Behind the Story : In Algeria, Faithful See Handwriting on the Wall : Forbidden to preach in public, the Islamic Salvation Front gets its message out with a street newsletter.

It was the first Friday prayer day for the Muslim faithful of Algiers since the assassination of the country’s leader, Mohammed Boudiaf.

In one corner of a densely inhabited, deteriorating housing project known unromantically as the Batiment Troisieme Groupe, or Third Group Building, a few older men prayed inside the small Omar Ibn Khatab mosque. But in the surrounding courtyard, a much larger collection of younger men leaned against entryways and huddled in stairwells near a wall that has become a message board for the clandestine Islamic Salvation Front.

The young men are like those whom French colonialists used to refer to derisively as hittists , a bastardization of the Arabic word for “wall.” The men, at least in the racist mentality of the colonialists, had no apparent occupation or goal. They seemed frozen in the urban landscape. They were “wall supporters.” If they moved, the joke went, the walls of the city of Algiers would come tumbling down.

In fact, the colonial-era wall leaners eventually did move, taking arms against the French and driving them from the country. Four years of bloody anti-colonial war ended with liberation July 5, 1962, nearly 30 years ago to the day.

On this Friday, the young men also had a purpose. They were waiting for the latest bulletin from the Islamic front.

Borrowing a tactic the French colonialists used 35 years ago to control Algerian rebels, the military regime banned outdoor prayers and religious meetings in Algiers five months ago. This prevented the Islamic front, usually known by its French acronym, FIS, from using the Friday prayers as its main organizing and propaganda venue. Since the ban, the politically charged Friday crowds that used to spill out of the mosques and into the streets in FIS strongholds like the Third Group Building no longer come.

Officially outlawed, more than 4,000 of its members arrested and detained in Sahara Desert concentration camps, seven of its leaders threatened with the death penalty before a military tribunal, the FIS went underground.

Instead of public preaching and proselytizing, the fundamentalists now rely on a secretly published Friday newsletter, Minbar-El Djoumoua, to spread their word. On the wall opposite the Omar Ibn Khatab mosque, arranged in neat columns--the top row in French, the lower row in Arabic--are the last few editions of the single-page newsletter, each edition numbered sequentially.

Few of the messages in the newsletters have anything to do with religion. Instead, like revolutionary tracts the world around, they focus on martyred and jailed colleagues and what they call the crimes of the state.

Bulletin No. 47, for example, has an article condemning the military tribunal trial of their two principal FIS leaders, Abbasi Madani and Ali Belhaj. “The trial of the leaders of FIS is an affront to the Algerian people,” it reports. Above the makeshift message board, a message written on a torn sheet of butcher paper supports the point with a threat.

“If the chiefs of FIS are put on trial, we shall resort to guns,” it says in Arabic.

Such threats are never taken idly in Algiers.

Modern urban guerrilla warfare was practically invented in this city. This was the site of the bloody Battle of Algiers, pitting Arab revolutionary peasants against French colonialists.

The steep hills that overlook the Mediterranean port made perfect vantage points for snipers to pick off their enemies. The labyrinthine alleys and passages of the Casbah made perfect escape routes.

Every Algerian schoolchild knows how the battles were fought. The details were drummed into their memories, along with the names of the revolutionary heroes, in the textbooks of the same state that now faces an armed rebellion of its own.

Boudiaf, the 73-year-old assassinated president of the ruling Council of State, was a decorated revolutionary hero in the guerrilla war. So was his replacement, Ali Kafi, 64, announced to the post Thursday by the military-backed regime.

The legacy of the Algerian revolution has now passed to the fundamentalists.

Over the past five months, 100 mostly low-level police officers have been killed at roadblocks and police posts in Algiers by men in cars, presumably FIS supporters, who shoot through open windows, Los Angeles drive-by style, and flee.

Reports of the killings and shootings are common fare in the dozens of daily newspapers here. Crime has increased. “Over the past three years,” said a diplomat based here, “there has been a steady disintegration of just about everything here. The social fabric is unraveling. Violence has become a daily event, commonplace.”

By many accounts, Algeria is a country on the brink of civil war.

It is popular in Paris and Washington to portray the looming conflict as a battle between secular--i.e., Western-style--institutions and Islamic fundamentalism.

France still has strong emotional attachments to its former colony and fears a flood of immigrants if a civil war erupts.

Some U.S. policy-makers see fundamentalist Islam vs. the West as the new Cold War.

But what is happening in Algeria may have more to do with Thomas Robert Malthus, the economist who preached economic doom based on unchecked world population growth, than Mohammed the Prophet. Three-fourths of Algeria’s foreign income is used to service its debt; 30% of the population is unemployed; nearly two-thirds of its burgeoning population of 26 million people are under 25 years old. Food is expensive and housing very scarce.

The hittists have nothing to do. As it was during the time of the Algerian war for independence, the mosque and Islam have become the organizing points for discontent. The men leaning against the walls in the courtyard of Third Group Building are waiting for the latest bulletin from the Islamic front.

Sometime after the noon prayers, Bulletin No. 48 came and was posted with the others in front of the small mosque.

The government in power is faced with a choice, Bulletin No. 48 announces:

“The choice is between two opposite paths. Either return free speech to the people through its freely elected representatives or increase the cycle of violence, encouraging extreme methods.”