I asked the novelist and dissident Boualem Sansal, recently released from Algerian prison, how he would like to be remembered. He did not hesitate. Not as the French Salman Rushdie – to whom he is often compared – but as the Algerian George Orwell. Orwell was not just a novelist but a prophet, who saw how a peaceful society could morph into a system of oppression. ‘Every day in Algeria,’ Sansal told me, ‘is like Nineteen Eighty-Four.’

Sansal was speaking to me after he had just given a speech in London, at the Policy Exchange think tank – his first public interventions in Britain since leaving prison in Algeria, where he had been jailed after a sham trial, where there were no witnesses or legal defence. Sansal was originally taken into custody in November 2024 for ‘undermining national unity’, and was further charged for insulting the authorities. Inside prison he saw prisoners whipped. This is why Sansal’s insights matter. When he talks about totalitarianism, he is not drawing analogies as a comfortable European intellectual, but because he has seen inside it.

‘In Islamist controlled countries, his candour is not tolerated. Nor, he has increasingly come to believe, is it fully welcome in Europe.’

‘In Islamist controlled countries, his candour is not tolerated. Nor, he has increasingly come to believe, is it fully welcome in Europe.’

After achieving independence from France, Algeria never truly settled the question of who should rule the country. The army emerged as the real power, presenting itself as the guardian of the state, while political Islam grew as the language of moral authority among the population.........

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