No Lover of Islam

[W]hen Brother Charles of Jesus saw Moussa, the amenokal of Hoggar, trying to islamise the Tuateg people with a Koranic school and the construction of a mosque to boot… it literally made him ill (English CRC n0 296, May 1997, p. 18)! Hence the cry of victory he let out the following year, in June 1908!

«Moussa has efforts to organize the Hoggar into an official, fervent Moslem kingdom have been turned by the Beloved to the good of souls, he writes. His efforts have failed totally and pitifully. Not only failed, but produced the opposite effect: he appointed a cadi and entrusted him with significant sums of money to build a mosque and a zaouia, and had a religious tithe levied through the whole of Hoggar In three months his cadi had made himself hated by everyone, squandered all the funds entrusted to him and ended up building nothing.

«The levying of the tithe upset everyone, so much so that all that remains now is the memory of an unpleasant incident and a horror of cadis and tithes. Let us pray and do penance.» (René Bazin, Charles de Foucauld, 1921 edition, p. 357; 1959 edition , p. 305; quoted in the English CRC n0 296, p. 18) — excerpted from the website of The Catholic Counter-­Reformation in the 21st century.

(This was originally published in From the Housetops as a sidebar of an article called “Venerable Charles de Foucauld“)