The Monks of Tibhirine Faith, Love and Terror in Algeria by John W. Kiser St. Martin’s, 335 pp., $25.95 TIBHIRINE is a village in the Atlas Mountains some forty miles southwest of Algiers. In 1938 a Trappist monastery was founded there by a small group of French monks from the Abbey of Aiguebelle. The Trappists are a contemplative order devoted solely to a life of prayer and manual labor, but as the years passed, the Muslim villagers developed cordial relations with the monks and even depended on them for certain things. One of the brothers was a physician, and he spent his days caring for the sick and infirm who lined up at the clinic early each morning. During the Algerian war for independence from France, these ties with the village served the monks well, and they survived the war without difficulty. In the decades after the war, however, as zealous Islamic revolutionaries mounted a campaign against Algeria’s military government, the country was enveloped in violence. Europeans were urged to leave, and many did, but the monks of Tibhirine stayed put, in part because they felt an obligation to their Muslim neighbors. On March 27, 1996, seven of the nine monks were kidnapped by a band of extremists, and two months later the Groupe Islamique Arm (GIA) issued a communiqu that they had cut their throats “as we said we would do.” “The Monks of Tibhirine” tells the story of these gentle and courageous men against the backdrop of unspeakable horrors inflicted alike on innocent Muslims and Christians over the course of two decades. It is a sad and heartrending tale haunted by its gruesome ending. The bodies were never found–in the end only the severed heads of the monks were recovered. They are now buried in Tibhirine. But it is also a tale of love and mutual respect. The monks died because they would not abandon their neighbors who trusted them and faced the same dangers. IN A WORLD that is always beckoning with more goods to accumulate, more places to go, and more opportunities to pursue, these monks strove to do with less, to live simply, quietly, and frugally in this one place, devoting themselves to prayer, work (a vegetable garden, tending bees for honey), and study. In the early nineties, they learned to live with an unwelcome guest–fear. In October 1993, the GIA declared war on outsiders in Algeria. “Foreigners have thirty days to leave the country. If they do not, they are responsible for their own death.” This was no idle threat, as the next few years would demonstrate. In 1993, fifteen Croats working on a dam near the monastery were murdered. Soon afterward Brother Christian, abbot of the monastery, began to write his “last testament,” which began: “If it should happen that one day, and that could be tomorrow, that I am a victim of the terrorism which seems now to be engulfing all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my church, and my family to remember that I gave my life for God and for this country [Algeria].” On Christmas Eve of the same year, the monks received a visit from one of the leaders of the GIA. Christian was able to persuade him to leave, explaining that it was the night on which the birth of Jesus is celebrated. Taken aback, the leader said, “Excuse me. I didn’t know.” Yet the visit was troubling and the message ominous. One day the band of thugs would return. Over the next several years as terrorists killed clergy and members of religious orders (the Church in Algeria is tiny, and all were known well by the monks), it seemed more and more likely that their time was drawing near. In May 1994 two men disguised as policemen entered a house for students run by the Catholic diocese in Algiers and shot a priest and a sister. On October 24 two Spanish nuns were shot in the back while entering the chapel of the Little Sisters of Jesus in Bab el-Qued for evening prayer. A few weeks later a group of armed men, again disguised as police, entered the house of the White Fathers and gunned down three members of the community and a visitor. This brought the total of foreigners killed between September 1993 and the end of 1994 to seventy-eight. Shortly afterward brother Paul wrote to his former abbot in France, “No one has any illusions anymore. Each of us knows that tomorrow could be his turn. But each of us has freely chosen to stay.” THE MONKS took some precautions, closing their doors at 5:30 rather than 7:30 P.M. and installing a new telephone line to the house of the Arab guardian. Every six months they would gather together to discuss whether they should leave, and each time they resolved to stay. Other religious communities were leaving, but it was their firm conviction that they had been called to serve God in this place, to live among people “who struggled each day to make a living.” When there were rumors that the monks might leave, one of the villagers said, “You have a door to leave from. We have no door, no way out. . . . We are frozen in fear. There is nowhere to turn.” In November 1995 two sisters who belonged to the Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart were shot leaving their home in Kouba. One of the sisters was a dear friend and a member of the Ribat-es-salaam (Bond of Peace), a group of Muslims and Christians that met twice yearly at Tibhirine since 1979. She had lived for almost thirty years in Algeria, spoke fluent Arabic, and believed it was her unique calling to live as a Christian among the Algerians. After her death, terror seemed to be standing before the gates of the monastery. Finally, early on Wednesday morning March 27, 1996, a little after 1:00 A.M., Jean Pierre, one of the monks, was awakened by voices outside his room. When he looked to the entrance of the cloister he could see a man with a turban, bandoliers, and a machine gun walking toward the room of the abbot. Christian met briefly with the leader, there was a shuffling of footsteps, the outside gate clanged shut, and then silence. Jean Pierre assumed that the intruders had left and that everyone had gone back to bed. Then he heard a knock on his door and another monk told him: We are alone, all the others have been taken away. They were not seen until the general of the Trappist order identified their heads at the Department of Forensic Medicine two months later. THE MONKS OF TIBHIRINE have found a worthy chronicler in John Kiser. The murders were widely reported in Europe, where people gathered in public places to mourn, but the news received little attention in this country’s press. So it is very good to have the story told in full by someone who writes confidently about the political as well as religious history that led up to the killings. Kiser has a keen eye for detail and his account is informed and intelligent. He is fascinated by the tranquility of the monks in the face of mounting danger and draws effectively on letters, journals, and sermons to convey their thoughts and feelings as they reckoned with the inevitability of their own deaths. In a letter written at Christmas 1995, Christian said, “Now all that is left us is to give our blood to follow Christ to the end.” But Kiser wishes to do more than recount a story of faith, love, and terror, as the subtitle has it. The events raised questions about Algerian politics, about the nature of Islam and Christianity, why the monks were there, why they were killed, and what their deaths mean for future relations between Muslims and Christians. Some of his best pages give a profile of the members of the GIA, mostly young men in the cities, alienated from the traditional structures of family and society in the villages from which they had come, distrustful of their elders, opportunistic, susceptible to the inflamed rhetoric of half-educated preachers. Though they claimed to act in the name of Islam, they were as willing to kill Muslim leaders as to murder foreigners. Among the majority of the Algerians, however, there was a great outpouring of outrage and revulsion at the killings, and Islamic leaders condemned the massacre as an offense against God and the teachings of Islam. The killings turned many Algerians against the terrorists, and Kiser believes that the death of the monks was a turning point for Algeria. One of the final chapters of the book is entitled “Martyrs of Hope.” It is a tempting scenario, but real optimism is hard to hold. A few months after the massacre of the monks, a bomb exploded in the residence of the archbishop of Oran, Algeria’s second largest city, killing the beloved bishop Claverie and his assistant instantly. In December 1997 four hundred people were killed by Islamic extremists on the first night of Ramadan. Although the violence has diminished in recent years, the GIA is still active, and indiscriminate killings continue–forty in the last month alone according to the BBC. It seems more likely that the meaning of the death of the monks lies in the witness of their lives, not the political history of Algeria. Yet they have become part of the communal memory of the Algerian people, and perhaps one day, as a professor at the University of Algiers observed, they will be considered saints by Muslims as well as by Christians. Kiser not only came to admire the monks–he also found himself drawn to the simple piety of the Muslim villagers. As the story unfolds it becomes clear he thinks the good will between the Muslim villagers and the Trappist community offers a model for relations between Muslims and Christians, interpreted, however, through his religious perspective. Here he wades in beyond his depth and is swept along by an undercurrent of religious platitudes. WHAT REALLY MATTERS, it seems, is not what one believes, but whether one has a good heart and a generous spirit, “faith unburdened by doctrine,” as he puts it at one point. The way forward in the great religious struggles of our time is to forge a religion of universal love, understanding, and good will. Faith means living in friendship with others. The monks, he writes, “represented my understanding of what Christianity should be, love God, but love thy neighbor first.” One hopes that this inversion of the words of Jesus will not escape readers. In answer to the question, Which is the greatest commandment?, Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The monks loved their neighbors because they loved God. Kiser was able to find statements in the writings of the monks, particularly of Christian the abbot, that seem to suggest he was moving toward a generalized belief in God. The task in relations between Christianity and Islam, he once said, is to seek “the notes that are in harmony.” The openness and freedom of the monks, however, derived from their very particular commitments. They could reach out to their Muslim neighbors because they were firmly and unapologetically rooted in the rhythms of a very ancient way of life, reciting the Psalms, reading the Scriptures, celebrating the Eucharist. In turn the villagers were humiliated and shamed by what was being done in the name of Islam. “This is not Islam,” one told him, citing a verse from the Koran: “Whoever kills another who has not killed or committed violence shall be seen as having killed all mankind.” The Muslim villagers were quite comfortable having Western Christians living in their midst. The tale of Tibhirine points not to a generic message of universal love, but to the strength and resiliency of traditional religious belief and practice. It was as Muslims that the residents of Tibhirine accepted the monks and lived peaceably with them. If there is a moral to the story, it would seem to be that the hijacking of Islam by Arab nationalism and Muslim extremism will be overcome from within Islam itself. Robert Louis Wilken is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia.
