Contentious Headwear across the Middle East

The Algerian debates over men’s and women’s headwear were part of larger ongoing debates about dress and imitation that had taken place across the Middle East since the late nineteenth century. In terms of the veil, male and female commentators across the Middle East questioned the necessity of both the face veil and the veil itself. Prominent women like Queen Suraya Tarzi of Afghanistan and feminist Huda Sharawi generated controversy when they unveiled.⁹ Texts like the 1928 Lebanese book Unveiling and Veiling by Nazira Zein al-Din also sparked controversy and conservative backlash. Women’s magazines in Palestine and Lebanon celebrated not only that women were unveiled but that they were well versed in the latest fashions from Europe, including wearing hats. For them, fluency in global fashion culture signified their participation in the modern world order. When an Egyptian official visited Constantine, one article in al-Najah noted with shock that both he and his wife were wearing hats, making them look like “American tourists.”¹⁰

Debates about European hats were concurrently sweeping the Muslim world. Since the late nineteenth century, as Muslim societies across North Africa and the Middle East changed because of European intervention and colonization, religious authorities debated and discussed which appropriations from European culture were permissible. An 1897 cartoon in the Egyptian publication al-Ajyal titled “Blind Imitation” mocked young Egyptians for thinking that clothing alone could make them modern.¹¹ Scholars from Al-Azhar in Cairo argued that “the adoption of European attire by Muslims [was] a strong signifier of Europeanization and by implication … a weakening of an Islamic way of life,” as Samira Haj has written. By contrast, the modernist Egyptian mufti Muhammad Abduh issued the famous Transvaal fatwa in which he argued instead that as long as “the person wearing a European headdress had no intention of forsaking Islam and taking up another religion, his action is not un-Islamic.” Other contemporary Muslim scholars, like the Indian Muslim reformer Sayyid Ahmad Khan, argued that such issues “belonged to mundane affairs since Islamic did not prescribe a social dress for Muslims to begin with.”¹²

In the late 1920s these ongoing discussions in the Egyptian press about imitation focused in on the hat. One cartoon mocked the dispute generated among religious scholars when the Afghan king prayed with his hat on while visiting Cairo, an episode also discussed in the Algerian press. The press also heavily covered “the tarbush incident,” in which it was rumored that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had yanked a tarbush off the head of an Egyptian diplomat. Despite this coverage that occasionally cropped up throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these discussions eventually became less contentious, with more or less consensus that while the tarbush was a symbol of Egyptian national identity, wearing a Western-style hat did not constitute a renouncement of Egyptian identity.¹³

These issues were equally contentious in Albania and Morocco. Etty Terem has written about an Albanian religious scholar who requested a fatwa from a Moroccan ulema, Muhammad al-Hajwi, about whether it was permissible for Albanians to wear the European-style hat. Terem maps out the various issues that al-Hajwi saw as interrelated to headwear, most centrally whether it was permissible for Muslims to imitate the style and dress of non-Muslims. On one hand, he argued that while the European brimmed hat did not undermine faith, it should be avoided because “it erases distinguishing markers of the nation.” On the other hand, al-Hajwi noted that Muslim civil servants should comply with the Albanian edict to wear the hat, so as to not risk their dismissal and replacement with non-Muslim civil servants, which would eventually lead to the loss of Muslim representation within the government. In other words, the issue of the hat had to be contextualized within the broader social context of power relations in Albania. There were also questions about modernity and Islam’s flexibility at stake. Terem summarized al-Hajwi’s argument as follows: “Islam is a pragmatic, rational religion, compatible with minor inventions, and promoting the integration of the umma as a partner in a modern global order. Modern Muslims need to distinguish between harmful and beneficial appropriation of goods and technologies that originated in Europe.”¹⁴

In French Mandate Lebanon the tarbush came to symbolize Lebanese identity and opposition to French colonialism. Yasmine Nachabe has analyzed, for example, how the tarbush symbolized authority in interwar Lebanese portrait photography. Wearing the tarbush in their portraits enabled men to project social standing and authority. Yet women were also a part of the tarbush’s contested meaning in Lebanon, as women would sometimes don the tarbush in their portraits to challenge patriarchal authority.¹⁵

These regional discussions illustrate that Algeria was not alone in its concern over headwear and what it came to represent. The Algerian discussions illustrate multiple sets of concerns at once. While by the 1930s in Egypt the tarbush was largely a nationalist symbol, in the 1920s its meaning was still contested. Wilson Chacko Jacob stated, “In the 1920s the tarbush could simultaneously be a sign of the modern and the traditional, the civilized and the savage, the national and the foreign, the masculine and the effeminate.”¹⁶ The Algerian discourses about both the hijab and hats similarly demonstrate not neat correlations to particular categories but rather how commentators played with each of these categories. Interwar discussions in Algeria responded to Muslims’ positions as colonial subjects after a century under colonial occupation, as well as developments elsewhere in the Muslim world. These dialogues demonstrate clearly the triangulated intellectual relationship between Muslim subjects, their pushback against their French colonizers, and their layered views on different regimes in the Middle East, most frequently the Turkish Republic. Women and men’s bodies—and how they chose to dress them in public—were at the intersection of these transregional concerns and local anxieties about changing Algerian cities.

“A Hijab Convenient to Her Time and Place”

Veiling styles were variable across Algeria. Within the debates in the press about hijab, commentators used the term “hijab” to refer to the haik. In Algiers women’s haik was a white cloth draped over the head that extended to calf- or ankle-length, often with a separate face veil that covered the lower half of the face while letting the forehead and eyes show.¹⁷ Women in other cities wore different forms of the haik, with some extending only to the waist, for example. The haik itself could be constituted from a simple white cloth, or it could be embroidered at the edges as adornment. Dahbia Lounas, a woman from the rural town of Mirabeau near Tizi Ouzou, explained that women there did not wear the haik, which was more “for women of central Algeria, in the capital and its surroundings.”¹⁸ Instead women wore simple, long, loose dresses, which she described as the typical “Amazigh style.” In the 1930s and later, women of her region did not cover their faces.

In terms of hijab styles, the haik is similar to the Iranian chador or the Mauritian malahfa, in that it is a simple cloth worn as an outer cloak over other clothes. While the haik is typically worn with a rectangular piece of fabric, the chador is a semicircle. Like the chador, the haik is typically held together by the wearer’s hands. While the chador is typically held closed or could be tucked under the arms, the haik and malahfa both offer women a subtle flexibility in terms of how much of the body is exposed depending on the wearer’s posture and movement.

Muslim and non-Muslim women across Algeria veiled in various ways before Algeria’s conquest, but colonial contact also shaped veiling practices. From the beginning of the French colonial occupation of Algeria in 1830 and in the following decades, colonialism facilitated sexual violence and a new demand for prostitution.¹⁹ French colonial attempts to regulate prostitution turned it from a casual occupation one could move in and out of to a permanently marginalized status.²⁰ About how this impacted veiling, Marnia Lazreg has written: “Colonial intervention meant a loss of status for … women, from decent (that is, Muslim) to immoral (used as prostitutes for Frenchmen’s gain). The veil became women’s refuge from the French denuding gaze. However, its form changed, became longer, and it acquired a new significance as a symbol of not only cultural difference but also protection from and resistance to the colonial-qua-Christian domination.”²¹ Her analysis suggests that urban women’s haik became longer as a form of protection against both the physical occupation of French people and the violating French gaze.

While the haik is less commonly worn in Algeria today, it remains celebrated, sometimes in marches, as a symbol of Algerian cultural heritage. Many continue to associate the haik with women’s involvement in the Algerian War of Independence, since some veiled women used their haik to smuggle weapons for the FLN, as discussed in Franz Fanon’s 1959 essay “Algeria Unveiled” and depicted in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. Today some Algerians distinguish between the haik and other forms of hijab or Islamic dress imported from the Middle East. Popular anti-Islamist sentiment in Algiers, for example, distinguishes between the “elegance” of the haik as compared to the so-called dirty Middle Eastern abaya, which drags on the street.²² For some Algerians today, the term “hijab” evokes any kind of veil covering hair as a religious choice, while the haik recalls a cultural patrimony.

In interwar Algeria commentators referred to the haik with the term “hijab” in the Arabic-language press and simply the term “veil” in the French-language press. One major topic of discussion was whether the face veil component of the haik was Islamically mandated or could be removed. For supporters of the face veil, it was an important tradition that connected Muslim women in Algeria to their past. For those who called for its removal, the face veil was an outdated custom that inhibited women from participating in public life. For both its supporters and its detractors, then, the veil was a marker of custom—either one to be celebrated or one to be abandoned. Here the interwar discussions about the veil cohere to other contemporary discourses about what to do with customary clothing in modern times.²³ Globally consumption of clothing and makeup became a language for girls from a wide array of spaces to present themselves as modern, unlike women of earlier generations.²⁴

In interwar Algeria one of the most prolific figures in the discussions about the hijab was Sheikh Abu Ya’la al-Zawawi, the imam of the Sidi Ramadan mosque, the second oldest mosque in Algiers, located in the casbah. His links to multiple communities reflect how interwar urbanization facilitated interconnection between multiple ideological communities. Born to a Kabyle-speaking family in the rural Azazga region of Tizi Ouzou around 1870, al-Zawawi only learned Arabic after his arrival in Algiers around 1890.²⁵ In his youth he was imprisoned for attacking a man who had assaulted his father, who was also an imam. While in prison he learned to speak French from the prison director, and he was ultimately released for good behavior after serving only three years of his seven-year sentence.

al-Zawawi’s allegiances were complicated. While he became increasingly committed to the Muslim reformist movement in the 1930s, he never entirely disavowed Sufism or the zawiya system, which was responsible for the education of Sufi scholars. Although he critiqued the French administration at times, he was among the imams paid monthly by the administration—a practice disavowed by reformists.²⁶ Still, he was well received by reformists. An article in al-Bassair called him an “ʿalim [Islamic legal scholar] of two generations,” reflecting both his age and his ability to move between both Sufi and reformist worlds.²⁷ Al-Zawawi also maintained a complicated relationship to European settler society. Within the press, for example, he defended his preference for French cafés and hotels over the Muslim café maure. As the imam of the Sidi Ramadan mosque in the casbah, al-Zawawi occupied an important intellectual role within Algiers.

His sermons were widely attended by large crowds, including women. In his Livre de l’Algérie reformist and nationalist leader Tawfiq El Madani described the powerful impact of al-Zawawi’s sermons: “He has revolutionized and transformed the traditional and ancient function of the preacher to make it a useful and national role. He preaches for everyone on local and specific subjects. His discourse is a real lesson, and he does not stop until he is certain that everyone present, men and women, have fully learned it. I bear witness that his preaching has had an active impact on souls.”²⁸ Al-Zawawi’s impactful sermons were sometimes reprinted in the press in publications such as al-Najah and al-Bassair, as well as compiled into books. His influence also spread through his regularly published commentaries in various interwar publications.

Al-Zawawi wrote extensively on the subject of the hijab in a series of articles published between December 1925 and February 1926 in al-Najah. These articles discussed the relationship between unveiling and the reform taking place in Turkey, evaluating current events through Islamic sources and history. After offering quotations from the Qur’an and Muslim scholars, he wrote, “Everyone agrees the hijab should not cover the face, so if [Muslim women] go to work like this … it will be great reform. But if it is going to lead to her being like her Western neighbors in wearing less clothes,” then that would be unacceptable.²⁹ He presented the style of hijab that allowed the face to be uncovered as a more moderate response to the unveiling becoming increasingly prevalent across the region.

In 1937 the Muslim reformist paper al-Bassair published a multi-issue debate on hijab within which the participants distinguished between the haik as Algerian “custom” and the parameters of hijab required by Islamic sources, which allowed for the face to be exposed. Articles contributing to the debate were featured in seven different issues of the weekly publication, between January and April 1937.³⁰ As commentators argued whether the haik was custom or Islamic requirement, they also debated its impact on women’s participation in society. The 1937 debate began with a long article by Mustafa Ibn Hallush, who argued that covering the face, hands, and feet was an outdated custom that had no basis in Islam and needed to be abandoned. He described the form of hijab in which the face and hands were exposed as the “middle” ground “between the two extremes” of strict hijab and complete unveiling.³¹ Ibn Hallush argued that an excessively strict form of hijab like the haik stood between present-day Algeria and a future, modern Algeria. He wrote, “The [customary] hijab inhibits the Muslim woman from participating in religious matters and society equally and from participating in the umma like a human being with rights and responsibilities.”³²

Two months later, Hamza Bukusha responded to Ibn Hallush in al-Bassair; he wrote that even if the ulema agree it was not Islamically mandated for women to cover their hands and face, it was “a beautiful custom” that should not be abandoned.³³ Then only thirty years old, Bukusha had studied closely under Ben Badis in Constantine. He would later become a leader of the Muslim reform movement in Algeria, imprisoned by the French during the Algerian War of Independence. For Bukusha, more important than whether it was Islamically mandated was the fact that it was “honorable” and had a long history. Bukusha noted that the stricter form of hijab was practiced in the Middle Ages, as well as by Arabs and Greeks throughout history. The title of his article even referred to covering the face as an “honorable custom in Islam and before.”

While many interwar commentators supported women uncovering their faces, Bukusha was by no means alone in his insistence that women’s faces should remain covered. In fact, al-Balagh al-Jazairi repeatedly published articles that called for women to adopt several strategies alongside the face veil to anonymize themselves and ensure they not be seen.³⁴ One author urged women to maintain anonymity even at home in the presence of nonfamily men. If a woman was home alone and her husband’s friend came to the door, for example, she should only answer if it was absolutely necessary. If answering the door was necessary, the author wrote, women needed to disguise their voices, as the sound of a woman’s voice alone could be enough to attract men and compromise her modesty. For Ibn Hallush, however, the stricter form of hijab’s association with the past was precisely the reason it should be abandoned in their modern moment. He noted that the stricter forms of hijab disappeared as nations “were civilized by science.”³⁵ “Science” here implicitly referred to the Muslim reformist opposition between local, superstitious religious practice, on one hand, and the spirit of science and civilization, which they described as fundamental to Islam, on the other.

One month after Ibn Hallush’s initial article, Djamila Debèche joined the debate with her own article on the topic published in the French-language reformist paper La Justice. Debèche would later found the first women’s journal, L’Action, for Muslim women in 1947. Citing the Qur’an, the Sunna, and the writings of Rashid Rida and Ibn Arabi, Debèche argued the haik was not a religious requirement but merely a custom. She wrote that Muslim “young girls or women, as long as they are decent, can go out in the city, in makeup, with their faces uncovered, and without the haik.”³⁶ Alongside her article, La Justice published a picture of Debèche unveiled.

Many referenced Islamic history to describe both more flexible styles of hijab as well as women’s greater public presence. Reformists across the region, including in Egypt, also drew on Islamic history as a model of Muslim feminine emancipation.³⁷ Debèche too stressed that there was historical precedent for both a more minimal covering style of hijab and women’s greater participation. She reminded readers that in the time of the Prophet and the imams who followed, most Muslim women left their faces and hands exposed and also maintained important public roles as teachers. An author writing under the pseudonym “Taciturne” wrote in La Voix des Humbles that Muslim women in early Islamic history had a public presence, especially tied to poetry, and many did not veil since it was only intended for the wives of the Prophet Muhammad.³⁸ Muslim reformism preached its own logics of historical time, which these commentators echoed. Omnia El Shakry has described how Muslim reformists in Egypt framed social issues within “a nonsecular concept of historical time—framing reform (islah) as a project of renewal (tajdid) in the face of the decline and digression of the Muslim world from the true path of Islam.”³⁹ Reformists in Algeria similarly evoked the Islamic past in their calls for a more modern future Algeria, which would require reform of Sufi traditions that had supposedly deviated from Islam.

Muslim commentators in Algeria of multiple religious and political allegiances articulated a vision of a future in which Muslim women would enjoy greater participation in Algerian society, although they were often unspecific about what this future participation might entail. Debèche’s article was introduced by Mohammed Benhoura, editor of La Justice, qadi, and leading figure in Algiers’s reformist circles close to the reformist leader Sheikh Tayyib al-Oqbi. Decidedly not a nationalist, Benhoura would later be assassinated by the FLN during the Battle of Algiers. In his introduction to Debèche’s article, Benhoura highlighted the similarity between her position and those recently expressed in al-Bassair by Ibn Hallush. He praised Muslim reformist leaders for their support for “the moral and social emancipation of the Muslim woman.”⁴⁰ Their shared vision of an Algerian future in which women would enjoy “moral and social emancipation” reflects how thinkers from quite different intellectual communities came together around women’s advancement. While Benhoura was a qadi and a leader within the reformist movement, Debèche would later be heralded by the French colonial administration as a model colonial subject for her openness to a European model of women’s emancipation. What emerged in these discussions was thus a vision of a future Muslim woman—one who could participate in society “equally,” according to Ibn Hallush.

As authors identified the parameters of the hijab Islam required for women, they consistently portrayed Islam as modern, flexible, and adaptable. In so doing they challenged the Orientalist and French colonial view of Islamic practice as something static from the past by positing that Islamic customs were well suited for the present and future. Many noted that since Islamic law does not mandate the covering of the hands and face, women in different regions could wear hijab in different ways. It left room, for example, for the diverse styles of hijab worn by more rural Algerian women, who often worked alongside men in planting and harvesting crops. After the back-and-forth between Ibn Hallush and Bukusha, al-Bassair invited Al-Zawawi to contribute and marry the two perspectives. Al-Zawawi echoed his 1926 articles from al-Najah and commended Ibn Hallush for favoring the sharia form of hijab that would be “convenient to her time and place,” or adaptable to their modern moment.⁴¹ Al-Zawawi wrote that historically “Islam was not as strict with differences in hijab across different nations as people are now.”⁴²

Yet despite this potential flexibility of the so-called sharia form of hijab, commentators were largely in agreement that unveiling entirely was unacceptable. An unsigned editorial in the Muslim reformist al-Shihab lamented that increasing numbers of Muslim women, including “the wives of the Muslim princes and ministers,” were unveiling completely.⁴³ They feared Muslim practice was in danger of being overrun by so-called Western practices. Al-Darraji wrote that his commentary about women’s hijab was relevant to all Muslim women, “whether … Turkish or Arab or anyone else because the sharia applies to everyone in the same way.”⁴⁴ Al-Zawawi reminded readers that Muslims “cannot decide ourselves what is right” and were bound by the dictates set by the sharia.⁴⁵ Others implied that unveiling would happen on its own with time. Ibn Hallush wrote that while the haik form of hijab was “burdensome” to women, he did not advocate for unveiling but rather to “leave it to time” and allow it to happen “step by step.” Even Debèche, who herself was unveiled, wrote in her provocative explanation about how hijab was not a religious requirement that “we do not want to change everything in one day. Today we’re content just to put these facts out there.”⁴⁶

Many commentators underscored that while they may complain about the so-called traditional haik, Islam itself was emancipatory for women. As in debates about education, they drew on both Islamic texts and early Islamic history. Through regional references—coupled with those about Islamic knowledge—Muslim thinkers reclaimed women’s advancement as an Islamic project, as opposed to one imported from Europe. In her article about hijab, Debèche noted that Islamic law empowered Muslim women to enter into contracts independently, “a right French women do not possess.”⁴⁷ Here Islam—far from being an unwaveringly misogynistic force—was rather one that grants Muslim women greater rights than some of her European counterparts. Debèche’s comparison to “French women” makes explicit a key feature of these discussions in the French colonial context: the triangulated comparisons between French women, Muslim women, and the modernizing women of the Middle East, often Turkey. While Algerian discussions around dress were rooted in a comparative south-south gaze toward other Middle Eastern spaces, Europe remained an important counterpoint. By asserting that Islam was not inherently misogynistic but potentially emancipatory, these authors reordered colonial ideology and challenged the ideological basis of their inferior status vis-à-vis European settlers within French colonial society.

Aspects of these debates were not unique to Algeria. Women authors and activists in Egypt, Baron has shown, demanded their right to greater participation in Egyptian society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with reference to early Islamic history and women’s rights in Islam.⁴⁸ What set Algeria apart, however, from other interwar Middle Eastern contexts where debates about hijab also raged was the settler-colonial context. This context continually reinforced claims that a Muslim women’s hijab was a marker of not only her subjugation but also Muslim society’s backwardness and incompatibility with modernity. In response to such claims, the Muslim discussions about hijab in Algeria sought to reframe hijab and Islam broadly as flexible and modern. Djamila Debèche’s article, which went as far as to claim that hijab broadly was a custom not required by Islam, even received endorsement from Muslim reformists. This support suggests that the desire to represent Islam and hijab as flexible and modern was a point of convergence across multiple intellectual communities.

Hats and the Panic of the Present

Choices in clothing and headwear had long offered men a means of expressing their politics, class, local culture, and even profession. For Muslim men, as Omar Carlier argued, even facial hair had particular connotations. Nationalist leader Messali Hadj’s combination of a “strong nose” and a full mustache, for example, connoted “social standing, virility, and honor.” During the interwar period, however, multiple sartorial norms shifted. In early 1920s Algiers most Muslim men continued to wear sirwal, the traditional loose cropped pants. The term sirwal even remains the Algérois word for pants today. By 1935, however, most Muslim men in Algiers wore European-style trousers. Carlier has noted that this fact was made even more remarkable because the Great Depression forced many Muslims to buy used clothing exclusively.⁴⁹ This shift toward European-style clothing may have been a consequence of men’s shifting taste in attire after having served in the French army in Europe during World War I.⁵⁰ By the late interwar period, only elite older men, administrators of Qur’anic schools, and functionaries in Muslim courts continued to wear sirwal and other traditional clothes “with different degrees of elegance and ornamentation” in order to assert their status as protectors of tradition. Of course, this varied across Algeria. In Constantine, for example, middle- and upper-class Muslim men would continue to wear the traditional robes throughout the interwar period.⁵¹

Although it had the longest history in Algeria, the turban-style head covering or ʿamama was rarely mentioned in the debates about headwear. By the interwar period, it was typically worn only by men such as Muslim reformist leaders or men affiliated with Qur’anic schools, mosques, and occasionally the Muslim courts. This limited use made it less politically contentious than the tarbush and the hat. Notably missing from these discussions was the chechia-style hat that Muslim men, particularly rural and lower-class, wore, similar to a tarbush in color and shape but softer in material, wider in diameter, and sitting lower on the head. The absence of the chechia in the debates in the press indicates that these commentators were particularly interested in the sartorial habits of the small but growing Muslim middle class.⁵²

Despite the multiple items of clothing that were in flux in the interwar years, the press fixated on styles of men’s headwear. Debates about men’s self-fashioning focused exclusively on their choice between three different forms, each with its own connotations and meanings. The tarbush, or red fez, had a shorter history in Algeria, as it was adopted across the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century as an equalizing form of dress worn by Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike. In turn-of-the-century Algeria, the choice to wear a tarbush signaled allegiance to a new modernity, in contrast to the ʿamama or turban, which was seen as dated. By the interwar period, with the exception of religious centers like Constantine, the tarbush was overwhelmingly the most dominant style, particularly for middle- and upper-class men. The tarbush could be purchased in various shades of red (which could signify religious affiliation), in different fabrics, and with different forms of tassels and adornments—all of which signified fashion trends as well as various forms of social distinction. The head covering that started the controversy, however, was the Western-style brimmed top hat, which the Arabic-language press simply called qubbaʿa, or hat.

While interwar Algerian discussions about dress were rooted in particular local tensions, they also reflected dynamics at play both globally and historically. In multiple contexts particular forms of clothing became symbols in the wake of political upheaval. Historians have explored, for example, how men wore liberty caps after the French Revolution, all-black ensembles during World War I, Mao suits after the Cultural Revolution, and brown jackets after the rise of fascism in Italy.⁵³ Historians have traced the spread of these clothing items and analyzed the multiple meanings they came to symbolize as they became adopted in increasing numbers. Historians have also considered how certain sartorial decisions reflected consumption of international taste patterns.⁵⁴ Kathy Piess has described dress as “a particularly potent way to display and play with notions of respectability, allure, independence, and status to assert a distinctive identity.”⁵⁵ Clothing could be a language for men to distance themselves from local traditions and instead self-fashion as cosmopolitan or modern. Colonialism too produced a particular set of dynamics around clothing, with often a sharp divide in the dress of the colonized and the colonizers. Within this context, clothing could be a way for male colonial subjects to play with their relationship to colonial power. The Gabonese elites analyzed by Jeremy Rich or the Sapeurs in Brazzaville, for example, negotiated French colonial sartorial norms to produce their own hybrid forms of respectability.⁵⁶

While interwar discussions around men’s hats reflected local discussions about Islam, colonialism, and modernity, they also speak to how some of these broader global dynamics played out in Algeria. Atatürk’s 1925 hat law was the catalyst for these discussions, and commentators in Algeria described those who wore the hat as loyal to the emerging world order embodied by the rise of secular authoritarian regimes in Turkey and Iran. Others described the hat as a careless attempt by young people to be stylish—a marker of the widening generational gap. The hat also represented a particular tension with colonial power, with some arguing that the hat signified a shame in one’s identity and an attempt to pass as a European settler. Finally, for many commentators the hat represented a rejection of local custom. The debates over the hat were, like the debates about hijab, about the place of customs in a modern society. Some saw the ʿamama and the tarbush as part of a long historical tradition that Muslims needed to maintain to ensure future prosperity. Supporters of the hat, in contrast, offered examples of Islamic history to demonstrate that many important leaders instituted their own forms of dress, and they situated Atatürk within this line of important leaders. For them, Atatürk and the hat signaled a new era of transnational Muslim greatness.

Globally, many sartorial norms shifted after World War I.⁵⁷ As colonial soldiers returned home from Europe, many of them brought European clothes and tastes with them. Ideologically too, World War I forced global populations to reckon with the large-scale violence that Europe, the supposed hub of modernity, had wrought. Yet the discussions in Algeria over clothing were predominantly influenced by Middle Eastern developments, as their timing reflects. The first commentaries on the hat began to appear in the press in September 1925 in response to new Turkish legislation. While the new Turkish laws initially only mandated particular types of hat for certain state employees, the Hat Law, passed in November 1925, officially banned Turkish men from wearing the ʿamama or the tarbush, punishable by death. Some commentators described those who wore the hat as loyal to the emerging world order embodied by Atatürk’s rise in Turkey.

Yet Islamic history was equally important for those who supported wearing the hat and who described Atatürk as part of a long lineage of important Muslim leaders whose reigns all involved new forms of headwear. They situated Atatürk within a longer history of Muslim advancement, which came in stages, each with distinct leaders and costumes. One al-Najah author, for example, described Atatürk as among the great reformers (muslihun) of Muslim history.⁵⁸ This author moved systematically through Muslim history and described how the ʿamama that was common during the Umayyad caliphate was replaced by the Persian-style qalansuwah, or tall triangular turban, under the Abbasid caliphate. He cited the work of a sixteenth-century historian from Tlemcen, Ahmad Ibn Muhammad al-Maqqari, about how the Muslims of Andalusia abandoned the turban for another form of headwear. In defense of Atatürk’s legal mandating of the hat, the author noted that Umayyad leaders were “extremely strict” about the ʿamama, while “in the year 153 [hijri], al-Mansur [legally] required” men to wear the Persian style qalansuwah. By situating Atatürk within a lineage of powerful Muslim leaders, intellectuals in Algeria who supported the hat argued that Atatürk was ushering in a new era of Muslim leadership. They understood Atatürk’s ban as part of a larger step forward toward modernity and civilization. Unlike those who presented Westernization as a threat to Muslim identity, these authors saw no contradiction in Atatürk’s “large step toward Western civilization” and his status as a powerful Muslim leader. This author’s commentary demonstrates how for some intellectuals in Algeria, Atatürk’s embrace of the hat was not an affront to centuries of Muslim tradition but an important moment within it.

Perhaps because of the extent to which they were oriented toward Turkey, Muslim authors did not describe Muslims who donned the hats as making a playful or subversive move that asserted “independence and an insistence on equal treatment,” as Marie Grace Brown has described Sudanese men’s choice to wear trousers. Notably, it is Brown’s analysis of tensions over the dress of Sudanese women that more neatly maps onto the Algerian debates about men’s hats: in both cases, there was “concern that overindulgence in foreign trends led to weakness and cultural instability,” which in turn led to an insistence that dress for both men and women remain “local and authentic” in order to maintain social cohesion and a strong future.⁵⁹

As the number of men from Algeria educated in French schools and entering the French colonial bureaucracy grew, some Muslim thinkers feared their culture was at risk of disappearing. This situation provided an important context for concerns about headwear. The hat sparked a panic about the present, which was rooted in fears about how to survive colonialism both culturally and psychologically. Troubled commentators lamented the pressure to assimilate and the self-hatred that colonial ideology evoked within Muslims. For them, choosing to wear a hat signified a shame in one’s Arabness and an attempt to pass as a European settler—a symptom of their powerlessness under colonialism. For many commentators, the hat represented a rejection of Arab and Algerian tradition. These commentators were less optimistic than those who described a future in which Muslim women would be “emancipated” in the dialogues about hijab. One author complained that the city of Bône (Annaba) was in decline and “the situation of the women … is really bad.”⁶⁰ The market was full of prostitutes. “Young men” were wearing hats. The author wrote disapprovingly that “they say it is just to protect them from the sun,” but they wore their hats “even at night!” Articles lamented that young boys were attending French schools and learning not about the glory of Arab civilizations but about European history and geography.⁶¹ One author quoted Rashid Rida that wearing the hat meant “forget[ting] one’s dignity.”⁶² He wrote that he who would “hide himself behind a hat” was “ashamed of who we are.”

In April 1937 the Lebanese reformist intellectual Shakib Arslan was invited to speak at the conference of the Association des étudiants musulmans d’Afrique du Nord (Association of Muslim Students of North Africa, or AEMAN) in Morocco. He commended how most North Africans continued to maintain their Arab identity, unlike the Arabs of the East who were “copying from [Europe] in a blind way,” which was dangerous because of the self-hatred it engendered.⁶³ While in this particular address he focused on mimicry of Europeans broadly, he had commented on hats in particular in 1926 in the Egyptian newspaper al-Fath, where he insisted that Egypt would lose its essential identity if Egyptian men adopted the hat.⁶⁴ In his address to AEMAN, he stated that those mimicking European customs clearly saw themselves as comparatively “small and weak.” Another anonymous editorial similarly stated, “It is cowardly to pick the look of a people that do not consider you one of them, and do not consider you equals even if you wear what they wear and talk how they talk.”⁶⁵ Here the hat was symptomatic of not only assimilation as a strategy but also the self-hatred colonialism engendered. Arslan reminded his Muslim audience that because of European prejudice, assimilation would never lead to a freer future.

For one commentator in al-Najah, while the choice to wear the hat might be understandable as an attempt by powerless people to seek access to power, the gesture was clearly little more than “try[ing] to imitate the powerful.”⁶⁶ He admonished those wearers of the hat (implicitly Muslims in Algeria and perhaps the Turkish) for believing that changing their appearance to look more like those with power—namely, Europeans—would bring power. Instead, he advised, Muslims should focus on attaining “the root of the West’s power and dominance: knowledge, work, perseverance, and vitality.” This was a recurring trope in these discussions of the hat. Commentators distinguished between sources of European power worth emulating, knowledge and technology, versus more superficial markers of Europeanness, like the hat.

Many of these tensions—between colonizer and colonized, between shame and pride, between assimilation and tradition—were framed in religious terms. Muslim authors connected the question of the hat in Turkey to the looming threat of atheism. The conservative Sufi newspaper al-Balagh al-Jazairi, which frequently challenged reformists, admonished the newspaper al-Najah for covering Turkish developments so heavily.⁶⁷ They complained that such exhaustive coverage was equal to support for “the Kemalist project,” which involved “replacing sharia with Western law,” as well as “forbidding the tarbush and hijab and requiring hats.” They interpreted Atatürk’s actions not as an alternative model of Muslim modernity but as a direct mimicry of “Western law.” The editors urged their readers not to be fooled by the label of “reform” that Kemalists used to disguise their real project: atheism. Within this view, the hat symbolized the erasure of Islamic practice. Another author reprinted Rashid Rida’s judgment that if the intent of “Westernizers” was to promote disbelief (kufr) by encouraging others to wear the hat, then wearing the hat itself was an act of disbelief.⁶⁸ Controversy erupted after the visit of the reform-minded king of Afghanistan, Amanullah Khan, to Cairo, where, it was rumored, the king asked the religious authorities of Al Azhar University whether it was permissible to wear a hat while praying. Many facts about this encounter, including whether the question was even posed and whether the response was given, were contested even in Algeria.⁶⁹

Writers frequently evoked the Qur’anic concept of taqlid, which in this context refers to “following.” While taqlid could connote following in a positive sense, Muslim authors used it to signify blind mimicry of Europeans. One article warned readers that the religious scholars at Al Azhar University decreed that Islam “forbids you to try and look like others [non-Muslims].”⁷⁰ These scholars ruled that sharia emphasized the importance of “conserving nationality and unity.” Articles about civilization and modernity complained that some Muslims were “copying nothing but bad morals from Europe.”⁷¹ The article then declared, “We have shown the judgment of God” on the hat and “have shown how that hurts our unity and our nationality.” The article encouraged its readers to act either out of fear of God or at least out of “patriotism” and reject the hat. Similarly, one author described “wearing the hat and dressing in a Western manner” as “preferring the characteristics of the umma’s adversaries over their own nation’s characteristics.”⁷² The hat was then the site of a struggle between the umma and their “adversaries,” Europeans. The nationalist discourse around the need to stand unified against the hat was so totalizing that it came to encompass not only one’s culture and politics but also one’s religious commitment.

Headwear for a Dignified Future Nation

Muslim reformists proposed pride in Algerian history and traditions to combat this shame and “loss of dignity.” James McDougall has analyzed how histories produced by Muslim reformist leaders, which spanned from precolonial Algeria to the present, enabled Muslims to envision themselves as part of a continuous, persevering Algerian people who could thus have a nationalist future beyond French colonialism.⁷³ The discussions about headwear similarly illustrate—perhaps more so than discussions about women’s labor or girls’ schooling—budding nationalist discourse. Unlike the new hat, both the tarbush and ʿamama represented history that predated French colonialism. Although before the interwar period the tarbush had reflected difference, since it was a relatively new Ottoman phenomenon slowly replacing the ʿamama, the debates about the hat during the interwar years reframed the tarbush as an Algerian tradition in opposition to the hat. The insistence on the tarbush as “tradition,” when it had been so recently introduced, signals how quickly sartorial norms were not only changing but also being redefined in the interwar years. Unlike the face veil, which was a tradition that could be modified, Muslim reformists and others saw the tarbush as integral to their identity and thus necessary to uphold for a strong future Algerian nation.

In a poem about the tarbush, ʿamama, and hat published in al-Najah, the ʿamama represented Algeria’s Arab history. The poem described the ʿamama as “the crown of the Arabs” and a reflection “of the old glory.”⁷⁴ The reference to “old glory” reveals the connections many commentators envisioned between tradition as embodied in the ʿamama and the tarbush and the potential greatness of a people. To adopt the hat, then, represented participation in the erasure of this tradition of “glory” in the face of colonization and Westernization. References to the lasting presence of the ʿamama and tarbush since the era of Arab “glory” functioned as a way to connect the Algerian present to an empowering vision of the past. These references to periods of Arab “glory” were analogous to the aforementioned allusions to early Islamic history as a model of how women could be Muslim and maintain important public roles.

These discussions were also—like those about hijab—future-oriented. About the ʿamama, tarbush, and hat in Egypt, Wilson Chacko Jacob has written: “The three sartorial symbols and their differentiated evocations of nationalism and masculinity were situated unevenly in the international order—conditioned by the epistemic and physical violence of colonialism—wherein the subject’s formation was measured against what was commonly regarded as the inescapable flow of modern time, with which Egypt was still playing catch-up.”⁷⁵ The Algerian discussions were similarly about Algeria’s attempt to “catch up” to “modern time.” Commentators in Algeria idealized the Islamic past and used references to Islamic knowledge to argue that a return to the true principles of the faith could bring about a future that was at once Muslim and modern. Some envisioned the tarbush as an emblem of a powerful potential future, while others suggested that it was change, in the form of the hat, that would bring about a greater future. In the poem about the tarbush and the ʿamama, while the ʿamama represented an Arab past, the poet connected the tarbush to the prosperity of nations. He wrote that the tarbush represented the “happiness of nations and countries.”⁷⁶ With it, “we build … castles of hope for the future and service to the homeland.” The author associates the tarbush with the dream of a successful national project in the future. The cohesion and strength of this future nation depended on the commitment of the Algerian people to their traditions, like the tarbush.

Cohesion was critical for a future Algerian nation, both in the sense of a people and an independent nation-state. One author, writing in the Muslim reformist al-Shihab, argued that the tarbush was part of a broader range of “attributes and characteristics” of the Muslim “religion, language, literature, and true traditions” of Algeria.⁷⁷ Here he alluded to the Muslim reformist and eventually nationalist, saying, “Islam is our religion, Arabic is our language, and Algeria is our homeland.” He argued a nation was only as strong as these “attributes and characteristics.” Reiterating the connections other authors drew between men’s self-fashioning and the greatness of Muslims, he warned of “weakening and decay” if the hat became more prevalent. Here tradition was not the vestiges of anti-modern ignorance to be wiped away as it was in discussions about hijab. Rather, it was a prerequisite for a strong Algerian future.

In his address at the AEMAN conference, Arslan cited the example of Japan to argue that maintaining traditions would not impede modernization.⁷⁸ He admired the long-standing Japanese belief that the emperor was part of the sun. He reminded his audience that despite the Japanese allegiance to this “ridiculous” belief, Japan was “one of the most advanced nations” in the world. In other words, tradition strengthened nations through a shared national culture, even when the traditions themselves may be of no discernible value. With his reference to Japan, Arslan joined Muslim reformists and thinkers like Debèche who challenged Europe’s supposed monopoly on advancement and civilization.

Some critiqued the idea that the strength of the nation depended on tradition. As in the discussions about hijab, history was a critical part of how commentators evaluated whether the tarbush had value in the present. While al-Shihab frequently attacked Muslims who adopted the hat, they also reprinted an article from the Egyptian newspaper al-Fajr, which criticized other Muslim intellectuals for insisting on the need to uphold traditions, irrespective of their utility. The author described the tarbush as “the most ridiculous thing a creature has [ever] worn on its head.”⁷⁹ He reminded readers that despite these ubiquitous references to the tarbush as a Muslim tradition, the tarbush originated in Greece. He questioned the utility of the tarbush, arguing that its red color and silk tassel initially had military value but there was no longer any reason to continue to wear it. He wrote, “Now, nothing is left but the trace of the old ages which do not help anything.” He thus encouraged Muslims to abandon the tarbush since it offered neither utility or authentic Muslim heritage.

One author from Morocco whose article was reprinted in al-Bassair complained that all Westernized Muslims “know of civilization is … fashion.”⁸⁰ Real civilization, he wrote, was that which would “bring together individuals, unify groups, work toward goals, work for the country, construct the nation, and elevate the social state [of the people].” In this nationalist formulation, plurality would fall away as individuals and groups united in service of the nation. This language combines the reformist rejection of plurality and insistence that there was one, single authentic mode of Islamic practice with the utilitarian ideals of nationalism. Yet while reformists were largely unified against the hat and unveiling, they were open to the diverse styles of hijab adopted by rural women. The hat and unveiling were so objectionable and impermissible because they represented assimilation to European norms.

The Gendered Stakes of Algeria’s Sartorial Future

The Algerian discussions of men’s and women’s headwear remained separate. An individual’s dress revealed multiple sets of allegiances, many of which were not always firmly decided but rather negotiated. A Muslim man’s or woman’s choice to don headwear would have been influenced by a number of factors, including but not limited to their social class, their geographic location, and their association with specific religious communities or professions.

Yet at the level of press discourse, these individual negotiations and choices became collapsed into decisions about custom and national cohesion. Particular pieces of headwear came to connote a particular stance on questions of custom, modernity, and nationalism. Despite being an Ottoman-era import, the tarbush came to symbolize Algerian and Muslim custom, while the hat represented modernization and secularization, either in the path of Atatürk or the French. Similarly in the discussions around the haik, proponents of the face veil argued it was an invaluable Muslim custom, whereas others argued it could be removed as part of the broader project to modernize Algeria. Reformist commentators who supported men wearing the tarbush and women removing the face veil envisioned both as emblems of a future independent Algeria that was firmly rooted in its Arab and Muslim identity. Interestingly, while some of these reformists were inspired by the Turkish Republic’s independence from Europe, they saw Atatürk’s embrace of the hat and outlawing of the tarbush as an egregious move to assimilate to European norms. Their perspective here was shaped by their experience as colonial subjects. In the face of attempts to assimilate Muslims to French norms, the tarbush represented their rejection of that pressure and insistence on the validity of their own identity. The growing Muslim reformist movement also envisioned the nation as inextricably linked to the Middle East by its Muslim identity, as opposed to Africa or the Mediterranean.

Discussions of the haik were also related to concerns about the future. These discussions differentiated between the haik, which commentators labeled Muslim tradition, and the hijab, which was Islamically mandated and, unlike the haik, could come in various forms and allow the face to be uncovered. Some reformists advocated the removal of the face veil of the haik to keep Muslim women’s dress aligned with their interpretation of sharia (that women needed to cover their hair and bodies) while potentially allowing her to play a greater role in society. While for many the haik represented how Algeria could remain stagnant, women remaining veiled but uncovering their faces was envisioned as facilitating greater participation in public life and a more modern society. The removal of the face veil thus was an important step in the creation of a future Algerian society in which women were active participants but remained dressed according to the mandates of Islamic law. Yet reformists were not unanimous. Bukusha, an important reformist leader, argued that even if it was not Islamically mandated for women to cover their faces, it was a good custom that protected women from unwelcome attention. For him, the face veil was necessary for a future Algeria in which women did not modernize too quickly and thereby disrupt social equilibrium between the sexes.

In both sets of discussions, Islam’s flexibility was important. Many commentators agreed that Islam was flexible enough to allow Muslims to participate in modern life and not be stifled by the requirements of their religion. Women could uncover their faces, participate more in public life, and still cover their hair. For proponents of the hat, wearing the hat similarly could distinguish oneself as modern without posing as an affront to their Muslim identity. For others, however, the hat was unacceptable because it was a symbol of the slow erasure of Muslim identity under colonialism.

History was used in different ways within both sets of discussions. Both Djamila Debèche and a commentator from La Voix des Humbles described how in early Islamic history women’s dress was less covering than the haik. For them and others like Ibn Hallush, a return to the veiling of authentic Islam meant unveiling the face and hands. In the discussions about men’s headwear, a poet in al-Najah described the tarbush and amama as symbols of former Arab “glory.” Others who wanted to replace the outdated tarbush with the hat argued that the tarbush did not even have Muslim origins but rather Greek. For Bukusha, the face veil’s pre-Islamic origins among Greeks and other Mediterranean cultures reaffirmed its status as an honorable custom throughout time worth upholding.⁸¹ Both sets of discussions mentioned Greece as a marker of ancient society—either in need of abandonment for modernity to flourish or as an important cultural legacy not to be abandoned.

While both sets of discussions had similar stakes related to custom, modernity, and a future Algerian nation, commentators typically did not discuss men’s and women’s dress together. Still, examining the discussions alongside one another illustrates that anxiety about the hijab or haik was not in isolation of a wider cultural anxiety about assimilation and custom, which applied to men’s headwear as well. There were important parallels in the two sets of discussions. Both invoked Islamic knowledge alongside regional developments. The link that was drawn between men’s dress and political strength, which was absent from discussions about hijab, suggests that at the precise moment when so many Muslim thinkers were agitating for women’s increased involvement in Algerian society, there were clear delineations on this involvement—namely, it was not yet envisioned to have urgently political stakes. In multiple colonial contexts, from Morocco to Bengal, scholars have argued that women’s role in society was as the bearers of tradition.⁸² While men had the opportunity to participate in a range of new, modern behaviors and activities, including new forms of education, consumption, and travel, women’s lives remained tied to the home. Far from trying to cement the imagined relationship between women and tradition, Muslim intellectuals in Algeria sought instead to rescue the hijab from being a symbol of outdated tradition by insisting it be reformed. By contrast, they urged men to wear the tarbush in order to preserve the custom in the face of European colonialism and a rapidly secularizing world order.

Past and Future Headwear: A Conclusion

In the following decades, while hijab continued to be contentious, the debates about men’s headwear largely fizzled out. In 1946 Djamila Debèche held a conference in Algiers titled “The Muslim Woman in Society,” at which she gave a speech that discussed men’s and women’s headwear together.⁸³ She argued that the veil was “secondary” to education for Muslim women’s advancement. The evidence was in Muslim men’s evolution. Young Muslim men, she declared were often indistinguishable in dress from their European counterparts. Their education, she argued, paved the way for their assimilation to European norms and abandonment of their “Arab clothing [and] the chechia.” Their education and shift in clothing reflected their openness to “modern ideas and French institutions because a new era of understanding encourages them into the path of progress.” Like earlier discussions about men’s and women’s clothing, clothing represented progress for Debèche. Yet while earlier commentators envisioned a future inspired by Atatürk in Turkey or consistent with long-standing Algerian tradition, for Debèche progress meant assimilation to French norms and openness to French culture.

Interestingly, history mattered for Debèche too, just as it had in interwar discussions. For her presumably mixed audience of settlers and Muslims, she offered a long history of the status of Muslim women before Islam, of famous Arab women, and of women figures in early Islamic history. She then moved to the early twentieth century and discussed Qasim Amin’s writings, Atatürk’s reforms, and Egyptian feminists’ successes. For her, this longer history indicated what was possible in the future for Muslim women. Muslim society could take inspiration from this history and contemporary developments, she argued, and campaign for women’s education as a means of achieving progress.

In later years the meaning around each of the articles of headwear examined here shifted. Muslim men continued to adopt European-style clothing in increasing numbers, including the hat and the beret. Nationalists like Ferhat Abbas continued to don the tarbush. More women, including those educated in Muslim reformist schools, unveiled completely. Many continued to wear the haik. During the Algerian War of Independence, the haik took on new meaning as both a mode of camouflage and a rejection of the pressure to assimilate. The debates over dress in the interwar years reflect the instability of the meanings ascribed to particular forms of dress and the particularities of the moment in question, with its own pressures and imperatives. While in the interwar years those pressures focused on questions of assimilation and internationalism, later decisions around dress were increasingly influenced by nationalism and anti-colonial struggle.

As with discussions about women’s labor and education, discussions about headwear became another domain in which Muslims in Algeria sought to push back against French stereotypes and assert a particular vision of how Muslims could embrace their own Muslim modernity, in conversation with developments abroad and new reformist interpretations of Islam. The remaining two chapters move to two different contexts. Chapter 5 considers how these tensions over Muslim women’s labor, education, and dress also concerned French feminists, who, like Muslim society, were equally swept up in interwar discussions about the Middle East. The final chapter then turns to the postwar context to consider how these issues around Muslim women shifted as nationalism grew in popularity.