A Page of Her Own in as-Salam

In September 1946 as-Salam appeared on Algerian newsstands. It offered readers cultural commentaries about international news, Arab cinema, and North African theater. As-Salam’s readership was concentrated predominantly in Algeria but also spanned Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. Its most novel feature was as-Salam’s prolific women’s page, run by Mademoiselle Anissa. While Muslim women occasionally published in the male-dominated interwar newspapers, the women’s page of as-Salam was the first such page devoted entirely to Muslim women in Algeria—almost a half century later than other Middle Eastern spaces.⁶

As-Salam’s women’s page typically featured an editorial by Anissa, letters from readers, articles on topics like a woman’s role within a marriage or powerful Muslim women throughout history, and a beauty column written by a Moroccan woman, Zineb Rachid. In the following years, Anissa’s women’s page continued to grow, expanding from a single page to three pages within the typically twelve-page review. In their letters to the editor, male and female readers alike underscored that they were most interested in the women’s page. By early 1948 the women’s pages were so popular they moved to the first pages of the review. The publication’s covers sometimes featured photographs of women, including the Egyptian actress Tahia Carioca and the Moroccan princess Lalla Aicha. The March 1947 cover featured a photograph of three Muslim students (figure 6.1) who had recently performed a theater piece at the Opera of Algiers as part of a celebration titled the “fête feminine” celebrating their reformist school, al-Tarbiya wa-l-taʿlim (“Upbringing and Education”). The caption of their photograph on the cover stated, “Algeria in the Middle of Renaissance: Our young girls participating in their grandiose project of generation with their entire souls, just like our boys.” The article that corresponded to the image also featured an advertisement for L’Oréal henna, which featured a woman in a white haik with a few strands of beautiful wavy hair revealed (figure 6.2), one of the few advertisements featuring a veiled woman ever to appear in as-Salam.

The pages of as-Salam reflect multiple new realities of the postwar years: nationalism’s increased currency, the rise of global beauty culture marketed to Muslim women, and concerns over a new generation of Muslim schoolgirls educated in French colonial schools. Mademoiselle Anissa, concerned with all three developments, outlined her own regime of conduct for young women. Her editorials and the letters of readers together indicate the shared feeling that the conduct of this generation of Muslim girls could either propel forward nationalist uplift or betray their people with frivolity and assimilation to European norms. Yet other women responded to such claims and sought to refocus the conversation away from women’s comportment and toward colonialism and Muslim men.

The women’s page of the first issue echoed the reform-minded ethos of the publication and featured an article on the “heroine of Turkish feminism,” Sabiha Gokchen, the daughter of Atatürk who had become the world’s first female fighter pilot in 1937.⁷ In this inaugural issue, Anissa offered an overview of the problems Muslim women in Algeria faced. She wrote, “Under the tent, or in the house, for us Muslim women, it is the same life of erasure.”⁸ She recommended a comprehensive education project to remedy the “forgotten” status of both rural and urban women, which included “school for the young ones, conferences, newspapers, cinema, and radio for the adults.” While Anissa envisioned herself as a guide for Muslim society, she presented the women’s page as a space of “sisterhood” for communal exchange and collaboration. She urged her female readers, “Write to me, my sisters, so that we can establish between us an active correspondence and so the flowers of friendship grow within our large feminine community … a platform … to hear your voices, I hope to receive your critiques, articles, etc.”

While Anissa framed her initial call for letters in terms of “friendship” and “sisterhood,” Anissa’s posturing was equally like that of an amateur ethnographer. In November 1946 she announced she would begin a “study on the emancipation of the Muslim woman.”⁹ She asked readers: which was more important in Muslim women’s advancement—education (which she defined as a basic religious education) or unveiling? In the following eight months, she printed a selection of the replies she received in each issue. Seven months later in June 1947, she published the results (both qualitative and quantitative) of her study (figure 6.3).¹⁰ Based on the letters, she calculated that 60 percent of respondents were for a religious education first, and then unveiling, 17 percent for religious education and no unveiling, and 20 percent felt unveiling needed to happen first.

As-Salam’s women’s pages enjoyed active participation from a wide readership. According to her own statistics, in the first eight months of the woman’s page alone, Anissa received 28,421 letters. She received letters from (in order of frequency) Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, France, England, the United States, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Libya, and Czechoslovakia. Of the 24,240 letters Anissa claimed to receive from Muslims, 8,701 were from Muslim women (80 percent, or 7,001, from “young women”). The letters published in as-Salam offer scholars access to a broad range of voices both from within and outside of Algeria—from Muslim schoolgirls to uneducated mechanics to European professors. While many wrote in from North African urban centers—Rabat, Oran, Algiers, Tunis—others wrote in from small villages and towns across Algeria.

That many of the individuals who wrote in to the women’s page signed their letters with initials raises questions about anonymity and reliability. From 1958 to 1962 a journal was published in Algeria titled Femmes nouvelles (New women), supposedly directed by a Muslim woman, Djemila Tarahoui. Some historians have read this as a source that featured Muslim women’s voices.¹¹ Yet Terrence Peterson has demonstrated, however, that the publication and its supposed letters to the editor were written by intelligence officers within the French Army’s psychological warfare bureau.¹² This raises questions about whether Mademoiselle Anissa’s columns and the supposed correspondence she received could have been fictions produced by to try to sway public opinion. Yet there are no indications that this was the case in the places where as-Salam appears in the archival record, including in colonial surveillance documents. Additionally, as Stephanie Newell has argued, the anonymity of sources does not diminish their usefulness in historical analysis.¹³ Her work demonstrates how editors and contributors evaded colonial censorship through articles left unsigned or signed with pseudonyms. In Algeria women’s use of initials or pseudonyms similarly enabled them to avoid potential backlash for themselves or family members.

The Educated Muslim Woman’s Guide to Respectability

There were some clear continuities between the interwar and postwar discussions about women, particularly about education. Interwar calls for women’s education in the press had materialized into intercommunal collaboration by the postwar period. In January 1947, for example, a group of Muslim elites and leaders, including Sheikh Bashir al-Ibrahimi, president of the reformist AOMA; Algeria’s first female doctor, Aldjia Noureddine (later Benallègue); and nationalist leaders Ferhat Abbas and Mohamed Khider formed the Provisional Committee of Support for the Muslim Algerian Student, which came together to work toward a nationalist program of action for uplift through education.¹⁴ One of the group’s platforms outlined in this initial meeting was increased access to schools for Muslim girls. They were not alone in this mission. New associations, founded by and devoted to Muslim women, also lobbied for more and better education.¹⁵ The numbers of French colonial schools had increased, but their curriculums remained limited. Beginning in 1947, public school classes were opened specifically for teaching literacy to anyone over the age of 14. In 1958 there were 392 classes for women, attended by 8,600 women ages fourteen to forty (mostly in their twenties) out of a total of 1,900 classes attended by 46,150 men and women. The classes for women taught French language alongside other skills including sewing and childcare. By 1954 the proportion of students enrolled in primary school with respect to total Muslim students was 33 percent in Oran, 26 percent in Algiers, and 22 percent in Constantine.¹⁶

While the numbers of Muslim children enrolled in schools remained relatively low compared to the total proportion of school-age children, they slowly increased after the interwar years. In 1930 only 5 percent (or 68,000) of Muslim school-age children were enrolled in French colonial primary schools. These numbers continued to steadily rise and reached 8.8 percent (or 111,000) in 1944 and 14 percent (or 302,000) by 1954. The numbers of Muslims enrolled in French colonial secondary education slowly rose from 1,358 students in 1940 to 6,260 in 1954. Finally, the numbers of Muslims enrolled in higher education also continued to rise from 89 in 1940 to 589 in 1954. The curriculum of Muslim girls’ education shifted in the postwar years as well. On February 13, 1949, a new reform merged Muslim and settler tracks of education so that the two groups were now classmates with the same sets of textbooks.¹⁷

Muslim reformist schools that emerged in the interwar period also continued to proliferate; the ninety schools in 1947 had doubled to 181 by 1954. Reformist publications stressed the importance of the Islamic education these schools offered women. Al-Bassair published “A Call for the Elevation of Muslim Woman” by a woman’s group, the Association for the Elevation of the Muslim Woman, in Tlemcen.¹⁸ It argued that the women educated in French colonial schools “ignore the truth of our religion, but the guilt is not theirs,” only a reflection of their limited possibilities. An Islamic education for Muslim women, on the other hand, was an urgent undertaking to repair “the crookedness found in our internal state.” Like interwar calls, this postwar one also insisted that it was through women’s education that Algeria could “elevate our nation,” “take its place among the advanced nations,” and “build the glory of North Africa.”

Oral interviews can offer some more details about women’s experience with schooling. Fatma Zohra Benaik, who was born in 1932, went to Qur’anic school as a child and then the Shabiba school in Algiers in the 1940s. The Shabiba school was a reformist school for boys and girls, funded by the reformist leader Tayyib al-Oqbi.¹⁹ Some of her teachers were Muslims who had been educated in Europe. She explained that while French colonial schools reinforced ideas of Muslim “inferiority,” the Shabiba school offered students a more political education, including about the French colonization of Algeria.²⁰ She described how girls’ education was largely an urban phenomenon and still difficult to access in rural Algeria. While more women could receive an education in the 1940s as compared to previous decades, these numbers remained small. Dahbia Lounas, who was a school-age child throughout the 1940s in the town of Mirabeau near Tizi Ouzou, reported that she never attended any kind of schooling and was illiterate like most women around her.²¹ Similarly, she did not know any women of her mother’s generation, who were school-age children in the 1920s, who attended any schools. While she knew some men who had been educated in her father’s generation, neither her father nor her uncles were ever educated. She reported that even in the 1940s, many around her felt that if one attended French schools, their mind would be “colonized by the French.” By contrast, Benaik’s entire family, situated in Algiers, was literate in both French and Arabic. Her father owned a small café in Algiers, and the family listened to the radio together every morning. Lounas, on the other hand, remained illiterate even into adulthood. This suggests that even as education for Muslims slowly expanded, it was geographically limited in its reach.

In the interwar years commentators described a movement for women’s advancement located outside of Algeria from which they urged the broader public to take inspiration. By the postwar years Muslim women in Algeria described how this energy had taken root within their country. In another postwar publication L’Action Halima Benabed noted that while women still had very limited access to professional positions—“around twenty teachers, around twenty midwives, two or three professors, a doctress in medicine”—more important was “the spirit you find everywhere in the cities … the march toward knowledge and progress.”²² Three years later, in as-Salam, Madame H. S., a midwife from Algiers, wrote that the era in which “the Muslim woman was just an object of pleasure has passed!”²³

The marker of this greater public interest in women’s advancement, according to Benabed, was the overwhelming public support for women’s education. Muslims in Algeria now understood, she wrote, that their evolution depended on women’s education. Since places were still limited in French colonial schools, communities relied on Muslim reformist schools and were enthusiastic about their daughters learning Arabic. Benabed described how everyone participated in this push for women’s education. Even though most women themselves remained uneducated, they took part in this movement for girls’ education by contributing money to establish new schools, supporting poorer students, attending celebrations for girls’ schools, and admiring the students’ monologues, as they had in the interwar years.

By the late 1940s, though, there was public anxiety about this new class of educated Muslim young women and how best to channel their advancement in ways productive for the nation. In as-Salam Anissa outlined her own model, which readers echoed, in which Muslim women should be educated, contribute to the nation through their labor, and remain focused on familial and communal uplift despite the pressure to assimilate or take part in new forms of consumption more readily available. This correspondence, published within as-Salam, demonstrates how in the postwar period a wide range of voices echoed claims about the importance of women’s education but often within a specifically nationalist framing. One letter to Anissa from a schoolteacher, Smain H., described ideal Muslim women simultaneously as “patriots, good mothers … educated, workers.”²⁴ This emphasis on women as “educated” and “workers,” though, did not exclude women engaged solely in the labor of childrearing and household management. The reader similarly framed domestic responsibilities as “a demanding social mission” that required “effort [and] sacrifice.” In this nationalist vision, all women had a role to play in the uplift of the nation, the stakes of which multiple readers contended were high. Commentators echoed interwar claims that educated women who channeled their education in service of the nation would contribute to “the renaissance of our people.”²⁵ Nationalist publications like al-Manar, journal of the nationalist party Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques (Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties, MTLD), praised the role of women in Pakistan and Indonesia, where they participated in nationalist military struggle.²⁶

This important social mission assigned to Muslim women demanded strict adherence, according to Anissa and some of her readers, to particular codes of conduct. Anissa’s guides and how-to columns delineated for Muslim women the most minute details of appropriate comportment and behavior.²⁷ These discussions about Muslim young women’s comportment responded directly to long-standing fears articulated in the interwar years that women’s education may lead to too much assimilation or distract women from their role as mothers.

As Anissa presented herself as a sort of guide for Muslim women from as-Salam’s inaugural issue, she was quick to assert that the model of advancement she proposed for Muslim women was not mimicry of European women. She wrote that Muslim women did not want the “agitation and masculine allures of Occidental people” for themselves.²⁸ In the interwar years too, some commentators disparaged European society as excessively masculine and thus imbalanced. Instead, Anissa presented herself as someone who wanted to reform women’s position in society slowly and gently. In that same editorial in the inaugural issue, she wrote, “We cannot risk disrupting the social equilibrium and harmony of our households, which Europeans envy.”²⁹ She asserted a pride in the “harmony” of Muslim households, in which both genders had their own distinct roles. Her invocation of European envy as a marker that this equilibrium needed to be protected allowed her to reinvert the long-standing assertion that Muslim inferiority was rooted in the deviancy of Muslim households. Like interwar commentators, Anissa reframed potential shame about Muslim patriarchy within the home as pride in “social equilibrium and harmony.”

The code of conduct Anissa outlined included how to properly consume cinema culture. Anissa wrote that while it was acceptable to take interest in cinema, her readers should not “become those stupid girls obsessed with photos of actors … to the extent of neglecting their work.”³⁰ Even as as-Salam devoted considerable space to coverage of developments in cinema and theater, Anissa urged young women to police themselves so that such frivolities did not disrupt schoolwork. Anissa warned that when girls were unfocused with respect to their schoolwork, “This tells our grandparents, often the enemies of Progress, that modern civilization entices [us] to more bad than good.” Schoolgirls needed to prove with self-discipline and focus that they could balance their access to new forms of leisure with their larger mission as educated mothers of the next generation. Any frivolity or extravagance risked provoking this older generation (“the enemies of Progress”) and thus damaging the cause of women’s advancement. The tension between concerns about frivolity and global beauty culture marketed toward Muslim women was on display within the pages of as-Salam. At the same time as as-Salam featured articles that advised women about makeup and how to dress stylishly on a budget, Anissa’s column urged women not to prioritize “the latest fashions” or “pretty dresses” over the needs of the nation.³¹ The beauty and style columns in as-Salam were one of the earliest instances of beauty marketing targeted to Muslim women, yet they were printed alongside commentaries that reminded women not to devote too much energy to such frivolities.

Both Anissa and her readers insisted that unveiled women practice modesty. A girl from Oran, “S. H. Bintou Chaab” (S. H. Daughter of the People), wrote that evolution was not simply throwing off the veil and parading around “decked out in a ridiculous manner in front of the world.”³² By “ridiculous” she meant with skin exposed. She continued, “We must not confuse ‘emancipation’ with ‘exhibition.’ ” She thus urged Muslim women to maintain modesty in their clothing, whether veiled or unveiled. Like Anissa, she worried about judgments from fellow Muslims. She warned fellow young girls, “We must not give arguments to our enemies.” Educated women thus saw themselves at the forefront of internal cultural conflict, where they were forced to carry the burden of modern women’s propriety.

In an editorial that urged unveiled Muslim women to continue to practice modesty, Anissa urged them not to “do damage to the cause of all of the women of the Muslim world with your extravagance.”³³ In this framing, Muslim girls in Algeria were part of a larger community of Muslim women globally who sought advancement but faced criticism from fellow Muslims wanting to limit this advancement. The broader region was also part of discussions about who should serve as role models for Muslim women. One young man from Hammam-Lif complained that while some valorized Egyptian women for being modern, “notice how they do not mind showing their cleavage.”³⁴

While interwar commenters worried that the new class of working women would enter spaces of Muslim male sociability like cafés, postwar commenters were concerned about schoolgirls who would have easy access to European heterosocial spaces like “balls.”³⁵ One young man from Mostaganem chastised Muslim women who unveiled “to be happy” and dance with young European men.³⁶ His mocking tone about girls’ desire “to be happy” echoed others’ concerns about frivolity. The schoolteacher Smain H. similarly complained about Muslim women “who do not think of anything but pleasure and luxury [and] receptions.”³⁷ Again, these anxieties were linked to the broader cause of women’s advancement. One young woman from the Belcourt neighborhood of Algiers, Leila, wrote that the Muslim women who equated civilization with “drinking wine, smoking cigarettes, [and] keeping bad company” were “slowing down our evolution.”³⁸ There was largely consensus between Anissa and other women who wrote into as-Salam that educated, modern girls needed to ensure they were representing Muslim women well so as to prevent conservative backlash from the older generation and others. Muslim women were thus urged to model with their comportment and conduct how advancement would not lead them to deviate from their commitment to Islamic values and service to the nation despite the pressure to assimilate.

Muslim Women Address the Nation

One major shift in the postwar discussions was how women made use of the rhetoric of nationalism and its emphasis on women’s roles as shapers of the next generation to demand women’s advancement. As in the interwar years, much of the public discourse around women’s advancement was focused on women themselves—including on their schooling, their comportment, and their mobility. Yet in the postwar years women increasingly made use of the forums available to them, like as-Salam’s women’s page, to turn attention to men. They shifted the terms of the debate from women’s comportment to street harassment. They argued that for women to be able to advance, men needed to pay them more respect, both within the household and on the street. Looking back on the period, one woman stated, “After the Second World War, Algerian women decided to take their independence [from men] by force.”³⁹

In as-Salam’s first issue Anissa urged Muslim society to pay attention to the Muslim woman, whose plight they had “forgotten.” She asked, “Are we not the framework of Muslim society, the guardians of the home and the traditions, the spouses, the mothers?”⁴⁰ Here Anissa set a tone that readers echoed in their letters. The emphasis on women’s domestic roles should not suggest such women wanted only a limited expansion of women’s power. As Afsaneh Najmabadi has argued for early twentieth-century Iran, women’s roles as mothers and household managers became a powerful and effective rationale in their arguments for increased rights.⁴¹ Muslim women made use of the symbolic labor women performed as guardians of the next generation and the nation as the basis on which they made demands from other members of the nation for a variety of ends, including better access to education. In July 1946 female students weaponized the rhetoric of patriotic motherhood when they petitioned as-Salam readers for 3 million francs to fund an all-female dormitory. They explained that girls from across Algeria who moved to Algiers for college struggled to find an affordable place to stay. Their appeal described women as “a brick in the social edifice we want to create with the glory of our country.”⁴² Their language presented women as the pillars critical to not only social well-being, “the social edifice,” but also national “glory.” They continued, “They carry the seed of our future, of our faith, the flame of our Renaissance and of our place in history.” These quotes all demonstrate how older reformist arguments about women’s education and its centrality to communal uplift, “glory,” and “Renaissance” were remade with more decidedly nationalist rhetoric (“our country”). Moreover, nationalist rhetoric was not only a list of demands made of women but ideals that women too could use to make their own demands.

Some readers also made use of the language of nationalism to critique ongoing discussions about appropriate comportment and conduct for Muslim women. Letters from readers reveal that Muslim women’s respectability was a contested terrain, not simply the articulation of a set of ideals. Awareness of these tensions helps tease out the political and social work that respectability performed in this postwar nationalist moment. As Brian Harrison has written, “Respectability was always a process, a dialogue with oneself and one’s fellows, never a fixed position.”⁴³ Men and women alike articulated a vision of the ideal, respectable Muslim woman—devoted to her family, focused on her labor in service of both her family and her nation, dressed modestly—and women consistently raised questions about these ideals.

Women challenged Muslim society’s emphasis on the veil. A young girl named Khadidja wrote that men did not understand how burdensome the haik was. She described it like a “shackle,” because wearing it was so inconvenient that it limited women’s movement outside of the home.⁴⁴ Others questioned the symbolic value attributed to the veil. A midwife from Algiers, Madame H. S., questioned why “a piece of fabric” was the “symbol of [women’s] virtue.”⁴⁵ Some men also argued that a woman’s character should not be reduced to her status as veiled or unveiled. A young man from Tazmalt, for example, wrote that he had seen “dishonorable veiled women and honorable unveiled women,” and thus a woman’s conduct was more important than her choice to veil.⁴⁶ One young woman from Bougie (Béjaïa) insisted on her right to determine her own codes of conduct. She wrote that even though she was unveiled, she was not “depraved.”⁴⁷ She did not “go out without the permission of [her] father” and “never [went] to balls.” She insisted her morality was not compromised by her lack of a veil and asserted her right to negotiate the bounds of appropriate behavior for Muslim women.

Women directed critiques at Muslim men for their obsessive gaze on Muslim women’s comportment and conduct. They used discussions about Muslim women to deflect any concerns about their own conduct, particularly with respect to assimilation and closeness with European women. Women complained that they were judged by different standards than European woman. Mademoiselle H. Said from Oran wrote, “Our young people are full of indulgence for European women, but intransigent, intractable on the conduct of Muslim women.”⁴⁸ This critique—leveled by multiple women who wrote in to as-Salam—pointed to the hypocrisy of Muslim society’s treatment of Muslim women. These critiques were an opportunity for women to note that the promises of nationalist rhetoric—in which the nation was a single family—had fallen short for Muslim women. The language of family reappeared in women’s critiques. H. Said wrote that Muslim women’s modesty was “exploited egotistically by our brothers against us.” Her use of “our brothers” here signaled both the nationalist frame of nation as family and the unfairness that women would be treated so exploitatively by members of this national family. Natalya Vince has argued this nationalist “familial” framing was a way nationalists deflected concerns about men and women working alongside each other in the struggle for independence.⁴⁹

One regular, everyday marker of this unfair treatment of Muslim women by Muslim men was verbal harassment in the streets. Muslim girls who enrolled in French colonial schools, which were often in European neighborhoods, had to traverse much of the city daily en route to school. One young woman, “S. T.,” described how men “mocked” and “bothered” her “along the whole route” to her high school.⁵⁰ The harassment was relentless, continuous, and debilitating. Despite being “one of the most dedicated girls in the whole class,” exhausted by the harassment, she ended her schooling prematurely at the age of sixteen.

Many women wrote in to as-Salam to complain of street harassment, and they asserted that it was not limited to any particular type of woman or even comportment. While S. T. was veiled, another schoolgirl from Oran wrote that her little sister was teased on her way to school for not wearing a veil.⁵¹ Another woman, Houria Illal, wrote that both veiled and unveiled women faced street harassment. She wrote that veiled young women walking alone in the street would be “followed by a band of young idlers, who are the plague of our society.” One woman from Oran, Asnia H. M., wrote that “when [Muslim women] triumph over stupid objections from old women and go out unveiled, they are met with insults from young men.” As they named the problem of harassment, Muslim women shifted the object of women’s safety from potential sexual impropriety implicit in concerns about dances, for example, to verbal harassment from Muslim men. Illal described their harassment in terms of the constant assault of “ideas”—likely sexual in nature—women were forced to hear from their harassers. She wrote that unveiled women like herself were “the object of very impolite propositions.” While commenters wrote that Muslim women were unsafe in European spaces, Illal responded that it was Muslim men, not Europeans, who harassed them in the streets. Illal wrote that, unlike Muslim men, “the Europeans leave us alone if we appear correct.” She elaborated that while European men may make comments to Muslim women who appeared to be of “loose morals,” they left most Muslim women alone.⁵² Such critiques remapped concerns about Muslim women’s safety from abstract threats of potential impropriety or licentious contact with European men at dances to the regular, everyday harassment they faced from Muslim men.

For Muslim women, street harassment was a symptom of a larger problem: despite the rhetoric of nationalism that valorized women as important pillars of the nation’s glory, Muslim men regularly disrespected Muslim women. Asnia H. M. wrote that she was “offended by the attitude of the young men of our race.” Street harassment was evidence, she argued, that men “do not respect the honor and freedom of the Muslim woman.” She used the language of the national family to underscore the extent to which this treatment was a betrayal. “Our brothers humiliate us,” she lamented.⁵³ Some male commenters also acknowledged the harassment women regularly faced. Selim Taleb from Sidi-bel-Abbes wrote that commenters could not encourage all Muslim women to unveil because they would have to deal with too much agitation from not only their parents but also from fellow Muslims.⁵⁴ A factory worker, Abdelkader Haddadi, lamented that unveiled women had to face “bands of zazous” who called out to them as they walked through the city, a reminder that openness to unveiling was not limited to elite Muslims.⁵⁵ Another young man from Tazmalt, who signed his letter simply “B. M. A.,” wrote that while he himself was uneducated because of insufficient space at the “indigenous school,” he urged Muslim women to persevere in their education and ignore “the words of their detractors.”⁵⁶

As had occurred in the interwar years, readers of as-Salam suggested that Muslim women could not serve as ideal companions to increasingly educated men because of their own lack of education and experience. This mirrored transformations taking place across the colonized world, as elite men—having received the benefits of a colonial education—looked for “new women” who would mirror their new cosmopolitan status and outlook.⁵⁷ A woman from Tablat, Nedjma Gamar, wrote that Muslim women were so devoid of cultivated intellect that they were nothing more than “cleaning ladies” for their husbands and nannies for their children.⁵⁸ Others reaffirmed the nationalist fantasy of a wife as a critical partner and source of support for her husband. A commenter from Mostaganem wrote that men faced so many stresses at work, they needed to be able to depend on their wives as their confidantes and partners.⁵⁹ Yet because Muslim women had so little access to education, men suffered.

Marriage as an issue raised questions of equity and authority. Some Muslim women contended that their marriages were another site of their humiliation by Muslim men. Nationalist rhetoric described marriage as a partnership in which each spouse played an important role, which produced “social equilibrium and harmony [in] our households,” according to Anissa in as-Salam’s first issue. Yet despite this ideal, Muslim women contended that they were continually mistreated by Muslim men. An unsigned editorial stated that for Muslim women, marriage was simply a form of domestic service, since men demanded “obedience” from their wives.⁶⁰ S. H. Bintou Chaab went even further, claiming men treated the Muslim woman “like a slave.” She wrote, “Her opinion is never listened to, [and] she is always under the constant domination of her husband, her master.” The realities of married life, in other words, did not reflect Anissa’s description of “equilibrium and harmony.”⁶¹ Such letters recentered Muslim men as figures who abused their position of power within marriages. One young person from the Collège de Blida wrote that the Muslim man left the house without his wife, not because Islam required women’s sequestration or because his wife was insufficiently educated, but because he wanted to behave as if he was single even when he was married.⁶²

Nationalism also provided the grounds for women to argue that attention should be turned from the miniscule details of women’s comportment to how Muslim men had so thoroughly assimilated to European culture, thereby violating nationalism’s commitment to cultural cohesion. While details of women’s lives were scrutinized and women were warned not to behave too much like Europeans or even keep European company, men were assimilating in much more tangible ways, including their clothing. A young Muslim Algerian woman living in France, Mademoiselle Mina, noted that Muslim men no longer wore the burnous, the traditional Amazigh hooded long cloak.⁶³ She questioned why men were permitted to transition away from customary dress, but for women such transitions were equated with a turn away from Islam. This was about not only personal hypocrisy but also collective identity. Mohammed-Lamine Boutaleb lamented that since men stopped speaking Arabic from age five when they entered French colonial schools, Muslim men and women “did not even share a common language.”⁶⁴ For Boutaleb and others who noted this, men’s and women’s different linguistic capabilities were not only a marker of different education levels but represented a fundamental violation of Muslim identity, since Muslim men so easily abandoned their native tongue. H. Said wrote that men’s “hypocritical respect for our traditions” produced ignorance and isolation for Muslim women.⁶⁵ These letters framed Muslim men’s assimilation as a slight against not only their Muslim counterparts but Muslim society writ large, since it would ultimately weaken social cohesion based on shared identity.

The most troubling reflection of men’s duplicity lay in mixed marriages, which had become increasingly common, even among working-class and rural Muslims. For Muslim women, men’s willingness to marry outside “of their own race” represented the ultimate hypocrisy. While Muslim women were held to the highest standards in terms of modesty and chastity under the guise of national cohesion, Muslim men were free to marry Europeans.⁶⁶ Chérifa B. wrote, “Don’t talk about female vanity when … [there are so few] women who abandon their religion, or following the example of their parents, marry any European.”⁶⁷ Muslim women interpreted marriage to European women as an act of betrayal. Mademoiselle H. Said called it “desertion.”⁶⁸ A woman from Oran, Khouira B., wrote that Muslim men were “abandoning the women of their own race.”⁶⁹ She pointed out that Muslim men who did not marry women “of their own race” had no business chastising Muslim women. These mixed marriages, women argued, would have a disastrous impact on Muslim society. Asnia H. M. wrote that a fusion of Muslim and European cultures was “grave and contrary to the divine will.”⁷⁰ This same rationale was cited in concerns about the potential assimilation of Muslim schoolgirls to European norms. Yet in these discussions that centered Muslim men, women contended it was men who violated the nationalist call to maintain difference and strengthen one’s own community.

Muslim women’s attack on mixed marriages was also a critique of Muslim leadership, since many Muslim activists and politicians had European wives, including nationalist leaders Messali Hadj and Ferhat Abbas. Madame H. S. wrote that ordinary Muslim men were marrying European women in part because of the example set by Muslim politicians.⁷¹ She asked, “Which one of them [Muslim politicians] dares to present himself in front of his people with a woman of his people as his wife by his side?” These commentaries about mixed marriage, like the discourses of respectability, reveal the political ethos of the moment. Questions of leadership, self-presentation, and performativity of race and culture were all lenses through which the questions of dignity in the face of empire were refracted. These all undergirded their critique of double standards for women’s behavior.

Djamila Debèche, L’Action, and Women’s Emancipation in a French Algeria

In September 1947, exactly one year after as-Salam’s first issue was published, a new publication devoted to Muslim women appeared on newsstands: L’Action: Revue sociale féminine artistique (Action: Social artistic women’s review). L’Action was founded and edited by thirty-two-year-old Djamila Debèche. Like the schoolteachers who initiated the debates about women’s education in the interwar years, Debèche was a liminal figure who straddled the worlds of both Muslims and settlers. Although she was born in the small village of Bordj Okhriss and spent her early childhood in Ouled Si Ahmed, she eventually moved to Monaco with her grandmother where she lived throughout her teenage years before returning to Algeria.

Debèche had a long career in publishing and broadcasting in Algeria that spanned the interwar and postwar periods. In 1936, at the age of twenty-one, Debèche began writing for the Algerian newspaper L’Écho de la presse musulmane. In 1937 La Justice published a lengthy editorial by Debèche in which she argued hijab was not a religious requirement.⁷² Between 1939 and 1944 she was a broadcaster on Radio Ptt d’Alger in the 8:30 p.m. Saturday evening spot. Her broadcasts included social and educational material intended for Muslim women. In 1947 she published a novel, Leila: Young Girl of Algeria, the same year she founded L’Action. In 1955 Debèche published another novel, Aziza.

In both the interwar and postwar years, Debèche was an exceptional figure. Alongside La Voix des Humbles’s Muslim women contributors, Debèche was one of the few women to be regularly published in the interwar press. Her article in the reformist newspaper La Justice took the provocative stance that Islam did not mandate veiling at all, and her article was published alongside a photograph of her unveiled (figure 6.4). Her article adopted the frames common among interwar writers, including references to Islamic knowledge, Islamic history, and contemporary developments in the Middle East. Her writing in the postwar period, including her novels and her writings in L’Action, was more concerned with the place of Muslims like her, who moved between Muslim and European worlds comfortably, in an increasingly nationalist Algeria.

While as-Salam was in print from 1946 to 1950, L’Action only lasted ten issues and was out of print by the summer of 1948. Muslim newspapers in colonial Algeria struggled to maintain both a readership and the necessary financial backing, so many were short-lived. While as-Salam offered coverage of regional politics and cinema, L’Action was more highbrow and published short stories as well as ethnographic accounts of different Muslim tribes, holidays, and even neighborhoods. Debèche’s ambiguity over her audience may have contributed to the review’s inability to succeed. While L’Action presented itself as a publication for both Muslim and settler audiences, such ethnographic accounts functioned to educate a settler audience about Muslims.

Alongside an analysis of as-Salam, L’Action illustrates that although the rhetoric of anti-colonial nationalism was on the rise, Muslim society was by no means unanimous in its aims. Indeed, as James McDougall has written, the terms and goals of nationalism remained contested even throughout the War of Independence.⁷³L’Action was decidedly more ambivalent about nationalism and even politics writ large than as-Salam. Like the schoolteachers, Debèche was among the last generation who believed in the emancipatory potential of a French Algeria for Muslims before it was no longer possible. At the same time as Anissa offered her own vision of the ideal Muslim woman and her readers responded with their own (often nationalist) visions of women’s possibilities, older ideals of Franco-Muslim collaboration remained in circulation in forums like L’Action and persisted well into the Algerian War of Independence.

Unlike the women who wrote in to as-Salam who saw Muslim women’s status as a consequence of the brutality of colonialism, Debèche still remained optimistic that collaboration with the French could ameliorate the problems Muslim women faced. While she did not say so outright, it was implied throughout as-Salam, which sought to bring Muslim elites and European settlers closer together through mutual understanding. Even as late as 1959, she continued to write articles petitioning the French state to do more for Muslim women.⁷⁴ In those articles she echoed interwar discussions using brief histories of Islam and Atatürk’s reforms to argue that Islam was emancipatory for women and that Muslim countries could be modern. Like interwar discussions about women, L’Action also reported on developments in Turkey and Egypt, and it offered histories of women’s powerful position in the Islamic past, including profiles on particular women such as Khadija and the women of the court of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid.⁷⁵ In an article about the holiday Mawlid, Debèche offered an explanation of Islam’s feminist history.⁷⁶ She wrote that Islam transformed society through its regulation of family life in which “the woman became the equal of the man to a certain extent.” She praised Muhammad in particular for “the considerable project of women’s emancipation [that he] realized.” Such articles demonstrate the longevity of these interwar claims even beyond reformist communities. L’Action was also oriented toward international feminist organizing for women. Its second issue, for example, offered extensive coverage of the October 1947 International Feminine Congress in Paris. Subsequent issues also reported on the successes of women’s rights projects in spaces like Argentina.

In her novels Debèche critiqued the societal focus on Muslim women’s comportment in ways that echoed as-Salam’s readers. The protagonists of Debèche’s novels, Leila (1947) and Aziza (1955), were, like her, trapped between two worlds. Although their social circles were primarily European elites, they resented the racism they faced from settler society as well as their alienation from Muslim society for being too Western. A passage from Aziza offers a commentary on Muslim men’s hypocrisy similar to that presented in as-Salam. At a party in Algiers, Aziza unexpectedly reconnects with a childhood playmate, Ali Kemal. Aziza (like Debèche) left her village as a young child after being orphaned, and by the time she meets Ali she is very assimilated to European norms and most of her friends are settler elites. Although they have much in common, Ali’s brother Allel tells Aziza she is not a good match for Ali and she would be better off marrying a European. Aziza says, “The elegant Western outfit he was wearing made me doubt the sincerity of his words. He wasn’t even wearing a fez [tarbush].”⁷⁷ While Allel deems Aziza too European, she notes he too was assimilated enough to wear “Western” clothes without even the traditional tarbush, which some Muslim nationalists, including Messali Hadj, for example, wore alongside suits. Like the letters from as-Salam readers, Debèche challenged the unfair scrutiny directed toward Muslim women, while Muslim men’s assimilation was accepted.

Unlike as-Salam, which published letters from readers, in L’Action Debèche instead chose to respond to letters on a single page, “From You to Us.” Without the context of the readers’ letters, the page functioned more as a space for Debèche to thank her readers than a space of community dialogue. One glimpse into L’Action’s Muslim readership was the personal advertisements it started posting in its third issue in November 1947 (figure 6.5). Although some were posted by Muslim women, most were posted by Muslim men, interested in marriage to a younger Muslim woman. Many specified that she should be educated or “évoluée.” Some even requested women of specific professions—“preference for a midwife or teacher.” Many noted that they had a comfortable financial situation, an indication of the elite status of L’Action’s Muslim readers. While most clearly indicated they were looking for marriage and to start a family, others, like an eighteen-year-old student in Algiers, wrote that he desired correspondence with a Muslim young woman and that marriage was “possible.”⁷⁸

Although as-Salam and L’Action were in print at the same time, neither explicitly mentioned the other. In L’Action’s final issue in April 1948, which featured a photograph of Debèche (figure 6.6), she wrote in response to an unposted letter from a reader: “I have nothing in common with the collaboratrice of the Algerian review about which you’ve talked to me. That person who is so charming is, in effect, of European origin.”

As-Salam was a review, and Mademoiselle Anissa never revealed her full name, so she could have been the subject of Debèche’s dismissive tone.⁷⁹ In the May 1950 issue of as-Salam, Anissa described the outpouring of responses she had to her inquiry about whether mixed marriages were acceptable. She wrote that she was visited by someone who may have been Debèche. She wrote: “Mlle B. B. who calls herself Muslim and praises wine, who calls herself Arab and can’t say a word in Arabic (she was raised in Nice) paid me a visit. She came to tell me her ideas about the subject [of mixed marriage]. For an entire hour she exposed me to incoherent theories inspired by naiveté and stupid pretension.”⁸⁰ Anissa likely used B. B. in lieu of D. D. to slightly anonymize her attack. Debèche was raised in southern France and wrote for the publication Le Petit Niçois as a teenager. The vitriol directed at Debèche here—“naiveté and stupid pretension”—speaks to the extent to which they had different aspirations for Muslim society.

Anticolonial Feminist Futures: A Conclusion

Thirteen years before Franz Fanon would publish “Algeria Unveiled,” which detailed the long history of the entanglement between colonialism and Muslim women’s veiling, Muslim women wrote into the women’s page of as-Salam to argue that women’s veiling practices were inextricable from empire. Scholarship on the veil in Algeria has paid particular attention to its important role within the Algerian War of Independence as a marker of Algerian defiance in the face of pressure to unveil and assimilate. During the Algerian War of Independence, the veil took on political meaning in response to the intensification of French efforts to push unveiling, including public unveilings and veil-burning ceremonies. As famously depicted in The Battle of Algiers, the veil also became a means of camouflage for women fighters. For others, it simply meant insisting on their right to be Muslim and resist the pressure to assimilate.

In the second half of the 1940s, the women’s page of as-Salam offered Muslim women and men a forum to critique the discussions about women that had unfolded and intensified in the preceding decades. While a small number of elite women wrote in to interwar newspapers, in the postwar period a wider segment of Muslim society wrote in to as-Salam. As they entered the ongoing discussions about Muslim women in large numbers, they articulated a countercritique of both colonialism and Muslim men. They wrote that it was colonialism’s exploitation of Muslims that limited Muslim women’s possibilities, and so questions of education and veiling were futile without consideration of colonialism’s impact. Muslim women also critiqued the obsession with women’s veiling, initiated by the French but also upheld within Muslim society. This obsession with veiling was part, they argued, of an unfair focus on Muslim women, while it was Muslim men who rejected their people by adopting European dress, speaking French, and marrying European women.

The contributions of the women and men who wrote into as-Salam’s women’s page should neither be minimized nor overstated. On one hand, they illustrate the ways women and their allies took advantage of new spaces like the women’s page to publish critiques of colonialism and the disrespect they faced from Muslim men. Such commentaries illustrate how the codes of conduct outlined for women within nationalist discourse were being disputed and negotiated. And yet, while the growing nationalist movement benefited from women’s participation, it largely minimized their concerns. As Vince and others have charted, women were told their concerns did not need to be foregrounded because they would naturally be resolved once Algerian independence was won.