African Islam à la Française: Religious Instruction in French Colonial Schools

Between 1850 and 1951, French colonial administrations in Algeria and West Africa organized schools called médersas. These schools offered a “Franco-Muslim” education to colonized Muslim elites. The Islamic curriculum was intended as a “lure” to attract students and designed to shape Islamic practice so that it could be more easily monitored and controlled by the colonial administration. The Islamic curriculum also varied from place to place in accordance with racial logics that separated “black Islam,” “Moorish Islam,” and “Arab Islam” into distinct categories. This paper focuses on the period between 1900 and 1920, when two médersas opened in Saint-Louis (Senegal) and Boutilimit (Mauritania). Through official correspondence and colonial academic texts, it charts how the two médersas evolved in drastically different directions and away from their common institutional ancestor in Algeria. The Islamic curriculum, in particular, was the locus of debates over the meaning of the school, both for French administrators and local Senegalese and Mauritanian populations. In the end, the médersa of Saint-Louis closed because the Franco-Muslim model was deemed inappropriate for black African Muslims, while the Boutilimit médersa thrived due to the support of local elites and colonial administrators. This paper argues that debates over the politics of religious education in colonial schools had far-reaching effects on colonial policy more broadly and on the lives of colonized Muslims in northwest Africa.