The school, which has been around since the first decade of independence, is the most structured Islamist organization in Algeria. The strongest. The richest. Perfectly hierarchical. All state resources, human and material, are at its disposal.

The school is an Islamist party tolerated and legalized even before the approval of the multiparty system in 1989. The school is the ideological/bottle-feeding apparatus of all Islamist parties in Algeria. All Algerian Islamism was born in the school, through the school and for the school.

The school, which continues to exist even before the establishment of political pluralism, is the most influential Islamist party in Algeria. The party that has the highest number of adherents: ten million adherents, sympathizers and friends. And it is growing.

Although there are a dozen Islamist political parties in Algeria, enemy brothers, those who operate legally, those who operate in the dark, others operate under other nationalist or societal names, the school remains the Islamist party that has sent all this political-partisan gang to the waiting room or to premature retirement.

The school is the ideological apparatus that has fed and still feeds all the Islamist political parties; the so-called moderate parties, the opposition parties. All this Islamist political world which takes the defense of Allah is the fruit of the Algerian school.

Why is the school the biggest Islamist party in Algeria?

The Algerian school is a kind of bivouac tolerated for the perpetual fanatical ideological indoctrination, just like what happened in the ideological training camps of the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.

The Nazis set up their training and ideological indoctrination camps in the forests and during the school vacations, but the Algerian school is an indoctrination camp throughout the school year, everything happens in the middle of the city.

Ideologically, the school takes care of the child from the age of 4 until the age of 18, from the Koranic school, passing through the three cycles of school education until the final year. In this fanatical ideological training and indoctrination camp, the child is made according to the precepts of the oldest Islamist party in the Arab world and in North Africa: the Muslim Brotherhood party.

The Algerian society has not been fanaticized, Islamized by the programs of the Islamic parties, but rather because of the programs of the Algerian school. In comparison to the diabolical ideological and fanatic work carried out in the school through the school programs, the ideological task of the Islamist political parties in Algeria is only figurative.
The young followers arrive in the Algerian Islamist parties, already well trained, ready for the daïchisation and the khwanjisation and any other fanatical and extremist ideological drift. In the Islamized school, these followers have already learned the rejection of secularism, the refusal of democracy, the hatred against all other religions, the animosity towards others.

As soon as the former Minister of National Education Mrs. Noria Benghabrit touched the fundamental principles of the Islamist school ideological indoctrination camps, a cruel war was unleashed against her. As soon as she started to make small changes in the school programs, the ideological battle was declared on all fronts.

A war under the pretext of the removal of the basmalah from school books, another because of the name of Palestine disappeared from the map in a textbook of geography, another in the name of the right to perform the prayer in schools, another around the origins of the minister, another about his grandfather Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit first director of the mosque in Paris …

All this multi-headed war unleashed against any change in the school programs was to keep the Algerian school as a blessed source that feeds the Islamist parties and ensure their political future in renewed human capital. This fierce ideological war against any change in the school curriculum is to preserve the school as the rich source of fanaticism in Algeria.

Today, the war against Islamism is not a political war, but first and foremost a pedagogical war. A surgical school war. We cannot put an end to fanatical Islamism without a real revolution in the school and for the school. The Islamist parties, no matter how fanatical and violent they are, no matter how much they talk, are only the servants of this Islamized school.

We must remember that the Islamization of the school is not a case specific to Algeria, but an Arab and North African phenomenon.

By Amine Zaoui

Translated by Kabylia blog