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Post-Independence Islam
While
the movement's roots date back to before the 1934-62 revolution,
Islamists have become more active as the failure of the state to
uphold Islamic values has become clear. Following a brief but fierce
post-independence power struggle in the summer of 1962, Ahmad Ben
Bella took power in Algeria. One of the National Liberation Front's
(FLN) founders, Ben Bella was supported by the army under Colonel
Houari Boumediene and enjoyed the backing of many FLN
leftists.
Ben
Bella, faced with extraordinary political and economic challenges,
led the country down the path of socialism and one-party
authoritarianism. Boumediene took power in a 1965 coup and pursued a
policy of radical nationalism, state capitalism and continued
centralization of power. While Ben Bella referred to Islam as one of
the bases of the Algerian nation, state Islam gained a higher
profile under Boumediene, who himself had studied at al-Azhar and
was socially, culturally and personally more conservative than Ben
Bella. Boumediene was also a strong exponent of Arabisation, one of
the principal planks of the reformist 'ulamas' platform.
For
all of the state's rhetorical commitment to Islam, though, the
'ulama and their successors were kept far from the actual
policy-making process under Ben Bella, Boumediene and Chadli
Benjedid, who had assumed the presidency in 1989. The army, though
not essentially political, was the regime's crucial linchpin under
all three presidents. It was their command of and ties to the
military which allowed Boumediene and Chadli to gain and retain
power.
The
Ministry of Religious Affairs, responsible for the welfare,
promulgation and supervision of the official state version of Islam,
was firmly entrenched in the bureaucracy. Far from impacting state
policy, it involved itself with administrative matters. The state
attempted to promote popular knowledge about Islam and to encourage
an Islamic cultural identity; but it also tried to maintain a
monopoly over religious symbols, structures and discourse.
This
monopoly, however, did not go unchallenged. A first, faltering
effort was mounted by the al-Qiyyam organization of Malek Bennabi
and al-Hashmi Tijani. Founded in 1964, al-Qiyyam opposed the
secularist and socialist content of the Ben Bella and Boumediene
government policies. While Bennabi was a serious scholar, many of
the movement's followers turned to violent excess, including a
series of attacks on Algerian women who the activists thought were
inappropriately dressed.(1)
These actions led to the banning of the organization in 1970.
Al-Qiyyam's influence was limited and never posed a serious threat
to the state's hegemony.
There
were further attempts to break the hold of state authorities on the
articulation of Islam in Algeria by the late 1970s. "State
Islam" failed to meet the spiritual, social and psychological
needs of the population, with the result that mosque attendance and
religious observation declined. The minister of religious affairs
himself admitted in 1981 that "three-fifths of the imams in
official mosques are not sufficiently qualified to comment on the
Qur'an and the Sunna accurately."(2)
Discontent was on the rise and Algerians increasingly turned away
from the system and to Islamism to manifest their dissatisfaction.
Mustafa
Bouyali's actions were the most violent expression of that
disaffection. A veteran of the Revolution and ardent Islamist,
Bouyali went underground in 1982 after police killed his brother. He
organized a maquis (underground) organization in the Larbaa region
south of Algiers, carrying out raids against government
installations until his death in a firefight in early 1987.
Bouyali
undoubtedly received some support from the local population and
became something of a folk hero in the area, but after a 1985 attack
on a police school in Souma which killed five cadets, many of his
sympathizers turned away. The fact that the attack took place on the
'Id al-Adha did not help Bouyali's case. Despite his five year
campaign, Bouyali's movement never consisted of more than a few
hundred supporters.
Other
Muslim figures, however, enjoyed considerably more popular support.
Shaykh 'Abd al-Latif Soltani and Shaykh Ahmad Sahnoun, respected
scholars who had long opposed the secularist tendencies of the
Boumediene and Chadli regimes, were thrust into the spotlight by a
series of clashes between Islamists and government forces in 1981
and 1982. Mass arrests at a November 1982 demonstration at the
University of Algiers led to a protest gathering by 100,000
demonstrators. Among those arrested were Soltani, Sahnoun and a
university educator named Abassi Madani. When Soltani died under
house arrest in March 1984 at the age of eighty-two, his funeral
procession drew 25,000 mourners in what was the largest Islamist
demonstration since the 1982 disturbances.
With
Soltani's death, Shaykh Ahmad Sahnoun became the most prominent
Muslim leader in Algeria. He founded the Islamic Da'wa League, known
as the Rabita, in an attempt to bring together different strands of
Islamist thought. Sahnoun tried to keep the movement from
splintering while at the same time encouraging debate and expression
of legitimate differences of opinion among Islamist thinkers and
activists.(3)
Among
those involved in the Rabita were Madani, Shaykh Mahfoud Nahnah and
Shaykh 'Abdullah Djaballah, all of whom would later found their own
Islamist political organizations.v Sahnoun has insisted that the
Rabita remain apolitical and focus on social, cultural and
educational issues.(4)
The
Rabita's activities have had and continue to have a considerable
political impact, though Sahnoun himself has refused any overtly
political role. The Rabita's precarious unity began to founder as a
result of new political opportunities produced by a wave of rioting
in October 1988 which badly shook the regime. Politics was at the
head of most Algerian Islamists' agenda after these events.
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