Political Islam in post-conflict Algeria

Despite the considerable attention in recent years to Islamist movements in the Middle East and North Africa, the situation in Algeria often goes overlooked. This oversight is perhaps due to a persistent focus on Algeria’s high politics as well as the chiefly terror/counter-terror lens through which Algeria has been understood since the end of its civil war (1991-2002). Moreover, to many it appeared the 2010-11 “Arab Spring” uprisings did not profoundly alter the country’s political landscape. Because of these analytical biases, Algeria’s Islamism, the country’s parties, civil society, and its contentious politics at-large have not been adequately explored.

Algeria’s Islamist politics are often presumed dead. Indeed, most discussions on the subject begin and end with the “first” Arab uprisings that took place twenty years ago. These reference the rise and fall of Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) party between 1988 and 1992, Algeria’s descent into a harrowing civil war (sometimes called the “Black Decade”) after they were stripped of power, lessons to be drawn from the FIS’s demise, and the lingering effects of the war on North African security and terror. Algeria’s armed groups and terrorist organizations exist mostly on society’s margins. And while they are central to understanding the country’s geopolitics, foreign policy, and the ruling political-military machine,1 they are arguably less important to understanding current dynamics and trends in the country’s domestic religious and social scene.

This essay broadly examines how Islamist currents in Algeria have evolved and contended with deep changes in the domestic sociopolitical milieu since the Black Decade. It focuses chiefly on the case of the Islamist party Movement for a Society of Peace (MSP), Algeria’s self-avowed branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and the largest formal Islamist organization to emerge from this war. It also devotes some attention to the shifts in and spread of Salafist strains, Sufi brotherhoods and smaller Islamist parties. Some of these actors are represented in the formal political sphere and have expressly political/electoral goals, while others exist outside this fray with avowedly non-political impetuses but still actively shape the electorate. These dynamics are in many ways reflective of larger patterns in North Africa and the Middle East. But Algeria’s complex political-religious landscape also compels us in its own right, to reconsider how Islamism can be defined, as well as conventional wisdom about Islamist behavior.

Partisan Islam
Since the birth of modern Algeria in 1962, Islam and Muslim identity have been a foundational pillar of the sovereign Algerian state. The revolutionary generation saw a centralized Muslim-Algerian identity as a bulwark against attempts by the French during the colonial occupation to erode the country’s social fabric and sow division among ethnic groups, regions and religious sects. Islam thus was discursively linked with Algerian indigeneity and identity, and religion became a central rallying point of the revolution itself, whose many voices and movements were eventually consolidated under the National Liberation Front (FLN). The religious and existential character of the country’s liberation struggle was—and still is—reflected in the fact that the freedom fighters are called moudjahideen, and those who died in the struggle are called chouhada, or martyrs.

In the run-up to independence in 1962 and during the nation-building that followed, various religious tendencies were integrated and consolidated by the state—the FLN party-army machine. To this end, the state appropriated the famed refrain of 20th century Islamic reformist Abdelhamid Ben Badis3: “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, and Algeria is my country” along with the full extent of its attendant religious-nationalist symbolism.4 In practice, the state attempted to control religious doctrine by creating a Religious Affairs Ministry that monitored and administered Islamic activities throughout the country. Religious scholars and preachers became state employees, and Islamic practices and ideas outside the government-approved framework were dissuaded and suppressed. (Who and what exactly constitutes the “state” remains obscured to most. It is usually seen as a trifecta of the FLN party, the military, and the security services, known as Le Pouvoir, or “The Power.” These elements have jockeyed with one another for clout over the decades.)

However, as far back as the early 1960s the government faced opposition to its efforts to centralize religion under the state.5 Within the FLN itself, religious opponents to second Algerian president Houari Boumediène’s socialist policies called instead for an “Islamic socialism.”6 Outside of the party, organized Islamic scholars7 fervently criticized the various presidents’ secular, leftist policies, and specifically attacked the alleged moral laxity of Boumediène’s 1971 “socialist revolution.”8 Influential religious associations such as al-Qiyam9 also pressured the regime to draw upon both Shari’a and nationalism in crafting policy—alleging that elements of the socialist proposals contravened Islamic scriptures outright.

In the 1970s and 1980s, religious, political, and economic grievances continued to build throughout Algeria, and in 1988, these pressures erupted in violent protests that shook the heavily populated north. In response to the unrest, the Algerian state abolished the single-party system in 1989 and replaced it with a multi-party system—albeit one still dominated by the FLN—in a new constitution. This political opening led to an explosion of new parties each along the lines of almost every ethnic, religious, intellectual, and cultural current in the country.10

Though the Islamic activists had disagreed with Boumediène’s policies, he nevertheless promoted Islamic activity and Arabization to cement the nationalist identity the state had been trying to forge since before independence.11 This empowered religious activism, which had intensified throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as Islamist movements and tendencies had converged and splintered along ideological and strategic lines. By the 1989 opening, three main (though not comprehensive) partisan movements had taken shape: The Movement for a Society of Peace (MSP, known as Hamas until 1996, although sometimes still referred to as such by party outsiders) under Mahfoud Nahnah, the Al-Nahda tendency led by Abdallah Djaballah, and the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) led by Ali Belhadj and Abassi Madani.12

The FIS formed from various religious movements, platforms, and intellectual strains in direct response to the mass uprisings and the new 1989 constitution. Through its novel and fiery rhetoric, the FIS mobilized large segments of the populace and was the first contemporary organization to more substantially erode the state’s control of Islamic discourse and institutions. Compared to the FIS, Nahnah’s MSP and Djaballah’s Al-Nahda were more restrained in their deployment of antisystem frames, mostly refraining from calling for the subversion of the military-backed system. As a result, these movements mobilized only modest numbers of people at this time, but unlike the FIS, they also secured for themselves a safer relationship with the regime.

Of these Islamist parties, the FIS initially became the most important player, first in the 1990 local and regional elections where it won the mayoral offices and majorities in most local governments in the populous north, and then again in the first round of parliamentary elections in 1991. Threatened by the FIS’s electoral successes, the military canceled the results as well as the second round of elections in 1992, dismissed the sitting president, and dissolved the FIS. The military cadres in favor justified its position as one that was “saving democracy.” This move unleashed radical elements within the FIS and pushed still other FIS activists into hitherto marginal radical organizations which then violently targeted the state, with later iterations targeting civilians.

The military violently cracked down on the FIS as well as these armed groups, sometimes indiscriminately, and armed Islamist groups retaliated, equally indiscriminately. From 1991-2002, the unremitting circle of violence between these insurgent factions and the army’s13 eradicateur (eradicator) program14 claimed hundred of thousands of civilian lives in what came to be known as the “Black Decade.” Ultimately, the military succeeded in crushing the FIS, and the main surviving Islamist parties—the MSP and Al-Nahda—found themselves in a wholly transformed environment in at least two respects.

First, the experience and memory of the conflict made the public at-large deeply averse to Islamism. The public, often not knowing qui tue qui, or “who was killing whom” during the conflict—the state or the insurgents—was further confused by the seeming multiplication of armed groups; it thus slowly came to conflate the FIS Islamist party with the insurgency. This trauma and confusion rendered a majority of citizens wary of radical politics; revolution, religious or otherwise, came to be widely seen as a false promise in the war’s aftermath. Though the conflict initially helped chip away at some of the state’s claims to religious authority, as the war wound down much of the Algerian populace came to prefer “state Islam” to challenger Islamist currents. Nowadays, it is rare (though not impossible) to hear someone say they oppose state control and provision of mosques, or that the 1992 cancellation of the election was unnecessary. Also, it is not always common to hear the period referred to as the Black Decade (or décennie noire in French). Instead, in everyday parlance the civil war is more commonly described as “waqt al-irhab”—the time of terrorism.

This is partly because the state appropriated and iconized individuals’ experiences of violence to support its framing and official history of the war, which cast Islamist insurgents as the sole aggressors. This discourse was cyclically-reproduced as civilians were enlisted in this process, and led much of the Algerian public to blame the insurgents, and by extension the FIS and its ideology,15 rather than the army’s use of violence against civilians, or the state’s cancellation of what were in fact free and fair elections.

Second, in addition to having to contend with a polity averse to Islamism, the MSP and Al-Nahda parties after 2002 also had to deal with a public that was growing weary of party politics itself. Parties were increasingly delegitimized for several reasons. First, following the 1989 political opening and through the 1990s, the sheer number of parties exceeded the number of social cleavages and political leanings,16 thereby saturating the partisan arena and confusing voters. Second, for much of the wider public, the idea of parties as vehicles for political representation was still new; Algerians were both inexperienced with multi-party politics and their political preferences were still evolving.

The public’s faith in parties was further eroded by the fact that the electoral process and parties themselves became tightly controlled by the state, especially during the Black Decade. The regime fragmented and coopted the opposition through political deals, trivial policy concessions, and financial rewards via its embedded patronage networks and rentier (chiefly oil) economy—while retaining a veneer of multi-party dynamism. Because of these factors, Algeria has emerged as a prototypical “liberalized autocracy,” where nominal competitiveness in political life has provided cover for entrenched authoritarianism.

This has become increasingly evident to the public, where the notion of ‘hizb’ (party) or ‘tahazub’ (literally partisanship, often used to reference the process of ‘party-fication’ of a movement) have become shorthand for political opportunism, or relinquishment of organizational and ideological integrity.

In the meantime, the state came to be seen as an all-powerful “man behind the curtain.”17 To be sure, the feared Department of Intelligence and Security, or DRS, (re-constituted in 2015 as the Department of Surveillance and Security, DSS18), was for decades the linchpin of state power, but gained even greater clout after the Black Decade. The powerful DRS infiltrated the armed Islamist groups, embedded itself throughout civilian life and, later, seized control of the narrative on the conflict. These methods renewed another sentiment: of an omnipotent regime backed by an invincible army and omnipresent intelligence apparatus.19 (The state also won back some political legitimacy as the broker of reconciliation and stability after the conflict.20) Since the end of the war, the regime has established itself as the sole protector of the citizenry, while harnessing fears over the threat of terror and the unknown. Political processes, including elections and the founding of new parties, are widely thought to be pre-determined and orchestrated by the DRS—as a result, the polity has generally retreated from its stakes in political and electoral outcomes. Whether real or perceived, this predominating belief in the regime’s pervasive power has nevertheless altered the electorate the Islamist parties have pursued.

For Islamists, the political environment after the Black Decade posed new challenges: What path, after all, could surviving Islamist parties like the MSP and Al-Nahda forge in a context where both political Islam and the partisan arena were increasingly distrusted?

A New Path Forward
The trauma and historical memory of civil war—compounded by the parties’ own inability to effectively dodge state efforts to coopt and divide them—produced shifts in the population’s political preferences unfavorable to Islamists. Meanwhile, an increasingly constrictive legal environment (explained more fully in the next section) dampened the parties’ core initiatives and political identity. Taken together, these factors left Islamist parties swimming upstream. Nevertheless, Algeria’s Islamist parties have come up with ways—suited specifically to the challenges of their context—to mobilize people, advance their agenda, and even contest the state.

In 1989, Abdallah Djaballah21 founded the Al-Nahda movement. Like the MSP, Al-Nahda was influenced in part by the Muslim Brotherhood. The party opted to participate in the 1997 parliamentary elections, and through this it helped to legitimize, along with the MSP, one of the first political processes since the Black Decade. Djaballah, however, was a more vociferous opponent of the regime and less of a loyalist than his counterparts in the MSP. As such, Al-Nahda under his guidance drew stricter terms and did not accept ministerial positions, in a stated bid to maintain credibility and retain nuisance power. However, the more cooperative MSP’s 1997 electoral performance—second place with 14 percent of the vote and winning 69 seats, more even than the FLN, which placed third with 62 seats—inspired debates within Al-Nahda. Various early party cadres deemed Djaballah’s approach too rigid, and he was ejected from Al-Nahda, after which he immediately formed a new party Islah.22 Years later, this scenario repeated itself, with Islah expelling Djaballah as its cadres again sought greater proximity to state interests and grew tired of Djaballah’s commitment to non-cooperation—which the state actively incentivized. In 2011, Djaballah founded his latest party, Adala.23

For the three smaller Islamist parties of Djaballah’s “eastern tendency”24, pursuit of ministries led to consecutive internal coups. For the MSP, in contrast, it would be the search for the ever-elusive “original vision” of late founder Nahnah—particularly as it related to the extent of cooperation with the regime—that led to breakaways and a proliferation of micro-parties. Of course, the state played a large role in incentivizing splinters here and in the wider Islamist landscape. Its rewarding of the MSP’s more obsequious stance, by boosting its numbers at the polls, however led its ranks to agonize over what they saw as their increasingly tokenized participation and its implications for their autonomy and claims to moral rectitude.25

The MSP’s relative success versus the Djaballah camp can be attributed in part to state meddling. But the Nahnah camp (for a time at least) also achieved a more optimal balance between opposition credibility and selective loyalism to the state, perhaps having better considered public opinion and the wary polity in two ways. First, MSP figures hedged against antipathy to political Islam by selectively downplaying their Islamist orientation and platforms, and positioning themselves as nationalists and “moderate” alternatives to the more militant Islamists of the Black Decade. Second, it hedged against disdain for parties by harnessing the associational sphere—informal networks, such as student unions—in order to feign distance from the trappings of partisan politics.

The MSP (then Hamas) was legalized in 1990 after the political opening of 1989. The movement aimed to compete directly with the FIS, and in this, it had the regime’s implicit support. The MSP founder Mahfoud Nahnah, supported by co-founders Mohamed Bouslimani and Mustapha Belmehdi,26 attempted a more gradual, loyalist, reform-oriented, bottom-up approach. Nahnah criticized what he considered the FIS’s coercion of disenfranchised groups, and the MSP recruited among a more educated demographic.

As the FIS won handily, the MSP’s mobilization efforts peaked much later, during the Black Decade when the violence, instability, and fear seemed to have no end in sight. The MSP portrayed itself as the moderate alternative to the FIS. Its cooperative relationship with the regime lent the party considerable latitude, which the MSP used to vigorously canvas and publicize. By creating its own newspaper and holding regular press conferences, its ideas on the role of women, the economy, and ijtihad on such issues, were promulgated and set discursively apart from those of the FIS. For example, the latter’s fiery, austere Ali Belhadj had announced (to the chagrin of other FIS leaders, it should be noted) that “there is no democracy in Islam,” whereas Nahnah emphasized the ideal of ‘Shuracracy,’ highlighting the democratic norms inherent in the Islamic principle of shura (consultation). He envisioned democratic processes as arbitrated by an Islamic council, with Shari’a as the basis for laws.