Algeria: Women in the firing line
International Viewpoint #264 MARCH 1995
Religious fundamentalism has very little to do with religion. Traditional Moslem discrimination against women in Algeria used to be on the decline, and feminists organised openly to improve girls' access to schools and to sport, and women's equality with men in terms of family and labour law. The present regression in that country is the result of massive rejection of the corrupt and antidemocratic 'socialist' National Liberation Front (FLN) which has governed the country since independence trom France. By repressing protests against the I.M.F.-backed austerity programme, the F.L.N enabled the fundamentalists to pose as the protectors of the poor. Our correspondents' reports on the French (Catholic) and North American (Protestant) extreme right shows the mobilising power Women and fundamentalism of Christian fundamentalism too. The U.S. religious right is shifting the focus of its attacks from abortion to homosexuality in a conscious search for voters and Tunds, while French National Front is considering down-playing their opposition to abortion rather than alienate a section of women voters. All this should warn us that fundamentalism is anything but archaic. It is much more a political movement of the extreme right kind, which uses religious sentiments and arguments to establish a particular kind of political regime in this world, not the next. The antidote to fundamentalism is not simply education and the preaching of tolerance. The West has nothing to teach the South in this respect. The way to stop fundamentalists enslaving people in Algeria, or controlling media and education in North America, is to build an alternative project for the transformation of society. *
1(0) by Samira Fellah
THE STATUS OF WOMEN has been a battlefield ever since the independence of Algeria from France in 1962. Modernists and traditionalists wrestled in a patriarchal society, shaken by the social transformations which followed independence and the need to rebuild the country. Women won considerable public space, at least in the larger towns. For a time, each attack on women's rights by the regime was opposed by a generation of women, nourished by western feminist ideas, shaped by their participation in the democratic struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, enthusiastic about independence, about nationalisation, about the massive enrollment of girls into schools, and young women's access to university. These women activists placed great emphasis on the legitimacy won by the moudhahidates (women participants in the liberation struggle).
These core networks of women were regularly activated to oppose discriminations in the legal status of women, restrictions on women's access to housing, to sports, or to the need for parental or husband's authorisation to leave the country. In effect, the regime was under constant pressure from traditionalist factions, and was always trying to give to women with one hand and take back with the other. So the women's movement was constantly active, up until the family code was adopted in summer 1984.
All this time, a small core of Islamic fundamentalists were developing a set of theories and strategies which went beyond simple traditionalism. Fundamentalist leader Soltani was already arguing in the 1970s that the Algerian regime was illegitimate because it negated the fundamentally Moslem identity of the Algerian people, because of its "socialist' path, and because it was leading the nation into depravity by authorising all that Islam forbade, and in particular by estranging women from their natural mission as procreators and educators. What the country needed, Soltani and the Fundamentalists argued, was a sharpening up of the moral fibre, which would have to take the form of a radical reeducation of those women who had been seduced by the West. These arguments started to circulate in pamphlet form, the most famous authors of time being the
Masmoudi and Abou Jerra.
Even in the 1970s, then, women were central to the Islamic (and any of)
other kind fundamentalist project.
Indeed, many of the splits within
Islamic the fundamentalist movement can be traced to differences of opinion on the women question. Until recently, the Women's sections of
El Irshad wel Islah (close to the Hamas movement)
recognised women's right to divorce, to work, to participation in sports. At the same time, tendencies like the Islamic Salvation
Front (FIS) were ready to use iron clubs to prevent women students from leaving their halls of residence in the evening.
But back in the 1970s, these reactionary ideas couldn't really spread far in a country sure of itself, admired in the third world, flush with oil revenue, and able to offer job, home and health care for all. In any case, the dictatorship was ready to stamp on the smallest sign of opposition activity.
Things changed in the 1980s, when
Algeria suffered an unprecedented economic crisis. The unemployment, marginalisation and impoverishment which hit whole swathes of society provoked bitterness, envy and mute anger. Society seemed ready to explode, waiting only for the right detonator. The simple explications of the Islamic fundamentalists, distributed through the mosques, "helped' a large part of society to understand the causes of its misery. - The women are the reason nothing works in this country any more!
They take the jobs of the young! They leave the weakest to drug themselves! The orphanages are filling up with unwanted children! At the same time, poverty pushed people back into traditional self-help an easy field for the structures, fundamentalists to organise in.
The sudden democratic opening which resulted from the social explosion in 1988 seemed to give all the political forces in the country new chances, the left and the fundamentalists alike. Except that the
International Viewpoint #264 MARCH 1995
Shadli regime wanted an intifah, an opening of the economy to the world market, and a dose of economic liberalisation at home. No way he was going to let the left wing develop at a time like this. The Islamic fundamentalists
PLANTUL found their economic policies in line with the times, and their confidence in the restraint of the armed forces encouraged them to go a long way in promoting their social policies. So while women's organisations also benefited from the new openings, and succeeded in organising some truly massive assemblies of women, they found themselves confronted with a powerful new opponent the fundamentalists, which seemed to enjoy the tacit support of the traditional enemy -the regime.
In the mosques, sermons became increasingly violent and anti-women. Physical attacks on women multiplied. The regime refused to intervene, apparently confident that they could deal with the fundamentalists at a later date, once it suited them to do so.
Women's organisations and campaigns during this period were no longer led only by the generation of fourty-somethings. A new wave of activists from the student and Berber movements (the only sectors of society where left ideas had developed and spread) came in and renovated the women's movement. But everywhere else, radicalisation in society took the forms designed by the fundamentalists.
The victory of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in the municipal elections of
1990 convinced the fundamentalists that they were the new winners in society. The FIS electoral campaign had promised to relieve women of many of their daily burdens - "Give them running water, decent housing and a living wage" went one slogan - at the condition that women return to the home, and leave the menfolk - or rather, the men of the FIS hierarchy, deal with the serious business of public affairs and the state. A huge majority of working women, exhausted by their double working day, long hours in public transport, the water shortage, the food shortage, the inconvenient hours of the education system, accepted this fundamentalist offer to look after them.
Other women, young for the most part, found a new liberty in fundamentalist agitation. It gave them a chance to move about the town, which traditional society would never have permitted. And their fathers, brothers and neighbours gave them a social recognition which they could never otherwise of dreamed of. For all this, the veil was an insignificant price to pay. It was transformed from sign of oppression to sign of self-affirmation.
These women came to argue with us, opposing feminist arguments in the name of a philosophy that could not be farther from women's rights. Thousands of these women were marshalled into demonstrations for an Islamic state. They marched through the streets of Algiers, Constantine and Blida, demanding a society in which they would be confined to the role of reproduction of the species.
Not surprisingly, the confrontation between fundamentalists and those women struggling for their rights became more and more direct, and more and more violent. In this increasingly unequal struggle, women's organisations are more and more frequently obliged to condemn the kidnap, rape or assassination of women.