Jacques Berque was one of the leading European Islamic scholars of his generation. Born in 1910 in Moliere in provincial Algeria, he was the son of Augustin Berque, a distinguished Arabist and member of the elite among the pieds noirs. His mother's roots lay in the petit blanc community and, further back, in Spain. Berque studied at the Sorbonne, which he detested, and he was unhappy in the Paris of the time. He spent his early career as a colonial administrator in Morocco while continuing his studies. In 1947 Berque became a Middle East expert for UNESCO. Under its auspices he was sent to Egypt in 1953, an experience that was fundamental to the formation of his worldview and his engagement with the post-war wave of decolonisation. In 1955 he returned to Paris and commenced work as director of Muslim Sociological Studies at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes (EPHE) shortly thereafter. In 1956 Berque was elected to the College de France, where he held the professorship of Social History of Contemporary Islam. He remained in this post until his retirement in 1981.

What makes Berque such a rich case to examine in an analysis of ideas of Europe is that he was a foremost representative of Oriental Studies – a discipline historically intertwined with European imperialism – at the time when European imperialism was manifestly coming to an end. Moreover, he was engaged both personally and academically with Algeria – the focus or source of so much Parisian debate about the meaning of Europe and Europeanness, as we have seen. It is difficult to pigeonhole Berque's thought. He was both loyal to the French and European Orientalist tradition, and deeply critical; at once a defender of European imperialism and one of its most damning critics in this period. Moreover, although never stale or unoriginal, Berque's subtle ideas of Europe and Europeanness correlated with those of other Parisian figures in this period, and not only in the imperial context. For this reason there is a strong comparative aspect to this chapter and Berque's Europe is analysed beside ideas of Europe that invoked its imperialism, its relation to the United States, and its struggle to manage its recent history.