Algeria's loss of faith

Modern Algeria is a nation which an Arab nationalist movement cobbled out of the three French "departments" in North Africa, and a great expanse of Tuareg-inhabited Sahara. The retreating French left a few die-hard Catholics in the region - monks, mainly. Recently Christianity has been spreading among the Arabs, this time "evangelical" and Arab-speaking. Algeria suppresses these. I owe the link to JihadWatch, but - as often over there - the situation is less simple than mere Islamic chauvinism.

In fact Islam is crumbling in Algeria, if not as quickly as it is crumbling in Tunisia and Libya.

There had never been an "Algerian nation"; just North African Arabs, and "Berber" groups like the Kabylie and the Tuareg. It is as if some alien conquerors had made a nation out of ... well, out of Spain or France; and then left.

When we were in Algeria, the local elite was officially secular, because they were the elite whom secular France had trained. But this elite felt contempt or fear for the Algerian commons. As a result they didn't offer much to the Algerian commons beyond slogans. This void was filled by those who believed, or pretended to believe, that God Himself had instructed them to look out for His believers.

A notion of shared history could possibly unite Algeria, as it had united France and (somewhat) unites central Mexico. But that takes many centuries which centuries Algeria has not yet shared. In North Africa, Islam provides that shared history, albeit a foreign one until 700 AD.

An election was held in 1991. Its first stage, toward local governments, went to Islamists. The military did a Turkey: it simply annuled those elections and canceled the next stage. Many Islamists, in turn, did a Syria (rather, the later Syrians would attempt an Algeria): a mass terror campaign. Only in North Africa, the Islamists had no foreign friends to keep the war alive. So the government won.

The nonIslamist Algerians today are more than just secular; they fear Islam. The average Muslim in Algeria, from direct memory of the terror or else from watching the news in Libya, is learning not to love Islam either. Maybe 10% of Algerians were "nonreligious" in 2013. That percentage is now a quarter. Tunisia is even further along, because their Islam (at least in the Tunis region) was always more cosmopolitan, allowing them a tourism industry, which terrorists have crippled. (Over the past decade Tunisia has allowed the Islamic al-Nahḍa "Ennahda" party into government; they've steadily been losing seats in their parliament, now at 52/217.)

If you're poor in North Africa and not a Muslim, you're on your own, at best. NonMuslims in North Africa are finding community in Christianity. Catholicism is tolerated in Algeria but they can't seek converts - I expect their congregations, these days, are mostly black immigrants from across the desert. North Africans who are Christian-curious have been seeking out the underground churches, which are in communication with evangelical post-Reform preachers.

Islamists see this as poaching, which it is. Their instinct, inherited from their 1990s forbears, is to react with violence. It worked against the French, right? The government has no choice but to act first, before the Islamists act.