From the 1910s until the 1950s, the French administration in Mauritania funded several official médersas that provided a “Franco-Muslim” education to a select group of students in the towns of Boutilimit, Atar, Mederdra, Kiffa, and Timbedra. As its transliterated name suggests, the French médersa was a hybrid institution that combined elements of an Islamic madrasa and a French école. These schools were an important element in French politique musulmane, or “Muslim policy,” in that they trained young men to work as intermediaries with the colonial administration. Their explicit goal, in the words of their French creators, was the “domestication” (apprivoisement) of Mauritanian Muslims and the “containment” (canalisation) of Mauritanian Islam into channels that the French could control. The médersas of Mauritania were closely linked in several ways with médersas in Algeria. From 1850 until 1950, the French administration in Algeria ran three médersas in Algiers, Tlemcen, and Constantine. Those three schools trained students to work in legal and religious fields – as qadis in Islamic courts, as imams in mosques, and as teachers in Qur’anic schools. The Algerian médersas also sought to foster a “double culture” of both French and Islamic learning, exemplified by graduates’ mastery of both French and Arabic. It is not surprising, then, that when the administrators of Mauritania imported the médersa institution to that Saharan territory, Algerian médersa graduates were sent there to teach. In making the move from the Mediterranean to the Sahara, though, the ideal of the “double culture” was complicated by the distinctions, both real and imagined, between the categories of Algerian Islam and islam maure (“Moorish Islam”). This paper, based on interviews and archives in Algeria, Mauritania, and France, analyzes the experiences of those Algerian teachers and their Mauritanian students. It asks how the institution of the médersa, designed for certain purposes in Algeria, changed in response to differing demands on the part of both nomadic communities and French administrators in Mauritania. How did Algerians, trained in a certain “Franco-Muslim” curriculum, view their role in educating students in a significantly different colonial context? How did the category of “Muslim” change in its relationship to the different colonial administrations? In this paper I argue that the médersa, with its explicit educative mission, demonstrates the role of colonized individuals in shaping those categories in northwest Africa.

Cultural histories of the Maghrib have tended to privilege the national, lay focus on the vertical relationship between metropole and colony, and give pride of place to the visual. This paper seeks to attune the historical ear to the North African soundscape in order to make audible a different phenomenon: the horizontal movement of musicians and musical recordings across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia which proliferated in the interwar period and frequently rendered colonial borders into borderlands. That process, in which a music-maker like the Algerian artist Lili Labassi, this paper’s focal point, performed in Maghribi capitals to the east and west of his native Oran and in which his popular “Lellah yal ghadi lessahra” (O you, who is going to the Sahara) was recorded in Algiers in the late 1930s, pressed in Paris, shipped back to Algeria, moved overland into Morocco at Oujda, and then fanned out across the French protectorate – where it was soon banned, makes questions of border-crossing central to North African history. The explosion of record sales in North Africa in the 1920s, along with the emergence of indigenous recording outfits, not only expanded the reach of musicians like Labassi but so too drew the ire of French officialdom. The spread of broadcast radio by decade’s end and the ensuing “war of the airwaves,” the Arabic radiophonic battle initiated by fascist Italy and aimed at undermining French control in North Africa, brought a surveillance regime to bear on the Maghrib which soon served to police listening. The erection of censorship regimes in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, competing and uneven, further criminalized music. This paper follows the repeated ban on Lili Labassi’s “O you, who is going to the Sahara” in Morocco between 1938 and 1940 in order to answer questions related to what colonial and subaltern actors heard in the music of the interwar Maghrib. In other words, why was Labassi’s disc censored in Morocco but not Algeria? What attracted listeners to the record in question? More broadly, how do fears of and interventions in music inform our understanding of power and subversion? In reading against the archival grain of intelligence briefs, confidential memos, and search and seizure reports – and listening to the music itself, this paper allows for long ignored actors and licentious spaces to gain a foothold in the narrative while demonstrating the need to listen across the Maghrib in order to narrate within it.

In 1933, Georges Hardy and Charles Richet, two veterans of the French Empire, published a monumental study of the dietary habits of the indigenous populations under French imperial control. L’Alimentation indigène dans les colonies françaises emerged not out of personal interest in foodways and cuisine—Hardy was an educator and Richet a doctor—but out of a growing concern with standards of living throughout the empire. Economic depression, environmental crises, and failed colonial policies wrought severe food shortages in much of French North Africa in the late 1920s and early 1930s. A wave of protests in the early 1930s put the basic promise of French associationism—the modernization of the economy, material improvements in the quality of life of the indigenous population—to the test. In response to these early contestations over colonial rule, colonial officials sought to address the basic needs of North Africans first. In the words of Hardy and Richet, the most effective governments need not have a “grand political vision” but instead must be able to provide the fabled “‘chicken-in-every-pot’.” An adequate food supply, therefore, was key to political and social stability throughout the empire. Thus, in the first half of the twentieth century, France joined other imperial powers in employing food as what Nick Cullather has called a “material instrument of statecraft.” Hardy and Richet’s study, therefore, subjected the entirety of French North Africa to the scientific logic of “the foreign policy of the calorie.” The initiative to tabulate how many calories indigenous populations consumed, how they consumed them, and how much they needed to consume to maintain their labor and prevent illness was part of the intertwined colonial policy goals of security and profit. In this paper, I analyze Hardy and Richet’s findings on the diet and foodways of North Africans under French colonial control. How did their codification of “traditional” indigenous foodways create new categories and means of consumption? How did Hardy and Richet account for geography and environmental change in a region marked by unpredictable weather patterns? How did their analysis reflect a newfound concern with food security in the empire? Finally, although new alimentation policies in the 1930s brought larger quantities of affordable foodstuffs to French colonies, they ultimately diminished North Africans’ capacity to produce their own sustenance.

In 1922, the members of the Association of Indigenous Schoolteachers, an organization of Algerian Muslims who taught in the public schools of French Algeria, founded the journal La Voix des Humbles. While the journal addressed a wide range of social, cultural, and political issues throughout its sixteen years in circulation, the issue most central to its contributors was “the woman question”—debates about Muslim women’s limited opportunities. The debate these schoolteachers initiated expanded throughout both the French- and Arabic-language press in the interwar period to include Muslim politicians, French settlers, as well as members of the Muslim Reformist Association of Ouléma. “The woman question” became not only about Muslim women, but also about what a future, modern Algeria would look like. Many of the schoolteachers, for example, described women’s education as a first step towards a modern Algeria that would be politically secular, while religiously Muslim. To make this future possible, they argued that reforms were necessary, notably primary and upper-level education for women, better protection of women in marriage procedures, and a profound reform of inheritance practices. Within these debates, references to France, Tunisia, Egypt, and Turkey in particular were numerous. In their arguments about women’s rights, Muslim intellectuals were inspired by their French education, their attention to successful women’s rights campaigns in Tunisia and Egypt, their admiration for secular regimes in Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, and the transnational conversations about Islamic reform taking place across North Africa and the Middle East. This paper examines the debates about women that swept the French- and Arabic-language interwar press in Algeria, with particular attention to their transnational dimensions. Such a focus offers an opportunity to move beyond questions of nationalism, and consider how Algerian Muslim thinkers engaged with several intellectual currents that moved transregionally in different directions.