André Servier

André Servier was an historian who lived in French Algeria at the beginning of the 20th century.

He was chief editor of La Dépêche de Constantine, a newspaper from the city of Constantine in northeastern Algeria. Servier studied well the customs and manners of the North African people, becoming one of the few French intellectuals who studied in depth Ibn Ishaq's Sira. His research included the Ottoman Empire and the Panislamic movement. The latter was developing at that time, along with the rise of nationalist ideals in the Magrebian areas and the Middle East.

Servier saw himself as continuing Louis Bertrand's work, but adapted to the Islamic background.

Analysing the budding nationalist movements, Servier wrote about the Egyptian Nationalist Party that it:

...aims to the re-establishment of the Islamic power and the expulsion of foreigners. It is a new form of pan-Islamism but a more dangerous form because it has realistic tendencies, aiming towards a practical goal that can be reached immediately. This movement of emancipation was born in Egypt as a reaction towards British domination. Its inspirer was Mustafa Kamil Pasha who, on October 22, 1907, proclaimed in Alexandria the program of the Egyptian Nationalist Party of which he was the chief: 'Egyptians for Egypt, Egypt for the Egyptians.' Moustapha Kamel added: 'We are despoiled and the English are the despoilers. We want our country free under the spiritual domination of the Commander of the faithful.'

A defender of Modernity and European colonization, Servier favored reflective morality against customary morality or authority-enforced puritanism. He had strong opinions about Islam and about the intellectual superiority of European thought and its institutions. He fervently defended the philosophical thought and work of the Western world as a philosophy founded on the idea of freedom and enlightened reason for mankind. Today his works are circulated among critics of Islam.

Islam was not a torch, as has been claimed, but an extinguisher. Conceived in a barbarous brain for the use of a barbarous people, it was - and it remains - incapable of adapting itself to civilization. Wherever it has dominated, it has broken the impulse towards progress and checked the evolution of society.

Islam is Christianity adapted to Arab mentality, or, more exactly, it is all that the unimaginative brain of a Bedouin, obstinately faithful to ancestral practices, has been able to assimilate of the Christian doctrines. Lacking the gift of imagination, the Bedouin copies, and in copying he distorts the original. Thus Musulman law is only the Roman Code revised and corrected by Arabs; in the same way Musulman science is nothing but Greek science interpreted by the Arab brain; and again, Musulman architecture is merely a distorted imitation of the Byzantine style.

The deadening influence of Islam is well demonstrated by the way in which the Musulman comports himself at different stages of his life. In his early childhood, when the religion has not as yet impregnated his brain, he shows a very lively intelligence and remarkably open mind, accessible to ideas of every kind; but, in proportion as he grows up, and as, through the system of his education, Islam lays hold of him and envelops him, his brain seems to shut up, his judgment to become atrophied, and his intelligence to be stricken by paralysis and irremediable degeneration.

Islam is by no means a negligible element in the destiny of humanity. The mass of three hundred million believers is growing daily, because in most Musulman countries the birth-rate exceeds the death-rate, and also because the religious propaganda is constantly gaining new adherents among tribes still in a state of barbarism.

Islam is a doctrine of death, inasmuch as the spiritual not being separated from the temporal, and every manifestation of activity being subjected to dogmatic law, it formally forbids any change, any evolution, any progress. It condemns all believers to live, to think, and to act as lived, thought and acted the Musulmans of the second century of the Hegira [8th century A.D.], when the law of Islam and its interpretation were definitely fixed.
. . .

In the history of the nations, Islam, a secretion of the Arab brain, has never been an element of civilization, but on the contrary has acted as an extinguisher upon its flickering light. Individuals under Arab rule have only been able to contribute to the advance of civilization in so far as they did not conform to the Musulman dogma, but they relapsed into Arab barbarism as soon as they were obliged to make a complete submission to these dogmas.
. . .

Islamized nations, who have not succeeded in freeing themselves from Musulman tutelage, have been stricken with intellectual paralysis and decadence. They will only escape as they succeed in withdrawing themselves from the control of Musulman law.

To sum up: the Arab has borrowed everything from other nations, literature, art, science, and even his religious ideas. He has passed it all through the sieve of his own narrow mind, and being incapable of rising to high philosophic conceptions, he has distorted, mutilated and desiccated everything. This destructive influence explains the decadence of Musulman nations and their powerlessness to break away from barbarism…

• Le Nationalisme Musulman en Egypte, en Tunisie, en Algérie : le péril de l'avenir, Constantine, M. Boet. 1913
• L’Islam et la Psychologie du Musulman, Paris, 1923
• Le problème tunisien et la question du peuplement français, 1925