Women’s Rights under Algerian Political Reform: Between Demands for Personal Rights and Accordance with Religious Authority

Abstract

This study examines the issue of Algerian women’s rights within the system of political reform that the country has seen since independence. These rights have been governed in part by the struggle against political despotism and in part by competition between the Algerian regime’s sloganeering exploitation of women’s rights to oppose political Islam, and the Islamists’ attempted linkage of religious identity with women’s rights in order to counter a perceived alienation of Algerian society and continuation of the culture of the colonial era. In the midst of this fray Algerian women were able to extract a set of rights associated with individual freedoms even as Islamic currents remained greatly influential, among the populace at large and in the political arena, in discussions of the notion of women’s full equal rights with men. This contributed to confusing the public regarding the notion of personal freedoms.