The Iowa Town That Carries the Emir's Name

On June 22, 1846, a new village was officially platted on the banks of the Turkey River in northeast Iowa. Three men had laid it out, Timothy Davis, John Thompson and Chester Sage, and the naming was left to Davis. He could have picked a European city, a president or a saint. He picked the name of an Algerian who was at that moment leading his people in North Africa.

The City of Elkader still tells the story on its own website. The founders "named the new village Elkader after Abd el-Kader, a young Algerian hero who led his people in a resistance to French colonialism between 1830 and 1847."

Emir Abdelkader never saw Iowa. But Davis knew who he was, because he read the papers. The Bulletin of Bend, Oregon, reported that Davis "had read of Abd el-Kader's fight against the French for Algerian independence, which was covered by U.S. newspapers sympathetic to the revolt against colonial rule." The writer Roya Hakakian, in an essay for Alhurra, describes how Americans "closely followed" the Emir's campaign in those years.

The town's walking-tour brochure explains the choice the way an Iowa farmer of the time might have. The Emir, it says, "fought desperately to drive out the French just as the colonists in America fought to drive out the British. In admiration of this brave man, Elkader was suggested and adopted as the name of this new town in Iowa." Americans who still remembered their own war of independence recognized something familiar in Algeria, and they put the Emir's name on the map.

The interest went both ways. The Algerian historian Maamar Laayeb, in a 2017 study in Qirtas, a journal of Abou Bekr Belkaid University in Tlemcen, shows that in 1836 and 1837 the Emir was in contact with the consul of the United States in Tangier, and offered the Americans a port on the Algerian coast in exchange for their support against France. He also chose, as his consul in Algiers, a man who already worked for the United States. Charles Henry Churchill, in The Life of Abdel Kader, published in London in 1867 from the Emir's own dictation, writes that the Emir's consul at Algiers "was a certain Italian, named Garavini, who was also consular agent for the United States of America."

The Emir's resistance ended in 1847. He later settled in Damascus, and it was there, in July 1860, that he did what made him famous around the world. When violence broke out against the Christians of the city, he and his Algerian followers took people into their homes and guarded them. The historian Tom Woerner-Powell, writing for the Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute in London, says that without "the swift and decisive actions" of the Emir and his men, between 10,000 and 13,000 innocent people would have died. A British observer wrote at the time: "it is a patent fact that thousands owe their lives to his liberality, energy and presence of mind."

Governments sent him honors, and the United States was one of them. President James Buchanan sent the Emir a pair of Colt pistols. Woerner-Powell describes them as "silver mounted Colt pistols in an ornamented case bearing the inscription 'From the President of the United States of America to his Excellency Said Abd el-Kader, 1860'." Churchill, listing the gifts that reached Damascus, simply writes: "America, a brace of pistols similarly inlaid."

The American press covered it. In October 1860 The New York Times ran an article headlined "Abd-el-Kader and the United States." "For Abd-El-Kader," the paper wrote, "this is indeed a chapter of glory, and of the truest glory." The Vermont Chronicle of October 23, 1860, carried "President Buchanan's Present to Abd-el-Kader," and The Banner of Liberty of Middletown, New York, printed "The Presents of President Buchanan to Abd-el-Kader" on October 31. The country was weeks away from a presidential election and months away from civil war, and small-town papers still made room for a story about an Algerian in Damascus.

The Emir died in Damascus in 1883. In Iowa his name stayed in use, and in 1915, according to the town's history, the senior class of Elkader High School published a short story about how their town got its name, titled "The Sheik."

In 1979 the story traveled to Algeria. An official at the United States Information Agency asked Donna Menken, editor of the Clayton County Register, how Elkader got its name, and her article ran in the agency's Arabic-language magazine, Al Majal. In Algiers, Benaoumer Zergaoui, a native of Mascara who worked at the U.S. Embassy, read it. In 1983 he went to Iowa to see Elkader for himself, and he brought back, in the words of Elkader's Sister City history, "his message of friendship offered by the people of Elkader."

Things moved fast after that. On May 9, 1983, Elkader passed a resolution to twin with Mascara, the region where the Emir was born. On January 19, 1984, ten citizens of Elkader arrived in Mascara, and on January 25, 1984, Elkader's mayor, Ed Olson, and Mascara's mayor, M'Hamed Khaldi, signed the sister-city documents together.

The town has kept the tie alive. Hakakian writes that the people of Elkader, more than 175 years after its founding, "still celebrate their connection to the emir." The local museum has an Algerian Room, and there is a park named after Mascara.

A year after the twinning, on April 17, 1985, President Ronald Reagan welcomed President Chadli Bendjedid to the White House and mentioned the Emir by name. "The records show that your great national hero, Abd Al-Qadr Al-Jaza'iri," Reagan said, "personally saved Americans and others from similar danger in Damascus in 1860. And we're grateful that you're following in his proud footsteps." That evening Bendjedid spoke of the founding of Elkader in 1846 as proof "that our two people share the ideals of liberty and independence."

In Algeria, Emir Abdelkader is remembered as the founder of the modern Algerian state. In a small town in Iowa, he is the man whose name people write on their letters every day. Americans who come to Mascara can tell their hosts that the Emir has had a town of his own in the Midwest since 1846.

Dr Mohammed Doumir