Arsène Roux

Who was Arsène Roux?

Arsène Roux was a French Arabist and Berberologist. He was born in Rochegude and emigrated to Morocco in his early twenties where he started studying Classical Arabic, Moroccan Arabic and the Moroccan Berber languages. In the following years, he worked in various schools and universities as a professor and director; he also founded and presided over the Collège Berbère d'Azrou.

During his time in Morocco he collected and studied an enormous amount of Shilha and Middle-Atlas Berber texts and manuscripts with the help of his Berber assistant Si Ibrahim al-Kunki. Some of these texts were published by himself in Rabat for use in his Shilha Berber courses; the majority however was taken to France upon his return there in the middle of the 1950s, where he continued his studies and he set out to correct, index and translate his collection of texts. Somehow, nothing of his extensive scholarly work actually saw publication except for a two-page summary of a lecture. He also worked together with the egyptologist Bruno Stricker on an edition and translation of Baḥr ad-dumu, by Muḥammad Awzal, which was published in 1960.