"I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice." This was writer Albert Camus' response that stunned critics and admirers alike to the Algerian student who stood up to intrusively question him when the writer was addressing students at Stockholm University.

It was part of Camus' engagement when he was in the Swedish capital to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, at the height of Algeria's war of independence from France.

For those less familiar with Camus, he was a French Algerian who grew up in a poor district of Algiers (French Algerians were also called pied noir, a derogatory term).

Camus moved to Paris after the World War II started and found fame at the age of 29 with his first novel 'l'tranger' published in 1942. His reputation blossomed after the war when the French people learnt that the young Camus was the one who wrote the editorials in the underground resistance newspaper Combat.

Yet, for all his risky involvement in fighting the Nazi Occupation, he was one of those rare voices that pleaded for reason and restraint in the post-war atmosphere of vengeful reprisals towards those linked to the collaborationist Vichy regime.

Camus was to go on expounding his unwavering commitment in the fight against oppression and struggle for justice and human dignity though his novels, plays, essays and journalistic pieces, as well as through his passionate advocacy of moral political causes of his era.

His style, his concerns and his prominence in Parisian public life seemed to embody whatever was most characteristically French about the intersection of literature, thought and political engagement.

Isolated by peers

But by the early 1950s, Camus began his long slide into isolation from Paris' fashionable left bank intellectuals, marked by the bitter break with his long time friend Jean Paul Satre and the people around him. Camus had dared to criticise Soviet Union's state terrorism -totalitarianism, the Gulags and the show trials in his 1951 book 'l'Homme Revolt' (The Rebel).

To them, criticism of the USSR would delay humanity's progress towards a better world. The scathing review of his book in Satre's magazine Les Temps Moderne by Francis Jeanson, Camus' defence and Satre's long vitriolic open letter led to an irreconcilable break between the two men.

With the Algerian war of independence, Camus' isolation was complete when he went against the prevailing opinion of the French left which supported the FLN (Front de Liberation National) and Algerian independence.

Like his peers, Camus had condemned French repression, subjugation and humiliation of native Algerians (Arabs and Berbers), but his moral politics obliged him to also condemn FLN's terrorist tactics on French settlers. Instead of independence, Camus had envisaged Arabs and French Algerians living in peace and equality in an Algeria which would remain part of France.

Apart from his commitment to moral politics, what set Camus apart from his Left Bank peers had to do with his origins. This will help in understanding his position on Algeria and why he said what he said in Stockholm about justice and his mother.

While Satre, Simone De Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the majority of their friends had studied in Paris' prestigious prep schools before going to the Grandes coles, Camus grew up amidst poverty in the working-class quarter of Belcourt in Algiers.

His father died in the battle of Marne during World War I. His widowed mother, partially deaf and illiterate, worked as a cleaning woman. Upon her husband's death, she and her two very young sons had to move into her domineering mother's household.

Camus' last novel was the semi-autobiographical 'Le Premier Homme' (The First Man) published 34 years after his death. It is delightful to read many passages of such tenderness, warmth and sensitivity as Camus recounts his memories of his permanently melancholic mother (a delight because tenderness and sensitivity were not his style or the subject matter of his other works of fiction).

He dedicated the novel to his mother, "A toi qui ne pourras jamais lire ce livre" (to you who will never be able to read this book).

His grandmother wanted Camus and his brother do the obligatory minimum of schooling and then go out to work like their uncle Etienne, a barrel-maker. It was his primary school teacher, Louis Germain who recognised Camus' potential, ensured that he continued schooling, gave him personal tuition and later obtained a scholarship for his secondary education.

Camus wrote a tender letter to his teacher upon learning of his winning the Nobel prize: "Mais quand j'en ai appris la nouvelle, ma premire pense, aprs ma mre, a t pour vous. Sans vous, sans cette main affectueuse que vous avez tendue au petit enfant pauvre que j'tais, sans votre enseignement, et votre example, rien de tout cela serait arriv."

(But when I learnt of the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without that gentle hand that you extended to the poor child that I was, without your teaching and your example, all this would not have happened.)

Camus' mother spent all of her life in Algeria, which was also the setting of almost all of his fiction (novels and short stories), to which he often referred nostalgically to its punishing sun and desert, blue skies and the beaches of Algiers and Oran.

Sentimental attachment

When war became inevitable and the FLN declared its war of independence, Camus, who had left Algeria in 1941 to make his name in Paris, became greatly disturbed at the prospect of random violence that threatened the white settlers as symbolised by his family, and that of the equally violent reprisals and summary executions by the French authorities of Arab FLN suspects and sympathisers.

When he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, three years into the Algerian war, Camus had many more hostile critics than he had admirers within France. They still could not forgive his criticism of the USSR and state terrorism of the communists.

But on the question of Algeria they could pin Camus' lonely position of opposing Algerian independence and criticism of the FLN on his sentimental attachment to the Algeria of his birth and childhood. For all his moral politics, justice would take a back seat when it came to the personal, his mother.

For them, Camus, like all pied noir, was a colonialist. What Camus said about his mother and justice would become famous in France and around the world. For his detractors, it was a sort of indictment that at heart, he was a white colonialist like all French Algerians.

The quote was carried in the Dec 14, 1957 issue of Le Monde. At the newspaper's office in Paris, director Hubert Beuve-Mry asked his reporter to confirm what Camus had actually said. Once the quote was confirmed, Beuve-My said, "I was totally sure that Camus would say some f*** (foolish thing).

Even today, what he said in Stockholm continues to cast a long shadow on his reputation as "l'ecrivain pied noir qui a toujours prfr sa mre la justice" (the pied noir writer who has always preferred his mother to justice), as noted in the April 2003 bulletin of la Socit des tudes Camusiennes (Society for Camus Studies).

Poor logic

Nearly 50 years later, after the collapse of communism and the unending political violence in Algeria, if one were to examine Camus' works, one cannot help but feel that his critics had unjustly misinterpreted what he said.

In the first place, it was poor logic to compare an abstract idea like justice to the destiny of an individual. But Camus wanted his statement to convey his rejection of all terrorism, "... I have always condemned terrorism, and I must condemn a terrorism that works blindly in the streets of Algiers and one day might strike at my mother and my family. I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice."

Camus had wanted to express tenderness when faced by a lack of reason, but lots of Algerians and 'progressive' French intellectuals interpreted his words in another manner. Camus soon found himself vilified by both the political left who wanted justice for the Arabs and the political right uneasy with his criticism of the French authorities' repression.

In this, Camus was merely staying the course of his moral politics as he had in his criticism of state terrorism in USSR in 'l'Homme Revolt'; his condemnation of Nazi Germany in 'lettres un ami allemand'; and his appeal to reason and restraint when, through his intervention using his newfound reputation as resistance hero, he saved a few collaborationist writers from the firing squad at the end of the German occupation.

To Camus, there simply could never be any justification for the murder of innocent civilians, no matter how noble the political cause.

This theme is explored in another of Camus' fiction, the play 'Les Justes' (The Just Assassins, 1950). It was based on real events - the bombing assassination of the Grand Duke of Moscow, uncle of Tsar Nicholas II, in 1905 by a small band of revolutionary romantics seeking justice for all Russians.

The hero, Kaliayev, who was designated to throw the first bomb was unable to do so due to the unexpected presence of the Grand Duke's niece and nephew in the coach. Camus introduced the fictional character Stepan, the group leader who had suffered torture in Tsarist prisons.

For Stepan, once the organisation had ordered the assassination of the Grand Duke, it had to be done whatever the circumstances, "when we decide to forget about children, we will be masters of the world and the revolution will triumph".

Rendering the event into a dramatic form allowed Camus to set two contrasting positions against one another - that of Stepan with his absolutist, doctrinal vision that the revolution's noble objective justified all violent means, against Kaliayev's moral position that the murder of innocents can never be justifiable.

No justification

In the Algerian conflict, Camus had to express his moral position in the face of overwhelming opinion on the political left that sought to ignore the troublesome question of political violence in the name of a higher ideal of justice for the oppressed.

His sentimental attachment to Algeria and the vulnerability of his own family made this task all the more difficult. The isolation and vilification of Camus by his former friends was such that his family waited for 34 years after his death before they could agree to the publication of 'Le Premier Homme'.

The unshakeable conviction of the rightness of one's political cause (and noble causes are not difficult to find) and its passionate pursuit is a great and not uncommon human virtue. But all too often, passion and conviction eclipse reason and morality, and this must have been at the root of the many human tragedies in the world.

'The Quiet American' is one of this year's better movies. It is set in Vietnam in the early 1950s as the French were beginning to lose the war of independence. One of the film's central characters is Alden Pyle (played by Brendan Fraser), a young, naive and idealistic head of the American Medical Mission.

But under that cover, he is actually a CIA agent who passionately pursues the mission of imposing democracy in Vietnam, which requires stopping the advance of the communists at all costs.

To achieve this, he creates and sponsors a rogue third force which orchestrates a series of terrorist bombings and massacres of civilians, while at the same time manipulating the media to put the blame on the communists in order to argue for increased American intervention in Vietnam.

When confronted about a bombing attack on civilians to which his friend and rival in love was witness, the veteran English journalist Thomas Fowler (played by Sir Michael Caine), Pyle speaks of "the big picture" - that killing innocent civilians is justifiable in the context of a noble objective of saving many more lives, by saving Vietnam from communism.

Muslim problem

That the 'small picture' subordinated to the 'big picture' was no doubt at the heart of Camus' isolation by his fashionable peers, who felt that highlighting state terrorism in the USSR would retard the march of humanity's progress towards that vision of a classless utopia. Why the fuss over the lives of a few innocents?

But the victims of terrorism's blind and random violence consider their suffering as anything but a 'small picture'. In a flash, families lose their loved ones, badly injured victims writhing in agony, mangled bodies strewn on the sidewalk.

'The Quiet American' shows graphically in slow motion the horrific inhumanity of such a terrorist act. The most moving sight was of a mother shielding her dead baby with her hat from Fowler's dazed stare.

But to the idealistic Pyle, all this is the 'small picture', as he ignores the pleas of the badly wounded while frantically directing a press photographer to get the most gruesome shots to show the American public and Congress.

Well, we may say all this is fiction. But the gruesomeness of real terrorist violence is not that far different if we can recall the footage of victims of a mortar attack by Serbian militia on a crowd of civilians queuing for bread outside a Sarajevo bakery during the Bosnian conflict.

That 'big picture' is often some secular ideology of one sort or another, or a nationalistic ferment that spins out of control. No less potent is religion at the hands of populist politicians and extremists, that stretches back into history long before the word 'terrorism' entered the political lexicon.

With religion as the 'big picture', terrorism becomes amorphous and acquires a transnational character.

Camus made a distinction between "state terrorism" and "individual terrorism". Let's leave aside the former and look at 'individual terrorism'.

Today, it is Islam that has come under the intense glare of the world - from the US embassy bombings in East Africa to Sept 11 (2001), and most recently the Casablanca and Riyadh bombings.

We have always felt reassured that the Islam of the Malay world is pacifist and moderate, but terrorist acts perpetrated in the name of the religion in neighbouring Indonesia, especially the massive Bali blasts should have shaken us out of our complacency.

Muslims who believe in terrorism as a political method are extremely small in number. But our ambivalence and unwillingness to condemn terrorism committed in the name of Islam, if not adulation of leaders of terrorist organisations as Islamic heroes, has done untold damage to the already prejudiced image of Islam and Muslims.

Worse than the image problem, such terrorist acts have given legitimacy to dictatorial Muslim regimes, often propped up by the US, to tighten repressive measures in the name of 'war against terrorism'.

Terrorism as a response to American political, economic and military hegemony is immoral and doomed to failure, but neither can Muslims afford to continue in their denial that terrorism is a Muslim problem.

Camus died in 1960 at the age of 46. One valuable lesson he taught us is to stay the moral course and not succumb to the logic of 'big picture, small picture'. Today, with the advantage of history behind us, even his most hostile detractors will probably accept that he was not that far wrong after all.

The collapse of communism and the continuing violence in independent Algeria have more than vindicated Camus. The Algerian war came to an end in 1962, with Algeria gaining independence from France at the cost of one million lives. The entire pied noir population, for all its belligerence, had to abandon what had been their nation for generations, to the mother country that hardly welcomed them.

Camus' appeal for reason and restraint was too little too late, and his opposition of Algerian independence was unrealistic, but that should not diminish the relevance of his moral politics, especially in today's world.

Had both communities, Arabs and pied noir, heeded his plea for peaceful co-existence with dignity and respect, Algeria would have been very different today.

Note: The insights on Camus' life were drawn from the following references :

1) 'Albert Camus - A Life' by Olivier Todd ('Albert Camus - Une Vie' translated into English by Benjamin Ivry) Alfred A. Knopf, N. York 1999, pp 434

2) 'Le Premier Homme' by Albert Camus, Gallimard, Paris 1994, pp 331. Camus' handwritten manuscripts on the nearly completed autobiographical novel was found at the site of the car crash where the writer was instantly killed. The driver of the car was his publisher, Michel Gallimard, who died a few weeks later. Catherine Camus, the writer's daughter and executor of his estate, felt that the time was right to publish the manuscripts more than 30 years after his death.

3) 'The Burden of Responsibility - Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century' by Tony Judt, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, pp 196

4) The quarterly bulletins of l'Association des tudes Camusiennes