This paper will explore the ways in which colonial authorities and North Africans themselves employed Islamic history and traditions reaffirm or challenge the legitimacy of French control over North Africa (1830-1962). The paper will focus upon the written work of North African intellectuals and colonial officials from the period of the First World War until the Second World War. I am especially interested in examining the linkages between Algerian and Tunisian conceptions of Islamic history, especially given the close ties between intellectuals living in the eastern area of Algeria (the Constantinois) and Tunis during the early 20th century. The nexus of these links was the Zeituna university in Tunis, which provided the social milieu for both Tunisians and Algerians to formulate these historical theories which saw Western civilization as apart from, and in many ways, alien to Islam. These Zeitunian graduates’ work remains a powerful indictment of French colonial power today, but to fully understand the environment in which they were produced, we must also examine French colonial efforts to craft an opposing viewpoint. French officials, writing both in French and in Arabic, attempted to recast Islamic history in order to justify their rule in the eyes of their Muslim subjects. The author will use official French publications, such as the military journal “El-Nasr”, and archival sources to argue that the French wished to promote a vision of Islamic civilization as deeply engaged in the development of the West and open to assimilation, thereby justifying French control as a sort of reciprocal action in light of events. The author hopes to conclude this paper with a discussion of what aspects of each theory have been definitively discredited today and which remain analytically useful in understanding contemporary post-colonial North Africa. The sources will include archival evidence the author has collected from trips to Nantes and Aix-en-Provence, as well as archival sources located in Tunisia and Algeria. The paper will also examine the works of Algerian and Tunisian scholars such as Sheikh Mubarak al-Milli and Sheikh Muhammad Khidr al-Hussein and Sheikh Salah Sherif al-Tunisi.

This study examines a selection of writings from al-Shihab, the Arabic-language mouthpiece of prominent Algerian Islamic reformist Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis, on the topic of gender roles. From a close reading of various articles covering the topic of gender, this study reaches two general conclusions. First, it demonstrates that, in the process of describing the ideal Algerian man and woman, the men of al-Shihab found themselves articulating their vision of an Algerian nation which had, at its core, an Islamic essence. Second, and more importantly, the study reveals that, in expressing this religious conception of nation, the writers nevertheless freely shifted into secular, rationalist, and scientific modes of argumentation. As religious reformers and scholars, they naturally implemented religious modes of argumentation, citing the Qur’an in order to claim authority for their vision of ideal gender types. However, they did not rely purely on religious discourse. By demonstrating the degree to which the men of al-Shihab freely crossed the intellectual boundary between the “religious” and the “secular,” this study suggests a reconsideration of such categories’ utility in describing the Algerian Islamic reform movement’s attitude toward gender questions as well as its understanding of nationhood. In order to illustrate these points, the writings in al-Shihab are compared and contrasted with those of the famed Egyptian attorney Qasim Amin. At first consideration, such a comparison may seem fruitless. The anti-traditionalist program that Qasim Amin advocates for Egyptian women does indeed contrast sharply with the platform of the Algerian reformists, a platform which prior scholarship describes as exceedingly conservative. However, an analysis which focuses on method of argumentation rather than content reveals similarities between the two sides, and thus, again, blurs the distinction between “traditional” and “progressive” and between “theological” and “rationalistic.” Scholars of Qasim Amin have argued that his proposal for women’s education and unveiling was designed as a developmental project on behalf of “the Egyptian nation” more so than it connoted any emancipatory project for women. Similarly, this study argues that the Algerian Islamic reformists embedded their concern for gender roles within an overarching concern for the Algerian nation. With this nation being imagined as quintessentially Islamic, it follows logically that the reformists would define its ideal woman and man in religious terms. A close reading of these sources, however, shows that a religious program could sometimes rest upon a secular basis of argumentation.

This paper examines ways that Algerians responded to restrictive policies regulating pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places (hajj) during the colonial era. Following a period of improvisation from roughly 1830-60, French authorities came to see the hajj as a potential vehicle to advance colonial power. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, they developed an elaborate system of regulations to control the hajj in the interests of political control and public health, and, more broadly, they tried to use the hajj to cultivate proper colonial subjects. At the centerpiece of these efforts was the travel permit or a special passport issued to Algerian candidates to the hajj. The process of issuing travel documents was complicated, expensive, and favored those who had a good understanding of the colonial system, its networks of patronage, unspoken rules, etc. This limited the hajj a select group. Such regulations combined with outright bans on hajj travel enforced in the last decades of the nineteenth century to make the hajj inaccessible to the vast majority of Algerians. They reacted in a variety of ways, one of which was to debark on pilgrimage without proper papers, making a “clandestine hajj,” an offense punishable by fines and imprisonment. Drawing on research in colonial documents held in France and Algeria, this paper will shed light on this activity. The colonial archive consists of documents from the Governor General’s office and local administrators in Algeria as well as correspondence from consulates across North Africa to Jeddah. This material speaks well to the size and social composition of this group, as well as its strategies for success.

This paper forms part of a dissertation in which I argue that Salafi Islam played multiple and contested roles as a basis of national identity, and impetus for political action in both colonial and postcolonial Algeria. It will explore an underappreciated Islamicization of the nationalist movement, and suggest that the nationalist movement as a whole converged around the Salafi principles of the Association of Algerian Muslim ‘Ulama (AUMA). Following the 1947 French drafting of the Statut d’Algerie, which reasserted the principle separating church from state, the AUMA pressed for unfettered access to preach and educate in state administered mosques. However facing French obduracy against surrendering control of religious space, the AUMA in 1950 presented the Algerian parliament with its Muthakirat fi qadiyya fasl al-Din ‘an al-Hukuma (Treatise on the Issue of the Separation of Religion from Government). Signaling a more confrontational anti-colonial stance, this document declared the dismantling of Islam Algérien, the AUMA term for the French administration of mosques, religious education, and the ahbas (pious land endowments), its central demand. In a post-war context restrictive for Algerian political activity, the AUMA’s declaration initiated a constellation of anti-colonial activity that drew in a cross-section of nationalist groups, and witnessed the emergence of the religious field as a new political arena. Using French and Algerian archives, religious and political publications, and oral histories, I trace a series of conflicts over the Grand Mosque of Constantine. Recognizing the centrality of the mosque to local spiritual, educational and social life, the AUMA, turuq (sufi brotherhoods), “secular” nationalists and the colonial state all competed to determine discursive authority in the religious field. The Algerian actors involved, whether in collusion or competition, were unified by their deployment of Salafi principles and concepts as an emotive means to garner popular, anti-colonial support. The intensity of these conflicts over sacred space suggests that Salafi Islam was a defining aspect of Algerian national identity, and ultimately remained so as Algeria entered into its revolution in 1954. My study of the Islamicization of the nationalist movement offers not only a rereading of anti-colonial politics in Algeria, but may also provide a new framework for analyzing nationalist movements and the origins of Islamism throughout the Middle East and North Africa.