In 1839, the Abbé Jacques Suchet was sent to the Algerian city of
Constantine, recently conquered by French forces, to minister to
the new French colonial population there. He commented favorably on
the Arabs' Muslim religiosity, perhaps seeing them as fertile
ground for missionary work. In the mid-1870s, when the Abbé Edmond
Lambert toured another colonial Algerian city, he recorded that
Arabs were inherently "liars, thieves, lazy in body and spirit" and
that even their seeming piety was insincere. In the space of less
than forty years, some French Catholics went from viewing Muslims
in Algeria as fellow religious devotees, potential converts, and
allies against French secularism to viewing them as enemies of
civilization. Sacred Rivals focuses on French Catholic ideas about
Islam and Arab-ness-"Catholic orientalism"-in the context of
religious culture wars in France and of missionary work in colonial
Algeria. It examines the way the stereotype of "Islam" was used and
abused in religious and political debates in French society, as
well as actual missionary encounters with Muslims in Algeria, where
missionaries and their potential converts came into intimate, daily
contact. It reveals that, counter-intuitively, it was sometimes the
most conservative Catholics who spoke most sympathetically of
Muslim religiosity. "Liberal," mainstream Catholics were often
quicker to denigrate Islam as backward, fanatical, and dangerously
theocratic. As Catholics increasingly came to identify with
France's more secular "civilizing mission," any admiration for
Islam would be eclipsed by a more racialized, colonialist view of
Islam. Disillusioned with the possibility of Muslim conversion and
seeking an explanation for their failure, even missionaries in
Algeria joined in with racially-coded attacks on "Arab" Islam.
Through stories of personal encounters, Sacred Rivals exposes the
ways in which religious prejudices against Muslims transformed into
racial ones, as well as the ways in which Algerian Muslims adapted,
used, and resisted French culture and imperialism.
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