Kamel Daoud (Arabic: كمال داود; born June 17, 1970) is an Algerian writer and journalist. He currently edits the French-language daily Le quotidien d’Oran, for which he writes a popular column, "Raïna Raïkoum" (Our Opinion, Your Opinion). The column often includes commentary on the news.[1]
Early life and education
Daoud was born in Mostaganem, Algeria on June 17, 1970.[2] The oldest of six children, he was raised in an Arabic-speaking Muslim family in Algeria.[3] Daoud studied French literature at the University of Oran.[2]
Daoud was married but divorced in 2008, after the birth of his daughter as his wife had become increasingly religious (and started wearing the hijab). He is a father to two children (the eldest, a son, the youngest, a daughter) and dedicated his novel The Meursault Investigation to them.[4]
Journalistic career
In 1994, he entered Le Quotidien d'Oran, a French-language Algerian newspaper. He published his first column three years later,[5] titled "Raina raikoum" ("Our opinion, your opinion").[6] He was the Editor in Chief of the newspaper for eight years.[7] He is a Columnist in various media, an editorialist in the online newspaper Algérie-Focus and his articles are also published in Slate Afrique.[8]
Controversy
On 13 December 2014, on On n'est pas couché on France 2, Kamel Daoud said of his relationship to Islam: "I still believe it: if we do not decide in the so-called Arab world the question of God, we will not rehabilitate the man, we will not move forward, he said. The religious question becomes vital in the Arab world. We must slice it, we must think about it in order to move forward".[9]
Three days later, Abdelfattah Hamadache Zeraoui, a Salafist imam at the time working on Echourouk News, responded to this statement by declaring that Daoud should be put to death for saying it, writing that "if Islamic sharia were applied in Algeria, the penalty would be death for apostasy and heresy." He specified: "He questioned the Qur'an as well as the sacred Islam; he wounded the Muslims in their dignity and praised the West and the Zionists. He attacked the Arabic language [...]. We call on the Algerian regime to condemn him to death publicly, because of his war against God, his Prophet, his book, Muslims and their countries."[9]
Daoud filed a complaint in Algerian court and the judiciary delivered a judgment on March 8, 2016 that Daoud's attorney called "unprecedented": Zeraoui was sentenced to three to six months in prison and a 50,000-dinar fine.[11] However, the judgment was set aside in June 2016 by the Oran Court of Appeal on the basis of a jurisdiction challenge.[12]
In April 2015, an excerpt from Meursault, contre-enquête was featured in the New Yorker magazine.[15] The November 20, 2015, issue of the New York Times featured an op-ed opinion piece by Daoud titled "Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It" in both English (translated by John Cullen) and French.[16]
The February 14, 2016, issue of the New York Times featured a controversial[17] second op-ed piece by Daoud, "The Sexual Misery of the Arab World" in English (translated by John Cullen), French, and Arabic.[18] Both of these articles were republished in his 2017 collection of essays Mes Indépendances.[19]
