Islam, Colonialism and Resistance in the Contemporary Maghreb: A Postcolonial Perspective

It goes without saying that Marxist and secular forms of resistance have been given much priority in postcolonial discourse. We find that almost all prominent postcolonial works produced in the 1980s and 1990s celebrated the secular and Marxist nature of anticolonial liberation struggles. This emanates from the fact that the concept of resistance within postcolonialism has been defined in secular terms. So, postcolonial historians and critics marginalised the role of religious anti-colonial movements in favour of secular, nationalist and Marxist liberation movements, and avoided investigating the link between religion and colonialism. However, the post-9/11 global return of religion has pushed postcolonial critics and historians to re-open the question of religion. Viewed as an attempt to bring postcolonialism and Islam closer, this article presents Islam both as a mobilising ideology for the anticolonial movements in the contemporary Maghreb and a tool of colonialism used by the coloniser to sustain its domination.