Twohig on Peterson (2022)

Joseph W. Peterson’s Sacred Rivals traces an important historical shift in the attitudes of French Catholic missionaries towards Algeria’s Muslim population. As the French conquest of Algeria began in the 1830s and 40s, ultramontane Catholics in particular “professed to admire Algeria’s Muslims” (13) for their devout faith, taking particular inspiration from their unity and public religiosity. However, a series of cultural shifts and individual failures of proselytism caused French Catholics to progressively “ally with their unbelieving fellow Frenchmen to condemn Muslims as enemies of civilization” only a few decades later (13). In tracing this shift from relative religious toleration to an increasingly race-based—and racist—discourse, Peterson makes several critical contributions to the history of interfaith understanding and the colonial encounter. In particular, he compellingly exposes the underpinnings of Islamophobic rhetoric in France today, connecting it back to the historical development of “Christian and colonialist prejudices” (14) in the nineteenth century. 

While Peterson’s book takes on broad subjects including interfaith understanding and racial discrimination, he does so alongside “microhistorical narratives” (7) of missionary work on the ground in Algeria. As such, Sacred Rivals provides a compelling read for a wide variety of potential audiences, including scholars of religion, historians of nineteenth-century France and its empire, and scholars of colonial Algeria. In particular, the work shows great facility in moving between institutions and actors in France, in Algeria, and across the Middle East. Additionally, Peterson draws attention to the gaps and silences in the historical record, particularly around Algerian children’s experiences of French catholic orphanages and seminaries. While French Catholic missionaries and their shifting attitudes are the principal subjects of this book, Peterson resists assuming that they are the only or primary agents of the Christian-Muslim encounter. 

The opening chapters of the book discuss the views of ultramontane Catholics including Louis Veuillot, as well as those of Jesuit missionaries, in the early years of the French colonization of Algeria. Writing against the prevailing assumption that active proselytization did not begin in earnest in Algeria until the arrival of the Pères Blancs in the 1870s, Peterson shows these earlier encounters to have quite a different tenor than later and more widely-studied missionary efforts, tracing both the “culturally adaptive” (61) methods of the Jesuits, and the ultramontane admiration for Islam’s “revolutionary, near-immediate actualization of its ideals” (38). Early religious toleration, while markedly different from the “clash of civilizations” approach of later years, still expressed Catholics’ anxieties about their own social position in France, however, as much as it did admiration for Islam. Ultramontane Catholics, for example, focused on Islamic piety partially in hope that it would produce “docile” converts, allowing Catholics to “re-Christianize France by Christianizing Algeria” (21). In the case of Jesuit missionaries, their presence in Algeria could also be read as a “backdoor ploy to achieve the recognition and educational prerogatives in Algeria that they had lost in France” (44). Peterson shows a strong application of his “microhistorical” approach here, particularly in chapter 3. The discussion of the young Algerian Khoudja brothers (christened Louis and Stanislas by French Jesuit missionaries), their conversion to Catholicism, and their eventual return to the Islamic faith, exemplifies how Catholic attitudes would have affected Algerians as they encountered conversion efforts. One of the strongest chapters of the book, this examination of the missionary encounter on a human scale provides depth to the book’s larger argument. 

French Catholic reactions to 1860 attacks by Syrian Druzes on Maronite Christians in Mount Lebanon (at the time, a part of Ottoman-controlled Syria) occupy the middle section of the work. Of particular interest is the Oeuvre d’Orient in France—a more “liberal Catholic” group—and its response to the attacks, which anticipated a move towards “harsher, civilizational denigrations of Islam” (92). There is a great deal of interesting material in these chapters, including a discussion of why the French government was more supportive of religious missions in Ottoman areas than it was of Catholic proselytizing efforts in Algeria. Peterson shows convincingly how “liberal Catholic inventions of a conspiratorial, monolithic Islam in the 1860s had less to do with shoring up support for any particular colonial project” and “more to do with convincing fellow Frenchmen of the need for” an “explicitly Catholic foreign policy abroad” (136). While the history of the Oeuvre d’Orient and its response to the events in Mount Lebanon has clear reverberation for the broader history of French discourse on Islam, this section of the book does stand out for its comparative lack of engagement with Franco-Algerian relations, and thus reads as somewhat less integrated to the remainder of the work.

The final segment returns to the microhistories of colonial Algeria at which the author excels. The arrival of the Pères Blancs in Algeria marked a new willingness, on the part of Catholics, to work with secular colonial authorities, as well as a new turn in Catholic treatment of Muslims in Algeria, one more based on racist rhetoric about religious fanaticism than the earlier admiration for Muslim piety. The close reading of fundraising materials—including photographs—disseminated by Catholic charities provides a lively and informative site for excavating the way that their “harder, more disillusioned” views of Arabs and Muslims were spread (145). The final chapter, like the one about the Khoudja brothers, illuminates the potential effects of these shifting attitudes on Muslim children. In this instance, young Algerians were recruited to be part of the petit séminaire indigène, with the eventual the goal of forming a local priesthood. Peterson’s narration of these children’s traumatic experiences illuminates the circular process by which French racial discrimination against Algerian seminarians provoked understandable resentment, and Algerians’ subsequent abandoning of the seminary led to disillusionment on the part of Catholics, and a further hardening of their attitudes: not just in individual instances, but in their overarching approach to missionary work. The section of the chapter on Algerian seminarians and Catholic missionaries as they encountered the Code de l’indigénat, and the troubling move towards a biological explanation of “colonial difference,” is of particular interest. 

The gesture towards current debates on Islamophobia and laïcité in France at the end of the work, while brief, attests to the broader resonance of the topics it tackles. Sacred Rivals counts among its goals an effort to demonstrate “some of the Christian and colonialist histories behind a series of negative stereotypes about Muslims and Arabs,” many of which are “still current,” and makes a plea for greater “mutual toleration and understanding” (208). Through a compelling combination of broader historical narrative, and micro-examinations of their effects on individual actors, Sacred Rivals achieves this goal, and will be of interest to a broad readership.