I Was a French Muslim

This engaging memoir provides a vivid account of a childhood under French colonization and a life dedicated to fighting for the freedom and dignity of the Algerian people. The son of a butcher and the youngest of six siblings, Mokhtar Mokhtefi was born in 1935 and grew up in a village de colonization" roughly one hundred kilometers south of the capital of Algiers. Thanks to the efforts of a supportive teacher, he became the only child in the family to progress to high school, attending a French lycâee that furthered his thinking on Algerian independence. In 1957, at age twenty-two, he joined the National Liberation Army (ALN), the armed wing of the National Liberation Front (FLN) that had been waging war against France since 1954. After completing rigorous training in radio transmissions at a military base in Morocco, he went on to become an officer in the infamous Ministáere de l'Armement et des Liaisons Gâenâerales (MALG), the precursor of post-independence Algeria's Military Security (SM). Mokhtefi's powerful memoir bears witness to the extraordinary men and women who fought for Algerian independence against a colonial regime that viewed non-Europeans as fundamentally inferior, designating them not as pure French citizens, but as "French Muslims." He presents a nuanced, intelligent, and deeply personal perspective on Algeria's transition to independent statehood, with all its inherent opportunities and pitfalls"--