“The Architects of Salvation”: Discourses of Extremism and Cultural Hegemony in Yasmina Khadra’s Wolf Dreams
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1609.06Keywords:
Wolf Dreams, Islamist discourse, Gramsci, Algeria, hegemonyAbstract
This article aims to analyze the construction of the extremist discourse in Yasmina Khadra’s Wolf Dreams (2025) placing the text in the context of Algeria’s “Black Decade” as well as the postcolonial legitimacy crisis. Through the close reading of two fundamental scenes, the mufti’s sermon, and the parable of the mantis, Khadra shows the evolution of Islamist discourse from spiritual consolation to the ideological domination of political Islam’s discourse. The study examines how political Islam captures and colonizes moral uncertainty and weaponizes despair. Using the Gramscian theory of cultural hegemony, the article shows how Wolf Dreams reframes Algeria’s civil war as an allegory of stagnant revolutionary continuity. The novel’s representation of indoctrination as a theatrical and linguistic process shows how political praxis is replaced by rhetoric of purity, creating a self-consuming cycle of violence. In the fusion of testimonial realism and allegory, Khadra not only chronicles national trauma but also interrogates the cultural logic that sustains extremism’s appeal.
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