Boualem Sansal and Freedom of Conscience

Not a great many English-speaking Americans — there still are some — have heard of Boualem Sansal, fewer have read his remarkable novels; so maybe the simplest way to introduce him is to say he is Algeria’s Alexander Solzhenitsyn, notwithstanding sharp differences.

Each incurred the displeasure of his country’s ruling cliques, who were only too happy to be rid of their troublesome truth-seekers by exile forced or voluntary. Solzhenitsyn spent years in the gulag prison system, Sansal had a successful career in science and civil service. Both objected to official histories and found their work banned, their lives endangered. Sansal, who writes in French, moved to France, which granted him dual-citizenship this year. The enduring call of home brought Solzhenitsyn back to Russia after the collapse of Soviet communism; Sansal made visits to his native Tissemsilt wilaya (province).

A gentle, modest man with a sense of humor, Boualem Sansal would reject the comparison. The Soviet rulers forced Russia’s conscience into exile (he returned after the fall of the USSR and died in his homeland); Sansal, trained as an engineer, had a successful career in Algeria before leaving Algeria of his own accord (though not without the encouragement of threats, official opprobrium, the banning of his books), but he made periodic visits.

Disembarking from a Paris-Algiers flight in late November, he was arrested; he has not been heard from since.  Reportedly the authorities are testing the political winds and preparing formal charges that could fall under a sub paragraph of Article 87 that defines certain opinions as acts of terrorism, and as such,  a Stalinoid catch-all for dissenters that includes expressing opinions that might endanger the national security, which can be prosecuted as capital crimes.

In short, they could hang him.

Given the Algerian state’s hypersensitivity to criticism and opposition, this is not a hypothetical outcome, even if the rapid mobilization of French and international cultural institutions gives  pause to the semi-tropical Beria’s.  The work of another French-language Algerian writer, Kamel Daoud, winner of this year’s prestigious Goncourt prize, is banned in Algeria, as is Sansal’s.  (READ MORE from Roger Kaplan: Mighty Eagle Foreign Policy)

Interestingly, the rumor in the Algerian press is that the crime for which the inside men want to indict Sansal would be not his writing, notably the novels Le Village de l’Allemand (The German Moujahid, 2011) and 2084 (2015) which are structured around the threat of Islamiste totalitarianism, but rather some comments to an interviewer in France regarding Algeria’s historic territorial malentendu (misunderstanding, to use in a different context Albert Camus’s famous term) with Morocco.

In a nutshell, there is a longstanding dispute over the western regions of Algeria, most pertinently the territory between the port of Oran and the Tlemcen, long venerated as a center of learning. Prior to independence in 1962 Tlemcen the town was home to renown religious teachers, as well as highly respected medical doctors, many of whom — in both fields — were Jews whose ancestry in many families preceded the Arab conquest of North Africa with the large scale conversion to Islam that followed.

The argument with Morocco flared into a “war in the sands” in the early ’60s that is regularly remembered to justify recalls of ambassadors and reciprocal insults over various pretexts, that may, in the longer view, be understood as pretexts on both sides not to deflect attention to the disappointments, surely as well as the rewards (to some), of independence from France.

What Sansal said, reportedly, was that during the colonial period France drew a map that made Morocco’s east a part of Algeria.  Formally, neither country was a colony; Morocco was a protectorate, Algeria, originally a military conquest, was divided in three departments, as such an integral part of France, though without citizenship rights for Muslims, a hypocrisy which, it must be admitted, is typically French.

Viewing French rule in Africa as uneven, or at times flawed, is not to indict France or even the whole colonial adventure.  Men of sensibility and perception recognize that there was good mixed with bad; on the cultural side it is no accident that some of the best French language literature has come out of Africa.  One of Sansal’s predecessors in Algeria — there have been many —, Kateb Yacine, certainly no supporter of French rule, stated in defense of the French language that it is a “trophy of war” that his countrymen would be foolish to throw away.

Boualem Sansal in fact is one of French’s great champions; he decries the corruptions in its usages in contemporary France and deplores the Algerian government’s linguistic policies, which have tended toward suppression of French as well as the indigenous Berber languages.

It is a banal observation, but the adoption of Hebrew in Israel — which was not in wider use in Israel at the time of independence any more than Arabic was in Algeria — has not been problematic for the simple reason that while obviously it has successfully been brought up to date, no one objects if you speak another language, and in fact this is why most Israelis are multilingual, a definite advantage in the modern world.

This could have been the outcome in Algeria, but instead, the authorities tried to make Arabic the only legal language. Since the truth was that no one spoke Arabic well, they imported teachers from Egypt who turned out to be, in large numbers, affiliated with the Muslim Brothers, which had the effect of introducing jihadism to the generation schooled after the war against France. The French terms Islamiste, Islamisme acquired wide currency during the Algerian civil strife of the 1990’s.

Boualem Sansal, trained as an engineer and with a doctorate in economics, belongs to a generation of post-independence, Berber-origin, Francophone, separation of mosque-and-state liberals who viewed with dismay, with sorrow, and cold moral clarity, the national movement’s misrule of a land rich in resources natural and human.

When he resigned from a high position in the civil service to devote himself to writing, he did not intend to be a prophetic writer like Solzhenitsyn, and in no small part because Algeria‘s successive governments included reformers as well as authoritarian single-party, central-planning, police-state types, and there was always the hope that change might follow the self-serving ploys of the ruling clans.

Change is stifled by censorship and free thinking, however, and Algeria is scarcely the only country where expressing a controversial perspective  — even one based on an arguable historical fact — can land you in the soup.  Boualem Sansal, otherwise always mild mannered and gentle, is a hard-liner on the freedom to think and write. He reacted angrily when a literary prize he was awarded was withdrawn after Hamas criticized him for visiting, and saying nice things about, Israel.

Seeing a connection between Islamisme and Nazism — the premise of The German Moujahid — and calling the idea of an “Islamic state” a new form of totalitarianism, the premises of 2084 (a transparent homage to George Orwell), is, obviously, provocative. Questioning the borders of a country many of whose citizens have an undoubtedly strong national sense but also a manifestly problematic one, is risky.  After all, people have been Article 87’d for raising the possibility of a local autonomy, as many do in Kabylia, a historic Berber region east of Algiers.

Algeria’s rulers always have worried about Kabyle separatism, and indicting Sansal for betraying his country by questioning the validity of its eastern frontier is in keeping with their sensitivity about their own political and territorial legitimacy; many Algerians who are perfectly secure in their patriotism and would bristle at Moroccan territorial claims (not that any have been made lately) will allow as how the regime is kind of low on credibility, if you consider massive absenteeism at elections and a widespread feeling that despite successive promises, hogra (contempt). clannishness, and corruption make up the default program of the power elite, even with occasional purges.

It must be particularly galling that Sansal supports Israel in its war against the same kinds of killer-extremists whom Algerian soldiers and policemen fought in the 1990s.  Could it be that the real crime is to ask whether the growth of politicized, intolerant Islam is due at least in part to the failures of the authoritarian regimes that sprang up across the umma — and beyond — as the European powers let go their burdens?

Algeria’s president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune (elected with 95 percent of the votes when his predecessor was suddenly found to have been dead during much of the term he had won despite a term-limit provision he himself had put in the constitution), supports Hamas; the regime media call Sansal a Jew. (READ MORE: Now We Move Forward, With Malice Toward None)

Which is a badge of honor, perhaps, I suppose. We at TAS join Tablet, PEN, the International Human Rights Day organizers, and many others — including in Algeria — in calling for the end of Boualem Sansal’s Orwellian, in French Ubuesque, detention.

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