Naomi Davidson has a clear, original story to tell about an important topic, namely the passage from French colonial to post-colonial treatments of Muslims and Islam. In the idioms, understandings, and policies of governance, she finds a consistent thread, or rather two such threads, and follows them from Algerian colonization through late-twentieth-century governance of Islam.

The first such thread was a vision of Muslims as uniquely defined by their religious obligations, as unable to choose not to follow the commands of shariah, and they were seen as always and essentially different from other subjects of France. For Davidson, this view explains why it was difficult to conceive of Muslims as becoming French citizens—colonial rule in Algeria indeed made such a combination difficult. For her, the major category in French governance of Muslims and their territories has been religion, rather than race, language, nationality, or post-colonial superiority. In making this argument, Davidson demarcates her approach from those taken by other historians who emphasize racial boundaries in their analyses of colonial policies.

The second thread to her narrative regards the imputed embodiment of Islam. For French authorities, she writes, Islam was most importantly and essentially about Muslims' bodies, as they ate certain foods or fasted, as they prepared for prayer and prostrated themselves before God, and as they dressed. Particularly compelling is her account of the importance French authorities attached to providing the right foods, in the right quantities, for the two major Islamic feast days, even in the midst of general Parisian penury during and after the Second World War.

These two premises stood in contradiction to the dream of an Islam français that would be compatible with French civilization. This idea lay behind the erection of the Great Paris Mosque in the 1920s, intended to be both a monument to the Muslims who had fought for France and an anchor, in the intellectual Left Bank, of that vision of Islam. Much as contrary plans for assimilation and “associationism” animated colonial debates on Algerians' future, so too these two contrary ideas of what Islam could become prevented any smooth policy trajectory in Paris or elsewhere.

The Paris Mosque serves as the emblem and narrative pivot of Davidson's fine book. She chronicles the plans and the intrigues surrounding it from the 1920s to the present, when it sits as a relatively bland and banal object of curiosity to visitors. Its architecture links French policies to images of preferred Islamic visibilities, drawing from the built forms and the imagined religious sensibilities of Morocco. This momentary imagining presents a sharp contrast to the postwar identification of Islam with Algerians during and after the period of the Algerian War (1954–1962), and to current projects on “Islamic cultures.” This well-written account successfully links space, place, and administrative policies to the broad sweep of twentieth-century French history.