Djihadisme et maïeutique. Les Écrivains français d’origine maghrébine face au 13 novembre

Abstract

Among the wide range of publications about the 13 November 2015 attacks on French soil, four novels, by Rachid Benzine, Dounia Bouzar, Fouad Laroui, and Yasmina Khadra opted to focus on the Jihadist’s point of view. Being French writers born in North Africa or of North-African descent, as well as Muslims committed against Islamism, they intend to propose more accurate interpretations of the Jihadist phenomenon. They reject the cultural explanation that draws a continuum between Islam and Jihadism, as well as the (postcolonial) socio-economical one: they focus instead on individual or geopolitical explanations. More interestingly, despite or because three of them are also scholars, they reassess the legitimacy of literature to participate in the socio-political debates, considering it as more politically efficient than scholarly argumentations, especially for younger audiences. Hence, they develop what I call maieutic novels, i.e. didactic novels that avoid the pitfalls of committed literature by making use of an oriented dialogism: the reader disturbingly explores the opposite rationales of jihadi and anti-Islamist worldviews, before experiencing the counter-exemplary path chosen by the Jihadist.