Jihad as Rite of Passage: Tahar Djaout’s The Last Summer of Reason and Slimane Benaïssa’s The Last Night of a Damned Soul
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-5-2010
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Abstract
Two recent novels by Algerians (Tahar Djaout’s The Last Summer of Reason, and Slimane Benaïssa’s The Last Night of a Damned Soul) offer critiques of Islamic totalitarianism in two settings: local Arab states like the one fictionalized by Djaout, and the cosmopolitan community of diasporic Muslims recruited to the ranks of suicide bombers in the name of self‐ and social purification. Djaout, assassinated by fundamentalists outside his home in Algeria for writing against them, and Benaïssa, charting the psychological path towards violence taken by one westernized Muslim in the United States, instantiate the ongoing debate within Islam.
Recommended Citation
Hawley, J. C. (2010). Jihad as rite of passage: Tahar Djaout’s The Last Summer of Reason and Slimane Benaïssa’s The Last Night of a Damned Soul. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 46(3–4), 394–404. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2010.482429
