Seven Questions on Islam, Education, and Colonialism in Northwest Africa for Samuel Anderson
"I hope that this kind of 'multi-local' approach can helpfully reveal trans-Saharan linkages that otherwise remain obscure."
Dr. Samuel D. Anderson’s The French Médersa: Islamic Education and Empire in Northwest Africa came out earlier this year with Cornell University Press. I was really excited to see it - I had read large sections of his dissertation with great interest, and both the topic and the approach strike me as vital for understanding some key dynamics in northwest Africa, colonial and postcolonial. I was able to catch up with him for an interview, which touched on core elements of the book and its importance.
AT: What was a médersa and why did the French colonial administration create them? What kinds of transformations did the French hope to produce?
SA: The term médersa in French can refer to any madrasa, but the focus of my book is a particular group of colonial schools, also called médersas or Franco-Muslim schools, that combined Islamic learning with French curricula. These schools were created first in Algeria in 1850 as a way to train Algerian Muslims to work as functionaries in colonial offices related to education, justice, religious affairs, and the “Arab Bureaux,” which conducted surveillance on Muslims across Algeria. In the early twentieth century, as the French expanded their territories in West Africa, new médersas were created there to continue that same work in Senegal, French Soudan (today Mali), and Mauritania, and to some extent elsewhere as well. The French were hoping that the médersas would create a group of Muslims who supported to the French colonial project. They also wrote frequently about the médersas playing a role in ‘canalizing’ Islam, or transforming the religion itself into something that was less threatening to their colonial project. In short, the médersas were intended to allow a greater degree of French control over Muslim life in northwest Africa.
AT: You note (p. 85) that “engagement and surveillance were the two poles around which Muslim policy revolved” in colonial Mauritania (and perhaps elsewhere?). How did the médersas connect to those two goals?
SA: In that section, I discuss the expansion of the médersa system into West Africa in the early twentieth century, but these two ideas were present in North Africa as well. Surveillance was the standard approach adopted by many French administrators who feared the potential of Islam as a force for resistance. This fear spawned a long-term effort to monitor Muslims, from prominent leaders to those running small Qur’anic schools, to ensure that they weren’t spreading anti-French “propaganda,” as colonial officials saw it. On the other hand, some administrators thought that engaging with Muslim leaders was a more productive and less antagonistic strategy, one that would create influential allies in Muslim communities.
The médersas could be seen as part of both strategies. This explains in part why these schools lasted so long amid so many other changes in colonial policy. Muslim students and teachers were intensively surveilled, subject to frequent reports and monitoring. In some cases, the sons of prominent families were sent, presumably against their will, to the médersas as a way to keep an eye on them. But the médersas also played a role in shaping Islamic institutions beyond schools. For much of the colonial period, in Algeria and in West Africa, a médersa diploma was required to hold an official position like qadi [judge] or imam in an Islamic institution.
One example that combines both strategies began in 1911: when the French conquered the sultanate of Wadai, in Chad, they sent the sultan’s three sons to the médersa in Saint-Louis, in Senegal, to monitor their education and to ensure their cooperation in the colonial project. Twenty-odd years later, the French administration in Chad restored the Wadai sultanate and named one of those sons sultan, confident that he would support the colonial project. I also like this example because its shows how much of the French empire in Africa was connected to these schools.
AT: You write (p. 29) that when the first three médersas were created in Algeria in 1850, the French-imposed curriculum emphasized grammar, law, and theology. Why were these three subjects taught? What Islamic subjects were left out? What attitudes towards Sufi texts and teachings were visible in these early schools? How did the French eventually try to blend in “secular” subjects?
SA: My answers to these questions are somewhat tentative, because explicit explanations for decisions about the actual teaching in the médersas are rare in the documentation I found. But the curriculum was always tightly linked to the envisioned professional trajectories of the students. Studying law and theology would certainly legitimate the médersa graduates who went on to the proscribed careers in Islamic courts and in ‘religious affairs.’ Formal knowledge of the Arabic language would too. Nothing else was explicitly included, but in the early years of these schools, from what I could find, French oversight was relatively minor. It was only in the 1870s and 1890s that a series of reforms brought more colonial structure to the médersas, incorporating a French curriculum and a different breakdown of Islamic subjects (the Arabic language class being divided into separate grammar and literature classes, for example). These changes brought the médersas more in line with the French educational bureaucracy, emphasizing administrative structures (introducing regular written exams, for example) more than instructional content. As for Sufi texts, I found no explicit references in any documentation about the curriculum. I think it was considered entirely a separate sphere, not connected to formal schooling in the médersas.
AT: You refer to the “little Nahda” in Algeria (p. 69) and to the encounter of Senegal’s Cheikh Touré with the legacies of Muhammad Abduh and Abdelhamid Ben Badis (p. 164) - what connections did the world of the médersas have to Islamic modernism?
SA: The connections between the médersas and Islamic modernism were some of the most exciting anecdotes to discover in researching the book. My limited understanding of Islamic modernism centered on Egypt, but I found a few ways that the movement was linked to both the Maghrib and West Africa through the médersas. One was Algeria’s “little Nahda” (explored in more detail in older work by Allan Christelow, for example), in which scholars like Abdelkader Medjaoui published pamphlets inspired by Islamic modernists like Mohammed Abduh, while also teaching at the médersas. My archival sources did not show a direct link between his teaching and writing, but I think it’s possible to infer one. Similarly, when Abduh visited Algeria in 1903, I think it is undeniable that médersa professors and students interacted with him there. And the example of Cheikh Touré’s travels from Senegal to Algeria and back in the 1950s shows that these ideas persisted for decades.
One direct link did stand out to me: when the first West African médersa was created, in Djenné in 1906, its foundational document stipulated that the curriculum should include “the Risala of Shaykh Abduh as taught in the Algerian médersas.” Though I never found more information about this requirement, it indicates that Islamic modernism was discussed in the médersas in the early twentieth century, in both North and West Africa, on a somewhat official level. This indicates to me that these colonial schools were a channel for ideas about Islamic modernism to spread within Algeria and from Algeria to West Africa. It strikes me as interesting that colonial schools were venues for the spread of these ideas, and I hope other scholars can follow this thread further in tracing this intellectual history.
AT: You argue (p. 165), “The broader pattern, across the region, suggests that a médersa education prepared students not to be obedient agents of the colonial state but rather to take on active roles in leading their communities amid and beyond the struggle for independence.” Could you explain some of those dynamics to us? And could you tell us a bit about some of the most famous graduates of the médersas - such as Moktar Ould Daddah and Malek Bennabi - and how this form of education influenced their careers?
SA: Two of the core arguments of the book are that the médersas complicate our understanding of “tradition” and “modernity” in Islamic education, and that the medérsiens constituted a hyphenated, bicultural elite. So although the explicit purpose of the médersas was to train an obedient Muslim elite, the mix of Islamic tradition and modernized education enabled students to act in new ways. This was especially evident in the mid-twentieth century, during the era of liberation movements and new independence.
The medérsiens were not, in general, the leaders of liberation movements like the FLN [National Liberation Front] in Algeria, but they were well positioned to contribute to those movements in other ways. I interviewed Ali Abdellaoui, a médersa graduate and later an Algerian diplomat, who told me that the medérsiens were able to contribute to the Algerian liberation movement by acting as intermediaries between the FLN leadership and the foot soldiers in the maquis, because they spoke both the language of international negotiation and the language of ordinary Algerians. I think it makes perfect sense that Abdellaoui and others—Abderrahmane Nekli, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, and Lakhdar Brahimi (a prominent UN envoy)—wound up as diplomats or politicians, since their education required them to embrace multiple perspectives that could seem contradictory. Intellectuals like Malek Bennabi also took up similar questions about how to combine Islamic and Western perspectives in the philosophical realm. Whether implicitly or explicitly, I think the influence of their Franco-Muslim education is clear in these different examples.
AT: What about some of the more prominent teachers - what was the impact of figures such as Auguste Dupuis-Yakouba and Boualem Ould Rouis?
SA: Teachers were, then as now, not always the most impactful figures, but they did wield influence within their school communities and beyond. Some, like Auguste Dupuis-Yakouba, a Frenchman who worked in Timbuktu, mostly stayed within the confines of the médersa, though he did publish some important publications, like an early French-Tamashek dictionary. Boualem Ould Rouis, who I discuss extensively in Chapter 4, was an Algerian who worked in Mauritania for many years, and who fundamentally transformed the médersa system there by embracing adaptations to suit local interests. Ould Rouis also illustrates how influential some of these teachers could be for their students, many of whom went on to influential careers of their own. One article I found described how Ould Rouis maintained a friendly relationship with his former student, the UN diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, for decades. My book is emphatically an institutional history, focused on the schools themselves and their relationship with the colonial administration. But these figures are reminders that every institution, and especially every school, also fosters personal relationships that can have an impact far beyond the walls of a classroom.
AT: A growing cohort of historians find a trans-Saharan approach to history to be intellectually fruitful. You write (p. 164), "It is only through a trans-Saharan approach that the multifaceted impact of the médersa system becomes visible." And in the same passage, you note that Abderrahmane Nekli might seem marginal if viewed in any particular national context, but his role emerges as larger when viewed in a regional framework. What advice do you have for historians, anthropologists, political scientists, etc. who want to pursue trans-Saharan projects?
SA: The trans-Saharan approach I developed was one of the most difficult aspects of this project and one of the most rewarding too. As you note, scholars from a range of fields are working increasingly within trans-Saharan frameworks, but I realized that, at least when I began this project, there were no examples I could find focused on the colonial period. So I had to develop what I call a “multi-local” approach, developing deep knowledge of different areas (in my case Algeria, Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali) then looking for connections linking them. This enabled me to see ideas (like the French idea of a ‘hyphen’), institutions (like the médersas) and individuals (like Nekli) popping up in multiple places, and then to connect the dots to come up with a new interpretation of trans-Saharan Africa in the colonial period.
So my advice to others pursuing trans-Saharan research is to follow a similar approach, delving deeply into the relevant local contexts and then following up on the connections that appear. It’s depressing to note, but trans-Saharan field research is increasingly hard to imagine, at least for graduate students. The grants that supported my research, like the Fulbright-Hays, have been eliminated or drastically cut. But nevertheless, I hope that this kind of “multi-local” approach can helpfully reveal trans-Saharan linkages that otherwise remain obscure.