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

A little-known story about the history of Islam in France is the construction of what is sometimes claimed to be the first mosque in the French hexagon. Promoted as an accommodation to the religious needs of France's Muslim soldiers serving during World War I, it was inaugurated in April 1916 in the Parisian suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne at the far eastern end of the Bois de Vincennes (hereafter Nogent Mosque) (Fig. 1). Parisians and tourists alike are familiar with the Great Mosque of Paris, which opened in 1926 in central Paris and was dedicated in honor of the 100,000 Muslim subjects who died in World War I. Like the Great Mosque, the Nogent Mosque figures within a genealogy of colonial exhibition practices, tourism culture, imperial surveillance, and an epistemology of Islam. But the Nogent Mosque's wartime construction and location on a former exhibition site make it a pivotal signifier...