The Arab Center for Research and Policy Centers welcomed a lecture from Amal Ghazal at the weekly seminar on 24 April 2019. Dr. Ghazal is a professor of history and the director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies at the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada and presented on "North Africa from the War of Tripoli to World War I: between Independence and the Ottoman state".
Beginning the lecture, Dr. Ghazal highlighted the political and intellectual movements and activities in the M'zab Valley in the Algerian Sahara during the First World War. She linked the Mozabites with the Ottoman and Maghrebi intellectual and political networks calling for Islamic unity and the need to fight French colonialism in North Africa.
The lecture focused on the efforts of the Mozabites, through their movements within the framework of the Ottoman empire and Maghreb during the First World War, to obtain autonomy and stay separate to Algeria as a French colony. In this regard, Dr. Ghazal highlighted that the experience of the Mozabites sheds light on three topics related to the history of the First World War era: