In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 6 a midwife to modernity: the biopolitics of colonial welfare and birthing a scientific moroccan nation, 1936–1956 In 1952, the French physician Jean Mathieu and the sociologist Roger Maneville interviewed 167 traditional Muslim midwives (qablat) to determine their suitability for the “veritable corps of Moroccan midwives ” planned for native women by the protectorate health service, with “modern ideas of hygiene and pediatrics.”1 It is unsurprising that the report rejected the Muslim qabla as dangerous—obstetricians in Europe also attacked midwives to redefine birth as the physician’s province. But for Morocco, the study placed entire responsibility for the social ills of colonial industrialization on the Muslim midwife.2 And it was the qabla’s way of thinking that precluded Moroccans from self-governance: “This study will show the wisdom of the Government in making the acquisition of modern culture a prerequisite for Moroccan independence . . . Midwife by definition, intermediary, abortionist, sorceress, adviser, weaver of spells . . . The qabla allows us to see, despite the seeming evolution of customs , the immutability, one may say, of the Moroccan mentalité.”3 Only when Moroccans discarded the qabla’s Muslim mentalité could they be granted political independence from France: “[When they differentiate] between the domain of religion and the domain of positive knowledge. In a word, when they will have acquired the secular mind.”4 To achieve the secular mind, the French taught Muslim women to knit, nurse babies, and keep house. The protectorate’s “médico-social” welfare state, created after the Second World War, was in part an application of metropolitan science to empire; in the nineteenth century, the French state responded to tuberculosis in the French working classes with puériculture , the science of raising children. French colonial humanism adapted the solidarisme of Frédéric Le Play for use in the empire, as a way to create a French imperial family. But in Morocco, colonial policy makers intended maternal and infant health programs (PMI; Protection maternelle et infantile) specifically to destroy the Muslim mentalité and to refash- a midwife to modernity 175 ion Moroccans into rational, well-differentiated individuals ready for industrial work. These policies gave rise to a battle between Moroccan nationalists and the French protectorate to define and govern the modern Muslim family. The nationalist leaders Allal al-Fasi and Muhammad alWazzani defined independent Morocco through an Islamic modernist idea of the welfare state. Of interest to us here is the field of battle—the Muslim woman’s reproductive body. Why did Moroccan independence depend upon birth practice ? When and why did the Muslim woman’s veiled body become the symbol of an antirational “Muslim mentality,” and its uncovering the triumph of the secular republic? In obstetrics, French colonial authorities and Muslim nationalists fought over population control and reproduction , but they also struggled to define both the body in public life and the political subject created by public health institutions. But can the body talk back? Can the body tell its own truth despite colonial and nationalist biopolitical strategies? Obstetrics and birth in Morocco illustrate the nature of medicine as a disjointed set of epistemologies, practitioners, and clinical practices rather than a discursive monolith—a medicine that can allow the human body to speak its own truth. the great awakening: tuberculosis, urbanism, and a new sociology of islam Nineteenth-century French doctors praised Morocco for its apparent immunity to “phtisie,” or pulmonary tuberculosis, but in 1922 a Fez native dispensary recorded 1,505 Muslim tuberculosis cases in one month.5 In a report of 1934, a Rabat doctor called tuberculosis “the primary cause of death for Muslim adults.”6 Yet as late as 1932, the director of the Service de la santé et de l’hygiène publiques (SHP), Jules Colombani, denied that tuberculosis was an epidemic among Muslims in Morocco.7 How is it that the protectorate “did not see,” or made itself not to see, an epidemic of Muslim tuberculosis until the 1940s? This blindness was due in part to the decentralized nature of the colonial health service, which impeded data collection, but the key lay in an early French sociological vision of Morocco as rural, tribal, and static. “Primitive” Moroccans could not have tuberculosis, the great industrial disease of nineteenth-century Europe. Only when the colonial frame of vision shifted with the modernist sociology of Robert Montagne did French authorities “discover” Muslim tuberculosis , recognize Morocco as an industrializing country, and take action in a new colonial welfare state targeting Muslim women and children. Robert...

Share