Previous page | New search |
The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here
Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | In the Eye of the Beholder: Sufi and Saint in North Africa and the Colonial Production of Knowledge, 1830-1900 |
Author: | Clancy-Smith, Julia A. |
Year: | 1990 |
Periodical: | Africana Journal |
Volume: | 15 |
Pages: | 220-257 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Maghreb France |
Subjects: | Islamic studies colonialism Religion and Witchcraft History and Exploration Bibliography/Research Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) |
Abstract: | Islam in colonial North Africa was largely equated with the cult of popular saints and organized sufism by European observers throughout the nineteenth century. The study of rural religion was initially the work of non-specialists, particularly amateur military ethnographers. French interest in and writing about marabouts and 'confréries' went through several stages that were dictated by political and military concerns. Three strands of writing in the emerging French sociology of Islam can be discerned during the past century: the tradition of the Bureaux arabes; that of traveller-adventurers; and the academic tradition based at the 'École d'Alger'. This review analyses those writers who were either representative of currents of thinking or whose ideas contributed to the building of a model or colonial 'sufi canon', that began to take shape in the course of the nineteenth century. Notes, ref. |