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Insults very often precede and/or supplant physical aggression. In a conflict situation insults could be considered as the ultimate in violence. In a decade of political violence in Algeria, people are not so much affected by death itself as they are by the humiliation their bodies sustained before death and their corpses thereafter. Emasculation has a special status. The insult, which consists in « feminizing » the other, relates in fact to the meaning of honor, which is the prerogative of men; men are the exclusive holders and principal guardians of honor. Insults therefore, are not mere verbalizations, they are tangible physical acts deeply felt. By forcing upon others a behavior viewed as contextually or ethically obscene, the insult can be perceived as inflicting a form of moral torture. Instances such as forcing a husband to witness his wife’s rape, or a father his daughter’s, or the shaving of a woman’s head while forcing her to live naked among rebels, constitute as many fatal insults for those who sustain them. More than physical injury to the victim, these insults are also fatal to the person’s referent group.

The “globalization” of religious discourse blurs the boundaries between the historically different schools, and tends to reduce the foundational gap between Sunnism and Shi’ism. Today we are experiencing a renewal of Salafism which recognizes only the fundamentals. Everything else is regarded as historical - therefore not sacred - and should be ignored or changed. The Salafi movement however continues to be divided between jâmida and jihâdiya. Practices within the mosque also vary as each individual seeks to demonstrate his individuality while following more global trends. The life stories of different imams reveal a sort of internal secularization of the mosque and greater flexibility in the re-interpretation of the fundamentals. Changes are also visible among new players who compete with the traditional Imam figure. The preacher figure, though not entirely new, nor a recent invention, remains a re-invented figure. While imams, muftis, and talebs are familiar in the Maghreb, the Da`Iya figure brought in by religious television channels is not as well known. Our study analyzes such changes taking place at the heart of the most important institution in Islam.