Sociology, and the social sciences in general, made their entry into the area from Turkey to Morocco through a transfer of European theories, concepts, methods, and interrogations during the colonial period. These transfers, at first provided by the French tradition, then rapidly followed by its Anglo-American rivals, allowed societies freshly open to social scientific investigation to enter into the scholarly representations of their worlds, a prelude to the deployment of the “civilizing missions” of their respective metropolises. Social science disciplines were then mobilized by the new indigenous elites to construct a national apparatus and to contest the self-image that had been reflected in the mirror of colonial science.

The relatively precocious development of the social sciences produced an accumulation of knowledge that diverged, both qualitatively and quantitatively, according to country. Yet one principal result of this process was to consolidate a representation of the unity of this part of the world. It is surely problematic to speak of the “Arab world” or the “Arab-Islamic world” as a stage on which the process of internationalization of the social sciences is played out or as a common identity, be it Arab or Muslim, despite the fact that the producers of these disciplines have asserted such an identity through pan-Arab or pan-Islamic social scientific associations, such as the Association of Arab Sociologists (1985). Such an approach erases specific national developments and makes it difficult to locate the role that Western social science maintained long after independence in the production and reproduction of local social sciences.