He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The French Médersa: Islamic Education and Empire in Northwest Africa, and shared the following:
Page 99 recounts a debate between two French colonial administrators concerning the fate of a school in Saint-Louis, Senegal, in 1919. The school was a médersa, a colonial invention that combined both French and Islamic curricula; this one had been controversial since it opened in 1908. The page begins by describing a proposal from Charles Mercier, the new director of the school, to reorient its structure and goals to be more in line with similar schools in Algeria, where the médersa system originated in 1850. Mercier had just arrived in Senegal from Algeria, and thought that this Algerian model would transform the Senegalese médersa from an “excellent primary school” into something akin to a “Muslim university,” which would better serve the colonial goal of training a Muslim elite to work with the French colonial administration. The second half of the page is devoted to a long and indignant retort from Mercier’s predecessor at the médersa, another administrator named Jules Salenc. Salenc rejected all of Mercier’s proposals, arguing that Algeria and Senegal were fundamentally different. He wrote: “Any less superficial study of Black Islam [l’islam en pays noir] would have shown him the problems with the ideas he proposed: excellent, perhaps, in Algeria, but completely useless and even dangerous in Senegal.” The page concludes with a coda: Salenc ultimately won the argument, Mercier left his position the next year, and the médersa closed shortly after that.Learn more about The French Médersa at the Cornell University Press website.
This page is more of an argumentative stepping stone than an encapsulation of the whole book. It highlights two of the book’s core themes, namely that these médersas linked North and West Africa in new ways under French colonial rule, and that ideas about race shaped their development. It shows that this linking was controversial. Some administrators believed that the two regions should be considered a single area, with Islam a major unifying factor, and others believed that they were fully separate, divided racially into Black and “white” Arab or Amazigh (or “Berber”) zones. These competing interpretations are central to the book’s third chapter, where this page appears, and which recounts the expansion of the médersa system from Algeria to West Africa. This page suggests—and the next pages demonstrate—that Salenc’s idea of a racial division won out, and the médersas in what the French considered “Black Africa” were closed shortly thereafter. In that sense, this page fits within a common interpretation of these schools—the idea that the West African médersas had a relatively short lifespan and thus a minor impact on the colonial history of Senegal or West Africa more broadly.
Reading past page 99, however, would help the reader understand the counterargument I make in the rest of the chapter and in the book as a whole. I argue that historians who address Franco-Muslim education, and who address the broader colonial history of northwest Africa, have been limited by the “Saharan Divide” that separates North and West Africa into distinct spheres of historiography. The specific dispute between Salenc and Mercier discussed on page 99 highlights the controversial comparison with Algeria, but it does not show how, beyond that specific case, Franco-Muslim education became an idea that linked North and West Africa for the century between 1850 and 1951.
A core theme in the book is that Franco-Muslim education was a “hyphen” that linked disparate ideas, especially those about the relationship between France and Islam under colonial rule, about tradition and modernity in Islamic education, and about North and West Africa. I draw the “hyphen” terminology directly from archival materials. Though neither of the documents discussed on page 99 use that term explicitly, the page clearly highlights how controversial the idea was. These were some of the first archival sources I read while researching this project, and they piqued my interest in learning more about this controversial trans-Saharan connection. I hope that a reader who opened the book to page 99 would feel the same way, and would want to read on.
--Marshal Zeringue
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