Islamism and the recolonization of Algeria

Abstract

In November 1988, during a visit to the shrine of Sidi Abderrahmane, a popular sufi and guardian of the old city of Algiers, I noticed two apparently “mad” people (or as they are called in colloquial Arabic, madroubin, meaning “stricken”): a young woman dressed in a hijab and a man in his late thirties dressed in Western clothes. They were unrelated, but their presence in the small terrace overlooking the Mediterranean and their delirium brought them close to each other. She spoke to herself about God and his wrath; he spoke to the few visitors about injustices perpetrated by an unspecified “them, " of history that will be remade. Addressing me, he also asked a rhetorical question about the meaning of women’s “oppression” (or hogra) without seeming to see the young woman walking to and fro, absorbed in her soliloquy. In many ways, he was a throwback to the North African tradition of the illuminated man who speaks his mind about the powers that be in a more or less metaphorical fashion. She was brought to the saint’s mausoleum to regain her sanity and stop mumbling about the divine. In June 1991, as I was waiting for the bus at a stop on the heights of Algiers in Hydra Square, a middle-aged woman wearing a hijab stood next to me. She appeared to speak to herself, in a low voice, unintelligible words interspersed with a recitation of the shahada. I had noticed in the cab that had taken me to Hydra that the driver played a cassette of an imam who broke into loud sobs in the middle of his khutba, moved by his own words.