Where did the idea that the intellectual is marginalized in Algeria come from?

A well-established idea among many educated people and certificate holders, whose number has increased significantly in recent years, after the widespread spread of education in Algeria, which was known for the scarcity of education and the historically few educated people. An idea that I return to discuss on the occasion of the 33rd anniversary of the death of Mouloud Maamari, who left us on this date in 1989 in a car accident while returning from Morocco, where he had stayed for a long period of his youth to study with his uncle, the high official in the upper palace.

The case of Mouloud Maamari, from which we can start to discuss this issue of marginalization, which we chose this week to say that it is a multifaceted issue, presented inaccurately, and even erroneously. What is meant by many educated Algerians, when they talk about the marginalization of the educated, remains measured by distance from political power, With the advantages that are supposed to come with it, and thus the talk about political marginalization in the first place, embodied in the lack of access to the position of the ministry, which has become the demand of many educated people, some of them no longer hesitate to suggest CVs on social media for their colleagues to occupy this position Within the executive body, a position whose symbolic status has clearly deteriorated recently, after the disruption of the performance of the selection institutions with which the political system was known, and the result was the caricature that we have been living with for years. Appointing a minister for a few hours, a position that often became the closest way to prison and nowhere else.

The Algerian learner’s focus on the political dimension of marginalization, which he says the educated person experiences, can be explained from several levels, perhaps the most important of which is that we are in front of educated “elites”, often poor, who have discovered the rentier nature of the political-economic system and want to immerse themselves in it through the political position, in a society devoid of From the existence of the independence of cultural and intellectual action, through large associations and a dedicated cultural life that could have been a means for this marginalized learner towards achieving himself, he is the one who discovered with time that political marginalization does not come alone, given this rentier nature of the political system that excludes politicians and the media as well. The one who is angry with the ruling authority is usually angry with the media as well, in a society that does not have cultural and intellectual media in the form of independent intellectual associations and platforms, which could have been an alternative to the tyranny of the regime’s institutions when it decided to marginalize those who decided to be marginalized and expelled.Marginalization We will discover as we follow the diaries of a thinker like Mouloud Maamari, that he is not very accurate. Because the man had an intellectual project, he was able to impose his presence on the intellectual and political scene in Algeria with time, even while he was being fought and excluded by the political system and its various institutions, after he was adopted from Before large groups of Algerians, I went out in mass demonstrations in 1980 when he was prevented from giving his famous lecture at the University of Tizi Ouzou, on Amazigh poetry, a university that bears his name now. From giving a lecture on Amazigh poetry inside the university campus, an entire region comes out with its villages and schools to defend it, so that its resonance reaches the rest of the country and all of the Maghreb.A man who set out in his intellectual work in which he focused on defending the Amazigh culture on small number of student circles, at the University of Algiers, to develop with time and take on various institutional dimensions, taking the form of the party and the association, the publishing house, the newspaper, etc., which eventually led to the demarcation of the Amazigh, which It was the demand of many generations.An intellectual work with a small number of students at the University of Algiers in the mid-1970s, which was not accepted by the official authorities, even when they temporarily silenced him, similar to what a second Algerian intellectual, the thinker Malik Bennabi, did, who was able to obtain intellectual recognition within And outside Algeria later, despite the fact that he was expelled by competing official political and intellectual elites, just as happened with Mouloud Maamari, despite the great difference in intellectual premises and convictions that emerged from the defense of the Berber language and culture of Maamari, and a kind of renaissance project based on Islam among the Prophet, at the present time finds a large presence within the Algerian university community, from the young people who adopted it without the ability to add intellectually to it, in order to link more with the transformations that the world is going through, although the project of Bennabi did not find nervousness - in the Khaldunian concept, which Maamari's intellectual project found it, so his defense was modest and he did not recruit many effective elites.

Two ideas emerged in the form of an elitist project besieged in Algeria in the seventies, which was dominated by national political thought at the official level, weak cultural load, based mainly on rural political elites with weak scientific qualifications, which did not attach great importance to the cultural issue, nor to the intellectual. A development that relied on a selective intellectual synthesis that brought together many opposites, among which was the present left within the university, which was used by intellectual and media institutions to attack the two competing projects, which helped give this period of the university’s history an intellectual vitality that is no longer present at the present time. The political and cultural decision centers that were able to recruit, in addition to the leftist, the Islamic, the Arab and the Amazigh under the banner of patriotism, and they ask everyone to cover up their convictions and intellectual piety at work times and during official working hours!