. These imperatives, elements in the larger colonial project, shaped the 'investigative modalities' devised by the British to collect the facts.  As with the 'investigative modalities' of British-controlled India, French administrators and academics applied their own methods of collecting and organizing information about their colony in northern Africa. These data would then be 'transformed into usable forms such as published reports, statistical returns, histories, gazetteers, legal codes, and encyclopedias'.  Applying this idea to colonial Algeria, George Trumbull IV has demonstrated how nineteenth-century ethnographic work cumulatively constructed an 'Empire of Facts', which produced 'cultural representations enforced through assertions of authenticity, generating "facts" Ethnography and history also worked hand in hand with colonial administration in neighboring Tunisia and Morocco, where the French established protectorates in  and , respectively. Although the French did not attempt to apply the same model of settler colonialism in these two regions as they did in Algeria, the production of knowledge about the history and cultures of their peoples followed similar patterns of fact-gathering established in that French 'colonial laboratory par excellence'.  This was especially the case with French colonial historiography, which maintained an interest in premodern Arabic chronicles and histories.  In describing French historiography in Morocco after , for example, Mohamed El Mansour wrote that it clearly reflected a specific ideological orientation. Its purpose was to justify French colonial designs in the region . . . This was made clear by French officials who, by creating 'academic' institutions such as the Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines, wanted above all to better know 'l'âme marocaine' (the Moroccan soul) as a first step toward the installation of a Western order in place of the sterile Islamic one.  Mansour added that as in Algeria, the interest of colonial academics and officials in Morocco extended to other domains such as archeology and ethnography. Edmund Burke III has recently offered a detailed study of the latter, demonstrating the ways in which the category of 'Moroccan Islam' was carefully constructed by ethnographers in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century.  Like the work of earlier French ethnographers and the Arab Bureau in Algeria and later French and Italian historians in Morocco and Libya, Masqueray's journey to the Mzab in search of manuscripts was an exercise in the production of 'useful' knowledge, financed by a government that had a vested interest in gathering information about peoples under its control.  Alongside the government, numerous 'colonial societies' and organizations in Hannoum, the change to civilian administration in Algeria was accompanied by a shift in interest to the accumulation of historical data and the production of historiography that justified the colonial project.  This took the form of societies and publications like Masqueray's Chronique d'Abou Zakaria, which uses a medieval text as a centerpiece of a study prefaced by an extended introduction on the importance of understanding a people's history and culture to rule them. For example, in discussing the stories of medieval texts of the Ibadis, Masqueray wrote: communities also extended to medieval texts resulting from colonization, such as Italian Orientalist Roberto Rubinacci's studies of Ibaḍ ı̄manuscripts seized from the Ottoman mutasarrif in the town of Yefren in  and brought to Naples. See R. Rubinacci, 'Notizia di alcuni manoscritti ibaḍ iti esistenti presso l'Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli', Annali dell Instituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli,  (), -. These pious legends fill large volumes. They are neglected today and I know an interpreter [for the French military] who, having been asked to translate one of these books, responded that it contained nothing but silliness. This is, I think, to speak too lightly. In our opinion, to this 'silliness' are tied a thousand serious matters, decisions of religious jurisprudence, historical and geographic information, and diverse customs. Moreover, if we want to understand a people in order to govern them, we must take them as they are, excluding nothing.  For Masqueray, the value of understanding the Ibadi past was inextricably linked with the usefulness of this knowledge in the present. Although a clear example of the relationship between historiography of medieval texts and the production of useful knowledge in colonial northern Africa, Masqueray's Chronique is far from unique in this regard. For example, Abdelmajid Hannoum has demonstrated the tremendous impact of Baron de Slane's translation of fourteenthcentury historian Ibn Khaldun's (d. ) famous Kitab al-ʿibar under the title Histoire des Berbères in .  Indeed, it is fitting that the footnotes to Masqueray's translation are complemented throughout by reference to de Slane's. As Hannoum has argued, translations like those by Masqueray and de Slane effectively created new texts, rewritten in the idiom of French colonial discourse and made accessible to the great synthesizers of Maghrib history whose work shaped generations of historiographical conversations on the region. In other words, just as had been the case with ethnography in an earlier period, studies and translations of medieval texts like Masqueray's or de Slane's were as much political as academic enterprises that served the colonial government's interest, helping to create and to maintain 'French conceptions of Algerian identity.'  The French did not produce colonial historiography on their own, however. Just as Trumbull noted regarding the informants and subjects for ethnographic studies in an earlier period, northern Africans themselves had a role in the formation of historiography on the medieval Maghrib in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The account Masqueray relates of his acquisition of Ibadi manuscripts in the Mzab demonstrates that translations and editions of medieval texts were often based upon manuscripts of very recent production, provided to researchers by local actors. The Kitab al-sıra may have been an eleventh-century composition, but the manuscript upon which Masqueray produced his Chronique was the product of a student in the Mzab valley in the s who copied it for him. Moreover, the broader historical narrative offered in his introduction was presented to him by Shaykh Amuḥ ummad Aṭ fayyish. In this way, Ibadis themselves    vo l .   , n o .  d'outre-mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence, the history of the publication of the second translation of the Kitab al-sıra survives.  Like the introduction to the first part of the Chronique, the notes and letters of LeTourneau's private archive suggest that he intended to publish the Arabic text along with a translation. As early as  April ,  Marius Canard from the University of Algiers wrote to LeTourneau to tell him about a young Tunisian scholar, Farhat Dachraoui, who had recently obtained a microfilm of the Kitab al-sıra from Lewicki. Dachraoui was hoping to see the University of Algiers manuscript for comparison and eventual publication.  Canard wanted to alert LeTourneau ahead of time because the latter was planning to publish the text himself. Foreshadowing events to come, Canard ended his letter with a remark on recent 'provocations' by the Algerian nationalist movement, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN).  Later correspondence confirms these plans for an Arabic publication. In a letter dated  December , retired lycée professor Charles Dalet wrote from Algiers to LeTourneau in Aix-en-Provence, requesting that the latter complete his project to publish the Chronique d'Abû Zakariyyâ'.  A letter dated a few days later from Henri Pérès suggests that LeTourneau had already been working with Dalet on the project and had been responsible for the translation. Pérès requested that LeTourneau send the first half of the Arabic text for publication with annotations.  The archival folder containing the correspondence also includes a handwritten copy of the Kitab al-sıra in Arabic, with notations for printing and corresponding folios from the manuscript exemplar.  Original plans to publish the Arabic text, probably in the Bulletin Arabe-Français, did not come to fruition. A letter from the University of Algiers library dated  May  thanked LeTourneau for returning three items, including two manuscripts for Pérès and one additional photograph of a manuscript belonging to the library.  LeTourneau had apparently used these manuscripts to complete his translation. In a letter dated  May, Pérès suggested publishing the translation in Revue Africaine, with no further mention of the Arabic text.  Soon thereafter, LeTourneau departed Provence for, among other places, Madagascar and then Princeton University, where he took up a visiting professorship. He did not intend to finish either the Arabic text or the translation of the second part of the Kitab al-sıra.  Instead, Pérès suggested that LeTourneau's younger colleague and friend in Tunisia, Hady Roger Idris, complete the second half.  Idris had exchanged letters with LeTourneau in the past.  Not until January , however, did Idris first mention the translation project.  In a letter from Gammart (Tunisia) Idris asked LeTourneau how the Arabic text had been established. He doubted the accuracy of some of the orthography and suggested, as he would do in latter letters, using a manuscript copy of thirteenth-century Ibadi historian Abū l-ʿAbbas Aḥ mad al-Darjını's Kitab al-ṭ abaqat held at the University of Algiers Library and the Egyptian lithograph of late fifteenth-century historian Abū l-ʿAbbas al-Shammakhı's Kitab al-siyar to corroborate the Arabic text.  The first half of the translation, attributed to LeTourneau, appeared in Revue Africaine in .  During that same period, Idris began working on the second half of the translation in Algiers. In a letter dated  May, Idris informed LeTourneau that he had established the text by comparing it with additional manuscripts of Abū Zakarıȳaʾ and al-Darjını̄at the University of Algiers.  The manuscripts upon which they based the new translation may have been among those donated to the university by French colonial military interpreter Adolphe Motylinski in the late s,  although without a catalog of the university's manuscript holdings from that time it is impossible to know for certain.  Ultimately, the two-part translation of the second half of the Kitab al-sıra based on these manuscripts appeared in the  and  volumes of Revue Africaine, this time attributed to Idris.  Even at this late date, however, efforts to publish an Arabic version of the texts had not yet been abandoned entirely. In a letter dated  December , Henri Pérès requested that LeTourneau send along an introduction to the 'the text' by January to follow his own preface about the manuscript copies of 'La Chronique'. Meanwhile, however, the political climate was changing in Algeria. Tellingly, Pérès added that he was in a hurry to finish with the Arabic text and be done with itespecially since he was not sure he would be returning to Algiers in light of recent political changes and the escalation of violence.  Earlier that year LeTourneau had received a letter from the Swiss archeologist and art historian Marguerite van Berchem, who wrote to say how much she looked forward to his new translation of the Chronique. Van Berchem, preparing her own study of the medieval Ibadi city of Sedrata discussed in the book, added that LeTourneau's former colleague in Algiers Marius Canard had promised to share the text with her 'but with these events in Algeria, I am afraid he will have had other preoccupations!'   Ibid. The conclusion of the Évian accords in March  brought an end to eight years of bloody war between France and the FLN, setting the stage for independence later that year. This sign of hope for Algeria's future was followed by a tragedy tied directly to history of the Kitab al-sıra. On  June, the militant, pro-French Algeria group 'L'organisation Armée secrète' (OAS) set fire to the University of Algiers library and the ensuing flames devoured almost all the manuscript holdings.  Among the many works lost were the manuscript copies of several Ibadi texts in Arabic, including the Kitab al-sıra. The only surviving traces of these and the hundreds of other lost manuscripts were the French translation of the Kitab al-sıra in Revue Africaine and the new manuscript copy of the Arabic text in LeTourneau's private archive dating to the s.  Like Masqueray's Chronique d'Abou Zakaria, this new translation of the Kitab al-sıra and the story of its publication belong to the history of French colonialism in northern Africa. But unlike Masqueray's text, which represented a transition from an 'ethnographic' to a 'historiographic' state in the late nineteenth century, LeTourneau and Idris's translation marked the end of the French colonial enterprise in the region in the mid-twentieth century. Over the  years of French colonization in Algeria, historiography changed with the political circumstances that helped shape its production. The University of Algiers in  represented a very different kind of institution for the production of knowledge than had the Arab Bureau in the nineteenth century.
The manuscripts upon which this new translation of the Kitab al-sıra was based did not require any misadventures to the Mzab valley or any clever 'ruses' by ethnographers. That is, the production of colonial knowledge was a civilian rather than a military-led effort by the mid-twentieth century: the site of production for this new translation was the city of Algiers and the library of the University of Algiers. On the surface, this serialized translation was an exercise in philology seemingly divorced from the late colonial context that produced it. Only hints in the correspondence behind its publication suggest that this new translation was prepared and published during such a tumultuous moment in Algerian history. The destruction of the library housing the manuscripts by the OAS serves as a jolting reminder of material entanglements of the publication history of the Kitab al-sıra and the reality of colonialism in Algeria.
In addition to the site of its production, the medium of its publication also connects this new translation of the Kitab al-sıra to the late colonial context of the twentieth century that produced it. Revue Africaine was one of several publications by societies and institutions that since the late nineteenth century served as media for the production and dissemination of knowledge about northern Africa. Established in  by and for the Société Historique Algérienne, Revue Africaine was designedas the introduction to its first volume announcedas 'an organ dedicated to the publication of [the society's] works'.  And for a century, Revue Africaine served faithfully as the mouthpiece for the systematic production of knowledge about French colonial Algeria and northern Africa. This remained the case all the way up until the appearance of its final volume in , as the French prepared their final exit from Algeria. At  am on  January , the General Assembly of the Société was held at Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines in Algiers.  Its proceedings give virtually no indication of the tumult occurring throughout the country (or just outside on the streets of Algiers) and certainly no sign that the end was coming. The president's address began with the obituaries and tributes to recently deceased members of the Société. A telling sign of events to come, however, was the lamented departure of two individualsnot to the afterlife, but to the metropole. Former Société president George Marçais and Professor Marius Canard, 'two of our distinguished university confreres . . . have left us definitively to enjoy a well-earned sojourn in the metropole'.  The departure of Canard, portended in the correspondence regarding the publication of the translation of the Kitab al-sıra, followed LeTourneau's as the faculty of the University of Algiers gradually abandoned ship. LeTourneau went to Aix, Canard to Paris, and Idris to Bordeaux.
The publication of the last installment of the Chronique d'Abû Zakariyyâ' in the final volume of Revue Africaine had brought the history of the translation of the Kitab al-sıra full circle from its first translation by Masqueray at the close of the nineteenth century. That first translation marked the beginning of the French domination of the Sahara, the end of the ethnographic state, and the beginnings of civilian rule in Algeria. The content, editors, site of production, and medium of publication for this second translation in Revue Africainecollectively symbolizing the power and longevity of the production of colonial knowledge about northern Africamarked the final moment of the historiographic state in Algeria in .

THE POST-INDEPENDENCE KITĀB AL-SIRA
Nearly a century after its first publication in French translation as the Chronique d'Abou Zakaria, an Arabic edition of Kitab al-sıra made its way to the press in . If previous publications of the text in translation mirror the colonial context out of which they emerged, the subsequent editions in Arabic in  and  reflect the legacy of colonialism in northern Africa and the efforts of post-independence historiography to decolonize the history of the region and recast it in a nationalist framework.  More specific to [A]t the time in which [Masqueray undertook his translation], his level of Arabic did not exceed that of a French teacher in a secondary school in this language during the colonial period. In this context, we observe that the method followed by the translator was one in which he simply ignored the sentence[s] in which he found difficulty reading one of the words.  Without comparing Masqueray's translation with the original manuscript copy with which he was working, it is not possible to argue for or against al-ʿArabı's judgment of his translation. But this technical critique, which as al-ʿArabı̄pointed out had already been made earlier by European Orientalists including George Marçais and Tadeusz Lewicki, preceded a much harsher critique of Masqueray and the French colonial project his work represented. In addition to what he perceived as the uselessness of most of Masqueray's footnotes (which together amounted to a much longer subtext than the Chronique itself), al-ʿArabı̄wrote that the tone and purpose of the text spoke to the violence it did to Algeria: Worse than all of the preceding is the blatant colonial spirit (al-rū ḥ al-istiʿmariyya al-fijja) that blackens the footnotes of the translator and his introduction, the likes of which we only find in the first generation of colonizers . . . . The translator strikes us with this inclination, bringing it to the fore at both appropriate and inappropriate times, especially in his use of terms like: 'our possessions', 'our Algeria', 'our Shawiyya', and 'our Mzab'. All of this is repeated in the introduction and the footnotes with the pride and honor with which a feudal lord speaks of his lands and slaves. In the mind of the translator, the entire process [of translation] is not limited to [the] transmission of information and the presentation of a service to researchers and scholars. Rather, [the translation] aims to provide a background in which the colonizers can understand the 'mentality of the people whom they rule: for if we desire to understand a people so that we may rule them, it is necessary that we take them as they are.'  appearing instead of an Arabic printed edition, but also that the unnamed team of Arabists at the University of Algiers neglected to provide any information on the manuscript(s) used for their translation.  In his criticisms of these colonial-era translations of the text, al-ʿArabı̄represents an early polemical trend in post-independence Maghribi historiography advocating for the decolonization of Islamic history in northern Africa that initially seemed intent on replacing it with a nationalist ideological framework.  As Houari Touati has argued, post-independence historiography in Algeria 'operated as the inverse of colonial historiography'.  A period of nationalist historiography that situated even ancient Roman to medieval periods into a nationalist framework provided a kind of counterbalance to a long-standing colonial tradition of history writing. Many of the same periods and personages that served as the focus of colonial historiography were repurposed in the post-independence period to produce very different readings of the past, more in line withand 'useful' tothe nationalist visions of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, or Libya.  The publication of the first full Arabic edition of the Kitab al-sıra in  likewise emerged out of the region's colonial past, although under very different circumstances. While studying in Paris in , Tunisian historian ʿAbd al-Raḥ man Ayyū b received a phone call from a friend about a collection of manuscripts belonging to the late Jean-Auguste Bossoutrot (d. ).  Bossoutrot, who had worked with the French military in southern Algeria and Tunisia, had himself been working on a translation of the text based on a manuscript in his possession although he never published it.  Using this copy along with another from the Dar al-Kutub library in Cairo, Egypt, Ayyū b edited a new Arabic edition under the slightly modified title Kitab al-sıra wa-akhbar al-aʾimma.  Ayyū b was keenly aware of the political nature of this work and its publication history. While discussing previous editions of the Kitab al-sıra, he continually raised the question as to why this work had appeared in French three times before appearing in Arabic (his bibliography suggests Ayyū b was unaware of al-ʿArabı's earlier edition), adding sardonically, 'It was as if Abū Zakarıȳaʾ wrote the Kitab al-sıra only so that it might be translated into French.'  Like al-ʿArabı's, Ayyū b's edition emerged from colonial legacy of the French in the post-independence period. His chance encounter with a colonial official's private archive had led hima Tunisian historian educated and living in Paristo undertake the edition in the first place. In many ways, this speaks to the decidedly different reality of French colonialism in Tunisia and the different body of historiographical material that was produced there. Rather than erase or conquer the production of knowledge on premodern history, as had been the case in Algeria, the French colonial project in Tunisia had produced a generation of historians who participated in the production of knowledge about the region's past.  While Ayyū b's edition of the Kitab al-sıra made sarcastic reference to the French translations that preceded his Arabic edition, there was comparatively little sense of polemical tone of Maghribi history and colonialism that had characterized al-ʿArabı's edition.
Finally, just as the Chronique d'Abou Zakaria was not the only 'useful' translation of a medieval work edited and published in the colonial period, the Kitab al-sıra was not the only medieval Ibadi text published and recast in a nationalist framework in the postindependence period. For example, in his introduction to the  edition of the thirteenth-century work the Kitab al-ṭ abaqat, Algerian historian Ibrahım Ṭ allaȳ wrote: What pushed me to carry out this illuminating task and encouraged me in it was none other than what we in our Maghrib need in the way of reviving our heritage and the most prominent of our historical personalities and linking our illuminated present to our glorious pastand this so that we might build our renaissance (nahḍ atana) upon both the pillars of authenticity and openness, . . . that cultural renaissance which Algeria and the rest of the countries of the Arab Maghrib are living.  Like the Kitab al-sı̄ra, the publication of this medieval text contributed to the construction of a nationalist (in this case both Algerian and pan-Maghribi) historical narrative. It offers a useful addition to an authentic past, one (re)built in the new context of an independent Algeria.

CONCLUSION
I have focused here on the publication history of the Kitab al-sıra in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the aim of demonstrating that it constitutes as much a part of the history of colonialism in northern Africa as that of the medieval period out of which it emerged. In following the history of its publication, I have argued that the Kitab al-sıra and its various forms and translations did not appear in print and become available to historians for academic purposes alone. Rather, each stage in this story is connected to the history of colonialism in Algeria and its legacy in the historiography of northern Africa. The first two publications of the Kitab al-sıra in French translation as the Chronique d'Abou Zakaria and the Chronique d'Abû Zakariyyâ' neatly bookend the French colonial project in southern Algeria. Emile Masqueray's printed edition appeared in , framed with an introduction and footnotes that reflect French colonial aspirations in the Mzab valley and the Sahara. These aspirations would be actualized with the region's occupation only five years later, giving rise to a large literature by francophone Orientalists on the Mzab valley and its Ibadi inhabitants. Masqueray's single manuscript copy of the Kitab al-sıra, acquired through clandestine means despite the initial wishes of the Ibadi scholars of the Mzab and translated into French, became a window for academics and colonial officials alike into the history and culture of the Mzab. Straddling the eras of the ethnographic and historiographic states, the Chronique exemplified the production of 'useful' colonial knowledge at the end of the nineteenth century.
By contrast, the second, serialized translation of the Kitab al-sıra in Revue Africaine from  to  marked the end of French colonial power in both the Mzab and northern Africa. The Chronique d'Abû Zakariyyâ' appeared thanks to the resources of the University of Algiers, including its rich manuscript collection at the disposal of French historians LeTourneau and Idris. Nevertheless, its publication coincided with the final days of French occupation. The publication of this second translation mirrors the coming change to the political landscape through both the flight of its editors to France as the country moved toward independence and the tragic loss of the manuscript materials upon which it was based in a fire set by the OASan organization determined not to see the end of l'Algérie française. Moreover, the surviving correspondence relating to its publication also suggests that the political climate of late s Algeria prevented the appearance of an Arabic edition of the Kitab al-sıra in that period.
When such an edition appeared in , its editor Ismaʿıl al-ʿArabı̄framed his Arabic text as a response to the violence inflicted on it by his French predecessors. In al-ʿArabı's eyes, Masqueray and the team of Arabists at the University of Algiers had been possessed by a 'colonial spirit' that rendered them incapable of understanding the text properly. Finally, the second published Arabic edition of the Kitab al-sıra in  speaks to the aftermath of the French colonial project in different ways. ʿAbd al-Raḥ man Ayyū b framed his edition with an admonishment of the text's publication history in French for more than a century. However, his own project to edit the Arabic text was made possible by a chance encounter with a French colonial official's private archive while he himself was studying in France. At the same time, the tone of his edition of the text speaks to the very different reality and legacy of the colonial project in Tunisia than in Algeria.
The Kitab al-sıra preserves a medieval textual tradition about the Ibadi Muslim communities of the Maghrib. But as its publication history demonstrates, when medieval Arabic texts or their translations appeared in print in northern Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they carried with them much more recent colonial histories. Historians using either Arabic editions or translations of medieval texts published in the colonial-era must recognise and address this history. Abdelmajid Hannoum has demonstrated that in translating medieval Arabic texts, colonial-era historiography in the Maghrib created new works that were repurposed to justify the colonial project and its epistemology. I have argued here that like the translation, the publication of these texts must be also situated historically in the context of colonialism. As the example of the Kitab al-sıra demonstrates, it was as part of the process of colonial knowledge in Algerian production that the manuscripts of medieval texts like it were commissioned, seized, or purchased before then being translated and published in the form of useful knowledge. Histories drawing from these medieval texts in northern Africa must engage with their colonial pasts and grapple with the reality that they were not merely published in the colonial period but were themselves products and tools of colonial knowledge production.