The Council of the Moroccan Community Abroad (CCME) paid tribute on Sunday, April 20, 2025, at the International Publishing and Book Fair (SIEL) in Rabat, to Abdellah Bounfour, a university professor and specialist in Amazigh studies.
Participated to this highly anticipated tribute: Mohamed Sghir Janjar, anthropologist, Hassan Wahbi, poet and writer, Fouad Bellamine, visual artist, Abdelghani Abou Al Aazm, lexicographer, Khadija Mouhsine, academic, Salem Chaker, emeritus professor and specialist in Berber linguistics, participated in this tribute, moderated by Najib Abdallah Refaïf, journalist and writer.
Abdellah Bounfour is a Moroccan linguist and philologist born in 1946, specializing in Berber languages, literature, and culture. He is an emeritus professor at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris. Originally from the Glaoua Berber tribe in the High Atlas of Marrakech, he studied at the University of Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle), where he earned a third-cycle doctorate in 1976, a state doctorate in 1984, and the agrégation in Arabic in 1986.
Unable to attend the event, Salem Chaker sent a message read by Najib Abdallah Refaïf, praising a nearly half-century-long friendship and collaboration. He wrote that “from the outset, Abdellah Bounfour had a comprehensive vision of Berber issues across North Africa and was an essential pillar of all our teaching and research activities.” During these “long years of collaboration, he was both a complementary and indispensable scientific partner, with a solid knowledge of Arabic, Amazigh, and French languages.”
This scientific quality was confirmed by Abdelghani Abou Al Aazm, one of Morocco’s few Arabic language lexicographers and a friend of Abdellah Bounfour since 1960, in a tribute message read by his daughter, Amal Abou Al Aazm. While conducting his scientific work on the Amazigh language, “he maintained an open, objective, and positively neutral approach to other languages, particularly Arabic, fostering fruitful and academic exchanges with many specialists in Arabic literature.” Notably, he defended a doctoral dissertation on Arabic rhetoric under the supervision of Roland Barthes in Paris.
In his message, Abdelghani Abou Al Aazm recalled images that define his friend’s personality: “He is sensitive to situations that provoke reflection and maintains a precise balance in his decisions.”
To honor his scientific contributions, Khadija Mouhsine highlighted Abdellah Bounfour’s achievements and brilliant career, though she noted that covering them fully “would be impossible.” She identified three main axes of his research: “First, the effort and concern for preserving texts, particularly in poetry but not exclusively. Second, the development of the poetics of Amazigh literary texts. Third, a poetics of genres.”
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