Overview

In 1839, the Abbé Jacques Suchet was sent to the Algerian city of Constantine, recently conquered by French forces, to minister to the new French colonial population there. He commented favorably on the Arabs' Muslim religiosity, perhaps seeing them as fertile ground for missionary work. In the mid-1870s, when the Abbé Edmond Lambert toured another colonial Algerian city, he recorded that Arabs were inherently ""liars, thieves, lazy in body and spirit"" and that even their seeming piety was insincere. In the space of less than forty years, some French Catholics went from viewing Muslims in Algeria as fellow religious devotees, potential converts, and allies against French secularism to viewing them as enemies of civilization. Sacred Rivals focuses on French Catholic ideas about Islam and Arab-ness-""Catholic orientalism""-in the context of religious culture wars in France and of missionary work in colonial Algeria. It examines the way the stereotype of ""Islam"" was used and abused in religious and political debates in French society, as well as actual missionary encounters with Muslims in Algeria, where missionaries and their potential converts came into intimate, daily contact. It reveals that, counter-intuitively, it was sometimes the most conservative Catholics who spoke most sympathetically of Muslim religiosity. ""Liberal,"" mainstream Catholics were often quicker to denigrate Islam as backward, fanatical, and dangerously theocratic. As Catholics increasingly came to identify with France's more secular ""civilizing mission,"" any admiration for Islam would be eclipsed by a more racialized, colonialist view of Islam. Disillusioned with the possibility of Muslim conversion and seeking an explanation for their failure, even missionaries in Algeria joined in with racially-coded attacks on ""Arab"" Islam. Through stories of personal encounters, Sacred Rivals exposes the ways in which religious prejudices against Muslims transformed into racial ones, as well as the ways in which Algerian Muslims adapted, used, and resisted French culture and imperialism.

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In this engaging and insightful study, Joseph Peterson explores the myriad ways in which Catholic missionary experiences animated debates about race, civilization, and imperial ideology in nineteenth-century French Algeria. What emerges is a rich and troubling story of how lasting perceptions of Muslims and 'the Arab' were wrought in the fires of religious and political competition. Sacred Rivals is an essential book for anyone interested in the intellectual, social, and cultural history of modern empire. * J.P. Daughton, Stanford University * Sacred Rivals renews our understanding of the Catholic-Muslim encounters during the colonization of Algeria by France in the nineteenth century. Drawing from Catholic discourses on Islam and missionary practices on the ground, Joseph W. Peterson analyzes brilliantly the shift from the admiration, by conservative Catholics, for the devout piety of Algerian Muslims to a condemnation of Islam as fanatical and inconvertible by liberal Catholics. These new exclusionary discourses and practices fed religious orientalism, the formation of modern stereotypes of Muslims as the enemies of civilization, and, above all, the racialization of Islam. This wonderful book provides us with an important genealogy of modern Islamophobia while suggesting that Catholicism had also produced earlier resources for the toleration of Islam. * Emmanuelle Saada, Columbia University * This deeply researched and carefully argued book offers new insight into how a specifically 'Catholic Orientalism,' alongside and in tension with a secular state 'civilizing mission,' shaped the ideology and practice of colonial government in nineteenth-century French Algeria. Peterson reveals the surprising ways in which internal contests between conservative and liberal Catholics shaped attitudes towards missionary work, shifting over the course of the nineteenth century from an ambivalent philo-Islamism to an increasingly hostile, racialized view of Muslim fanaticism and the perceived menace of 'pan-Islamism.' It will be of great interest to scholars of religion, race, and colonialism in the French Empire and beyond it. * Judith Surkis, Rutgers University * Weaving its argument seamlessly from the stories of colonizers and colonized in Algeria, Sacred Rivals shows how religion served to articulate and extend French imperial domination, and how colonial occupation offered resurgent Catholicism a field of action it had lost in France. Peterson argues convincingly that conservative Catholics viewed Islam more 'positively' as a model of unified religiosity France had lost; yet failing to find more than a handful of converts, they rationalized their disappointment with increasingly bitter racial and cultural generalizations about Arabs and Muslims. This is a 'social history of ideas' that will be read eagerly by scholars of French empire and the church, and more broadly by readers interested in the roots of French Islamophobia. * Ian Coller, University of California, Irvine *

In this engaging and insightful study, Joseph Peterson explores the myriad ways in which Catholic missionary experiences animated debates about race, civilization, and imperial ideology in nineteenth-century French Algeria. What emerges is a rich and troubling story of how lasting perceptions of Muslims and 'the Arab' were wrought in the fires of religious and political competition. Sacred Rivals is an essential book for anyone interested in the intellectual, social, and cultural history of modern empire. * J.P. Daughton, Stanford University * Sacred Rivals renews our understanding of the Catholic-Muslim encounters during the colonization of Algeria by France in the nineteenth century. Drawing from Catholic discourses on Islam and missionary practices on the ground, Joseph W. Peterson analyzes brilliantly the shift from the admiration, by conservative Catholics, for the devout piety of Algerian Muslims to a condemnation of Islam as fanatical and inconvertible by liberal Catholics. These new exclusionary discourses and practices fed religious orientalism, the formation of modern stereotypes of Muslims as the enemies of civilization, and, above all, the racialization of Islam. This wonderful book provides us with an important genealogy of modern Islamophobia while suggesting that Catholicism had also produced earlier resources for the toleration of Islam. * Emmanuelle Saada, Columbia University * This deeply researched and carefully argued book offers new insight into how a specifically 'Catholic Orientalism,' alongside and in tension with a secular state 'civilizing mission,' shaped the ideology and practice of colonial government in nineteenth-century French Algeria. Peterson reveals the surprising ways in which internal contests between conservative and liberal Catholics shaped attitudes towards missionary work, shifting over the course of the nineteenth century from an ambivalent philo-Islamism to an increasingly hostile, racialized view of Muslim fanaticism and the perceived menace of 'pan-Islamism.' It will be of great interest to scholars of religion, race, and colonialism in the French Empire and beyond it. * Judith Surkis, Rutgers University * Weaving its argument seamlessly from the stories of colonizers and colonized in Algeria, Sacred Rivals shows how religion served to articulate and extend French imperial domination, and how colonial occupation offered resurgent Catholicism a field of action it had lost in France. Peterson argues convincingly that conservative Catholics viewed Islam more 'positively' as a model of unified religiosity France had lost; yet failing to find more than a handful of converts, they rationalized their disappointment with increasingly bitter racial and cultural generalizations about Arabs and Muslims. This is a 'social history of ideas' that will be read eagerly by scholars of French empire and the church, and more broadly by readers interested in the roots of French Islamophobia. * Ian Coller, University of California, Irvine *

In this engaging and insightful study, Joseph Peterson explores the myriad ways in which Catholic missionary experiences animated debates about race, civilization, and imperial ideology in nineteenth-century French Algeria. What emerges is a rich and troubling story of how lasting perceptions of Muslims and 'the Arab' were wrought in the fires of religious and political competition. Sacred Rivals is an essential book for anyone interested in the intellectual, social, and cultural history of modern empire. * J.P. Daughton, Stanford University * Sacred Rivals renews our understanding of the Catholic-Muslim encounters during the colonization of Algeria by France in the nineteenth century. Drawing from Catholic discourses on Islam and missionary practices on the ground, Joseph W. Peterson analyzes brilliantly the shift from the admiration, by conservative Catholics, for the devout piety of Algerian Muslims to a condemnation of Islam as fanatical and inconvertible by liberal Catholics. These new exclusionary discourses and practices fed religious orientalism, the formation of modern stereotypes of Muslims as the enemies of civilization, and, above all, the racialization of Islam. This wonderful book provides us with an important genealogy of modern Islamophobia while suggesting that Catholicism had also produced earlier resources for the toleration of Islam. * Emmanuelle Saada, Columbia University * This deeply researched and carefully argued book offers new insight into how a specifically 'Catholic Orientalism,' alongside and in tension with a secular state 'civilizing mission,' shaped the ideology and practice of colonial government in nineteenth-century French Algeria. Peterson reveals the surprising ways in which internal contests between conservative and liberal Catholics shaped attitudes towards missionary work, shifting over the course of the nineteenth century from an ambivalent philo-Islamism to an increasingly hostile, racialized view of Muslim fanaticism and the perceived menace of 'pan-Islamism.' It will be of great interest to scholars of religion, race, and colonialism in the French Empire and beyond it. * Judith Surkis, Rutgers University * Weaving its argument seamlessly from the stories of colonizers and colonized in Algeria, Sacred Rivals shows how religion served to articulate and extend French imperial domination, and how colonial occupation offered resurgent Catholicism a field of action it had lost in France. Peterson argues convincingly that conservative Catholics viewed Islam more 'positively' as a model of unified religiosity France had lost; yet failing to find more than a handful of converts, they rationalized their disappointment with increasingly bitter racial and cultural generalizations about Arabs and Muslims. This is a 'social history of ideas' that will be read eagerly by scholars of French empire and the church, and more broadly by readers interested in the roots of French Islamophobia. * Ian Coller, University of California, Irvine *

Author Information

Joseph W. Peterson is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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