One Friday this summer, Paris police stopped Ali Habib on his way to the mosque. Wearing a long robe and the white chechia skullcap, he looked the part of an illegal alien, an Islamic fundamentalist, or both. To their astonishment, the police found that Habib's identity papers showed him to be Daniel Huguet, a Frenchman born in Brittany in September 1941.
His moustache and dark eyes, gestures and manner seem Arab. Indeed, many of Habib/Huguet's colleagues at Le Monde newspaper know only of his Algerian identity. When I first met him in Algiers six years ago, I too thought of him as Algerian. Through mutual friends, I learned of his extraordinary story.
Try as he might, Ali Habib says he cannot think of himself as French. He believes he was affected by the "schizophrenia" of relations between France and Algeria - "132 years of French colonisation did a lot of damage; Algeria still hasn't recovered from its identity crisis", he told me when we met again this week.
The son of a rich Breton merchant family, Daniel Huguet was a problem child who repeatedly ran away from home. After the Algerian war of independence started in 1954, he joined the Federation de France, the famous porteurs de valises who supported the National Liberation Front (FLN) by carrying weapons and explosives. At that stage, Huguet was motivated not by idealism but revolt, "against my family, against France".
Huguet's older brother was a French officer serving in Algeria. "When he heard I'd been arrested, he wrote to me saying I had sullied the name of the family and France, that he would kill me if he ever saw me in Algeria. We didn't speak to one another for 40 years."
At the end of 1958, Huguet was sent as a conscript to Algeria. He deserted and joined the FLN, running the infirmary for a katiba - as the guerrilla units were called - of 15 to 30 men. "Gradually, I felt I belonged to something, that I was a revolutionary."
It was in the maquis that Huguet first encountered Islam. "The fighters were very Islamic, because they knew they might die at any moment. The educated ones read the Quran to the others. I wanted to be like them." Six months after Algerian independence in July 1962, Huguet became a Muslim.
Independence was the high point of Algeria's - and Huguet's - existence. "I was very proud. I felt as if the country belonged to me. The maquisards took me in a jeep around the capital. The women were ululating." The government gave Algerian nationality to foreigners who had fought with the FLN; "I felt I had earned my nationality," he recalls. At the same time, the French convicted Huguet of desertion and collusion with the enemy, and he could not visit France until after an amnesty law was passed in 1974.
Huguet became a journalist, working for the Algerian press agency APS, Algerian radio and the government newspaper, El Moudjahid. "We believed in the revolution, in nationalisation, in agrarian reform," he says now, with self-mockery and nostalgia.
"We were the good guys, the forces of progress against the decadence of the West." In 1968, his boss at the radio station insisted that he use an Arabic name, so he became Ali Habib.
By the mid-1970s, Habib was losing his enthusiasm for the revolution. "I could see there wasn't much freedom," he explains. As a journalist, he covered the endless "fraternal delegations" who visited Algiers. He had travelled to Latin America, met Che Guevera and Castro. "I learned Spanish, Hispanic culture. For me, it was almost as big a revelation as Islam and Arabic."
Habib's mother shocked the family by leaving most of her fortune to her errant son, who donated his inheritance to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and the Dhofar liberation movement, a now defunct group that was fighting Oman with Yemeni Communist support.
Ali Habib fled Algeria two and a half years ago, after weeks of anonymous phone calls giving a countdown to his assassination. He left for the sake of Kais, the 12-year-old boy whom he adopted as an abandoned baby. In Paris, Habib and his son settled in the largely north African 18th arrondissement, but he feels he is in exile.
The principal error of post-independence governments was, Habib says, "lack of justice, and total contempt for the population". When the Islamic Salvation Front was created in 1989, he understood the appeal of its slogans, about justice and equality.
"Young people were fed up with la hogra - the government's contempt for them. Islam was their refuge." The deepest hatred, he says, was that of the so-called "democrats" for Islamists: "I saw the way they came to my neighbourhood and arrested every young man, then sent them to camps in the desert. Some of my journalist colleagues said they should all be left to die there."
But Habib makes no excuses for the guerrillas who behead villagers every night. "The Prophet Muhammad never killed children or old people. It's a total aberration, a deviation from Islam," he claims. "People in France say: `You got independence, now look what's happened to you. It's because you're intrinsically savage'. What is happening in Algeria is not worse than what happened in Bosnia or Rwanda. That's what civil war is about: horror."
