“'The foundation of religion, I learned in school,' said Mr. Bou Bekeur’s son, Abdel Rahman, 25. 'We pray more than them and we know religion better than them,' he said of his father’s generation. 'We are more religious. My father used to drink. I never drank. My father asked me if it was O.K. to take a car loan. I told him, no, it is haram,' forbidden in Islam.

So his father did not take the loan. His father is a quiet man in a house of strong-willed people. He can barely help his children with their homework, because his Arabic is poor. And he worries about their future, and the future of his country."
-- from this news article

And the new generation in Algeria, raised in a society suffused with Islam, told that the highest aim, for a Believer, is to become a "slave of Allah" and to fulfill all of the duties of a "slave of Allah," will gradually unlearn to think, as the older generation, the one that had some exposure to French schools and French non-Muslim ways of thought (which also came, of course, from contact with the more than a million non-Muslims who once lived in Algeria, and gave it what civilizational advances it at one time enjoyed), managed, in some small degree, to do. The secular classes, those who studied in the French-language schools, or who travel back and forth to France, or the Berbers, a special case as they always have been in Algeria (that non-Arab identity offering a conceivable way out of Islam, and that resentment of Arab cultural and linguistic imperialism, that has been felt most strongly since the protecting French left, helps to make Berbers, in Algeria and in France, more accessible to the message of proselytizers, or of other forms of quiet apostasy.

Notice, in the excerpt from the article just above, how the father simply asks the son what the rule on loans is in Islam. He does not think for himself, he does not question the rule: "My father used to drink. I never drank. My father asked me if it was O.K. to take a car loan. I told him, no, it is haram,' forbidden in Islam.

So his father did not take the loan."

End of story. His not to reason why, his but to do and sigh. This is Prohibited, This is Commanded. That's Islam. A society suffused with that kind of attitude will end up as torment for those capable of thought, a society living on lies, conspiracy theories, inculcated and permanent hatred of Infidels, incuriosity about the world, limited means of artistic expression, no free and skeptical inquiry without which the enterprise of science, and indeed all progress, becomes impossible. In short, a nightmare that, if the secular class, to which the stratokleptocrats of the regime belong, properly apprehend and are, for all of their misdeeds, nonetheless willing to ruthlessly suppress the enemies of mental freedom (more dangerous to Algeria's future than is the thievery of the rulers), something might be salvaged from what Algeria has, in the last forty-six years since the French left, steadily become.