Islam, Plato and Protestantism: Gellner in North Africa
Résumé
Ernest Gellner made a valuable contribution to the study of North African Islam of the colonial period. He perceived that urban Islam expressed by a written religious culture was consistent with the idea of a nation-state imported from Europe. He drew the conclusion that scriptural Islam of the cities could be compared to European Protestantism, while oral Islam of the tribes and the saints could be compared to European Catholicism. The first one was favourable to political modernity while the other one was not. If this model was to some extent relevant during the colonial period, it failed to explain the political evolution of the postcolonial state, including political Islam.