Battles for Hearts and Minds the Nogent Mosque During World War I

Battles for Hearts and Minds The Nogent Mosque During World War I

Maureen G. Shanahan

little-known story about the history of Islam and former exhibition pavilions were transformed into a tempo- in France is the construction of what is some- rary hospital largely serving colonial soldiers, many of whom were times claimed to be the first mosque in the from France’s North African territories. The hospital, intended French hexagon. Promoted as an accom- to serve a largely Muslim community, added the mosque in the modation to the religious needs of France’s middle of the war. Built in the context of a wartime propaganda Muslim soldiers serving during World War I, campaign, it was a response to a German mosque constructed for it was inaugurated in April 1916 in the Parisian suburb of Nogent- French prisoners-of-war in a camp near Berlin. The French mil- sur-MarneA at the far eastern end of the Bois de Vincennes (here- itary then circulated photographs of the Nogent Mosque in a bi- after Nogent Mosque) (Fig. 1). Parisians and tourists alike are fa- lingual French-Arabic counter-propaganda pamphlet, on bilingual miliar with the Great Mosque of Paris, which opened in 1926 in and Arabic postcards, and in wartime photography albums. central Paris and was dedicated in honor of the 100,000 Muslim How the mosque is interpreted and remembered in contem- subjects who died in World War I. Like the Great Mosque, the porary culture raises questions about the legacy and losses of Nogent Mosque figures within a genealogy of colonial exhibition colonialism. Closed in 1919 when demobilization required co- practices, tourism culture, imperial surveillance, and an episte- lonial soldiers to return to their homelands, the mosque was de- mology of Islam. But the Nogent Mosque’s wartime construction stroyed in the 1920s after construction on the Great Mosque of and location on a former exhibition site make it a pivotal signi- Paris had begun. Its location is now marked by a simple stone stele fier in a shifting colonial imaginary. Further, the French Army’s depicting the façade and the dates marking its construction and production and circulation of photographs and postcards of the closure: 1915–1919 (Fig. 2). Now known as the Jardin d’Agrono- Nogent site and the mosque reveal a profound ambivalence be- mie tropicale, the terrain serves at least three functions: a public tween demands for loyalty placed upon colonial soldiers and trust garden; the setting for the Centre de coopération internationale in their fealty to France. en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD), a re- The Nogent Mosque was built on a site then known as the Jardin search center on tropical plants; and a historical library in one of Colonial, which housed a colonial agronomy school founded in original agronomy school buildings. Although the site holds itself 1899. Before the war, the school commissioned greenhouses, out on its website and signage as a site of memory, most of the buildings for instruction and collections, and exhibition pavil- structures from the colonial era have not been preserved and are ions. It hosted an agricultural exhibition in 1905 and a colonial in ruins. These ruins include the first agronomy building, com- exhibition in 1907. During the war, the instructional buildings pleted in 1902; several structures brought from the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris; others transferred from the 1906 colonial exhibitions in Marseille and in Paris; and pavilions constructed for the Maureen G. Shanahan is a professor of art history at James Madison University. Her current research focuses on film and photography of the garden’s 1907 colonial exhibition. The site still includes statues of French colonial soldier and subject during World War I. This research colonial-era administrators; war memorials dedicated to colonial has been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities soldiers in the interwar years; and a collection of monuments to summer seminar, a Clark Art Institute award, and a French Fulbright “the glory of colonial expansion.” Award. A catalog of her co-curated exhibition, Colonial Wounds/Post- In this paper, I am concerned with how the mosque signified colonial Repair (March–April 2019) at James Madison University’s within competing assertions of colonial benevolence and demands Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art, is distributed by the University of Virgin- for loyalty, contradictory claims that emerged within the context ia Press. [email protected] of multiple challenges to French colonialism. Isabelle Levêque’s

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shanahan.indd 18 7/31/2019 1:47:06 PM 1 Jardin Colonial Hospital Mosque, Nogent-sur- Marne. [April] 1916. Photograph. #00002297. Photo: Ciradimages et Bibliothèque historique du research on the site, initially a study for the city of Paris, provides the Cirad á Nogent-sur-Marne © Cirad. best documentation (Levêque, Pinon and Griffon 2005; Levêque 2003). Michel Renard’s (2015) research deepens the documenta- 2 Stone stele commemorating the Jardin Colonial Mosque. Inscribed “Hôpital du Jardin tion on the mosque but maintains a focus on Islamic iconography. Colonial Mosquée, 1915–1919.” However, these histories do not address how the mosque signified Photo: Richard Fogarty, August 2008 within the visual culture and discursive formations of orientalism and colonialism. As Robert Aldrich has argued (1999; 2005: 61–67), the Jardin Colonial is a case study of the “vestiges of the During the war, the Nogent Mosque was a key element of a colonial empire” in and around Paris. Claimed by historian Naomi propaganda battle for the loyalty of the Muslim subject in French Davidson (2016) as a precursor to the Great Mosque of Paris, which territories, and this battle was largely fought on a visual-cultural exemplifies a postwar “Islam française,” the Nogent Mosque might terrain that deployed photography, film, and postcards, as well also be understood as a precursor to the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, as architecture. In serving as a material manifestation of France’s whose colonial pavilions encode what Patricia Morton (2003) de- counter-propaganda aimed at retaining and preserving the loyalty scribes as an “architectural physiognomy” that reinforced stereo- of its Muslim subjects, the Nogent Mosque foregrounds the rituals, types and hierarchized colonized cultures. The mosque’s design structures, and personnel of religious institutions at the expense of figures within architectural histories traced by Zeynep Çelik other political-social and cultural types of association. Although (1992), Mark Crinson (1996), Patricia Morton (2003), and Steven the mosque’s construction occurred in response to enemy propa- Nelson (2007). Their research investigates colonialist and oriental- ganda, German propaganda was not the only or even the primary ist ways of looking at indigenous architecture as well as ideologies threat to loyalty. Dissent, criticisms, resistance, and revolutionary invested in exhibition era structures. The Nogent Mosque and the threats came from multiple sources within the empire. How then Jardin Colonial became the subject of multiple postcards, photo- did the French military understand the mosque as a visual tool graphs, and films whose circulation and distribution had, I argue, in the propaganda war? Why would they imagine it to be an ef- competing and contradictory functions and audiences. As scholars fective symbol of French benevolence when other material condi- such as Ali Behdad (2016), Luke Gartlan (2013), and Martin Jay tions were not addressed? How might the mosque have functioned and Sumathi Ramaswamy (2014) have shown, photography played not only as a projection of French orientalist fantasies but also as a historic role in the formation of orientalism and in the shifting a materialization of a benevolent self-image that simultaneously political and power dynamics of the colonial and imperial gaze. disavowed colonialism’s brutality and oppression?

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shanahan.indd 19 7/31/2019 1:47:08 PM THE MOSQUE AS ORIENTALIST SIGN Architectural diagrams of the Nogent Mosque show that it can be understood within French orientalist designs for colonial exhibitions as sites of imaginary travel, leisure, and entertainment (Figs. 3–4). The undated designs, probably produced in December 1915, are signed by “the architect of the Jardin Colonial. M. Péri.” But little information about him exists. Ostensibly intended as space for the hospital’s Muslim soldiers to pray, the mosque’s main room was only about 46 square meters (495 square feet). In addition to its primary entrance, the mosque had separate entrances for the minaret and a small “lavatorium.” It is unclear what the function of this lavatorium would have been, since ritual ablution depends upon running water near the main public entrance. Nor is it clear if this smaller room was ever completed, since no photographs of the rear of the structure exist. The directional orientation on the plan indicates that, in order to face east towards Mecca, the believer would have to position himself facing the minaret and the area

3 M. Péni. Hôpital du Jardin Colonial Mosquée. Echelle 0.02 p.m. Dessin par l’architecture du Jardin Colonial. (“Mosque of the Colonial Garden Hospital. .02 scale per meter. Architectural drawing for the Colonial Garden.”) Front and rear views. [December 1915]. Photo: courtesy of Isabelle Levêque, Archives de Paris, Direction de l’urbanisme.

4 M. Péni. Floor plan of the Nogent Mosque. [December 1915]. Photo: courtesy of Isabel Levêque, Archives de Paris, Direction de l’urbanisme.

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shanahan.indd 20 7/31/2019 1:47:09 PM 5 “Jardin Colonial. Hôpital Colonial. Un pavillon et blessés dans le jardin.” (Colonial Garden. Colonial Hospital. [Guyana] Pavilion and wounded in the garden.) Nogent-sur-Marne, January 14, 1916. Photo: Collection La Contemporaine, Fonds Valois. VAL 403/029.

6 Exterior view, Nogent Mosque. 1916. Photo: Collection La Contemporaine, Fonds Valois. VAL 403/002.

marked “prières” (prayers). Its size and scale to the human figure, minaret, invoking it as a communal space but also suggesting the as represented by the male figure depicted near the entrance, sug- soldier at leisure and on leave. Rather than permitting the viewer gest that it was similar in size to colonial pavilions already on site. the fantasy of faraway travel and exotic lands, the visibility of A photography album maintained by the Jardin Colonial permits North African men as soldiers calls attention to the immediacy a comparison between the Pavillon de la Guyanne built for the and proximity of the war. 1907 colonial exhibition and the mosque (Figs. 5–6). Although Exterior shots of the Nogent Mosque, taken on multiple occa- the mosque is perhaps a third taller and wider than the Guyana sions starting early in 1916, suggest that its style borrowed from pavilion, which was used during the war as a ward for twenty-two orientalist architecture and exhibition culture. The mosque’s en- soldiers, both are relatively intimate spaces. In both the soldiers trance portal projects from the facade of the main building, form- appear organized before the structure in wide, distant shots aimed ing a simple porch with a few steps, in the Hispano-Islamic ar- to capture the building and the men. In the image of the Guyana chitectural language used at Maurice Yvon’s former Ecole colonial pavilion, the tallest of the six French men turns toward a military (1896) (now Ecole nationale d’administration publique) in Paris. photographer in the foreground at far right, whose black armband The mosque’s large, carved wooden double door is framed by a signals the war’s losses. double jamb, surmounted by a stained glass window in a geomet- The incorporation of the military photographer in the Guyana ric design, and set in a rounded and tapered horseshoe arch. The pavilion image reminds us that the French military had to com- door, transom window, and framing jambs are in turn framed by pete with illustrated photography magazines over the image of the war, and that, in early 1915, it sought to gain control of that public image through a combination of censorship policies and the formation of photography and film sections (Forcade 2004: 451–66; Véray 2004: 701–16). In the mosque photograph (Fig. 6), no photographer is visible, but the colonial imaginary is evident in the stag- ing of a soldier on the balcony of the small minaret, his arms raised in a performative display of a call to prayer. By comparison to the photograph of the mosque in Figure 1, the mosque now has Arabic calligraphy above the portal proclaiming “Praise be to Allah alone,” suggesting that Figure 1 was taken shortly before the final decoration was attached. The figures in the later photograph animate the scene. Uniformed men sit on the steps of the mosque and stand together in conversation before the

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shanahan.indd 21 7/31/2019 1:47:09 PM 7 F.-R. Lapeyrère. Ecole nationale superieur d’agriculture colonial (ENSAC), Jardin Colonial, Nogent-sur-Marne. 1902. Photograph published in La Dépêche colonial illustrée (June 30, 1909). Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France

8 F.-R. Lapeyrère. Pavilion de la Tunisie. 1906- 1907. Photograph #00005965. Photo: Ciradimages et Bibliothèque historique du Cirad á Nogent-sur-Marne, © Cirad.

color tiles and surmounted by the Arabic inscription. The cornice and crenelated roofline (Figs. 9–10). The similarity of the mosque crowning the portal is decorated with a blind arcade and rectan- tile design to these suggests that it may have been designed by gular pediment, resembling and miniaturizing elements of the en- the same architect or drawn from the same craftsmen for the ex- trance portal for the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia, which terior decorations. One report interpreted the ENSAC building had in turn been replicated in the Tunisian Pavilion by Henri as “pure Tunisian style decorated with faïence that someone had Saladin for the 1900 Universelle Exposition de Paris. The pairs of the whimsy to bring from Turkey and some of which came from horseshoe-arched windows, their stained glass, framing bas-relief the Bardo Palace, now partially demolished” (quoted in Levêque, patterns, and the rectangular decorative tiles all participate in the Pinon, and Griffon 2005: 60). It is not clear if the writer is referring visual language of orientalist architecture in Paris constructed over to the original Bardo in Tunisia or the replica built in 1867 at Parc the preceding fifty years. Montsouris as the Tunisian pavilion for the colonial exhibition that The mosque’s orientalist aesthetics, especially its crenelated year. What the review does suggest is that the “pure Tunisian style” roof and simplified facade with decorative floral tiles, share the decorations, Turkish faïence, and Bardo tiles (original or not) are features of two extant buildings at the Jardin Colonial, suggesting an undifferentiated mix and that origin and originality are indis- a common architectural style. These design elements resemble tinguishable from simulacra and replica. the garden’s original building for the Ecole nationale superieur d’agronomie colonial (hereafter ENSAC) (1902) and the Pavillon de la Tunisie (1907) (Figs. 7–8). The ENSAC building contained a sixty-person lecture hall, chemistry laboratories, and a concierge apartment, but was used as a movie theater during the war, while the Tunisian Pavilion displayed Tunisian products during the 1907 colonial exhibition but functioned as a hospital ward with thir- ty-two beds during the war (Levêque 2003: 100–101). Isabelle Levêque, Dominique Pinon, and Michel Griffon credit F.-R. Lapeyrère, an architect-entrepreneur from Bordeaux, with designing these two buildings, as well as the Pavillon de l’Indochine, but little information exists about his career or other projects (Levêque, Pinon and Griffon 2005: 60, 85, 90). The original color tiles are still visible on the ENSAC and Tunisian buildings, although the Tunisian pavilion has since lost its dome

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shanahan.indd 22 7/31/2019 1:47:10 PM 9 ENSAC building. Photo: M.G. Shanahan, March 2017

10 Detail of tiles, ENSAC building. Photo: M.G. Shanahan, March 2017

The mosque as a recurring motif exemplifies Edward Said’s Not a grand structure like the Paris or Fréjus mosque, the (1994) argument about orientalism as a set of discursive, systemic, Nogent Mosque’s small size and interior design configure it within institutional, and career-making practices taking force from the the legacy of colonial exhibition pavilions, which enclosed cafés, Napoleonic era onwards. From the time of Napoleon’s Egyptian replicated marketplaces, or displayed colonial products for the campaign in 1789 through the nineteenth century, the caravan- visual pleasure of the bourgeois consumer. The Nogent Mosque’s serai, bazaar, hammam, and mosque became architectural genres small interior displays an orientalist’s horror vacuii. Textiles and taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and an important part of French ornamentation cover the walls and ceiling, resembling a fantastical academic eclecticism (Leconte 2009: 43–67). As Zeynep Çelik has rug merchant’s shop more than a mosque interior (Figs. 11–12). shown, mosque facades or simulacra became a significant part of Reports in the September 2, 1916 issue of the Parisian daily Excelsior exhibition culture in the nineteenth century, from Léon Parvillée’s claim that Algerian and Moroccan carpets came on loan from the designs for the Ottoman Empire in 1867 to the Algerian pavilion, Louvre, a lantern from General Hubert Lyautey, then governor conflating elements of multiple Tlemcen mosques, in 1878, to general of Morocco, and a mihrab from the Sultan of Morocco. Henri-Jules Saladin’s Tunisian pavilions in 1889 and 1900 (Çelik The prewar Nogent exhibitions provided earlier iterations of this 1992: 96–100, 125–31). The first permanent functioning mosque in France was the Great Mosque of Paris, designed by French architects Robert Fournez and Maurice Mantout, constructed after World War I from 1922 to 1926. A diminished form of Al Qairawan in Fez and a “cité musulman,” the mosque complex is, Moustafa Bayoumi argues, a permanent display of colonial travel and a “co-opted and digest- ible Islam for a native French population” (Bayoumi 2000: 284). The mosque at Fréjus (1928–30) in southern France was built by the French military for its African soldiers. Modeled after the Great Mosque of Djenne in Mali and planned as a part of a West African village, it never served any religious purpose and lacked a qibla, mihrab, and prayer space. Christine Gruber has argued that it was a propaganda effort intended to suggest the soldiers’ homeland (Gruber 2012: 37, 46).

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shanahan.indd 23 7/31/2019 1:47:10 PM 11 Interior, Nogent Mosque. [1916]. Photograph. Photo: Ciradimages et Bibliothèque historique du Cirad á Nogent-sur-Marne, © Cirad.

12 Interior, Nogent Mosque. [1916]. Postcard. Photo: Collection of the Musée Nogent.

genre of display. In a long article describing the August 1905 ex- captured the scopophilic gaze of an exhibition-going public. But position at the Jardin Colonial, La Dépêche colonial illustrée pub- the garden’s “curious mix” of former colonial pavilions in the “ver- lished a photograph of the Fine Arts Room with a corner of the dant enclosure” seemed to contradict “the even more strange” ap- room transformed into a tentlike structure constructed of multi- pearance of the “wounded who live there.” The “contrast between patterned textile panels and furnished with stuffed armchairs. nature, stone, and faces strikes you,” he wrote, as though a desire to The pavilion-sized Nogent Mosque, its orientalist style, its inte- find a pleasurable if inanimate colonial spectacle had been under- rior décor, and its setting within a former exhibition space locate mined by the living, discerning gaze of the colonial soldier. Guided it within a genealogy of voyeuristic and objectifying cultural prac- by “an Arab surgeon and doctor,” the journalist toured the hospi- tices. As Timothy Mitchell has argued, the orientalism on display tal, encountering convalescing soldiers in the Madagascan pavil- in the 1889 Exposition Universelle de Paris represented not only a ion. One, singing a popular French song, “stops on our approach, French imperial power but also a “new machinery for laying out petrified.” The journalist’s use of the word médusé (petrified) sug- the meaning of the world,” the “world as exhibition,” and the “sub- gests not only that the soldier froze in response to the journalist’s ject as object” (Mitchell 2009: 409–23). In the Egyptian section, un presence but also that the journalist manifested the same kind of rue de Caire (“a Cairo street”), the mosque was a façade. Because objectifying and alienating gaze that the Egyptian visitors experi- Europeans took the exhibition as a display of the real, this “reality enced on the rue de Caire in 1889. That the exhibitionary mode of effect” claimed an exact relationship to the external world. Yet the seeing had by 1916 become naturalized is suggested by the jour- model—in this case, the mosque façade—was also differentiated nalist’s closing description. On leaving the park, as he passes the in time and space from the thing it represented, that is, a mosque in Cairo. The visitor was thus alienated from the material referent through mediating materials—the catalogs, plans, signs, programs, guide- books—that constituted meaning through its discursive formations and modes of representation. These alienating and objectifying modes of seeing extended to French spectators’ attitude towards Egyptian visitors, as described in Arabic accounts. This “reality effect” in the eye of the European and the simultaneous objectifying and alienating impact upon colonial subjects are evident in reports about the Jardin Colonial hospital and mosque. In September 1916, a French journalist reported on the Jardin Colonial’s transformation into a temporary hospital and

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shanahan.indd 24 7/31/2019 1:47:11 PM 13 “Jardin Colonial Hôpital Colonial. Chambre mortuaire.” Nogent sur Marne, 1915. Photo: La Contemporaine, Fonds Valois VAL 403/073.

14 Print of ink drawing of the Nogent Mosque. [January 1916] Archives du Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires étrangères Diplomatiques-La Courneuve, 1CPCOM 1663. Photo: Archives Diplomatiques-La Courneuve, © Cirad.

open door of the mosque, he describes an orientalist tableau: “His feet naked, an Arab has just prostrated himself. It is already the hour of evening prayer” (Annebault 1916: 9). Made to be a voyeur, the reader is invited to see religious ritual as theatrical display. The mosque as stage set for an exotic tableau seems aimed to reassure the French reader (and writer) that the colonial subject could be contained within an orientalist spectacle. It is at odds with the more dissonant image the article begins with: the modernity of the colonial soldier within a garden that had, only a decade before, presented the colonial subject as a figure of primitivism. The dis- juncture between the garden’s prewar use as a site of spectacle and leisure for the Parisian and its wartime function for injured soldiers convalescing from a traumatizing new kind of war raises questions about the shift in how the colonizer and colonized encountered each other. If the mosque was a visual display of benevolence, who was meant to see it, to be its audience or “consumer”: the wartime Parisian, the wartime colonial soldier, or some other visitor or viewer? How how did prewar conceptions of leisure figure in what viewers saw in the image of the colonial soldier in convalescence and at rest in a colonial garden? The significant numbers of colonial soldiers fighting on French terrain, convalescing in hospitals in and around Paris, and being buried in regional cemeteries dramatically challenged prewar visual and spatial codes. Before the war, there had been a minus- cule number of colonial subjects in France, perhaps as few as 5,000 (Bayoumi 2000: 278). But due to the manpower needs of the war, France recruited some 600,000 colonial men as soldiers and work- ers, about half of whom were from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia (Deroo 2014: 138–39). Hospitals in the Paris region, including the Jardin Colonial, Hôpital Cochin in the center of Paris, Hôpital Villemin in the Bois de Boulogne, and the American Red Cross Hospital in Neuilly cared for French colonial soldiers. Between August 1914 and May 1919, the Jardin Colonial hospital cared for almost 5,000 wounded soldiers, most of whom were North Africans and Muslim. By November 1915, there were 172 beds in five pavilions with plans to expand (Levêque 2003: 99–105).

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shanahan.indd 25 7/31/2019 1:47:12 PM 15 Soldier at Nogent Cemetery. [October] 1915. Photo: La Contemporaine, Fonds Valois 403/081.

UNCERTAIN LOYALTIES AND saint’s niche on the wall above him and to the viewer’s left estab- CERTAIN REVOLTS lishes the religious paradigm. In another photograph, taken in the In this wartime context, the Jardin Colonial’s transformation hospital’s small “mortuary chamber” prior to the construction into a hospital undermined the colonialist and orientalist fanta- of the mosque, an enormous Red Cross banner covers the entire sies foregrounded in exhibition aesthetics and consumer culture. back wall and visually dominates two flag-draped beds and a coffin Archival records and photography albums show that news re- below it (Fig. 13). This image precedes a series of photographs of ports, film, photography, and postcards of the Jardin Colonial, “a Muslim funeral” on January 12, 1916, probably of Bouabdallah the mosque, and the convalescing soldiers became an import- Lakhdar Ben Ahmed, an Algerian who died the day before and ant part of wartime propaganda about France’s treatment of its who is buried in the Nogent cemetery. Muslim soldiers and their loyalty to France. But the war’s mass Religious accommodations, represented by the mosque, may production of wounded and dead also put pressure on France’s have responded less to the demands of colonial subjects than at- war ministry to respond to the religious needs and demands of tacks by an enemy propaganda campaign. Before the war, on June these Muslim soldiers. 25, 1911, the French president had decreed the formation of the By September 1915, the War Ministry had created a photogra- Commission interministérielle des Affaires musulmanes (CIAM), phy album of the Jardin Colonial intended to be distributed and a committee supervised by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and published in North African newspapers for a popular audience. Colonies and the under-secretary of state to the interior, that sought Meant to show the types of medical care and restful garden envi- to manage French relations with its Muslim subjects (Levêque ronment provided to injured soldiers, the album, now in Nanterre's 2005: 169). But in 1915, the Germans and Ottomans launched La Contemporaine archives, also evidence the imposition of campaigns to encourage French Muslim soldiers to defect to the a Christian iconography. According to letters in the Archives opposing side. Around the same time, on July 3, 1915, the Parisian Diplomatiques at La Courneuve, the Ministry sent photography daily Le Rappel announced that two Algerian imams, Cheik Bou albums to the French governor general of Algeria (September Mezrac el Mokrani and Katrandji Sid Abderrahmane, had been 16, 1915), Governor General Lyautey of Morocco (October 6, designated by Governor General of Algeria Charles Lutaud for ap- 1915), and the consulate general of France in Egypt (November pointment by the War Ministry to serve under the wartime mili- 1915) (AD-LC 1CPCOM 1663). The letters state that the images tary government of Paris for the purpose of ministering to Muslim should be disseminated “among the indigenous populations” and soldiers at hospitals and health services in the region. Articles in Le should testify to the “support and concern that the Government of Matin on December 10, 1915 and Le Petit Journal the next day an- the [French] Republic has brought to the benefit of our wounded nounced that the CIAM planned the construction of the mosque Muslim soldiers all desired comforts and the progress of science.” under Mokrani’s supervision, a hadj to Mecca and Medina, and the The photographs in the album depict shots of the buildings; med- inclusion of more Muslim advisors on the CIAM. ical technologies such as the radiography room, the isolation A key feature of the German propaganda campaign was the con- chamber, and an ambulance; group photographs of soldiers; inte- struction of a mosque for French prisoners of war in the Crescent rior scenes of the hospital wards; and wounded soldiers reading Camp at Zossen near Berlin. The publication and dissemination of and playing cards or croquet in the garden (VAL 403). At least images of the Zossen mosque motivated the War Ministry’s flurry two images suggest the projected imposition of religion that came of activity. Yet the Nogent Mosque was promoted to the French under attack during the war. In one, a bedridden soldier in the press as benevolence, colonial cooperation, and religious accom- isolation chamber looks up at the camera, but a small Gothic-style modation. In a note dated December 3, 1915, P. de Margerie of the

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shanahan.indd 26 7/31/2019 1:47:12 PM 16 Cheik Bou Mezrac el Mokrani standing before the Pavillion de Tunisie, Jardin Colonial, displaying the Croix de Guerre. An intertitle identifies him as “a member of the Mokrani family, leader of the Algerian rebellion of 1871.” Photo: Etablissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense (hereafter ECPAD). Film # 14.18 B 706 – 11 Jan 1918 to 2 June 1919.

17 Feast with couscous and méchoui. Jardin Colonial. [April 1916]. Postcard. Photo: Ciradimages et Bibliothèque historique du Cirad á Nogent-sur-Marne, © Cirad.

CIAM announced to the prime minister that the “construction of by Piat in December 1915, depict staged scenes of mourning sol- this mosque, in addition to producing the best effect in the Muslim diers, their heads bowed as they gaze upon their comrades’ graves, world, would permit the Jardin Colonial Hospital to rival that of the whose horseshoe-shaped wooden markers are decorated with a Crescent Camp that the Germans have installed at Zossen, where star and crescent design and Arabic text (Fig. 15). The consul re- our infantrymen prisoners find all the facilities conforming to the turned the photographs and rejected their use as propaganda after precepts of their religion” (AD-LC 1 CPCOM 1663). An ink draw- consulting a Moroccan named Naib Tazi. Tazi had advised that the ing of the planned mosque suggests that the role of the Algerian images could “awaken in their [the Moroccan public’s] thoughts imams was to promote an image of cooperation and accommo- the idea that the war had made among their ranks more numerous dation between France and colonial soldiers. One version of the victims.” Further, the star and the crescent “had no religious sig- drawing is attached to Margerie’s note, but a second version in the nificance for the Moroccans and … could evoke in their spirit the CIAM file shows that a handwritten text in Arabic has been added memory of the Ottoman flag” (AD-LC 1 CPCOM 1663). To the to the drawing of the mosque with a French translation below Moroccan viewer, the photographs not only projected an image of (AD-LC 1 CPCOM 1663). In this second version, Mokrani and the colonial soldier as cannon fodder but also confused Ottoman Katrandji’s names and titles endow the mosque and the text with iconography for a generalized Islamic symbol. In addition, in the their authorization and approval (Fig. 14). The French description context of colonialism’s social and racial hierarchies, the soldier’s claims that the mosque will be built according to “the model of bowed head, staged by a military photographer, suggests not just Mohamaden mosques,” “oriented towards the kibla [Mecca],” and permit Muslim soldiers “to fulfill their religious duties.” The architect of the mosque text and other parts of the propaganda campaign may have been Emile Piat, a longtime colonial functionary who was then charged with surveillance of Muslim soldiers under the health care services in the Parisian region. But the file also shows his mis- understandings about religion, political and social history, and how the campaign might have been received by a North African public. A note dated January 5, 1916, from the consul general in Tangier to Prime Minister Aristide Briand, rejected two photographs of Muslim tombs in the Nogent cemetery as a poor choice for propaganda purposes. The photographs, sent

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shanahan.indd 27 7/31/2019 1:47:13 PM 18 Cover of book by Lieutenant El Hadj Abdallah, L’Islam dans l’Armée Française (Constantinople 1915). The cover illustration depicts the mosque at the Crescent POW Camp in Zossen near Berlin. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

awaiting the general (VAL 403/082). On April 16, 1916, Le Petit Journal reported that “the imams attached to the military government of Paris” had the day before inaugurated the Nogent Mosque. The mosque, it reports, was “richly decorated with ex- pensive Oriental carpets and … three magnificent lamps … from the Tunisian government.” Its inauguration, celebrated with a feast of couscous and méchoui (barbecued lamb), served as a reunion of wounded and convalescing Muslim soldiers from around the Paris region, reunited for an “enthusiastic protestation of devotion to France, ‘their mother’” (Fig. 17). Other photographs document Mokrani’s visits to soldiers at Cochin Hospital and the Jardin Colonial Hospital in October 1916 and his reception of the colonial minister, René Besnard, at the Jardin Colonial in September 1917 (VAL 373/040; VAL 403/005; VAL 403/099). This Parisian press activity remained silent, however, about German propaganda. In 1915, an Algerian from the French Army deserted to the German-Ottoman side and published a forty-page pamphlet under the name of Abdallah El Hadj: L’Islam dans l’armée française (Islam in the French Army) (Fig. 18). In it, Boukabouya Rabah, the author’s true name, denounced the French military’s treatment of its Muslim soldiers. As historian Richard Fogarty has mourning but also compulsory submission to authority. shown, Boukabouya’s attack focused on institutionalized racism Like the cemetery photographs, news reports indicate that within the French Army, such as the privileging of white officers the mosque’s construction served to stage expressions of loyalty despite their frequent failure to conform to the French ideal and to France as much if not more than its manifest aim as a sign of the establishment of contradictory policies limiting indigenous ad- friendship and cooperation. From 1916 to the end of the war, the vancement to officer status (Fogarty 2008: 96–132). Boukabouya press (mostly unillustrated) covered Mokrani and Katrandji’s ap- also complained about the status of religion, charging that France pearances, while Army photography and film document their min- repeatedly left Mecca and Medina open to attack, that Islam was istry to colonial soldiers. In numerous photographs, they appear in not respected as a religion, and that its holy days were not observed, front of or inside the mosque. A middle-aged man with a salt and “nor were Muslim dead placed in appropriate tombs” (Mokrani pepper beard, Mokrani is seated in the center of the mosque in and Katrandji 1916: 21, 37). Indeed, to this day, the military sec- one interior shot (Fig. 11) and Katrandji is probably the younger tion of the Pantin cemetery in the outskirts of Paris retains crosses mustached man seated in the corner behind Mokrani and to his marking the graves of “unknown Muslim” soldiers. left (viewer’s right). Identified in an Army film, Mokrani appears The cover of Boukabouya’s pamphlet is illustrated with a drawing as the focus of a clip in which he displays his croix de guerre medal of the mosque constructed at the Crescent prisoner of war camp awarded in June 1919 (Fig. 16). Yet the film also identifies Mokrani at Zossen near Berlin. The Zossen mosque was built to recruit as a descendant of the leader of the 1871 Algerian revolt. French colonial subjects to the Ottoman side. Imams and speakers This wartime press campaign, like the Excelsior article, addresses came from the Ottoman Empire, a German ally, to lecture about a Parisian public acculturated to exhibition spectacles yet nervous, Islam, its history, and its great empires. Photographs of the Zossen in the context of war, about the loyalty of France’s Muslim sub- mosque and these events appear in Der Grosse Krieg in Bildern, a jects. Army photography too served to document Mokrani and photography album published in twenty-two issues from 1915 to Katrandji’s almost monthly appearances at official events at the 1917 and in seven languages, including French and German but Jardin Colonial and elsewhere, events reported in the Parisian dai- not Arabic (Fig. 19). They show, by the scale of the human figures lies. On March 7, 1916, Le Petit Parisien reported on an awards cer- to the mosque’s domed structure, that it was a much larger building emony presided by General Lyautey that took place the day before than the Nogent Mosque. Its large dome rises above an octagonal at the Jardin Colonial; Mokrani and Katrandji were photographed base with a triple-arched façade and seems modeled upon Sinan’s

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shanahan.indd 28 7/31/2019 1:47:14 PM domed mosques built during the era of Suleyman the Magnificent. time without the man in the minaret balcony. An interior shot In response to Boukabouya’s pamphlet, the French published shows Mokrani (center right) and Katrandji (center left) seated on L’Islam dans l’Armée Française. Réplique à des mensonges (Paris the floor, facing the camera with a few soldiers on either side (Fig. 1916), which included photographs of the Nogent Mosque. 20). The photographs seem selected to present France’s Muslim Nominally authored by Mokrani and Katrandji, the document may hospitals as therapeutic garden settings and France as attentive to have been written by one of the French members of the CIAM. The religious and burial practices. fifty-nine page bilingual French-Arabic counter-propaganda pam- Later in 1916, after the construction of the Nogent Mosque and phlet quotes and counters each of Boukabouya’s claims, using six the bilingual Arabic-French counter-propaganda pamphlet by photographs, captioned only in Arabic, to support its argument. Mokrani and Katrandji, the Jardin Colonial produced bilingual and Three depict soldiers’ residence halls; although not identified in Arabic postcards of the mosque in an attempt to address the North the text, the images depict the distinctive architecture and garden African subject. The director of the garden, Emil Prudhomme, ini- setting of Carrières-sous-Bois, a former sanatorium transformed tiated or facilitated this process, possibly with an additional aim into a wartime military hospital for Muslim soldiers (Rominger of fundraising to support hospital expansion plans outlined in a 2018: 701–708). The photographs serve as visual evidence sup- November 1915 memo (AD-LC 1 CPCOM 1663). On November porting a claim that the French hospitals are “like these, a paradise 7, 1916, he wrote to the CIAM to propose that he select 10 photo- on earth” (Mokrani and Katrandji 1916: 36). A fourth photograph graphs and commission a print run of 5,000 per image for a total of depicts a cemetery with star and crescent tombstones; a very similar image in the Fonds Valois identifies the location as the Ivry cemetery and the war dead as Jardin Colonial soldiers (VAL 402/088). The counter-propaganda pamphlet asserts that, as of February 3, 1916, Mokrani was charged with the care of these Muslim tombs (Mokrani and Katrandji 1916: 38). Finally, two photographs represent the interior and exterior of the Nogent Mosque: “A mosque has been built in the immense hospital garden of Nogent-sur- Marne, where the Muslims are the most numerous” (Mokrani and 19 Photograph of mosque at the Crescent or Katrandji 1916: 39). The exterior shot (similar to Figure 6) shows Half-Moon Camp. Der Grosse Krieg in Bildern. Berlin: Georg Stilke, 1915. [no. 11], p. 36. several soldiers posed on the steps and in front of the minaret, this Photo: courtesy of the US Library of Congress

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shanahan.indd 29 7/31/2019 1:47:16 PM 20 Photograph of interior of Nogent Mosque, published in Mokrani Boumeraq El-Ouennoughi & Katrandji Abderrahmane, L’Islam dans l’armée française. Réplique à des Mensonges. Paris 1916. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

21 Jardin Colonial Hospital, Nogent-sur-Marne. The Mosque. [1916]. Postcard. Photo: Collection of the Musée Nogent.

50,000 postcards (AD-LC 1 CPCOM 1661). The six photographs accompanying Prudhomme’s message include three shots of a former pavilion transformed into a hospital ward and three interior images of the mosque. These interior photographs foreground the décor. One depicts a wide shot of the interior space, another is a close-up of a carpet, and a third shows Mokrani with four soldiers arrayed before a carpet hung on the wall (Fig. 12). The large print run imagines a renewed attempt to address the “indigenous populations” of North Africa that had been intended as the audience for the photography albums distributed in fall 1915. While Prudhomme’s focus is on the carpets, the postcards that ended up in production suggest not only the mosque’s luxurious interior but also an imagined pastoral function. One of Prudhomme’s recom- mendations, similar to the interior mosque scene published in the propaganda pamphlet, did become a postcard with an Arabic caption identifying the setting as the Nogent Mosque. Another postcard, an exterior shot of the mosque, this time with green tinting, has a bilingual caption (Fig. 21). Other wartime postcards, now in the Nogent Museum collection, show Mokrani and Katrandji standing with a group of soldiers before the mosque; a row of bedridden soldiers brought outside, “weather permitting”; soldiers exiting the ENSAC building, at the time a movie theater; soldiers lining up at the refectory door; and decoration ceremonies offici- ated by French politicians and generals. One image shows a group of mostly African soldiers, one wearing a bathrobe, some with bandaged heads, others leaning on canes, wearing dusty, worn- out boots or even slippers. They have been compelled to leave the hospital to pose together, waving their postcards in an enactment of a traveler’s salutation modeled by Prudhomme, the man in the lab coat holding an album (perhaps the Fonds Valois photographs) (Fig. 22). Although the postcard images are illegible, the group photograph suggests that the desired sender is the North African soldier and the imagined recipient is his faraway family.

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shanahan.indd 30 7/31/2019 1:47:22 PM 22 Lieutenant Albert Moreau. Wounded soldiers standing with Mokrani and Prudhomme outside the Pavillon de l’Indochine, Hospital of the Jardin Colonial, Nogent-sur-Marne. 1916. Photo: ECPAD.

23 “Foyer musulman des Amitiés musulmanes, rue Le Peletier. La mosquée.” January 14, 1916. Photo: Collection La Contemporaine, Fonds Valois 368/016.

CRITIQUE AND DISSENT AMONG SOLDIERS a striped band. Despite claims in their paper that the organization AND ELITES was supported by the French government, a debate ensued in an- But just how successful or not were the French propaganda cam- other paper, L’Oeuvre, about the organization’s true leadership. paigns—the Mokrani counter-propaganda pamphlet, the news Archival documents confirm that Les Amitiés Musulmanes was reports, photography albums, and postcards—in responding to run by a Dr. Loufti, a Turkish subject, and eventually, mounting dissent among the troops? While there is no known evidence of complaints and surveillance of the organization resulted in its the Jardin Colonial soldiers’ written reactions to the propaganda closure and Loufti’s expulsion from France in September 1916 campaign, the postcard photograph conveys the methods of survi- (AD-LC 1 CPCOM 1661). vors. Their gazes alternatively avert or confront the verbal slap of a In the debate that unfolded in L’Oeuvre, a Tunisian writer at- military photographer’s barked-out orders; one anxiously hides his tacked the Amitiés Musulmanes mosque as a mockery, outlin- face, his eyes preoccupied and downcast as he grips his cane, while ing an argument that could have equally applied to the Nogent four seasoned soldiers in the front row perform the part with a mix Mosque. In an article published on January 25, 1916, and entitled of exhaustion, compliance, fear, defiance, and resilience. Like the “Les Faux Amis d’Islam,” a gentleman named Abd el Karim Josset compulsory postcard image, the theatricalized uses of the Nogent wrote from Tunis claiming to represent the sentiments of group Mosque may have generated negative reactions. Judging by the commentary on another Parisian “mosque,” the Nogent Mosque seems likely to have been read as an orientalist spectacle for a French public and failed in its propagandistic purpose. About five months before the opening of the Nogent Mosque, on December 15, 1915, a Parisian aid society called Les Amitiés Musulmans published a photograph of the interior of their “mosque” in the first issue of their short-lived newspaper. Although the newspaper image is a poor quality reproduction, another photograph of this interior appears in the Fonds Valois albums (Fig. 23). It shows the small carpet-covered orientalist interior with four men, their backs to the camera, seated on the floor to the left of a wooden lectern. A lantern hangs at upper left before a floral-patterned wall décor that is framed by

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shanahan.indd 31 7/31/2019 1:47:23 PM 24 Muslim Delegation at the Jardin Colonial, November 13, 1916. Doumergue awards a medal to the cherif of Mecca while Ben Ghabrit, behind him, looks on. Film still from ECPAD Film 14.18 A 1288. Photo: Collection of Musée Nogent.

of Tunisian Muslims: and others—visited Paris landmarks, museums, and factories. Their final stop, as documented in a French Army film of the visit, [W]e have discovered that the false friends of Islam are those that try their best to ridicule our religion by unabashedly inaugurating was the Jardin Colonial for a decoration ceremony. The film clip caricatures of mosques that the papers proclaim are “furnished and and a captioned postcard depict Ben Ghabrit watching the politi- decorated with taste.” That means they are decorated with Syrian cian Gaston Doumergue awarding a medal to the cherif of Mecca, torches, Turkish lamps modernized with electric bulbs, and a thou- Husein ibn ali al-Hashimi, as a Moroccan Sufi scholar engages sand and one knick-knacks of Oriental bric-a-brac that one can pro- cure in the bazars and Tunisian souks. True mosques, those to whom with the camera (Fig. 24). Curiously, the film does not depict any entry is forbidden to non-Muslims, are shorn of anything susceptible of the notables before the Nogent Mosque, perhaps because the to distract the eyes of the faithful while the soul is elevated towards pavilion-sized mosque failed as a benevolent gesture before elites the master of the world (Josset 1916: 3). more accustomed to grander structures, pomp, and power than the hospitalized soldiers. Or perhaps the mosque’s propagandis- Josset goes on to argue that such mosques are created not by true tic uses were less significant than the image of North African and believers but by those who want to create “exotic attractions” for Arab leaders being recognized by the military and political leader- the “promenading Parisian.” They mount “imaginary ritual[s]” as ship of the French republic. The transformation of the scene into a spectacles, promote an essentially “anti-Muslim” idea of the cleric postcard suggests a French belief in the potency of the image. by casting the imam as a “Mahomaten priest,” and misunderstand Ben Ghabrit has sometimes been dismissed as a “colonial collab- that “the cadis, muftis, the cheik [and] Islam itself are only jurists orator” and ally of “treacherous leaders” like the sultan of Morocco, and [have] no authority over the faithful.” Josset then turns from re- in contrast to future revolutionaries like Messali Hadj, the father ligious practice to pay equity, an issue that Boukabouya had raised. of the Algerian revolution (Bayoumi 2000: 286–87). Archival evi- Josset attacks the inequity in military spousal pay for Muslim sol- dence indicates that Ben Ghabrit remained under surveillance his diers’ wives, who receive only 75 centimes per day, while other entire career and that Lyautey saw him as maintaining a façade of (presumably French) women receive 1fr25 per day. Finally, in a collaboration while evading Lyautey’s claims to be his superior, classist and racist dig at the Amazigh minority considered unedu- notably when Ben Ghabrit extended an invitation to Lyautey to cated by the Arab elite, he claims that among educated Tunisians, attend the opening of the Great Mosque of Paris only ten days Les Amitiés Musulmanes provokes “sweet hilarity” since the Arab before the event (AD-Nantes). Instead, some evidence indicates text seems to have been edited by “an ignorant Kabyle, so grievous that Ben Ghabrit, perhaps drawing upon his legal training, sought are the errors sprinkled throughout.” to advocate for Muslim subjects. In a remarkable twenty-three Perhaps the highest-ranking colonial subject who criticized page report dated April 5, 1920, he argued for a coherent policy French policies towards North African soldiers was Si Kaddour recognizing the “universality” of Islam and the rights of its sub- Ben Ghabrit (or Benghabrit), who visited the Jardin Colonial jects. Under cover of a letter dated three days later, he sent the in November 1916. Ben Ghabrit was the founder of the Islamic report to then president Alexandre Millerand (AD-LC 55 CPCOM Institute and Great Mosque of Paris, which he led until his death 12). Ghabrit’s report flatters the French image of maternal benev- in 1954, the year Algerians launched their war of independence. olence by contrasting it to the British, who have “only one argu- An Algerian by birth, he was chief of protocol for the sultan of ment: force.” The report adopts the discourse of mutual friendship Morocco, Moulay Youssef, and designated by the CIAM to in order to advance the cause of equality, while at the same time lead a hadj of notable Muslim leaders and scholars to Mecca in cautioning the limits to “friendship.” France can count on “friend- 1916. On their return, Al-Hashimi, the cherif of Mecca, and the ships in the Muslim world, but those friendships risk being alien- “Muslim delegation”—including Ben Ghabrit, Moulay Youssef, ated if she [France] does not … realize the promises of liberty in

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shanahan.indd 32 7/31/2019 1:47:24 PM whose name she convinced Muslims to come fight in her defense.” may have responded to the German propaganda about the status The report then provides a territory-by-territory analysis, begin- of Islam in France, such as the need for correct burial processes, but ning with Morocco and continuing to Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, most of the demands that Boukabouya, Ben Ghabrit, and others Hedjaz (the Arabian peninsula), Syria, and Turkey, detailing many advanced during and after the war address material conditions, complaints that Boukabouya, Josset, Messali Hadj, and others had not religious mandates. The Nogent Mosque’s orientalist exterior or would soon make. Ben Ghabrit argues that indigenous people and crowded interior seems unlikely to have convinced anyone should not be treated as subalterns when “their loyalty and work of French benevolence except Parisians, colonial generals, poli- merit higher status.” For example, he asserts that indigenous agents ticians, and administrators acculturated by a century of colonial should receive equal status with the French but currently receive exhibitions and eclectic academicism. The North African soldiers different salaries and inferior treatment. He prophetically cautions made to pose before and in the mosque could well have applied that the consequences of France’s colonial practices in contradic- Josset’s criticism of the Amitiés Musulmanes “mosque,” seeing the tion of its republican ideals are likely to lead to rebellion: Algerians Nogent Mosque as a “caricature” that distracts the eye and resem- who fought for French freedom “are naturally led to demand lib- bles a bazaar or souk. The mosque is best interpreted as a contested erty for themselves.” stage upon which French and North African subjects encountered each other. The Zossen mosque and Boukabouya’s pamphlet, key features of the German-Ottoman propaganda wars over the loy- CONCLUSION In the context of the war as a fight for democracy and freedom, alties of Muslim soldiers, may have motivated the construction of the history of the Nogent Mosque exemplifies colonialism’s con- the Nogent Mosque. But the representations and reproductions of tradictions and France’s desire to project an image of benevolence the mosque’s exterior and interior and the compulsory stagings of even as the French military regularly staged colonial subjects in soldiers before it or elsewhere in the Jardin Colonial all suggest a performances of deference and gratitude. The Nogent Mosque façade of collaboration that would cloak repression and motivate revolution in the years to come.

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