The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Algeria

Modern political thought in Algeria emerged in the vacuum created by the systemic French conquest of the territories of the Ottoman Beylik (province) of Algiers in the 1840s. This conquest destroyed all but the most resilient local indigenous political institutions, represented by the tribes and Sufi brotherhoods, and immediately implanted French political institutions at the upper levels of the state. It took decades for the traumatized population to regain its political vision. In the early 20th century, however, a new French-educated class of Algerians, patronizingly described by the French as évolués (evolved, developed), began to consider both the past and future of their country, thereby laying the foundations of modern Algerian national identity and political thought. This identity was complex: on the one hand, it was traceable to the ancient Berber and Phoenician kingdoms of antiquity, but on the other, it was firmly Arab and politically secular but at the same time culturally Islamic. Whether Algeria existed before l’Algérie française was a moot point, and in the face of French colonialism, it was impossible to imagine reconstituting it in anything but a modern guise.

The Algerian political community, however, consisting of groups in both Algeria and France, was divided over what modern Algeria should be. At one end of the spectrum stood the secular socialist trade unionists and at the other end the reformist ‘ulama’ led by the eminent scholar ‘Abd al-Hamid b. Badis (d. 1940). Ibn Badis introduced the Salafism of Muhammad ‘Abduh to Algeria and launched an attack on folk Islam, as represented primarily by the Sufi brotherhoods, in favor of an urban middle-class interpretation of the faith consistent with modernity. Although the Algerian War of Independence, spearheaded by the Front de Libération National, traditionally has been seen as both a war of national liberation and a socialist revolution, recent studies indicate the importance of Islam as a popular idiom and motivator of political action, especially in the countryside where jihad rather than revolution galvanized people to participate.

Although the independent state of Algeria prided itself on its nationalist socialist credentials, its citizens proved to be the most open in the region to the Islamist discourse that swept across the Middle East and North Africa from the 1970s onward. One reason for this was the almost complete absence of continuity between the precolonial and postcolonial eras and the consequent alienation of many from the political structures of the new state. Education and an adequate response to the country’s social and economic problems might have alleviated this alienation, but in any case, the new political discourse of Islamism received an immediate and significant welcome, especially in cities such as Algiers. What was distinctive about Islamism in Algeria was its strongly nationalist color, despite the apparent contradiction between the communities of Islam and the nation respectively. This can be traced to Ibn Badis himself and his understanding of Salafism as a tool for national revival and identity formation in opposition to external European, and specifically French, attempts to undermine the Algerian political persona. This link between Algerian nationalism and Islam was assisted by the association of the French Empire with Christianity—a link made most clearly by the Cathedral of Notre Dame d’Afrique, established by Cardinal Lavigerie (d. 1892), which sits atop a cliff overlooking the Bay of Algiers.

Although submerged in the halcyon days of the revolution, the Islamic strand had been present from the start of Algeria’s engagement with modernity. In the late 20th century, it offered Algerians not a means to evade the nation-state but instead a means to make it accountable and give it authenticity. Islamism is by definition a hegemonic interpretation of Islam, however, and it was rejected not only by the secular-minded army but also by important sectors of the population, most notably the Berber population of Kabylia, who saw it as part of a program of Islamization and Arabization that ignored their contribution to the formation of Algeria and devalued their approach to Islam. The result was the vicious civil war that erupted when the Front Islamique du Salut won the elections in 1992 but were prevented from acceding to power by the army.