As much as their sex permits it: French Colonial Views of Women and Islamic Law in Early Modern Senegal

In A new account of West Africa, a book published in Paris in 1728, Dominican monk Jean-Baptiste Labat wrote that “Muslim doctors” recently “decided that very wise women who are faithful to their husbands would be able to find some small corner in paradise” by receiving “the mark of Circumcision.” My goal in this paper is not to debate the modern practice of female circumcision but to explore an early modern discussion of it in order to understand the colonial, racial, and spiritual meaning it carried for French male colonizers in the past. This paper explores how French male understandings of Islamic law and their ideas about West African women’s bodies intertwined at the turn of the eighteenth century in Senegal. It argues that French male colonial conversations about genital mutilation, both male and female, carried significant implications for local and transatlantic states in this period. According to local male dialogues, circumcision could be a visible, bodily marker of commitment to Islam and identification as a member of a community that French traders often conflated with political Senegalese states. Transatlantically, French men viewed Muslim Senegalese women, especially those willing to undergo circumcision, as being most similar to their idealized white French female counterparts. This suggests that circumcision played an integral role in French hierarchies of Africanness and defining who could and could not be enslaved. To have an informed debate about female genital mutilation in the present, we must better understand the colonial work it did in the past.