Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877–1956 by Ellen J. Amster (review)

Medicine and the Saints is an intriguing and innovative study of colonialism in Morocco that explores an array of “medical encounters” between the Moroccan state and the French colonial administration (2). The bulk of the book narrates the period from pre-Protectorate Morocco in the late nineteenth century until 1956, the year of Morocco’s independence. Amster challenges the view that colonial modernity displaced Islamic epistemology and indigenous approaches to healing and replaced them with a liberating and egalitarian positivist knowledge and medical science. Instead, she suggests, Moroccans digested “the experience of French colonialism and its forms of modernity” (5), ultimately elaborating a modern knowledge system to understand health and healing that “expresses different and layered ways of knowing” (209). This book offers a careful and engaging exploration of the negotiations between French and Moroccan knowledge systems.

Amster employs a wide range of disciplinary approaches and analyzes an impressive variety of primary sources consisting of Arabic manuscripts, French and Moroccan archival records, medical journals, and oral narratives. The book is organized into six chapters in addition to an introduction and an epilogue. The first three chapters effectively address the Moroccan digestion of French positivism and modernity in the pre-Protectorate period. In Chapter 1, Amster explores Moroccan Islamic conceptions of political sovereignty and legitimacy. Drawing on the work of Cornell, she identifies a uniquely Moroccan model of leadership that united sultanic and saintly authority, connected material and divine worlds, and was grounded in Sufi knowledge.¹ This Islamic idea of sovereignty and polity, she argues, disappeared in the early twentieth century. In order to defend his rule against the charismatic Sufi critic and rival Muhammad al-Kattani, Sultan ‘Abd al-Hafiz adopted scientific modernity and salafiyya—modern Islamic thought rooted in positivist knowledge from the Arab East. Amster suggests that positivism was strategically used by the Moroccan sultan and the ruling elite to discredit Sufism and Sufi knowledge.

Chapter 2 examines the French civilizing mission as a construct based “upon both a racial theory of the sciences and an idea of epistemology itself” (61). Amster notes that Auguste Comte, Ernest Renan, and Émile Durkheim provided the scientific language for conceiving of the conquest of North Africa as a civilizing mission. In Morocco, French physicians, informed by positivism and its civilizing orientation, “saw Islamic belief itself as a pathology of mind and society” (74); to them, republican science and colonial clinics offered a way to regulate and improve Islamic society. However, Amster suggests that Moroccan salafis who embraced scientific modernity “in order to purify religion and reform society” also absorbed the French positivist theory of knowledge and made Sufism and Sufi knowledge the target of their war (80).

In Chapter 3, Amster focuses on French medicine in Morocco on the eve of military occupation and colonization. She skillfully makes the point that “French medicine did not provoke a ‘clash of civilizations in Morocco’” (108). Rather, Moroccans were interested in Western science and adopted new technologies, while French physicians strategically adapted French medicine to elements of saintly healing. However, because of the co-optation of saints and Sufi brotherhoods by the Protectorate, Moroccan sainthood and the idea of Sufi saints protecting and healing the Moroccan umma disappeared. Subsequently, “Salafiyya became the only viable language of Moroccan political opposition, and the sultan became a new locus of Moroccan sovereignty” (109).

Chapter 4 considers French welfare in Protectorate Morocco from 1912 to 1937. Amster explores the internal contradictions of French colonialism, focusing her attention on four diseases. She meticulously demonstrates that colonial welfare fractured the population by race, provoked native resistance, and privileged ever-increasing colonial interests at the expense of Moroccans and that medical technologies often exacerbated disease. She maintains, however, that although French colonial welfare did not always improve Muslim health, “It did provide tools for Moroccans to critique French rule and to imagine a...