Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-Century France and Algeria

In 1839, the Abbé Jacques Suchet was sent to the Algerian city of Constantine, recently conquered by French forces, to minister to the new French colonial population there. He commented favorably on the Arabs' Muslim religiosity, perhaps seeing them as fertile ground for missionary work. In the mid-1870s, when the Abbé Edmond Lambert toured another colonial Algerian city, he recorded that Arabs were inherently "liars, thieves, lazy in body and spirit" and that even their seeming piety was i...