Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956

Introduction. Colonial Embodiments

Introduction colonial embodiments In 1907, a doctor of the French government was beaten to death by a Muslim mob in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh. After clubbing him to death and crushing his head, the crowd dragged the naked corpse of Dr. Émile Mauchamp by the neck through the city streets on a rope. This gruesome spectacle served as the pretext for the French invasion of Oujda in 1907 and the establishment of a French protectorate in Morocco in 1912. At his funeral, the French minister of Foreign Affairs eulogized Mauchamp as “civilization’s martyr” to a fanatical Islamic hatred of science . But just before his death, rumors circulated in Marrakesh that the doctor prepared for an imminent French invasion by secretly poisoning his Muslim patients: [Mauchamp] belongs to a kind of French Christian freemasonry sworn to destroy the Muslims of Morocco. Savant and capable doctors like Mauchamp are chosen and sent among Moroccan populations. There, the doctors care for Arabs with the appearance of a great benevolence, curing them . . . gaining the confidence of all . . . but they have administered a subtle poison which acts two, three or four years later, and they will surely die.1 If we perform a historical autopsy, we find the viscera linking body to body politic. Poison is a way of knowing, a “French, Christian freemasonry ” that will enter Muslim bodies to destroy Islam and undermine Moroccan independence, a knowing that annihilates both religion and biological life in Muslim bodies. Conquest appears a political and epistemological invasion, a clash of sovereignties inside a human body that is at once the field of battle and its prize. Colonialism, then, is a story of bod- 2 medicine and the saints ies, how ways of knowing become ways of being in bodies corporeal and political, a story of embodiments. This book traces a history of colonial embodiment in Morocco through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic sultanate of Morocco and the Republic of France, 1877–1956. On the eve of colonialism , Frenchmen and Moroccans had very different ways of knowing the body. In a precolonial political imaginary derived from Islam, Moroccans invested sovereignty in God’s Islamic community (umma) and negotiated authority through a human body known as contiguous with the land, Islamic history in Morocco, and temporal politics. Frenchmen constructed the republican citizen as a bounded, rational, and sovereign individual whose physicality constituted one dimension of his relationship to the state. Medicine reveals the Franco-Moroccan encounter, for it draws upon scientific paradigms (cosmologies), knowledge systems (hygiene and medical theory), and the technologies of physical intervention (therapeutics ). As a social vehicle, the body is a mediator upon which to read ways of knowing and doing. A study of healing reveals the body’s social logics, for a repair of the body usually entails a repair of society; as Jean Comaroff writes, “The body social and the body personal always exist in a mutually constituitive relationship.”2 David Arnold has described colonial medicine as the hegemonic inscription of Foucauldian power/knowledge on the colonized body: “Colonialism used . . . the body as a site for the construction of its own authority , legitimacy and control.”3 Histories of colonial medicine illuminate how native bodies were invented as objects of scientific knowledge, racisms were naturalized, and health dictatorships were designed to sanitize , rationalize, and control native bodies. Yet the grand colonial medical schemes collapse in the social histories of colonial Africa and Asia, where unruly bodies eluded colonial control. Native patients often ran away from European hospitals, selectively used European cures while escaping (or ignoring) their ideological designs, or cheerfully extracted biomedical cures for re-integration within indigenous systems of healing. In the colonies , European medicine could not discipline colonized bodies, because it failed to constitute individual subjectivities. As Gyan Prakash notes, colonial biopower failed to create “self-subjecting individuals.”4 Yet anthropologies of healing reveal strange reintegrations. Colonial terror is reborn as a healing dynamic between white and Indian residents of the Putamayo region in South America.5 British biomedical technologies are renamed and circulate in an African semiotic field.6 Colonial officers long absent from Sudan now reincarnate as possessing spirits in a introduction 3 women’s Sudanese zar Islamic healing cult.7 A South African “madman” wears precolonial cosmologies and global capitalism on his body as colorful bricolage.8 Colonialism circulates in the viscera of postcolonial bodies, hidden in symbolic languages of corporeality and woven...