Introduction

Algeria and the New Muslim Middle East

Abou-Ezzohra never mentioned France or even Europe in his speech, even though some of these Middle Eastern regimes and women’s rights movements he admired looked to Europe as a model. Instead, he articulated the progress of Middle Eastern nations in terms of Islam, not the region or the specific countries in question. The education and leadership of “our Muslim sisters,” he reflected, was “the foundation” of the “renaissance of Islam.” Abou-Ezzohra referred to the Algerian woman sometimes as simply “the Muslim woman” and elsewhere as “the Algerian woman.” Women of the Middle East were specified by their country of origin—“the Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi woman.” This fluidity of language, between “Muslim” and “Algerian,” was common in interwar Algeria. Muslims themselves most often referred to themselves as Muslims, but occasionally as Algerians.

Scholars of Algeria are thus forced to negotiate these terms and ambiguities. I refer to the Muslim population of colonial Algeria as “Muslims” because this is often how they called themselves. The term “Muslims” over “Algerians” refuses the assumption of the inevitability of a future, independent Algeria, which more accurately corresponds to the ambiguity of the national question in the interwar years. I use the geographic language of the Middle East in spite of its Eurocentric origins because it most accurately describes what commentors often meant when they spoke of “Muslims” in the region.³

The status of women in the Middle East was changing rapidly. By the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire had been steadily losing territory for almost a century, a process that began with the French occupation of Algeria in 1830. Much of the territory once under Ottoman rule was now under European control either as colonies or as “mandates,” unofficial colonies. By 1919 Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, and Lebanon were under French control, while Egypt, Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq were under British control, Libya was under Italian control, and northern Morocco under Spanish control. Much of the world around interwar Algerians was under European control.

By 1923, after the four-year-long War of Independence, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (in power 1923–1938) and the Turkish National Movement had successfully wrestled control of Turkey away from not only what was left of the Ottoman Empire but also the French, British, and Italian forces who had occupied Istanbul since the end of World War I. In the following decades, the newly independent Turkish Republic underwent a broad range of reforms designed to strip Turkey of its former perch as the center of the Muslim world and elevate it to a modern nation-state. This process compelled a range of women’s rights reforms, including the abolition of polygamy, equal rights to divorce for men and women, and most revolutionary of all, universal suffrage.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was not the only new leader in the region to prioritize women’s rights as an avenue toward modernization. In 1919, after the third Anglo-Afghan War, Afghanistan won back the right to control its foreign policy from Britain. The new Afghan monarch, King Amanullah Khan (r. 1919–1929), also pursued a project of modernization that included women’s rights. He campaigned against polygamy and the veil, and he encouraged women’s education in both urban and rural areas. In 1921 Reza Pahlavi led a largely bloodless coup in which he took control of Iran as prime minister. By 1925 he was named Reza Shah (r. 1925–1941), thereby marking the end of the Qajar dynasty and the beginning of the Pahlavi dynasty. Like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Reza Shah sought to marginalize the clergy’s influence as part of his project of modernization. He enacted a series of reforms, such as granting women entry into colleges of law and medicine, a measure that facilitated Iranian women taking on a more public presence. Atatürk, Reza Shah, and Amanullah Khan all enacted state feminism, defined by Marya Hannun as “the state’s implementation, co-option, and instrumentalization of women’s rights and ostensibly ‘feminist’ reforms often with the explicit purpose of establishing its modernist credentials and breaking with an older regime.”⁴

Yet women’s advancement was not only a top-down project of statecraft. It was equally a key issue for social and political movements across the region. Egyptian women were particularly well organized. Women marched in the streets alongside men as part of the 1919 Egyptian Revolution against British occupation. In 1923 Huda Sharawi formed the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU). In 1925 the EFU created their own journal, L’Égyptienne (published in French and eventually in 1937 in Arabic), which they used to publicize their positions on social and economic questions. In 1925 the EFU succeeded when their demands for compulsory primary education for both boys and girls were finally met. In Palestine, Muslim and Christian women organized together, led protests against the British Mandate, and demanded a broad platform of women’s rights. In Syria and Lebanon, the Women’s Union formed in 1924 and called for greater access to education and voting rights for women. In 1926 four thousand women marched in Damascus to demand an end to the French bombing of Syria.

For Muslims in Algeria, news of these developments in the Middle East provoked both excitement and despair. On one hand, they were inspired by the positive correlation they saw between women’s advancement, modernization, and broader societal uplift. On the other, they compared this regional transformation to how they remained constrained by settler colonialism. The de facto segregation of colonial life forced most Muslims to live with limited access to schooling or employment and dilapidated, overcrowded housing. The colonial economy offered Muslims few opportunities for stable work. The status of women in Algeria, they argued, reflected the impoverished material conditions of everyday life.

Politically as well, settler colonialism continued to stifle opportunities for Muslim advancement and equality under the law. Already a century into France’s colonial occupation of Algeria, Muslims there had long been forced to endure a subordinate status with respect to the European settler population. This status was codified by the Code de l'indigénat (Native code, hereafter Indigénat), a series of laws that arbitrarily restricted freedoms for Muslims and cemented their secondary status.⁵ Citizenship rights too remained extremely limited. Muslims could apply for French citizenship only if they were willing to renounce their Muslim personal status—a move most Muslims interpreted as apostasy. Even for those willing to do so, applications were frequently denied for arbitrary reasons. The Blum-Violette Proposal of 1936 aimed to extend citizenship rights to between twenty and twenty-five thousand Muslim elites without requiring them to renounce their Muslim personal status but was never even voted on because of the outrage it sparked from European settlers in Algeria. By the interwar years, most Muslims had lost hope that reform was possible within the French colonial system. Anti-colonial nationalism, while initially marginal in the interwar years, became an increasingly compelling and attractive political ideology.

Algeria was also inextricably changed by World War I. During and immediately after the war, economic prospects were so dismal that many men migrated to metropolitan France in search of opportunity.⁶ In 1914 thirty thousand Muslim men from Algeria were working in France.⁷ By April 1917, almost 3 percent of the total Algerian Muslim population was in France as soldiers (173,000) or as factory workers (120,000).⁸ By 1924 another 120,000 Muslim workers had arrived in France. By the interwar years, then, Algeria had experienced a mass exodus of its Muslim male labor. For those who remained, there was little reliable work. While some veterans who returned to Algeria were initially optimistic their service might grant them additional rights, the French colonial regime repeatedly failed to deliver on their promises.⁹ The Jonnart Law of 1919, for example, gave 421,000 Muslim veterans the right to vote for Muslim members of municipal councils, but many felt it did not go far enough.

In the realm of rights for Muslim women too, Muslim voices were stifled. Judith Surkis has demonstrated that European fantasies about Muslim sexuality, including women’s strict sequestration and subjugation by their husbands, were not just Orientalist fantasies that appeared in European art.¹⁰ They also shaped Algerian legal and political realities. French administrators returned to such fantasies to legitimize the confiscation of land and denial of political rights to Muslims. Despite the considerable public support for increased education for girls, the French colonial regime was slow to open schools. Administrators claimed that the domination of Muslim women by Muslim men was such a salient feature of Muslim life that to offer women an education risked provoking anger. Such claims absolved the state of any responsibility to work toward improving Muslim women’s possibilities.

It was these conditions established by settler colonialism that rendered interwar Algeria so different from other Middle Eastern spaces, even as there were sometimes parallels in its debates about women. It lacked the state feminism of Turkey, Iran, or Afghanistan. It also lacked the organized women’s movements established by the elite women of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. The colonial economy and the French colonial regime’s continued dismantlement of Muslim institutions in Algeria left only a very small (albeit growing) middle class.

As a country positioned geographically between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, Algeria’s discourses around women were equally a product of its status within the Mediterranean, as an extension of the French metropole, as a predominantly Muslim former Ottoman territory, and as a culturally Arab and Amazigh (popularly known as “Berber”) space within North Africa. Understanding their multidirectional gaze requires a multidirectional analysis that is attentive to the north-south, east-west, and south-south orientations of their references. This analysis pushes beyond the scholarly obsession with political and legal dynamics between France and Algeria in isolation and instead explores how social questions about women equally animated public life in the interwar years and connected Algeria to the Middle East. While scholars have increasingly been thinking about North Africa’s relationship to other Mediterranean spaces since Mary Lewis’s Divided Rule, they are only beginning to map its connections to the Middle East.¹¹

Still, there were transformations underway in Algeria that created dynamics similar to those taking place in the Middle East. Urbanization provoked profound transition and crisis in Algeria. Long-standing distinctions that had structured Algerian public life became blurred. Rural people became city dwellers as hundreds of thousands of migrants from rural Algeria now crowded into the Muslim neighborhoods of cities. Association meetings, theaters, cinemas, and markets were all sites of increased heterosocial proximity. Women who recently migrated to cities dramatically joined the labor force and traversed the boundaries of their streets, neighborhoods, and markets en route to work. Sartorial norms began to shift as some members of the growing Muslim middle class began adopting European-style dress. The Muslim reform movement that emerged out of Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century rapidly grew in popularity across Algeria.

The language of “progress” and “modernity” permeated Muslim discourse in Algeria. Samira Haj has recently, in conversation with other scholars like Talal Asad, modeled how scholars can use the category of tradition to refer “not simply to the past or its repetition but rather to the pursuit of an ongoing coherence by making reference to a set of texts, procedures, arguments, and practices.”¹² This understanding of tradition enables scholars to situate Muslim intellectual production within a longer Islamic discursive tradition in order to better analyze how Muslims played with and redefined the categories of modern or traditional. The Future Is Feminist brings a gender analysis of a settler-colonial context into these ongoing scholarly discussions.

Despite a century of settler claims that Algerian culture and Islam were backward, Muslims in Algeria took recent Middle Eastern political and social shifts as evidence of Islam’s capacity to be modern and to facilitate progress. Similarly, invocations of Islam were not stagnant references that simply celebrated a past golden age. Instead, commentators ordered and reordered the corpus of Islamic knowledge to reframe Islam as emancipatory, flexible, and modern. I use “Islamic knowledge” as an umbrella category to hold together references to the Qur’an, hadith literature, and Islamic history. Together, these references to Islamic knowledge and to news from the Middle East enabled Muslims in Algeria to organize the world on their own terms. Their praise for the modernization of the Middle East decentered Europe and enabled them to articulate new aspirations for the future. These discourses offered them a path forward amid growing frustration and resignation about what the French colonial project could offer Muslims.

Algeria’s Future Is Feminist

As Abou-Ezzohra lamented the contrast between the stifled Muslim women of Algeria and their more emancipated Middle Eastern counterparts in his wedding speech, he also looked to Algeria’s future. He wrote that there was still “hope for a better future” in Algeria. The number of Muslim girls attending school was slowly increasing. Nearly twenty Muslim women had even become schoolteachers. These developments suggested that there was a path forward for Algeria, toward a more feminist and prosperous future. He was clear about who was responsible for ushering in change: “The male elite has a role to play.”

The Future Is Feminist argues that discussions of the woman question in interwar Algeria opened up new horizons of feminist possibility, and understanding these discussions requires attention not only to the colonial divide but also to the multiple social divides—between rural and urban, poor and elite, Sufi and reformist—that were also being negotiated as Algerian Muslims imagined their future. This analysis, which keeps both feminists and their detractors in view, works not to squeeze Algerian discourse into our understanding of feminism, but rather to expand the frame of feminism itself. Judith Butler has summoned scholars to “emancipate [feminism] from the maternal or racialist ontologies to which it has been restricted.”¹³ If we adopt Margot Badran’s definition of feminism as “the awareness of constraints placed upon women because of their gender and attempts to remove these constraints and to evolve a more equitable gender system involving new roles for women and new relations between men and women,” many of the commentators analyzed within the pages of this book qualified.¹⁴ They envisioned themselves as beginning the discussions that would lead to such a removal of the impediments that constrained women, including, for example, their limited access to employment or education. Most of them also envisioned a more equitable society. Many still envisioned women’s social role to be confined to the family, but even they imagined a woman’s potential future as a more empowered, educated household manager. Others were open to women taking on a greater variety of public roles, including within traditionally masculine professions. Muslims in Algeria referenced models of feminist advancement from the Middle East and, through these references, theorized their own versions of a hybrid feminist project adaptable to Algerian realities. Yet they have largely been left out of the growing body of scholarship on Middle Eastern and African feminisms. To insist that Algerian feminism be legible in today’s terms functions much like interwar calls for Muslim women to be liberated according to French models.

The frame of feminist possibility also illuminates how interwar developments created openings of which women took advantage to work toward feminist outcomes. Zuhur Wunisi, for example, grew up during the intense debate in the interwar years about what the end goal of girls’ education should be. She and other girls educated in Muslim reformist schools capitalized on interwar feminist possibility to expand what was possible for Muslim women. They were educated, became teachers and authors, some unveiled, and Wunisi herself would later become one of Algeria’s first women politicians and government ministers. The book’s final chapter also turns to the postwar period to demonstrate how these interwar discussions paved the way for later conversations in which women used nationalist discourse to critique both French colonial society and Muslim men.

Attention to how Islam informed these commentator’s arguments is critical to any serious analysis of these questions about interwar Algerian feminism. Margot Badran has recently analyzed what she differentiates as Muslim secular feminism on one hand, and Islamic feminism on the other.¹⁵ Secular feminism, she writes, emerged in Muslim societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Responding to the Islamic modernist teachings of Muhammad Abduh, this feminism called for gender equality in the public sphere and was often tied to nationalist movements. Islamic feminism, on the other hand, developed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and emphasized “the Qur’anic principles of human equality and gender justice” to preach gender equality in society as well as within the family.¹⁶ Interwar Algerian discussions borrow from both of Badran’s types of feminism. They appeared in the context of emergent Algerian nationalism and yet cited forms of Muslim regional belonging that transcended Algeria’s borders. While the interwar discussions were largely concerned with public life, including women’s labor and education, the postwar discussions also analyzed here were more concerned with familial dynamics. Notably, Islamic knowledge for them was not about mastery of a static set of historical texts but rather something malleable to be worked into a vision for a modern and sometimes feminist future Algeria. The goal here is not to valorize Algerian commentators as undiscovered feminist heroes but rather to explore how feminist imperatives can be simultaneously encouraged and constrained, sometimes by the same voices. This analysis thus works to “release the term [feminism] into a future of multiple significations … and to give it play as a site where unanticipated meanings might come to bear,” as Butler has called for. Through its analysis of these tensions, The Future Is Feminist also offers a fresh perspective on the intersections of Islam and feminism—an urgent undertaking given the enduring depictions of Muslim women as oppressed that persist in both popular culture and academic circles.¹⁷

While critically important, the growing body of scholarship on feminism in the Middle East has focused largely on either women-led movements for women’s rights or state feminist projects, which were more developed elsewhere in the Middle East in the interwar years and well underway by the later twentieth century.¹⁸ Attention to a space peripheral to the Middle East, Algeria, offers a model of how to consider feminist possibilities and horizons where there was not yet any such women-led movement for women’s rights. The Future Is Feminist explores which feminist possibilities could exist under settler colonialism and how they became central to both working through the social divisions of the present and the imaginings of possible Algerian futures.

While the commentators who raised questions about women in the Muslim press were largely male, this book is not another story of women’s “silences” and “absences.” This study—unlike those on the women’s rights projects that swept the Middle East in the interwar years—begins with working-class women. In Algeria women’s changing status was not measurable through new access to consumption patterns, education, or activism—the key markers of “new women” and “modern girls” elsewhere. Instead, it looked like women struggling to support their families through continued poverty, with the occasional splurge on nonessential groceries, like black market coffee. Still, women becoming primary earners within their households had a profound impact on power relations within the home. Outside of the home, these women also left their mark on the explosion of interwar public life. Women who worked by day as domestic workers also performed on stages in some of the country’s largest theatrical avenues. They campaigned for causes in the streets and marched among crowds in protests. They frequented cinemas and theaters. Their presence was felt within association meetings or political rallies by offering youyous (zagharid) of approval.¹⁹ The details of their lives and questions about these details animated debate across all the institutions of the emergent Muslim public: the press, association life, schools, urban space, and the theater. This book explores how women, both working-class and elite, and concerned men identified, pushed back against, and worked within the constraints placed on them both by the French colonial state and by Muslim society. A mujahida, or female fighter, in the Algerian War, Louisette Ighilahriz described her mother, who would have been of the interwar generation, as “illiterate but hyperpoliticized.”²⁰ The interwar discourses on women, then, while perhaps not conventionally feminist, contained feminist possibilities, which made possible the activism and militarism of the next generation.

In its attention to the future’s feminist possibilities, this analysis contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the future as a category of historical analysis, which has ranged from the heavily theoretical to the everyday evocations of the future. My analysis is particularly informed by other scholars who have examined the political uses of the future as a language to work through anxieties about the present and shape particular versions of the past. In Future Tense Roxanne Panchasi has written about how the future became a powerful “way of framing potential changes to French society and ways of life (already underway in some cases) as out of step with the nation’s history and cultural traditions” in interwar France.²¹ More recently, in Familiar Futures Sara Pursley has offered a layered and multifaceted analysis of the different ways concepts of the future were mobilized and familiarized during the Iraqi revolutionary era.²² She analyzed, for example, the narratives produced by Iraqi schools and military not for their nationalist content but for how they sought to produce bodies that were oriented toward a particular future.

In the interwar Algerian discussions about Muslim women, too, the future became a container for ideas about how women’s advancement could create a social uplift, which in the interwar years was often located in an ambiguous future. By the postwar years, as nationalism became a more dominant (albeit still disputed) ideology, commentators more consistently referred to a nationalist, anti-colonial future. Yet part of what this book seeks to map is how in the interwar years multiple futures were still possible. Commentators’ calls for the urgent need for change in the present in order to achieve later prosperity constituted visions of the future, even if they were unspecific about when that future would take place and what it might look like.

The Future Is Feminist engages theoretically with the frame of colonial internationalism and its “future-oriented politics” proposed by Manu Goswami. Goswami argued that attention to internationalist politics of colonial subjects can illuminate “an open-ended constellation of contending political futures” that has been otherwise eclipsed by the scholarship’s enduring focus on nationalism. In colonial internationalism, she argued, the present was envisioned as “a transformative juncture,” which could lead to “a potential transition to a new egalitarian world order.” She focused on the work of the sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar, whose internationalism involved “three interlocking strands: an emphasis on the historical category of the possible, a dual rejection of imperialism and cultural nationalism, and an insistence that equality was the central problematic of political and epistemological struggles alike.”²³ The “new egalitarian world order” proposed by Sarkar and his contemporaries was envisioned as an equality that would push back against the assumptions of Orientalism and reflect itself “in the discussions of learned societies, in school rooms, theatres, moving picture shows, daily journals, and monthly reviews.”²⁴

The Algerian case illustrates how some of these uniquely interwar imperatives were also at work in discussions about women and the future. Muslim commentators also believed the contrast between how Algeria was stifled under settler colonialism while there was advancement and modernization across the Middle East made the present a moment of both crisis and possibility. They too imagined what more egalitarian futures could be possible in ways that were often ambiguous about nationalism. In fact, the precise parameters of this future better Algeria were often unspecified. The Algerian case illustrates how a wide set of references—including to Islamic knowledge and regional developments—could be marshaled to diagnose the problems of the present and to argue for a more egalitarian future—both in terms of men and women, but also between colonizer and colonized. For almost all commentators, women’s advancement was envisioned as the pivotal key that could propel Algeria forward in the new international world order.

Within the scholarship on Algeria, the teleology of the Algerian War of Independence remains so powerful that it has dictated which societal actors merit historical attention. Decades of recent scholarship has focused on political questions, including the tensions that resulted in the ultimate success of anti-colonial nationalism. Even histories of the interwar period have demonstrated how the anti-colonial nationalism of the 1950s would not have been possible without intellectual and communal developments of the interwar years—including the rise of the reformist movement and its histories of precolonial Algeria and the rise of communal culture through associations and cafés.²⁵ James McDougall has argued that Algeria was so remade by colonialism that even intra-Muslim discussions were shaped by the French because of their reliance on French categories, including “the Muslim world.” I argue instead that such claims flatten the way interwar commentators stretched such categories to contain multiple meanings. As they debated developments in Algeria with references to the Middle East, for example, they played with notions of belonging in ways that rendered the concepts of Islam, nation, or the Muslim world unstable.

My analysis takes seriously how colonialism shaped Muslims’ lived realities and worldviews while simultaneously remaining attentive to the ways Muslims drew connections to the Middle East that transcended colonial boundaries and sometimes remained ambivalent toward anti-colonial nationalism. This book charts a different type of revolt: one that focused on the status of women rather than the political project of nationalism. In its attentiveness to feminist possibility, my analysis is in dialogue with what Manijeh Moradian has called “a methodology of possibility.” She writes, “A methodology of possibility takes the collective feeling of hope or possibility itself—however fleeting or naïve—as a legitimate object of study, as a way of rethinking the legacy of anti-imperialist revolutions.”²⁶ In the Algerian case, attention to feminist possibility, over feminism as a cohesive movement or feminists as intentional actors, reveals a whole world of transnational feminist imagining and aspiration. These previously underexamined articulations of feminist possibility were radical in the ways they wrote back against French colonial claims about Muslim misogyny—the very ideological underpinnings of French empire in Algeria.

The enduringly powerful teleology of the Algerian War has also implicitly suggested that women’s ability to actively shape Algerian society began with their participation in the Algerian War. The narrative posits that women’s emancipation was uniquely possible alongside national liberation. Until now, the longer history of women’s eventual involvement in the Algerian War remains untold, although some have described the interwar years as a turning point. In 1955, for example, the French historian Roger LeTourneau wrote, “In the last twenty years or so the emancipation of Muslim women [in North Africa has] begun.”²⁷ The search for women’s presence in interwar public life requires a look beyond the most obvious markers of what advancement looked like. Indeed, if we rely on figures and state archives alone, change appears miniscule. Despite all the interwar agitation for more schools for girls, the number of schools open to Muslim girls remained small. In terms of literacy, for example, in 1954 on the brink of the Algerian War, women’s literacy was only at 4.5 percent.²⁸ For men, the literacy rate was 13 percent. Yet literacy rates do not reflect the dynamic processes by which Muslims encountered news, information, and commentaries. While walking down the street, men and women alike would hear young boys selling newspapers shouting recent headlines. Men who congregated in cafés would listen as someone read aloud (and even translated) from a newspaper or journal. The women who worked as domestic workers in European homes would listen to the radio left on while they worked. Women would gather and discuss community developments and news on rooftops or in associations. Press archives illuminate how women occupied a central role, symbolically and physically, in interwar Algerian intellectual and social life. While many women’s lives remained constrained, their life circumstances and possibilities became the object of heated debate.

This book treats women’s participation in the Algerian War of Independence not as an inevitability but rather as one possibility among many. Nationalism is of course part of this story. It explains why it was so important for Muslim reformists, for example, to have their own ideal for Muslim women who contributed to a distinct Muslim Algerian identity. Yet even within discourses we may firmly label as nationalist, authors played with other forms of belonging, including to a Muslim umma, to solidarity among women globally, and to other modernizing nations. Decentering nationalism allows us to take seriously the wide range of voices who were unconvinced or ambivalent that an independent future Algeria was the most ideal future for Muslim women and Algeria broadly, and who would otherwise be written off as assimilationist, insufficiently subversive, or marginal. In terms of the question of women’s rights too, my analysis holds in equal view those who advocated women’s equality with men, those who were more skeptical, and those who suggested that any education at all for women could emasculate men and upend Muslim society.

There has been so much focus on eventual anti-colonial revolt as a pathway to liberation, but what other forms of liberation were available to Algerians? What forms of liberation could be imagined while everyday circumstances remained constrained both materially and politically? For many, the status of women was key. The Future Is Feminist offers a window into a society working through their anxieties about the future through a multidirectional and multivocal inquiry into the status of women.

Methodological Considerations for Algeria’s Multivocal Muslim Press

The French- and Arabic-language Muslim press makes up the key source base of this work, as it illuminates the social concern about women only peripherally present in state archives in France and Algeria. This project has been driven by an imperative that histories of Algeria (especially social histories) require Arabic-language sources and sources beyond colonial archives. Scholarly conclusions about Algeria have been predetermined by their overuse of French-language sources and heavy reliance on French colonial state archives alone. As Augustin Jomier has written in his important article on interwar Mzabi women’s agency, while women were virtually “invisible” in the French language sources, Arabic-language sources help reveal a whole world of women’s power and agency that complicates scholarly assumptions.²⁹ My attempt to offer a social history of gender in interwar Algeria contributes to the growing body of new social histories of Algeria, including by Arthur Asseraf on the media, as well as by Charlotte Courreye and Augustin Jomier on Muslim reformists.³⁰

My use of Arabic-language sources and paying attention to the work “Islam” does within discourses about women does more than expand our sources; it also radically transforms our view of this historical moment. Whereas many intellectual histories narrowly focus on a few key thinkers or a single community, my analysis of multiple overlapping Algerian communities in tandem through both French and Arabic sources maps the complexities of the debates about women. My commitment to multivocality allows for an analysis of how discourses from a broad range of commentators intersected, overlapped, and clashed as they posited their versions of feminist possibilities in the present and the future. This attention to multivocality examines a broad range of voice without privileging either secular or religious voices, or assuming there was a neat divide between the two. Khaled El-Rouayheb has critiqued the enduring focus of intellectual histories of the Middle East on “European ‘modernity’ and its challenges while breezily ignoring the continuing tradition of madrasah scholarship in the modern period.”³¹ Community members, religious leaders, and imams of both traditional Sufi and reformist traditions published regularly in dozens of publications. Also, religious authorities were not the only figures to marshal Islamic knowledge. Rather, the corpus of Islamic knowledge provided a language for commentators to use to justify their arguments about women. Even Muslims who may not have adhered to Islamic practices in their private lives cited the Qur’an and hadith in their appeals to the broader public. While this analysis is attentive to evocations of Islam and the work those evocations performed for commentators, it is also attentive to other social divides, which illustrate that Islam alone cannot explain Muslim behavior and society, as was theorized by colonial-era ethnographers and administrators and persists today among some contemporary thinkers.

More traditional archival sources play a role as well. French colonial surveillance reports, correspondence, and memos illustrate the multiple meanings assigned to debates in the press about Algerian women. French colonial surveillance reports, for example, interpreted Muslim efforts to reform women’s status as a marker of the success of the French civilizing mission, even though some discussions were quite critical of the colonial regime. Master’s theses completed at Algerian universities reveal how Muslim women’s labor and Muslim family life in Algiers transformed between the 1920s and the 1950s. Minutes from local government meetings illustrate how representatives made use of press analyses to level legislative or legal arguments about women.

The book begins with a chapter that builds the world of interwar intellectual life in terms of its communities, publications, and spaces. Chapter 1 offers an overview of how after World War I, the number of Muslim presses in Algeria grew exponentially, sparking new levels of public engagement with news from the region and lively debates about social changes both abroad and at home. Chapter 2 then moves straight into an exploration of migrant domestic workers who changed the optics of Algerian cities as they traversed the boundaries of Muslim and settler neighborhoods every morning en route to work. Chapter 2’s analysis is both attentive to the spatial, in its look at how domestic workers moved through the city, and the intellectual, in its analysis of how within the press these women became markers of colonialism’s social and economic upheaval and provoked masculine anxieties about growing female power. Chapters 3 and 4 go deeper into the realm of intellectual discourse around women, focusing on education and dress. Chapter 3 examines how diverse Muslim commentators agreed that women’s education was the first step in women’s larger empowerment and social progress. As they advocated for women’s education, they looked east to other countries in the region and inward to Islam’s own history of feminist reform to challenge French colonial ideology about Muslim misogyny and offer a vision of Algerian Muslim belonging to the modern world. The debates about both women’s hijab and men’s headwear mapped out in chapter 4 illustrate that it remained contentious what precisely such a Muslim modernity would look like in Algeria. The final two chapters move to two different but interconnected contexts. Chapter 5 examines how these ongoing debates in Muslim society were so fluid that they also intersected with French feminist discussions. French feminists too were preoccupied with Muslim women’s education and advancement, but most often so they could advance their own case for suffrage. The book’s final chapter moves to the postwar context, as an extended conclusion of the book’s themes. It illustrates how in the postwar period, nationalism offered Muslim women a language that would counter the interwar discourses of which they were the subject. They used nationalist language to challenge not only colonialism but also Muslim men and the limits they imposed on women’s labor, education, and dress. Together these chapters explore how Muslim commentators envisioned feminist futures as a path forward out of the problems of the Algerian present.