Notes
Introduction
1. Abou-Ezzohra, “En instruisant nos filles nous deviendrons meilleurs, extrait d'un discours prononcé à l'occasion d'un mariage,” La Voix Indigène, July 12, 1934, 2.
2. Though it is admittedly Eurocentric, I use the term “interwar” throughout this book because of its usefulness as a shorthand for the period in question and because, as Marc Matera and Susan Kingsley Kent have shown, it was truly a global historical moment, as populations across the world enjoyed new access to global news and formed various international solidarities.
3. Laure Blévis, “La citoyenneté française au miroir de la colonisation: étude des demandes de naturalisation des ‘sujets français’ en Algérie coloniale,” Genèses 53 (2003): 25–47.
4. Marya Hannun, “States of Change: Women, Islamic Reform, and Transregional Mobility in the Making of 'Modern' Afghanistan” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2021), 204.
5. For the sake of clarity to nonspecialist audiences, I am using the term “settler” to refer to the European population of Algeria, legally classified as “Algerians” in some periods of the colonial era. My intent is not to assert that there was always an Algerian nation this population was outside of. To the contrary, at the time these people were citizens of the legal and geographic space called “Algeria.” For clarity’s sake, though, I find “settler” allows for the clearest and most immediate distinction between Europeans living in Europe and Europeans living in Algeria, as well as those legally classified as “Algerians” in the colonial era and those classified as “Algerians” post-1962.
6. Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 38.
7. Mahfoud Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 77.
8. Gilbert Meynier, L’Algérie révélée: La guerre de 1914–1918 (Paris: Editions Bouchene, 2015), 405.
9. Donal Hassett, Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918–39 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
10. Judith Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).
11. Charlotte Courreye’s L’Algérie des Oulémas is one recent text that begins to pull out some of Algeria’s connections to the Middle East (mostly Egypt). Charlotte Courreye, L’Algérie des Oulémas: Une histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine (1931–1991) (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020).
12. Samira Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, and Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 4–5.
13. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’ ” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 16.
14. Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 19–20.
15. Margot Badran, Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences (London: Oneworld, 2009).
16. Badran, Feminism in Islam, 4.
17. While recent texts have brought in a range of new perspectives on the topic, feminism in the colonial North African context remains underexamined. See Jean Said Makdisi, Noha Bayoumi, and Rafif Rida Sidawi, Arab Feminisms: Gender and Equality in the Middle East (New York: IB Tauris, 2014).
18. Amy Aisen Kallander, Tunisia’s Modern Woman: Nation-Building and State Feminism in the Global 1960s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Valentine Moghadam, “Feminism, Legal Reform, and Women’s Empowerment in the Middle East and North Africa,” International Social Science Journal 59, no. 191 (2008): 9–16; Margot Badran, “Between Secular and Islamic Feminism/s: Reflections on the Middle East and Beyond,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 1, no. 1 (2005): 6–28; Fleischmann, “Other ‘Awakening’ ”; Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed, 1986).
19. The youyou or zagharid in Arabic is a North African ululation sung by women independently or in unison to show excitement, celebration, or praise, often at particular rituals, like weddings.
20. Natalya Vince, Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory, and Gender in Algeria, 1954–2012 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).
21. Roxanne Panchasi, Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France between the Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 4.
22. Sara Pursley, Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood and Sovereignty in Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).
23. Manu Goswami, “AHR Forum: Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (December 2012): 1462, 1464, 1467.
24. Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “The Futurism of Young Asia,” International Journal of Ethics 28, no. 4 (July 1918): 540.
25. James McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
26. Manijeh Moradian, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 25.
27. Roger LeTourneau, “Social Change in the Muslim Cities of North Africa,” American Journal of Sociology 60, no. 6 (May 1955): 534.
28. Vince, Our Fighting Sisters.
29. Augustin Jomier, “Muslim Notables, French Colonial Officials, and the Washers of the Dead: Women and Gender Politics in Colonial Algeria,” French Politics, Culture and Society 39, no. 1 (2021): 18.
30. Arthur Asseraf, Electric News in Colonial Algeria (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
31. Aaron Spevack, The Archetypal Sunni Scholar: Law, Theology, and Mysticism in the Synthesis of al-Bajuri (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014).
1. The Rise of the Woman Question in Interwar Algeria
1. Mohamed Hamed Filajl, “La Femme Musulmane,” La Défense, November 2, 1934.
2. Mustafa bin Hallush, “Hijab al-Marʾa ʿAda la Din” [Women’s hijab is a custom and is not religious], al-Bassair, January 29, 1937; Hamza Bukusha, “Hijab al-Marʾa Dīn wa-l-Mubalagha fihi ʿAda Sharifa fi al-Islam wa-qablahu” [Women’s hijab is religious and the exaggeration of it is an honorable custom in Islam and before it], al-Bassair, March 5, 1937; Sheikh Abu Yaʿla al-Zawawi, “Hawla Hijab al-Marʾa” [About the veil of women], al-Bassair, March 19, 1937; Mustafa bin Hallush, “Hawla ʿAdat al-Hijab” [About the custom of the hijab], al-Bassair, March 26, 1937.
3. Allison Drew, We Are No Longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 22.
4. James McDougall, A History of Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 131.
5. Drew, We Are No Longer in France, 22.
6. McDougall, History of Algeria, 133–34.
7. Marie Baroy, “Rôle du travail de la femme dans l’évolution sociale de la Casbah” (master’s thesis, Université de Alger, 1943), 122.
8. Marguerite A. Bel, Les arts indigènes féminins en Algérie (Algiers: Ouvrage publié sous les auspices du Gouvernement Général de l’Algérie, 1939).
9. Julia Clancy-Smith, “A Woman without Her Distaff: Gender, Work, and Handicraft Production in Colonial North Africa,” in Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East, ed. Margaret L. Meriwether and Judith E. Tucker (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999), 33.
10. Dahbia Lounas, interviewed virtually by Sara Rahnama, October 31, 2021.
11. Kamel Kateb, Européens, “Indigènes” et Juifs en Algérie (1830–1962) (Paris: Editions de l’Institut national d’études démographiques, 2001), 276.
12. Zeynep Çelik, “A Lingering Obsession: The Houses of Algiers in French Colonial Discourse,” in The Walls of Algiers, ed. Zeynep Çelik, Julia Clancy-Smith, and Frances Terpak (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 134–60; David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Allan Christelow, Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Sarah Ghabrial, “Le ‘fiqh francisé’?: Muslim Personal Status Law Reform and Women’s Litigation in Colonial Algeria (1870–1930)” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2014); Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty; Joshua Cole, Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).
13. There were exceptions to this rule, in the form of smaller political newspapers that reflected new political developments, such as communist or fascist newspapers.
14. Peter Dunwoodie, Francophone Writing in Transition: Algeria, 1900–1945 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005).
15. Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013), 47.
16. Fanny Colonna, “Training the National Elites in Colonial Algeria, 1920–1954,” Historical Social Research 33 (2008): 291.
17. Colonna, 189, 289.
18. Dunwoodie, Francophone Writing in Transition, 15.
19. This figure is for 1936. See Colonna, “Training the National Elites,” 16. There are no statistics on female literacy in French, but almost all of the articles published by Muslim women in the interwar period appeared in French-language newspapers. The government likewise did not collect literacy rates for Arabic. Most Algerian men and some women would have attended Quranic schools (kuttab) as small children. As Arthur Asseraf has noted, “Rote learning from the Quran did not necessarily allow adult men to read a newspaper in the renewed Modern Standard Arabic” (Electric News in Colonial Algeria, 88).
20. Saïd Faci, Mémoire d’un instituteur algérien d’origine indigène (Constantine: Attali, 1931) and L’Algérie sous l’égide de la France contre la féodalité algérienne (Toulouse, 1936); Mohand Lechani, Le malaise algérien (Algiers: Pfeifer et Assant, 1939); Rabah Zenati, Bou-el-Nou (Algiers: La Maison des Livres, 1945).
21. Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault, eds., Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale (1930–1962) (Paris: La Découverte, 2012), 547–52.
22. Claire Marynower, L’Algérie à gauche (1900–1962): Socialistes à l’époque coloniale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2018).
23. Claire Marynower, “Réformer l’Algérie? Des militants socialistes en ‘situation coloniale’ dans l’entre-deux-guerres,” Histoire/Politique 1, no. 13 (2011): 112–24.
24. Claire Marynower, “ ‘À nos sœurs indigènes … le meilleur de notre affection’: Militantes socialistes dans l’Oranie des années 1930,” Genre and Colonization 1 (Spring 2013): 192–231.
25. Fonds Associations, Archive of the Wilaya of Algiers.
26. The numbers of such individuals were also on the rise in the interwar years because of a series of laws that marginally increased the numbers of Muslim elected officials. The Fédération des élus had over one thousand members at its inception in 1927.
27. Dunwoodie, Francophone Writing in Transition, 65.
28. Patrick Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2002).
29. Kamel Kateb, Européens, "Indigènes" et Juifs en Algérie, 194.
30. Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
31. McDougall, History of Algeria, 103.
32. McDougall, 122.
33. Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty, 80.
34. McDougall, History of Algeria, 123.
35. McDougall, 130.
36. Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 159.
37. Within the écoles normales, Muslims were a small minority in the overwhelmingly European student body. Most of the contributors to La Voix des Humbles would have graduated from one of these schools.
38. Colonna, “Training the National Elites.”
39. Memo by Governor-General William Merlaud-Ponty, Fonds École Normale de Bouzareah, Archives Nationales d’Algérie, Algiers.
40. Jonathan Gosnell, The Politics of Frenchness in Colonial Algeria, 1930–1954 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 48.
41. “L’Enseignement des indigènes: un interview avec M. le Recteur Hardy,” L’Echo Indigène, July 4, 1934.
42. “Le Bolchévisme et les instituteurs indigènes,” L’Ikdam, November 29, 1920.
43. Prochaska, Making Algeria French, 10.
44. Vince, Our Fighting Sisters.
45. Julien Fromage, “Innovation politique et mobilisation de masse en ‘situation coloniale’: un ‘printemps algérien’ des années 1930” (PhD diss., École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2012).
46. McDougall, History of Algeria, 161; Courreye, L’Algérie des Oulémas.
47. Courreye, L’Algérie des Oulémas, 35, 38, 50.
48. Courreye, 67.
49. McDougall, History of Algeria, 43.
50. Zahir Ihaddaden, Histoire de la presse indigène en Algérie: des origines jusqu’en 1930 (Algiers: ENAL, 2003).
51. Asseraf, Electric News in Colonial Algeria, 49.
52. McDougall, History of Algeria, 161.
53. McDougall, 161.
54. Letter from Commissaire central de la police de Constantine au préfet de Constantine, July 30, 1923, ANOM ALG GGA 15H 22, Dossiers de presse, Gouvernement général d’Algérie, Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France (hereafter ANOM).
55. Letter from the Prefect of Constantine to the Governor-General, September 1, 1931, ANOM ALG GGA 15H 22, Dossiers du Presse, Gouvernement général de L’Algérie, ANOM.
56. Letter from the Resident General of France in Tunisia to the Governor-General of Algeria, April 11, 1921, MN 19 2, Notes et rapports sur les relations entre les indigènes algériens et les jeunes tunisiens, Archives nationales de Tunisie, Tunis.
57. Other texts that offer more comprehensive overviews of the Muslim press are Zahir Ihaddaden, Histoire de la presse indigène en Algérie des origines jusqu’en 1930 (Algiers: ENAL, 2003), and Dunwoodie, Francophone Writing in Transition.
58. Drew, We Are No Longer in France, 94 (quotation), 5.
59. Newell, Power to Name.
60. Derek Peterson, Steph Newell, and Emma Hunter, African Print Cultures: Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016).
61. Asseraf, Electric News in Colonial Algeria, 42.
62. Ami Ayalon, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy, 1900–1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 103.
63. Malek Bennabi, Mémoires d’un témoin du siècle: l’enfant, l’étudiant, l’écrivain (Algiers: Samar, 1965), 128.
64. Asseraf, Electric News in Colonial Algeria, 191.
65. Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 61.
66.al-Najah, October 22, 1926.
67. “Déclaration,” L’Égyptienne, February 1, 1925.
68.Filastin, October 1929, quoted in Ellen Fleischmann, The Nation and Its “New” Women: The Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1920–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 165.
69. Fleischmann, The Nation and Its “New” Women, 154.
70. Muriam Haleh Davis, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 3.
71. Colonna, “Training the National Elites,” 189.
72. Drew, We Are No Longer in France, 21.
73. Ethan Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Sophie B. Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria, 1870–1962 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
74. McDougall, History of Algeria, 110.
75. Joshua Cole, Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).
76. Ali Merad, Le réformisme musulman en Algérie de 1925 à 1940 (Paris: Mouton, 1967), 67, 62.
77. Dahbia Lounas, interview conducted digitally by Sara Rahnama, October 31, 2021.
78. Courreye, L’Algérie des Oulémas, 35.
79. Hannun, “States of Change,” 27.
80. Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question (New York: Routledge, 1994), 83.
81. Julia Clancy-Smith, “The House of Zainab: Female Authority and Saintly Succession in Colonial Algeria,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, ed. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 256.
82. Jomier, “Muslim Notables,” 18.
83. Joshua Cole, “À chacun son public: Politique et culture dans l’Algérie des années 1930,” Sociétés et Représentations 38 (February 2014): 21–51.
84. Mahieddine surveillance report, ANOM ALG ALGER 9H/37, Surveillance Politique, Gouvernement général de L’Algérie, ANOM.
85. Théatre populaire algerien, ANOM ALG ALGER 4I/190, Service des liaisons nord-africaines, Administration des indigènes, Préfecture d’Alger, ANOM.
86. Hadj Miliani and Samuel Sami Everett, “Marie Soussan: A Singular Trajectory,” in Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France, ed. Samuel Sami Everett and Rebekah Vince (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 82.
87. "Nouveau moyen-âge et renaissance arabe," L’Afrique du Nord illustrée, January 28, 1933.
88. Chris Silver, Recording History Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022), 47, 56, 59, 60 (quotation).
89. Unsigned document, February 1940, Archive of the Archdiocese of Algiers (henceforth AAA), Algiers.
90. Omar Carlier, “Messali et son look. Du ‘jeune Turc’ citadin au zaim rural, un corps physique et politique construit à rebours?” in Le corps du leader: Construction et représentation dans les pays du Sud, ed. Omar Carlier and Raphaëlle Nollez-Goldbach (Paris: Harmattan, 2008), 263-299.
91. J. L. L., “La Situation en Afrique du Nord,” L’Afrique française, July 1936, 395.
92. “Rapport de Police Spéciale d’Alger,” No. 3226, April 14, 1939, ANOM ALG ALGER 4I/67, Service des liaisons nord-africaines, Administration des indigènes, Préfecture d’Alger, ANOM.
2. Domestic Workers in a Changing City
1. Yvonne Mussot, “Enquête sur la femme musulmane,” Oran républicain, June 12, 1937. Throughout the book I use this formulation to offer both colonial and Arabic names for cities.
2. This brief feature in Oran républicain is the only archival trace of Ben Drahou I was able to locate.
3. Letter from the Mayor of the Commune of Arba to the Prefect of Indigenous Affairs, July 8, 1929, ANOM ALG ALGER 2I 50, Administration des indigènes du territoire civil, communes mixtes, Administration des indigènes, Préfecture d'Alger, ANOM.
4. “Artisanat, travail de la laine, main d'œuvre féminine …” 1927–39, ANOM ALG ALGER 2I/50, Administration des indigènes du territoire civil, communes mixtes, Administration des indigènes, Préfecture d'Alger, ANOM.
5.Oran républicain featured a Muslim page on Fridays and a women’s page on Saturdays. Yvonne Mussot, “Enquête sur la femme musulmane,” Oran républicain, June 5 and 12, 1937.
6. Scholarship has paid an exciting new attention to domestic workers in the twenty-first century, including Caroline Kahlenberg, “New Arab Maids: Female Domestic Work, ‘New Arab Women,’ and National Memory in British Mandate Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 52 (2020): 449–67; Attiya Ahmad, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Sumayya Kassamali, “Migrant Worker Lifeworlds of Beirut” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2017); Ray Jureidini, “Sexuality and the Servant: An Exploration of Arab Images of the Sexuality of Domestic Maids Living in the Household,” in Sexuality in the Arab World, ed. S. Khalaf and J. Gagnon (London: Saqi, 2006).
7. Abdelhafidh ben El-Hachemi, “Religion Doesn’t Demand That of Us,” al-Najah, May 27, 1927.
8. Hanan Hammad, Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 14.
9. Evans, Algeria, 35.
10. G. Laloë, Enquête sur le travail des femmes indigènes à Alger (Algiers: Typographie Adolphe Jourdan, 1910).
11. Sarah Ghabrial, “ ‘Muslims Have No Borders, Only Horizons’: A Genealogy of Border Criminality in Algeria and France, 1848–Present,” in Decolonising the Criminal Question: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Problems, ed. A. Aliverti, H. Carvalho, A. Chamberlen, and M. Sozzo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
12. Kamel Kateb, Européens, "Indigènes," et Juifs en Algérie, 166.
13. Alternatively, these statistics can also be represented as 12.4 percent in 1926 (of a total Muslim population of 4.5 million) to 14.9 percent (of a total Muslim population of 5.5 million) in 1936. John Ruedy, Modern Algeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 121.
14. McDougall, History of Algeria, 134. McDougall also maps out the effects of the overpopulation of Algerian cities in this moment, notably in makeshift shantytowns that developed on the outskirts of urban centers.
15. Kateb, Européens, "Indigènes," et Juifs en Algérie, 271.
16. Letourneau, “Social Change in the Muslim Cities of North Africa,” 529.
17. Father Letellier, Report on the Casbah by White Fathers, December 3, 1941, 1, Archives of the Archdioses of Algiers in Algiers, Algeria.
18. Omar Carlier, “Medina and Modernity: The Emergence of Muslim Civil Society in Algiers between the Two World Wars,” in Çelik et al., Walls of Algiers, 63.
19. Father Letellier, Report on the Casbah.
20. Mlle B, “Le travail de la femme dans l’évolution sociale de la casbah d’Alger" [Women’s labor in the social evolution of the casbah of Algiers] (1946), 34, available at BNF. These were predominantly from Kabylia.
21. Laure Lefèvre, “Recherches sur la condition de la femme Kabyle” (PhD diss., Université d’Alger, 1939), 153, available at the Archives of the Wilaya of Algiers.
22. Zeynep Çelik, “A Lingering Obsession: The Houses of Algiers in French Colonial Discourse,” in Çelik et al., Walls of Algiers, 135.
23. Rosalia Bentami, L’Enfer de la Casbah (Algiers: Impr. du Lycée, 1936), 69.
24. Nadia Hijab, “Women and Work in the Arab World,” in Women and Power in the Middle East, ed. Suad Joseph and Susan Slyomovics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 41–51.
25. “Artisanat, travail de la laine, main d'œuvre féminine …”
26. Clancy-Smith, “A Woman without Her Distaff,” 34.
27. “Artisanat, travail de la laine, main d'œuvre féminine …”
28. Charles-Robert Ageron, Les Algériens musulmans et la France (1871–1919), vol. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 849.
29. Marie Baroy, "Rôle du travail de la femme."
30. Lazreg, Eloquence of Silence, 29–35.
31. Clancy-Smith, “A Woman without Her Distaff,” 27.
32. Judith E. Tucker, “The Arab Family in History: ‘Otherness’ and the Study of the Family,” in Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers, ed. Judith E. Tucker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 195–207.
33. My attention to these shifting constellations has benefited from the historiography on the danger associated with Black women’s movement in the United States, including Hazel Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 738–755; Tera Hunter, “The ‘Color Line’ Gives Way to the ‘Color Wall,’ ” in To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998): 98–129; and Marcia Chatelain, “ ‘Modesty on Her Cheek': Black Girls and Great Migration Marketplaces,” in South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 59–95, as well as the historiography of women’s mobility in the Middle East, including Farzaneh Milani, Words, not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011).
34. Maurice Borrmans, “La femme de ménage musulmane en service dans les familles européennes” (master’s thesis, University of Algiers, 1955), 4.
35. “The Danger of Women,” al-Najah, November 19, 1926.
36. Carl Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 13, 78.
37. Baroy, "Rôle du travail de la femme."
38. “Artisanat, travail de la laine, main d'œuvre féminine …”
39. Mussot, “Enquête sur la femme musulmane,” June 12, 1937.
40. Troupe théâtrale "Alif-Ba," March 3, 1941, ANOM ALG ALGER 4I/183, Service des liaisons nord-africaines, Administration des indigènes, Préfecture d'Alger, ANOM.
41. Miliani and Everett, “Marie Soussan," 90.
42. “Artisanat, travail de la laine, main d'œuvre féminine …”
43. “Artisanat, travail de la laine, main d'œuvre féminine …”
44. al-Gharbi, “La femme musulmane,” La Défense, December 7, 1934.
45. In 1939 Mussot married Joseph Charles Enkaoua, a member of the powerful Jewish Enkaoua family of Algeria. Here she may have also been talking to her own community of Algerian Jewish women, since many Jewish Algerian women donned the haik as well. By the interwar period, most urban Jewish women had unveiled, but rural Jewish women continued to wear the haik. Yet Mussot’s columns in Oran républicain either focus on Muslim women as objects of study or speak to women broadly without distinction, so she likely was not speaking to Jewish women here. Hadas Hirsch, “Veiling,” in Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
46. Mussot, “Enquête sur la femme musulmane,” June 12, 1937.
47. “La jeune fille musulmane [The young Muslim girl],” La Voix Indigène, August 11, 1932.
48. Sheikh Yahya bin Muhammad al-Darraji, “Al-Marʾa al-Muslima wa-l-Hijab fi al-Shariʿa al-Islamiyya [The Muslim woman and hijab in Islamic Sharia],” al-Najah, January 25, 1926.
49. In Victorian Britain too, Lynda Nead has shown that men conflated women in public with prostitutes in order to limit women’s movement. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 65. In her study of mobility titled Walking the Victorian Streets, Deborah Nord wrote, “The figure of the fallen woman—the street prostitute and ultimately the bourgeois wife with a past—served as a means of representing first the novelty and buoyancy and then the danger and inevitability of urban experience.” Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 13.
50. al-Darraji, “Al-Marʾa al-Muslima.”
51. Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 31.
52. Abdelhafidh ben El-Hachemi, “Religion Doesn’t Demand That of Us.”
53. “The Danger of Women,” al-Najah, November 19, 1926.
54. Ali ben Ahmad ben Muhammad El-Namri, “The Education of Girls and Unveiling,” al-Balagh al-Jazairi, November 28, 1930.
55. This appeared as part of Ramadan’s calls for better access to education for Muslim women, further analyzed in chapter 3. Muhammad Salih Ramadan, “Taʿlim al-marʾa” [The education of the woman], al-Bassair, November 19, 1937.
56. al-Namri, “Education of Girls and Unveiling.”
57. Mohamed ben Mabrouk, “La femme musulmane,” L’entente franco-musulmane, June 1, 1939.
58. Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty.
59. Many pamphlets were circulated by Catholic groups among settlers in Algeria that compared, for example, France’s birth rate to that of other nations. These materials suggested that because of abortion, France would be weak compared to other global powers. There was a racial element to this material as well, since the fear stoked was not only that France as a nation would be surpassed but also that whiteness would be overtaken by other races. See Fonds Fonctionnement de l’assistance aux mères et nourrissons (1926–1936), DZ/AN/17E/3275, National Archives of Algeria, Algiers.
60. “The Women Thieves,” al-Najah, September 18, 1925.
61. Brian McDonald, Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants: The Female Gang That Terrorised London (London: Milo, 2015).
62.al-Najah, August 15, 1924, 8.
63. Omar Carlier, “Le café maure. Sociabilité masculine et effervescence citoyenne (Algérie XVIIe–XXe siècles),” Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales 45, no. 4 (1990): 975–1003.
64. “Two Sayings about Women,” al-Shihab, September 22, 1927.
65. al-Gharbi, “La femme musulmane"; Abdelhafidh ben El-Hachemi, “Religion Doesn’t Demand That of Us.”
66. “al-Banat al-Jahilat” [Ignorant girls], al-Bassair, April 29, 1938.
67. Séti B. M., “La voix d’une sœur,” La Défense, May 4, 1934.
68. Publication of Alliance Nationale contre la Dépopulation, box ASP/60/2112, Direction de l'Intérieur et des Beaux-Arts, Gouvernement d'Algérie, AN Algeria.
69.al-Najah, May 16, 1928.
70. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 125.
71. Fatma Zohra Benaik, interviewed virtually by Sara Rahnama, March 4, 2019.
72. Dahbia Lounas, interviewed virtually by Sara Rahnama, October 31, 2021.
73. While the Qur’an mandated that Muslims leave a portion of their inheritance to daughters (albeit half of that allotted to male heirs, as given in Surah 4:11), Kabyle tribal agreement in place since 1748 disinherited women entirely. Ali Hacène, a judicial interpreter within the French colonial courts, wrote that the inferiority of women broadly in Kabylia could be traced back to the single issue of their disinheritance. He wrote that most of the Kabyle population was against women’s disinheritance but were bound to the custom, although some went around it by giving money to their daughters before their death. Others reported that even non-Kabyle Algerians had begun this practice of disinheriting their daughters. Ali Hacène, “La femme kabyle: son rôle social en Kabylie, ce qu’il est et ce qu’il doit être,” L’Écho Indigène, September 12, 1934.
74. Etty Terem, Old Texts, New Practices: Islamic Reform in Modern Morocco (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 136.
75. “The Desirable Goal,” al-Najah, December 15, 1926.
76. “Ouargla,” al-Najah, February 24, 1928.
77. Vince, Our Fighting Sisters, chapter 1.
78. Caroline de la Brac Perrière, Derrière les héros: les employées de maison musulmanes en service chez les Européens à Alger pendant la guerre d'Algérie, 1954–1962 (Paris: Harmattan, 1987), 54.
79. Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, and Madeleine Yue Dong, eds., The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
80. The anxiety around modernity producing sexually unrestrained women is not restricted to colonial Algeria. As Durba Mitra has analyzed, such anxieties were formative in colonial India as well. Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
3. The Educated Muslim Woman and Algeria’s Path to Progress
1. “Taʿlim al-Banat Fard” [Education for girls is an obligation.], La Lutte Sociale, July 13, 1937.
2. Jomier, “Muslim Notables,” 8.
3. “Taʿlim al-Banat wa-l-Sufur” [The education of girls and unveiling], al-Balagh al-Jazairi, November 28, 1930, 1.
4. Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 4.
5. Mathéa Gaudry, "L'Instruction de la femme indigène,” L'Afrique française: bulletin mensuel du Comité de l'Afrique française et du Comité du Maroc, December 1935.
6. Charles-Robert Ageron, Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), 71.
7. McDougall, History of Algeria, 146.
8. Fleischmann, “Other ‘Awakening,’ ” 106.
9. Kateb, Européens, “Indigènes” et Juifs en Algérie, 255, 256.
10. Gaudry, “L'Instruction de la femme indigène.”
11. This technical training, however, enabled massive waves of migration of Muslim men to France between the 1920s and the early 1950s. Eric Deroo, Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 372–79.
12. Maurice Viollette, L'Algérie vivra-t-elle?: Notes d'un ancien gouverneur général (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1931), 211.
13. Quoted in Gaudry, “L'Instruction de la femme indigène.”
14. Alongside training schools for girls existed similar workshops for older women. The city of Bousaada, for example, had two of these workshop schools for women. One was attached to and administrated by the school for Muslim boys, while the other was a professional education center for working with wool specifically run directly by local administrators. 26–27 Alg ALGER 2I 50, Administration des indigènes du territoire civil, communes mixtes, Administration des indigènes, Préfecture d'Alger, ANOM.
15. Letter from the Commissary of Police of the City of Oran (M. le Blanc) to the Prefect of Indigenous Affairs, August 26, 1935, Archives of the Wilaya of Oran, Algeria.
16. A. Léon, Colonisation, enseignement et éducation: étude historique et comparative (Paris: Éditions L'Harmattan, 1991).
17. Julia Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 34.
18. “Nasaʾih Islahiyya Hariyya bi-l-Iʿtibar hawla Mashruʿat Sumuw al-Wali al-ʿAm li-Tahsin Halat al-Ahali al-Muslimin” [Reforming advice worth considering about the projects of Violette to ameliorate the situation of Muslim inhabitants], al-Najah, December 22, 1925.
19. “al-Taʿlim al-Sinaʿi - Taraqqihi fi al-Umam al-Ukhra – Taʿlim al-Banat” [Vocational training - It’s development in other nations - The education of girls], al-Najah, November 23, 1923.
20. “Hawla Ihdath Kulliya Kubra li-Taʿlim al-Sanaʾiʿ al-Nisaʾiyya” [About the establishment of a great college for feminine vocational training], al-Shihab, January 21, 1926.
21. “Artisanat, travail de la laine, main d'œuvre féminine …” 1927–1939, ANOM ALG ALGER 2I/50, Administration des indigènes du territoire civil, communes mixtes, Administration des indigènes, Préfecture d'Alger, ANOM.
22. Nadia Mamelouk, “Anxiety in the Border Zone: Transgressing Boundaries in Leïla: revue illustrée de la femme (Tunis, 1936–1940) and in Leïla: Hebdomadaire Tunisien Indépendant (Tunis, 1940–1941)” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2008), 119.
23. Jaouida Chaouch Sellami, “Fondation: Contexte socio-politique, national et international,” in Dar el Bacha: Reflet d’un siècle, 1900–2000 (Tunis: Éditions Caractères, 2000), 17–41.
24. “Des écoles pour nos filles,” La Voix des Humbles, November 1925, 20–25.
25. Mohand Lechani, “La famille indigène en Algérie,” La Voix des Humbles, May 1931, 10–15.
26.al-Najah, October 4, 1929.
27.La Voix des Humbles, December 1934.
28. Houria Ameur, “La femme musulmane dans l’Afrique du Nord,” La Voix Indigène, July 18, 1929.
29. “Admission de jeunes Musulmanes,” Letter from the Sous-Prefect of Philippeville to the Prefect of Indigenous Affaires in Constantine, August 22, 1939, SDR 58, Fonds Service des Reforms, Archive of the Wilaya of Constantine, Algeria.
30. Charlotte Courreye, "L’Association des Oulémas Musulmans Algériens et la construction de l’État algérien indépendant: fondation, héritages, appropriations et antagonismes (1931–1991)" (PhD diss., Université Sorbonne, 2016), 363.
31. Courreye, "L’Association des Oulémas Musulmans Algériens et la construction de l’État algérien indépendant," 362.
32. Merad, Le réformisme musulman en Algérie de 1925 à 1940 (Paris: Mouton, 1967), 327.
33. “Des écoles pour nos filles.”
34. Ali Merad, Ibn Bâdîs: Commentateur du Coran (Paris: Paul Guethner, 1971), 238.
35. Ben Badis, al-Shihab, April 1939, 112, quoted in Merad, Le réformisme musulman en Algérie, 330.
36. Omnia Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” in Remaking Women, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 150.
37. Nova Robinson, Truly Sisters: Arab Women and International Women’s Rights (forthcoming), 132, 136, 109.
38. “La femme musulmane: lettre ouverte aux dames françaises du Congrès de Constantine,” La Voix Indigène, March 10, 1932.
39. Seghir Hacène, “Le Congrès de Constantine,” La Voix Indigène, April 7, 1932.
40. Hamed Largueche, “La femme musulmane,” La Voix Indigène, May 5 1932, 2.
41. Hacène’s response is reprinted in Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 291.
42. Nadia Mamelouk, “Leïla: 1936–1941 bien plus qu’une revue féminine,” in Leïla: Revue illustrée de la femme, 1936–1941, ed. Hafedh Boujmil (Tunis: Éditions Nirvana, 2007), 12, 15.
43. Colonel Chérif Cadi, “Pour la femme musulmane,” La Voix Indigène, May 19, 1932.
44. Colonel Cadi, La Voix Indigène, July 8, 1929.
45. Faissal Abualhassan, “Generating Frenchness: Tensions of Race and Civilization in Chérif Cadi’s Terre d’Islam (1925),” Johns Hopkins African History Seminar, 2019, 9.
46. Abou-Ezzohra, “En instruisant nos filles nous deviendrons meilleurs, extrait d'un discours prononcé à l'occasion d'un mariage,” La Voix Indigène, July 12, 1934.
47. Mohamed Saleh Ramdane, “Taʿlim al-Marʾa” [The education of women], al-Bassair, November 19, 1937.
48. The era in which the Muslims of Algeria “led” “the caravan of life” alluded to earlier periods of Islamic history, perhaps referring to the Islamic Golden Age during the Abbasid caliphate.
49. Muhammad bin Ahmad al Mansur, "Al-Marʾa al-Djazaʾiriyya al-Haditha wa-l-Kitaba fi al-Suhuf” [The modern Algerian woman and writing in newspapers], al-Bassair, November 11, 1938.
50. “La renaissance de la femme irakienne,” originally printed in La Voix des Humbles and later reprinted in the reformist La Défense, April 13, 1934; “The Modern Eastern Uprising in the Country of Afghanistan,” al-Shihab, November 24, 1927.
51. Séti BM, “La voix d’une sœur,” La Défense, May 4, 1934.
52. Séti BM, “La voix d’une sœur.”
53. Kamel Kateb, École, population et société en Algérie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), 45.
54. Courreye, "L’Association des Oulémas Musulmans Algériens et la construction de l’État algérien indépendant,” 94, 95, 96, 362.
55. "al-Tabarruʿat li-Tashyid Jamiʿ Mila al-Hurr wa-Madrasatiha al-Hurra,” al-Bassair, August 20, 1937.
56. “Siham fi Qulub al-Hasidin” [Arrows in the hearts of the envious], al-Bassair, May 3, 1938.
57. "La fête de la Kheira," ANOM ALG ALGER 4I/183, Service des liaisons nord-africaines, Administration des indigènes, Préfecture d'Alger, ANOM.
58. al-Mansur, “al-Marʾa al-Jazaʾiriyya.”
59. Al Kinti, [“The modern eastern uprising in the country of Afghanistan,”] al-Shihab, November 24, 1927.
60. Mohamed Hamed Filaji, “La femme musulmane,” La Défense, November 2, 1934; “The Situation of Muslims in Russia: A Conversation with the Delegate in the Conference of Mecca,” al-Shihab, July 15, 1926.
61. “Ruqi al-ʿAlam al-Islami bi-Taʿlim al-Marʾa” [The Rise of the Muslim world by Women’s Education], al-Najah, October 5, 1927.
62. Bouchène et al., Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale.
63. “Talaq Mustafa Kemal Atatürk” [The divorce of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk], al-Shihab, November 26, 1925.
64.L’Ikdam, November 10, 1922, quoted in Asseraf, Electric News in Colonial Algeria, 138.
65. Abdelhafidh ben El-Hachemi, “Fi Bahr al-Siyasa: al-Hadith ʿan Turkia wa-Mustaqbaliha al-Muzdahir” [In the Sea of Politics: A Talk about Turkey and Her Flourishing Future], al-Najah, October 19, 1923.
66. “al-Imtiyazat al-Ajnabiyya bi-Faris” [Special treatment of foreigners in Persia], al-Najah, May 20, 1928.
67.El Ouma, December 10, 1938, quoted in Asseraf, Electric News in Colonial Algeria, 139.
68. Malek Bennabi, Islam in History and Society, trans. Asma Rashid (Islamabad: Islamic Research Institute, 1988), 4.
69. Asseraf, Electric News in Colonial Algeria, 127–29.
70. Such articles included but were not limited to El-Hachemi, “Fi Bahr al-Siyasa: al-Hadith ʿan Turkia” [In the Sea of Politics: A Talk about Turkey], al-Najah, August 15, 1924; “Feminine Politics in Turkey,” al-Najah, March 6, 1925; “About the Feminist Movement in Turkey,” al-Najah, May 8, 1927; Benriba, “Féminisme et instruction (Turquie et Algérie),” La Voix des Humbles, October 1930; Jean Melia, “Le Réveil de’l'Islam Algérien,” La Voix Indigène, May 24, 1934.
71. Such articles included but were not limited to “Rawdat al-Adab: al-Marʾa al-ʿIraqiyya” [The Garden of Education: the Iraqi woman], al-Shihab, May 20, 1926; "The Industrial Education of Women: Its Advancements in Other Nations, and the Education of Girls," al-Najah, November 23, 1923; al-Najah, October 2, 1927; “The Modern Eastern Uprising in the Country of Afghanistan,” al-Shihab, November 24, 1927; al-Najah, September 16, 1931; Filaji, “La femme musulmane”; Sarah Graham-Brown, “Women’s Activism in the Middle East: A Historical Perspective,” in Joseph and Slyomovics, Women and Power in the Middle East, 23–33.
72. Salah Labdi, “La femme musulmane,” La Défense, November 9, 1934.
73. El-Hachemi, “Fi Bahr al-Siyasa: al-Hadith ʿan Turkia.”
74. Benriba, “Féminisme et instruction."
75. “La Renaissance de la femme irakienne,” La Défense, April 13, 1934.
76. “Opinion of the Muslim World on the Education of Women.”
77. Lechani, “La Famille indigène en Algérie,” 14; Abou-Ezzohra, “En instruisant nos filles nous deviendrons meilleurs,” 2.
78. Abou-Ezzohra, “En instruisant nos filles nous deviendrons meilleurs,” 2.
79. al Mansur, “al-Marʾa al-Djazaʾiriyya.”
80. “Al-taalim al-sanaaii trquya.”
81. Faris Haddad, “Taʾthir al-Marʾa fi al-Hayat al-Ijtimaʿiyya” [The influence of women on the social body], al-Shihab, December 6, 1926; Abderrahman Yalaoui, “Du mariage à la polygamie,” La Voix Indigène, January 21, 1932; Séti B., “La voix d’une sœur,” La Défense, May 4 and 25, 1934; Abou-Ezzohra, “En instruisant nos filles nous deviendrons meilleurs,” 2; “Les Jeunes Algériens pour l’émancipation de la femme musulmane,” La Défense, July 19, 1939.
82. “al-Mujaddidun,” al-Balagh al-Djaziri, April 10, 1931.
83. François Psalty, “L’Émancipation de la femme turque,” L’Écho de la presse musulmane (originally Annales de Turquie), January 24, 1936.
84. Abou-Ezzohra, “En instruisant nos filles nous deviendrons meilleurs,” 2.
85. Benriba, “Féminisme et instruction.”
86. “Échos d’Orient,” L’Égyptienne, May 1938, 38.
87. Hannun, “States of Change,” 198.
88. Mohammad Lamine Lamoudi, “Al-Marʾa al-Jazaʾiriyya al-Algerianah” [The Muslim Algerian woman], al Islah, November 28, 1929.
89. Ahmed Smaili, “Chez les peuples: Égypte: Islam et le féminisme,” La Lutte Sociale, November 21, 1936.
90. McDougall, History of Algeria, 152.
91. Kateb, Ecole, population et société en Algérie, 43.
92. Muhammad al-Bashir al-Ibrahimi, “Al-taqrir al-adabi” [Literary report], al-Bassair, October 15, 1951.
93. Courreye, "L’Association des Oulémas Musulmans Algériens et la construction de l’État algérien indépendant," 366–71, photograph on 370.
94. Zuhur Wunisi, ‘Abra al-zuhūr wa-l-ašwāk, 131–32, quoted in Courreye, "L’Association des Oulémas Musulmans Algériens et la construction de l’État algérien indépendant," 161.
95. Sophia Mo, “Reading Motherhood at the Margins of Algerian Feminist Retellings of Resistance” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, Denver, Colorado, December 3, 2022).
96. Zuhur Wunisi, “al-Marʾa al-Muslima wa-l-Haraka al-Kashfiyya” [The Muslim woman and the Scout Movement], al-Hayat 4 (October/November 1955): 7–8.
97. Merad, Ibn Bâdîs, 216.
4. The Haik, the Hat, and the Gendered Politics of the New Public
1. “Turid al-Hadara?” [You want civilization?], al-Najah, March 13, 1927.
2. I use “hat” in this chapter as a translation of the Arabic native category qubbaʿa, which means simply “hat,” as opposed to the other forms of men’s headwear that could also be referred to as hats.
3. The corpus of materials that Algerian thinkers envisioned as part of sharia included the Quran, hadith, and Sunna (prophetic sayings) texts.
4. Thomas Wide, “Astrakhan, Borqa’, Chadari, Dreshi: The Economy of Dress in Early-Twentieth-Century Afghanistan,” in Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World: Gender, Modernism and the Politics of Dress, ed. Stephanie Cronin (New York: Routledge, 2014), 165–203; Marie Grace Brown, Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017); Reina Lewis, Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
5. While these actors never explicitly defined modernity, they tended to describe it in terms of modernization, technology, urbanization, and an expansion of resources.
6. Vince, Our Fighting Sisters, 140–79; Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); Mayanthi Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Neil MacMaster, Burning the Veil: The Algerian War and the Emancipation of Muslim Women (New York: Manchester University Press, 2009); Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); John Bowen, Why the French Don't Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Ryme Seferdjeli, “ ‘Fight with Us, Women, and We Will Emancipate You’: France, the FLN and the Struggle over Women during the Algerian War of National Liberation” (PhD diss., London School of Economics, 2005); Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005); Mahmood, Politics of Piety; Winifred Woodhull, “Unveiling Algeria,” Genders 10 (Spring 1991): 112–31; Assia Djebar, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (Paris: Des Femmes, 1980).
7. On the broader historiography on men’s dress and comportment, see Hoda Elsadda, “The New Man,” in Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel in Egypt, 1892–2008 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012): 38–58; Hanan Kholoussy, “The Grooming of Men,” in For Better, for Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 23–48; Omar Carlier, “Messali et son look. Du ‘jeune Turc’ citadin au za’im rural, un corps physique et politique construit à rebours?” in Le corps du leader: Construction et représentation dans les pays du Sud, ed. Omar Carlier and Raphaëlle Nollez-Goldbach (Paris: Harmattan, 2008), 263–99; Deniz Kandiyoti, “Gendering the Modern: On Missing Dimensions in the Study of Turkish Modernity” and Resat Kasaba, “Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities,” in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, edited by Bozdogan, Sibel and Resat Kasaba (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).
8. The late Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety challenged this insistence on hijab as stagnant symbol of religion. She demonstrated how for the Egyptian women’s mosque movement, the hijab represented an evolving relationship between self and piety. See also Nilüfer Göle, who further deconstructed the idea of the hijab’s particularism by arguing that secular and religious individuals alike engage in self-fashioning in ways that reflect a particular relationship to modernity and politics. Nilüfer Göle, “Manifestations of the Religious-Secular Divide: Self-State and the Public Sphere,” in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, ed. Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 48.
9. Hannun, “States of Change,” 2.
10.al-Najah, February 5, 1928.
11. Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 199.
12. Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition, 148.
13. Jacob, Working Out Egypt, 207, 222.
14. Terem, Old Texts, New Practices, 14, 18.
15. Yasmine Nachabe, “Marie al-Khazen’s Photographs of the 1920s and 1930s” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2011), 122.
16. Jacob, Working Out Egypt, 189.
17. Katherine Ann Wiley, “The Materiality and Social Agency of the Malahfa (Mauritanian Veil),” African Studies Review 62, no. 2 (2019): 149–74.
18. Dahbia Lounas, interviewed virtually by Sara Rahnama, October 31, 2021.
19. Assia Djebar’s 1985 novel, L'Amour, la fantasia, offers a fictional exploration of this relationship between political conquest and the violent exploitation of female bodies. Assia Djebar, L'Amour, la fantasia (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1985).
20. Aurelie Perrier, “Intimate Matters: Negotiating Sex, Gender and the Home in Colonial Algeria, 1830–1914” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2014).
21. Lazreg, Eloquence of Silence, 53.
22. Edward McAllister, “Yesterday’s Tomorrow Is Not Today: Memory and Place in an Algiers Neighbourhood” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2015).
23. Christopher Breward, Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis (London: Berg, 2004).
24. Weinbaum et al., Modern Girl around the World.
25. Pessah Shinar, Modern Islam in the Maghrib (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004), 270.
26. Various payment receipts, IBA ASP 2 103, Fonds Beaux Arts, National Archives of Algeria, Algiers (hereafter AN).
27. Kamel Chachoua, L’Islam kabyle: religion, état et société en Algérie (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001), 194.
28. Chachoua, 195.
29. Sheikh Abu Ya’la al-Zawawi, “al-Marʾa al-Turkiyya wa-l-Hijab" [The Turkish woman and the hijab], al-Najah, December 29, 1925.
30.al-Bassair, January 29, February 5, March 5, March 12, March 19, April 2, April 9, 1937.
31. Mustafa Ibn Hallush, “Hawla ‘Adat al-Hijab,” al-Bassair, April 2, 1937.
32. Mustafa Ibn Hallush, “Hijab al-Marʾa ʿAda la Din” al-Bassair, January 29, 1937.
33. Hamza Bukusha, “Hijab al-Marʾa Dīn wa-l-Mubalagha fihi ʿAda Sharifa fi al-Islam wa-qablahu,” al-Bassair, March 5, 1937.
34. “Huquq al-Zawjayn” [The rights of the married couple], al-Balagh al-Jazairi, March 11, 1932, 1.
35. Mustafa Ibn Hallush, “Hawla ‘Adat al-Hijab,” al-Bassair, March 26, 1937.
36. Djamila Debèche, “L’Islam ne prescrit pas le port du voile à la femme musulmane,” La Justice, February 20, 1937.
37. Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).
38. Taciturne, “Le voile,” La Voix des Humbles, November 1926, 16.
39. Omnia El Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” in Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women, 150.
40. Mohammed Benhoura, untitled editor’s note, La Justice, February 20, 1937.
41. al-Zawawii, “Hawla Hijab al-Marʾa,” al-Bassair, March 19, 1937.
42. Sheikh Abu Ya’la al-Zawawi, “al-Marʾa al-Turkiyya wa-l-Hijab,” al-Najah, January 19, 1926.
43. “Al-Sufur wa-l-Tahdhir,” al-Shihab, date unknown.
44. Shaykh Yahya Bin Muhammad al-Darraji, “al-Marʾa al-Jazaʾiriyya wa-l-Hijab fi al-Shariʿa al-Islamiyya” [The Muslim woman and hijab in Islamic Sharia], al-Najah, January 25, 1926.
45. al-Zawawii, “al-Marʾa al-Turkiyya wa-l-Hijab.”
46. Debèche, “L’Islam ne prescrit pas le port du voile.”
47. Debèche.
48. Baron, Women’ s Awakening in Egypt, 49.
49. Carlier, “Messali et son look,” 278, 282–83.
50. Clancy-Smith, “A Woman without Her Distaff,” 29.
51. Carlier, “Messali et son look,” 282, 283.
52. Colonna, Instituteurs algériens, 1883–1939 (Algiers: 1975), 16.
53. Tina Mai Chen, “Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, and Gender-formation in Mao’s China,” Fashion Theory 5, no. 2 (2001): 143–71.
54. Jeremy Rich, “Civilized Attire: Refashioning Tastes and Social Status in the Gabon Estuary, 1870–1914,” Cultural and Social History 2 (2005): 189–213.
55. Kathy Piess, Cheap Amusements: Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 63.
56. Jeremy Rich, “Gabonese Men for French Decency: The Rise and Fall of the Gabonese Chapter of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, 1916–1939,” French Colonial History 13 (2012): 23–53.
57. Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
58. “Mustafa Kamal wa-l-Qubbaʿa,” al-Najah, December 25, 1925.
59. Brown, Khartoum at Night, 31, 164–65.
60.al-Najah, July 29, 1927.
61. “Shabab al-Yawm wa-l-Din” [The youth of today and religion], al-Balagh al-Jazairi, February 19, 1932.
62. “Qubbaʿa,” al-Shihab, July 22, 1926.
63. Shakib Arslan, “Jamʿiyyat Talabat Shimal Ifriqiya” [The Association of North African students], al-Shihab, April 1937.
64. Jacob, Working Out Egypt, 210.
65. “Qubbaʿa.”
66. “Labs al-Qubbaʿa,” “Turid al-Hadara,” al-Najah, March 13, 1927.
67. “Sahifat al-Najah,” al-Balagh al-Jazairi, October 17, 1930.
68. “Labs al-Qubbaʿa.”
69. “al-‘Ulamaʾ wa-l-Qubbaʿa” [The ulama and the hat], al-Najah, February 10, 1928.
70. “Labs al-Qubbaʿa” [Wearing the hat], al-Shihab, July 19, 1926.
71. “al-Taqlid al-aʿma fi Ism al-Hadarah” [Blind copying in the name of civilization], al-Bassair, October 23, 1935.
72. “Libs al-Qubbaʿa” [Wearing the hat], al-Shihab, July 15, 1926.
73. James McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria.
74. Rashid, “al-Tarbush wa-l-‘Amama” [The tarbush and the ʿamama], al-Najah, September 25, 1925.
75. Jacob, Working Out Egypt, 224.
76. Rashid, “al-Tarbush wa-l-‘Amama.”
77. “Libs al-qubbaʿa,” al-Shihab, July 19, 1926.
78. Arslan, “Jamʿiyyat Talabat Shimal Ifriqiya.”
79. “Raʾiy hawla al-Tarbush,” al-Shihab, April 29, 1926.
80. Salah al-Abdi, “Taqlid al-Taqlid,” al-Bassair, October 30, 1936.
81. Emna Ben Miled has analyzed how veiling similarly emerged in the Mediterranean region as a cultural practice, unattached to any religion. Emna Ben Miled, Les Tunisiennes ont-elles une histoire? (Tunis: Les Presses de l’Imprimerie Simpact, 1998).
82. Laura Bier, “Feminism, Solidarity, and Identity in the Age of Bandung: Third World Women in the Egyptian Women’s Press,” in Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives, ed. Christopher Lee (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 143–72; Mounira Charrad, “From Nationalism to Feminism: Family Law in Tunisia,” in Family in the Middle East: Ideational Change in Egypt, Iran, and Tunisia, ed. Kathryn Yount and Hoda Rashad (New York: Routledge, 2008), 111–36; Anupama Roy, Gendered Citizenship: Historical and Conceptual Explorations (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2005); Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr, Women, Immigration and Identities in France (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 30 (1988): 61–88.
83. Djamila Debèche, “La femme musulmane dans la société,” Terres d’Afrique, 1946.
5. French Feminists and the New Imperial Feminism
1. al-Gharbi, “La femme musulmane,” La Défense, December 7, 1934.
2. Marie Bugéja, “La femme musulmane,” La Défense, December 14, 1934.
3. Margaret Cook Andersen, Regeneration through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Jennifer Boittin, “Feminist Mediations of the Exotic: French Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, 1921–1939,” Gender and History 22, no. 1 (April 2010): 131–50; Sara L. Kimble, “Emancipation through Secularization: French Feminist Views of Muslim Women’s Condition in Interwar Algeria,” French Colonial History 7 (2006): 109–28.
4. Mrinalini Sinha has noted, “The further point of bringing British and Indian feminisms into the same field of analysis, however, is to demonstrate their co-implication in the history of the combined but uneven evolution of a system whose economic, political, and ideological reach was worldwide.” Mrinalini Sinha, “Mapping the Imperial Social Formation: A Modest Proposal for Feminist History,” Signs 25, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 1077–82.
5. C. Senieh, “Le Prophète a-t-il voulu l’asservissement de la femme musulmane?” La Française, March 19, 1932; “Le salut de femmes turques,” La Française, April 15, 1933; “Chez les féministes de l’Europe Orientale,” La Française, September 30, 1933; Cécile Brunschvicg, “Les progrès du féminisme en Turquie,” La Française, November 8, 1933; “À propos des étudiantes turques,” La Française, November 24, 1934; “Femmes turques d’aujourd’hui” and Andrée Barras, “La femme turque émancipée,” La Française, April 13, 1935; “La Turquie d’Atatürk,” La Française, March 22, 1936.
6. Elsa Mornay, “La femme, l’Islam, et les derniers harems,” Minerva, April 28, 1934.
7. Germaine Malaterre-Sellier, “La libération des femmes musulmanes,” La Française, April 15, 1933 (later reprinted in La Voix des Humbles, July 1933).
8. Robinson, Truly Sisters, 2.
9. Robinson, Truly Sisters, chapter 3; Charlotte Weber, “Unveiling Scheherazade: Feminist Orientalism in the International Alliance of Women, 1911–1950,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 150; Fleischmann, The Nation and Its “New” Women; Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 232–36.
10. “Une Française fait depuis quatre ans partie de la délégation française à la Société des Nations,” La Française, April 12, 1937.
11. G. Buzenet, “Les journées féministes du Maroc,” La Française, April 14, 1934.
12. Abou-Ezzohra, “Instruisons nos filles … et nous deviendrons meilleurs: extrait d’un discours prononcé en Algérie à l’occasion d’un mariage musulman" [Educate our daughters … and we become better: Excerpt from a speech given in Algeria on the occasion of a Muslim wedding], La Française, November 24, 1934.
13. “Le Congrès d’Istamboul: L’Orient et l’Occident coopèrent,” La Française, June 8, 1935.
14. Boittin, “Feminist Mediations of the Exotic.”
15. Germaine Malaterre-Sellier, “En Tunisie,” La Française, May 21, 1932.
16. “Le Congrès d’Istamboul.”
17. Jane Bagnault, “Les femmes françaises et le problème musulman,” La Française, February 15, 1936.
18. “L’Enseignement des Indigènes: Entretien avec M. le Recteur Hardy,” L’Écho Indigène, July 4, 1934.
19. Clancy-Smith, “A Woman without Her Distaff,” 34.
20. “Femmes de Demain vous présente quelques-unes de ses collaboratrices habituelles” [Femmes de Demain presents to you some of its regular contributors], Femmes de Demain, November 14, 1935.
21. Vonnick, “Fête de bienfaisance à Constantine” [Celebration of Charity in Constantine], Femmes de Demain, May 15, 1936.
22. Vonnick, “Chez les petites Musulmanes" [At the Home with the Little Muslim Girls], Femmes de Demain, March 15, 1936.
23. A. Lafuente, “L’Aiguille musulmane: lettre ouverte à Mme Malaterre-Sellier,” La Française, April 15, 1933; Ghabrial, “Le ‘fiqh francisé’?”; Rachid, “Une grande Française Madame Aurelie Tidjani,” L’Echo Indigène, January 10, 1934. For more on Aurélie Picard, see Ursula Kingsmill Hart, Two Ladies of Algerie: The Lives of Aurelie Picard and Isabelle Eberhardt (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1987).
24. Letter from Jeanne Bottini-Honot to Joseph Brenier, April 23, 1939, 20140057/20/365, La Ligue de l’Enseignement, Archives Nationales de France, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, France.
25. “Une Conférence de Mme Bottini,” La Défense, January 25, 1935.
26. Letter from Jeanne Bottini-Honot to Joseph Brenier, April 23, 1939.
27. Sakina Messaadi, Nos Sœurs Musulmanes, ou, Le mythe féministe, civilisateur, évangélisateur du messianisme colonialiste dans l’Algérie colonisée (Houma, 2001), 40.
28. “Une conférence de Mme Bottini.”
29. “Une lettre de femme indigène,” La Française, February 28, 1931.
30. Peter Knauss, The Persistence of Patriarchy: Class, Gender, and Ideology in Twentieth-Century Algeria (New York: Praeger, 1987), 56.
31. Rosalia Bentami, L’Enfer de la Casbah, 15.
32. Bentami, 15.
33. Lucienne Jean-Darrouy, "Le statut personnel et la femme musulmane," Femmes de Demain, March 15, 1937.
34. Marie Bugéja, “La femme musulmane: Mon but dans l’évolution de la femme musulmane algérienne,” L’Écho Indigène, February 7, 1934.
35. Marie Bugéja, “Pour l’évolution des femmes musulmanes,” La Française, April 28, 1934.
36. Letter from the Mayor of Montgolfier to the Prefect of the Department of Oran, July 19, 1934, Direction de l'Interieur et des Beaux-Arts, Gouvernement d'Algérie, AN Algeria, pp. 2–4.
37. On medical services for Algeria’s rural Muslim population, see Claire Fredj, “L’administration française et les soins aux ‘indigènes’: la mise en place de la ‘triade médicale’ dans l’Algérie des années 1920,” in Les savoirs de l’administration: Histoire et société au Maghreb du XVIe au XXe siècle, ed. Elboudrari Hassan and Norman Daniel (Casablanca: Fondation du roi Abul Aziz, 2015), 119–36.
38. Madame Toubab, “La Fdans la vie coloniale,” L’Action Nouvelle, July 1, 1933.
39. Paule L. Becquet de Nodreat, “La Clinique indigène d’Alger,” La Française, March 19, 1932.
40. “La Femme française aux colonies” [The French woman in the colonies], Femmes de Demain, June 1, 1936.
41. Malaterre-Sellier, “La Libération des femmes musulmanes.”
42. This perspective may have been informed by her engagement with delegates from British colonies at international conferences. “Le congrès d’Istamboul: L’Orient et l’Occident coopèrent,” La Française, June 8, 1935.
43. Jane Bagnault, “Le suffrage féminin et le problème algérien,” Femmes de Demain, April 20, 1936.
44. Hubertine Auclert, Les Femmes arabes en Algérie (Paris: Société d’Éditions Littéraires, 1900), 63, quoted in Lazreg, Eloquence of Silence, 50.
45. Lucienne Jean-Darrouy, “À nos lectrices et à nos lecteurs" [To our female readers and our male readers], Femmes de Demain, November 14, 1935.
46. Cécile Brunschvicg, “La Situation des femmes en Algérie,” La Française, February 28, 1931.
47. George R. Trumbull, An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge, and Islam in Algeria, 1870–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 36, 182.
48. Yaël Simpson Fletcher, “ ‘Irresistible Seductions’: Gendered Representations of Colonial Algeria around 1930,” in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 204.
49. Amélie-Marie Goichon, La Vie féminine au Mzab (Paris, 1927), vii–viii, quoted in Çelik, Urban Forms, 91.
50. Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
51. Other scholars have written extensively about Bugéja—notably Jeanne Bowlan and Sakina Messaadi. See Messaadi, Nos Sœurs Musulmanes; Jeanne M. Bowlan, “Civilizing Gender Relations in Algeria: The Paradoxical Case of Marie Bugéja, 1919–39,” in Clancy-Smith and Gouda, Domesticating the Empire, 175–92; Sakina Messaadi, Les Romancières coloniales et la femme colonisée: contribution à une étude de la littérature coloniale en Algérie dans la première moitié du XXe siècle (Algiers: Entreprise nationale du livre, 1990); Lazreg, Eloquence of Silence, 94–95.
52. Marie-Louise Armand, “Bibliographie,” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie d’Alger et de l’Afrique du Nord (1938): 265.
53. Some of the books she authored included Nos sœurs musulmanes (1921), Visions d’Algérie (1929), and Énigme musulmane (1938).
54. Bugéja, “La Femme musulmane: Mon but dans l’évolution de la femme musulmane algérienne”; Marie Bugéja, “La Femme musulmane,” La Défense, December 14, 1934; Marie Bugéja, “La Femme musulmane,” La Défense, January 18, 1935; Rabah Zenati, “Les Femmes musulmanes: à Madame Marie Bugéja," La Voix Indigène, December 1932.
55. Marie Bugéja, “La Femme musulmane: Mon but dans l’évolution de la femme musulmane algérienne.”
56. Jeanne Bottini-Honot, Parmi des inconnus (Constantine: Éditions de l’Académie Numidia, 1929), 10.
57. Bottini-Honot, 35.
58. Trumbull (Empire of Facts, 183) described the amateur and professional ethnographies that depicted various regions of Algeria as “ethnographic tourism,” which often involved the objectification of male and female bodies and did not always operate according to the logics of heterosexual desires.
59. Brunschvicg, “La Situation des femmes en Algérie.”
60. Brunschvicg.
61. Jeanne Bottini-Houot (sic), “Le Féminisme en Algérie,” La Française, July 15, 1933.
62. Bagnault, “Les Femmes françaises et le problème musulman.”
63. “Pour la femme kabyle,” La Française, November 23, 1929.
64. Bottini-Houot (sic), “Le Féminisme en Algérie.”
65. Malaterre-Sellier, “En Tunisie.”
66. Brunschvicg, “La Situation des femmes en Algérie.”
67. Lafuente, “L’Aiguille musulmane.”
68. Bottini-Houot (sic), “Le Féminisme en Algérie.”
69. “Pour la femme kabyle,” La Française, November 23, 1929.
70. Seghir Hacène, “Le Congrès de Constantine,” La Voix Indigène, April 7, 1932.
71. Bottini-Houot (sic), “Le Féminisme en Algérie.”
72. Paule Husset, “Elles et nous" [Them and us], Femmes de Demain, October 1, 1936.
73. “Pour la femme kabyle”; Mohammed Taouti, “Une opinion des milieux indigènes d’Algérie sur la femme musulmane” [An opinion from the indigenous milieu of Algeria on the Muslim woman], La Française, March 14, 1931; Abou-Ezzohra, “Instruisons nos filles.”
74. Malaterre-Sellier, “La Libération des femmes musulmanes.”
75. Mohammed Taouti, “Une opinion.”
76. Senieh, “Le Prophète a-t-il voulu l’asservissement de la femme musulmane?”
77. “Le Droit de vote et la femme musulmane” [The right to vote and the Muslim woman], Femmes de Demain, February 15, 1937.
78. “Les Femmes musulmanes et le projet Violette” [Muslim women and the Violette Project], Femmes de Demain, March 1, 1937.
79. Lucienne Jean-Darrouy, “Musulmans, vos femmes aussi sont des êtres humains …” [Muslim men, your wives are also human beings …], Femmes de Demain, April 1, 1937.
80. C. Fel, “La Situation sociale de la Musulmane d’Algérie,” La Française, April 5, 1931.
81. Bagnault, “Les Femmes françaises et le problème musulman.”
82. Bagnault.
83. Jeanne Bottini-Honot, “Instruction des filles indigènes: Congrès des femmes méditerranéennes,” La Voix Indigène, January 1933.
84. Bottini-Honot, Parmi des inconnus, 30, 31.
85. Lucienne Jean-Darrouy, Femmes de demain, November 14, 1935.
86. Husset, “Elles et nous.”
87. “L’Union franco-musulmane,” Femmes de Demain, March 15, 1937.
88. Paule Husset, “À l’Union féminine franco-musulmane [On the feminine Franco-Muslim],” Femmes de Demain, July 8, 1937.
89. Bagnault, “Les Femmes françaises et le problème musulman.”
90. Jeanne Bottini-Houot (sic), “Une o œuvre féminine à Sétif,” La Française, June 17, 1933.
91. Bugéja, "La Femme musulmane," La Défense, December 14, 1934.
92. Yvonne de Bruillard, “La Question féminine arabe jugée par un Arabe de treize ans,” La Française, March 19, 1932.
93. Henriette Sauret, “Orientales et Occidentales,” La Française, April 5, 1931.
94. Bowlan, “Civilizing Gender Relations in Algeria,” 186.
95. C. Fel, “La Situation sociale de la musulmane d’Algérie,” La Française, April 5, 1931.
96. Brunschvicg, “La Situation des femmes en Algérie.”
97. Lucienne Jean-Darrouy, “View of a Woman: To Be or Not to Be a Citizen,” Femmes de Demain, February 1, 1937.
98. Bagnault, “Les Femmes françaises et le problème musulman.”
99. Husset, “Elles et nous.”
6. Muslim Women Address the Nation
1. Mademoiselle K. A., [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, May 1, 1947.
2. Houria, “Le Mariage musulmane,” as-Salam, July 1, 1947. The critiques of colonialism within discussions about women occurred outside of the press as well. In May 1948 Mademoiselle Guerab held a conference about the emancipation of the Muslim woman at the Cercle Cligny. Among the causes of the Muslim woman’s inferiority, Guerab cited “the consequences of colonialism,” including prejudice and a lack of educational opportunities. Anissa, “Autour d’une conférence,” as-Salam, July 1948.
3. Fatima Zohra Guechi, La Presse algérienne de langue arabe 1946–1954: enjeux politiques et jeux de plumes (Constantine: Bahaeddine, 2009), 286.
4. This mirrors the process Partha Chatterjee has described in colonial Bengal. He identified two phases: the first in the late nineteenth century when “the women question” was hotly debated, and the second in the twentieth century when nationalism had become increasingly the dominant ideological issue. He wrote that within these periods, women’s possibilities changed as they became educated in larger numbers. The particular forms of patriarchy they faced also changed, as did the types of demands being made on women. See Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Zubaan, 1990), 233–53.
5. MacMaster, Burning the Veil.
6. Laura Bier, “Modernity and the Other Woman: Gender and National Identity in the Egyptian Women’s Press, 1952–1967,” Gender and History 16, no. 1 (2004): 99–112; Marilyn Booth, “Women in Islam: Men and the ‘Women’s Press’ in Turn-of-the-20th-Century Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 2 (May 2001): 171–201; Baron, Women’s Awakening in Egypt.
7. Gokchen was the world’s first female fighter pilot and one of the adopted daughters of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
8. Anissa, “Chronique d’Anissa,” as-Salam, September 1, 1946.
9. Anissa, as-Salam, November 1936.
10. [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, June 1947.
11. Jaime Wadowiec, “Muslim Algerian Women and the Rights of Man: Islam and Gendered Citizenship in French Algeria at the End of Empire,” French Historical Studies 36, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 649–76.
12. Terrence Peterson, “Counterinsurgent Bodies: Social Welfare and Psychological Warfare in French Algeria, 1956–1962” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2015).
13. Newell, Power to Name.
14. Khider was involved with Messali Hadj’s Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques, while Ferhat Abbas was leader of a rival nationalist group, the Union démocratique du manifeste algérien—both political parties established in 1946. “Notre avenir dépend de notre jeunesse estudiantine: il faut l’aider!” as-Salam, February 15, 1947.
15. In July 1947 the Association of Muslim Algerian Women was founded to advocate for “the education of the Muslim woman to accelerate her evolution.” In May 1948 a group of Muslim teachers and students in Algiers banded together to create the Association of the Arab Algerian Young Woman, which similarly vowed to develop “Arab and Islamic education to benefit Muslim Algerian young women.” Associations, ANOM ALG ALGER 4I/184, Service des liaisons nord-africaines, Administration des Indigènes, Préfecture d'Alger, ANOM.
16.Le problème de l’enseignement en Algérie (Algiers: Baconnier, 1960), 13, 32.
17. Gosnell, Politics of Frenchness in Colonial Algeria, 47.
18.al-Bassair, January 19, 1948.
19. Ouanassa Siari Tengour, “Les Écoles coraniques (1930–1950): portée et signification," Insaniyat 6 (1998): 85–95.
20. Fatma Zohra Benaik, interviewed digitally by Sara Rahnama, March 4, 2019.
21. Dahbia Lounas, interviewed virtually by Sara Rahnama, October 31, 2021.
22. Halima Benabed, [Letter to the editor], L’Action, September 1947.
23. Madame H. S., “The Actual State of the Evolution of the Muslim Woman,” as-Salam, May 1950.
24. [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, March 1, 1947.
25. B. M. A, [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, May 1, 1947.
26. Guechi, La Presse algérienne de langue arabe, 284.
27. “A Little Savoir-Vivre,” as-Salam, May 15, 1948.
28. Anissa, “Chronique d’Anissa,” as-Salam, September 1, 1946.
29. Anissa, “Les Fleurs de l’amitié,” as-Salam, December 1946.
30. Anissa, as-Salam, October 15, 1946.
31. Anissa, “Les fleurs de l’amitié,” as-Salam, December 1, 1946, March 1, 1947.
32. S. H. Bintou Chaab, [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, March 15, 1947.
33. Anissa, as-Salam, April 15, 1948.
34. [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, May 1, 1947.
35. Mademoiselle Chérifa B., [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, June 1, 1947.
36. [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, March 15, 1947.
37. Smain H., “Crisis of Marriage in Algeria: A Reply to Mademoiselle Sylviane,” as-Salam, May 1950.
38. Mademoiselle Leila, [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, April 1947.
39. Lounas interview.
40. Anissa, “Chronique d’Anissa,” as-Salam, September 1, 1946.
41. Afaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 202.
42. “Call in Favor of the Students,” as-Salam, July 1946.
43. Brian Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 161.
44. Khadidja, [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, May 15, 1947.
45. Madame H. S., “The Actual State of the Evolution of the Muslim Woman,” as-Salam, May 1950.
46. B. M. A.
47. Mademoiselle Chérifa B.
48. Mademoiselle H. Said, [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, July 1, 1947.
49. Vince, Our Fighting Sisters.
50. [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, February 15, 1947.
51. [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, January 15, 1947.
52. Houria Illal, [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, January 15, 1947; Asnia H. M., as-Salam, May 1950.
53. Asnia H. M.
54. Taleb Selim, [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, March 1, 1947.
55. Abdelkader Haddadi, [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, March 1, 1947.
56. B. M. A.
57. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
58. Nedjma Gamar, [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, April 1947.
59. “A Man and His Wife,” as-Salam, February 1, 1947.
60. “The Muslim Woman and Her Evolution,” as-Salam, February 1, 1947.
61. S. H. Bintou Chaab.
62. [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, May 15, 1947.
63. Mademoiselle Mina, [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, March 1, 1947.
64. Mohammed-Lamine Boutaleb, [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, December 1, 1947.
65. Mademoiselle H. Said.
66. Khouira B., [Letter to the editor], as-Salam, April 1950.
67. Mademoiselle Chérifa B.
68. Mademoiselle H. Said.
69. Khouira B.
70. Asnia H. M.
71. Madame H. S.
72. Djamila Débêche (sic), “Islam Does Not Prescribe Wearing the Veil to the Muslim Woman,” La Justice, February 20, 1937.
73. McDougall, History of Algeria, 179.
74. Djamila Debèche, Les grandes étapes de l’évolution féminine en pays d’Islam (Nevers: Imprimerie Chassaing, 1959).
75. Zineb, “Khadidja Bent Khoualid: Épouse du Prophète,” L’Action, September 1947; “Au Palais de Haroun-Er-Rachid,” L’Action, October 1947.
76. Djamila Debèche, “Le Mouloud: Le 20 avril 571 de l’ère chrétienne naissait à la Mecque Mohammed,” L’Action, February 1948.
77. Djamila Debèche, Aziza, trans. Zahia Smail Salhi in Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region, ed. Fatima Sadiqi, Amira Nowaira, Azza El Kholy, and Moha Ennaji (New York: Feminist Press / City University of New York, 2009), 193–97.
78. “La Correspondance de nos lecteurs,” L’Action, January 1948, March 1948.
79. French colonial surveillance reports never mentioned that Anissa was of European origin.
80. Anissa, “Nour El Mahal: Enquête épistolaire sur le mariage mixte,” Salam Ifrikya, May 1950.
Conclusion
1. M. Chakib, “Gala de l’Association des femmes musulmanes algériennes,” L’Algérie Libre, February 26, 1954.
2. MacMaster, Burning the Veil, 46.
3. Letter from Governor-General Roger Léonard to the Minister of the Interior in Paris, March 12, 1952, IBA/ASP/EL/10/1052, Citoyenne de statut civil local—électorat, AN.
4. Zahia Smail Salhi, “The Algerian Feminist Movement between Nationalism, Patriarchy and Islamism,” Women’s Studies International Forum 33, no. 2 (2010): 113–24; Chérifa Benabdessadok, “Tradition et modernisme: Un faux débat?” in Présences de femmes (Algiers: Office des publications universitaires, 1984), 7–11; Chafika Dib-Marouf, Fonctions de la dot dans la cité algérienne: Le cas d’une ville moyenne: Tlemcen et son “Hawz” (Algiers: Office des publications universitaires, 1984); Souad Khodja, Les Algériennes du quotidien (Algiers: Enterprise Nationale du Livre, 1985).
5. Danièle Djamila Amrane-Minne, Des Femmes dans la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Karthala, 1994); Diane Sambron, Femmes musulmanes: guerre d’Algérie, 1954–1962 (Paris: Éd. Autrement, 2007); Vince, Our Fighting Sisters.
6. Goswami, “AHR Forum.”
7. Kateb Yacine, Le Poète comme un boxer: entretiens 1958–1989 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1994).
8. Sarah Ghabrial, “Le ‘fiqh francisé’?”
9. Jomier, “Muslim Notables.”
10. Lucie Ryzova, The Age of Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 9.