Medicine and sainthood: Islamic science, French colonialism and the politics of healing in Morocco, 1877–1935

This dissertation examines the colonial relationship between Third Republican France and the Sultanate of Morocco through a social history of medical knowledge, 1877–1935. European science did not lead inevitably to European domination, for the sultans of Morocco appropriated European science (and scientists) from the end of the sixteenth century. However, the introduction of state institutions and colonial capital, beginning with the French military mission to Morocco in 1877, transformed scientific exchange into colonial conquest. A history of medicine reveals the complex nature of this colonial relationship and the impact of French Protectorate rule on Moroccan society. Moroccans and Frenchmen had different ways of knowing the body in the early twentieth century, which were embedded into different social frameworks. Moroccans understood traditional healing as an element of political sovereignty and used it to create historical order. Through “visiting the awliya\u27” (Friend of God, Islamic saint), patients linked political and religious figures into a living geography and integrated labor, welfare, and family lineage into a social framework. Medicine had political meaning in France as well, where colonial policymakers used medicine for the “civilizing mission,” a program to bring moral and material improvement to peoples of the French empire. After 1900, French positivists argued that societies could be placed along a developmental trajectory, depending upon their understanding of science. Muslim North Africans, they believed, could be guided to modernity through medicine. French colonial policies did not succeed in their ideological goals, but French rule did ultimately affect how Moroccans saw the physical world and located themselves within it. This dissertation explores these changes through two case studies: municipal public hygiene and women\u27s medicine/obstetrical practice. Colonial public hygiene contributed to French control over public space, water and housing in Moroccan cities. These changes did alter the social bases of traditional authority and affected how Moroccans organized politically. The problem of “women\u27s medicine” highlights the paradoxes of French Protectorate rule in Morocco and French approaches to Islam