Tricolored Veils and Republican Imams: Presenting Islam as Modern (and Truly French) during the Algerian War

Todd Shepard examines aggressive French efforts to “integrate” so-called Muslims from Algeria into the Republic during the Algerian War (1954-62). More specifically, he focuses on how French officials and planners analyzed and embraced the Islamic religion and the measures they instituted to this end in both the Algerian and metropolitan (European) departments of France. In general, French officials used the category “Muslim from Algeria” as a racial category and took Islam-as-religion into account only to explain either Algerian “irrationality” in Algeria or to interpret putatively religious acts by Algerians in the metropole as indicating nationalist sentiments. Shepard examines efforts to establish a new state-sponsored institution for Islamic study and training in Paris and French reforms that extended civil marriage to “Muslims” in Algeria and increased women's rights. He first focuses on plans and efforts made to establish a French Islamic Institute in Paris, which would train clerics and theologians and, it was hoped, compete with Cairo for leadership among religious Muslims. Second, he focuses at once on official explanations that highlighted Muslim religious teachings/theologians/imams' support for marriage reforms and how images of veiled women getting married in civil ceremonies in Algerian town halls were used in the French and international press to demonstrate French-Muslim entente. French explanations presented these statements and images as indicative of “true” Islam's embrace of women's equality and its capacity to participate in the French secular state. These two instances of French “reform” challenge analyses of other historians of the period. And because these religiously-premised reforms also were marginal to more-widely discussed policies that relied on racialized definitions of “Muslims” they also speak directly to current claims that discussions of the Islamic religion in Europe are wholly distinct from racial questions or racism.