Islamists and the military

The book Islamists and the Military: The Blood Years in Algeria by Mohamed Samraoui... This book is an extremely dangerous document; its author is not just an eyewitness, but an active participant and an integral part of his narrative, and perhaps this — in the view of some — was a motive for rejecting his historical testimony, either because he is motivated or because he is part of the contemporary historical reality; and therefore he is still veiled by the curtain of contemporaneity, unable to transcend the experience to judge it. All of this is countered by the fact that the importance of the testimony contained in this book goes beyond its direct narrative value to much more; to the patterns that can be abstracted from it, for this testimony can serve as a nucleus for an interpretive model of the relations between the military and Islamists, among those close to them, since the beginning of the era of military coups in the late forties. And if the history of Islamic movements between the seventies and nineties has not yet been written seriously, then this book can be considered a documentation of a repeated and prominent pattern, without which understanding the relations between Islamists and the military in the last third of the twentieth century is impossible. From this perspective, the book is not only a chronicle of what was called the Red Decade in Algeria, nor is it only about the Islamic Salvation Front that was overturned by the "French generals," nor is it solely about the crisis of Islamists with democratic practice; rather, above all, before and after all that, it is about the relationship between Islamists and the military.