French colonial expropriation of Algerian land partly served winemaking, an activity Islam prohibits

Evidence

It may not be a detail, or without irony, that much of the fray over Algerian land, and the consequent campaign against the waqf, had to do with coveting chunks of Algerian territory for cultivating vineyards for the production of the much-beloved French wines, an intoxicant prohibited by sharʿi precepts. As genocides will become relevant for us later, it is no detail that by 1962, close to a million Algerians lost their lives to French colonialism, most having been unarmed civilians, including a large proportion of women and children. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 246

Categorization

• CANDY: The ironic detail that colonial land-grabbing in a Muslim territory was driven partly by wine production — a practical nugget for conversation.
• SHARE: The vineyard/wine irony behind the Algerian waqf expropriation is a narrow tidbit worth sending to someone interested in colonial economic history.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”