2024 Theses Doctoral

Colonizing Islam: Imaginaries of Religion and Sovereignty in North Africa

Touilila, Fatima-Ezzahrae

At the beginning of the 20th century, in the midst of fears of anti-colonial Muslim uprisings fomented by the Ottoman Sultan, a network of French colonialists, diplomats, and scholars argued that France should colonize North Africa through Islam and not against it. They contended that, since expanding its dominion over large populations of Muslims, France had become “a Muslim Empire” and should govern as such.

This dissertation studies what it meant for France to attempt to rule as a Muslim power through colonial expansions and crises from the 1900s to the 1920s. It reads this colonial rhetoric and practice against the grain of a wide array of North Africans’ writings, ranging from Islamic jurisprudence manuscripts, newspapers, memoirs, and private letters that reflected the multiple dimensions of anti-colonial struggles: from dreams to re-unify North Africa under the Ottoman Empire to trans-colonial Muslim solidarities from Morocco to India. By so doing, it attempts to place marginalized North African voices at the center of discourses on colonial subjecthood, race, and Islamic belonging.