Madah-Sartre: The Kidnapping, Trial, and Conver(sat/s)ion of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir » (New Edition)

Exiled Algerian writer Alek Baylee Toumi is an associate professor of French and Francophone studies at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.  He is the author of the play Albert Camus: Entre la mère et l’injustice and the book Maghreb Divers. James D. Le Sueur is an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria, the second edition of which was published by Nebraska in 2005.

“Hell is other people,” Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote in No Exit. The fantastic tragicomedy Madah-Sartre brings him back from the dead to confront the strange and awful truth of that statement. As the story begins, Sartre and his consort in intellect and love, Simone de Beauvoir, are on their way to the funeral of Tahar Djaout, an Algerian poet and journalist slain in 1993. En route they are kidnapped by Islamic terrorists and ordered to convert . . . or die. Since they are already dead, fearless Sartre gives the terrorists a chance to convince him with reason.

What follows is, as James D. Le Sueur writes in his introduction, “one of the most imaginative and provocative plays of our era.” Sartre, one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, finds himself in an absurd yet deadly real debate with armed fanatics about terrorism, religion, intellectuals, democracy, women’s rights, and secularism, trying to bring his opponents back to their senses in an encounter as disturbing as it is compelling.

Leslie Armour - Library Journal

In exiled Algerian writer Toumi's (French & Francophone studies, Univ. of Wisconsin, Stevens Point; Maghreb Divers) play, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir return to earth from heaven to attend the funeral of a writer in the Djurdjura Mountains of Algeria. They are captured by "Islamist" fundamentalists and brought to trial (by Islamist, Toumi makes clear he means the particular Muslim group that has struggled to make Algeria an Islamic state bound by the Sharia). Sartre's crimes include atheism; de Beauvoir's, feminism. The problem is that Toumi gives neither the fundamentalists nor our protagonist philosophers very good points to argue. Sartre's defense of atheism does not convince; he fails, e.g., to remind his accusers of the early tradition of Islamic tolerance. De Beauvoir fares a little better, shaming her female tormentors for betraying their sex, but she does not produce details of the arguments in Islamic thought regarding the status of women. The Islamists, who are simply portrayed as religious bigots, are allowed by Toumi no more than a hint of their central argument that Westernization threatens their culture and that it is the time for rallying around a simple faith. The play has been given public readings by the author in, e.g., Paris, Toronto, and New Orleans, and it may come to life in these readings, for Toumi is clearly passionate. But though he does not mean to be anti-Islamic as such, he is likely to generate more heat than light. Librarians with backup collections in recent philosophy and Islamic issues will find this a good book with which to stimulate general readers to dig deeper; recommended.