One French bureaucrat, Andre Quellien, is credited with inventing the word ‘Islamophobia’ in his writings about how to manage the locals in Africa and in the Middle East. Quellien sees Islam as a benign force in local societies, a force with colonial administrators can harness to keep the peace, as historian Pascal Bruckner writes:
In 1910, Andre Quellien, a writer working for the French minister of the colonies, published a work entitled Muslim Politics in French West Africa. Addressed to specialists and imperial officials, it offers moderate praise for the religion of the Quran as “practical and indulgent,” and better adapted to the “natives,” whereas Christianity is “too complicated, too abstract, too austere for the rudimentary, materialistic mentality of the negro.”
In short, Quellien is advising the French Empire to let the locals keep their Islamic traditions and beliefs. The French, in Quellien’s opinion, should not bother introducing the locals to Christianity.
He advises the French to avoid Islamophobia, and rather to see Islam as an ally. Islam will help the French with their task of keeping order in the colonies. Was Quellien correct in his assessment? Arguments can be made on both sides: on the one hand, Islam’s authoritarian bent seems to support civil authorities; on the other hand, Islam would eventually be a part of overthrowing those civil authorities, dismantling the French Empire, and instituting local autocrats.
Pascal Bruckner reminds the reader that the word ‘Islamophobia’ was first introduced in the context of managing the colonies which were parts of a global empire:
The author of this report thought it important to emphasize that so long as it was treated tactfully, Islam would become French colonialism’s best ally and favor European influence and control.
The indigenous religions of Africa were, in many places, eradicated by Islamic invaders. Prior to the Muslim conquests of the late 600s and early 700s, Africa hosted a variety of religions, including local anamistic traditions, as well as Judaism and Christianity. These belief systems coexisted peacefully.
As a colonial administrator, Quellien saw Islam as a useful force because it kept a potential anamistic revival at bay.
Because the religion of the Prophet “wrests these peoples away from fetishism and its degrading practices,” Quellien argued that it was imperative to stop seeing Islam as fanaticism and to treat it instead with a benevolent neutrality, thus foreshadowing the great Arabist Louis Massignon (1883 - 1962), a left-wing Catholic who specialized in Muslim mysticism and advocated dialogue between Islam and the Roman Catholic Church.
While he perhaps didn’t foresee the danger which Islam would be to the French Empire, Quellien did see the need for a balanced view of Islam. Some European authors had developed idealized and naive images of Islam, overlooking the brutality of Islamic civil law.
European universities had highly developed studies of Semitic Philology and Orientalism, but the academic nature of the these studies centered on ancient texts, and were unaware of the practical realities of Muslim society in the Near East and in Africa.
Thus Quellien denounced the “Islamophobia” that was rampant among colonial officials, but he was just as opposed to the “Islamophilia” peculiar to Romantic orientalism: “singing the praises of Islam is just as biased as describing it unjustly.”
In his analysis of Islam, Quellien is less concerned with truth and justice, and more concerned with keeping the peace. The primary task of an imperial administrator — and this is true, whether in the French Empire, the Russian Empire, the Roman Empire, or any other empire — is keeping the domestic peace and producing revenue. It is in this context that Quellien sees Islam as useful.
Islam must be objectively considered as a tool for governing. Here, Quellien writes as an administrator concerned about social peace: he deplores the temptation to demonize a religion that keeps the peace in the empire, no matter what abuses — minor ones, in his view — it may commit, such as the continuing practices of slavery and polygamy.
While some accounts of imperialism include the notion that empires impose, or attempt to impose, their own religious culture onto their colonies, Quellien here advises the opposite: he urges the French Empire to resist the urge to introduce Christianity into the colonies.
He argues that it is better to leave the locals under the rule of Islam. This will make the colony more manageable for the French.
Since Islam is colonialism’s best ally, its followers must be protected from the harmful influence of modern ideas and their ways of life must be respectded (an attitude found today on the far left and in English-speaking countries).
Quellien is unsentimental and almost machiavellian in his clear-eyed assessment of Islam as a tool for controlling local populations. He is mercenary in regard to concepts like truth or justice, seeing rather that Islam will be useful for managing locals. He does not address the question of whether Islam will bring truth and justice.
Quellien can be seen as either brilliant in his insight, or as foolishly naive. Only a few decades after he wrote, a destructive wave of uprisings would take away the order which the French had been able to establish in their various colonies.
The locals would be left under the arbitrary and authoritarian rule of various dictatorships. Civil order would decline, as would the standards of living. Islam would be a part of the uprisings and of the regimes which were established in the vacuum created by the French exit from the colonies. No longer moderated by the presence of French colonial administrators, Islam would become more powerful in society, fanning the flames of militant political fanaticism, and establishing intolerant social structures.
