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ABSTRACT
DYNAMICS OF CONCEALMENT IN FRENCH/MUSLIM NEO–COLONIAL
ENCOUNTERS:
AN EXPLORATION OF COLONIAL DISCOURSES
IN CONTEMPORARY FRANCE
By Casey Koons This paper investigates the neo-colonial situation occurring within contemporary France, surrounding the tensions that have emerged concomitantly with increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants in the country. Proposing the application of methods from the history of religions, the thesis traces the concealing function of colonial discourses in French colonial Algeria, suggesting a connection between them and French immigration policy in the 20th^ century. It further investigates the roles that these discourses play in the formation of the religious identities of the liminal sons and daughters of Muslim immigrants to France with several case studies, including a look at the hijab debate in France and the novel Le Gone du Chaâba by Azouz Begag. Using these examples, the thesis concludes by exploring the way that colonial dynamics of concealment may be subverted.
DYNAMICS OF CONCEALMENT IN FRENCH/MUSLIM NEO–COLONIAL
ENCOUNTERS:
AN EXPLORATION OF COLONIAL DISCOURSES
IN CONTEMPORARY FRANCE
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Comparative Religion by Casey Joseph Koons Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2008 Advisor________________________ (Prof. Frederick Colby) Reader_________________________ (Prof. Mark McKinney) Reader_________________________ (Prof. Elizabeth Wilson)
Introduction
Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in the world today, particularly within the United States and Europe. This increase is due, in part, to the many Muslim immigrants in the West and their higher birthrate compared to Americans and to Europeans. The heightened presence of Muslims in the West has come at a time when there are also increased conflicts between Western countries and countries bearing a Muslim majority, as well as a perceived threat of terrorism coming from self-identified Muslim radicals. This conflict has led many thinkers in the West to consider Islam to be anti-Western, a revival of the Orientalist notion of “The East” as the opposite of “the West;” namely, the East is perceived as uncivilized, intolerant (freedom-hating), and unscientific. The argumentation in this vein runs from the moronic to the exceedingly nuanced and, although it should be immediately apparent that much of the “Muslim Threat” is constructed, it is not the case that there are not legitimate tensions between Muslims and non- Muslims. This is particularly true with respect to the immigration situation in Western countries, where many different layers of conflict, control, and cooperation exist between populations of immigrants and the mainline non- Muslim population. It is these spaces of cultural contact that concern this thesis, for, within them, fascinating negotiations of identity can be observed in response to the discourse of power and control. Western countries have reacted to the influx of Muslim immigrants with a variety of responses and polices. To be sure, Muslims have faced racism and discrimination in nearly all cases. France boasts the largest percentage of Muslims in Western Europe, nearly five million Muslims, or 10% of the total population that is frequently recorded in the press.^1 France also has a historical approach to immigration and an attitude towards religion that runs against many of the pluralistic approaches seen in the United States and Great Britain. From within the conflict between the Muslim voice in France and the secular French policies of integration and laïcité (secularity), one can observe the tensions felt throughout the Western world in highly aggravated form. Indeed, it was in part this tension that caused the riots in Paris in 2005. The violence, which included the torching of cars and attacking of police stations by a disenfranchised segment of French society, not all of whom were Muslims, was inspired by blatant examples of dehumanizing statements on the part of French 1 ”Background Note: France.” in Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs (Washington, United States State Department, 2008, accessed 4 March 2008); available from http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3842.htm; Internet. Most researchers agree with this number, placing the number of Muslims in France at between four and five million. Some French census data disputes these numbers, claiming the Muslim population is 3% of the total.
ministers. The riots were largely the work of "third generation" immigrants to France who have known no other world but one without hope of employment or acceptance into larger society. Many of these young men are Muslim children and grandchildren of the immigrants from the Mahgreb that came to France seeking a better life in the 1960s. The youth in the banlieues (ghetto/housing development) were described by interior minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement as sauvageons (wild children), reminiscent of an earlier colonial term for the “other,” namely sauvages (savages). In 2005 Chevènement’s successor Nicholas Sarkozy repeatedly refered to the youth of the banlieues as racailles [scum] and voyous [hoodlums]. These remarks, aggravated by Sarkozy’s steadfast refusal to retract them, led to anger that contributed to the rioting in the banlieues. 2 Sarkozy’s statements were part of a discourse of colonialism, which is the central topic of this thesis. Ania Loomba stresses the importance of discourse in colonial studies, which she understands, from Foucault and others, to be: ”…a whole field or domain within which language is used in particular ways. This domain is rooted…in human practices, institutions and actions.” 3 The colonial enterprise reshaped the world through the deployment of devastating new discourses of power and control. These discourses were manifested in human understandings of “the other,” and deployed through colonial institutions like schools. As Loomba notes, it is difficult to speak from outside a discourse.^4 This is because a discourse determines the bounds of what can be known. The colonial situation illustrates a function that the delimiting property of discourse can serve. Historian of religion Charles H. Long describes ‘dynamics of concealment’ associated with colonial discourses that deny the human legitimacy of colonized individuals and, in so doing facilitate colonial acts of violence. These dynamics are a central focus for this thesis. The methodology developed by Charles Long, Ashis Nandy and others has been readily applied to the religions of the colonized in India and the Americas. Comparatively few studies have applied these theories to cases of European colonialism on a population of Muslims. This thesis is an attempt at a preliminary application of these methods toward the French colonization of Algeria. I contend that discourses of control and concealment that were developed in the period of the French colonization of Algeria continue to function in the discourses of immigration and integration currently at work in metropolitan France. The first chapter traces this history of colonialism as it was established in colonial Algeria, and lays the methodological foundations for understanding these dynamics of concealment. The second chapter then turns to contemporary France to assess whether or not the conditions faced by Muslim immigrants and their descendents can be considered extensions of this colonial discourse and, by 2 Azouz Begag, Ethnicity and Equality: France in the Balance, trans. Alec G. Hargreaves (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), viii. 3 Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd ed., The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2005), 38. 4 Loomba, Colonialism, 38.
primary contention of this thesis that colonial modes of understanding the world are still active in discourses surrounding immigrants in contemporary France. Where I use the term I refer instead to the historical period that comes after the formal end of colonial practices after World War II. Colonial discourses, I argue, continue into the present day and create what I refer to as neo-colonial situations such as the conditions of Maghrebi population in France. The value of the experiences of these individuals cannot be underestimated for the scholar of religion. As the following chapter will explore, they constitute acts of creation that can teach us much about the exchanges that take place in colonial contact zones.
Chapter One
In this argument for the applicability of methods from the history of religions to colonial contact between secular French and immigrant Muslims, we start with an exploration of the field from which the methods originate. A question that continues to vex scholars of religious studies is a concise and agreed upon definition for the term ‘religion.’ It may seem odd that a discipline would have difficulty defining such a primary category, and indeed the difficultly has persuaded many scholars from other fields to dismiss religion as an valid central locus for academic research. Even some historians of religion, including J.Z. Smith, have argued that the search for a definition of religion ought to be abandoned in favor of analyzing religious data.^8 As Catherine Albanese points out, however, the difficulty of locating exactly what religion is demonstrates its central role in the study of the human, for religion seems both within and without human culture. It is both shaped by human action and thought as well as shaping human action and thought.^9 Religion seems at some points to be characterized by the creation and maintenance of boundaries of human experience, while often functioning as the only means for human beings to overcome boundaries.^10 The presence of religion on so many levels of human existence and the ways through which it seems to facilitate the formation and function of human beings make it impossible to deny that religion is a central category for understanding the human. The realization of the importance of the category of religion does not necessarily lead to a satisfying definition, a point that is of key importance in any study of immigrant Muslims in contemporary France, many of whom (including Azouz Begag himself) have claimed to be ‘secular.’ A brief history of the lineage of the scholarship on which this thesis is based will provide a working definition of religion and justify the applicability of that definition to this research. The field called ‘the history of religions,’^11 of which this thesis is concerned, began with the Orientalist and translator Frederich Max Müller. A scholar of Indian religions and noted Sanskrit translator, Müller’s interest in the religions of India were rooted in the search for origins: the origin of religion, the origin of language and the origin of the German culture. In the late 19th century, when Germany could claim neither a colonial empire (like Britain and France), nor a coherent national identity, the discovery of Sanskrit and its relationship to Germanic languages offered scholars like Müller a new venue for expressing the significance of the German people in Europe.^12 India in this period revealed layers 8 Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi. 9 C. L. Albanese, America, Religions, and Religion, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub., 1999), 6. 10 Albanese, America, Religions, and Religion, 19. 11 Originally called Religionwissenschaft, the “science of religion” 12 Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986) 42.
divorcing religion from historical context, the early phenomenologists of religion, like Otto, could not account for the variation of religious expressions found in various cultures and time periods. Otto did not bother himself with these manifestations, preferring to analyze the internal mental states associated with certain mystical traditions.^16 While offering a valuable new positionality towards religion that elevated it as a category for research, Otto’s methods make it impossible to contextualize the effects of a historical space, such as the era of colonialism, on the religions of people. The solution to the problems posed by the phenomenological approach would be, in part, provided by the scholar Mircea Eliade. For Otto, the religious response to the sacred was hard-wired into the human mind, and did not depend on history for its origination nor its expression. For Eliade, the human encounter with the sacred, or hierophany,^17 caused structures of human consciousness to be created and developed. Archaic people, Eliade argued, had their consciousness shaped through religious encounters with the natural world. In his work, Patterns in Comparative Religion , Eliade argued that it was through structures such as the sky, sun, mountains, and seasons that notions like the ultimate, the everlasting, and the cyclical came to be part of human culture and religious expression. Charles Long paraphrases Eliade’s contribution well: “Eliade shows that the originary being and nature of the human is based upon the imagination of matter, of the forms of the world as they are apprehended in human consciousness, not as abstract categories but as concrete modalities of meaning...”^18 This emphasis on the material brought the study of religion back to an appreciation of historical context. Religion seen now not as an abstract quality of the mind, but the transformation of human consciousness through encounters in space and time. The work of Eliade has been extended by Charles H. Long, who defines religion as being “orientation in the ultimate sense, that is, how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world.”^19 Religion is the means through which the question “What is the world and what is my place in it?” is answered. The workings of this definition are exemplified by the cosmogonic myths catalogued by Eliade, and by Long in his book, Alpha, the Myths of Creation. Through the stories of the actions of heroes, Gods, and originary beings, the cosmos is defined. The chaotic reality that confronts a human society is given meaning and order, and within that ordering, a place for the human is defined. The relationships between people and nature, and between people is established in myth and brought into practice through ritual activity. A classic example of this 16 Long, Significations, 44. 17 A term of Elaide’s referring to eruptions of the sacred into the profane world. 18 Long, Significations, 27. 19 Long, Significations, 7. In adopting this definition of religion, I join several noted historians of religion such as Davìd Carrasco, David Chidester, and Philip Arnold. It is worth noting the importance of ultimacy in the above definition. There are many ways through which humans negotiate their sense of self, religion is here understood to the process at the fundamental basis of these negotiations, not the way identity is formed on all levels of meaning.
ordering is the cross-cultural tendency to associate monstrous creatures and perils with unexplored areas. Even among “modern” people, colonial sailors would label unexplored areas of their charts “Here be Dragons,” reflecting the danger these unordered spaces pose to human understanding. Here the first order of this field’s utility to the data is shown. We can see the novel Le Gone du Chaâba as a form of myth making. The book reveals a language, and therefore an understanding of the world, that is quite different from that of the Western non-Muslim reader as it explores the childhood of the author. On several levels, the novel addresses the formation of identity, including the very obvious coming-of-age theme that flows throughout. The modes through which identity is defined in the novel both involve religion and constitute religious acts. Likewise the actions of the French schoolgirls are bound up in identification, as the headscarf is on of the most conspicuous visual indicators of Muslim identity. However, these are not the most compelling reasons to approach the data. The neo–colonial space out of which liminal individuals emerge present new problems to the scholar of religion, but offers unique opportunities for levels of understanding that would ordinarily be impossible from within a traditional scholarly discourse.^20 The colonial space is a nexus for multiple world-defining discourses, and while certainly not the first time that cultures come into contact, colonialism was unique for the dehumanizing potential of discourses that informed and enabled it. We will find that these discourses of colonialism radically reshaped the materialities, originally proposed by Eliade, in response to which religious identities are formed. Eliade understood the pre-modern human consciousness as being formed through the religious imagination of the material. Early people came to their understanding of finitude by confronting the sky, which was unreachably distant, and the mountains of stone that could not be destroyed by human action. Modern humanity, in Eliade’s mind, had lost these archaic religious structures; Eliade believed that modernity, here understood as the period beginning with the European Enlightenment and the era of colonialism, had stripped humanity of a religious way of interacting with the world and that we were significantly poorer for the loss. He viewed his scholarship not only as a discursive exercise, or even as a project to better understand the human. He believed that his work could have a 20 It certainly true that the academy is not without many scholars from liminal post-colonial situations. Azouz Begag himself is a noted sociologist for the CNRS. When I argue that the “western scholarly discourse” cannot imagine the formulations of hybrid identity without a vector like a novel, I am not merely saying that as a white American, I lack the correct positionality to understand the colonized person. It is the discourse of the academy that can not accommodate these hybrid formations well. Even Azouz Begag, in his scholarly research can not avoid the classifying language, identifying many of the young Maghrebis as “rusters,” people would lack a complete cultural identity. To overcome this discourse, something with more narrative power, such as the novel, will be seen to challenge colonial discourses far better than scholarly positions can.
history as the Europeans. This discourse not only allowed the colonizers to act without full consideration of their actions as I will explore later, but it suggests that colonized people existed in a Eliadean mode of religious understanding which was disrupted by the more powerful “modern” through colonial encounter. The discourse of the civilized and the primitive, and other colonial dehumanizing discourses like it, were central to the formation of the concept of “Western Civilization.” The period of colonialism was one of ontological crisis for the people of Europe. The boundaries of the World had been expanded, and just as is the case for those who underwent colonialism, when one’s world changes, one’s position in it becomes uncertain. The formulation of a new European identity was facilitated by colonial contact with indigenous peoples: “The self–conscious realization of the Western European rise to the level of civilization must be seen simultaneously in its relationship to the discovery of a new world which must necessarily be perceived as inhabited by savages and primitives who constitute the lowers rung on the ladder of cultural reality.”^24 Dichotomies like civilized/primitive (or the euphemism: developed/underdeveloped) established, in part through the academy, the system of relationships that characterize the modern world, and cannot be entirely avoided.^25 This dilemma is exemplified in this thesis, which despite its aim to critique and suggest alternatives to French colonial discourse, cannot avoid the use of certain terminology appropriate to it, such as the idea of “the West,” in our exploration of French colonial discourses. This is the reason why the experience of those people within these neo–colonial situations is so valuable to the researcher, because it represents a subversion of these discourses that we in the academy can not ourselves produce. We will find that these discourses of colonialism still have power over our understanding and can conceal realities of colonialism to us. A key component of the colonial arché are dynamics of concealment^26 that make it difficult to demonstrate that the new arché is also, indeed primarily, the mythic foundation of the “rational West”. Ania Loomba shares an example of this when she points out that the Oxford definition of the word “colony” contains a suspicious omission: it explains the colonial exercise with absolutely no reference to the indigenous people affected.^27 Indeed, it was this view of the “New” world, 24 Long, Significations, 94. 25 Charles H. Long, “A postcolonial meaning of religion,” in Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous religious traditions and modernity, ed. Jacob K. Olupona (New York: Routledge. 2004), 94. 26 This thesis engages in an investigation of concealment in a specific sense as developed by Charles Long, referring specifically to the opacity of the colonized discussed by Ashis Nandy, and called “the veil” by W.E.B. DuBois. It is very true that many kinds of concealing and revealing exist on both sides of a colonial encounter, but is key to our understanding that on a certain fundamental level, there the colonizers are completely unable to conceive of the colonized. 27 Ania Loomba, Colonialism–Postcolonialism, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 7. The definition quoted reads: ”a settlement in a new country...a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state; the community so formed, consisting of original settlers and their decedents and successors, as long as the connection with the parent state is kept up.” No mention of the relationship of the colony to indigenous people of the “new locality” is present.
a landscape that was untamed and unoccupied, that lead to the colonization and later westward expansion of Europeans across the American continent. The discourses that facilitated this expansion did so through concealing fundamental realities from the colonizers. The usual relationship between the victims of modern colonial violence and the perpetrators can be understood partially again by the concealing intellectual dichotomy of the civilized vs. the primitive. Dehumanization of the natives of the Americas, the slaves from Africa, and eventually the Muslim residents of colonies like Algeria, is a necessary step towards the intellectual and psychological constructions required to justify colonial acts of exploitation. It is what allowed a new nation founded on revolutionary ideals of equality for all men to institute one of the most vicious forms of slavery ever recorded. The move is a simple one: if the victims of colonial activity are not thought to be fully human in the sense that Europeans are, then the Enlightenment rights and Christian morals of equality and the civil treatment of humans could be said to not apply to them. Long calls discourses like the civilized/primitive divide dynamics of concealment. They function to conceal the realties of colonialism from the colonizers in order to enable the colonial enterprise.^28 The removal of the moral and intellectual dilemmas that would ordinarily arise given the actions of colonists, while significant, is neither the most fascinating nor the most important facet of these dynamics. The effects of colonial encounter are impossible for colonized people to conceal from themselves. The presence and actions of the colonizer illustrate a reality with which the pre-existing indigenous mythic structures of orientation are unable to contend. To address this incongruity, those who underwent colonialism needed to form new modes of being human, and such new modes are precisely the interest of this thesis. Many of these new religious movements, such as the Ghost Dance religion in the American west and the cargo cults of the Melanesian islanders, assume and adapt elements of the colonizing culture. This process was frequently referred to by cultural anthropologists as ‘syncretism.’ Davìd Carrasco argues that syncretism is often used to refer to a process whereby a weaker culture is disrupted by the presence of a dominant culture, and in response, the weaker culture adopts the ‘strong’ cultural forms of the dominant culture.^29 This academic notion rests on a problematic assumption, however. Given the profound effect the colonial encounter had on the colonized culture, what data is there to suggest that an equivalent reaction should not appear in the colonizing culture? Colonials in India, the Americas, and Algeria, despite possessing technologies and intellectual discourses that granted them more power than the people under their rule, were widely surrounded by non-Western people and alien cultures in the 28 Charles H. Long, “Indigenous People, Materialities, and Religion: Outline for a New Orientation to Religious Meaning,” in Jennifer I. M. Reid, ed., Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long (Lanham, Massachusetts: Lexington Press, 2003), 170-171. (^29) This line of thought, and Carrasco’s argument will be thoroughly explored in Chapter 3. See page 47.
our discussion of those dynamics in the second chapter to now address how this understanding of colonialism applies to the French colonization of Algeria. Comparisons between the case of Algeria and instances of colonialism already explored using these hermeneutics will demonstrate how the methodology may be applicable, and how it may be challenged by French case in Algeria. The importance of text and discourse to the French colonization of Algeria is illustrated by the following story. In the first days of the colonial exercise in Algeria, about a week before the Dey would surrender to French military forces in July of 1830, a vital piece of military/colonial equipment was delivered to the beachhead. It arrived alongside a shipment of other vital goods such as grain and munitions. Five laborers who had accompanied the machine worked all day and into the night assembling it. This machine of war was a printing press. On June 30, 1830, the press was inaugurated by the cheers of assembled troops and sailors as it printed the first copies of an Army bulletin announcing the progress of the campaign in Algeria. 34 It is as though, despite the battles they had fought and their presence within the foreign land of Algeria, the efforts of the soldiers was not made real until they were inscribed in text. That the press was assembled in such haste on the beach shows how significant this act was. Koos quotes Jean- Toussaint Merle, who directed the construction of the press, “ cette date signalera peut-être un des événements les plus influents de la civilisation sur la plus belle somme sur la plus florissante de nos colonies. (This date will perhaps signal one of the most influential events in the civilization on the most beautiful sum of the most flourishing of our colonies. ”^35 The press seized a kind of power that night, power that the soldiers could never achieve through any force of arms. It was the power to inscribe history, the means to deploy discourses of control. Although the French colonization of Algeria was marked by significantly more hesitation than the British pursuits in India and other colonial ventures, the French settlers in Algeria nonetheless re–inscribed the history of the country to legitimize the conquest of the territory.^36 Abdelmajid Hammoun, in his analysis of the way in which the mythic Berber heroine Kahina’s narrative was transformed by the French, argues that the French historians’ “aim was indeed to understand it [the past] better, and create a whole new mythology which would justify and consolidate their colonial enterprise.”^37 This mythology depended on laying claim to peoples and landscapes, and proceeded through the re-formulation of mythic narratives like the story of the Kahina. Denis Dominique Cardoane, one of the first Frenchmen to write a ‘history of Algeria,’ included a chapter on the Kahina story. Significant for Cardoane is the idea that North Africa was the land of Christianity populated by the Greeks and Romans of the Byzantine Empire prior 34 Leonard R. Koos, “Colonial Culture as Francophone? The Case of Late Nienteenth-Century Algeria,” in Francophone Post-Colonial Cultures: Critical Essays, ed. Kamal Sahli (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003), 18. 35 Koos, “Colonial Culture,” 18. 36 Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 10. 37 Abdelmajid Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001), 29.
to Umayyad conquest. The Berbers, under the direction of their ruler the Kahina, employed a “scorched earth” tactic against the Arab invaders, destroying wells and farmland as they were ceded to the enemy. Cardoane was not the first to make this observation. His source, the 13th century Arab historian Nuwayri, alluded to this land destruction as well. But rather than the Berber peasants failing to understand the Kahina’s plan and joining the Arab army in protest as in Nuwayri’s account, in Cardoane’s history, it is the native Greek Christians who did not trust the tactic. In this narrative, the Berbers can be blamed for the seizure of rightfully Christian lands by Muslim invaders.^38 The French, the self- professed heirs to the Greeks and Romans due to their imperial and “civilizing” missions, were simply re-claiming land that was theirs and that was lost due to the political failings of a Berber queen named Kahina. In this formulation, it was less the population of the Berbers that was significant, but the land that was historically Christian and the Berbers to be distrusted for their failure to keep it from the Arabs. A later 19th century French historian would take the same narrative of the Berber queen and recast it to show al-Kahina and the Berbers she represented as themselves justifications of the conquest. For Mercier, and for those historians who would follow him, it was the origin of the Berber people that justified colonial occupation. Ernest Mercier describes the Kahina as a Jewish Berber Queen who ruled with wisdom. Mercier differs from Cardoane in that he describes the Queen quite positively, both honorable and intelligent compared to the Arab conquerors. She is said at one point to have “taught the Arabs kindness” through her treatment of captives.^39 Mercier’s account of the Kahina is fascinating because it sharply makes clear the distinction between the settled Jewish community of the Kahina and the Muslim invasions of the Arabs. In the narrative, the Kahina can do no wrong, whereas none of the Arab actors in the story, including those described by Cardoanne as honorable, can escape the opprobrium of being Muslim.^40 In the mind of Mercier, the Berbers shared their geographical origins with the Romans and Greeks, who also settled in North Africa, traveling south from Europe into North Africa. Mercier’s history implicitly establishes a European origin for the Berber people and therefore their kinship with the French -- as opposed to the “hated Turk” of the Muslim Arab. It is interesting how this discourse of the other, while it divides on racial lines, uses religion as the category of separation. The Berbers were made “closer” to the French through their comparative distance to Islam. This process of separation was made explicit by those historians who followed in the tradition of Mercier. Henri Fonnel, Mercier’s contemporary, had this to say of the Berber people: Since 1830 we have been on the wrong path for we have been too exclusively occupied with the Arabs, and have mistakenly neglected the real indigenous, the Berbers (the Kabyles), an eminently hard-working race, not 38 Abdelmajid Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories, 32. 39 Abdelmajid Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories, 39. 40 Abdelmajid Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories, 60.
history with European Christianity. Religious conversion had been the goal of both Christians and Muslims throughout the Middle Ages. The North African Muslims have a significantly greater knowledge of the colonists prior to the era of colonialism which informed their resistance to it. Both the narrative of al-Kahina and Henri Fonnel’s observation shows that Islam would serve a different purpose in these colonial dynamics then religion has been seen to in other situations investigated with these methods. At the end of the 19th century the French added a new colonial structure to their array of taxes and land ownership laws. This was free, secular, and compulsory education targeted at the Muslim population. Peter Dunwoodie describes the purpose of these programs: “The objective was thus quite simple, and quite drastic: to lead the Muslim population out of the supposed obscurantism and misery of centuries of Islam into the light of (republican) civilization.”^46 So once again, civilization, in the French case, is being set against Islam. By 1892 there were 12,300 Muslim students in 124 of these schools, along with 474 classes within the European schools for the indigenes. “Perfection” was the aspiration: “...primary education for the mass of the population, will effectively bridge the gap and, by helping them to live with the same concepts, will teach them to see themselves and to act as members of the same human family, of the same nation.”^47 This push for assimilation was coming from metropolitan France and had many detractors among the French Algerians, members and decedents of the colonists that settled Algeria, who argued that the Muslims were irreducibly inferior and could not be lifted up through any process of education. Their opposition would be redoubled when students from these schools would demand the rights to which this “perfection” would seem to entitle them. Before World War I, the Muslim Algerian response to these schools was largely distrustful. Most Muslim Algerians of means avoided the schools through various loopholes, a practice that the racist colonists were happy to encourage.^48 A large population of Muslim Algerians fought on behalf of the French in the first World War, and after so serving desired French citizenship more strongly than before and saw the schools as a place in which facility with French cultural modes could be obtained, and thus could gain freedom within the colonial situation. Ferhat Abbas, a student from one of these schools, comments on the spirit of this time: “You will understand why my generation and preceding generations continued to call upon republican, liberal France in the face of colonial, tyrannical France. They thought that they merely had to apprise the form of the contradictions which had led to our sufferings for her to put an end to them.”^49 This new generation of students confronted the discourse of the civilized and the primitive directly, appealing to spirit of liberté, égalité, fraternité, that held such promise in comparison to the colonial realities of racism and marginalization. 46 Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, 19. 47 Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, 20. 48 Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, 20. 49 Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, 21.
Despite the idealistic (and paternalistic) mission of these schools, and the new crop of significantly more motivated Muslim students, assimilation seems to have been prevented. Peter Dunwoodie argues that the school’s purpose was not true to its alleged assimilating mission: “The aim, obviously, was to educate, that is to introduce the Muslim pupils into French culture, while retaining a significant number of distinctions in order to constantly reinforce the notion of difference, inferiority, and dependence which assimilation was officially working against.”^50 Structures within the schools, such as separate syllabi, inferior living conditions for the Muslim students, and an informal rule that prevented the Muslims students from becoming surveillants (supervisors)^51 actively acted against the sense of assimilation that the schools supposed offered. The schools served as a means to reinforce a dehumanizing discourse by forever addressing the Muslims as you would a child. As for the response of students from these schools who called for full assimilation in their own right, Dunwoodie notes that many of the members of the Young Algerians called for unqualified and total assimilation with French, which many of them did not see as conflicting with Islam. Fehat Abbas again noted: “I then turned to the Qur’an and I sought for a single verse forbidding a Muslim to integrate himself with a non-Muslim nation. I did not find that either.”^52 Fehat and others wanted to be as equal a part of the colonial society as the residents of French descent. Many of them had fought for the French in the First World War and truly empathized with the spirit of the French republic. To allow these men this level of acceptance would have greatly upset the colony, which depended on a social stratification reinforced by discourses of primitivism. French Algerians were all but unilaterally opposed to this threat to their powerbase^53 which challenged their own authority as the intellectual and political leaders of the colony. The rhetoric used in opposition to these individuals is instructive. For my part, I have observed in Algeria that a poorly digested education, qualifications often obtained through exemptions, disturb, irritate, unbalance, and, finally, embitter men so presumptuous that they end up believing that they are far superior to those whose religion they share ... 54 This French Algerian response to a generation of French speaking, acculturated Algerian Muslims is striking. The rhetoric of assimilation calls for an elevation of the indigenous population through imbuing them with French concepts of government and culture. It seeks to erase the indigenous culture and, chief among it, Islam. Again we see that Islam serves as a marker for colonialism, it is the grounds on which the colonial authority quoted by Dunwoodie bases his argument that assimilation was unsuccessful. 50 Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, 24. 51 They were instead always addressed by the informal tutoiement (you). 52 Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, 27. 53 Chief among the Young Algerians demands was to be eligible for local government positions as the French settlers were. 54 Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria, 28, emphasis added.
