On the 20th anniversary of the fundamentalist assassination of Algerian educator Salah Chouaki, Karima Bennoune translates his warning - so relevant today - about the need to be uncompromising in the battle against the very ideology that motivated his murder.
What is the ideology motivating alleged “warriors of God” to “trample Islam underfoot in the name of Jihad”? Algerian anthropologist Mahfoud Bennoune explored this question in 1994, offering an analysis of the political beliefs motivating “throat-slitting emirs” still much-needed today.
Today’s brutal jihadists like “Islamic State” follow in the footsteps of fundamentalists who have afflicted Muslim majority societies since the 12th century. Algerian anthropologist Mahfoud Bennoune revisited that history in order to strategize against jihadists - a task which remains essential.
Looking back, it feels as if Salwa Bugaighis embodied not the hopes and aspirations of the majority of her country's people but a dream of revolution, shared by a minority of educated Libyans and nurtured by western journalists and democracy activists, says Lindsey Hilsum
Wole Soyinka believed that one of the best ways to comprehend the kind of horror that is happening in Nigeria is to remember the experience of other nations in the region confronted with jihadist groups much like Boko Haram. Mahfoud Bennoune confronted the same questions in Algeria in the 1990s.
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the Algerian jihadists war on culture. Those who waged the intellectual struggle against fundamentalism in Algeria throughout the 1990s received little support internationally. Karima Bennoune pays tribute to those who fell in the culturicide, and warns
