Fatima Sadiqi, Women and the Codification of the Amazigh Language (New York: Lexington Books, 2024), xiv + 170 pp. ISBN 978-1666917710. $105.00 hardcover.

 Bruce Maddy-Weitzman
Tel Aviv University

Fatima Sadiqi has been producing cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary scholarship in the fields of gender and women studies in Tamazgha (broader North Africa), transnational and global feminisms, and Amazigh studies for over three decades. Her latest book takes us on a fascinating journey, conceptually and temporally, to argue for the fundamental role of Amazigh women’s weaving designs in the codification of the Tifinagh script. The author ably navigates five disciplines (history, archeology, anthropology, linguistics, and gender studies) drawing on a wealth of previously underutilized sources. These include studies of rock art, texts by native scholars, archaeological findings, as well as Fatima Sadiqi’s personal experiences growing up in a rural, gendered household in the Moroccan Amazigh heartland. At bottom, this is a story of “anonymous women,”, “from the margins of the marginalized.” 

The result is an exciting and intriguing thesis: from antiquity, Amazigh women’s weaving practices, and specifically their rug designs, inspired the Amazigh script Tifinagh, one of the oldest, if not the oldest alphabet in history. Amazigh women, she argues, played a crucial role in codifying the Amazigh language, i.e.  in the production of knowledge, and not just the production of culture. Thus, Saddiqi “defolkorizes” Amazigh women’s artistic legacies and conferred with the agency they deserve.

To be sure, the thesis is more of a hypothesis as it borders on the speculative, evidence remains partial and requires further research. Sadiqi admits as much,  Moreover, some may find her interdisciplinarity dizzying, at times complicating rather than clarifying. But there are enough tantalizing indicators to lend the thesis credence. More generally, she hopes that this feminist reading of the history of Amazigh linguistics “will open venues of research on Amazigh women’s remarkable contributions to Amazigh studies” and help advance our knowledge of the historical construction of the Maghreb and North Africa.

Belying long-held stereotypes of Amazigh populations, Sadiqi gathers a wealth of evidence that the Amazigh have always had a civilization, a history, and a language of their own, and pioneered in areas as diverse as agricultural knowledge, the domestication of animals, the discovery of minerals, writing, and religious thought. Moreover, she argues cogently for the nativist/indigenous perspective regarding the much-discussed origin question: the origin of Amazigh and their language, she demonstrates, is in the prehistoric Great Sahara, and not in the East (Levant and Arabian peninsula), as medieval Muslim historiographers held, nor in the Mediterranean-European milieu, in line with French colonial agendas.  

The introduction poses five research questions: 1) Why is there an ignorance about the Amazigh’s, especially women’s, roles in modern historiography? (2) Is this ignorance related to the fact that Amazigh women’s history is oral? (3) Why are Amazigh women associated with the production of culture and not with the production of knowledge? (4) Why has Tifinagh, the Amazigh alphabet, survived despite being used only for short texts? (5) Could Amazigh women’s art be behind the codification of the Amazigh language?

The answers are developed over the course of five chapters. Chapter One provides the historical context of the Amazigh people’s origins and evolution, and the ways in which women evolved in these communities. Chapter Two seeks to close the gap between the widely recognized role of Amazigh women as carriers of the community’s cultural and linguistic identities, and the disproportionately small share allocated to them in Amazigh studies in general, and in linguistic research in particular. It also includes discussions on Amazigh women and religion, economic management, and artistic production. As a reader whose knowledge of pre-monotheistic religious beliefs and practices was woefully thin, her discussion of Amazigh deities, their symbolic representations, and their connection to ancient weaving practices, was especially informative and insightful.

The last three chapters form the central core of the book: Amazigh women’s “creation or participation” in the formation of the Amazigh script, Tifinagh, through art, she asserts, is “an unconventional medium in linguistics.” Chapter Three focuses on the “material manifestations of weaving”, namely ‘Amazigh rock art.’ Sadiqi references the abundant prehistorical and historical inscriptions that were painted or engraved on rocks or funerary and/cultural monuments across North Africa and the Great Sahara. Crucially, she shows, both weaving and rock inscriptions display designs that share intriguing similarities in shape and style. Drawing heavily from groundbreaking studies by Ahmed Skounti, Abdelkhalek Lemjidi, El Mustapha Nami and Mustapha Ouachi, she emphasizes the variety and diversity of inscriptions over a huge area, in the realm of both images and letters. Understanding their meanings, and even dating and then integrating the findings into a coherent narrative, remains a challenge for archaeologists, linguists and pre-historians. Their analyses lead to what the author calls the long and unsteady journey of Tifinagh, in which the Tuareg, particularly their women,  play a central role.

Chapter Four focuses on the Amazigh women’s art of weaving, more precisely the designs women have been creating on rugs for millennia. The chapter highlights the designs as ancestral art and relates them to the beginnings of agriculture in the regions inhabited by Amazigh. These designs emphasize the importance of rain and its relation to fertility, divinity, and religion. Especially instructive is the discussion of the Amazigh goddess Tanit, the main deity of Carthage, whose cult spread throughout the Mediterranean. She is strongly represented in rug designs, representing the importance of sexuality, procreation, and fertility in ancient Amazigh women’s cosmology. Moreover, Sadiqi notes that the meanings of these designs have been immortalized in one of the most significant rituals in Amazigh communities in Morocco and across the region: the ritual of Taghunja (or tasliyt n unzar – the rainbow).1 

All the preceding chapters lead to Chapter Five: the decisive role of women in the codification of the Amazigh language. In her words, the previous chapters provided “glimpses of women through the filmy veil of female divinity, rug symbolic icons, or the process of community-building…synthesized through women’s rug designs, their meaning, their powerful symbolism, and their importance in understanding the Amazigh language and culture.” This chapter hones in on the script-related aspect of the rug designs, concluding that “women’s rug designs may well be at the root of the Amazigh alphabet Tifinagh, hence at the root of the codification of the Amazigh language.”

Sadiqi’s final musings offer further insights into the underlying value of her study. In focusing on Tifinagh and linking it to women’s artistic designs preceding it, she notes, this book is an attempt to resolve the conundrum that a language dies when its alphabet is not used extensively.

It should be clear that this ground-breaking study is as much about contemporary Amazigh identity, culture and politics as it is about the Amazigh past. The dynamic between the oral and written codification of the Amazigh language manifests itself in various new forms that continue to adapt without losing the ancestral ones. This is attested in tattooing and jewelry, but more importantly from the perspective of this book, in calligraphy and computerized language.

Over the last half-century, the Amazigh cultural movement has moved from the intellectual fringes to the mainstream of its varied social contexts. Tamazight is now an official state language in both Morocco and Algeria, and in wide use in Amazigh regions in Libya. The Tifinagh script has been standardized and employed in the public sphere. As Amazigh identity continues to evolve, percolate into and shape contemporary social and political realities across Tamazgha, the findings of this valuable book deserve to be made widely known and integrated into scholarly, educational and societal discourses. Scholars and students of North African history, comparative linguistics, women's and gender studies, indigenous studies, art history and material culture will find much to chew on.

Through a variety of artistic pieces such as tattooing, rug designs, rock inscriptions, etc. women’s agency is underpinned as cultural producers of knowledge and as promoters of and preservers of Tamazight, as their artistic productions have helped in the codification of the Amazigh language and the transmission of Tifinagh alphabet. Sadiqi’s book is a catalyst for further research in this vein as it will encourage bringing to the forefront Amazigh women’s social, cultural and linguistic roles in Amazigh communities throughout Tamazgha.