Contenu du sommaire : Écrire l'histoire de l'islam moderne et contemporain – Biologie et sciences sociales

The religious and intellectual history of early modern and modern Islam is often reduced to a teleological and Arab-centric narrative, where modernity begins with the Egyptian Expedition or the Nahḍa, the Arab Renaissance. This history would see the succession of Sufism, Muslim reformism, Islamism, and Salafism as a “genealogy of Islamism.” Using a regressive history approach, this article will illuminate the plurality of possible pathways and the heterogeneous nature of historical moments through a presentation of the current dynamics of international historiography on Islam between the fifteenth and the twenty-first century. Moving back through time, it attempts to identify breaks and continuities, and the successive readings of medieval authors and concepts (such as salafiyya). The article endeavors to demonstrate the constructed nature of the historiographical vulgate of “Muslim reformism” at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as that of “Arabic thought in the liberal age.” The debates on the “neo-Sufism” and Aufklärung of the eighteenth century have led to a better understanding of Islam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, thirst for renewal (tajdīd) flourished in hadith, Islamic law, and Sufism. Recent research on the process of “confessionalization” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shows the importance of political factors in these developments of Islam during the age of the three Empires (Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman).

This article provides an analysis of the Book of the Desert (Kitāb al-Bādiya), a nineteenth-century legal treatise written by Muḥammad al-Māmī (d. 1282/1865), a Muslim scholar from the Tiris desert in present-day Mauritania. In his book, the author reflects on the adaptation of sharia—the religious law of Islam—to the needs of pastoral populations in the western Sahara: how to embrace a normative system that at first glance seems incompatible with nomadic ways of life, given that it presupposes the existence of a state governed by an Islamic ruler (imām) and considers the city the natural environment for legal institutions? Challenging the narratives of center-periphery relationships and the so-called post-classical “decline” that continue to structure the field of Islamic intellectual history, this article seeks to explore the different contextual layers of al-Māmī's reasoning as a scholar: that of a religious notable deeply involved in the struggle for power among nomadic groups and a fervent supporter of the jihad movements in West Africa over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; that of a Muslim jurist of the mālikī school who approached his society from the perspective of Islamic legal thought; that of a Bedouin preoccupied with the legal and religious implications of the cultural gap separating his world from that of urban dwellers.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, various polemics shook the Mizab region in the north of the Algerian Sahara, then under French rule. Islamic scholars were arguing about the consumption of European goods, raising a number of questions about their lawfulness. Historians typically analyze these polemics as a form of cultural resistance to colonization, or as a sign of the allegedly difficult adaptation of “Islam” to “modernity.” They single out two types of reaction: that of self-professed “reformist” scholars, and that of “conservatives” lampooned as the buttresses of a barren tradition. Based on the case of Mizab and on a wide range of Islamic legal documents, this article opens up a new perspective on the relations between Islam, modernity, and colonialism, demonstrating that other logics were also at work. For the Islamic scholars involved, the most important issue at stake was the purity of their community and the means of preserving it in a context of cultural and political uncertainty. Using the tools of Islamic law, the advocates and detractors of these “innovations” were trying to control and delineate the community they led. By bringing together colonial and Islamic sources, Colonial Studies and Islamic Studies, this article challenges a reading of the modern history of Islam based on notions such as modernity and reform, which were largely instrumental to these debates. It also moves away from a historiography that is blind to the internal complexity of these societies, drawing attention to the different rationalities at work in colonial North Africa.

This essay proposes to reframe the twentieth-century history of Islam by rethinking the relationship of that history to some dominant categories of twentieth century sociology, especially the secularization thesis. The global history of Islam since the late nineteenth century has been shaped by an apparent paradox between its two most significant features. The first of these has consisted of persistent calls for Muslim revival, reform, and unity across the world, tending toward a unification or transcendence of the older forms of variation within the tradition. The second, countervailing tendency has been an increasing fragmentation of structures of authority within the tradition, a proliferation of the meanings attributed to it and of the forms of practice taken to embody it, and a renewed acuity of internal sectarian conflict. This is a paradox that only an understanding of Islam as social practice embedded in the forms of secularity characteristic of modern societies—and emphatically not one of Islam as “medievally” religious and uniquely “secularization-resistant”—can apprehend.

This review article seeks to analyze the main contributions of historical research and, to a lesser extent, sociology and anthropology, over the last ten years in three distinct but closely interwoven domains: the history of eugenicism, the history of heredity, and the history of the biological notion of race. After clarifying the relations between these too-often conflated objects, the article compares the evolution of their respective fields of research, distinguishing between the development of previously addressed themes and the exploration of new perspectives. It considers historiographical reflections on eugenicist policies of forced sterilization, on the close relations established between eugenicism and natalism in certain countries such as France, and on the genealogy of the category of race and mechanisms for objectifying racial diversity. The profound renewal of the three domains of research over the period considered is analyzed via two complementary perspectives: the significant broadening of their geographical horizons and the reproblematization of scientific objects. Though the focus of earlier work on the European and North-American experience may have suggested that biopolitics, eugenicism, and “scientific racism” were the prerogative of Western countries, the recent increase in studies of Latin America, Asia, and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East and Africa, has definitively discredited this reductive vision. In parallel, a better awareness of gender perspectives, the exploration of historical continuities between eugenicism and medical genetics, and the reevaluation of the role of biomedicine in debates on human heredity and the notion of race have profoundly renewed the three fields of research studied here.