A painful tale of politics, death

ALGERIA was where contemporary jihadism first showed its spectral face.

In 1992 the former French colony’s army stepped in to block elections that would have brought an Islamist party to power. The party’s frustrated allies -- particularly the Armed Islamic Group, which included veterans of the Afghan war against the Soviets -- began a hideous civil war, replete with the mass throat cuttings, beheadings and other medieval atrocities that since have become something of a jihadi calling card. The savagery ended in an uneasy truce seven years later.

Yasmina Khadra is the pseudonym of Mohamed Moulessehoul, a 51-year-old novelist and retired Algerian army officer who fought in that war. In a previous book, “The Swallows of Kabul,” Khadra, who writes in French, explored the tragic consequences of a minor Afghan bureaucrat’s envelopment in Taliban fanaticism. In “Wolf Dreams” and “In the Name of God,” he intimately charted his own country’s descent into bloody fanaticism.

“The Attack,” which is set in Israel, is his best and most ambitious novel yet. It has been a bestseller in France, where it has been nominated for the prestigious Prix Goncourt and Prix de l’Academie. Khadra’s other American publications have been in small presses. “The Attack” was scooped up by editor Nan Talese’s Doubleday imprint, already has a film deal and is to be sold in Target discount stores as one of the chain’s “breakout” summer books.

Nothing about mainstream American culture has given quite so much hope in a long time.

This is an audaciously conceived and courageously important novel. Khadra’s story is told through the eyes and in the voice of Amin Jaafari, an Israeli citizen of Bedouin descent who is a brilliant surgeon on the staff of a Tel Aviv hospital. Amin is a man devoted to his work and family and, although hardly blind to politics, he is neither preoccupied nor sentimental concerning them.

In the book’s harrowing opening sequence, Amin’s hospital is rocked by a nearby explosion and prepares to treat the victims of what clearly is a terrorist attack. A suicide bomber has detonated a killing device inside a fast-food restaurant; 19 people are dead, including 11 children attending a classmate’s birthday party. After hours of treating the wounded, Amin makes his way home, discovers his wife, Sihem, has not returned from a visit to their family home and falls exhausted into bed.

He is awakened by the authorities who want him to identify the remains of the suicide bomber ... Sihem.

This is the first inkling Amin has had of his wife’s involvement with political violence -- or politics at all -- the rest of this engrossing narrative follows his personal quest to find out how and why his young wife had given herself to murder for a cause. As such, it becomes Khadra’s inquiry into the chilling mystery of the suicide bomber.

Khadra has been compared to fellow Algerian Albert Camus, and “The Attack” is very much a novel of ideas in the French style. As a onetime writer of mysteries, Khadra -- who, like Camus, admires Raymond Chandler -- has a mastery of plot that lends this story a propulsive, whodunit energy. It is a facility that carries the reader through a translation (by John Cullen) that is merely serviceable.

At its core, though, his is a book about motives and the search for motives.

When Amin finally finds the terrorist cell to which his wife belonged, he is imprisoned alone in a cave, then repeatedly taken out and subjected to mock executions. His captors off-handedly taunt him with the fact that, as a secularist, he doesn’t even know the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca, toward which a pious Muslim faces while praying. Later, when the group’s commander appears, he dismisses Amin as “an eminent humanist.” (It’s interesting how “humanist” has become, these days, an epithet in the mouths of religious extremists across cultures.)

The commander is “a young man in his thirties, somewhat frail looking, with a face like a knife blade scorched on one side and two yellowish eyes.” He puts a loaded pistol in Amin’s hand and says the captive is free to shoot him in revenge and then leave. Amin refuses. The commander tells him that his captivity and psychological torture have been an elaborate charade designed to humiliate the well-educated and secular physician, so that he can “experience, physically and mentally, the kind of hatred that is eating away at us.”

The commander’s subsequent explanation of the motives that send Amin’s wife into the street contains the core of Khadra’s insight into the suicide bombers’ motivations:

“When a person has been scorned, when his self-esteem has been wounded, all tragedies become possible. Especially if one recognizes that he’s impotent with no means of restoring his dignity. I believe that the best school for hatred is located in this very place. The instant when you really learn to hate is the one in which you become aware of your impotence. It’s a tragic moment -- the most appalling, the most abominable of all....

“There are only two extreme moments in human madness: the instant when you become aware of your own impotence and the instant when you become aware of the vulnerability of others. It’s a question of accepting one’s madness, Doctor, or suffering it.”

Discount for the now ubiquitous language of personal psychology and you’ve got Karl Marx’s shrewd old intuition that revolutionary consciousness was born in the moment the serf realized that his ax was a weapon, as well as a farm implement. The knotty paradox at the heart of jihadism is that its greatest recruiting tool and principal weapon is a humiliation engendered not from without, but from within -- the humiliation of a failed culture. And if that humiliation grows out of a kind of serfdom, the power that holds the jihadis in its thrall is neither Western colonialism nor Zionism, but the totalitarian delusions of cultural failure elevated to messianic ideal.

Circular, isn’t it?

Khadra is too realistic a thinker and artful a writer to posit a single idea as the blade to slash this Gordian knot, but there’s a saving sanity in the exchange Amin has with an elderly Jewish hermit he encounters while wandering his family’s land after release. They discuss their mutual distaste for Ariel Sharon’s policies toward the Palestinians, studding their exchange with Biblical quotations.

“You astonish me,” the hermit Zeev tells Amin. “Where did you learn all those verses from Isaiah?”

“Every Jew in Palestine is a bit of an Arab and no Arab in Israel can deny that he’s a little Jewish.”

“I couldn’t agree more. So why so much hate between relatives?”

“It’s because we haven’t learned much from the prophets and hardly anything about the elementary rules of life.”

He nods his head sadly. “Then what’s to be done?” he asks.

“First of all, give God back his freedom. He’s been hostage to our bigotries too long.”

In “The Attack,” Khadra/Moulessehoul’s physician protagonist decides on a way forward for himself, rejecting the overtures from other relatives who are part of his dead wife’s terrorist cell. When he leaves them, Amin concludes, “I’ve arrived at my destination. The route I took has been terrible, and I don’t have the impression that I’ve reached anything or learned anything redemptive. At the same time, I feel liberated.... For me, the only truth that counts is the one that will help me one day pull myself together and go back to my patients. Because the only battle I believe in, the only one that really deserves bleeding for, is the battle the surgeon fights, which consists in re-creating life in the place where death has chosen to conduct its maneuvers.”

In the end, Amin’s decency and moral sanity are no shield against violent tragedy, but it would be a grave misreading of this important and urgently humane novel not to recognize the authority of its realism.

Happy endings are beside the point.