Sacred Surveillance: Indian Muslims, Waqf, and the Evolution of State Power in French Mandate Syria

Abstract

The development and evolution of surveillance capacities around waqf—pious endowment property—was an important if overlooked dynamic during the French Mandate in Syria (1920–1946). Comparative analysis of British and French sources draws out new insights regarding the larger system of administration and surveillance of waqf in Syria. Two little-studied features of the interwar Anglo-French colonial experience frame this chapter: the emergence of pious endowments as a key site of state surveillance and the extent to which the circulation of people through colonial spaces destabilized already tenuous colonial categories of citizenship, identity, and property.