Conclusion

On the evening of February 24, 1954, Muslim men and women gathered at the Opéra of Algiers. The building, which bordered the casbah, had been constructed between 1850 and 1853, only two decades into the French occupation of Algeria. Its principal architect, Charles Frédéric Chassériau, was also responsible for the design of a number of important structures in Egypt, Algeria, and France, including the consulate of France in Alexandria, the Marché des Capucins in Marseille, and the boulevard de l’Impératrice Eugénie in Algiers with its arcades that were meant to recall Paris. That evening in February 1954, the Opéra hosted the annual gala of the Association des femmes musulmanes algériennes (Association of Muslim Algerian Women, AFMA). The night was an opportunity for members and supporters to gather, enjoy performances of dance and Andalusian music, and raise funds for the organization’s operations. AFMA’s efforts included agitation for increased access to education for Muslims, as well as material support to poor families and to women whose husbands had been arrested or detained as political prisoners.

Amid the festivities that night were speeches by the organization’s president and founder, Mamia Chentouf, and its secretary-general, Nefissa Hamoud. Chentouf addressed the audience in Arabic. She contended that women’s limited participation in social and intellectual life was one of causes of the “decline of the nation.”¹ She lamented that some Muslim men were so ignorant that they “oppose[d] the liberation of the Muslim woman in the name of Islam.” Chentouf insisted that instead, it was the rights Islam accorded women that “liberated her.” Chentouf described the contradiction between Islam’s feminist possibilities, the former glory of Islamic history, the current state of “decline” Muslims in Algeria suffered, and the enduring misogyny Muslim women in Algeria continued to face. Two days later, the PPA’s nationalist newspaper L’Algérie Libre reported on the gala with a quotation from Chentouf as the article’s title: “Women’s emancipation is a religious obligation and a social necessity.”

Chentouf’s speech that evening drew on many of the same themes that had preoccupied interwar Algerian commentators, including Islam’s support for women’s advancement and the need to reform Muslim women’s status for society to progress. She echoed the interwar commentators who insisted that women’s advancement reflected a commitment to Islamic principles, not a project of French assimilation. Her choice to address the audience in Arabic also indicates the orientation of the association broadly, which, like the other nationalist organizations in its milieu, insisted on Muslims’ identity as both Arabs and Muslims. While she drew on Islamic evidence, she was unveiled. Her ability to deliver such a speech in front of a crowd within the Opéra of Algiers—one of the monuments of the French colonial project—reflects how these interwar ideas gained a new legitimacy within a nationalist frame on the eve of the Algerian War of Independence.

Chentouf’s life was formed by many of the interwar dynamics this book has analyzed. Her childhood involved multiple migrations. She was born in 1922 in a small village, but her father’s support for the reformist Association of Oulémas was so contentious among the village’s Sufis that the family eventually migrated to the nearby seaside town of Nemours. Nemours was coincidentally also the town where the domestic worker and communist activist Rahma ben Drahou lived and worked. In Nemours Chentouf’s parents were able to secure her a position within a French colonial primary school and eventually in 1935 an upper-level French colonial school in Mascara, a town 250 kilometers east of Nemours. Later, as a midwifery student at the University of Algiers, she would join the AEMAN, as well as Messali Hadj’s nationalist party, the PPA-MTLD.

In 1947 Chentouf founded the AFMA, an auxiliary to the PPA-MTLD, with Hamoud. While sources point to the presence of women (and their youyous, which signaled affirmation and support) during Hadj’s public speeches in the 1930s, the party lacked any formal organ specifically for its women adherents until the creation of the association. Indeed, this blind spot with respect to women until 1947 reflected nationalism’s ambivalence about the problems Muslim women faced. The PPA-MTLD, for example, had never had a coherent policy with respect to women since the foundation of its newspaper, Étoile nord-africaine, in 1926.² Its position broadly was that women suffered because of the conditions created by empire. When the nationalist struggle would succeed in the creation of an independent Algeria, the problems Muslim women faced would inevitably fade away. Yet the PPA-MTLD was able to mobilize women into participation in the nationalist struggle through a range of networks, including Muslim reformist schools and eventually the AFMA.

Despite Muslim women’s growing activism since the interwar years, French colonial administrators continued to claim that Muslim women’s religion and customs prohibited their advancement. In a 1952 letter to the minister of the interior, Governor-General Roger Léonard wrote that Muslim women’s limited opportunity “results from customs and Quranic principles [and thus] escapes the direct action of the legislator.”³ He opened his letter with this claim and then called for greater access to education for Muslim girls in Algeria as an important first step toward greater participation in public life. He closed his letter with the assertion that Muslim women’s rights depended on “the reactions of a society, attached to its religious customs, and infinitely sensitive to any measure that appears to be a violation of its consciences.” He called for more education for Muslim women, an empty platitude in between the opening and closing of his letter, where he echoed long-standing claims by administrators that Muslim patriarchy was too intransigent and Muslim society too sensitive for the state to be able to intervene in any regard on behalf of Muslim women. This stance both absolved the state from its failure to educate Muslim women or improve the material conditions of their lives, while also shifting the blame to nebulous Muslim customs.

Less than eight months after the Association of Muslim Algerian Women’s gala, on November 1, 1954, the FLN attacked a series of targets across Algeria—an event that launched the start of the Algerian War of Independence. This book concludes with Chentouf’s story not to suggest there was a neat, linear progression from Muslim women’s limited participation in public life at the start of the twentieth century to their prominent position on the eve of the Algerian War. Rather, this book has mapped how interwar discussions about women were seeds that bloomed—with the support of other factors—into later developments.

In the later decades of the twentieth century Algerian feminism became more organized and vocal. In the 1980s in particular there was a proliferation of women’s publications, academic texts, associations, and marches.⁴ Algerian feminists like Chérifa Benabdessadok, Chafika Dib-Marouf, and Souad Khodja published academic texts on feminism that took up many of the questions first posed by interwar commentators. They asked: How could categories of tradition and modernity be questioned and remade? What would it mean to consider such questions without the colonial gaze? Could Islam be an emancipatory force for women? Decades later, in 2019, a group was founded in Algeria called Les Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie (The archive of women’s struggle in Algeria). With a Facebook group of thousands of members, the group has photographed and disseminated several Algerian feminist publications, including some pages from Djamila Debèche’s 1947 L’Action.

While much of the historiography on Muslim women in twentieth-century Algeria has focused on their participation in the War of Independence, this book has turned our attention instead to the interwar years.⁵ The interwar discussions about women reflect a moment of colonial internationalism.⁶ Interwar commentators were critical of empire, and yet many remained ambivalent about nationalism. They were invested in news from abroad, most frequently from the Middle East, and they used this news as material to help them work rhetorically through the crisis of their present moment. At the center of this temporal anxiety were concerns about women. The future—full of possibility—became the space onto which commentators could project their aspirations for both Muslim women and Muslim society in Algeria writ large. These tensions of course persisted into the rest of the twentieth century, but both nationalism and the eventual FLN government attempted to subsume them under the singular identity of Muslim, Arab, Algerian.

Attention to this period with a turn away from the teleology of the War of Independence reveals a whole host of actors and discussions that the focus of nationalism has rendered insignificant. In 1962 writer Kateb Yacine stated, “To write in French is almost, on a much more elevated level, to snatch a gun from the hands of a paratrooper.”⁷ As early as May 1922, the schoolteachers who were part of the Association of Schoolteachers of Indigenous Origin used their platform, La Voix des Humbles, to raise critiques and to agitate, in French, for change. Like the Young Algerians of that same generation, they were culturally and politically assimilationist and yet also raised critiques of the French colonial project. Like other publications, they too suffered from surveillance and censorship from the state. Central to the transformation they envisioned for Muslim society was the position of Muslim women and their limited access to education. My intention here is not to posit a new origin story of Algerian anti-colonial nationalism with these schoolteachers at the center. Rather, I propose an expansion of our notion of what constitutes radical imaginings. The fluid possibility of the interwar years enabled transnational imaginings of how women’s advancement could transform Algeria.

Thinking with feminism as a possibility rather than a fixed identity allows us to analyze the ideas, commitments, and negotiations of multiple social, political, and religious groups together. This offers a path forward from the scholarly interest in the “agency” and “resistance” of Middle Eastern women, both of which have been complicated in recent decades by scholars Saba Mahmood and Judith Tucker. In the case of colonial Algeria, Sarah Ghabrial has explored how as women navigated the bifurcated legal system, they may have pushed back against the pressures of patriarchy in their own lives while reinforcing colonial assumptions about Muslim misogyny.⁸ Augustin Jomier has explored the case of Mzabi washers of the dead who used their powerful position to enforce patriarchal norms.⁹ Ghabrial and Jomier have further complicated the older categories of “agency” and “resistance” by showing how even as women resisted one form of power, they may have upheld another.

Attention to interwar discussions about women, this work argues, reveals the contours of multiple sets of power relations—between women and men, rural and urban, poor and elite, Sufi and reformist. As commentators envisioned new futures for women and for Algeria broadly, they had to contend with these social divisions and work through (or sometimes conveniently avoid) how such divisions would be resolved in the future. While their versions of advancement varied and were envisioned toward varying ends, most saw women’s advancement as a critical means toward a better future. Even some reformists who envisioned women’s social role as predominantly within the home still sought to create more equitable power relations within the family and more (albeit limited) opportunities for women’s advancement. In Algeria discussions about women and feminist imaginings matter, I argue, because they constitute a realm of emancipatory action that was able to operate under the constraints of colonialism. The enduring scholarly interest in nationalism has obfuscated attention to such imaginings as historically significant. While they sometimes intersected and upheld nationalist thought, these discussions about women also connected Algeria to the broader Middle East and reflected a geographic and intellectual gaze that was multidirectional.

My analysis’s focus on labor, education, and dress in chapters 2, 3, and 4 echoes ongoing processes of modern subject formation underway across the Middle East and much of the world. Of effendi status in Egypt, for example, Lucie Ryzova has written, “At the center [of effendi status] was a claim on modernity, institutionally codified through (modern) education and (modern) employment, and expressed by (modern) dress.”¹⁰ These three domains, labor, education, and dress, in other words were contested sites of debates about modernity and social change elsewhere too. In Algeria, this work demonstrates, these discussions were shaped by how colonialism constrained Muslim colonial subjects. Instead of the kind of white-collar labor that made effendis in Egypt, Muslim women in Algeria were limited to domestic service. Instead of discussions about the importance of education to train men to work for an “inwardly expansive modern state” as in Egypt, discussions about education analyzed here focused on the limited access and curriculum available to Muslims in Algeria. In discussions about dress too, while the Egyptian effendi could codeswitch between traditional and modern modes of dress, in Algeria the connotations of different forms of dress were shaped by the settler-colonial context.

In the end, interwar discussions about women reflect fluidity. Social divisions were at once rigid categories that divided Muslim society, but simultaneously fluid enough to be navigated and moved between by multiple actors and communities. Algeria’s place in the emergent international world order was also fluid. In some ways it belonged to the Middle East or the Muslim world, and in others it was on the cusp of its own national project. The status of women too was fluid. Some doors, like those of Muslim reformist schools, were opening to women, while others, such as access to most professions, remained firmly shut. While more elite urban women maintained a limited public presence, other working-class women moved between homes, neighborhoods, and even cities as part of their work. In later decades some of this fluidity would narrow as nationalism’s centrifugal power strengthened. Yet the interwar moment remains important because of the possibilities for women’s advancement that arose as feminism, internationalism, and Muslim reform intersected.