The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islamic studies defines Islamic modernism as an intellectual response to the rise of the West that “promoted a re-interpretation of Islam which would fit in the modern world.” These ideas, the Encyclopedia explains, “implied an acknowledgement that the Muslim world had lost its position in the world.” Islamic modernism is thus understood as a religious intellectual movement that began to emerge in the late 19th century in response to a state of crisis made visible by the contrast between a declining East and a flourishing West. This paper seeks to challenge this view, arguing that the Islamic discourse on modernism is neither inherent to the Muslim World, nor opposed a priori to the West. It takes the 1930s writings of a group of religious scholars from the Zaytuna Mosque in Tunis as a case study in order to illustrate a universalist Islamic modernism articulated around ethics. For the Zaytuna ulama, the world as a whole is engulfed in a moral crisis, which can only be surpassed through an active cultivation of an ethics of the community. These scholars write out of concern for the state of the Islamic Umma, but contrary to Islamic modernism à la Rifat al-Tahtawi or Hassan al-Banna, their discourse is not built in opposition to, but rather in conversation with the West and some of its own modernist intellectuals such as Max Weber or Emile Durkheim. For the Zaytuna ulama, the advocacy for and cultivation of an Ihsas Mushtarik, or ‘sense of commonality’ throughout the Arab-Muslim world, is the direct and necessary response to the ethical crisis in which it finds itself.

During the First World War, over 300,000 Muslim Algerian colonial subjects traveled to France as soldiers and workers, participating in every major battle of the Western Front. The Algerian homefront was also fully mobilized - in addition to military and labor conscription, France pursued a policy of extensive material extraction, shipping tens of thousands of sheep and literally tons of grain to France along with mules, horses, ploughs, and other essential goods. Yet, myriad questions about the Algerian home front remain unanswered: How did the wholesale mobilization of Algerian society change the relationship of Muslim colonial subjects to the French state? How did military service change Algerians' perceptions and expectations of France, and how did the prerogatives of empire shape France's response to colonial conscripts’ demands for the rights of citizenship? This paper explores the relationship between the Algerian social experience of the First World War, and the early development of Algerian national consciousness. Although it is commonly accepted that Algerian nationalism entered a new phase of development in the wake of the First World War, we know surprisingly little about the role of the war experience in fueling its emergence. This omission is all the more surprising when we consider the almost complete absence of nationalist movements in Algeria prior to the First World War, and when we consider the central role of émigré workers and soldiers in the emergence of Algerian nationalism. Drawing upon military records, the accounts of ethnographers and petitions written by Algerians, this paper examines how Muslim participation in the French war effort enbled, not only soldiers, but diverse groups of Algerian colonial subjects to make new kinds of claims on the colonial state. Despite the efforts of administrators to draw a strict boundariy between subject-soldiers and citizen-soldiers, Muslim military service fundamentally altered the nature of the colonial relationship. Conscription exposed colonial subjects to a wider social, political and technological world while highlighting their unequal status. The war forged a new culture of contentious politics, by providing Algerians with a conceptual vocabulary of national identity and legitimizing their demands for enfranchisement.My current project re-conceptualizes the history of citizenship and national identity in the French Empire through this case study of the dialectic between state policy and the consolidation of sub-altern identity in Algeria.

Borrowing insight from Michel Foucault about the authoritarian nature of modern education, this paper evaluates lay and religious education of Muslim girls in Libya between 1911 and 1943. It argues that to the extent secular assimilationist policies existed in Libya based on the French model, they almost completely excluded Libyan women. Italian colonial officials limited investment in state run education for Muslim girls based on their own interpretation of respect for local customs, arguing that the establishment of schools for female Muslim students aroused opposition since the education of girls was seen as contrary to Islam. The only state-funded schools for girls during the first decades of Italian rule were professional schools for lower class Libyan girls that focused on the production of textiles. While largely ignoring assimilation, these schools had a civilizing component of teaching hygiene, but the limited number of pupils largely left women out of the secular civilizing project. The second part of the paper evaluates the area of education most open to Libyan girls: French missionary education. While the colonial government explicitly prohibited proselytism, a limited number of girls were included in a religious civilizing mission through missionary schools. This section will look at the gendered and racial assumptions at the heart of missionary education and the lasting impact of the religious mission on the lives of Muslim girls, including their later involvement in the Libyan literary scene. Finally, the religious civilizing mission was also mobilized against parts of the European settler populations in the last decades of Italian rule. As a result, the third section examines the activities of female Catholic teaching congregations, exploring their contribution to the colonial educational project. Utilizing missionary correspondences, colonial reports, and Libyan literature, this paper reframes previous assumptions about identity, culture, gender, race and education under colonial rule.