An Empire of Facts presents a fascinating account of the formation of French conceptions of Islam in France's largest and most important colony. During the period from 1870 to 1914; travelers; bureaucrats; scholars; and writers formed influential and long-lasting misconceptions about Islam that determined the imperial cultural politics of Algeria and its interactions with republican France. Narratives of Islamic mysticism; rituals; gender relations; and sensational crimes brought unfamiliar cultural forms and practices to popular attention in France; but also constructed Algerian Muslims as objects for colonial intervention. Personal lives and interactions between Algerian and French men and women inflected these texts; determining their style; content; and consequences. Drawing on sources in Arabic and French; this book places such personal moments at the heart of the production of colonial knowledge; emphasizing the indeterminacy of ethnography; and its political context in the unfolding of France's empire and its relations with Muslim North Africa.
#3006847 in Books Cambridge University Press 2000-10-30Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 8.98 x .63 x 5.98l; .90 #File Name: 0521659973244 pages
Review
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Negotiating ModernityBy A CustomerIn this manuscript Ali Mirsepassi; a professor of Sociology and Near Eastern Studies at Hampshire College; broaches a question of the first importance. Why and how did Iranian intellectuals manage to embrace modernity while at the same keeping a critical distance from it? By deconstructing the discourse of modernity in general and its apprehension among Iranian intellectuals in particular; the author manages to provide a rich account of how Iranians negotiated with the multifaceted challenge of modernity. In the course of doing so he criticizes (neo) Orientalist accounts of how the ascendancy of political Islam was made possible in Iran. This book offers an insightful account of how despite its vociferous rhetoric; the Iranian discourse of authenticity was itself impregnated with modernist sensibilities.Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization is a major addition to the field of Iranian intellectual history and deserves to be read by all those interested in this topic.
