French colonial strategy split Quranic rhetoric from waqf law to fragment native property

Evidence

Targeting family endowments went hand in hand with an unusually liberal strategy to centralize the Shariʿa institutions, with the disingenuously declared purpose of building Algeria’s religious unity. This was no contradiction at all. Advocating the Quran’s integrity, which appeared to maintain the “true” form of Islam, and simultaneously attacking the family waqf constituted a two-pronged weapon: the first allowed for the fragmentation of property and precluded it from entering the waqf domain, and the second broke up property held in joint ownership. Either way the French would defeat the “natives” into submission. This strategy had another advantage: maintaining a semblance of solidarity with, and insisting on, the Islamic tradition (by promoting the Quran’s injunctions) forestalled the much detested assimilation that, were it to run its full course, would prompt the Algerian Muslims to demand political rights, even rights equal to the French themselves. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 241

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Home Boy / other postcolonial texts about how colonial powers use religious rhetoric instrumentally, and to the broader theme of sovereignty as re-creation rather than rule. — connects to: the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”
• DEEPTHINKING: The two-pronged colonial move — pious Quranic solidarity to forestall assimilation on one side, property fragmentation on the other — against the backdrop of sovereignty-as-unbounded-whim is dense enough to sit with.