Memoirs of a Mujahed: Algeria's Struggle for Freedom, 1945-1962

"Memoirs of a Mujahed" is the first book published in English by an academic who fought in the Algerian war of independence. It is an adaptation of the author's best seller, "Akfadou, Un An avec le Colonel Amirouche", published in French in 2009 by Casbah Editions, Algiers. Although these memoirs target the public at large, academics, students of history and Islamist ideology, of asymmetric, psychological, and guerrilla warfare, as well as political sociologists will find it valuable. When the author was seven years old, he saw his father, a nationalist activist, savagely beaten and incarcerated by French troops. A burning hatred of colonialism and the French, sparked by that appalling incident, ignited his first flickers of political awareness. The book combines a harrowing personal narrative with history, politics, and ethnography. It briefly addresses the turmoil of prewar nationalist activism before relating the tragic though exhilarating war events he lived or witnessed as a guerrilla fighter. Sent by the Revolutionary Provisional Government to the US, one month before the end of the war, he describes with a broken heart Algeria's bittersweet independence accompanied by violence unleashed by the race to take power. Attending Georgetown, Wesleyan and Colorado Universities, he analyses an arduous cultural adjustment and the discovery that the quality of leadership, and not natural wealth, constitutes the decisive factor in a country's greatness. Looking back with dismay at Algeria’s missed opportunities since 1962, the work devotes a portion of the epilogue to a revolution hijacked by non-revolutionaries who led the country into a new Algerian war, prompting the inescapable questions: What went wrong? Has a different episode of violence dawned in Algeria, or did the previous one never end?