Could I defend my father from the Armed Islamic Group with a paring knife? This was the question I pondered on Tuesday June 29, 1993. That day I woke up early in Dad’s apartment, on the outskirts of Algiers, Algeria, to an unrelenting pounding on the front door. It had been exactly two weeks since the murder of Dr. Mahfoud Boucebsi, the country’s leading psychiatrist, and one week since the assassination of Mohamed Boukhobza, a sociologist and former colleague of my father’s at the University of Algiers. As a local newspaper described the season, “at the time, every Tuesday a scholar fell to the bullets of . . . fundamentalist assassins.” 1 Boucebsi and Boukhobza, and others, had been killed that year by the Muslim fundamentalist armed groups that plagued Algeria’s predominantly Muslim population.
My father’s teaching of Darwin had already provoked a classroom visit from the head of the Islamic Salvation Front, who denounced him as an advocate of “biologism” before Dad ejected the man. Now, whoever was pounding on the door would neither identify himself nor go away. We tried to ascertain who might be outside with him. Inside the apartment, my father was not frightened for himself, but visibly worried for me, then a law student visiting for the summer break. He tried repeatedly to phone the police. Perhaps terrified themselves by the rising tide of armed extremism that had already claimed the lives of many Algerian officers, the local police station did not even answer. We were alone to face whoever was on the other side of the door. That was when I went to the kitchen, found a paring knife, and took up a position inside the entryway. What happened to Dr. Boukhobza was not going to happen again here, I told myself. I don’t know what I was thinking: I am not exactly the combatant type. My father looked at me and rolled his eyes. But I could not come up with anything else to do. So there I stood....
Fortunately, on June 29, 1993, the unwanted and unidentified visitors eventually departed. We never knew why, or exactly who they were.....
Subsequently, Algerian fundamentalists would add Mahfoud Bennoune’s name to “kill lists” posted in extremist-controlled mosques in Algiers, along with the names of so many others— journalists, intellectuals, trade unionists, women’s rights activists. They would murder more of my father’s colleagues, his friends and relatives, and as many as two hundred thousand Algerians during what came to be known as “the dark decade.” No matter how awful things became, the international community largely ignored these events. Like the local police who would not even answer our urgent calls in June 1993, the world would leave all those victims to fend for themselves."
(Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories From The Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism. Karima Bennoune)
