by SALAH CHOUAKI
(translated by KARIMA BENNOUNE)
Salah Chouaki, noted education expert and dedicated leftwing activist, murdered on September 14, 1994.
(Algerian educator Salah Chouaki published this article in the newspaper El Watan on 15 March 1993 as Algeria headed into its “dark decade” of fundamentalist violence and state counter terror abuses. He was amazingly prescient about the rising threat of political Islam. The day after this article appeared a campaign of fundamentalist assassinations of Algerian intellectuals escalated with the killing of former Minister of Education Djilali Liabes. Just eighteen months later, on 14 September 1994, after receiving threats which failed to silence him, Chouaki himself was gunned down by the Armed Islamic Group. During the subsequent decade, as many as 200,000 Algerians were killed.)
Compromise with political Islam is impossible
There is an unresolvable contradiction between support for the idea of a modern society and the belief, sincere or feigned, that it is possible to ‘domesticate’ the totalitarian monster of fundamentalism.
The expression “we are a Muslim state” was used recently by the head of the government, as if to tell the fundamentalists that he had no lessons to learn from them. Meanwhile, he labelled the most important modernist forces “secular-assimilationists”- as if they represented a totally outmoded politics. Taken together, all of this reveals a tendency to accept being drawn onto the playing-field of political Islamism. This is a choice which leads inexorably toward fundamentalism itself.
Thus, the state embarks on a course of one-upmanship, beginning a competition with parties that exploit religion and use it for reactionary political ends. In so doing, the state itself and modernist forces have lost the battle before it has even begun.
Even if the fundamentalist forces were to be soundly beaten on the terrorism front thanks to the mantra, “we are a Muslim state”, and because of the attack launched on the partisans of modernization, they would keep their ideological trump cards. Hence, the fundamentalists can try yet again to take power– not merely a piece of power which they already have, but total power – as soon as they have caught their breath.
What religious restoration?
If the state uses religion, under whatever pretext and in whatever form – from then on there is no reason to think that others would not surface alongside it, to dispute its monopoly!
From the moment that we plant in the minds of the general public the seed of the idea that the question of power is intimately related to some sort of “religious restoration,” we are in fact accepting that political discourse may be dismantled and reduced to religious discourse. We are no longer speaking to citizens, but to believers. We are no longer speaking to civil society but to an abstract ‘umma’. We are no longer running a state under the rule of law but a de facto state. From that moment onward, the Constitution and the laws lose all meaning, as we continue to experience in a tragic fashion. Is it not in the name of God and of sacred religion that terrorists continue to savagely assassinate Algerians?
Women Living Under Muslim Laws for more