“The Idea that One Could Come to Terms with the Arabs”: How Frantz Fanon Found Common Ground with Islam in Algeria

Abstract

IN A PREVIOUS article, I argued that there is an elephant in The Wretched of the Earth. It is Islam and its anti-colonial tradition.2 The proposition sounds controversial, but it really isn’t if one considers that the Algerian war of national liberation was a self-declared jihad against invaders. The offi cial newspaper of the National Liberation Front (FLN), which Fanon edited and in which he wrote extensively, was called el-Moudjahid. The tradition of resistance to French occupation that dominates Algerian history in the nineteenth century, whose memory Fanon fi nds still vivid in the minds of Algerians of all ages, was Islamic in its organization, its ideology, even in its name. The anticolonial jihad led by Emir Abdel-Qader is well known, but there were other campaigns led by Hadj el-Moqrani, Cheikh el-Haddad and Cheikh Bou’amama. Elsewhere in Africa, one can cite the jihad campaign led by Abd Allah Hasan who fought the British and the Italians in Somalia; Al Hadj Umar Tall in Guinea, Senegal and Mali; Mohammad al-Sanusi and, of course, the jihad campaign of Omar al-Mokhtar in Libya, Usman dan Fodio in Nigeria, and Ma’ al-’Aynayn and abdel-Krim al-Khattabi in Morocco. I could not predict, when I fi rst presented this argument at a conference in Boston, the strong reaction of the audience. I remember the moderator telling me with clear displeasure: “Hamas and Hizballah would be proud of you.” Audience members, mostly academics in the liberal or radical left tradition, were incensed. How could I link the great icon of the left, Frantz Fanon, not just to any religious tradition, which would have been bad enough, but to a religious tradition that is today still feared and despised? So I would like to start with a disclaimer: I truly mean no disrespect to Fanon, to the liberal or radical tradition or to the Islamic tradition. I just see Fanon’s thought articulating itself at the junction of numerous traditions. In addition, the ideas I am presenting are by no means defi nitive and simply aim to further the discussion on an admirable thinker, especially aspects of his thought that have so far fallen outside the frameworks of academic discourse.