`As God wills'.

The Monks of Tibhirine
Faith, Love, and Terror
in Algeria
John W. Kiser
Saint Martin's Press, $25.95, 335 pp.

The first Trappist monks arrived in Algeria in the nineteenth century in the wake of the French colonial army that took Algiers from the Barbary pirates in 1830. They started a monastery in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains. The government valued the agricultural skills of the monks--a value well placed; in 1865 Napoleon III himself came to inspect their well-kept fields and vineyards. The monks toiled under the motto of "sword, cross, and plow." They were a key part of the mission civilitrice of French colonialism--an ideology with traces in the attitudes of the saintly hermit of Algeria, Charles de Foucauld, who died in 1916.

The violently anticlerical Republican government of France ended the Algerian Trappist settlement in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Religious houses were closed and their inhabitants expelled. The Trappist farms were sold in 1904 to a Swiss family consortium that continued to advertise their products as coming from "the Trappist Domain." The monks themselves dispersed to various communities in Europe. A few monks returned to Algeria in the late 1930s. The community grew after World War II, when a number of men had discovered the beauty of the land through their experiences in the French military.

John Kiser chronicles the trials of a Christian contemplative monastery set in a largely Islamic country--trials exacerbated by the struggle for independence from France, the decades of political struggle in the postindependence period, and since 1988, by the bloody struggle of Muslim fundamentalists against the Algerian government. Kiser's book guides us through the complex story of the sociopolitical landscape of Algeria, to the story of the 1996 murder of the monks of Tibhirine.

This new monastic foundation was a far cry from the old one. The small community (it never reached a dozen members) was poor, simple, and deeply committed to the contemplative life. One of the monks, an elderly lay brother named Luc, was a medical doctor who ran a clinic for the impoverished locals. The monks provided a space for Friday prayers for their Muslim neighbors. The prior, Brother Christian, had studied Islam in Rome and participated in discussions with Muslims who were sympathetic to the life of the Christian marabouts. No effort was made to convert Muslims.

What complicated life at the monastery of Our Lady of the Atlas was a militant Islamic group that terrorized the entire country by killings and assassinations as part of a strategy to disgrace and eventually overthrow the government. In October 1993 the group (known as the GIA) issued an ultimatum: All foreigners must leave Algeria by December 1 under pain of death. In fact, a number of deaths did occur. Then, three days after Christmas, members of the GIA invaded the monastery making three demands: medical care for injured militants, medicines and equipment to take with them, and money. The monks readily agreed to care for the wounded, but rejected the other two demands as blackmail.

The months after this encounter saw a dramatic escalation of attacks against Christian religious. The monks were advised to leave their isolated monastery, but they refused. They felt an obligation to stay in solidarity with their neighbors and in fidelity to their vocation as witnesses to peace and reconciliation.

In March 1996, the GIA returned to the monastery and forced seven monks to go with them to the mountains. On May 21, the GIA announced that the monks had been executed because the Algerian government had not agreed to free some imprisoned Islamic militants. Some weeks later, the heads of the monks were found. Today, their remains (the bodies have never been discovered) rest in a small graveyard on the grounds of the monastery. As of this writing, the monks have not been replaced and Our Lady of the Atlas remains empty.

An extraordinary letter was written by the prior of the monastery two years before his martyrdom. Fully aware of the precarious situation in which the monks lived, Father Christian left the letter in a sealed envelope, to be opened only at his death. He finished his letter on New Year's Day, 1994. The letter was opened in 1996, just months after his murder. It is a classic example of the literature of martyrdom.

Brother Christian wrote that, should he lose his life through a terrorist act, he wanted everyone to know that he gave up his life for God and for Algeria. He begged people not to condemn Islam or Muslims. He lamented caricatures of Islam; such caricatures, he wrote, were not faithful to the Islam he knew. Nor did he wish to be called a martyr at the expense of the many anonymous Algerians who had died at the hands of the terrorists and were not remembered, despite their terrible sufferings.

In a final, powerfully moving paragraph he addresses his killer directly--he was sure that he would meet him in the world to come. To this unknown person he says merci and adieu. He concludes with the expectation that the two of them--two happy thieves (larrons heureux)--will meet in paradise if it is the will of God who "is the Father of both of us." His final words are in Arabic: "As God wills."

Kiser's book adds a good deal to what has been written about the monastic martyrs of Algeria (most found, alas, in somewhat out-of-the-way places like Cistercian Studies Quarterly). He gives a good account of Algeria's complex political situation, and provides a fine account of the international efforts to free the monks.

One incident caught my eye in reading about these monks in Rene Guitton's Si Nous Nous Taisons (Paris, 2001). After the first invasion of the monastery by the GIA, old Brother Luc, the eighty-year-old doctor and ex-soldier, was as determined as his confreres to remain at the monastery and not take refuge from the incursions ravaging the countryside. He was at least partially inspired in this resolve by the words of his favorite French musician, the late Edith Piaf and her heartbreaking song "Je ne regrette rien"--"I regret nothing."

If, as one prays, these monks enter the ranks of those officially recognized as martyrs, one also hopes those who are in charge of the process will find that little fact a genuine sign of authentic sanctity. What other kind of saint would we want?

Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and writes the Religion Booknotes column for Commonweal.