2 Dinars Sharif Abdelkader El Djezairi

Abdelkader ibn Muhieddine led the armed resistance against the French conquest of Algeria from 1832 until his surrender in 1847, and spent years afterward in French captivity before eventual exile to Damascus. The 1996 issue commemorating him arrived during one of the most violent periods in modern Algerian history — the civil conflict between the government and Islamist insurgents that killed tens of thousands throughout the decade. That a gold commemorative was produced at all, through the state bank, during that crisis says something about the political weight still carried by Abdelkader's name as a founding symbol of Algerian national resistance.