Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France

Abstract

Analysing the experience and status of Muslims in France is a surprisingly complex topic which presents all researchers with a series of methodological challenges. The most obvious method—Religious Studies—seems clearly inadequate for an issue which raises questions of gender, immigration, housing policy, governance and class. What, then, is the best approach? Naomi Davidson’s Only Muslim proposes a genuinely original perspective, a type of social-cultural history of architecture, centred on two emblematic buildings, the Hôpital Franco-Musulman de Bobigny (opened in 1929) and the Mosquée de Paris (opened in 1926), with a clear concentration of interest in the constellation of buildings and institutions associated with the latter. Through a close analysis of these two initiatives, Davidson traces a history of French government policy towards Muslims. Davidson’s key argument is that for over a century French policy was constantly shaped by the goal of creating an Islam français. This idea was drawn from a series of prominent French studies of Islam, discussed in Davidson’s useful review of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century thinkers. (Curiously, however, Davidson neglects any comparison with Said’s idea of ‘Orientalism’—an odd omission in a book of this nature.) There is an important conceptual problem here: while Davidson consistently insists on the unitary nature of French thinking concerning Islam, she also notes that the great divergence between the various analyses of the Islam provided by local studies. The picture which finally emerges of Islam is that it represented a set of values at variance with French thinking concerning religion: indeed, it was a form of thought that French observers had difficulty in understanding as a religion. Davidson notes how frequently French thinkers would conceptualise Islam as a form of corporeal discipline: as a set of rituals concerning the manner in which to pray; as a set of prohibitions and orders concerning acceptable eating and drinking. These rituals, considered French observers, shaped each Muslim in a similar, compatible fashion. This body of evidence then allowed French observers to distinguish between mere folk Islam and a pure, orthodox form of Islam represented by Moroccan Muslims.