Code art.: 1089
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Info on Abd el Kader.
His father was a sheikh of the Sufi order of the Qadiriyya, and ʿAbd al-Qāder consequently received a thorough Muslim religious education. He traveled to Mecca, Damascus and Baghdad and was impressed by the reforms through which the wālī Mehmet Ali emancipated Egypt from the Ottoman Empire. He returned to Algeria a few months before the French invasion of 1830. In less than two years he became a commander (amir, emir) and led a rebellion of various tribes, achieving many tactical victories. On 20 May 1837 he signed the Treaty of Tafna with General Bugeaud, commander of the French expeditionary force (and then governor general of Algeria from December 1840 to July 1847). With this convention (which was later the origin of several misunderstandings) France recognized its authority over the sultanate of western Algeria (except Oran, Arzew, Mostaganem and Mazagran), over the sultanate of Titteri and over the province of Algiers, except the cities of Algiers and Blida, the Mitidja plain and the Algerian Sahel. In these territories, which constituted two-thirds of Algeria, ʿAbd al-Qāder tried to organize a theocratic state, with the Koran as the supreme law. When he wanted to annex Constantine, appointing one of his representatives (the Arabic term khalīfa has nothing to do with the supreme magistracy of classical Islam), France organized an expedition, called the "Iron Gates", which ʿAbd al-Qāder considered a violation of the Treaty of Tafna. From that moment, the war resumed with violence, becoming an effective guerrilla war throughout western Algeria that lasted until 1842. ʿAbd el-Kàder, however, failed to unite the Berbers and Arabs. Zouave.