Ernest Gellner and His Legacies

Gellner now breaks the possible illusion that the Ahansal saints exhaust the sacred landscape of the High Atlas. Gellner has given us a highly structured account of one saintly formation: the descendants of Sidi Said Ahansal, their main lodge, their secondary centres, their genealogy, their mediation, their relation to lay tribes, their use of baraka, their political location among transhumant frontiers, and their internal stratification. Now he widens the field. He asks what else counts as sacred in this society, and what happens when sanctity appears in forms that are not reducible to the Ahansal genealogy.

Up to this point, genealogy has appeared everywhere. It has explained the distinction between igurramen, holy lineages, and lay tribes. It has supported the claim that the Ahansal saints descend from Sidi Said Ahansal. It has connected Sidi Said Ahansal to the Prophet through a sherifian line. It has organised the difference between the main lodge and other Ahansal centres. It has underwritten marriage, rank, rivalry, holy settlement, and the uneven distribution of baraka. Now Gellner asks a more concentrated question: what kind of thing is the genealogy itself?

Up to this point the main lodge has dominated the account. We have seen its location, its transhumant politics, its secular arm, its origin legend, its land deed, its internal hierarchy, its dynasts, rivals, small families, slave population, and associated villages. Gellner now takes the argument outward. He asks what happens to Ahansal sanctity once it is dispersed, reproduced elsewhere, partially laicised, reactivated, ambiguously claimed, commercially entrepreneurial, frontier adapted, or challenged by puritan rivals.

Gellner now asks: what kind of society exists inside the holy centre itself? If the lodge is the institutional body of baraka, sacred blessing, how is that body internally organised? Who ranks above whom? Which families matter? How does saintly descent become hierarchy? How do internal rivalries develop among people who all, in some sense, share sacred ancestry? What happens to a system of inherited charisma when the descendants multiply and settle into different households, factions, offices, reputations, and degrees of wealth?

Gellner's analysis contains a dynamic model explained functionally: expansion, diaspora, flow, recognition, settlement types. The saintly system changes because descent multiplies, people move, frontiers shift, political pressures alter, and new opportunities arise. The model is structural, but not immobile. The political theory is subtle. It suggests that non state order is not simply maintained by tradition. It requires constant reproduction. Saints must be recognised again and again. Settlements must sustain their reputations. Genealogies must be remembered. Miracles must be narrated. Oaths must be feared. Mediation must succeed often enough. Hospitality must be maintained. Clients must return. Land must support the shrine. Descent must be sorted. Rivals must be managed. The stateless order is not primitive simplicity. It is a labour intensive system of social reproduction.

The individual saints themselves, especially Sidi Said Ahansal, therefore have to be understood both as persons in legend and as founding principles of social order. The legendary date of Sidi Said Ahansal’s arrival in the region is AH 800, or 1397 to 1398 CE, when he founded his zawiya. Sidi Lahcen u Othman is also an important founding figure and his great grandson, who in 1598 signed a land deed transferring lands to him, lands later inhabited by the saints of the main lodge, adjoining saintly villages, and the Ait Atta of Talmest

Gellner also has a wider theory of stateless politics. Gellner is not describing absence. He is describing alternative political institutions. Elections, chiefs, oaths, shrines, arbitration, clientage, sanctuary, Kadi judgement, Shra’a, and saintly mediation together form a non state regime of order. There is no monopoly of legitimate violence, but there are mechanisms of legitimacy. There is no court hierarchy, but there are appeal routes among saintly centres. There is no police, but there is fear of sacred punishment and retaliation. There is no bureaucracy, but there are lodges, genealogies, and recognised offices.

Durkheim argued that the sacred is not just private belief but a collective classification that organises social life. The shrine is sacred because people collectively treat it as set apart, dangerous, powerful, and not to be violated. But Gellner’s use of the sacred is more conflictual than Durkheim’s. The sacred here does not simply express collective unity. It manages collective division. The oath is needed because people do not trust one another. Sacred unity is mobilised to contain social mistrust.

European anarchy remains the rebel wet dream. But on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa it was a genuine and rich social reality before the coming of industrialisation, puritanism and nationalism tried more or less successfully to bury it. Ernest Gellner’s book ‘Saints of The Atlas’ describes it. What follows is my attempt to remind readers of this social formation. Why bother? Well, anti-Muslim racism is rearing its ugly head across the world. The rise of English, Welsh and Scottish Nationalism in the recent local elections and the racist US President and his regime’s illegal and murderous actions in the Middle East are symptoms. We need to prosecute the racists in the courts but we also need to talk about Muslim society in a much more intelligent, informed and thoughtful way. Just as we refuse to think about Jewish culture solely via the prism of Israel’s current genocidal regime, we need to extend our vision of Islam so as to see its richness, variety and beauty. I admire Gellner’s work and think it gives us a slice of that richness and beauty so I thought the time was right to share.

In May this year there was a conference in Prague about 'Ernest Gellner's Legacy and Social Science Today'. Afterwards, participants and others interested in Gellner's ideas were invited to contribute to a series of essays here at 3:16 about Ernest Gellner's work in anthropology, philosophy and the social sciences. Starting off the series the anthropologist and historian Alan Macfarlane presents his reflections on the many dimensions of Gellner's work. The latest in the series is by Richard Marshall.

Ernest Gellner and Edward Said whisper furiously as they pass each other by in opposite directions down endless corridors, strong ghosts scrawling crazed graffito on walls… An imagined conversation between Ernest Gellner and Edward Said continues the Ernest Gellner's Legacies series.

Ernest Gellner once asked Benedict Anderson what was the punchline of his Imagined Communities. “There is no punchline!”, Anderson answered. In a sense, it says everything about his theory. Guido M. R. Franzinetti continues the Ernest Gellner's Legacies series.