Ed McAllister revient pour Textures du temps sur la nostalgie des années Boumediene. Cette nostalgie n’a pas le même contenu selon le lieu d’où l’on se remémore le passé…
يعود إد ماكاليستر في حبكات الزمان إلى حنين الناس إلى عهد بومدين. هذا الحنين الذي لا يكون له نفس المضمون بحسب المكان الذي نتذكر من خلاله الماضي.س
Debates in Algeria about the place religion should occupy in society among many Algerian intellectuals, and many of those I have talked to that live in the wealthier neighbourhoods that occupy the high ground above central Algiers, frequently remind me of a the full frontal opposition between the secular and the religious that is found in debates in France (and increasingly, elsewhere in Europe). This binary is not new to Algeria, where it has evolved and takes different forms from those found in France and has, as a result, become an Algerian narrative. In its least nuanced form, the terms of this debate pit a top-down brand of secularism, imbued with modernist concepts of republicanism, rationality, and toleration of difference against the normative version of Islam that emerged in the mid-1980s and is equated by secularists with intolerance, anti-rationality, social repression and obscurantism. In Algeria, the binary nature of this debate has been intensified by a much oversimplified political split between éradicateurs and conciliateurs during the conflict of the 1990s and continues a series of binaries that exist in socially held depictions of the Algerian past (Algerian/French; Arab/Berber, internal maquis/frontier army, etc).
