Image of Sacred rivals : Catholic missions and the making of Islam in nineteenth-century France and Algeria

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Sacred rivals : Catholic missions and the making of Islam in nineteenth-century France and Algeria

In  , Abbé Jacques Suchet arrived in the Algerian city of Constantine, an important North African crossroads and citadel dating back to the days of the Roman Empire. The city, perched on a rock and surrounded by cliffs on three sides, had been conquered with much bloodshed only two years before, in colo-nial France’s first successful foray into the Algerian interior. Suchet had been sent to Constantine by the bishop of Algiers to minister to the new French pop-ulation there, which comprised mainly soldiers. But the abbé could not help but turn his thoughts to the indigenous Arabs. Suchet was pleased with their Muslim religiosity, perhaps seeing them as fertile ground for missionary work. “Truly the dispositions of these good Arabs, the respect, the affection that they bear for priests and nuns astonishes us and fills us with admiration,” he wrote in letters that were published back in France. These Arabs were “true descendants of Ishmael; they have pure and completely patriarchalvalues.” Nearly forty years later, another priest—Abbé Edmond Lambert—toured the Algerian city of Oran to record ethnographic observations about the nature of “the Arab” and other Algerian races. Like Suchet, he paid lip service to the Arabs’ “respectful curiosity” and “decorum” as they stopped to observe a passing Catholic religious procession. Unlike Suchet, though, he believed that, at their core, Arabs were “liars, thieves, lazy in body and spirit,” and that even their seeming piety was not sincere but rather for external show alone

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Detail Information
Series Title
-
Call Number
266.20965 SAC p
Publisher
New York : Oxford University Press.,
Collation
xi, 304p.
Language
English
ISBN/ISSN
9780197605295
Classification
266.20965
Content Type
-
Media Type
-
Carrier Type
-
Edition
2
Subject(s)
European History
History of Religion
Colonialism & imperialism
Specific Detail Info
-
Statement of Responsibility
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