Jabal al-Awras

The Aures mountains are a long mountain range with connected settlements, with villages, gardens and trees. Al-Idrisi describes its people as proud and dignified, and compares its shape to a letter. ²

The Aures (Greek Aurasion, in Procopius) is a mountain massif of Algeria, part of the eastern Saharan Atlas. The meaning of the name has not been discovered. It is a compact massif of about 8,000 square kilometres, rising from the depression of Batna to Biskra and beyond, with Khenchela in the valley of the Wadi al-'Arab. Djebel Chelia (2,327 m) and Kef Mahmel (2,321 m) are the highest points in Algeria; the Atlas article of this encyclopaedia gives 2,329 m for Chelia, and both figures are kept. The western Aures has three long chains running south-west to north-east, separated by the Abdi and Abiod valleys, which reach the Sahara through narrow gorges; the eastern Aures is much more massive. ³

The northern slopes are short and steep but well watered, with holm-oak forests and cedars; the southern slopes, longer and drier, have three zones, a cool zone above 1,500 metres, a middle zone of Aleppo pine and juniper, and the foothills where barley, wheat, maize and sorghum grow, with figs and apricots; the first palms appear below 800 metres along the wadis. The people live by cereals, fruit and goat-keeping, and move seasonally between the northern and the Saharan slopes; the Awas are villagers, except in the east, where hamlets of gourbis lie in the woods. About 115,000 people speak Berber, called Shawiya by the Arabs; the women keep Berber, while the men use Arabic outside the family. ⁴

Neolithic stones show that the Aures was occupied from the Old Neolithic. Roman cisterns and irrigation ditches survive, and the Byzantines built a line of forts along its northern foot. When 'Uqba ibn Nafi' entered the Maghrib, the Berbers inflicted heavy losses on him, and he died at Tahuda near the Aures on his return from his great raid to the west. After the kingdom of Kusayla fell, the Aures became the centre of Berber resistance to the Muslims, which was suppressed only at the beginning of the second/eighth century, after the struggles in which the Kahina is remembered. Berbers from Tripolitania and southern Ifriqiya settled there; converted willingly or by compulsion, they kept a spirit of independence, which showed in their adoption of heterodox doctrines, Ibadism in the second/eighth century and Nakkari doctrines in the fourth/tenth, and from the Aures came Abu Yazid, whose revolt briefly threatened the Fatimids. The Hilali invasion helped arabise the massif, but the people kept their independence, escaping the Hafsids and then the Turks, who set up chieftains loyal to their policy. ⁵

From the tenth/sixteenth century, preachers from the far south of Morocco gave the Islam of the Aures the form it kept until about 1935, a religion closely linked to a particular social structure. At that date the Algerian Salamah intervened in particular. The Aures people kept their old political order, the village as a municipal republic, run by the assembly of the people, the jma'a, which was similar to, though more sketchy than, the order of Kabylia. The French occupation touched it only superficially: in 1845 the duc d'Aumale took Mshunesh, and Bedeau brought the main tribes under French authority, but expeditions were needed in 1848-1849 and 1850 to suppress a revolt, and French troops intervened again in 1859 after risings in 1879. In 1866 the Maliki judicial system was applied to the Aures and qadis were sent there, though customary law continued as a supplement to Islamic law and the French penal system. ⁵