ABSTRACT

The original pilgrimage started in Oran about twenty years after the French conquest in 1830. Indeed, many testimonials attest to the participation of Muslim devotees in the Christian pilgrimage and their visits to the shrine at other times of the year. Despite the overall transformation of Mas de Mingue, the pilgrimage continues this incessant back-and-forth movement between the sanctuary and the neighbourhood. The pilgrimage on Ascension Day shapes a moral geography that is embedded in the dislocations of the contemporary world. Like the Cuban pilgrims at the shrine of Our Lady of Charity in Miami, the pieds-noirs come to the shrine in Nmes to make sense of themselves as a displaced people. The pilgrimage of Nmes has been a significant moment in the construction of this post-colonial diasporic consciousness. In the last few years Arabic language courses and Koran classes for the neighbourhood children have been aimed at re-embedding their homeland traditions in the new generations of local Muslims.