The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912-1956: France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization

Following the French conquest of Morocco in 1911 the French established a network of colonial schools for Moroccan Muslims designed to further the agendas of the conquerors. The Moroccan Soul examines the history of the French educational system in colonial Morocco, the development of French conceptions about the “Moroccan soul,” and the effect these ideas had on pedagogy, policy making, and politics.

Based in large part on French conceptions of “Moroccanness” as a static, natural, and neatly bounded identity, colonial schooling was designed to minimize conflict by promoting the consent of the colonized. This same colonial school system, however, was also a site of interaction between colonial authorities and Moroccan Muslims and became a locus of changing strategies of Moroccan resistance and contestation, culminating in the rise of the Moroccan nationalist movement in the 1930s. Spencer D. Segalla reveals how the resistance of the colonized influenced the ideas and policies of the school system and how French ideas and policies shaped the strategies and discourse of anticolonial resistance.