The Islamist discourse of the FIS and the democratic experiment in Algeria

The Algerian civil war of the 1990s has been framed as an example of the dangers involved in allowing Islamist parties and movements to participate in the democratic process in the Middle East and North Africa. However, it is misguided to simply blame Islamism for the failure of the Algerian democratization process, or to define Islamist politics as an aberrant political phenomenon needing eradication. This study investigates both the historical and ideological connections between Islamism and the established norms and motifs of political imagination in Algeria. It is argued that the political discourse of the dominant Islamist party during democratization, the Front Islamique du Salut, was ambiguous in its attitude to democracy, but it is also shown that its approach to the political was in fact anchored in established regime strategies for using postcolonial identity as a legitimizing tool.