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WORLD O MEETER ARCHIVE
Burke’s book demonstrates that the French built an enormous colonial archive containing information on notable families, tribes, and towns, and that their analysis of Morocco routinely drew on essentialist notions, often assessing the country through. Fascinatingly, the discourse of ‘Moroccan Islam’ continued into the post-colonial period, influencing Western scholarship on Morocco, including the works of Clifford Geertz, Ernest Gellner, and John Waterbury. Indeed, there are obvious similarities with other regional or ethnic notions of Islam invented by the French in the imperial age, such as ‘black Islam’, Islam noire, created to map Muslim populations in sub-Saharan Africa, and ‘white Islam’, Islam bidan, or ‘Moorish Islam’, Islam maure, created to categorize Muslims in Mauritania, the Maghrib, and the wider Arab world. In the eyes of French scholars and officials, it was a timeless system of beliefs and practices, as well as a political system with the sultan, as ‘Commander of the Faithful’, at its center. In fact, ‘Moroccan Islam’ became a central bureaucratic category. The chapters of the third part (‘Governmental Morocco’) examine the construction and evolution of the essentialist notion of ‘Moroccan Islam’, which, in the French colonial mind, was a distinct national form of Islam. The protectorate’s first governor general, Louis-Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey, established a technocratic administration based on a bureaucracy of ethnographic information and analysis – the ‘ethnographic state’. The second part of the book (‘Native Policy Morocco’) discusses the history of ethnographic knowledge production, its institutionalization, and its influence on colonial policies in the era of the protectorate, 1912–1956.After1912,theprojecttorecordanddocumentthecountry’s ethnographic landscape expanded massively. Overall, the French colonial archive about Morocco was heterogeneous and continuously evolving. Also, differing scholarly agendas (and rivalries) and political 316 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2019 debates in the metropolis, for example about general questions on the relationship between state and faith, had a significant impact on colonial writings about Morocco. It convincingly shows that the French colonial archive on Morocco was significantlyshaped bythe studyofEgypt,brieflyconqueredbyNapoleon in1798,andAlgeria,subduedbytheFrenchinthe1830sand1840s.Tobe sure, much of this knowledge had little to do with the actual realities on the ground. The first part (‘Ethnographic Morocco’) traces the French ethnographic discourses about Morocco prior to the creation of the protectorate in 1912.
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Burke discusses these questions in three parts.
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Equally importantly, it legitimized French colonial rule, with French officials regularly claiming that they alone had the ‘scientific’ expertise, the intellectual authority, to govern the country. It informed French policies towards Moroccans, from tribal legislation to the engagement with the sultan. According to Burke, the French colonial archive had several functions. In The Ethnographic State, Edmund Burke III now looks at one of the vastest European inventories of knowledge about a Muslim country, showing that French colonial ethnography and modern social sciences were crucial in the administration of the Moroccan protectorate. The colonial archive on Islam has attracted increasing scholarly attention, with the works of Holger Weiss on German West Africa, Alex Padamsee on British India, or George Trumbull IV on French Algeria. Their writings provide us with insights not only into the diversity and complexity of European ideas about Islam but also into the ways in which these ideas shaped the policies of colonial administrators. As European empires expanded into lands inhabited by Muslims, colonial scholars and officials created an extensive body of texts about the religion. Islam often played a crucial role in this story. Major studies in the field, such as Bernard Cohn’s Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (1996), Christopher Bayly’s Empire and Information (1997), and Saul Dubow’s A Commonwealth of Knowledge (2006), have examined the mechanisms by which ethnographic, cartographic,linguistic,andecologicalknowledgewasproducedandused. At the forefront of this research have been historians of Europe’s overseas empires, who have explored processes of gathering, distilling, and ordering of colonial knowledge, and the relationships between this knowledge and colonial conquest. Over the last three decades, scholars, often inspired by the works of Foucault and Said, have shown a persistent interest in the intersection of knowledge and power in the modern world. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014. The Ethnographic State: France and the Invention of Moroccan Islam. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: