Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-Century France and Algeria

ISBN-13: 9780197605271 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 304 str.

Assistant Profess Joseph W. (Assistant Professor of History

Recenzje

Weaving its argument seamlessly from the stories of colonizers and colonized in Algeria, Sacred Rivals shows how religion served to articulate and extend French imperial domination, and how colonial occupation offered resurgent Catholicism a field of action it had lost in France. Peterson argues convincingly that conservative Catholics viewed Islam more 'positively' as a model of unified religiosity France had lost; yet failing to find more than a handful of converts, they rationalized their disappointment with increasingly bitter racial and cultural generalizations about Arabs and Muslims. This is a 'social history of ideas' that will be read eagerly by scholars of French empire and the church, and more broadly by readers interested in the roots of French Islamophobia.

O autorze

Joseph W. Peterson is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Review of Books.