In an article published posthumously, in the Revue de la Méditerranée in 1951, Augustin Berque, the intellectually accomplished but professionally somewhat unrecognized former Director of Native Affairs at the Government-General of Algeria, examined difficulties in the public management of religious affairs, and the failures of policy toward successive, competing spokesmen for Islam in France's colonial possessions.Footnote ¹ In concluding his assessment of this thorny question, Berque addressed his reader as in an imaginary dialogue: “And so? Oh, I quite agree with you! The one great remedy is our laïcité, which would leave to the Faith its secret oratory, intimate and inviolable. But [what are we to do] in the meantime?”Footnote ² There remained at the time a tenacious assumption that the empire, at least in Africa, might still endure into the unforeseeable future and that institution of a rational, public secularism as a lasting benefit of France's rayonnement civilisationnel could still be anticipated as an ultimate goal. But, of course, “the meantime” was in fact all the time that Berque and his colleagues had, and it was running out much faster than they imagined. That as late as 1951 the well-informed, scholarly, and policymaking readers of the Revue could still be expected to imagine the relationship between imperial and Islamic authority in these terms suggests an extraordinary capacity for self-delusion, or a remarkable intractability in the terms of a debate that had been near the top of the colonial policy agenda for almost half a century.

Scholars of French imperialism have long been attentive to such intractability—the constant equivocation between restated republican principles and their “temporary” subversion by the requirements of rule “in the meantime,” the permanent deferral of declared aims, and the resulting “betrayal” of France's imagined “civilizing mission” by the actual form of its domination. In the arena of religion and secularism, however, as in other spheres, this antinomy is perhaps less “the real story” in itself than something of a distraction, indicative only of the inertia of colonial discourse and telling us little about the dynamics of colonial societies. The prolific textual production of the colonial state and its theoreticians is obviously important. But it has sometimes been mistaken for something that it is not—the history of colonialism itself—rather than for what it more precisely is: part of a larger and in many respects, over a long period, static, internal debate about French self-conceptions. This debate was constantly recycled within the circles of opinion and policy making, in official pronouncements, newspapers, parliamentary speeches, and academic congresses, but it remained, on the whole, only tangentially related to the facts of social life among, or the actual practices of governance over, the populations of the empire. If such debates—over “assimilation” or “association,” citizenship and exclusion, education and “backwardness,” secularism and religion—can be understood as having shaped the history of colonial policy, the everyday life of colonialism was often played out on quite another level, one where things were much less clear cut.Footnote ³ There, the question of the colonial management of religion by the secular state was no theoretical debate over republican principles and the exigencies of imperial rule. Instead, it was a bitterly contested, local social struggle over cultural authority, physical public space, and the material resources that went with them. The ways in which this struggle is still being played out in the public space of contemporary France suggests the degree of abstraction from actual social life with which official discourse has continued to address the question since it was first posed in the imperial capital and its colonies.Footnote ⁴

This paper, then, addresses a particular problem of more general significance in the history of colonial Algeria, the French empire, and the relationships between state and religion in imperial contexts. Several studies have addressed the political significance of Islam (or of a cultural politics organized around the articulation of a “true” Islam) in Algeria, focusing on its role in anti-colonial resistance, nationalism, and oppositional politics after independence.Footnote ⁵ The protagonists in these studies have been primarily leaders of Sufi turuq, millenarian mahdis, and reformist ‘ulama.Footnote ⁶ Rather less attention has been paid to the broader religious field, and the intermediate actors of the “official clerisy,” the establishment figures who “collaborated” with the colonial state, particularly in the period I consider here.Footnote ⁷ What most exercised Berque was their loss of credibility—the loss of their “traditions of knowledge, of dignity, of prudent and enlightened exegesis” that had remained lively in the early 1900s, and their reduction thereafter to the role of police spies and electoral agents, thus enabling the emergence of an oppositional movement of anti-establishment, nationalist ‘ulama.Footnote ⁸ Positions of religious authority, whether as platforms for community leadership and solidarity or as positions of self-promotion and preferment, obviously involved bidding for material and symbolic resources controlled by the colonial state. At the same time, they required an ability to assert a certain autonomy relative to the state, a position as its interlocutor among a subject population and as a necessary spokesperson for, and provider of resources to, a certain constituency (at least) among that population. This balancing act was obviously difficult, and as the various collaborative bargains that kept the colonial system working became increasingly tenuous, such intermediate positions became more difficult to maintain. Ultimately, of course, in the case of Algeria, they became fatally compromising.

But this does not mean that they are uninteresting, simply part of “the shabby history of collaboration” that a more heroic history of resistance would gloriously sweep away. Quite the contrary: the story of how these positions were carved out, maintained, demeaned, and de-legitimized, to be replaced by other forms of cultural authority and domination, is a significant part of the history of the construction, reproduction, and ultimate demise (or appropriation) of the colonial state, and of the nature of its relationship to the people whom it constantly sought to dominate. The overarching story of colonial policy-making (and its failures), the growth of nationalism (and its certain victory), or the ideological dichotomy of collaborators and resisters, are inadequate lenses for scrutinizing how this process really developed in the fine details of local power struggles within colonial society.

One way of getting closer to these details is to consider the arena and the actors of imperial France's religious affairs as engaging in a contested jurisdictional politics, a field that Lauren Benton defines as having “merged cultural discourse about difference and conflicts over the location and scope of colonial political authority.”Footnote ⁹ As Benton also usefully points out, “The construction of the colonial state proceeded haltingly and in response to [among other things] myriad conflicts over the definitions of difference, property, and moral authority.” Benton's work on comparative colonial legal history has contributed to a growing appreciation of how “indigenous litigants” in colonial courts, but also other actors and intermediaries of various kinds, were able to exploit the opportunities offered them by colonial legal and administrative systems and their limitations. This has become especially clear in scholarship on India and Africa, and is also suggested by work on the French mandate state in Syria and Lebanon, and the protectorate regime in Tunisia.Footnote ¹⁰ This salutary shift of focus has led to reconsideration of the nature of the colonial state in these contexts, of its degree of coherence, and the nature of its power.Footnote ¹¹ As Benton puts it, “The colonial state became a state not by imposition but through a series of conflicts over the nature and relation of its subjects.”Footnote ¹² This formulation perhaps requires qualification. Account must be taken of the fragility and fissures built into the colonial state, and the playing out of local contests through which it took shape, without underestimating either the extent of its capacity for coercive force or the often dramatic consequences of its imposition. Indeed, the untrammeled exercise of overt violence by the colonial state and its auxiliaries, so prominent in Algerian history, reached its pitch when the state's fissures and fragility were at their most pronounced, rather than when it was most confident.Footnote ¹³ In other words, without underestimating the extent or severity of their impact, or the lengths to which their proponents were prepared to go to impose them, we ought not to credit imperial projects with greater rationality and coherence than they actually possessed. In the case of the secular French republic and its struggles to govern the Islamic dimension of its empire, the gap between the state's projected self-image of a seamless, rational coherence and the uneven, contested terrains on which the practices of governance were actually fought out is particularly visible and striking.

Much of the existing historiography gives one of three conventional narratives about the relationship between the French empire and Islam. The first is the nationalist narrative of a consistent cultural oppression—the “depersonalizing project” of anti-Muslim, “crusading” France which supposedly aimed deliberately to alienate North Africans from Islam and make them (or at least Algerians and some upwardly mobile Tunisians) into secular or Christian Frenchmen. A second, more nuanced view sees the colonial state as engaging in a calculated exploitation of religious authorities for the maintenance of order. At best, a deliberately cultivated “French Islam” (notably in West AfricaFootnote ¹⁴) would benefit from a “benevolent neutrality” as a relatively autonomous but nonetheless co-opted instrument of imperialism, or at least it would be able to maintain a decaying spiritual patrimony in its surviving institutions, whose leaders concluded pacts for “cultural survival”Footnote ¹⁵ with a power they could no longer resist. A third narrative sees the state as having had as little as possible to do with Islam, preferring for the most part to stay out of the “intimate” life of its subjects and leaving the management of religious matters to a minimal level of bureaucracy whose primary qualification was to be as inexpensive as possible. The results might include the withdrawal of religious consciousness into what Augustin Berque (and his son after him) called “Islam refuge”Footnote ¹⁶—religion as a sacred, inviolable space of escape and empowerment that colonial power could not penetrate and from which an assertion of cultural selfhood, and ultimately of political independence, would emerge. Alternative to or alongside this is the notion that the state's attitude amounted to murder by neglect—the confiscation of habus (religious endowment) properties, and shoestring budgets for religious courts and personnel indicated a deliberate policy of starving the religious infrastructure in the hope that it would in time simply disappear.

Each of these depictions contains elements of truth, and each is justified by aspects of imperial rhetoric or particular events. But approaching the question in their terms supposes a greater effectiveness, a more consistently realized intentionality of imperial agency, than actually existed. For whatever the intentions of imperial policy (themselves often internally incoherent), they constantly came up against the irrepressible and often uncontrollable social life and political strategizing of the people they were trying to control. In fact, the very logics of domination which various institutions of the state were attempting to work out and apply in what they intended should be a coherent enterprise of imperial practice ended up involving the state, in both the metropole and the colony, in the actual production of an ungovernable series of religious, social, and political spaces. Such spaces were occupied and used as platforms by different groups and constituencies among the subjects of the empire's jurisdiction. Through them, those subjects themselves produced their own jurisdictional politics, creating spaces for playing out their own social struggles for recognition and authority, not simply against a monolithic apparatus of colonial oppression, but through the cracks and inconsistencies that ran through the whole edifice of the imperial project.

According to Augustin Berque, “Islamic policy” as an instrument of control had been clumsy and inept, and public secularism could still, eventually, be “the great remedy.” When Jacques Berque came to analyze the unfolding and consequences of colonialism in North Africa, Islam appeared to him as having been a “refuge” of inviolability out of which militant self-assertion had eventually emerged. But what had actually been going on “in the meantime?” How had the secular republican state's attempts to control and dominate Muslims actually dealt with the Muslim space of the empire in the first half of the twentieth century? A useful illustration of what happened is the way in which the often contradictory principles and priorities of imperial policy-making intersected with the actual dynamics of social life and struggle in the empire's two “capital” cities, Paris and Algiers, between the institution of public secularism as a principle of republican government in 1905 and the escalation of the Algerian war of independence in 1957. In Algiers, Algerians found a new space in which to establish and exercise their own jurisdictional politics because of the particular circumstances set up by the framework of imperial law and the institutions of colonial government. In Paris, they did so despite them. In both cases, what occurred at the intersection of the practices of the secular state with the spaces of Islamic authority was a breakdown of the would-be coherent and rational machine of imperial domination. This was caused in part by the internal incoherence of the state apparatus itself, but more importantly by the irrepressible activities and opinion of its Muslim subjects, who constantly escaped from the constraints within which imperial power sought to confine them. It is especially significant that this happened in both colony and metropole, and under diametrically opposed “Islamic policies.” In Algiers, “la France laïque,” the principled secular Republic, tried to distance itself from the direct management of religious affairs by devolving responsibility to properly constituted Muslim authorities while retaining a discreet level of oversight. In Paris, in the expedient guise of “la France islamique,” an imperial “Muslim power,” the same state invested overtly in the spaces and signs of Islam, attempting both to concentrate responsibility for its Muslim subjects in its own hands and to exercise a very visible authority over both their physical persons and their cultural identity.

Most importantly, in neither case is this story a dualistic political history of the colonial state versus its colonized subjects. It is, rather, a multi-vocal, many-sided social history internal to colonial society, both in the colony and in the metropole. This is a history of conflicts over authority and patronage fought out between elite factions clinging to a vanishing prestige or trying to establish a new ideological hegemony, and a newly assertive, emerging public of shopkeepers, artisans, and workers who increasingly found the means of their own subjectivation in the spaces of colonial jurisdictional politics.

FRANCE'S SACRED SPACE: THE ASSOCIATIONS CULTUELLES AND THE SECULAR REPUBLIC IN ALGIERS

It has often been assumed that in Algeria the relationship of government to Islam after the passage of the 1905 law on the separation of religious institutions from the stateFootnote ¹⁷ was straightforward: religious forces (notably the leading Sufi turuq) were instrumentalized where they could be made to accommodate the system, and suppressed and replaced by a supine and unqualified “official clerisy” where they could not. The law on separation itself, voided of its substance by the 1907 decree by which it was brought into force in Algeria, “is considered to have remained a dead letter” in the colony.Footnote ¹⁸ The reality was more complicated. According to Allan Christelow, the truncated application of the law on separation produced “the central contradiction in French Islamic policy from 1907 to the revolution [of 1954]. The colonial administration was obliged by law to create the forms of religious independence, and to tolerate manifestations of it when they arose spontaneously; yet at the same time, it sought to keep the content, that is to say the men and the ideas involved, under administrative reins.”Footnote ¹⁹

What this account does not tell us is the actual results of the juxtaposition of the partial application of official secularism with local administrators' attempts to maintain control of the religious field, and the existence of “forms of religious independence.” The law of 9 December 1905 stipulated (following an amendment put down by Albin Rozet, the deputy for Haute-Marne) in article 43: “The conditions of the application of the present law to Algeria and the colonies shall be determined by measures of the public administration (des règlements d'administration publique).” This was a more flexible disposition than had been requested by deputies from the “old colonies” of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guyane, who had proposed the straightforward application of the law to the Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands. A similar amendment offered by Alcide Treille, senator from Constantine, was withdrawn for procedural reasons.Footnote ²⁰ The concern, of course, was that withdrawal of state financing for religious personnel and institutions, as stipulated in the law's central article 2,Footnote ²¹ would amount to a dangerous loss of control over the public space of religion in the empire's Muslim territories. Accordingly, the decree of 27 September 1907, which enacted the application of the 1905 law in Algeria, added a qualification to article 2, whereby, “The Governor-General may, in the public and national interest, accord temporary stipends to ministers designated by him and who shall exercise public acts of religion in conformity with the law.” “In no case” were such stipends to be maintained “beyond a period of ten years reckoned from the date of publication of the present decree.” Despite this sunset clause, the 1907 decree was repeatedly renewed, first for five years on 19 September 1917, and then for three successive ten-year periods, on 31 August 1922, 25 September 1932, and 19 May 1941.

Thus far, the story is what one might expect: metropolitan legislation is adapted to the needs of social control in the colonial territory by the application of “exceptional” dispositions of administrative exigency, introduced as “interim” measures “in the public and national interest,” which are then prorogued as necessary ad infinitum. But this does not mean, as has generally been supposed, that the application of separation had no significant consequences. There was, after all, a certain kind of truth to the slogan that Algeria was France (even though, of course, it was also not-France). After the law on separation, the Government-General and its subordinate services were no longer entitled simply to nominate candidates to officially remunerated posts in the Islamic infrastructure. Nor could the government any longer be directly responsible for the maintenance or expansion of that physical infrastructure.Footnote ²² Aristide Briand, who had been rapporteur for the 1905 law's passage through parliament, insisted as justice minister in 1909, against the pleas of Governor-General Charles Jonnart, that the colonial administration could not be authorized to nominate religious officials.Footnote ²³ When in 1924 the assertive Governor-General Théodore Steeg tried to reassert formal, direct control over the personnel of mosques, he was unceremoniously slapped down by his superior, Interior Minister Jacques Maunoury. A professional lawyer, Maunoury asserted in a very sharp note to Steeg that such an action would “contravene the very principle of separation,” and that this was out of the question.Footnote ²⁴

In fact, an informal and more or less disguised system of government nomination and oversight of the religious establishment, through “consultative councils” run from the departmental Prefectures, remained in place in much of Algeria until the mid-1940s, most notably in the eastern department of Constantine. But local notables took advantage of the devolution offered to them by the principle of separation in the city and department of Algiers, in four other towns in the west of the country (Mascara, Mostaghanem, Sidi Bel Abbès, and Tiaret), and eventually elsewhere. Following the provisions of the 1907 decree,Footnote ²⁵ they formed religious associations (associations cultuelles) for the management of Islamic religious affairs.

The “Islamic Religious Association of the City and Department of Algiers” (Association cultuelle de la ville et du département d'Alger, al-jam‘iya ‘l-diniyya ’l-islamiyya li-madinat al-Jaza'ir wa ‘amalatiha) was constituted on 6 August 1908, and on 1 February 1910 it was granted legal stewardship of all mosque buildings and saints’ shrines, their contents, furniture, and libraries.Footnote ²⁶ In line with article 2 of the 1905 law, the Association was supposed to constitute its own funds through public subscription for the upkeep of the physical infrastructure whose steward it became.Footnote ²⁷ But it would never have any substantial financial resources of its own. In October 1913 a report to the governor-general noted that it was “without any financial means and is supported on the budget of the colony.”Footnote ²⁸ In June 1920, the Association's president, Muhammad Ben Siam, noting the poor state of repair of most buildings in its care, pleaded for funds from the Directorate of Native Affairs, whose reply referred back to the 1907 decree and pleaded in turn insufficient government resources, and the responsibility of the Association for its own finances.Footnote ²⁹ Evidently, the Association never fulfilled its stated function of keeping up the mosques and the self-sufficient, community management of religious spaces. So what was it for?

The Association's founders were well aware that it could be difficult to raise public subscriptions for the building and maintenance of religious infrastructure. Ben Siam had in 1904 been obliged to abandon his own project for a mosque at Hussein Dey, the district of Algiers in which he was a major landowner. Still, such subscriptions had been collected as exercises in collective community solidarity, in association with the state, in the 1890s, and many would be collected again in the 1930s for the building of “free” mosques and schools organized by the anti-establishment reformists. It seems reasonable to suspect, therefore, that the reason none were collected under the cultuelle was that the Association had never intended to raise them. It remained, as its leaders presumably intended, dependent on the colony's budget, and indeed the Association became a means to redistribute resources that could be squeezed out of the administration by men who could gain a place on the its committee. Little was provided for mosque building or maintenance, or for the new positions that were regularly requested, as imams, hazzabs, mu'zzins, or wakils (prayer-leaders, Qu'ran-readers, criers of the call to prayer, and custodians). But the Association did provide stipends for the leading officials and for those they could nominate to fill vacancies in existing posts in the religious establishment.

For the administration, the creation of the cultuelles was an attempt to respect the letter of the law while retaining effective control. The various associations it established were supposed to manage the day-to-day religious business of the Muslim community and to nominate their own candidates for positions of responsibility. Candidates were subject to approval by the administration, which could exercise a veto as it saw fit.Footnote ³⁰ But for Algerians, or at least the notables of certain towns, the cultuelle was to become a space of relative autonomy for the management of their own religious affairs. More precisely, it became a means to (re-)construct their symbolic social authority and their actual material influence in the community through redistribution of the resources, however meager, to which each association gained access.

That the possibilities opened up by the creation of such a space were thought worth pursuing is indicated by the competition to create cultuelles. Six different associations initially emerged in 1908 in the département of Algiers, one in each of the middle-sized towns of Aumale, Médéa, Miliana, and Tenès, and two in Algiers itself. One of those in Algiers was the spontaneous creation of “a certain number of Muslims … known for their hostility towards the administration.”Footnote ³¹ From the outset, then, the application of separation threatened to get out of hand, and the Prefecture acted quickly to install its “own” cultuelle, constituted from reliable figures from the establishment notability, which claimed and was granted authority over the whole département. But this does not at all mean that the administration had things all its own way thereafter.

The notables who generally monopolized the Algiers Association's leadership, from its creation in 1908 through to the 1930s and beyond, were not simple beni oui-oui (“yes-men”), administration stooges lacking caliber or interests of their own. Many held positions in the civil administration or elected offices: the bash-agha Bashir Boumediene was deputy (adjoint) to the mayor of Algiers; Mustafa Ould Aissa was municipal councilor for Algiers; Mahieddine Zerrouk, a former member of the Algiers Conseil général; Muhammad Sebaoui, a sitting conseiller général; Ferhat Belkacem, a member of the Conseil supérieur du gouvernement; and Ahmad Si Salah was president of the Kabyle section of the Délégations financières, the colonial assembly responsible for allocating the Algerian budget. It is clear that all of these men had a considerable stake in the distributive possibilities of placing supporters in influential religious positions. From 1919 onwards, when a mass Algerian electorate came into being for the first time, such patronage opportunities took on an added significance.Footnote ³² There were also Islamic scholars and dignitaries of independent standing in the Association: Abu'l-Qasim Hafnawi, the Maliki mufti of Algiers, was a recognized man of learning, as had been his predecessors Muhammad Said Ibnou Zekri and Muhammad Ben Zekkur.Footnote ³³ According to one report, confrontations over the rival cultuelles in Algiers were calmed in 1908 only due to Ibnou Zekri's considerable standing among his coreligionists.Footnote ³⁴ Ahmad Bu Qandura, the Hanafi mufti since 1894 and a prominent figure among Algiers’ urban notability, succeeded his father in office and opposed Algerians' conscription into the French army in 1911.Footnote ³⁵ Ali Sharif Zahhar, an aged grandee named by the Prefecture as the Association's first president, was a retired captain of cavalry in the colonial army, but also heir to an immensely distinguished family of Ottoman Algiers: a descendant of a sixteenth-century saint and the youngest son of the last naqib al-ashraf (syndic of the descendants of the Prophet) of the city before the French conquest. The French had captured him as a child when in 1843 they overran the emir Abd al-Qadir's smala (itinerant capital) at the high point of the emir's war against the conquest. Ali Sharif Zahhar subsequently became an eminent representative of the “rallied” aristocracy under the Second Empire.Footnote ³⁶ Muhammad Ben Siam, whose son Ahmed succeeded him as president of the cultuelle, was a member of the Délégations financières. But he maintained through his seat in the colonial assembly his position as descendant of a distinguished family of ‘ulama that, established for centuries among the patriciate of Miliana, west of Algiers, had been regional government officials for the Ottomans before rallying to the French. All of these men invested in the apparatus of the colonial state as a means of maintaining their families’ threatened social capital. They could on occasion assert their prerogatives in the face of the administration, while also channeling its rule over their compatriots.Footnote ³⁷

That the Association served as a fractious forum for personal and factional politics among this local notability is apparent in the archives: When Mahieddine Zerrouk was removed as president of the Association in April 1929 he took his successor Bashir Boumediene to court over the issue. For Ben Siam, the cultuelle was plainly a means of preserving the old élite and its privileged access to spaces of authority, sometimes literally so; when in April 1933 the administration closed down the Association after years of attempting to bring its internal factionalism under control, Ben Siam retained the keys to its records held at the Grand mosque and refused to return them for over a year.Footnote ³⁸ Similar, local factional fights were played out over the cultuelles in other towns. In the interior garrison town of Batna, a group of local landowners, merchants, and artisans created a cultuelle and founded a mosque in 1925. Nine years later Dr. Benkhellil, a politically active incomer to Batna who became a leading member of the local nadi al-islah (modernist “reform club”), tried to take over the association and its mosque, provoking a legal dispute with the existing local leadership that was still unresolved in 1942. That year, in the port city of Bône (‘Annaba), the supporters and opponents of the local conseiller général each organized their own cultuelle, before resolving their differences through mediation by regionally respected ‘ulama two years later. In 1944 in Saïda, on the steppe below the Atlas Mountains, the regularly elected president of the cultuelle complained of the “ill will” manifested towards his association by the local authorities, and “maneuvers” against it by the district bash-agha and conseiller général.Footnote ³⁹

The local notable establishment, then, were not always able to monopolize the cultuelles. It seems clear that these apparently petty skirmishes over the spoils of local associative life served as platforms for, or symbolic doubles of, real struggles for local preeminence, influence, and prestige. It is apparent from these few examples that groups identified by local administrators with existing or emerging cleavages in local society—existing local worthies opposed by incoming modernist professionals, or rival factions in local political life—tended to coalesce around competing religious associations. All of them sought to use the officially recognized cultuelle to gain access to and control over the mosque as a central symbol of community leadership.

Moreover, first in Algiers and later elsewhere, this space of influence, preferment, and access to state resources also became a necessarily public space of broader mobilization. If the notability that ran the Algiers cultuelle saw in it an intermediate and officially self-governing position between the local population and the imperial state, this was not simply a resurrection of an older kind of “notable” politics. Even before the advent of formal mass politics in the period after 1919,Footnote ⁴⁰ Algiers in the 1910s was a place where local support could be created and mobilized around the symbolic themes of the defense and promotion of religious authority, as well as around the material resources of access and preferment. The factional politics that soon came to dominate the committee led its members to build popular constituencies, and membership ballooned until it was beyond the control of the notables who had once considered the Association their own preserve and provider. This was possible because membership in the Association was technically open to anyone who wanted to join and could pay the subscription, because its committee had to be elected (if only infrequently), and because its distributive function provided a means of electioneering. By the late 1920s, this had created a public, effectively political space that neither the administration nor the notables could control. Whereas the Association's leaders had sought to preserve it as a space of their own authority, in which they could influence a pliable popular constituency, they instead found themselves facing an unmanageable public opinion. Indeed, Algerian public opinion was born in this period precisely within such newly emerging spaces of mobilization and sociability as the cultuelles provided, and this new public would not tolerate mismanagement of community interests by the old elites.Footnote ⁴¹

Beyond notable factionalism, then, the cultuelle also had the potential to be, and at least in Algiers did become, a matter of larger public interest. Already by 20 January 1914, Algiers' cultuelle could produce a list of 3,738 members, beginning with the département's religious functionaries but also including landowners, wholesalers, madrasa teachers, stonemasons, journeymen, manual laborers, shop and office employees, milk sellers, café owners, vegetable sellers, bakers, fishmongers, ironmongers, grocers, tailors, café waiters, jewelers, students at Islamic schools, porters, hot food sellers, and gas depot foremen. The Association was evidently perceived as a public forum concerned with issues of community interest in which ordinary people demanded to be represented. At the Association's General Assembly in February 1926, when a faction of the notable leadership attempted to limit membership to educated property owners, they met vociferous opposition from the floor by crowd of would-be members reflecting a broader cross-section of Algiers society.Footnote ⁴² Committee member Mustafa Ould Aissa reminded his colleagues in January 1931, “There can be no arguing with the fact that, wherever [in the Algiers département] they live and perform their religious duties, believers are entitled to hold us to account for the mandate that we hold, because they all have the right to belong to our Association.”Footnote ⁴³

From a devolved space of more efficient and less expensive governance, the Algiers cultuelle as a public space gradually became a headache for the colonial administration. On 25 September 1923, the government received a petition of forty-eight “notables and artisans” of Algiers: thirty shopkeepers, four café-owners, two tobacconists, three landowners, one baker, and eight without declared occupation. They demanded the governor-general intervene directly to bypass the factional politics of the Association's council. This was precisely the responsibility the administration was trying to shrug off. When Mulay Mustafa, délégué financier for Médéa, complained of abuses in elections to the Association's committee in 1928, he was advised that the Association was “a private organization, whose administration is not subject to the jurisdiction of the public authorities”; his only recourse, if the Association's own statutes were being contravened, was to pursue those responsible in the civil courts.Footnote ⁴⁴ By 1931, reports from every side suggest a mounting public dissatisfaction with the way that nominations to posts in the “official clerisy” had become means for each faction of the Algiers cultuelle to exercise patronage without reference to their colleagues, the wider community, or the aptitude of those nominated. The administration's objections that it was incompetent to interfere went unheeded. In May 1931, 250 people demonstrated in front of the Prefecture—an event almost unheard of before this period—to protest the Association's mismanagement and cronyism.Footnote ⁴⁵

The previous year Jean Mirante, director of native affairs at the Government-General, had already diagnosed the problem: the cultuelle, he wrote, had become a dysfunctional system that had fallen into public disrepute, an embarrassment, and a threat to public authority. It was a threat because the administration, as things stood, had no real control over who could be a member of the Association and hence no control over its factional infighting or the effects of this on public opinion and public order. It was embarrassing because the administration was still financing the whole affair, and was held responsible by Algerian opinion for the disrepair into which the public affairs of religion had fallen. Having wanted effective control without public responsibility, the state had ended up with no effective control but all the responsibility in the eyes of the public.Footnote ⁴⁶ By July 1931, Mirante considered that the Association was becoming “more and more a center of agitation in which each of the two opposing factions in the committee has no concern except that of manipulating the influence of religious officials to its advantage in electoral competition.”Footnote ⁴⁷ On 17 April 1933, the act of 1 February 1910 was rescinded and the Association closed down. In its place, a consultative committee of senior local religious dignitaries under the direct supervision of the Prefecture was re-established,Footnote ⁴⁸ and a system of examinations controlled by the state was announced for aspirants to religious positions, to general applause from all wings of the Algerian press. Al-Ikhlas, the mouthpiece of the Jam‘iyat al-‘ulama al-sunna, the “Association of Orthodox ‘Ulama,” a conservative, anti-reformist group tied to the establishment, approved the measure that brought to an end the Association's “negligence and incompetence,” and a “deplorable situation that had caused great harm to the people.” Al-Najah, a progressive, pro-reformist, but politically quietist and generally pro-administration newspaper printed in Constantine, congratulated the administration for ending “the criticism and misunderstandings surrounding religious affairs in Algiers.” Al-Mirsad, the more combative journal of the Jam‘iyat al-‘ulama al-muslimin al-jaza'iriyyin (Association of Algerian Muslim ‘Ulama), the reformist, politically independent movement that would eventually become important in the nationalist movement, also approved the intervention, criticizing both the administration and the Association for previous ineptitude and mismanagement.Footnote ⁴⁹ There can be little doubt that the sorry history of the cultuelle contributed to the current of opinion among more independently-minded ‘ulama, who would soon begin to insist that the principle of separation be fully applied, and that religious affairs be handed over to themselves. It seems remarkable, and has been little noticed, that during this period all the opposing shades of Islamic opinion in Algeria could express satisfaction at more direct intervention in religious affairs by the French state. This illustrates the perverse, unintended outcomes of separation, and the ways in which it allowed religion, public space, and politics to become entangled in (some) Algerians’ own manipulations of the system.

But in September 1944, as a measure of liberalism in the aftermath of Vichy and the re-establishment of “republican legality,” state control was again relinquished and the Association reconstituted. In the new circumstances of post-war promises of imperial reform, this measure was greeted as a restoration of “religious freedom” and an indication of respect for the principle of separation; since 1938, the state's increasingly authoritarian interference in religious affairs had become a bigger problem than its previous failed attempt at devolution.Footnote ⁵⁰ Ironically, but perhaps predictably, the reconvened Association was headed by the same committee that had existed at the time of its dissolution eleven years before. The same set of contradictions prevailed once more, and the re-instituted leadership of the Association played on them expertly. The year 1945 would find Ahmad Ben Siam again in charge. Maintaining the independence of his prerogatives, he insisted on the principle of the state's non-interference in the Association's decisions, while simultaneously pointing to the Association's lack of resources to keep both his line of credit to government coffers and the state's responsibility, despite itself, for the Association's upkeep.Footnote ⁵¹ He would persevere, despite the Association's waning relevance, disappearing constituency, and dying membership, until the eve of the war of independence.Footnote ⁵²

In Algiers, the partial application of the principle of separation created just enough space for local initiatives, notable factionalism, and even at times something approaching an embryonic social movement comprising Algerians from all walks of life, to proliferate beyond the control of both the administration and the notables. What was intended as a controlled devolution of religious affairs instead created an ungovernable space of local politics, one in which notables played out their struggles for influence, but which also allowed a wider constituency to mobilize to petition, demand involvement, and hold the state to account, demanding that it intervene not less but more in the religious field. The community of believers had acquired a public opinion.

ISLAM'S CIVILIZING MISSION: THE NADI AL-TAHDHIB AND THE ISLAMIC EMPIRE IN PARIS

While bureaucrats in Algiers struggled with the unforeseen consequences of the separation of religious affairs from the state, an apparently opposite development was unfolding at the heart of the empire, through programs of symbolic and material investment in France's image as a “Muslim power.” In Paris, an “official Islam” was enshrined in the city's spatial and symbolic center when, in 1926, President Gaston Doumergue, accompanied by Moulay Yusuf, the Sultan of Morocco, dignitaries of the Republic, and representatives from Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan officially inaugurated the Muslim Institute and Paris mosque on the place du Puits de l'Ermite in the fifth arrondissement.Footnote ⁵³

France's Islamic policy, elaborated in part by the special Interministerial Committee for Muslim Affairs, was a grandiose imperial project. Conceived in the propaganda campaigns of the First World War, it operated on a plane far removed from the technical legal frictions of republican secularism. It was advanced by military proconsuls and colonial grandees whose concerns for the projection of French imperial power in the Muslim world had little to do with the details of colonial micropolitics. The guiding force behind the Paris mosque, and its real founder and first rector, was Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit, an Algerian notable and scholar who had made his career in the service of French imperial diplomacy. For him, the building, the most tangible expression of France's interwar “Islamic policy,” was the manifestation of “the inspiration in the government of France of a policy of friendship towards the Muslims which has been established down the centuries.” The mosque's completion in the presence of the president of the Republic, he said, “consecrated the eternal union of France and Islam.” Marshal Lyautey, resident general in Rabat and architect of the Moroccan protectorate, declared at the laying of the first stone in October 1922, “The union of France and Islam is among those factors of tolerance whose effect is greatest in ensuring the peace of the world.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The symbolism of the mosque as an expression of France's imperial self-conception as “an Islamic power” did attract attention from France's Muslim subjects: it became a highly contentious issue within North Africa. Tunisian nationalists asserted in a newspaper attack on Ben Ghabrit, “God forbids a mosque to be built in a Christian city,” and opposed the collection of funds for the project in the suburbs of Tunis.Footnote ⁵⁵ But however Ben Ghabrit and Lyautey might have intended their imagined Muslim audience to be awed or inspired by their grand vision, and however offensive some might in fact have found it, as far as Maghribi Muslims themselves were concerned the prestigious building in the fifth arrondissement was not necessarily the most significant Islamic space in Paris, legitimate or otherwise.

Jurisdiction over Islam, and its assertion for the welfare of the Muslim community, emerged in the interwar period elsewhere in Paris, beyond the state's means of control, and in competition with other emerging currents of Maghribi politics playing out in the heart of the imperial capital. As in Algiers, the space of Islamic jurisdiction in Paris became a terrain of contention, but one that developed far from the spatial center of imperial-Islamic symbolism, in the peripheral districts inhabited by emigrant workers, and without reference to the pretensions of the state to embody Islamic authority in itself. The life of the Algerian migrant community in France was marked by the same social conflicts that were playing out within colonial Algerian society, and ultimately it was these conflicts, rather than any gradually emerging unity, that were most crucial to the development of nationalism. Our understanding of the experiences of the emigrant community can be enriched and nuanced through a micro-historical examination of particular moments and spaces in which these conflicts over social, cultural, and political authority within Algerian society were played out and became visible. The history of how the colonial state began to control immigration is now well known.Footnote ⁵⁶ In considering the colonial jurisdictional politics of Islam, it is instructive to examine in tandem with this how certain self-constituting groups within emerging hierarchies of Algerian society set about controlling the populations over whom they would ultimately claim their own national jurisdiction. But in fact, the particular idiom of authority in which we are interested here, among the Algerian emigrant workers of Paris, was not yet “national.” Rather, it was something at once more and less than a dissident political demand—the claim made by a group of Algerian ‘ulama that they were bringing a “civilizing mission” to France.

In August 1936, the Association of Algerian Muslim ‘Ulama, the modernist reform movement of Algerian scholars referred to earlier, set up an Islamic mission in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris.Footnote ⁵⁷ The nadi al-tahdhib, (“Educational Club,” or Cercle de l’Éducation), was soon holding regular meetings in several locations in the city and its suburbs. It had been established, like the Association of ‘ulama, under the terms of the 1901 law on associations, and its meetings were an expression of the desire and ability of self-appointed Algerian cultural authorities, based in Algeria itself, to claim rights and responsibilities over emigrant Algerians in the metropole. The club's declared intention was “to pursue the intellectual, moral, and social education of the Muslims residing in the region of Paris.” Their activities included the provision of instruction in Arabic and Islam, giving lectures, and running alcohol-free cafés. The development of the mission was rapid, and within fourteen months its organizers claimed to have established six clubs—four in Paris and two in St-Denis—and to be in the process of starting two more, in Paris and at Gennevilliers. A year after the initial foundation, the police were watching six such clubs in and around Paris where educational activities were regularly taking place.Footnote ⁵⁸ Each offered daily lectures and classes in Arabic and French, from 8:00–10:00 p.m. and the founders claimed that their work reached “thousands of proletarians eager for instruction, [who thereby learn] to read and write as well as [taking instruction in] the Qur'an and Islamic ethics.” Although open to all Muslims in the city, the clubs were in fact frequented almost exclusively by Algerians.Footnote ⁵⁹ Sections were eventually established in other locations, until by the mid-1950s there were branches of the ‘ulama's mission from Roubaix in the Nord to Marseille and Estaque in the Bouches du Rhône, and in Lille, Paris, Vitry, and provincial towns.Footnote ⁶⁰

The ‘ulama saw their mission toward the whole of Algerian society as one of “civilizational” import, as constituting a renaissance of Islam and the Arabic language and as effecting a vital work of re-moralizing, re-educating, and renovating Algerian society and culture. In their conception, formulation, and exercise of this work, they did not express simply an internal movement of reform within Islam, one whose horizon of reference would be contained within a purely endogenous system (as had been the case, for example, of earlier “reform” movements such as that of the Wahhabis in the Arabian Peninsula in the mid-eighteenth century). Rather, the ‘ulama sought a re-articulation, in an endogenous idiom, of ways of seeing, ordering, and altering the social world, which were very much shaped by European colonial modernity, and which relayed the new types of power relations that came with it.Footnote ⁶¹ Their view of Algerian society was expressed in terms of a clear distinction between the learned and the ignorant, a division which echoes the old established hierarchy in Islamic social thought which traditionally subordinated the ra‘aya/‘amma, the “flock,” or common people, to the khassa, the notability. The latter might consist in the ‘umara, or ‘asker, the princes or military class on one hand, or the ‘ulama, the men of religion and learning, on the other. However, the Algerian ‘ulama of the 1920s and 1930s invested this distinction with a new meaning. For them, in brief, “ignorance” encompassed everything in what Algerians called “Islam,” and recognized as traditionally sanctioned cultural practice, that was not in conformity with the particular doctrinal teaching of the ‘ulama. Moreover, it was more or less everything and anything that constituted the everyday religion and popular culture of the rural population and urban lower classes, whose “backwardness” the ‘ulama castigated at least as harshly as did the most trenchant colonialist ideologues. The dialects of Berber and Arabic they spoke, the forms of Islam they practiced, their beliefs and rituals marking the year and its seasons, as well as their illiteracy and supposed indiscipline and inability for self-direction, were all marked out as signs of the people's “degenerate” condition. As Fanny Colonna has pointed out, what these intellectual-activists called “ignorance” covered “more or less [everything concerning] the ordinary religion and way of life of [Algerian] peasants at this time. They protest, not a few juvenile disorders, a few excesses in the harvest season, but the very means of celebrating life and death.”Footnote ⁶²

If the culture, habits, beliefs, and languages of peasants in the Algerian countryside, and of their fellows who had begun to migrate in increasing numbers towards the towns and cities of French North Africa, were already degenerate and in need of salvation by “civilizing,” how much more endangered were those who, in increasing numbers in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, had become migrant workers in the metropole?Footnote ⁶³ Not only were they dispossessed and proletarianized, vulnerable and exploited, but their ignorance of their “true religion” made them susceptible to all the ills of barbarism in the metropole: alcohol, gambling, prostitution, straying from the faith of their community and the direction of its legitimate leaders. As the leading light of the Paris Educational Club, shaykh Faudel al-Wartilani, expressed it to an audience in Algiers in September 1937, “They are straying further and further from the precepts of the Qur'an, but they must be forgiven, for they have among them no scholars or qualified men to show them that they are deviating from the true faith. The colonialists profit from this, and seek to complete their perdition, by furnishing them with opportunities to drink alcohol.… All in an effort to destroy Islam!”Footnote ⁶⁴

The self-ascribed role of ‘ulama, among the proletarians of Paris as in the villages and cities of Algeria, was as the moral conscience, the guardians, of their community. If this was a perfectly classical Islamic conception of social authority, it was rearticulated through modern ideas and institutions, through legal associations and clubs, by printing newspapers, and holding lectures for the teaching of science, language, and history, as well as religion. Most importantly, however, it was a new role also in that it broke entirely with existing forms of Islamic culture and social structure in the Maghrib, and set out to institute a newly centralized and exclusive social authority over the meaning and form of Algerian community, one that would be formulated and expressed by the ‘ulama alone. In the interwar period, this process of the formation of a new idiom of religious social authority, which aimed at the re-moralization and renaissance of the Algerian community in terms produced and controlled by the ‘ulama, also entailed a claim to the spiritual and social direction of the community against another danger that threatened their ignorant and vulnerable “flock,” the “danger” of politics.

At the moment of founding their Educational Club in Paris, the Algerian ‘ulama were, or so they imagined, at the crest of their self-appointed significance in shaping the future of their community. The extension of their mission to the emigrant community in France, in August 1936, followed in the wake of the visit to Paris in July of a delegation of Algerian representatives, mandated by the Algerian Muslim Congress held in Algiers in June to present a bill of major reforms for Algeria to the newly installed government of the antifascist Popular Front. Léon Blum, that government's leader, had declared on meeting the delegates, “I am glad of this visit, of French Muslims to a French Jew, of democrats to a democrat. I will no longer permit the Algerian Muslims to be treated as our poor cousins.”Footnote ⁶⁵ This encouraging welcome provided much comfort to the prime movers behind the delegation, which included both communists and elected officials of liberal bourgeois and professional backgrounds. It was the Association of ‘ulama, however, who most considered themselves responsible for the Algerian Congress; as one of them reminded an audience in Algiers later that year, “the Congress is our work.… Let us not forget that, if the ‘ulama abandon the Congress, it must be considered as dead.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The same speaker insisted on the same occasion that the Association itself had “no political tendency.”

The declared apoliticism of the ‘ulama was a marked feature of their movement in its first years, but it ought not to be misunderstood. Their project for the moral and material development of Algerian society and for their own establishment as the leadership of the community itself necessarily carried political implications. But these were not simply as “contributions” to nationalism. Their goal—as their leader put it, “the good of Islam and the emancipation of the Algerian Muslims, outside of all political tendencies”Footnote ⁶⁷—was expressed as a declaration of their own Association's imagined position above the fractious divisions of interwar colonial politics, as a sacred mission to bring a modern, rational-scientific Arab-Islamic civilization to the “ignorant masses.” Conceiving of themselves as outside or above petty politics (such as those that had plagued the Algiers cultuelle), the reformists hoped to preserve their dignity as the unquestioned bearers of a social authority over whom no mere “political tendency” could claim to hold sway. They also hoped to avoid the accusation—the most dangerous of all in the colonial order—that they were “engaged in politics,” by which was invariably meant engaged in anti-colonial subversion, which the system could not tolerate. The ‘ulama hoped, instead, at least up to the end of the 1930s, to reach a workable partnership with the imperial system, and the platform of reform demands presented to the Popular Front in Paris in 1936 marked the pinnacle of their optimism in this regard.

In this context, the nascent, radical political nationalism which the so-called “ignorant masses” of proletarian workers in Paris had themselves begun to articulate in the mid-1920s was, to the ‘ulama's vision of things, the greatest danger. On 20 June 1926, almost exactly a month before the official inauguration of Paris mosque in the center of the city, Maghribi immigrant workers had formed the Étoile nord africaine (ENA), the first organization committed to gaining North African independence, initially under the aegis of the French Communist Party (PCF).Footnote ⁶⁸ The ENA was the principal rival of the ‘ulama for the leadership of the community and the formulation of its demands. Excluded from the Congress and its delegation in the summer of 1936, it opposed the platform of reformist demands which the ‘ulama and their allies had presented to the government, and from the outset it was committed to a populist and revolutionary strategy for independence. This radical movement of the workers themselves was seen by the ‘ulama as a dangerously irresponsible adversary. A senior member of the Association, speaking at the nadi al-tahdhib in September 1937, reiterated the assertion, “The Muslims, of whom most are illiterate, are as yet incapable of governing themselves” and vaunted the progress achieved toward the gradual enlightenment of their community by the ‘ulama, thanks to whom “the future may be considered with confidence.” In the meantime, however, they warned against the “demagogic propaganda” of the independentist leaders, who, they said, were “either agents provocateurs or else madmen.” The Congress leaders, described as “well-informed generals, concerned for the welfare of their troops,” were compared to the Étoilistes and their iconic leader Messali Hadj, “a turbulent demagogue lacking all self-possession who is leading his followers to certain disaster.” The independentists were even accused of being “agitators in the pay of fascism whose aim is to divide the Algerian community” and to “lead them into the ranks of fascism.”Footnote ⁶⁹

The Educational Club, however, established as it was within the emigrant community itself, could not remain above politics, but was necessarily itself open to a number of political interventions—it was a forum for all the tendencies active within the society of which it was a part. ENA adherents themselves were frequently members of the educational association, and the clubs set up by the ‘ulama became important foyers for the playing out of the struggle between competing Algerian factions for the representation and leadership of their community. This took place within an inchoate field of what was quickly becoming, by the late 1930s, nationalist politics. Members of the ‘ulama's mission were simultaneously socialists, communists, and separatist-nationalists. The Paris police even believed that the Étoile nord-africaine had initially attempted to use the Club as a vehicle to promote its own program, but that the early success of the ‘ulama had forced the nationalists into open opposition against their would-be directors of conscience. The dissolution of the ENA by the Paris Prefecture on 26 January 1937 benefited the mission of the ‘ulama, who reproached Messali and his colleagues for “self-aggrandizement in the eyes of the workers, making themselves out to be victims of their devotion to the cause of the Muslims when in fact they seek only to live at their expense.” The ‘ulama feared that the nationalists’ actions “can only contribute to delaying the implementation of reforms for Algeria,” and insisted that the Algerian workers in Paris must, “in their own interests, follow only the directives of the Muslim Congress, which represents the opinion of the immense majority of the Muslims and which the ‘ulama strongly recommend.”Footnote ⁷⁰ What was going on in the meetings of workers and ‘ulama in the Parisian suburbs, the lessons in Arabic orthography, and the discussions of Islamic ethical conduct was an intense conflict over the legitimate representation of the community. Vaunting the virtues of patience and orderly conduct, the ‘ulama pointed to the necessity and inevitability of a reformist solution to the situation of the emigrant workers and their families, and of compatriots at home in Algeria. It was, of course, despite the warm words of Léon Blum, a solution that never came.

There is, in retrospect, a neat symmetry to the rival movements of the radical workers and the reformist ‘ulama. Both the Étoile nord-africaine and the Association of ‘ulama began life in the mid-1920s, the former in the suburbs of Paris and the latter in Constantine, the major city of eastern Algeria. Ten years later, in August 1936, the same month in which the ‘ulama established the nadi al-tahdhib in Paris, the ENA, until then a purely emigrant organization, began to implant itself in Algeria. Ben Badis, the founder of the Association of ‘ulama, died, disappointed in his hopes of reform, in April 1940. The ‘ulama themselves eventually became the subordinate cultural functionaries of the revolutionary populism to which the workers’ movement gave birth and which in 1954 would produce the armed National Liberation Front (FLN).

In France, as in Algeria, the reformist ‘ulama and their educational missions set themselves up in competition with the officialized Islam of the state over control of the religious field, and with the more radical politics of proletarian revolutionaries over the proper guidance and leadership of the community. Their own mission to civilize their compatriots and to ensure the well being of Islam in the emigrant community, and the contests in which it engaged, generally operated well outside such exalted spaces as the Quartier Latin and the beautiful neo-mauresque Orientalism of the Institut musulman, a space whose significance as an effective conduit of imperial power existed mainly in the minds of its architects. But Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit's imagined space of an imperial Islamic authority, too, would eventually become a place that Maghribi Muslims could claim for their own jurisdiction, for the expression of their own, insurgent political subjectivity. Ben Ghabrit died in 1954, four months before the outbreak of the Algerian war for independence. In 1952, nationalist militants were reported to be selling copies of the radical newspaper L'Algérie libre outside the Paris mosque on the day of ‘id al-kabir. On the occasion of ‘id al-saghir in May 1957, an FLN orator held the floor inside the mosque's prayer hall for ten minutes after the end of the sermon. Tracts by the nationalist UGTA (Algerian General Workers’ Union) were distributed, and while a collection was taken up in support of the FLN guerillas, within the precincts of the mosque itself the Algerian national flag was prominently displayed.Footnote ⁷¹

JURISDICTIONAL POLITICS AND THE LIMITS OF THE STATE

The stories told here illustrate the playing out of a productive tension, rather than a static contradiction, between republican France's divergent approaches to its Muslim colonial subjects. Although certainly, the secular state's Islamic empire seemed at times like an untenable contradiction to the neat and orderly minds of colonial administrators, the state's attempt to be both guarantor of official secularism and protector of an official Islam in fact produced a series of spaces and practices, both physical and discursive, in which a number of unpredictable things could occur, and in which many of the empire's Muslim subjects could engage in struggles over their own jurisdictional spaces.

In Algiers, the messy application of metropolitan law, through an attempt to devolve responsibility while retaining control, created an irresolvable problem for the administration in an ungovernable space of local factional politics. These were played out by notables against each other as well as against the administration, whose role was often that of a somewhat overwhelmed referee who carried the additional burden of financing a game he could not effectively control. The functional system of domination over which the likes of Jean Mirante would have liked to preside was rendered dysfunctional by its own internal inconsistencies and the readiness of the Algiers notability to exploit them. But just as the administration was incapable of keeping the fractiousness of the notables in check, so too the notables' internal struggles to use religious space and cultural authority to maintain their own social position gave rise not only to the mobilization of popular constituencies, but to demands from a much wider social spectrum: first, for inclusion in the management of what they considered as their public space, and second, to their impatient opposition to the notables' management of it when this proved self-serving. Ultimately, through no one's particular intention, a politics emerged that provided all parties with a stick with which to beat the administration both when it intervened in Muslim religious affairs and when it did not. This was an early moment for the constitution of a public opinion not averse to holding both the Algerian élite and the French government accountable for their mismanagement of public affairs.

In Paris, an opposite policy had the same effect: there, an overt, indeed grandiose public investment in the identification of the state with Islam—the creation of an official Muslim space in the capital as a symbol of “la France islamique”—was far removed from the attempted devolution and official distancing pursued in the colony. In the long term, it would turn out to have produced a space that would become a stake in both local factional and international politics, exploited by various constituencies. (Eventually this included the independent Maghribi governments, which have continued to compete for control over the mosque and the official institutions of Islam in France.) More immediately, however, it also failed to forestall the creation of rival, autonomous spaces beyond the control of the authorities, from which emerged alternative constructions of, and more meaningful competitions for, jurisdiction over the immigrant Muslim community.

What is most significant in both cases is the extent to which the dynamics of religious authority and the spaces of jurisdiction over the community escaped the state's attempts to control them. In the end, what was crucial in both was not so much the tergiversations of imperial policymaking, but rather the internal social, political, and cultural struggles of Algerians to create and determine the boundaries of their own community and to regulate its life. The state was ultimately, even at the moments of its apparently greatest strength, incapable either of containing these struggles or of turning them to its advantage. These local examples of struggles over jurisdictional politics show how mistaken is the idea, still persistent in the case of Algeria, of a colonial state as a unified apparatus of consistent oppression imposing its will on (and/or being uniformly resisted by) a correspondingly unified and homogeneous mass of “colonisés” who exist only as the crushed subjects of imperial jurisdiction. On the contrary, neither the secular state nor the Islamic empire was capable of creating and maintaining the public spaces of its Muslim subjects simply as the theatre for the exercise of its own control. Social struggles of, and between, Algerian (and other) colonial subjects were themselves irrepressible, and as the unfurling of the green and white flag with the red crescent and star in the Paris mosque in 1957 graphically demonstrated, it would be when these conflicts could no longer resolve themselves within the institutional frameworks and the public spaces of the colonial state that the empire's Muslim subjects would ultimately take over those spaces and make them their own.