Jihad as rite of passage: Tahar Djaout’s The Last Summer of Reason and Slimane Benaïssa’s The Last Night of a Damned Soul

Abstract

Two recent novels by Algerians (Tahar Djaout’s The Last Summer of Reason, and Slimane Benaïssa’s The Last Night of a Damned Soul) offer critiques of Islamic totalitarianism in two settings: local Arab states like the one fictionalized by Djaout, and the cosmopolitan community of diasporic Muslims recruited to the ranks of suicide bombers in the name of self‐ and social purification. Djaout, assassinated by fundamentalists outside his home in Algeria for writing against them, and Benaïssa, charting the psychological path towards violence taken by one westernized Muslim in the United States, instantiate the ongoing debate within Islam.

Keywords:

• jihad
• masculinities
• fundamentalism
• conversion
• Tahar Djaout
• Slimane Benaïssa

Notes

1. See Ansary and Matar for accounts of the displacement of Muslim civilization from the centre to the margins of history; see Lyons and Almond for histories of earlier cooperation between the cultures.

2. Despite the West’s tendency to aggregate, one cannot deny the multiplicities of “Islams” (see Mutalib and Hashmi; Zakaria; Friedman; Aslan).

3. “Djaout, a Berber himself, by digging through Maghrebian history to find Berber sources, contradicts the government’s official policies of Arabicization, which in fact have also been taken up by the fundamentalist opposition” (Hayes 112).

4. On female suicide, see Victor (x, 199, 264–68) and Gambetta (271).

5. See Reuter (3) and Ventura (53–54).

6. See Rushdie reference below.

7. Louise Archer reports that

 [A]ll boys in [her] study [of Islamic schoolboys in England] primarily identified themselves in terms of their Muslim identities [rather than their Pakistani or Bangladeshi roots] [ … ] [T]he boys’ negotiations between Muslim black and “gangsta” masculinities may be read as points of resistance, as attempts to redefine and distance themselves from unpopular versions of Asian masculinity. (48, 64)

8. There is no shortage of competing versions of the past on offer. Yahya Birt, for example, makes pious references to Abu ‘l‐Qasim al‐Qushayri and Ibn al‐Husayn al‐Sulami to encourage young British males to reject false models of macho masculinity (“negative masculinity”) in favor of the chivalric lifestyle exemplified by “the loyalty of Abu Bakr, the justice of ‘Umar, the reserve and modesty of ‘Uthman, and the bravery of ‘Ali (radiya’Llahu 1anhum)” (7).

9. Note Ruth Stein’s startling psychoanalytic description of the suicide’s desire to subsume his ego in God’s, and to allow his body to dissolve. “Whereas the sense of the sacred and transcendent is precious”, she writes, “and many of us would agree that life is all the poorer without it, fundamentalism is the self‐rejecting submission to an ideal authority that finally turns out to be submission to an alienated (projected), horrifying aspect of oneself” (Stein 3).

10. Still, 43% of the groups using suicide terrorism before 9/11 were Islamic; 76% after 9/11 are (Gambetta 298).

11. A macabre camaraderie echoes in the report from New York Times reporter David Rohde, recounting the long nights he spent in captivity among the Taliban: “They searched for ways to break the monotony [ … ] On some evenings, I found myself reluctantly singing Taliban songs that declared that ‘you have atomic bombs, but we have suicide bombers’” (5).

12. See Sageman (156–65).