Magic and Religion in North Africa

Finally, religious brotherhoods, penetrating into the most remote douars villages or nomadic encampments, have ensured an entire Islâm Islam a strength and a cohesion that political institutions would not have sufficed to give it. Thus, there are no nationalities in Islam from a legal point of view: one is a Muslim before being from one country or another. As our law proceeds from an entirely different conception, when we wanted to apply to Muslims the chapters of our civil code relating to nationality, the most singular complications followed(1). The patriotism of Muslims, instead of relating to their country, relates to their faith. While one might have dreamed of a Pan-Germanism, a Pan-Slavism, or a Pan-Americanism, there is no "Pan-Arabism" or "Pan-Turkism"(2), but the zealots have imagined a "Pan-Islamism."

Thus, the expression "Muslim civilization" is justified because in this civilization, religion is predominant: it invades public and private life. This is why the history of Muslims is above all a religious history: wars, even when they are not directed against the infidels, are almost always justified as holy wars; mahdisme the messianic belief in the coming of the Mahdi, the appearance of the "Master of the Hour," is in our countries the classic form of insurrection.

(1) In the treaty signed between Philip III and the Sherif Ech Cheikh El Ma’moûn in 1609, it is said that any subject who flees from the lands of one to the lands of the other will be handed over, as soon as requested, except in the case where they have changed religion. (C. Levé and Fournel, Treaties between France and Morocco, p. 19).

(2) However, the appearance of a certain "Pan-Turkism" is noted. See Arminius Vambéry, "The Constitutional Tatars," in The Nineteenth Century and After, June 1906.