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Islam. ‘Under the pretense of religion’, Addison wrote, ‘he designed an empire; and he was a prophet in show, but a tyrant in project.’ Indeed, Muhammad’s political manipulation of religious truth was so similar to political puritanism that for Addison, the Prophet’s only rival as ‘the only great impostor that ever continued so long prosperous in the world’ was Oliver Cromwell. Muhammad ‘so well managed his ambition and injustice, under the cloak of religion, as never any have yet proved his equal’, wrote Addison. ‘The nearest and most exact transcript of this great
’, I refer to ‘lived experience’, or simply the physical fact of living one’s life in a specific place and time. I am aware that the possibility of understanding the soldier’s experience was certainly contested at the time – many soldiers believing that it was impossible for civilians to comprehend the experience of the soldier. George Mosse eloquently describes this and its political manipulation as the ‘Myth of the War Experience’ in Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford
, sadly, only to be expected in a colonial society in which ethnic discrimination, extreme poverty, rural hunger and political manipulation were endemic. By contrast, the extreme military repression that ensued in and around Constantine, with its presumptive targeting of adult civilian males as irretrievable enemies of the state, was born of the Algerian situation. It was the culmination of the asymmetry