Kamel Daoud (Mesra, Algeria, 1970), winner of the Goncourt Prize for his novel “Houris”, is an indispensable writer and essayist in trying to understand the historical tragedy of the growth of Islamism in Algeria, the Maghreb and Europe.
Son of an Algerian gendarme and the liberal daughter of a bourgeois family, Daoud was the only one, among six brothers, to pursue higher education, which began very poorly, seduced by the strictest “Muslim piety”, flirting with a Maghrebi Islamism that began to grow up in the Algeria of his childhood, adolescence and early youth.
That first, radical religious experience was decisive in his formation and subsequent rejection, without fissures, of an Islam that had become a dogmatic, fearsome religion.
The young Daoud began practicing journalism in several Algerian newspapers, where his freedom of judgment soon ran into censorship problems. His reflections on the Koran became political dynamite. From Daoud’s point of view, thirty years ago, the language of the Koran functions as a dangerous dogma for the civic liberties and spiritual freedom of individuals.
This type of criticism was worth a string of death threats, dictated as a fatwa: the sentences of the muftis and specialists in Islamic law, which can justify the legality of the political-religious murder.
Since his break with dogmatic Islam, Daoud renounced colloquial Algerian Arabic to begin building his work, as a narrator, essayist and journalist, in French. Starting in 2000, his emerging fame opened the doors of journalism and French publishing.
Daoud won the Goncourt prize for the first novel, in 2015, nine years before the Goucourt that was awarded to him on Monday afternoon.
During that period of time, the novelist has published half a dozen novels, of increasing magnitude. After ‘The Fable of the Dwarf’ (2003), ‘Oh, Pharaoh’ (2005), came ‘Mersault…’ (2014), a rereading of a famous novel by Albert Camus, ‘The Stranger’. Daoud takes up Camusian existential and dramatic reflection to adapt it to the new and always tragic Algerian reality. It is perhaps his most famous and emblematic book. The novel ‘Zabor or the Psalms’ (2017) followed.
Daoud has also published three books of stories, two books of chronicles and two essays on contemporary art issues. His chronicles in the weekly ‘Le Point’ are a basic reference, accompanied by flammable controversies. His denunciation of the most fanatical Islamism during Christmas 2016 in Germany is legendary.
Given the evolution of the Maghreb, with absolutist temptations in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, accompanied by Islamist flares, with many ramifications in Europe, Daoud is a privileged observer. He knows, in an intimate and personal way, the importance of language in the spread of jihadist Islam and believes that the “sacred language” of the Koran is one of the capital matrices of a religious conflict and war, which is essential to combat in the cultural field. , literary, verbal.
Our societies know with relative precision the police scope of Islamic terrorist threats. Daoud invites us to discover the ultimate root of this “problem”: a cultural threat of disturbing scope. The jihad against Europe and the West begins with the Quranic use of language and culture, which is taught in some European public schools.
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