Abd al-Qadir's Smala on the High Plains

From 1832 the resistance to the French conquest of Algeria was led by the Emir Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhyi al-Din al-Jaza'iri (rahimahu Allah), a young scholar of the Qadiri Sufi tradition who was given the bay'a of the western tribes and set about building not merely a war band but a state. In the interior, away from the French-held coast, he founded a regular army paid from a treasury, appointed governors and judges who applied the Shariah, struck his own coinage, established arsenals and fortified towns, and bound the tribes into a single administration. The most striking expression of this mobile state was the smala, a vast travelling capital, an entire ordered city of many thousands of tents laid out in streets and quarters with its markets, workshops, schools, treasury and the emir's household, which moved across the high plains so that the seat of government could never be pinned down and destroyed. The French pursued it for years until a cavalry column surprised and captured the smala in 1843, a heavy blow; Abd al-Qadir fought on until his surrender in 1847. Exiled afterwards, he settled at last in Damascus, where in 1860 he famously sheltered thousands of Christians from sectarian killing, an act that made his name a byword for chivalry and Islamic magnanimity across the world. He is remembered in the Muslim tradition as a scholar, a Sufi, and the founder of the modern Algerian resistance. This scene depicts the smala at its height around 1840, the ordered tent-city of his mobile state on the Algerian high plains beneath the Atlas.