Marnia Lazreg, scholar of Algeria and the Veil, dies at 83

As a young girl growing up in colonial Algeria, Marnia Lazreg was instructed by her grandmother to wear a veil to “protect” herself. Mrs. Lazreg refused. She had no need for such protection, and the veil would not provide it anyway.

Decades later, as a sociologist from Hunter College, she delved deeper into an aspect of Muslim society that had haunted her since childhood: was the veil imposed on women really necessary, from a religious perspective or from a security perspective?

The answer she came up with in a collection of five essays, “Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women,” published in 2009, was the same answer she had given her grandmother so many years earlier: a resolutely negative answer.

Ms. Lazreg died on January 13 in Manhattan. She was 83.

Her death, in a hospital where she was being treated for cancer, was confirmed by her son Ramsi Woodcock.

Ms. Lazreg’s academic work revolved around the troubled history of her native country, which has struggled to free itself from the legacy of colonialism, the legacy of its bloody war of liberation against France, and the six decades of authoritarian rule the country endured. always suffocated. that, as a committed anti-colonialist, she was careful not to criticize openly.

In books that also examined Algeria’s class structure (“The Emergence of Classes in Algeria,” 1976) and the use of torture by imperial powers (“Torture and the Twilight of Empire,” 2008), Ms. Lazreg grappled with both complicated legacy of French rule and the internal conflicts that arise in Muslim societies.

Although not widely discussed and often peppered with academic jargon, Ms. Lazreg’s books were unusual because she herself was unusual: an Algerian-born scholar, from a working-class background, based in America and writing in English, from a feminist, anti-colonial perspective. .

Like other Algerian intellectuals, she was tormented by the continued grip of the colonial power, France, on her country, against which the Algerian nation had formed.

In contemporary Algeria, France remains an obsession. Ms. Lazreg was not immune.

“All this Algerian wants is to be left alone, to be left alone, without having to remind you, French intellectuals and politicians, that we are not yours, that we have never been yours. So worry about your own problems. Algeria is no longer one of them.” she said in a 2009 interview with the Algerian news website Toute Sur l’Algerie.

Yet her work was shaped by this twisted relationship. ‘Writing about Algeria is an endless discovery of a history I was never taught’ she wrote in the Journal of World Philosophies in 2020.

“Thinking that I would come to terms with the colonial legacy, I first studied the rise of social classes in the aftermath of the war of decolonization in Algeria,” Ms. Lazreg continued. She concluded that under the country’s then regime, which called itself socialist, the classes would “liberate themselves from their dependence on the state.”

However, that argument turned out to be wrong in a country where everything from business to social and intellectual life is still dependent on the state.

“She was very anti-colonial, and I think that made her reluctant to take too hard a line on the Algerian government, for fear of feeding Western narratives,” her son Woodcock said in an interview. “She was always very proud of Algerian independence.

Perhaps her best-known work was “Questioning the Veil,” in which she pushed back against the idea that the Muslim faith requires it, or that it represents an authentic expression of choice for women.

“Denial of a woman’s physical body helps perpetuate the fiction that obscuring and covering it does not harm the woman who inhabits the body,” Ms. Lazreg wrote.

She suggested that social pressure from men was behind much of the urge to reveal. She told the moving anecdote of a young woman whose systematic abuse at the hands of her brother only stopped when she put on the veil.

Nevertheless, and despite these findings, “she always wanted to avoid playing into Western narratives that Islam is misogynistic,” Mr Woodcock said. “On the one hand she was anti-colonialist, but also feminist. It was a tightrope she always had to walk.”

The economist mentioned the book ‘uneven and with a rather weak understanding of French secularism’, but nevertheless said it had ‘great merits’. Other statements in the book have not gone down so well, for example her criticism of “the American-backed constitutions of both Afghanistan and Iraq,” which she said have been “praised for protecting women’s ‘rights’ despite evidence of the contrary. .”

Ms. Lazreg’s enduring concern with colonialism seeped into her 2008 book on torture, which in her view became a kind of matrix for colonial society: “The history of torture becomes synonymous with the history of colonialism and war, with the modern history itself.” wrote the historian Priya Satia in a review in The Times Literary Supplement in 2009. “In Lazreg’s ethical vision, colonialism itself is a kind of torture chamber.”.

Among Ms. Lazreg’s other books were a novel, “The Awakening of the Mother” (2019); “The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question” (1994); “Foucault’s Orient” (2017), a critique of the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault; and “Islamic Feminism and the Post-Liberation Discourse” (2021).

Marnia Lazreg was born on January 10, 1941 in the Algerian coastal city of Mostaganem, east of the capital Algiers, to Aoued Lazreg, who owned a dry goods store in the city’s market, and Fatima (Ghrib) Lazreg.

By chance and luck, Ms. Lazreg was able to attend a French school and earn a baccalauréat diploma — the equivalent of a high school diploma — even as Algeria was fighting for its independence in 1960. It was a rare achievement for an Algerian. woman at the time.

She earned a degree in English literature from the University of Algiers in 1966, and because of her proficiency in English – “she had studied English obsessively as a way of resisting” the French, her son said – she became a prized recruit for the state oil company Sonatrach, which has recently become embroiled corruption scandals.

In 1966, she opened Sonatrach’s first office in the US, in Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. She began taking classes at New York University and earned a Ph.D. in sociology there in 1974.

In addition to her academic career, Ms. Lazreg worked in international development for the World Bank and the United Nations, with a focus on women’s issues. She helped coordinate the World Bank’s efforts to involve women in lending programs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and she served as a consultant to the UN on development programs.

After a previous stint teaching at Hunter College and stints at Sarah Lawrence and Hampshire, she returned to Hunter full-time in 1988. She also taught at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

In addition to her son Ramsi Woodcock, Mrs. Lazreg is survived by another son, Reda Woodcock, and a granddaughter. A previous marriage ended in divorce.

After earning her baccalauréat, her son said, Ms. Lazreg taught for a while in so-called “indigenous” schools — a limited window into the future. Algeria’s independence in 1962, he added, opened a new world to her.

“That experience of liberation was transformative for her,” he said, adding that it led her to dismiss complaints about the long decades of oppressive rule Algerians have suffered since. “She would say, ‘Look, we’re free. You can’t put a price on that.’”