Sacred rivals : Catholic missions and the making of Islam in nineteenth-century France and Algeria /
Joseph W. Peterson
- Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2022
- (XI-284 p.)
Bibliogr. p. 255-278
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.