France and the classical sociology of Islam, 1798-1962

The classical French sociology of Islam was shaped by the arc of French imperialism in the long nineteenth century, beginning with the French expedition to Egypt in 1798 and ending in 1962 with the independence of Algeria. While its legacy can be understood as part of the discursive machinery best described by Edwartd Said, it was also part of the history of modern French social thought. The aim of this article is to explore the complex patterns of the unfolding of the French tradition of the sociology of Islam, both in its relations to the calculus of French knowledge power as well as to metropolitan social science. The genealogy begins with the Description de l'Egypte and includes other major nineteenth-century projects that mapped the scientific and ethnographic terrain upon which French imperialism would operate, including the 37-volume Exploration scientifique de l'Algerie (1844-67), the four-volume Documents pour servir à l'étude du nord-ouest africain (1892-4), the 33-volume Archives marocaines (1904-25), Paul Marty's monographs on Islam noir, as well as numerous books and articles on Muslims in Africa and the Mediterranean. The Algerian experience was central to the development of the French sociology of Islam, shaping not only perceptions of Tunisia, Morocco and French West Africa, but also even Syria and Lebanon. In the 1890s the Durkheim school of sociology plated a key role in linking the sociology of Islam to the larger discipline in France. After World War I, French intellectual institutions both in France and in the colonies were reshaped as a more professional but also more explicitly governmentally driven approach to research cae to the for. But the professionalization of sociology in France failed to lead to an intellectual transformation of colonial forms of knowledge. The article concludes with a question: is the sociology of Islam to be thought of primarily as a colonial science, a kind of infra-discipline heavily market by the field of power? Or is it better understood as part of French sociology? It argues that in some complicated ways, it was both.