'Muhammad, the first Arab feminist:' Interpretations of Islam in the Interwar Algerian Debates about Muslim Women

In 1922, the members of the Association of Indigenous Schoolteachers founded the journal La Voix des Humbles. The issue most central to this journal was “the woman question”—debates about Muslim women’s limited social role, rights, and possibilities. In La Voix des Humbles, “the woman question” was about not only Muslim women, but also a future Algeria that could be modern and politically secular—even as it remained religiously Muslim.  To make this future possible, they argued that reforms were necessary, notably primary and upper-level education for women, better protection of women in marriage procedures, and a profound reform of inheritance practices.  Their arguments for a reevaluation of Muslim women’s social position and these reforms involved a complex negotiation of European ideologies of secularism they accessed through their French education, their admiration for secular regimes in the Middle East, and the transnational conversations about Islamic reform taking place across North Africa and the Middle East.  Perhaps most interestingly, they offered new interpretations of verses from the Qur’an and examples from early Islamic history that demonstrated how offering women a greater social presence, as well as social and political rights, was consistent with Islam since its inception.  The debate these schoolteachers initiated quickly expanded to include Muslim leaders, particularly those from the Muslim Reformist Association of Ulama, who responded to these questions and offered their own interpretation of a woman’s rights according to the Qur’an.  My paper explores how this debate was informed by new and contested interpretations of the Qur’an and Islamic history.