Postcolonialism and Religious Identity in Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation

Abstract

Though Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigationrewrites and responds to Albert Camus’s French classic The Stranger, it fails to defend Algerians’ religious identity, especially that our age is characterized by a fierce criticism and demonization of Islam. Though the novel won many world prizes of literature, and it is considered as a distinguished work in postcolonial literature, Algerian readers view it as scandalous because of its denouncement of the Qur’an and its profanation of the sacred. The paper shows that postcolonialism is embedded in a secular Western methodology. Thus, it fails to defend the religion of the colonized. Hence, there is a need for an Islamic postcolonial approach.