Magic and Religion in North Africa

...done on the Muslim religion, to highlight the borrowings made by one civilization from another. Without disregarding the interest of this research, we have placed ourselves at a different point of view.

We have sought above all to present the sociological and psychological reason for institutions and their secular evolution, whatever the regions where they may have originated, and admitting that, except for special exceptions, analogous phenomena have been formed in parallel in the same way in various countries. We do not deny the existence of borrowings, since the Muslim orthodoxy of North Africa is itself a borrowing from the Orient. Be that as it may, these borrowed institutions then vegetated by their own means and by drawing their sap from the new soil where they were transplanted. Under these conditions, one will not be surprised to see us cite Muslim orthodoxy and African folklore indiscriminately.

The civilization we have studied is the current civilization of North Africa, and we have left aside, provisionally, the study of the liberal and even nationalist movement which is taking shape in the Orient and which the Maghrib North Africa is beginning to know. This movement foreshadows for tomorrow a very different Islam, but this Islam has precisely for its character, in spite of the banner that its partisans display, to be less and less Muslim, and one should not be surprised by it. We indicated in our introduction that this secularization is an habitual form of the evolution of societies.

This book can certainly not be presented as a work of popularization; however, in our thought, it is intended not only for students, but also for the educated public.