Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 2 | Page 14

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

in Egypt. Of note among these chapters is the work of Diana K. Davis of the University of California. Davis, who explores the means by which a
superficial concern for the natural environment was used by French colonists in North Africa for political purposes, to deprive native pastoralists of
their land rights. Davis provides repeated examples of colonial authorities’ framing the traditional activities of pastoral peoples as disruptive to the
natural environment: “Such environmental disruption, the French story claimed, had been occurring since the Arab nomad 'invasions' of the
eleventh century, the so-called Hilalian invasion. This claim was based on a combination of observation of the landscape, unfamiliarity with
traditional Algerian land-use practices, and a highly selective reading of certain medieval era texts like the work of Ibn Khaldun… what the French
never understood during the colonial period was that traditional North African land-use practices were largely ecologically \