A Sufi scholar held off a European army for seventeen years
Abdelkader was raised to be a religious scholar, memorising the whole Quran by fourteen. Instead he spent seventeen years leading Algerian tribes against France's invasion, and his fair treatment of prisoners won praise from his Christian enemies. In exile in Damascus in 1860, he stepped in to shield the city's Christians from massacre.
Sometime around 1806 to 1808 he was born at el Guetna, a hamlet about 25 kilometres west of Mascara, then part of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers. His family claimed descent from Hasan, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and his father headed a lodge of the Qadiriyya Sufi order, respected as a mediator in tribal disputes. His name honoured that order's 11th-century founder in Baghdad. Tradition says he could read and write at five, was cleared to comment on the Quran at 12, and excelled at poetry, oratory and horsemanship. Oran, the seat of Turkish administration, struck him as too lax, and he soon returned home to study.
In 1825 he made the pilgrimage to Mecca with his father, then visited Medina, Damascus and Baghdad and made a second pilgrimage. Heading home he admired Muhammad Ali's modernising reforms in Egypt, and he married his cousin Kheira in 1827.
That year a dispute over a long-unpaid French debt and a slap with a fly-whisk gave France a pretext to blockade Algiers. The blockade lasted until June 1830, when French troops invaded and exiled the Ottoman governor, just before a revolution in Paris replaced Charles X with Louis-Philippe. In 1832 the tribes chose Abdelkader as their emir, Commander of the Faithful. He built a coalition that resisted one of Europe's strongest armies until he surrendered in 1847.
France held him for almost five years until Napoleon III freed him to Bursa, and in 1855 he settled in Damascus, where he acquired the name El-Djazairi, the Algerian, still carried by his descendants. His 1860 protection of Damascus Christians brought honours from several countries. There too he wrote his chief spiritual work, the Kitab al-Mawaqif, the Book of Halts. He died in 1883.
Source: Emir Abdelkader
