Why is a town in Iowa named after an Algerian Sufi?
An Algerian commander fought France for fifteen years, sheltered Christians in Damascus in 1860, and said he was only keeping the law of his religion. Who really did the killing that summer, and what his book of inner life says about the law.
21 Oct 2026
Read the essay on Substack ↗See the Instagram carousel ↗
Talks and interviews
- Eugene Rogan: The 1860 Events and the Reconstruction of Ottoman Damascus, Professor Eugene Rogan ↗
angloturkishsociety · talk page- 24:30 The Algerian veterans and the rescue
- Eugene Rogan: Archives: The Case of the 1860 Massacre in Syria ↗
Center for Contemporary Arab Studies · talk page- 36:20 Lincoln's pistols, Victoria's letter
- John Kiser: John Kiser - Commander of the Faithful, the Life and Times of Emir Abd el-Kader ↗
AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies · talk page- 17:20 How Elkader, Iowa got its name
- Éric Geoffroy: Éric Geoffroy : l'émir Abdelkader, un spirituel dans la modernité ↗
Mizane TV · talk page- 17:47 Respect for prisoners and the greater jihad (French)
- Ahmed Bouyerdene: Ahmed Bouyerdene : l'émir Abdelkader, fragments d'un portrait 1/2 ↗
Mizane TV · talk page- 44:19 The 1846 massacre and who was blamed (French)
- Ahmed Bouyerdene: Vidéo 6/7 : Ahmed Bouyerdene ↗
AISA ONG Internationale · talk page- 1:21 The broken promise of 1847 (French)
Books
- John W. Kiser, Commander of the Faithful: The Life and Times of Emir Abd el-Kader (Monkfish, 2008). The readable life.
- Michel Chodkiewicz (ed.), The Spiritual Writings of Amir ʿAbd al-Kader (SUNY Press, 1995). The Mawāqif in English, in selection.
- Ahmed Bouyerdene, Emir Abd el-Kader: Hero and Saint of Islam (World Wisdom).
- Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World (Allen Lane, 2024).
- Tom Woerner-Powell, Another Road to Damascus (De Gruyter, 2017), the critical reading.
Free online texts
- Charles Henry Churchill, The Life of Abdel Kader (London, 1867), written from the Emir's own conversations. ↗
- Kitāb al-Mawāqif (Damascus, 1966), Arabic. ↗
- Dupuch, Abd-el-Kader au château d'Amboise (Bordeaux, 1849), French. ↗
- Price, History of Clayton County, Iowa (1916), vol. 1, on Elkader. ↗
- Bouyerdene, Geoffroy and Simon-Khedis (eds.), Abd el-Kader, un spirituel dans la modernité (Presses de l'Ifpo, 2012), open access on OpenEdition Books.