Imaginative links: Islam and dreams of a Saharan French empire

Abstract

ABSTRACT French colonial expansion across North and West Africa brought contact with varied political and religious groups, particularly along the Saharan rim and in the western Sahel. Numerous French metropolitan politicians and colonial administrators alike saw the Sahara as a great connecting medium, a new-age mare nostrum that would serve as the centerpiece of an expansive overseas empire. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Xavier Coppolani and Robert Arnaud (or Randau) served as the leaders working across this seemingly impassable divide to invent a political, demographic, religious, and vividly Romantic homogeneity for the area and its people, one based almost entirely in the power of Sufi Islam. Such unifying concepts built on older Saharan traditions of politico-religious linkage while thriving in a moment of changing French metropolitan colonial theory. Ultimately beset on all sides by local, metropolitan, and imperial resistance, these attempts failed over time as they hardened stereotypes and overlooked important realities of human connection throughout the region. The complex and contradictory forces involved in the joining of disparate social and political entities in the Sahara offer substantial insight into the reality of colonial expansion and political formation.