Speakers: Thomas Small & Aimen Dean
Thomas: Aimen, once again man, the news is perfectly in sync with Conflicted, Gorbachev is dead. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Premier of the Soviet Union is dead.
Aimen: And to imagine that he had such a lifespan. Imagine if he was still in charge of the Soviet Union, we will still have the Soviet Union by 2022. That's amazing.
Thomas: Well, given what's going on in the Ukraine at the moment, maybe if the Soviet Union had never cracked up at the end of the eighties and the early nineties, things would be a little bit smoother over there in that part of the world. I think that Vladimir Putin agrees.
Aimen: He would still be just a miserable officer in the KGB.
Thomas: Yeah, poor guy, in East Germany, possibly.
Aimen: Most likely, yes.
Thomas: Gorbachev's death is perfectly timed for us, because our season about the Cold War in the Middle East reaches its conclusion today. And Gorbachev, after all, was the Soviet leader who oversaw the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
Now, remember dear listener, we're talking about the Cold War in the Middle East, so we won't be focusing our episode on Moscow or even Russia, but rather far away from the cold wastelands of Eurasia to the fertile coastal planes and vast desert expanses of … Aimen?
Aimen: Algeria.
Thomas: Algeria, let's get into it.
[Music playing 00:01:20]
Thomas: Now, Aimen, we're going to be making the argument today that the modern history of Algeria, recapitulates everything we've covered in this season of Conflicted, which dear listener, is reaching its end. That's right.
This episode, episode 19 is the penultimate episode of season three, and the last one in which we'll focus on a specific country or historical era.
In this episode, Aimen, we're going to basically summarize everything we've discussed so far about the Clash of Civilizations in the Middle East, about modernization there, about the Cold War, and so on, all through the prism of Algeria.
Aimen: Well, Thomas, for me, Algeria always foreshadowed what is going to happen in the rest of the Muslim world. For some reason, they seem to be always ahead of everyone else, and we will see this clearly illustrated throughout this episode.
Thomas: I've got to ask you a question at the outset, Aimen, why is Algeria such a blank really? You never hear about it, it's hardly ever in the news, nobody visits it or nobody seems to visit it. Why is Algeria (which is like the largest country in Africa or one of the largest for sure) so unknown, unseen, unheard?
Aimen: Unfortunately, it's all due to the mentality and the mindset of the rulers of Algeria since the 1960s. They really restricted travel into the country. They always had this antipathy towards their Arab neighbors, because they were still francophone in their language and their history and their culture.
You need to get a visa in the 1970s and ‘80s to go and visit Algeria and goodness, even if you are European, even if you are Arab even, you still need a visa to go and visit Algeria. And goodness, it'll take about two months or three months wait until you get your visa.
And then when you go there, you have to jump through hoops to prove who you are with, who you're visiting.
So, it was a closed off police state in not allowing foreigners to come, even if they are fellow Arabs. Even though it is within the midst of everything, within the Southern Mediterranean, it's not a destination. And therefore, people always saw Algeria as this closed off mysterious society.
Thomas: What about Algeria's place in the Arab world, Aimen, or really in the modern Arab imagination; what did Algeria mean to you when you were a kid growing up in Saudi Arabia?
Aimen: Well, Algeria was always for us condensed in one sentence, balad al’ard almilyun shahid, the land of the million martyrs.
So, why? Because we are always told that Algeria gave a million martyrs. Many of their citizens were killed in the patriotic liberation war against France and the French occupation of Algeria.
And there was this black and white movie that we used to watch us kids about the heroism of Djamila Bouhired. I'm sure many Algerians when they hear this name, like they puffed up and they say, “Yes, this is Algeria's answer to Joan of Arc.”
So, and she was an Algerian female revolutionary leader and intelligence officer within the Algerian Liberation Front. And it shows like in her heroism and how she was tortured and how she was imprisoned, and yet she's still was a symbol of Algerian heroism.
Thomas: Algeria’s story is a great story, full of heroism and tragedy. Let's get straight into it. Now, we're not going to cover the ancient history of Algeria in any detail. We already did that kind of in our episode on Libya, because like Libya, Algeria was part of the Berber lands of antiquity that were settled by the Phoenicians and some Greeks, then conquered by the Romans, and then Christianized just like Libya.
In fact, the most famous inhabitant of ancient Algeria was called in Roman times, Mauretania, not the same place that the current country called Mauretania is. It all of the Maghreb, was Mauretania; Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and so on.
The most famous inhabitant of ancient Algeria, I think undoubtedly, is Saint Augustine of Hippo. No Christian theologian had a greater impact on the development of Christianity in the Latin speaking West.
So, because of Saint Augustine and his impact on Western civilization, ancient Algeria has acclaim to be really the heartland of the West in some respects, but we can't talk about ancient history.
Let's talk about the name Algeria, the word Algeria is not ancient. It comes from the Arabic word Aljazayir, which means the islands. Now, it's never been clear to me Aimen, why Algeria is called “the islands.”
Aimen: Algeria as a country right now is named after the capital city. So, therefore, if we want to understand where the name come from, we have to go back into the origins of the name of the capital city.
The capital city was built in 960, not as a capital city, but it was built by one of the dynasties that were vessels of the Fatimids. And it was called Aljazayir because that coast, when the tide is low, it exposes lots of rocks in the formation of little islands here and there. And so, it was named after its capital city, Algiers, or Aljazayir.
Thomas: Aljazayir, the islands. So, Algiers, the capital city, it was founded in 960. It was actually founded on the ruins of an ancient city, which had been destroyed during the Muslim conquest of Roman Mauretania.
Now, Aimen, in our Libya episode, you talked about this, that the Arab conquest of the Berber lands of Africa didn't go smoothly at all. The Berbers put up a real fight.
Aimen: 55 years of continuous resistance against the Arab invasion. The Arab invasions came in waves, and the Berbers were really ferocious, until finally they said to the Arabs, “What is it exactly do you want?”
And the Arabs said, “Well, we are spreading Islam.” “Okay so, if we convert to Islam, will you leave us alone?” “Yes.” “Okay, we're Muslims, now get lost.”
Thomas: But this reputation for sort of patriotic or whatever you want to call it, but ferocity remains to this day, amongst the Muslim peoples of North Africa, of the Maghreb.
Aimen: Indeed. Throughout my jihadist journey from Bosnia to the Caucasus to Afghanistan, the most ferocious and battle hardened and bravest of all the warriors were always the Algerians, the Tunisians and the Moroccans, and the Libyans.
They were always regarded as the backbone of the modern Jihad. You can't have a jihadist theater without having a contingent of those North African fiercesome warriors.
Thomas: But also, the most sort of single-minded, the most ideologically convinced. I have this sense that an Algerian jihadist is going to be the one who's not going to see any gray. It's a black and white kind of worldview.
Aimen: Oh, yes. The Algerians are famous for this. Since the days of the early Muslim rule, Algeria has always been a festering breeding ground for what we call the Kharijite ideologies, the zealots, the extremists.
So, an Algerian, always, it will come either ultra-liberal or sometime ultra-radical Islamist. And this image still remain to this day. Algeria is a land of extremes.
Thomas: Yeah, and we'll see this play out in the Algerian civil war when we get there. Now, we're still in the Middle Ages. So, the city of Algiers was founded in 960 by a prince of the Zirid dynasty.
Now, the Zirids were vessels of the Fatimid caliphs, those Ismaili caliphs who ruled from Cairo in Egypt, whom we've mentioned many times.
Aimen: The Zirid Kingdom, in fact, had its capital in Tunisia. Algiers was actually just a provincial city rather than the capital of the Zirid dynasty.
Thomas: This makes the history of Algeria quite similar to the history of Libya, because Libya was also sort of marginal most of the time. So, was that part of the Maghreb, the Central Maghreb where Algeria is today, it was quite marginal cut between Tunisia and Morocco.
So, its history was similar to Libya, but more glorious, brutal, a bit of both. I think the main point though, is that Algeria until very recently in historical terms, was not politically united at all. It had no single capital, certainly not Algiers.
And in the Middle Ages, due to Berber dynastic infighting and the Christian reconquest of Spain, the Reconquista, which slowly undermined the political unity of the whole area of the Maghreb and Islamic Spain, it was fragmenting into various principalities.
So, during this period, the Mediterranean coastal cities of the Central Maghreb, like Algiers, became infamous for piracy and slave trading.
Aimen: Remember Thomas, that the Reconquista, while it is something of a glory to the Europeans, it was more of a tragedy for the North African Muslims. And they viewed the rising power of Spain and Portugal (and we're talking here about the Naval powers) as a threat that, “Okay, the Reconquista is done. Now, there will be the Conquista, there will be the invasion of the Muslim lands.” And therefore, they needed to be prepared.
So, unfortunately, while Europeans think of them as pirates, the Muslims at the time, thought of them as the defenders of the coast, as the defenders of the Muslim North African Coast.
Thomas: And they were right to be worried because in 1492, what a year, the new world is discovered, but also, the Fall of Granada happens. So, that's the last-
Aimen: Excuse me, it is Gharnata.
Thomas: Gharnata. The fall of Gharnata happens. This is the last Muslim principality of Spain. It falls to the Christians. And four years later, the Spanish Empire does begin a campaign across the North African Coast, capturing several towns and cities.
Aimen: In fact, Thomas, to this day, 500 years later and more, there are two Moroccan cities that are actually now an enclave of the Spanish kingdom.
To this day, Sebtah and Melilah (these are the correct Arabic names), they are still occupied by Spain and Morocco still lay claim to them. And in fact, the Moroccans are never relinquishing their acclaim to both Sebtah and Melilah.
Thomas: Well, Algiers was also one of those cities that the Spanish conquered and the people of Algiers reached out for help to an Ottoman pirate who was then in Tunisia. His name, if you can believe it dear listener, was Barbarossa.
Aimen: Indeed.
Thomas: Like an actual pirate, he came to Algiers and in a way, eventually helped the Ottoman Empire to repulse the Spanish.
Interestingly, Aimen, Barbarossa, did you know this; he was born on the Greek island of Mytilene, otherwise known as Lesbos, which perhaps makes the pirate king Barbarossa, history's most famous lesbian. That's my dad joke.
So, the Barbery Coast, as it became known, the Barbery Coast of North Africa fell under Ottoman rule though only nominally. In reality, the Regency of Algeria as it's called, was a politically decentralized network of semi-independent towns ruled by pirate captains and overseen by a Beylik in Algiers, who was the head of a renegade multiethnic Janissary elite, which governed itself via a semi-democratic institution called the Diwan.
And if that's confusing, that's because I'm confused about Ottoman Algeria. It is totally confusing.
Aimen: Indeed. And by the way, you may call them pirates, but in history, in Arabs books, they call them the sea defenders of the Muslim African Coast. That's how they call them in Arabic history.
Thomas: But infamously, these sea defenders of the Muslim African Coast were very much involved in the white slave trade. This is just a fact of history.
Aimen: Oh yes. There is no question that white slavery, especially from the Southern Coast of France, the Italian Coast and then your Greek Coast, and then you have the Ottomans engaging in the famous children tax, where they take the young boys from Serbia and from other Balkan countries, Hungarian and other places. And then they train them to become the Janissaries of the Ottoman empire.
The white slave trade and practice was so widespread and there is no denying it, but at the same time, the Spanish and the Portuguese started engaging in the black slave trade from the West African Coast.
Thomas: As a result of the slave trade, as a result of piracy, as a result of its growing Naval power, the Beylik in Algiers became very wealthy.
Now, the point of all of this is that just like everywhere else we've been discussing this season, Algeria had its Ottoman period and like everywhere else, the Ottoman state in Algeria was not a modern state.
Its state structure was traditional authoritarian, patrimonial and hierarchical based on military rule and Sharia law. And this changes from 1830, when Aimen, what happens?
Aimen: 1830, the year in which the French troops landed in Algiers and started the occupation of what would the French later call the fourth French shore.
Thomas: Yes. In 1830, the French invaded. And this has echoes of the history of Egypt when the French invaded, the Napoleon invaded in 1798. And in a way, the 1830 invasion of Algeria by France was Napoleon's fault as well, bloody Napoleon really.
So, here's the story. It's totally fascinating. In 1796, so this is before he invades Egypt, in 1796, Napoleon and his armies are rampaging through Italy, conquering everything. And to feed his army, he buys wheat for his soldiers on credit from Jewish merchants in Tuscany, but he later refuses to pay the bill.
So, these Jewish merchants in Tuscany are left with a huge unpaid bill. Now, they had been financed by the Bey in Algiers. So, they owed him lots of money, but couldn't pay until the French paid them back. And this state of affairs lasted for over 30 years.
So, the Bey was demanding payment from the Jewish merchants. The Jewish merchants were saying, “We can't pay you, the French haven't paid us yet.”
So, eventually the Bey in Algiers orders the French Council in Algiers to pay up or else … and when, once again, the Frenchman refuses, the Bey whips him with his fly swatter. Now, you don't ever dishonor a Frenchman, God knows. So, in retaliation King Charles X ordered an invasion.
Aimen: Actually, Thomas, Arab historians say that it was a slap on the face, that the Bey slapped the French diplomat on the face and that what led to the invasion and occupation of Algeria. So, they call it the most consequential slap in history.
Thomas: So, yes, the French invaded. Now, Napoleon is actually to blame for the invasion itself in a way, because the French invasion of 1830 used the invasion plans that Napoleon drew up in 1808.
So, Napoleon had been planning to conquer Algeria all along. And I think it's safe to say Aimen, that like the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, but much more powerfully because they stayed in Algeria.
The invasion and conquest of Algeria was an epoch changing event for the history, not just of the Maghreb, but really, of the Muslim world. It was a tremendously shocking event.
Aimen: It was shocking in the sense that since the crusades, this is the first time, an instance where a French, or I would say European army invades a Muslim, and I would say Arab-speaking land, and then stay, they don't leave. They just remain there and establish a permanent colony.
Thomas: I came across a quote from an Algerian intellectual who witnessed the invasion in 1830 and it's quite moving. He says, “And such is the way with countries, when the course of their civilization is run. And thus, they come to a halt according to the will of God, most high and they retreat, falling into decline.”
So, there was definitely this sense amongst Algerian intellectuals, that the culture of the Islamic Maghreb, which in the 12th and 13th centuries had been glorious indeed, and then had fragmented and then been conquered by the Turkish Ottomans and had sort of run out of steam.
And as a natural consequence, God handed power over to an invader. That was at least this man's interpretation of history. And I think it has a lot of resonance. It's very powerful, this idea of decline and conquest.
Now, we've got to speed up here. It took the French decades to pacify the whole territory. And in the course of their conquest, nearly a million Algerians died. These are the million martyrs, Aimen that you discussed at the beginning of the episode.
I find this interesting, to the Algerians, the conquerors were always alruwman, Romans, and in a way, the conquest was not dissimilar to the Roman conquest of Mauretania, 2000 years earlier.
But also, what do you think about this Aimen? Invoking the Romans in that way indicated the eschatological expectations that the French invasion caused among the Algerians.
And it cannot be denied that in the wake of the French conquest of Algeria, there was a rise of Mahdism throughout the country; many men, warriors who were acclaimed as the Mahdi rose up to fight the French.
Aimen: Indeed. And this is not dissimilar from what happened in Sudan in the 1880s, when there were Mahdism against the invasion by the British. Because the European race was always described in Arab history books as the Romans, because they are the successors of either the Western Roman Empire or the Eastern Roman Empire. It is the Roman race. It is the European race.
So, with the word Roman means also European in the mindset of people. But of course, the invoking of the word Roman, rather than the Frankish or what they call the French at the time, shows that they were falling back on the ancient text in order to justify the rise to jihad against these invaders.
However, thank God, most of them, basically, they have never succeeded because we don't want a Mahdi. However, there was a potential savior and he almost succeeded. Unfortunately, he did not.
Thomas: Yes, you're talking about a really remarkable Algerian, possibly the most remarkable of all time. Second, perhaps to Saint Augustine, but Emir Abdelkader ibn Muhieddine.
Emir Abdelkader, who was called by his followers, Amir al-Mu’minin, the Commander of the Faithful, was possibly the most noble and most chivalrous freedom fighter in modern history. What do you think, Aimen? Tell us about Emir Abdelkader.
Aimen: First of all, I have to say that he is my hero, and I believe him to be one of the Nobelists. Apart from being charismatic and a scholar and a writer and a leader, he was also someone who behaved in the most chivalric manner in warfare.
He is al Emir Abdelkader El Djazairi, which means prince Abdelkader the Algerian. And he is the first Algerian leader to use the word “Algerian.” And this is why many Algerians regard him as the real founder of modern Algeria, because he actually united the country under one identity. He called himself al Emir Abdelkader El Djazairi, the Algerian. And therefore, he united the tribes around him.
He started to style himself as Algerian and started two things simultaneously. One is to actually raise an army against the French occupation, made up of Berbers and Arabs, as well as the Tuaregs, but also, he started to modernize the state.
He actually created the modern state in Algeria in the current form that we understand what a modern state is; with infrastructure, with industry, with ministries, with departments.
And he started even manufacturing modern weapons, pistols, and rifles. He built the industry for that. And I have to that was remarkable.
Thomas: It was sort of in microcosm, that process that we described a few episodes ago, where the competition between the rising Christian West and the Islamic world required the Islamic world to modernize.
So, if you're invaded by a modern army, the way that you're going to repel that army is by modernizing and Emir Abdelkader definitely did that.
What I'd like to trace this a little bit further, because I find it fascinating what you say, that he was the first person to invoke the moniker, the Algerian, to use the word Algerian as the definition for all the peoples of the Central Maghreb.
Because it makes me think that that national identity in Algeria is very much tied up to an opposition to the French, is actually like to be an Algerian, is to be against the French. And this will play out in their war of independence and in their civil war down the line.
But more importantly, Aimen, in a way, modern Islamic national identities are often thought of as negative, they're not western. And so, there's a foreshadowing even there within Algeria of that Islamist self-identity of being essentially not western.
Aimen: Thomas, you're absolutely right. Because the Algeria national identity yes, was born out of opposition to the French, to the point where the Algerian national anthem is nothing but berating the French; “Oh, France, the time for reprimands are over, but the time for you to pay the price is now.”
And it's all about, “Ya Faransa, Ya Faransa.” Funny enough, the word Faransa, which means France is repeated more often in the national Algerian Anthem than the name of Algeria itself. So, you were right. The national Algerian identity actually is defined as I’m against France. And this is what their national anthem is about.
Thomas: Well, this may have been an unintended side effect of Emir Abdelkader’s anti-French mobilization.
Now, in the end, the Emir, who as you say, he unified the Berber, largely the nomadic tribes of inland Algeria. And they were able to resist further French encroachment. The French had really grabbed much of the coast and Abdelkader was able to hold onto some of the coast because he had mobilized the tribes of the inland of the desert.
And eventually, a peace treaty was signed between Abdelkader and France. So, they granted him control of inland Algeria. And though yes, to some extent he was a modernizer as you say, it's also interesting that the regime he set up was uniquely theocratic.
He even called the unit of currency, the muhammadiyya, and this again, foreshadows the unique blend of modern politics in Islam in Algerian and Maghrebi and Arab and Islamic history in the modern period.
His father had been a Sufi, he was a Sufi. He was very pious, but he was also determined to both modernize the state and to return it to Islamic Sharia values.
Aimen: Indeed. And he was a Hashemite by the way. However, unfortunately, whenever you see the clash between modern armies and with armies that yet to catch up with modernity, the winner is in inevitable and the French in the end, were able to defeat the armies of Prince Abdelkader and to drive him all the way to Morocco.
And even though he tried to resist still, in 1847, he did what was expected of him, the inevitable; he surrendered to the French and the French granted him the terms that he asked for, including that he will be allowed to go into voluntary exile in the Ottoman Empire. However, the French were never always known to be keeping their words.
Thomas: Not at all. I must say Aimen, the French really behaved despicably in Algeria throughout their time. But right now, that peace treaty that they'd signed with Abdelkader, they promised to uphold the peace, they broke it, they broke the peace treaty. They started attacking his army.
So, the French really, they say Perfidious Albion about the British. And surely, the British Empire has lots of crimes, but the French, I think their perfidy was greater, at least in Algeria.
Aimen: Absolutely. Prince Abdelkader was actually on his way, on his ship to the Ottoman Empire, to actually live in exile, yet the French Navy, surrounded him, captured him, sent him to France and imprison him for four years.
If it wasn't for the good grace of Napoleon III, when he became the emperor of France in 1851 that he released him, and a strange friendship developed between the two. Napoleon really found I Prince Abdelkader a truly noble individual.
Thomas: As did many people in Europe at the time. Abdelkader was very highly regarded by most Europeans; his manners, his style, he was a very, very civilized gracious noble man.
Aimen: Exactly. When the French military in Algeria used to execute all those who opposed them from the Algerians and the Berbers, prince Abdelkader was actually kind and noble towards the French prisoners. And he was always returning them back safe and sound to their army.
And so, Prince Abdelkader was finally allowed in 1852 to actually go into his exile first in Istanbul and then after that, in Damascus. And then in Damascus, I think this is where the greatest legacy of Prince Abdelkader, when he saved Syria, he saved the entire Levant from a bloody or potential bloody Muslim-Christian War.
Thomas: We mentioned this in our Lebanon episode because one of the things that was happening as the Ottoman Empire was modernizing in the Levant, if you remember, dear listener, was the arise in religious intercommunal of violence.
And one very spectacular example of this violence broke out in Damascus where Jews and Christians were really being attacked badly, mercilessly by the Druze and the Sunni members of the city.
Aimen: Indeed. And to the point where Prince Abdelkader, he actually had large properties and farms in Damascus and the surrounding Levantine area, he harbored 15,000 Christians as well as several thousand Jews.
He harbored them for months and to prevent the bloodshed that was in 1866 to the point where his heroic deed impressed even the other religious leaders that they said, “That's it, we must stop. We must find a way to coexist peacefully.” So, he is credited for preventing a religious war in the Levant in the mid-1860s.
Thomas: Prince Abdelkader, the Algerian, really a symbol of a kind of Islamic modernity that could have been.
Aimen: Indeed. You know what Thomas, there is a city in the United States of America that is named after Prince Abdelkader.
Thomas: Really?
Aimen: Yes, it is Elkader city in Iowa.
Thomas: I've never heard of Elkader city.
Aimen: Well, actually it's a town of only like 1,400 people. But nevertheless, in the 1840s, when the stories of the heroism of Prince Abdelkader reached America and his fight against the French and the French colonialism, a group of new American settlers named their new founded town Elkader, in honor of Prince Abdelkader.
Thomas: Oh, that is amazing. So, the legacy of prince Abdelkader lives on in Iowa.
Aimen: Of all places.
Thomas: So, the point of all this in terms of Algeria is that Algeria experienced Western colonization, like most parts of the Middle East to some extent, and yet it experienced Western colonization, most comprehensively, most brutally. The French installed a military governor general who answered to the minister of war.
And eventually, once they pacified the country enough, the French divided the coastal area into three full departments of France. Which is to say they sent representatives to Paris, to parliament, so that it was actually France.
The representatives were elected by French citizens only of course. And tens of thousands of settlers had swarmed into Algeria. Some were native Algerians, but that was a tiny minority. Really, it became a colony of France for the French settlers who bred like rabbits.
And by the end of the French colonial period, there were a million French citizens sort of sitting on top of many millions of Algerians underneath. And the French settlers in Algeria and their descendants produced many leading lights of French culture and society, perhaps most famously the novelist, Albert Camus, who was an Algerian, I mean a French Algerian really. And he wrote about Algeria under French occupation or during the French period.
Aimen: I think this is when the French decided on a different kind of that final solution.
Thomas: Whoa, Aimen. My goodness, you're really invoking harsh language.
Aimen: No, no, seriously. It is a final solution in the sense that, well, we are not going to kill them physically, but we are going to kill their culture, we're going to kill their history. We're going to change their minds completely. We're going to francophone the hell out of these people to make sure that they are French at heart, French in mind, and they will only speak French.
So, the Arabic language was banned from being taught and they forced everyone to speak French in public, to abandon Arabic as an official language or even a language of correspondence, a language of learning. Everything was francophoned in the country.
Thomas: This is quite similar to Libya's experience of Italian colonization. Remember how brutal, dear listener, that had been. But to do justice to the history, within the French colonizing class, there were two kind of prevailing ideologies.
One, the assimilationists ended up pursuing policies like you've just described Aimen; frenchification really. But there was another group of voices, mainly from the military, weirdly enough, who in fact had learned to really respect the Arab, Berber, Bedouin warriors like Prince Abdelkader.
And they were called associationists. They respected the traditional culture more than the liberal settlers and thought that France could create a more accommodating kind of regime there, which would allow the native Algerian culture to survive.
But sadly, it was the settlers and the assimilationists who got their way, and French administration in Algeria was focused entirely on settler interests.
Aimen: And I think Thomas, this is where the French civilizational hypocrisy is exposed because yes, they wanted to create this empire all throughout Africa and the far east on their image though.
In other words, “We are so liberal, we tolerate all cultures, especially the French, nothing else. We will allow all languages to flourish, and by languages, we mean the French and all those different dialects, but that's it.”
Thomas: So, in the aftermath of the French revolution, French civilization for the French becomes something like a replacement religion for the Catholicism, which had been upset by liberal revolutionary ideas.
And it's funny, no offense to French listeners. And I adore France, obviously as an Anglo-American, it makes me feel very inferior every time I visit France. But you talk to French people and to this day, they often speak of their own culture as if it is clearly a universally legitimate culture, as if it is clearly of universal import, that it is what civilization and culture are in an ideal way.
Aimen: And this is exactly Thomas, how they pursued their policies in Algeria of making the Algerians French at heart, French in mind, French speaking people, that's it, no acceptance of any other form of culture whatsoever.
And I think in my opinion, you know, they were pursuing this with a religious zeal that is contrary to the liberal image they were trying to portray.
Thomas: Well, that's the Clash of Civilizations for you, certainly in Algeria, but I think it's also worth pointing out that some Algerians even, and in some cases, particularly very pious religious ones, did accommodate themselves to French rule.
A bit like that quote that I recited earlier of the idea that, well, God has handed Algeria over to the French as a punishment, or our civilization has reached its end and something new is coming, so we must submit to it.
A lot of the coastal aristocrats, the native Algerian coastal aristocrats, they accommodated themselves to French rule. There was a large segment within the French colonial army of Algerians. They were known as the Harkis, who made their peace with the French, and even, and most importantly, from my personal point of view, Sufi.
So, we don't often talk about Sufism in Conflicted, and I will hope maybe one day we can redress that because I love Sufism. I find it absolutely fascinating. And there was an Algerian Sufi in the early 20th century. His name was Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawi, who founded a Sufi tariqa, a Sufi brotherhood in Algeria.
And he was totally okay with French rule. And he developed a new form of Islamic spirituality that accommodated modernity without sacrificing what he considered to be the most essential points of Islam, the remembrance of God, and holiness of virtue. He created a version of Muslim modernity that was deeply spiritual. And for many Europeans actually, very attractive.
And Aimen, you might find this interesting; the reason I am Orthodox Christian, because I converted to orthodoxy when I was 20-years-old in Greece, the reason I was in Greece, the reason I pursued Orthodox Christianity was because as a teenager, I came across a book about Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawi and his way of formulating Sufism and his ideas on contemplative prayer and how the mind meditating upon the name of God can unite with the divine and hopefully, be purified of sins and things — a very mystical vision, which as an evangelical Christian, I had never encountered.
And so, it was really Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawi who introduced to me the possibilities within religion. And then when I found out that in fact in Greece, there were monasteries where a tradition of contemplative prayer was being carried out still, very much like the one that Sheikh Ahmad was talking about, I went there and I became Orthodox and everything.
So, I owe it to an Algerian Sheikh who had made his peace with modernity, without sacrificing Muslim spirituality for my own religious journey.
Aimen: Wow. This is incredible Thomas, and I always know from our endless conversations that you are a fanboy of Sufi scholars of Islam from Al-Ghazali to Ibn Arabi. And I know Ibn Arabi, is one of your Sufi heroes.
Thomas: Ibn Arabi, yeah, the great and illusion Sufi mystic from the 13th century who died in Damascus and is buried there. When I lived in Damascus, I would visit his shrine. Yeah.
Aimen: And do you know who was actually also buried beside him in that shrine from 1883 until 1966?
Thomas: I know very well, Emir Abdelkader El Djazairi.
Aimen: I think he was so happy to be buried next to Ibn Arabi. I don't know why the bloody Algerian leaders of the independence decided to exhume him from there and bring him all the way to Algeria. It was disturbing.
Thomas: I'm glad you've brought up independence, Aimen, because we've got to move on.
Now, dear listener, there was never really peace in French Algeria. Law and order was impossible to maintain in the face of waves of Algerian resistance. And in 1954, a war of independence broke out in Algeria that lasted eight years and was really of all the wars of independence in the Muslim world, the bloodiest of them all.
It involved the guerilla tactics by the revolutionaries, the state cracked down on them. They tortured them. It resulted in about a million dead people, but the numbers are very, very contested, but that's what some scholars suggest, about a million people died in the course of the war of independence.
Aimen: While we can't talk too much about the war of independence itself, it's eight years. And goodness, it will take at least eight episodes of Conflicted to talk about the war of independence, and not to mention how lucky the Algerian Liberation Front at the time, because they had Nasser rising in Egypt in 1954, which gave them a lot of help and support.
But if you want to know about it, really watch the amazing, the absolutely amazing film, The Battle of Algiers, it's a black and white film.
Thomas: Oh yeah, what a film.
Aimen: What a film.
Thomas: What a flick.
Aimen: Absolutely. I definitely recommend it.
Thomas: Yeah. 1966 the film came out by an Italian director, Gillo Pontecorvo and it's filmed in the cinema verité style, like as if their news reels, as if you're really in amongst the revolutionaries and the generals finding them, a cat and mouse game, it is really a fantastic film. One of the best ever made.
Aimen: Indeed. Now, we have to go and salute the victorious Algerians and now, we have to see what are they going to do with the new country they established.
Thomas: That's right. So, the National Liberation Front, which was founded in 1954 and which were the leading lights of the independence movement. They came to power in 1962 when president De Gaulle of France signed the Evian Accords ending the French presence in the country.
Now, the NLF, the National Liberation Front would go on to rule Algeria as a one-party state. And to some large extent is inspired by Nasser in Egypt who had supported them throughout the war, they created a similar style secularizing, modernizing one-party, dictatorial state for Algeria.
And they were helped in that by the discovery of, guess what dear listener? Oil. In 1956, weirdly during the war of independence, oil and gas were discovered in the Sahara Desert of Algeria.
And in 1961, the country began exporting oil in a big way. So, this takes us back really to the OPEC episode that we did, if you remember. Algeria joined OPEC directly after independence, which was a newly founded thing OPEC.
So, Algeria was an early member of OPEC. And because the country had the income from oil and gas, it was able to modernize in a big way throughout the sixties and the seventies.
So, initially, unlike in Egypt where economic socialists sort of Nasserite ideas undermined the economy, Algeria's economy was able to withstand these policies because of oil and gas, which Egypt didn't have.
Aimen: Three years after independence in 1965, Houari Boumediene, one of the heroes of the liberation war, mounted a coup against the setting president at the time, and established a new revolutionary presidential council. And he started to solidify Algeria as a socialist planned economy based on natural resources. He was another Gaddafi, but thank God, he was sane.
Thomas: How many coups have we have we had in this season of Conflicted? Dear listener, you'll see the history of Algeria, again, it's like a precis, a little summary of everything we've talked about.
So, ‘65, there's a coup, the military takes over, a military dictatorship rams through modernization, a ruling through a revolutionary council.
In 1971, it nationalizes the oil industry.
In 1973, the oil price booms, and they push industrialization in a big way.
In 1975, the government hosts the Algiers agreement between Iran and Iraq. You'll remember this from the episode on the Shah. This is the agreement that defined the border of the Shatt al-Arab River in Mesopotamia, and settled the Kurdish Question for a while. It was this agreement that Saddam Hussein broke.
So, in 1975 in Algeria, this agreement was signed. So, this Algerian world is very similar to lots of Arab countries in the seventies. And just like countries like Egypt and like Iraq in the Cold War, because the regime in Algeria was dictatorial, it was leftist, it was modernizing, it essentially sided with the Soviet Union.
And it got weapons from the Soviets and it was considered part of the Soviet sphere of influence in the Middle East.
Aimen: So, in 1979, yet again Thomas, 1979.
Thomas: Oh, 1979, it's the year that I was born. So, clearly, a very important year.
Aimen: Oh goodness. What did you do to the world, Thomas? You jinxed it.
Thomas: I ask myself that every day.
Aimen: So, in 1979, president Houari Boumediene dies. And of course, he was lucky. He presided over a long period of growth in the Algerian economy. Thanks to, first at the time, a manageable population.
He took over the country when it was about 11 million people, and then he died when the country was about 15 million people. So, its manageable population growth, but also with the booming economic growth because of the high oil prices.
So, he was lucky. He was absolutely lucky, but unfortunately, his legacy is that he did not save some money on the side for when the oil prices will crash down. And guess what, dear listener? The oil prices crashed down in 1981. And at the time, there was a new president, Chadli Bendjedid, in Algeria.
Thomas: Yes. So, the collapse of the price of oil in the early eighties was a real disaster, not just for Algeria, but for the whole Middle East. And especially, obviously, for those countries that were dependent upon oil exports, it affected everywhere.
And sadly, it was sort of an inevitable consequence of the price of oil having been high for so long. So, no matter what a cartel like OPEC would wish, by conspiring to keep the price as high as possible, all they did was incentivize new players in other parts of the world who were not part of their cartel to jump into the industry.
So, in the 1970s, the oil price is so high, lots of capitalists say, “Great, we should start selling oil.” This is when Mexican oil expands in the Gulf of Mexico. The Alaskan oil fields are opened up, and the North Sea oil is opened up to exploration and exporting of oil. And so, the British get in, in a big way.
So, basically, the industry is flooded with oil and the price of oil goes down. This has a tremendous impact on countries like Algeria, whose whole economic model depended on a high oil price.
Aimen: Poor president Chaldi Bendjedid, he couldn't have been more unlucky with the time that he became president. He became president during the 1980s, and what a bad time, oil prices were low. And there were other geopolitical events taking place around the world that were undermining the Algerian society. And also, internal factors.
Among the internal factors is that the Algerians were, after the war of liberation, started breeding like rabbits. And those bunnies started to grow and these bunnies started demanding jobs, and demanding education, and putting more and more strain on the economy of the country. They need servicing, they need education.
But there is not that much money coming from the oil sales and the Algerian economy wasn't exporting anything. And there was no tourism to begin with. This is one of the biggest mistakes of the Algerian ruling class, closing off the country to the outside world.
That robbed them of billions upon billions of dollars of tourism revenue, which their neighbors to the east and to the west, Tunisia and Morocco, were enjoying so much. And actually, one of the reasons why Algeria became a polarized society is because of the closing off of Algeria from the outside world. That allowed a lot of radical ideologies to fester.
And aside the eighties and what was going on throughout the eighties, we talked about it in the last episode — the Afghan jihad against the Soviets, and that attracted possibly thousands of Algerians to go and fight the jihad there in Afghanistan. And of course, those chicken will come home to roost.
And so, they came back to Algeria and they started spreading the hybrid belief between Muslim Brotherhood and political Salafism, as well as Jihadi Salafism. And all of these factors conspire together to create the perfect storm in Algeria by 1988.
Thomas: Yeah. So, the young generation of Algerians were ripe for Islamic and political radicalization. And this was something that Algeria shared with the rest of the Arab world in the eighties.
Like many other countries after independence, the Algerian government had invited in teachers from other Arab countries, mainly members of the Muslim Brotherhood to de-Frenchify, Islamize, and Arabize the state and society.
They weren't hugely successful at the Arabization part of that program, but the Islamization program did succeed to a large extent. And so, after the oil price collapsed, the government responded to a growing Islamic revivalism in the country by adopting a more Islamist paradigm.
So, this happened a lot at this time, that previously, secular governments in the wake of a growing Islamic revivalism, they tried to become more Islamic to satisfy those calls.
And in fact, the Algerian government invited in Yusuf al-Qaradawi, of all men, the infamous ideologue, later on, he would have a talk show, a notorious talk show on Al Jazeera. Yusuf al-Qaradawi was among the men that the Algerian government invited in, in the eighties to help direct these efforts.
Also, Aimen, and this is related to what we were just talking about; since independence, the government had suppressed and dismantled the traditional Sufi brotherhoods, which might have acted as a counterweight to Islamism, and which had traditionally been a primary feature of Algerian Islam.
The Sufi brotherhoods had been suppressed. And so, there was no traditional Islamic institution around to counteract the growing Islamism which only grew louder when all those Algerians who had gone to Afghanistan to fight in the jihad, returned back to the country. And this sort of broke out in a big way in October 1988, when huge protests, really riots, exploded across the country.
Aimen: Indeed. 33 years before The Arab Spring, Algeria had its own Arab Spring in 1988. This is why we said, Algeria is going to foreshadow many of the events that would come later in the Arab and Muslim world.
These riots are happening because one, high unemployment; two, lack of development, and the inability of the state to grip on corruption and as well as the fact that there is a new Islamic revivalism.
But this is not the Islam of Sufism which is quietest and focusing on the spiritual wellbeing of the individual rather than the entire society. No, this is a new brand of Islamism. This is political Salafism, supported by Jihadi Salafism.
Thomas: And dear listener, if there are echoes here of the situation in Iran in 1978, that's for a reason, 10 years earlier; it was the same kind of mixture of elements that led to the protests breaking out in Tehran and elsewhere in Iran. And president Bendjedid of Algeria responded to the protests of 1988 in the same way that the Shah had, which is to say he decided to liberalize everything.
So, Algeria had been a one-party state. He decided we're going to open up politics to mass participation. He said other people could create political parties. Other parties could participate in elections. And so, immediately two months later, in January of 1989, the Islamists banded together and founded the Islamic Salvation Front.
Aimen: Oh yes, the Islamic Salvation Front or known in its French acronym as FIS. You see, this was one of the cleverest political branding exercises, because why, they didn't call it a Hezb-e which means a party. They didn't want to be just another party.
No, no, no. They looked at the ruling party, which was the National Liberation Front, and they decided to counteract, “If that's the front and we are going to be a front.” So, instead of Al-Jabhat al-Wataniya lil-Tahrir, The National Liberation Front, we are going to create al-Jabhah al-Islāmiyah lil-Inqādh, the Islamic Salvation Front.
So, they countered the National with Islamic. They countered the front with the front and what comes after liberation? Salvation. Because they believe that, “Okay, thank you so much, the liberation generation, you did what you could for the country. Now, it is our turn to rescue the country from your mistakes.”
Thomas: From sin, from a compromise with Western culture. In fact, basically, the FIS was saying you may have politically liberated us from French rule, but you haven't saved our souls from French culture; we are going to return Islam to the state.
Now, the FIS unified the discontent of both small businessmen in the country who tended to be pious and conservative and were feeling the pinch of the lower oil price, and young unemployed men who tended to be angry and easily radicalized. And the FIS’s goal was to establish an Islamic state under Sharia law.
Aimen: But Thomas, as someone who observed the FIS in Algeria in 1989, 1990, 1991, these three years were so pivotal because their ability to whip up the masses was absolutely incredible.
They were able to fill stadiums 10 times over, and they will be chanting Islamic religious chants, and the demanding that, “Dawlat ‘iislamia, Dawlat ‘iislamia” which means that we want an Islamic state, we want an Islamic state.
The chants were not only heard in the presidential palace and Algiers — no, they were even heard and reverberating in the Élysée Palace in Paris, and other European capitals.
The Islamic Salvation Front really galvanized the masses. And they preyed on their fears. They preyed on their antipathy was France. They preyed on their natural instinctive love for their religion. And boy, they really did it well.
Thomas: From the perspective of a secularist, we can see here the usual problem of democracy in a Muslim majority country. The Islamist party immediately gained much more traction than any secular rivals, because of the people's piety.
And also, because of the network of mosques that any Muslim country will have in which Muslim political parties, Islamist political parties can exploit or can take advantage of to further their own political aims.
An American undersecretary of state at the time, when he was looking at the rising power of the FIS, he said, “You know what, our fear is that when with an Islamist political party, participating in democracy, you get ‘one man, one vote, one time.’”
Because the Islamist parties, the FIS were not Democrats. They were looking forward to replacing democracy and to replacing secular authoritarianism with in their minds, at least, traditional Islamic authoritarianism.
Aimen: Indeed. And they were always invoking the memory of who? Abdelkader Djazairi.
Thomas: Oh, dear Abdelkader. I don't think he would've supported the FIS, especially not with what followed.
So, in June of 1990, local elections took place in Algeria and the FIS won 54% of the vote.
So, new FIS counselors took up their positions across the country, and it must be admitted, they were highly regarded by the citizens, compared to the national liberation front cronies that they had replaced, they were more professional, they were more in touch with the people.
Aimen: And they were less corrupt.
Thomas: Yeah. So, their stock is going up in Algeria. So, then, a general election was scheduled for January, 1992. And the first round of that election took place in December of 1991.
Now, in that first round, 48% of the vote went to FIS, but it won 80% of the seats in the first round.
Now, the army knew that the FIS was going to sweep the board in the upcoming elections in January. And they were worried. On the one hand, the FIS had openly stated that they would punish the officer class for their crimes against the nation in the proceeding decades.
On the other hand, in general, there was anxiety throughout the Algerian military, because what had happened in the last year or so was that the Soviet Union, which had supported the Algerian army and had armed it for decades, collapsed.
And so, I think it's important in order to understand the sort of chaos that was beginning to engulf Algeria, it was a time of transition.
It wasn't a time of transition just for Algeria. It was a time of transition across the Soviet world, across wherever the Soviets had had their sphere of influence. The Soviet Union was no more. And all of its former satellites and allies were struggling to adapt. This was true of Algeria as well.
So, feeling the stress, feeling the strain of the rising Islamist tide, the Algerian military thought we have to do something about it. Who did they call up for advice? François Mitterrand, the president of France.
Aimen: Oh, yes. You know what, one of the leaders of the FIS, he said, “Our Algerian army, their weaponry is from the Soviet Union, but their hearts and their minds and their summer houses are where? In France.”
Thomas: Yes. The French intelligence had long established relationships with the new Algerian government after independence. The French were still there, to some extent, Algeria was still their backyard, if you like.
And so, François Mitterrand and the French intelligence gave the generals, gave the officers in Algeria, the go ahead to do something about the threat of the FIS. The army basically said we are saving democracy from itself. And they canceled the January elections and they forced president Bendjedid to resign. In fact, he did so on air.
Aimen: Yeah. On TV, the defense minister and the most powerful man in the country at the time, Khalid Nasser, he brought him to the palace. And he brought the news cameras and told him, “Look, the country need a new leadership because the country is going into chaos. So, thank you so much for your service.”
And then they decided, okay, what do we do? We find someone else with a cleaner hand to come and become president.
Thomas: Yeah, they looked around. They didn't really want to be accused of launching a coup (though, in fact, that's what they had done). So, they looked around for a president to come to power who might placate the Islamist opposition, and might allow the one-party state system to continue in a functional way. And they found a man called Mohamed Boudiaf.
Aimen: Oh yeah. Mohamed Boudiaf, one of the heroes of the Liberation War against France, and who actually fell out with the leadership with Houari Boumediene after the 1965 coup.
So, he went into Morocco for exile for almost 30 years. And then they said to him, “Okay, come back, all is forgiven, we know that you've been away for 30 years, but nevertheless, come back to rescue you the country from its impending doom.”
Thomas: So, with president Boudiaf now in power and democracy effectively canceled, the FIS was dissolved by the government and its leaders imprisoned.
Now, the activists for the FIS, it's many, many, many, many, many supporters around the country, they considered this to be an act of war, and 40,000 FIS militants took to the mountains and went into the desert and prepared. Everything was really, really tense.
Meanwhile, President Boudiaf decided, well, the country needs reform and he laid plans for properly reforming the country and sort of clipping the wings of the military's power.
Aimen: Well, you know what happened, Thomas, to those who tried to clip the wings of the military, and they have no power behind them; the military will always clip their wings.
So, in 29 June of 1992, just five months, five months after becoming president, Mohamed Boudiaf is sitting in one of the big auditoriums addressing hundreds and hundreds of people and he's in the podium giving a speech.
Thomas: And this is being broadcast, live on TV.
Aimen: He heard a sound of a bullet from behind him, and he just looked back. And as soon as he looked back, a hell of bullets came from behind him, just from behind the curtain. And from behind the curtain emerged this military figure with an AK47 shooting down at president Boudiaf, riddling him with bullets.
After that, there was silence. And I remember watching this myself like on TV, I was 13-years-old. And when the news clip came and they showed how it happened, I saw that, where president Boudiaf was sitting, there was a man, one of the country's ministers sitting in shock, holding both his hands together and crying. The country went into a shock.
And many people actually were in the streets when the military was conducting the funeral, and the funeral was held by the military, when Boudiaf's body like was in this procession, the people were shouting at the generals, “You brought him back to kill him.”
The people always felt that by 1992, they will have a government of the people, by the people, for the people. Now, they're having a government, for the people, despite the people.
Thomas: The government blamed the Islamists for the assassination of President Boudiaf. Initially, this was the story that the government announced. The vast majority of historians and the people of Algeria at the time, knew that it was the generals themselves who had killed the president in order to secure their own privileges into the future.
But yes, as you say, the Arab world was shocked by this live assassination. Algeria was shocked, and the whole country sort of held its breath (if you like), for nine months, held its breath, “What's going to happen? What's going to happen?”
And then in March of 1993, the Islamist militants who had gathered and mobilized in the deserts and in the mountains, began carrying out a wave of assassinations; intellectuals, professors, writers, all French speaking were killed.
And this was making a very, very, very clear statement to the country; we're coming. We're purifying this country and we're purifying it of the French, and everything that it stands for, the West.
Aimen: Indeed. Two distinct Jihadi military armies were formed. The first one is the Salvation Army. Of course, we're not talking about the rather nice Salvation Army that we know of and we love, and we support.
Thomas: No, this is AIS, the Islamic Salvation Army; the AIS, that was one of the two main Islamist militant groups that were founded at that time. The other one being the GIA, the Armed Islamic Group.
Aimen: Well, you can call that the Jaysh al-Inqadh or the Islamic Salvation Army was let's say, like the equivalent of Al-Qaeda. The GIA was in fact, the precursor for ISIS. We are talking here about far more radical and far more blood thirsty version of the Islamic Salvation Army.
Thomas: These two groups, the GIA and the AIS caused basically a split within the Islamists. And this is very important as the civil war breaks out shortly thereafter, because the civil war wasn't just a one group against the government.
It was really two groups against each other against the government, and the government against both or sometimes just one with the other. So, it becomes a very complicated triangle of a war, but the FIS and the GIA were both Islamist groups. And the GIA, yes, Aimen, they were even more brutal than the FIS.
Aimen: Indeed. When I said that Algeria was always foreshadowing the rest of the Arab and the Muslim world, we were not exaggerating because they had their ISIS, I will say 20 years, exactly 20 years before Syria and Iraq had their ISIS.
So, this is where the GIA committed unspeakable horrors, atrocities against many. Not only the Algerian intellectuals Thomas, but also, anyone who worked for the government even if they worked as a municipality worker.
Thomas: So, later that same year, the Algiers Airport was bombed. A terrorist bombing was carried out there. And, in this bombing, civilians were killed. This was a shocking event, but a sign of the blood bath to come.
Because Aimen, it has to be said, it's true that the consequences of the intra Islamist struggle between the GIA and the AIS was that the GIA, especially which tended to harness or focus the anger and energy of the radicalized youth of Algeria, the GIA became more and more brutal and merciless in its methods. And weirdly, this can be traced back to of all places, London.
Aimen: Oh yes. London-abad, the capital of Jihadi Englastan. It tells a lot that when the GIA wanted some theological opinion on the jihad, they were carrying out against the Algerian state, they reached out not to religious scholars in Saudi Arabia or in Egypt or in Jordan, no. They reached out to a Jihadi cleric, a senior Jihadi cleric who is residing in London, in Wembley of all places, a place associated with football.
Thomas: This is the infamous, the notorious Abu Qatada, a Palestinian, Jordanian cleric who had sought asylum in the UK.
Aimen: Can you believe it? The UK authorities believed his story about being a persecuted, a religious free thinker.
Nonetheless, the GIA reached out to him because he had gathered around him a strong Algerian diaspora following in the UK, in France, in Belgium and in the rest of Europe. And the question itself was blood curdling.
Thomas: You mean people are approaching him with a legal question. They want a legal ruling, a fatwa.
Aimen: They wanted a jurist opinion on a theological matter, for him to sanction an act of bloodshed, that they are planning to carry out. They went to him and they said, “Sheikh Abu Qatad, as you know, we are the Mujahideen of Algeria. We are fighting against the state and the state security apparatus and the military, in retaliation for our attacks on them, they started to target our families, our children, and our women. And therefore, we believe that the only way we can deter them from doing so is by targeting their own women, their own children. Can we do that?”
And Abu Qatad, in 1994, he gave them that theological jurist fatwa that they could indeed attack and kill the women and the children of the security officers and of the military officers.
Thomas: This sort of fatwa, Aimen, it's unprecedented. This flies in the face of classical Islamic jurisprudence on Jihad, basically 100%. Had any jurist of any note in the history of Islam allowed Mujahideen to indiscriminately kill civilians, women and children?
Aimen: Nope, he broke away with 1400 years of Islamic jurisprudence and of Islamic rules. The Quran is very clear, “Alla taziru waziratun wiz’ra ukh’r.” No soul shall bear the sins of another soul. That's it. This is a clear divine order. And do you know, this verse is repeated twice in the Quran to make sure that people get it; no soul bears the sins of another soul.
Thomas: And I guess the GIA having received from Abu Qatada the fatwa they were after, they took his fatwa and ran with it. They said, “Okay, great, we've got sanction now to do what needs to be done.”
Aimen: It is like giving the keys of a Lamborghini to a 15-year-old teenage delinquent.
Thomas: Drunk.
Aimen: They went to town with it, oh, to several towns where they committed several unspeakable massacres, and they were no longer applying it just to the children and wives, and sisters and mothers of the security officers and military offices.
No, they were even targeting people who worked for municipalities, who worked for the state, even collecting garbage, against teachers, and against journalists. They spared no one, anyone who is associated with the state or even sympathizing with the state, he was subject to that fatwa to the point where Abu Qatada himself, eight months after issuing the fatwa, he rescinded it.
Because he felt that, “I didn't tell you to do that.” But no, because one of the greatest things I've learned when I was young, when I was learning Sharia, is that I used to see my cleric, my sheikh in the mosque give different answers to different people.
And when I ask him why, he said, “Because fatwa isn't about just the situation, it is about who is asking. Because if someone comes to me and I know that they will be wise with what permission I will give them, I give it to them. But if someone comes to me and I know that he is seeking that permission for a nefarious reason, no, I don't give it to him.”
So, Abu Qatada made a school boy's error, but it cost the lives of tens of thousands of women and children and innocent people across Algeria.
Thomas: The GIA's rampage against civilians really foreshadowed the radical tech fearism that would explode in the wake of 9/11, the war on terror, the rise of ISIS and other groups. So, once again, Algeria is the petri dish is the experiment of radical Jihad. It happened in Algeria first.
Now, throughout all this time, the Algerian government had been negotiating mainly with the FIS, the outlawed Islamist political party, and other is Islamists who had been setting up autonomous zones under their rule, where they were imposing forms of Sharia law that actually had become more like a mafia protection racket.
This is what often happens when is Islamists set up little mini states. It certainly happened with ISIS. It happened with Al-Qaeda in Yemen. To some extent, they provide government services, but as the pressure mounts upon them, they tend to devolve into something like a mafia racket.
So, the government's been negotiating with the Islamists, trying to find some solution. And in November, 1995, they basically give up these negotiations. They feel that we can't really make any headway and they call for elections.
Now, in these elections, a lot of former FIS supporters voted against the Islamists. They were tired of all the fighting. They were tired of the bloodletting. This is again, something that would become a normal part of the pattern in the future.
That civilian populations initially support Islamist political parties. But then when the is Islamist parties achieve some sort of power, they realize what that means. They tend to turn against them.
Now, a new constitution was drawn up for Algeria in November, 1996. And throughout all this time, pro-government militias are being formed by the army. Now, this is a remarkable development. The army in order to counter is Islamist militias that are running rampant all around the country, they set up civilian militias of their own called Patriot militias.
This has the effect, perhaps the foreseeable effect of really animating the GIA. The most brutal of the Islamist groups, animating them again. And in 1998, huge massacres, really the biggest massacres begin to be carried out by the GIA across the country.
So much so that their rivals, the AIS, the other Islamist group, they call a truce with the government. They don't want to be blamed for these massacres. They're appalled by them.
This allows the government to turn its attention to the GIA. The government makes some headway in cracking down on the most brutal of the Islamists groups. And then in September of 1999, Aimen, Abdelaziz Bouteflika comes to power as president of Algeria.
He grants amnesty for many Islamists. Let's say the more moderate ones, the ones who had turned against the GIA, and other radicals. And over the next few years, President Bouteflika crushes the GIA. And something like peace is restored under the auspices of an authoritarian military dictatorship like before.
So, the Algerian civil war sort of ends with a bang and a whimper. Nothing much had been accomplished. About a quarter of a million people died during the course of the civil war. It was horrible, but it was a foreshadowing of things to come.
Aimen: Thomas, if I would summarize the influence of the Algerian civil war on the rest of the Arab world. I would say that it became the blueprint on how to deal with subversive Islamist insurrections.
Thomas: You mean President Bouteflika’s, sort of his strategy was adopted by other countries?
Aimen: Indeed. The carrot and the stick, except in on one hand, you have very juicy carrots on the other one, you have a very scary, nailed stick.
But the reality is that with radical violent Islamists, the only way to deal with them is this strategy. Either you try to convince as many of them to leave that path and to join you.
And on the other hand, those who refuse to abandon violence, then you have to come down so hard on them that you will make an example out of them in order to deter others from doing so.
Thomas: Yeah, the Algerian civil war was a wakeup call for Arab states, for Islamic governments across the world. In the eighties and nineties as is widely known Arab governments, Muslim governments, they tended to support, and if not support, at least, tolerate the rising Islamism, even the rising jihadism, thinking that they could harness it for their own ends.
And as the Algerian civil war played out with increasing brutality and as president Bouteflika, successfully crushed the Islamist opposition in the country, Arab governments paid attention, and they more and more realized, “Well, we have to adopt something like Bouteflika’s strategy here. We can no longer tolerate Islamism in that form. The global jihadist form, certainly not.”
After the Arab Spring in 2011, the governments especially were faced with this existential question; do we continue to tolerate radical Islamism or not?
Aimen: You see Thomas, I'm always confronted with this question that if it is the will of the people, if it is the democratic expression of the people to elect Islamist parties, then let it be.
But the problem is that the entire political framework is flawed as it is right now in the Arab and Muslim world. What I mean by that is that in order for a democracy or at least some semblance of participatory rule to succeed in Arab societies, we need to have a permanently fixed figurehead there sitting at the top of all the political proceedings, making sure that if things get heated, that he would intervene, he would arbitrate between all the political trends and resolve matters.
And if necessary, dissolve the current legislative assemblies and call for fresh elections in order to calm things down. This figurehead is called a king, a monarch.
Thomas: I knew you were going to mention a king, Aimen, monarchy once again.
Aimen: I don't want Arab all to end up being an experimental laboratory for some snobbish intellectuals from the West to say like, “This will work and this will work.”
No, there are actually examples and models that worked and including, in particular, the interesting experiment of Morocco. The kingdom of Morocco and the king himself in the aftermath of the Arab Spring liberalized, but moderately, and allowed political parties of Islamist nature to actually engage in politics and they won.
Basically, like a Muslim Brotherhood government in Morocco was ruling there for several years. A prime minister from the Muslim Brotherhood was ruling on behalf of the king. He had considerable power economically speaking, as well as in terms of legislative laws.
However, the experiment here proved to be successful when they lost the vote. What did they do? They stepped aside, because the king who had the loyalty of the military means that he had the final say; “So, you lost the elections. Now, step aside, because the winning coalition, I need to name a prime minister from among them.”
And this is exactly how the experiment in Morocco shows that in order for the Arab world to move away from absolute monarchies and from autocratic rule, we need to have semi-constitutional monarchies that would serve as the vehicles towards not only social and economic modernity, but also, political modernity.
Thomas: Well, Aimen. Perhaps, evidence that you're right about that is that of all the countries in the Middle East, when we've told many of their stories over the course of this season, of all those countries, Algeria was without an Islamic monarch for longer than anyone else.
Perhaps if Emir Abdelkader had managed to become a Monarch of Algeria back in the 19th century, everything would've been different. Maybe it's because they had 150 years of republicanism in Algeria, of various forms that when the civil war came there, it was so brutal. They didn't even have the memory of a king, the memory of someone who could hover above mere politics and create some semblance of unity. Who knows?
As I was thinking about the Algerian experience in the 20th century and the outbreak of civil war there, I couldn't help, but think of my own country, the United States.
Because I'm realizing Aimen that though, yes, this season has been about a Clash of Civilization and the way in which Western civilization has clashed with traditional Islamic civilization as the one has sought to replace the other over time.
In a way, we're also talking about what today is called a culture war, certainly within these Islamic countries themselves. the Clash of Civilization results in a culture war, and those culture wars can easily become very violent.
And when you were telling the story of that president of Algeria who was assassinated by someone from behind the curtain while he was on TV and that hail of bullets bringing him down, and then his minister in tears realizing this is the turning point, and we're just going to descend into violence — I thought my country, the United States with all of the tremendous polarization that's going on at the moment, and with a tremendous number of guns there, a highly armed society, would it take that much for something like that to happen there and what would happen if civil war returned to the United States? My God.
So, maybe Algeria's history foreshadowed not just the Arab Spring and all sorts of Islamic events in the future, maybe it foreshadowed the second American Civil War, who knows? Watch this space.
Well, Aimen, that's it for the Algerian Civil War, and really, that's it for the historical arc of this season of Conflicted. We've done our best to tell the story of the Cold War period in the Middle East. We've done our best to explain and narrate the checkered experience of modernization in the Middle East.
And we've ended the story really right back where we started in season one, all those years ago, right on the verge of 9/11, and the beginning of the War on terror; we’ll be back with you in two weeks’ time.
A reminder that you can follow the show over on Facebook and Twitter at MHconflicted. And for a deeper dive on some of the subjects we cover here on Conflicted, head over to Facebook and search Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group. There, you will find other fans of the show, engaging in heated debates, enlightening conversations, and just generally geeking out over Conflicted related topics.
Those of you who already subscribe to the show will know that at the end of each episode, Aimen and I pick a question sent in by a lucky listener to answer for our exclusive bonus content section.
To access that content, be in with a chance of getting your own question answered, and to listen ad-free, you can subscribe to the show for just 99P on Apple Podcasts or sign up to Conflicted extra on Spotify, also for just 99P.
That's it for this week. Join us again in two weeks’ time for another episode of Conflicted.
[Music playing 01:23:49]
Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Bea Duncan. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer, production support and fact checking by Talia Augustidis. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley.