Islamophobia, a French invention: colonial genealogy of a state hatred (1910-2026)

N. Rochat — Genève, Suisse — 2026-10-27

1910, the word is born inside the machine

On 25 May 1910, at the Paris Faculty of Law, a young man defends his thesis. His name is Alain Quellien, and he is a « writer at the Ministry of the Colonies ». The title: La Politique musulmane dans l'Afrique occidentale française. It is there, in this state document, that the word « islamophobia » appears for the first time. Here is its definition:

« Islamophobia: there has always been, and there still is, a prejudice against Islam spread among the peoples of Western and Christian civilization. For some, the Muslim is the natural and irreconcilable enemy of the Christian and the European, Islamism is the negation of civilization, and barbarity, bad faith and cruelty are the best one can expect of the Mohammedans. »

Remember well where this word comes from: an office of the Ministry of the Colonies. Islamophobia was not invented in a mosque, nor by a « mullah » from Tehran — a fable long served up to discredit the term. It was invented by the French colonial state itself, to name its own fear.

The founding paradox

But here is the paradox, and it is fierce: Quellien was not a defender of Muslims. He was a colonialist, condescending to the bone, who calmly wrote:

« The civilization of Islam, rudimentary and mediocre as it may be, is worth more than the inorganic, quasi-savage state in which the pagan peoples struggle. »

So what was he doing, if he despised Islam? He was solving a problem of efficiency. The irrational fear of Islam — « islamophobia » — was, in his eyes, a management error: it antagonized the Muslims, made them difficult to administer. His solution was not respect, but instrumentalization: to lean on the « tolerant » Sufi brotherhoods, to turn them into relays of French domination, to « make use of the Islamized elements » — his exact formula. His master was Louis Gustave Binger, director of African Affairs, author of a 1906 pamphlet whose title pulls no punches: Le péril de l'islam.

In other words: the man who coined the word « islamophobia » was not fighting the hatred of Muslims — he was reproaching that hatred for being clumsy. He preferred, over fear, manipulation. Two faces of the same coin: dominating Islam.

« A principle of administration »

And meanwhile, others went further. Gabriel Angoulvant, governor of Côte d'Ivoire from 1908 to 1915, stated the thing in all its nakedness. The historian Jean-Louis Triaud reports his position in a sentence one does not forget:

« Islamophobia is a principle of native administration. »

There it is. Not a slip, not an opinion: a principle of administration. Islamophobia raised to a doctrine of colonial government, on the same footing as taxation or forced labor. That is exactly the meaning the term has kept, a century later, when it is applied to the State.

From the colony to the Republic

For it is here that the loop closes. In 1910, the French state names its fear of Islam and turns it into a tool. In 2021, the same state passes the so-called « separatism » law, closes mosques, controls imams, dissolves associations — an arsenal tailored to a single community, exactly as Quellien's « Muslim policy » tailored Islam to the measure of the colony. In 2023, it bans the abaya at school. In 2026, it calls an anti-Muslim attack a « first », as if the hatred did not have one hundred and sixteen years of archives. This is not a resemblance: it is a filiation. The « Muslim policy » of 1910 and the state Islamophobia of 2026 are the same project, in the same hand: to manage Islam, never to respect it.

The proof by the biographies

And for those who would still doubt, let us look at who coined the word. Three men, and three files:

Three Frenchmen, three Christians, three civil servants of the colonial state. Not a Muslim. Not a « mullah ». Behold the inventors of the word « islamophobia » — and behold, in the negative, the definitive proof that the hatred did not come from Islam, but from the office that claimed to administer it.

The conclusion

The word « islamophobia » is a confession. It says, all by itself, that France has never known how to see Islam other than as a problem to be administered — through fear (Angoulvant) or through manipulation (Quellien). There is no need to search for the origin of the hatred: it is signed, dated and archived at the Ministry of the Colonies, in 1910. And those who, today, would ban the word in order to ban the thing know very well what they are erasing: a century of evidence. Islamophobia is not an invention of Muslims to « silence criticism » — it is a French invention, to silence Muslims. The case is closed. It has been open since 1910.

📚 BIBLIOGRAPHY (rule no. 19)

1. Alain Quellien, « La Politique musulmane dans l'Afrique occidentale française », doctoral thesis, Paris Faculty of Law, 25 May 1910.

2. Louis Gustave Binger, « Le péril de l'islam », 1906.

3. Jean-Louis Triaud / FASOPO, « Sociétés politiques comparées », April 2020 — on the first occurrence of the term in Quellien.

4. Abdellali Hajjat & Marwan Mohammed (CNRS), « Islamophobie : comment les élites françaises fabriquent le « problème musulman » », 2013 — deconstruction of the « 1979 mullahs » thesis.

5. Wikipedia, « Histoire du terme islamophobie » — https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_du_terme_islamophobie

⚠️ Reservations published. (1) The quotations from Quellien, Binger and Angoulvant are reproduced from the historian Jean-Louis Triaud (FASOPO, 2020) and the work of Hajjat & Mohammed (CNRS). (2) The « 1979 mullahs » thesis (Fourest/Venner) is refuted by academic research. (3) The article establishes a documented historical filiation; it attacks no person and no community.