La France, l’Islam et la loi de 1905 Genèse coloniale d’un poncif : l’Incompatibilité

Abstract In the French collective imagination, Islam is the object of a triple representation. This religion is said to be the last to have been established on French territory through migratory flows from the former colonial empire, the most unsuited to the secularized context of French society, and the most alien to the French law of worship resulting from the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State. This article proposes to go beyond this representation and to put it into historical perspective. More precisely, it aims to deconstruct it, particularly from the point of view of Algeria, by looking back at the colonial genesis of a cliché that has undoubtedly left its mark: the impossibility of placing Islam under the liberal auspices of the French system of cults because of a presumed incompatibility, behind which there loomed above all the fear that Muslims would use it in a roundabout, anti-colonial manner. In return, some of them proved to be the guardians of this right in the face of structural intrusions of the state in Muslim affairs.