Paper short abstract:

After the World War II, the Catholic image of Islam was shaped by the "portraits" sent from the Apostolic Delegation of Sub-Saharan Africa headed by Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre. On the basis of this documentation, this paper aims to retrace the origin of some Islamophobe stereotypes.

Paper long abstract:

After the World War II, when the time seemed ripe for relative democratisation of the colonies, students from Africa studied at the universities of the Near East (in particular Al-Azhar in Cairo) and acquired a level of the Arabic language that permitted them to refer to the Islam, that became the source of the legitimacy of political action that no longer depended on recognition by the colonial administration but on sources of faith found in countries, like Egypt, which had freed itself of colonialism. This scenario sparked a deep Catholic unease in the colonial territories under the Apostolic Delegation of Dakar headed by Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre. From this moment on, the image of Islam in the Catholic world was shaped mainly by the reports sent to the Holy See from the Apostolic Delegationin Africa. It is no coincidence that the Catholic missions tried harder to proselytise areas where the pressure of the Islam movements was strongest, for example Madagascar and Cameroon. This topic, nonetheless has been overlooked by historiography because of the impossibility of accessing Vatican archives relating to the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958). The opening of the archives of Pius XII has made a vast unpublished documentation that permits us to bring to the surface the Catholic narrative about Islam. This paper aims at analyzing this correspondence that, throughout the 1950s, still confirmed the permanence of a highly concerned judgement on Islam already expressed in 1939 by a secret Vatican enquiry, to date unknown to historiography.