Shadows and Light: Colonial Modernity and the Grand Mosquee of Paris

The earth has been made to me a mosque.

--Saying of the Prophet Muhammed

Because, without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, [the exercise of power] gives 'power of mind over mind.'

--Michel Foucault

It must be a silent place facing Mecca. It needs to be spacious so that the heart may feel at ease, and high so that prayers may breathe there. There must be ample light so as to have no shadows; the whole should be perfectly simple; and a kind of immensity must be encompassed by the forms. . . . Nothing should be hidden from view.

--Le Corbusier ¹

In 1911, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, the man later known as Le Corbusier, would travel to Istanbul in search of miracles and meaning, both for architecture and for modern living. The young, rather mystical draftsman would be so stunned by the mosques and their sublime architecture that he would write the above lines in homage to them. It was during this trip that Corbusier discovered the importance of light and form for his own rational and utopian system of architecture. For years afterwards, he would try to implement his architectural system across France and Europe, though with only limited success. And like so many others, when he couldn't achieve his desires in Europe, he would move his testing ground to the colonies and overseas territories of Europe--for Corbusier, to Algiers in particular. ²

In recent years, some excellent work--by Gwendolyn Wright, Janet Abu-Lughod, Timothy Mitchell--has investigated the relationship between the modernity of colonialism and the planning of the modern colonial city. ³ Here we discover, for example, how colonial urbanism spatially executed its historical understanding of the world through a form of "urban apartheid": how the modern European colonial city needed the existence of the dilapidated native city ("the old barbarian city," as the magazine Le monde colonial illustré called it), ⁴ with its lack of European rational planning, to illustrate and perform the need for la mission civilisatrice. And we see how the European colonial city was also a kind of "virgin" space for European planners and architects, who took advantage of the opportunity to produce an entirely new built environment to test novel forms of urban planning linked to modern flows of colonial capital and goods, along with the allure of tourism and colonial migration. As General Lyautey himself proclaimed, North Africa was for France "what the Far West is for America: an excellent testing ground for creating new energy, rejuvenation, fecundity." ⁵

But this is only one half of the story, a one-way journey landing in the soil of Algiers. Meanwhile, another migration is moving swiftly across the Mediterranean, sometimes in subterranean ways. This is of course the movement of the colonized themselves across the sea and into the metropole. Postcolonial studies and migration literature don't ignore this movement, but they tend to locate it largely in the historical context of post-independence. In the case of France, North African migration is largely figured as a post-1962 phenomenon, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of North Africans had been living in metropolitan France since the First World War. Their treatment not only sets the stage for later migrations and for the virulent racism found today, but it also reveals how colonialism comes back home. Furthermore, this migration should help us understand the modernist logics of difference and purity--centered in this case around a concept of capturing Islam--that built both colonialism and our contemporary urban environment. That history is the subject of this paper, but the main character is not a population but a building, the Grande Mosquée de Paris, built by the French between 1922-26 for their "Muslim sons." The plot (pun intended) is the city of Paris--"capital of metropolitan France, but also the capital of France overseas." ⁶ And...