Mourad Bourboune

Mourad Bourboune (born Jan. 23, 1938, Jijel, Alg.) is an Algerian novelist who, like many young Algerian writers in the decades following their country’s independence, criticized the oppressiveness of the new state as well as its religious traditionalism.

Bourboune’s first novel, Le Mont des genêts (1962; “The Mountain of Broom”), describes the collapse of the old order and the coming of a new age that began with the insurrection of Nov. 1, 1954, the event that precipitated the Algerian war for independence. Le Muezzin (1968) presents the principal character in enigmatic terms and uses him to show the rupture of modern-day North Africans with their past. The protagonist is an atheistic muezzin (the caller to daily prayers) whose sacrilegious violence acts to exorcise and delineate the sham and hypocrisy of the Algerian government since independence.