Intifada

Now finished my three volume set on matters Mediterranean (see reference 2) with a fatter book called 'The French Intifada' by one Andrew Hussey, who appears to be British but a long time resident of France, with the biog. I read being published online by the University of London Institute in Paris. A rather better writer (of books anyway) than either of the other two, my only reservation being the irritation of his supplying parenthesised translations to lots of fairly obvious bits of French. But maybe the younger generation's grasp of elementary French is even more elementary than my own.

The largest section of the book is that on Algeria, this being followed by a section on Morocco and another on Tunisia. With the whole wrapped in opening and closing sections on the North Africans (a lot of whom are Berbers rather than Arabs) in France, particularly Paris, the outlying areas of which sound much worse than corresponding areas of London, say Eltham or Peckham.

Algeria sounds like a dreadful mistake. The French needed a bit of national glamour to make up for losing the Napoleonic wars and thought that grabbing Algeria and stuffing it with rejects from all parts of the northern litteral of the Mediterranean was the way forward. There seems to have been a sense that Algeria was France's Wild West, a wonderful land of opportunity, with just a few colourful indigenous to brush aside. How wrong could they be.

A thought from Morocco was the suggestion that Moroccans were deeply insulted by being the unwilling hosts for lots of dissolute arty types from the west, there for the sun, the booze and the (mainly gay) sex. Not people with traditional, conservative Muslim virtues at all. The insult being aggravated by being portrayed in lots of successful films, such as 'Casablanca'.

A scary aspect of the book is the fact that most of the violence appears to be driven by anger and hate born of hopelessness. These angry young men (and some women) do not have an agenda, they just want to smash things up, to make a big ugly mark on the hated white world. And if they can grab a few consumer goods - say flashy trainers - while they are at it, so much the better. Anger and hate which is bubbling away, just under the surface, ready to blow off at the slightest thing, often the police trying to do their duty.

Another is the way that radical Islam provides a home, a cloak and a focus for such people. The home which we have failed to provide by other means. A home which means that their first allegiance is to their faith, rather than their country. From where I associate both to our own very nasty religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and to our own anti-Semitism. Which seems to have been a much bigger feature of French life than it was, or is, of English life.

One thought on exit is that while this mess, particularly in Algeria, was of French manufacture with unforced errors (to use a term from tennis) carrying on into the second half of the twentieth century, there would probably have been something of a mess however the Ottomans withdrew from North Africa. As the tide of empire goes out, leaving behind a foreshore littered with hate, weak institutions and mixed-up populations, there is usually trouble.

Another is that while poverty appears to have fueled many of the dreadful events chronicled in this book, absence of poverty is not a sufficient condition for all to be well. One only has to look at Saudi Arabia, awash with money, to see that.

Another is that legalising drugs is not going to be a magic bullet. It might empty our prisons and free up some money for some more productive use, but it is not, of itself going to provide gainful employment for all the people with colour, without qualifications and without much experience of the world of legitimate work. And in one sense, rather the reverse, in that it will take away the illegitimate work that they do have.

Time to take another peek at Hourani, for a longer view. It will be interesting to see how well a book written 25 years ago reads now. See reference 1.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=hourani.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=promised+land.