Algeria is a strange country, eh? What causes a muslim majority ethnic-arab nation to even consider secular and reformist ideas seriously?

In Turkey, it was mustafa Kemal, in Malaysia and Indonesia, it was the massive presence of Chinese and Indian origin non-muslims in whose hands most capital and entrpreneurship was (& is) concentrated, so what's the reason for Algeria striving towards Sharia' reform?

Posted by: voletti at September 9, 2004 7:32 AM

I believe the reason they are different is the fact they were a colony of France's for well over one hundred years, with a large percentage of the population being ethnic French. I also think most of the present day leaders of Algeria were educated in France. I am not sure that is an advantage but it must have had some influence on them.

Posted by: Sheik Canuck (swt) at September 9, 2004 9:42 AM

“These amendments are unconstitutional as they go against the constitution, which says Shariah Islamic law is the state religion,” said Lakhdar Benkhalef of El-Islah opposition party.

Did anybody else catch the meaning of this statement? Not Islam itself, but rather SHARIA is the state religion. Granted the two are more or less one and the same to the educated, but that statement sure clarifies the whole agenda of Islam in any given country - not "enlightening the masses" to the glory of following Allah, but rather the imposing of a strangling code of totalitarianism.

Nice to see the mask slip a bit from time to time.

Posted by: Walker Colt at September 9, 2004 2:55 PM

From 1830 to 1962 France ruled Algeria. It was the only period of stability, of progress material and moral, and of decent treatment of non-Muslims (including the North African Jews who were made French citizens by the loi Cremieux, and hence at last exempt from the heavy burden of the shari'a, and dhimmitude).

It was also the period in which French scholarship on Islam developed to the highest levels. What began as a purely bookish enterprise was given a boost by the ability of people to live in, and among, Muslims, both Arabs and Berbers, to observe their habitus, their moeurs. France learned, in those 130 years, a good deal -- and the whole folly of its current appeasement, and entirely avoidable transformation from within, comes from the fact that the French elites no longer understand Islam (Olivier Roy, Gilles Kepel, and the comical Dominique de Villepin do not qualify as experts on Islam). Essentially, they stopped miinding their P's and Q's, from Quatremere to Peroncel-Hugoz. At the moment, next to the computer on which this is being written, is an offprint of "Le Djihad ou Guerre Sainte selon l'Ecole Malekite" par E. (Edmond) Fagnan. It was published in Alger, at Typographie Adolphe Jourdan (Imprimeur-LIbraire-Editeur), 2, Place de la Regenese, 1908. ONe could learn a lot, in Paris and Washington and London, right this very minute, if a few people would take time from their busy busy schedules to sit down and read Edmond Fagnan, or Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, or Armand Abel, or Vajda, or a host of scholars who wrote in French.

When France left Algeria in 1962, those who foresaw a grim future in Algeria were painted as black reactinaries. Think of what happened to that great scholar of the Mexican past ("The Four Suns") Jacques Soustelle, and how he was depicted. Think of those French generals, given a press as bad as that for Laval, and le Marechal, and Joseph Darland. But whatever forebodings one had, more than a million French and Spanish and Jews, including people who never counted colons among their ancestors but had lived in North Africa for centuries, or even millennia, fled to France. And hundreds of thousands of harkis, Arabs who had supported the French, were offered refuge in France as well.

And in Algeria, the FLN instutitued a reign of terror, and forty-two years of misrule, punctuated by the even greater dangers of mass-murderous misrule which the FIS and other Islamic groups offer, was instituted. Without the revenues from oil and gas, Algeria would have sunk into a complete abyss. Without the contact with France, without French aid and the ability to send workers to France, Algeria would be nothing. It had its moment; the moment when the Infidels offered a hint of decent rule. The same thing, perhaps, will be said of these few years in Iraq with the Americans -- yes, those were the years when something other than Isla, and the distempers that inevitably accompany it, were possible (this will be recognized by only a very few, and articulated by almost none).

The force for decency -- i.e. for limiting the power of Islam -- is mainly to be found, in the Algerians in metropolitan France and in Algeria, mostly among the Berbers. For their resentment of the Arabs, of the banning for so long of the Berber language and Berber culture (and how many of those "Arabs" who oppress them are themselves really Berbers, a generation or two or three removed from their forced arabization?), helps them to see that Islam itself, so closely identified with the Arabs, is not quite as wonderful as so many insist. Far more Berbers than Arabs convert to Christianity, for example. Saad Sa'adi, the Berber leader of a secular, and largely Berber movement based in the Kabyle, represents the best that can be hoped for in Algeria.

Again, one can repeat: it was under the French that modern agricultural methods were instituted. It was under the French that a civil code was possible. It was under the French that roads were built. It was under the French that some kind of semi-decent society other than what reigned before, and what came after, for a while was possible. This is not meant to endorse colonialism. But there are people who, coming from Algeria and now living in France, recognize the truth of that description, and find it difficult to reconcile it with their inherited beliefs about Islam. The West, they know, is better in every way. The West is where they want to live. But many of them still wnat to bring with them the very thing -- Islam -- that is responsible for the primitiveness, the violence, the daily unpleasantness and hysteria, of Muslim societies. This is to live in constant contradiction between what one knows, and what one pretends to know. An intolerable situation, morally and intellectually.

Posted by: Hugh at September 9, 2004 3:42 PM