A Colonial Education

Some French administrators and settlers claimed education in Algeria began with French colonialism. The Constantine-born ethnographer and lawyer Mathéa Gaudry, for example, wrote in 1935 that there was no education system in Algeria at the start of the French colonial project in Algeria in 1830.⁵ Such claims ignore how over the course of the nineteenth century, the French colonial state dismantled precolonial education systems, and since the 1905 metropolitan law that separated church from state in particular, the state continued to dismantle the Qur’anic education system, limited the numbers of Qur’anic schools open, and kept Sufi zawiyas under strict surveillance.⁶

In the interwar years, access to French colonial schools remained extremely limited for Muslim boys and girls alike. The proportion of school-age children enrolled in French colonial schools rose slowly in the first half of the twentieth century from “under 2% in 1890, not quite 6% in 1918, almost 9% in 1944, and nearly 13% in 1954.”⁷ In much of the Middle East too, widespread multidisciplinary, public education was only available from the late 1940s onward.⁸ While all Muslim children suffered from the limited numbers of schools open to Muslims, the problem was exacerbated for Muslim girls. In 1921 only 4,455 school-age Muslim girls were enrolled in French colonial schools. This number rose to 15,736 in 1936, but that was still only 2.7 percent of the total population of school-age Muslim girls, as compared to 12 percent of Muslim boys or 68.7 percent of settler girls.⁹ The numbers of schools for Muslim girls across Algeria slowly increased from four in 1892 to twenty-three by 1929, twenty-six in 1930, thirty-six in 1933, and forty-eight in 1934. Of the 851 young girls who attended the two schools for girls in Algiers, 19 percent were from middle-class or elite families, while the majority (81 percent) were from poorer families. The number of girls who continued on to French colonial secondary education was very limited. In 1934 in Algiers, for example, the Lycée for Girls admitted fifteen Muslim girls, five of them from mixed Muslim/European families.¹⁰

Within the French colonial education system existed two separate tracks, one for settlers and one for Muslims, which primarily offered professional training. While some metropolitan officials argued that Muslim boys should receive a multidisciplinary education similar to that of settlers, the settler lobby insisted that Muslim boys should strictly receive professional training, which would enable them to either work as translators within the French colonial bureaucracy or legal system, or perform agricultural work.¹¹ For Muslim girls, French colonial schools taught solely artisanal training, most often carpet weaving. The colonial education system thus worked to produce stratified laborers for the Algerian economy and maintain settler dominance. Indeed, in his memoir former governor-general Maurice Viollette lamented that schools for Algerian girls offered no real instruction. “In reality,” he wrote, “they function more like workshops than schools.”¹² Although technical, schools for Muslim boys and girls still sought to inculcate Muslim boys and girls with French culture. As in other colonial spaces, administrators described French colonial schools for girls as conduits through which the French colonial project could penetrate Algerian homes. The superintendent of the schools of Algiers, Georges Hardy, stated, “When we bring a boy to a French school, we gain unity. When we bring a girl, that unity is multiplied by the number of children she will have.”¹³

The benefits of women’s artisanal training were twofold: the workshop would be a place where Muslim women could gently learn new skills and French norms, and in return the state would benefit from the eventual labor of a new workforce of Muslim women who would contribute to the economic progress of Algeria.¹⁴ Administrators envisioned that artisanal training was ideal because it could be described as emancipatory in a gentle way, but it would not be too disruptive to Muslim family dynamics because ultimately it would not radically transform women’s possibilities.¹⁵ Artisanal work could also be taught in ways that would not disrupt class, so the particular crafts taught were oriented toward the girls’ class, embroidery for richer girls and carpet weaving for poorer girls, with sometimes both offered in the same workshop.¹⁶ These distinctions often also mapped onto rural/urban divisions, in which urban students worked with linen, silk, and precious metals, while rural students worked with wool. While urban students made luxury items like lace, rural students often wove objects of necessity like tents, haiks, or burnouses.¹⁷

Many French administrators envisioned women’s artisanal training as an avenue through which Algerian women’s labor could be standardized and captured for the benefit of the colonial state, producing both a new class of workers and a new market of goods. This was seen as benefiting the colonial economy, while also offering supposedly lazy and oppressed Algerian women the emancipatory opportunity to work and thus be transformed into modern workers. Incapable or unwilling to penetrate the Algerian domestic sphere out of concern for male reactions, colonial administrators landed on artisanal workshops in an attempt to expand both the colonial economy and the sociocultural reach of the colonial state.

Despite critiques from Muslims and settlers alike, Muslim families took advantage of these schools. In 1925 al-Najah reported, for example, that “the girls of Ouargla have achieved the maximum degree of artistry in … weaving, chic embroidery, [and] lacemaking, and all locals confidently and eagerly send their daughters.”¹⁸ For the author, these girls’ training was salvation from a life of poverty and potential vice. Articles in al-Najah and other publications also defended the schools against concerns that attendance in French colonial schools may corrupt girls. Expressing that they “disapproved” of such fears, the newspaper insisted that such ideas were “holding us back from a great personal and national benefit.”¹⁹ This position was Islamically framed and tied back to the flexibility of sharia. They wrote, “The Islamic sharia does not forbid girls from industrial [artisanal] education… . To forbid her from her education is an injustice!” Another article in the reformist al-Shihab similarly urged readers to send their daughters to French schools with a reference to sharia.²⁰ They reminded readers that any fear of Muslim girls being corrupted by the time they spent with their French teachers was unfounded and had no religious basis, since “the Islamic sharia is a sharia of advancement, fraternity, and humanity.” Because of its values of “fraternity and humanity,” the sharia was open to women’s education, necessary for “advancement,” even in French colonial schools.

By 1926, however, al-Najah was complaining that while Muslim girls were supposed to earn income from the sale of the goods they made in school, “no matter how fast [they] work[ed]” they earned only “one franc per day.” Others critiqued the schools’ limited focus. Administrators and settlers lamented that such schools did not teach women the necessary skills to make good homemakers, such as basic sewing and ironing.²¹ Critiques from the Muslim community became more vocal and regular with the appearance in 1922 of the journal La Voix des Humbles, published by the Association of Schoolteachers of Indigenous Origin as part of its attempt to speak directly to the French colonial state and settler society, and to challenge the state’s excuses—namely, limited budget and Muslim misogyny—for not opening more interdisciplinary schools for Muslim girls. Some commentators in the press worried that Muslim youth internalized shame about their culture, religion, and identity. These editorialists warned that the pressure to assimilate to French norms would erode and erase Muslim culture over time.

In Tunisia, a French protectorate between 1881 and 1956, education for women also remained limited in terms of both numbers of schools and curriculum. The resident-general’s wife was envisioned as an emissary between the French colonial regime and Tunisian women. In 1900 the wife of Resident-General René Millet founded a school exclusively for Tunisian girls that would teach the French language and domestic tasks.²² Tunisians distrusted this school, and many wanted their daughters to receive the multidisciplinary education offered in French schools.²³ It initially only had twelve pupils enrolled and maintained a majority French student body for most of its existence into the 1940s. By 1920 there were fourteen French-run primary schools exclusively for girls across Tunisia, although until 1945 Tunisian girls had no access to female-only secondary education. There too, elites took to the press to express their frustration with the lack of access to education for Tunisian girls.

The Schoolteachers of Oran and the Fight for Women’s Access to Education

The most vocal group who initiated consistent calls for Muslim women’s education were the French-educated schoolteachers. They were predominantly concerned with the material aspects of women’s education—the limited number of schools open to Muslim girls and the fact that they taught only artisanal training. Publishing in French meant that La Voix des Humbles and La Voix Indigène could direct their critiques directly to settler society and the administration. They challenged the excuses of French colonial administrators for not building more schools for girls, and they occasionally marshaled the rhetoric of the colonial project itself. An unsigned editorial in La Voix des Humbles titled “Schools for Our Girls” claimed that French inaction on the issue of girls’ schooling did not reflect the spirit of “French generosity.” They challenged the words of the French deputy, “Ch. Damas,” who had said, “A race will not emancipate itself when it condemns half of itself to eternal servitude.”²⁴ Damas repeated a long-standing claim of state officials since the nineteenth century that Muslims’ intransigent misogyny rendered their advancement impossible. La Voix des Humbles labeled this a “sterilizing theory,” since the state refused to endow Muslim society with the means (schools) to enact this emancipation. In another article, Mohand Lechani critiqued French claims that they could not offer girls a multidisciplinary education because of the risk of upsetting the gender balance of Muslim households. He wrote that the ongoing petitions by Muslim men to build more schools for girls rendered such claims “a fallacious pretext.”²⁵ In the face of such demands, he said, the state had redirected their excuse to limited budget.

Many publications frequently called for women’s education broadly without specification about the parameters or curriculum of such an education. In October 1929, for example, al-Najah reprinted an article from La Voix Indigène called “The Kabyle Woman and Marriage,” which called for her to be educated. In the following issue they wrote, “The article that we reprinted in our last issue is from our colleague, La Voix Indigène. We share their opinion on [the need for] education for the Kabyle woman, on the condition that it conforms with Islamic principles.”²⁶ Even among schoolteachers, despite the continued calls for women’s education in schoolteacher publications, the topic of women’s advancement broadly remained contentious. At their annual conference in Tlemcen in 1934, when a speaker raised the topic of “the emancipation of the Muslim woman,” audible protest was heard from the audience.²⁷

There were a few moments where women contributed to the discussion about women’s education initiated by schoolteacher publications. In 1929 La Voix Indigène reprinted an editorial by Houria Ameur, the first Muslim woman to attend the Algiers Law School and daughter of Tahar Ameur, the conseiller général of Fort National (Larbaâ Nath Irathen) with Sufi lineage.²⁸ She wrote that most Muslim girls “have an ardent desire to go to French schools, and their mothers” support them. The obstacles standing in women’s way were twofold: the insufficient number of schools and “eternal masculine pride, common among all races.” Ameur’s claim that this pride was shared “among all races” allowed her to challenge Muslim men while not giving weight to French colonial stereotypes that Muslim men were particularly misogynistic. Ameur’s attention to Muslim men is also a reminder that while men may have rhetorically proclaimed their support for women’s education, many still discouraged the girls in their own lives from attending school. An administrator from Philippeville (Skikda) explained that a Muslim qadi, Hadj Youcef Bouhedja, had initially wanted to send his daughter to be educated at the Legion of Honor’s maison d’éducation, but his family eventually pressured him that it was inappropriate.²⁹ If true, this suggests that even more assimilated men who were part of the French colonial legal apparatus faced social pressure around educating their daughters.

The Muslim Reformists and Women’s Uplift of the Umma

Calls for women’s education were also taken up by the increasingly popular Muslim reform movement. Like the schoolteachers, Muslim reformist thinkers envisioned themselves as educators of the broader Muslim public who needed to learn about the compatibility between Islam and a modern education for Muslim girls. For the reform movement, the education of Muslim women was an integral part of a return to Islam’s true principles, a turn away from the Sufi Islam practiced in Algeria, which had deviated from these true principles, and a revival of past Islamic glory through education and uplift. Some Sufi voices, like those published in al-Balagh al-Jazairi, on the other hand, were wary that women’s education beyond childhood Qur’anic memorization may lead to licentious behavior.

Women’s education was an important pillar of the Muslim reform movement since its inception in Algeria. The reformist movement empowered lay people to read the Qur’an themselves, unmediated by an overreliance on local Sufi scholars. In 1913 Ben Badis returned to Algeria after five years in Tunis at Zeitouna University and began teaching at Constantine’s Djamâa El Akhdar, or Green Mosque. In the 1910s Ben Badis himself offered a weekly night course for women in the Green Mosque, where he taught about important women in early Islamic history and their example.³⁰ Men were asked to wait outside, and the lights were turned low so women could unveil if they wanted.

This attention paid to an Islamic education for women adhered to the ideas of Egyptian reformist thinkers like Muhammad Abduh, who described the equality between men and women as one of Islam’s foundational principles (albeit with the caveat that the family still needed a leader, the husband).³¹ Similarly, Rashid Rida wrote that he agreed with feminists that women had the right to pursue education, to own property, and to hold certain public roles.³² Ben Badis agreed too on these points and argued that educated mothers would be critically important actors in the struggle to raise a future generation with Islamic values and identity—a matter of particular importance in a settler colony where settlers denigrated Islam and Algerian identity. Reformist thinkers repeated the claim that woman was man’s first school, and thus her education was critical in order to establish a foundational Islamic education in the population writ large. Sheikhs from various local Sufi tariqas (brotherhoods) harshly criticized Ben Badis’s ideas about women’s education and courses for women as inappropriate.

Reformist discussions about women were shaped by the reform movement’s call for laypeople to engage with Islamic knowledge unmediated by scholars. Muslim scholars or judges had long issued fatwas, or rulings, in which they arranged various pieces of Islamic knowledge (taken from the Qur’an, hadith, or Sunna) to argue for a particular interpretation or rule. Empowered by the Muslim reformist call for lay Muslims to read the Qur’an themselves and not rely too heavily on scholars for interpretation, interwar commentators in both the French- and Arabic-language press cited the corpus of Islamic knowledge—Islamic history, the Qur’an, Sunna, and the Hadith literature—to support their calls for women’s education and advancement. They celebrated the rights Islam granted women, which included education for both sexes, a marriage contract that ensured women’s consent, the payment of a dowry from the groom’s family, and women’s right to divorce and to inherit.

This discussion of Islamic knowledge within the debates about women’s education added another dimension to the Muslim press’s project to educate its readers. Through references to Islamic knowledge, authors worked simultaneously to challenge both French colonial claims about Muslim misogyny and long-standing arguments from some Sufi communities that women’s education in anything beyond the Qur’an was dangerous. Both sets of ideologies needed to be dismantled, they argued, for Muslim society to enjoy a prosperous, modern future.

Muslim reformist commentators positioned themselves against such Sufi voices both theologically and in terms of women’s advancement. They reminded Muslim readers that there was a host of evidence from Islamic knowledge that proved women’s education was an integral part of the Islamic tradition since its inception. As one unsigned editorial stated, Islam “does not forbid women from learning or being educated, but the opposite! And this is what we must write and talk about with a loud voice so all the people will hear and learn.”³³ Examples from Islamic history also supported such claims. In 1935 Ben Badis wrote in al-Shihab about how the Virgin Mary, Moses’s mother, and the Prophet Muhammad’s wife Aisha were examples of feminine perfection for not only their morality but also their intellect.³⁴ Later, in 1939, he wrote that the many women in Islamic history celebrated for their scientific and literary knowledge should inspire Muslims to work toward education for both sexes “on the basis of our religious and national identity” so that Algeria can take “a dignified place among nations.”³⁵ He saw “religious and national identity,” women’s advancement, and Algeria’s global standing as intertwined.

A key ideological commitment of the Muslim reformist movement was the idea of Islamic renaissance in the present that would revive a lost former Islamic glory.³⁶ The movement argued that if Muslims could return to Islam’s true principles and focus on education, the entire umma, or global community of Muslims, would be uplifted out of the stagnation and poverty of their current situation, including the harsh realities of much of North Africa and the Middle East under European colonial domination. Muslim reform offered Muslims a path forward out of the stifling realities of colonial domination in which a new emphasis on their own faith could produce communal uplift.

Such reformist ideas about how Islam was emancipatory for women had such currency in the interwar years that they reappeared in schoolteacher publications as well, as in the coverage of the 1932 International Congress of Mediterranean Women in Constantine. The congress in Constantine was organized by metropolitan French and settler women. They invited participants from various Mediterranean countries and asked each representative to offer a thirty-minute presentation about the status of women in their country, including both their rights and the challenges they faced. This congress was one of several women’s conferences held in Beirut, Baghdad, Cairo, Constantine, Damascus, Istanbul, and Tehran between 1928 and 1938.³⁷ Unlike the other women’s conferences in the region, the Constantine congress did not connect the challenges women faced to the constraints imposed by colonialism, likely because of its European organizers. La Voix Indigène published coverage of the conference and a series of editorials directed at the congress’s attendees. In advance of the congress, La Voix Indigène published an “open letter” to the French women attending the conference asking them to lobby the state to build more schools for girls.³⁸ The editorial reminded French women that the Muslim people would not evolve because of a “more or less sincere discourse or under the effect of a magic wand.”³⁹ In other words, speeches and congresses alone were insufficient. Instead, they urged European women to intervene on their behalf in favor of a multidisciplinary, “general, [and] rational” education for Muslim girls, equal to that of French girls.

At the congress itself, Hamed Largueche spoke on behalf of Algerian women. His speech, which was later reprinted in La Voix Indigène, illustrates how some contributors wanted to depict early Islamic history as emancipatory for women to push back against French colonial stereotypes that equated Islam with misogyny. Such commentators cited the important roles Muslim women occupied in early Islamic societies, including as poets, writers, teachers, and jurists.⁴⁰ Largueche explained the Prophet Muhammad’s role in ushering in a series of reforms that elevated both Muslim women and society as a whole. He described a rich intellectual life in which women participated as equals. This depiction of early Islamic history evoked modern ideas about enlightenment, including an active print culture, educated women who held prominent public roles, and intellectual freedom. He reframed Islam as emancipatory in terms his audience of European women would understand.

In the following month after the congress, on its front page La Voix Indigène published a Muslim woman’s response to the congress. Madame Seghir Hacène was the wife of the caid of Sigus, a small town 20 miles south of Constantine.⁴¹ Hacène angrily argued that the feminists’ perspective was clouded by their stereotypes about Muslims. She wrote that the attendees “ignore[d] everything or almost everything about the life of my sisters,” whom the attendees saw as “savages, resistant to civilization and progress.” Like Ameur, Hacène wrote that Muslim women suffered not because of an oppressive religion that rejected their education but rather because of the same problem that plagued people globally: the persistence of misogynistic customs and limited access to education. She stated that while Islam itself respected women and mandated education for women, the Muslims of Algeria “did not observe the Qur’anic prescriptions,” and instead subjected Muslim women “to an arbitrary regime … [of] egoism.”

Hacène sought to shift the discussion away from Islam’s supposed backwardness and instead to the question of access. She wrote that the feminists ignored that education alone was “the magic key to the emancipation [of all] human being[s], men or women.” Like Ameur, she worked to deracialize Muslims through her use of “human beings.” For Muslim women to advance, they, like all peoples, required access to schools. She urged French women to push the state to build “schools, many schools, many schools, for all the indigenous girls with obligatory attendance.” While the French feminist publication La Française occasionally reprinted articles from La Voix Indigène, they neither reprinted nor responded to Hacène’s letter. Seghir Hacène never reappeared in the interwar press, although she may have been related to Ali Hacène, a judicial interpreter within the French colonial courts, who published several legal manuals as well as an article about the challenges Kabyle women faced in L’Echo Indigène. Seghir Hacène’s choice to publish her commentary in La Voix Indigène suggests that she read it and may indicate she was ideologically aligned with Zenati and other schoolteachers. It may have also been a pragmatic choice since the conference attendees would be more likely to read a response published in a French-language publication. Despite Zenati’s overall assimilationist tendencies, he was willing to publish Hacène’s critique of the congress and the French colonial state’s failure to educate Muslim women, which reflects how assimilationists too issued critiques of the state, particularly around questions relating to women.

These claims echoed regional feminist discussions. In contemporaneous Tunisian and Egyptian publications, women also stressed that education was the most important factor that would transform women’s possibilities and lives. While the French colonial regime focused on the veil as an impediment to women’s advancement, Tunisian women took to the women’s review Leïla to insist that education was most important in improving women’s social standing. They insisted that unveiling was more of an ideological gesture than a marker of real reform. Instead, they used forums like Leïla to make direct, specific demands of both French and Tunisian society at large for education. Speaking to Tunisian socialists who insisted on the importance of unveiling above all else, Leïla contributor Bahri Guiga “explained sarcastically that the elimination of the hijab would not reduce infant mortality, ameliorate general hygiene, or [offer] education.” Similarly, female contributor Essaida Foudhaili wrote that even if all Tunisian women stopped veiling immediately, they would continue to be unequipped to participate in Tunisian society as equals to their male counterparts because of their lack of education. Like Hacène, some Tunisian commentators also critiqued Tunisian men for not doing more for women. A contributor, Mademoiselle Radhia, for example, wrote that the responsibility lay with men to encourage change in their own families by insisting their own sisters and daughters receive an education. She insisted as well that women be strong in standing up to their husbands and fathers, reminding them that “men are not God.”⁴²

In Algeria, commentators in La Voix des Humbles and La Voix Indigène echoed Largueche’s and Seghir Hacène’s insistence that Islam was emancipatory for women. Some even attached the term “feminist” to the possibilities for change they saw in Islamic history. In La Voix Indigène, Chérif bin Larbi Cadi described Muhammad as “the first Arab feminist” because “he, inspired by God, recommended treating women equitably.”⁴³ Cadi was particularly committed to spreading the message that Islam was progress-oriented. He wrote that some Muslim elites were “too assimilated … with regard to religious practice and alcohol to be effective links” between Muslim and settler communities.⁴⁴ While he was critical of what he described as the excessively assimilationist tendencies of the schoolteachers, he published in their publications such as La Voix Indigène. He himself was a naturalized French citizen and lieutenant colonel, and he came from an elite family, in which three out of his four brothers were knights or officers of the Legion of Honor, and all four were qadis, Muslim judges within the French colonial system.⁴⁵ His family’s connections enabled him to be educated in French schools in Constantine and Algiers, and eventually Paris. He was naturalized as a French citizen at the age of twenty-two in 1889 and later became one of the few Muslims to become an officer in the French army. Cadi was also married to settler Jeanne Dupré until she passed away in 1913, and in 1918 he remarried Cyprienne Bertrand from the metropole. Many of Algeria’s elite Muslim families maintained ties to the Muslim side of the French colonial legal system, yet his position as an officer in the French army and his naturalized citizenship rendered Cadi unique. Yet at age sixty-seven, despite his own complicated allegiances, he contended in La Voix Indigène that it was important elite Muslims retain their ability to connect and speak to average Muslims by not assimilating too much, indicating how nuanced elite Muslim self-identification was in this period.

Cadi was not alone in his use of the term “feminism” in his 1932 discussion of Islam’s compatibility with feminism. In the 1934 wedding speech reprinted in La Voix Indigène, Abou-Ezzohra similarly described “the feminist movement gaining terrain every day” in the Middle East as a “completely Islamic movement.”⁴⁶ The education and leadership of “our Muslim sisters” in the Middle East, he contended, was “the foundation” of the “renaissance of Islam.” While Cadi and Abou-Ezzohra were published in schoolteacher newspapers, they agreed with Muslim reformists that while local Sufi practices had allowed misogyny and tribalism to reign, a return to Islam’s true feminist principles would allow for a truly modern future Muslim society. Indeed, in the 1930s, as the Muslim reformist movement grew across Algeria, the discussion of women’s education shifted from a focus on French schools to calls for a more hybrid Islamic education.

Reformist discussions similarly presented women’s education as a path to future renaissance. In November 1937 Mohamed Saleh Ramdane, a twenty-four-year-old poet from the rural town of El Kantara, penned a commentary titled “The Education of Women” in the Muslim reformist al-Bassair.⁴⁷ For Ramdane, the lamentable plight of the “poor, ignorant [Algerian] women” was a reminder of Algeria’s place globally. A century into colonial occupation, Muslim women and Muslim society broadly in Algeria were largely uneducated and impoverished. Women’s education, he argued, would turn the tide for Muslim society in Algeria, and even restore Algeria’s status globally to the past glory it had shared with the Muslim Middle East. He wrote, “There is no reason for our delay in the caravan of life today, which we used to lead.”⁴⁸ “Our” and “we” here refer not to an Algerian nation but the Muslim umma. For him, women’s status was thus a marker of Algeria’s loss of former shared Muslim glory, Algeria’s weak global standing, and the potential for future renaissance.

For Muslims in Algeria, this regional renaissance was already underway in the Middle East. In al-Bassair Muhammad bin Ahmad al Mansur suggested that the articulate commentaries written by women in Middle Eastern newspapers signaled “the resurrection of Arab civilization in the East.”⁴⁹ These women’s eloquence was a marker of a broader social renewal underway. The titles alone from articles about the Middle East signaled these themes, such as “The Renaissance of the Iraqi Woman” and “The Modern Eastern Uprising in the Country of Afghanistan.”⁵⁰

Muslim women also took up the framework of educated mothers to argue that if educated, they could instill knowledge of this Islamic glory in the next generation. In 1934 a Muslim woman writing under the pseudonym “Séti BM” wrote to the editors of the reformist paper La Défense after reading “The Renaissance of the Iraqi Woman.”⁵¹ She explained that she was compelled to write to La Défense to ask why the Muslim women of Algeria were not given the same opportunities or resources, namely, schools, to advance like the women of Turkey or Egypt. She wrote that “because France does not understand the entire moral beauty of its task, our people stay in this state of ignorance and apathy.” Like the schoolteachers, she underscored the state’s failure to live up to the promises of “its task” of uplift for its colonial subjects.

Séti wrote that an educated mother could teach her children that “while others [Europeans] were in the most complete ignorance and barbarism, the Arab had his doctors, his poets, his writers, his astronomers, [and] his architects.”⁵² Her reference to a past of Arab glory functioned to decenter Europe’s role as the sole imparter of civilization and modernity. Mothers could “make [their children] love their ancestors,” which would enable the children to “revive such a glorious past” in the future. For Séti, an educated Muslim mother’s capacity to instill within her children pride in a lineage of Arab glory was critical, because it offered Muslim children dignity in the face of colonialism. Her letter exemplifies how women’s position as mothers could be leveraged to argue for the need for schools, in ways that referenced both past Muslim glory and contemporary news from the Middle East.

By the late 1930s the Muslim reform movement had established more of its own schools, which offered Muslim children a multidisciplinary education, including physical exercise, grammar and vocabulary, French literacy, history and geography of North Africa, math, and religion (Qur’an, Islamic principles, and the life of the Prophet Muhammad).⁵³ Like French colonial schools, they were in operation from October to June. Alongside the school, there were also reformist associations, theater troupes, and sports clubs. These schools were mixed-gender until “puberty,” which made them the object of harsh critique from the Sufi sheikhs committed to strict gender segregation. Archival documents suggest there were plans to also open schools that taught girls artisanal training as well, but it is unclear whether they were ever realized.⁵⁴

Muslim community members, including women, largely funded these schools.⁵⁵ Newspapers regularly published lists of donors to the schools whom they thanked for their contributions. Many women were on these lists for donating their wedding jewelry, dowry, or other money. Among women with limited financial means, dowry jewelry circulated as an alternate female financial system. It was passed down matrilineally and could be melted and sold piecemeal when needed. Dowry jewelry was a key means by which Muslim women contributed, whether in the form of money or the jewelry itself, to the establishment of reformist schools for Muslim boys and girls. The newspapers also joyously commemorated end-of-year celebrations in which community members gathered to watch female students debate certain topics, among them the woman’s right to education in Islam.⁵⁶ These celebrations and their coverage in the press demonstrate that girls’ education was a communal project—lobbied for, funded, and celebrated by community members. While the numbers of these schools remained limited because of funding difficulties, they indicate how multidisciplinary education for girls moved from a hope articulated by the Voix des Humbles schoolteachers in the early 1920s to a reality made possible through reformist community cooperation by the end of the interwar years.

Women’s active participation in reformist education also came through associations affiliated with the reformists. Hundreds of Muslim women were active members of the El Kheira (or “Goodness”) Association, for example. Surveillance documents noted that a third of the attendees at their events were usually women.⁵⁷ Notes from a 1938 meeting estimated that some four hundred Muslim women were in attendance. Speeches at these meetings focused on women’s lives, and the organization had particular branches that worked toward a broad range of interests, including education and professional training for women. A newspaper reported that thanks to courses El Kheira offered, more than a hundred girls were now literate in French and Arabic. In 1941 the organization established its own artisanal training school for women.

The reporting on these schools continued the ongoing conversation about the compatibility between women’s education and Islam, and educated girls took advantage of the press as a space to challenge concerns about their education. Girls and women stressed that these schools empowered Muslim women to fulfill their Islamic responsibilities. In 1938 al-Bassair published an article written by an educated girl in Constantine, “Bint Sayyida Asi Z. H. R.,” who challenged this idea that education could lead to “leaky morals.”⁵⁸ The descriptor “leaky” framed girls’ morality as something fragile and easily susceptible to damage, as some Sufi communities contended. Like Houria Ameur and Seghir Hacène, who were published in La Voix Indigène in 1929 and 1932, respectively, Bint Sayyida Asi Z. H. R. critiqued Muslim men for their failure to support women’s education for the women in their own lives. She wrote that these family members “believe if she is educated, she will rebel and behave inappropriately.” She insisted that despite such fears, education would not lead to “copying Europeans blindly and wearing makeup.” The fears were thus that women’s education may not only enable licentious behavior but also facilitate assimilation to European gender norms. Like other commentators, she reframed women’s education as rooted in Islamic ideals. She wrote that “true education will bring nothing but purity, goodness, Islamic behavior, and morality.” Education would thus strengthen a girl’s Islamic identity and “purity,” an implicit reference to her sexual chastity.

The Educated Women of the Modern Middle East

Muslim reformist publications also praised how women in other Middle Eastern spaces had taken on greater social roles and called for similar transformation in Algeria. The Muslim reformist al-Shihab reported that in Afghanistan, “his majesty the King [Amanullah Khan] worked tirelessly by himself to make the umma understand the necessity of education.”⁵⁹ Through the education of girls in particular, the article contended, Afghanistan had “reached the door to development in a stable and calm way.” The phrase “stable and calm” worked to assuage fears that women’s education would provoke too great a change to Algeria. Muslim reformist papers also published commentaries that called for Muslim women in Algeria to take on all the roles that Egyptian and Turkish women were playing in society, including “journalists, female doctors, lawyers, and even a pilot.”⁶⁰ While the precise parameters of the feminist future they wanted varied, they agreed education was the critical first step toward this advancement. As another article stated, “Before we can have the liberation of women which we want [in the future], we need education [now].”⁶¹

Unlike other Middle Eastern spaces, discussions about women’s education in Algeria were not framed predominantly in terms of the uplift of the future Algerian nation alone. Instead, these discussions proposed multiple modes of belonging that transcended geographical and temporal bounds and insisted on Muslims’ right to see themselves as modern. Muslims in Algeria weaponized news from the Middle East to challenge colonial ideology about Muslim backwardness and to argue that Europe had no monopoly on modernity or civilization. Instead, they claimed ownership of their unique historical moment in which women’s advancement and broader societal uplift were sweeping across the Middle East. References to concurrent developments in the Middle East or a shared Muslim past became a language that commentators across multiple communities adopted. This allowed them to engage in conversations about how Muslims in Algeria could participate in the “century of Progress” despite the considerable constraints on their daily lives as colonial subjects.

As the largest Muslim newspaper in Algeria, the Arabic-language al-Najah offered Muslim readers access to news from the Middle East. It had a wide readership that would have spanned multiple ideological communities. Al-Najah offered particularly consistent coverage of developments in Turkey to feed the Muslim public’s fascination with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In 1922, after he emerged victorious in the Turkish War of Independence, the cult of personality around him was so strong that portraits of him were sold in Algerian marketplaces.⁶² From the mid- to late 1920s al-Najah published news or commentaries about Turkey in almost every issue. They covered new reforms passed in Turkey, and they reprinted articles from Egyptian papers that were critical of how Mustafa Kemal Atatürk dismantled religious institutions and were interested in him and his private life. In 1925 publications in Algeria reported at length about his divorce, including coverage of his ex-wife’s perspective.⁶³ In 1929 al-Najah’s editor, Smaïl Mami, even used the public thirst for material about Turkey to secure more subscriptions. He wrote that if more readers subscribed, the newspaper could appear daily (which it did briefly in 1930) and could offer readers even more news about Turkey.

Turkey mattered so much to secularists and Muslim reformists alike because of its political and economic independence from Europe, which they described as a victory for the umma. By this period, much of the region except Turkey, Iran, and the eventual Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were under some form of European colonial rule. In 1922 the newspaper L’Ikdam stated, “We salute with a deep respect and veneration … the savior of Turkey, the glory of Islam.”⁶⁴ In 1923 the cofounder of al-Najah, El-Hachemi, wrote, “The [Turkish] coup d’état was a great event, and it pleased all the Muslims [of the world].”⁶⁵ An unsigned 1928 editorial in al-Najah stated, “Yesterday the Eastern states [Turkey and Iran] were enslaved. The Europeans had them by their necks, but today they only want to live free from this bondage and enjoy what modern states enjoy.”⁶⁶ Interwar authors used the language of “bondage” to refer to the plight of the colonized, so the parallels to the colonized were clear to readers. These states had successfully “tak[en] back [their] freedom from” Europe and laid claim to their right to build their own modern states. Even in 1938, after Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s death, the nationalist newspaper El Ouma commemorated the fact that he upheld “the dignity of Islam.”⁶⁷ His victory in Turkey, they wrote, ensured that “the crushing of the Crescent by the Cross” would not happen. Such commentaries used emotive language to evoke feelings of victory and shared pride among readers. Intellectual circles were abuzz over news about Turkey in the early twentieth century. Malek Bennabi described how even as a teenager who attended the Ecole Jules Ferry in Constantine, he closely following the news from Turkey by skimming newspapers in the local grocery store.⁶⁸ Later in a madrassa where he was training to become a magistrate, he and fellow students regularly discussed Mustafa Kemal Atatürk at the local café.

The way these Muslims in Algeria read Mustafa Kemal Atatürk illustrates the nuances to their international allegiances. Even though Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was known for his efforts to secularize Turkey, Muslims in Algeria still saw him as the strong Muslim leader who saved Turkey from the fate of the colonized states of North Africa and the Middle East. The language of “Crescent” and “Cross” referenced not religion but European dominance and Muslim resistance. This frame was not entirely new to Algerians. They equally celebrated the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid’s victory over the Greeks in the 1897 Greco-Turkish War as a victory for the Muslim world.⁶⁹ Yet while Abdul-Hamid’s official title was the caliph of all Muslims, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk dismantled Turkey’s religious institutions, including the caliphate itself. While scholars and lay audiences alike have tended to overemphasize the explanatory power of religion in the Middle East, the framing of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as a Muslim hero in spite of his secular reforms reflects the overlaps between religious language and discussions about political hegemony and resistance.

In their enthusiasm about how Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s reforms had transformed Turkish society, Muslim commentators in Algeria continually returned to the question of women’s advancement.⁷⁰ Publications in Algeria also reported on the successes of the regimes of Reza Shah in Iran and Amanullah Khan in Afghanistan in terms of reforms for women, as well as women’s rights movements in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and India.⁷¹ Many felt transformations in women’s status were underway across the region, or “the order of the day,” as one commentator described it.⁷² The analysis that follows is thus shaped by the attention of commentators within Algeria, who most often referenced developments in Turkey and Egypt. Although Tunisia’s feminist movement was also developing in the interwar years, it received almost no coverage in Algeria. While feminist movements in Syria and Lebanon were occasionally mentioned, they too received little coverage.

Commentators in Algeria identified the formula that seemed to govern developments across the Middle East: women’s advancement had ripple effects and elevated the whole society. El-Hachemi wrote that women’s uplift in Turkey enabled women to contribute their intellect and labor, which in turn uplifted the whole society.⁷³ In this formulation, women’s advancement was not a by-product of Turkey’s modernization but rather “one of the biggest causes.” Benriba wrote in La Voix des Humbles that the “emancipation of the woman” that was underway “everywhere” had produced “evolution” and “prosperity” that benefited everyone.⁷⁴La Défense reported that in Iraq the education of young girls granted them “a new mentality,” which in turn worked to produce a “modern society” and a move away from “backward traditions.”⁷⁵ The parallel to Algeria was clear. Algerian society suffered in stagnation because of its inability to capitalize on women’s potential contributions. As an unsigned editorial in al-Najah in 1927 stated, unlike the rest of the Middle East, “no one [in Algeria] is taking care of the education of women … not the administration, not the Parliament … no one.”⁷⁶ Calls for women’s education in Algeria were similarly framed in terms of the potential uplift of Muslim society. Authors in La Voix des Humbles and La Voix Indigène, for example, claimed women’s education would serve as a catalyst for “social reconstruction” and “social progress in Algeria.”⁷⁷

Commentators frequently contrasted the status of Algerian women with their Middle Eastern counterparts. On one hand, there was the “disastrous situation” of Muslim women in Algeria.⁷⁸ They were stagnant, “stuck in ignorance.” The French’s responsibility in this issue was obvious, but in his wedding speech, Abou-Ezzohra blamed Muslim society as well for this calamity. He reasoned that it was Muslims’ “egoism,” “lack of concern,” and tolerance of the “corruption of customs” that had enabled this terrible state of affairs. Muslim women suffered as a result, but they were not alone. Women’s education, he argued, was “the greatest factor of [their] evolution,” and he concluded that Muslims were “punishing [them]selves” by not affording Muslim women an education. A range of social issues, including “the bad education of our children” and the high divorce rate, reflected this society in crisis. Yet Abou-Ezzohra was also filled with “hope for a better future” because the number of educated Muslim girls was increasing.

Other commentators also moved between the status of women in Algeria as compared to the Middle East. Muhammad bin Ahmad al Mansur compared the capabilities of women of the Middle East to Algerian women in al-Bassair.⁷⁹ He wrote that after he read “beautiful articles [written] by the Arab ladies of the East,” he was “melting of sadness and misery when [he] consider[ed] the luck of Algerian women in Arabic education.” An unsigned editorial in al-Najah stated, “Send your daughters to school to save them from poverty and to work toward the development of the region. This is why the liberated Eastern women do their work, just as men do their work, and that is perfection.”⁸⁰ Education would simultaneously improve the immediate material circumstances of women and their families, as well as “develop … the region.” Both women and men had their own particular role to play in this uplift project. The focus on “the region” here indicates how the idea of uplift was not limited to a national context. Instead, women’s education was a vehicle for Muslims in Algeria to participate in the broader uplift of “the region.” Commentators insisted that for Muslims in Algeria to evolve—in whatever limited way was possible under French colonialism—they needed to take seriously the question of women’s education.⁸¹

As commentators across communities envisioned women as equal participants in a vibrant, modern society, references to the Middle East assuaged concerns that perhaps women’s advancement projects may have unpredictable results.⁸² One author noted, for example, that Turkish women who were educated and were employed in office buildings, banks, and businesses occupied their new posts “honorably.”⁸³ Their intact “honor” signaled to readers that their morality and modesty was not compromised by their new labor or increased public presence. Abou-Ezzohra described how since women’s education became a priority in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, women were now in leadership roles in “literary, scientific, athletic, and political movements.”⁸⁴ As women took on these public and important roles in society, he noted, they “continued to wear their hijab.” His juxtaposition of women’s leadership with their hijab demonstrated for his readers that education would not necessarily lead women to lose their religiosity or Muslim identity.

Women’s Rights and the Progress of Civilization

These discussions about women’s education were multidirectional. While Muslims were invested in a discourse about Islam’s capacity to be modern and in developments from Middle Eastern countries, they mobilized such discourse to critique France. While their definitions of progress differed, there was consensus among almost all interwar commentators that “progress” was something good to aspire to. Moreover, and crucially, for them, progress was universal. Algerian Muslim commentators did not simply lay claim to progress as something the French had and that they as Muslims were entitled to as a universal good. On the contrary, they argued that the very universality of progress meant that in some cases, the French could learn from Muslims. Women’s inheritance and voting rights, for example, were two such key instances. The picture that emerges, then, is one of progress as a collective process in which Muslims in Algeria take it as foundational that they and the French are equal participants. This was a fundamental restructuring of power relations. Algerian Muslims and French settlers may be temporarily placed in unequal positions due to the power structures of colonialism, and Muslims may therefore need to make claims on France, but such claim-making was not a concession to French superiority.

Discussions about women were a forum to assert not only the compatibility between Islam and women’s rights but also their ability to access progress as Muslims. Benriba wrote in La Voix des Humbles, “While the Turkish women can vote and enjoy full participation in politics as equals, her French and Algerian sisters are still unable to vote… . The progress of civilization is not Christian, not Oriental or Occidental, but universal.”⁸⁵ On the question of women’s suffrage, Turkey was more advanced than not only Algeria but France as well. Just as Muslims in Algeria framed Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s initial victory as a shared success, the progress of his reforms offered them the opportunity to claim their ownership of “the progress of civilization.” To them, developments in Turkey proved that Muslim spaces could advance alongside (and even surpass, as on the question of suffrage) Europe. That Muslim countries have “advanced” beyond Europe in terms of women’s inheritance rights and suffrage was a discursive challenge to the French colonial narrative of Muslim backwardness and misogyny. Such claims appeared in other Middle Eastern publications as well. One “Echoes from the Orient” column of L’Égyptienne quoted another publication that wrote, “What revenge of the weaker sex who, in Turkey, have gone beyond Europe!”⁸⁶ Such claims carried particular weight in Algeria’s settler-colonial context because they challenged the colonial logics that used supposed Muslim misogyny to justify colonial policies and practices.

Through their attention to the rights Islam granted women, commentators reclaimed Islam as a modern force more feminist than other legal regimes. Algerian commentators were not alone in these claims about the importance of women’s rights within Islam. The language of Amanallah Khan’s constitutional reforms in Afghanistan, for example, similarly asserted that women’s rights were such a crucial part of the sharia that to violate one necessarily meant violating the other.⁸⁷ In Algeria the reformist leader and editor of La Défense Lamine Lamoudi asserted in Al Islah, “No women in the world have rights like women in Islam.”⁸⁸ He wrote that Muslim women had “moral rights and civil rights,” most notably the right to maintain their own wealth and property, independent of their husbands or families.

Many commentators contrasted the rights Islam granted women with those enjoyed throughout history by European women. Muslim commentators in Algeria took great pleasure in noting that Muslim women had enjoyed the right to maintain their own wealth and property independent of their husbands or families and the right to divorce since Islam’s inception, while these were relatively recent rights for European women. Writing in the communist La Lutte Sociale, Ahmed Smaili wrote that “Islam accords women rights that even ‘civilized’ Europe is far from knowing, except in the U.S.S.R.”⁸⁹ Like the comparisons between women’s suffrage in Turkey and France, such claims offered Muslim commentators the ability to push back against French colonial claims about Islam’s inherent misogyny and inferiority.

From Students to Teachers: A Conclusion

Discussions about women’s education exploded in the interwar Muslim press. They responded to the material reality that there were few educational options available for Muslim girls in Algeria. Commentators also looked abroad to the educated, modern women of the Middle East, whom they saw as an emblem of what was possible in Algeria. References to both Islam’s feminist potential and news from the Middle East fueled arguments that if Muslim women could be educated, there would be uplift for all of Muslim society, despite the ways it was constrained by settler colonialism. Such claims in turn enabled commentators to reclaim Islam’s emancipatory potential from women in the face of French colonial claims which equated Islam with misogyny. McDougall has explained that there was a broad “gradualist, reformist politics that fez-wearing, French-education professionals and turbaned or chechia-capped Islamic scholars draped in the burnus could comfortably share,” which predominantly involved “education—in French and Arabic, for boys and girls, at all levels—and opposed administrative inequity, popular ignorance and ‘superstition’, and” the corruption of Muslim elites working within the colonial bureaucracy.⁹⁰ McDougall uses pieces of dress—the fez, chechia, burnous—to describe how multiple communities, each with their own particular set of allegiances and sartorial norms, were able to embrace the reformist position around particular issues, among them education at all levels for Muslim boys and girls.

By the end of the interwar period, there was still no consistent, formalized curriculum for Muslim girls in French colonial schools. Most continued to offer only artisanal training. In 1949 there was finally a fusion of Muslim and settler education tracks, so Muslim children were no longer segregated into their own classes and were taught with the same curriculum as European children. The numbers of Muslim boys and girls enrolled in secondary education and higher education increased from 1,358 in 1940 to 6,260 in 1954, as well as from eighty-nine Muslims enrolled in higher education in 1940 to 589 in 1954. Meanwhile, the numbers of Muslim reformist schools across Algeria continued to rise after the interwar period from seventy in 1935 to 144 in 1949 and 181 by 1954.⁹¹ In 1951 there were 16,286 students enrolled in reformist schools across Algeria, 6,696 or 41 percent of whom were girls.⁹² The influence of the Muslim reform movement continued to grow as well, alongside this expansion in schools. The AOMA’s educational apparatus continued to formalize, with earlier generations of students becoming teachers, including women.

Reformist education for women expanded in the decades following the interwar years, beyond what Ben Badis envisioned. Reformist schools had an enormous impact for the girls who attended, the fruits of which Charlotte Courreye has argued were most visible in the 1950s. While Ben Badis was initially committed to educating women so that mothers would transmit Islamic values to their children, the reformist education system for girls multiplied and expanded in subsequent decades. Courreye has written that the generation of girls educated within these schools in the 1950s were so committed to their education, they resisted any attempts by their families to prematurely marry them off. Some of the girls educated in such schools in the 1930s and 1940s were also serving as teachers themselves by the 1950s. In a photograph of students at the reformist Ecole al-Tahdib in Algiers, open from 1954 to 1962, the female students are unveiled.⁹³ Their unveiling illustrates their willingness to break from strict Islamic doctrine, a departure from the informed mothers Ben Badis envisioned when he first began educating women in the 1910s.

These dynamics were also at play in the education and career of author and politician Zuhur Wunisi. Born in 1936 in Constantine, Wunisi was among the early generations of students to be educated in reformist schools. There was such demand for Arabic-language education in the reformist schools that Wunisi began teaching even after only having completed her primary education. In her autobiography she describes a tense encounter she once had with an AOMA inspector of education, who wanted to ensure her teaching met AOMA standards.⁹⁴ She continued teaching concurrent with her education, which eventually included two degrees from the University of Algiers. She published across a variety of forums, including al-Bassair, the journal of the Muslim Boy Scouts, al-Hayat, and the official organ of the FLN, al-Moudjahid.⁹⁵ In 1955 in al-Hayat, she published an article in which she used the historical example of the seventh-century companion of the Prophet Muhammad, Asma bint Abi Bakr, to encourage women to engage in revolutionary warfare alongside men.⁹⁶ As part of the first generation of Muslim girls to receive an education in Muslim reformist schools, her education imbued her with both the historical knowledge and the ideological vision to articulate this call to arms for Muslim women.

In the post-independence period, Wunisi served in the Algerian parliament and held cabinet positions across multiple presidencies in the 1970s and 1980s. In the interwar years Ben Badis had written that he was against the participation of women in high political positions, yet Wunisi’s expansive career, which began in reformist schools, illustrates how they served as a launching pad for women, beyond what Ben Badis originally envisioned.⁹⁷ Her story illustrates how the interwar years sparked feminist possibilities that expanded later. While there was disagreement among Muslims about women’s education—what subjects it should include, whether it should be in French or Arabic, what its goals were—women took advantage of the openings available to them to write in to the press and demand better, as well as to gain an education and play a larger societal role, in the case of women like Wunisi. Of course, interwar debates also included authors like those in al-Balagh al-Jazairi who suggested women’s education could corrupt Muslim society. Yet the gradual expansion of women’s educational possibilities and growing support for women’s education as a project in subsequent decades suggests that such voices were limited in their impact.

The next chapter turns to the debates over women’s and men’s headwear. Like those over education, these discussions saw Muslim dress for what it said about Muslim society. As with education, international references were key to how commentators in Algeria understood themselves, framed their sartorial choices, and envisioned more prosperous, feminist futures.