Introduction
hat is the best way to examine the problem of citizenship and gender in the
W emergence of civil society and its dialectical relationship with a monolithic
state in Algeria?
One way is to analyze the Algerian debates over personal status in order to
capture the nature of the relationship that links the triad of state, civil society
and citizenship. This allows us to investigate the ambivalence that characterizes
the nature of the state and women’s access to citizenship.
Indeed, women are caught between the ambiguities of modernity and the
regressive local traditional values. This ambivalence has hindered women’s access
to a full-fledged citizenship based on the individualization of their allegiance to
the state.
It is worth noting that the ambiguities are those of the political class. In
Algeria this class is mainly represented by the state technocracy, a group which
had proved instrumental in erecting the normative and institutional bases of the
state structures after independence in 1962. Their characteristics and reflexes
correspond most closely with Hishem Sharabi’s concept of neo-patriarchy in
the Arab region.1 This argument purports to demonstrate that the ambivalent
attitude towards modernity—which has been taken as a “technical” infrastructural
device, rather than a total phenomenon—has sown the seeds both of radical
Islamism and of a gendered notion of citizenship, instead of that of universal
enfranchisement.
However, it is not in women’s limited access to the public realm that the
hesitations of the neo-patriarchal state are most cogent but rather in women’s
empowerment as individual decision-makers in the domestic realm of the
155
156 SECULARISM, WOMEN & THE STATE: THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN THE 21ST CENTURY
family that is the reproductive space par excellence. In this cloistered space, the
ambivalent attitude of neo-patriarchy feeds into the resolve of resurgent religious
fundamentalist claims in tailoring a lame or subordinated citizenship for women
in Algeria. The end result was the promulgation, in the early 1980s, of a Family
Code bill. These laws entrenched women within the confines of a “minority”
status in exchange for their access to the polity. To be admitted to the polity as
into the public space, women in Algeria are asked to sacrifice their majority status
in the family, thus ensuring that their access to citizenship will not undermine
belief in the conjugal and familial cosmogony.2
Debates over personal status started as early as 1963 and were, at first,
dominated by the revolutionary euphoria of Independence. This was well
illustrated by the adoption, on July 25, 1963, of a law (Loi 63-224) establishing
a minimum age for marriage. The law was intended to curb the early marriage
of young girls. However, the bill was never enforced, as conservatives in the
legislative and executive bodies quickly denied its legitimacy and denounced it as
a “secularist” move (secularism being understood as a menace to the social order).
Further attempts at issuing progressive provisions favoring an individualized
decision-maker status for women were made in 1966 and 1972. However,
these too were aborted after negative reactions from conservative quarters. Most
significant in this contest was the systematic ambiguity of the elite in power
regulating the place of secularism, and that of women.
of targeted left-wing radicals (following a wave of repression in the mid and late
1960s), and women, who were integrated into areas of mass consumption such
as education and health. Last but not least was the co-option of the advocates
of religious conservatism, whose “cardinal sin”—the endorsement of socialist
policies—was lavishly compensated for by the promulgation of Islam as the
religion of the state and the establishment of colleges and institutes dispensing
religious education. These educational institutions, by and large, constituted
veritable breeding grounds for the later, more transparent fundamentalist claims
of the 1980s.
The technocratic nature of state- and nation-building during that period
has left a deep imprint on the later development of what I would call a
“commodity” notion of citizenship. Indeed, within a dynamic of rapid social
change, from a pre-industrial formation into a dependent post-colonial one,
universal enfranchisement could not be incorporated as a gratuitous right of a
transcendental Republic, but rather brandished as a “barter good” in exchange
for carefully tailored allegiances. This is where universal access to the Republica is
negotiated against the preservation of allegiances of an ascriptive type, specifically
with regards to women’s empowerment as individual decision-makers in the
domestic space.
Article 2 of the 1976, 1986 and 1989 constitutions stipulates that Islam is the
religion of the state. The heterogeneity of the official ideological discourse about
Socialism and Islamism, and also about local traditional communitarianism,
has abetted a growing individualism. It has also helped legitimize regressive
conservative claims against the ideal of modern citizenship. Furthermore, the
present economic liberalization has simply dragged along, as a corollary, a clear
political and social fundamentalist expression. This has occurred notwithstanding
the monolithism of the technocratic neo-patriarchal state, which has attempted
to excoriate both conservative and radical progressive opinions, in an effort to
maintain, indefinitely and exclusively, the mythical unitarianism of the nebulous
notion of nationalism. In this, the Algerian case mirrors its sister Arab neo-
patriarchies.
Indeed, contrary to the broad support for a) the confinement of Arab women
to the private domestic boundaries of the family and b) the marginalization
of Arab women from decision-making processes in the public arena, one has
to marvel at the formidable monopolization of family and personal status
legislation by exclusively male-dominated executive, as well as legislative and
state structures.3
The classical typology, which draws a clear line between categorizations of
“public” and “private,” ought to be handled with care where the role and status
158 SECULARISM, WOMEN & THE STATE: THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN THE 21ST CENTURY
of women in the Islamic discourse are concerned. The process of the Family
Code enactment in Algeria shows, all too clearly, that women’s involvement, as
full-fledged decision-makers, in the management of family matters within the
ideal type of the individualized citizen, with direct allegiance to the state and the
new national space is perceived as the factor most threatening domestic stability
and social cohesion.4
Whereas women’s participation in areas of public activity has been accepted
as a social structural change, bestowing women equal decision-making powers in
the family has not. It is perceived not only as sacrilegious, but threatening for the
traditional predominantly patriarchal order, whose best guarantor remains the
relational dynamics of the family unit. As paradoxical as it may sound, an active
role of women in this domestic arena would entail the attainment of decision-
maker status for them. This would promote their individuality but, by the same
token, undermine the harmony of the Islamic dual cosmogony, on the one hand,
and patriarchal power, on the other hand.5
The idiosyncratic tension between ideal womanhood and ideal citizenship
came to the fore with the legislature of 1982. The National Popular Assembly
(APN) was to examine a personal status bill regulating domestic relationships.
Its purpose was to delineate the boundaries of women’s status as wives and
mothers, under the guardianship of their husbands and fathers. The bill was a
very significant expression of the tentative preservation of the dominant agnatic
and patrilineal familial structure, a structure largely ensured and protected by
the subservient status of women. In addition to systematizing Shari’a provisions
as those provisions are found in the Qur’an, Sunna and the dominant Maliki
interpretations of the Islamic legal discourse—all of which give preeminence to
the “male believer” above his female counterpart—the bill also introduced further
limits on women’s movements as participants in the public arena by conditioning
their right to work. They can only do so with their husbands’ permission. Rather
than voicing a theological injunction, this last condition expressed the traditional
local Algerian customs involving women’s effacement and dependence on male
kin. It is significant that most provisions of the bill were an expression of a
misogynistic residual social order, which were conveniently added as legislative
principles, since ones actually based on Shari’a would have necessarily introduced
a debate along the more complex and most “fastidious” procedures of Ijtihad and
Taqleed in the Islamic legal tradition. Neither the technocrats of the government
who proposed the bill, nor the neo-patriarchs of the National Assembly, were
ready to open any public forum on the matter. Recoursing to theological
expertise was discreet, and limited to ad-hoc questions.
However, these legislative debates were far from unanimous, for the National
11. THE AMBIGUOUS STATE: GENDER AND CITIZENSHIP IN ALGERIA 159
Assembly at that time included a few delegates with progressive views, who
attempted to advance the concept of citizenship and individual allegiance to the
state, comprised in the official ideological discourse of the modern nation-state.
They were opposed by staunch conservatives who opposed equal legal status
between men and women.
The Justice Minister, in his introductory talk about the bill, left no doubt
as to the position of the modernizing state builders. He summarized the bill’s
mission as embodying “...the legislative reference within the framework of
Islamic principles, which ought to guarantee woman her rights, her position
as partner of man, and as mother in society.” Following in the footsteps of
the Minister, the Chairman of the Assembly’s Administrative and Legislative
Commission clarified women’s status as subordinate in marriage, divorce and
guardianship.
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Accordingly, the die was cast with regard to the nature of the legislation to
be issued by the Assembly. Although about ten delegates tried, in vain, to remind
their peers of the Constitutional provisions on sex equality and the universality of
citizenship for both sexes (Constitution, Article 58), the Assembly’s arena turned
into a veritable inquisition court against women’s right to decision-making
in familial matters, and a venting-session about the threat it posed to social
stability.
The intervention of the conservative delegates left no doubt as to the values
informing their positions. Some excerpts from the January 1982 APN minutes
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with secular views” while others clearly affirmed that the bill represented
an opportunity for “rejecting secularism because it has made of woman a
merchandise, by prohibiting polygamy and encouraging the separation of bodies
as well as adultery.” Obviously, fear of secularity eloquently summarizes a fear of
individuality and the ensuing sexual and social empowerment of women. This
was clearly expressed in the allegory of “the separation of bodies.”
The bill was not enacted by the 1982 legislature, and was discreetly
withdrawn because of the conservative onslaught throughout the debate and the
160 SECULARISM, WOMEN & THE STATE: THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN THE 21ST CENTURY
delegates during the 1984 National Assembly debates. The point of this
maneuvering was to impose polygamy as an unconditional provision in the Code.
It is worth noting that polygamy is hardly a widespread practice in Algeria. Both
local customs, as well as a post-independence growth of atomization of the family
structure under the pressures of merchandization and urbanization, were not
favorable to polygamous unions. In fact, polygamy was introduced as a Qur’anic
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2)7 in the National Assembly was more informed by tentative trepidations to
constrain women’s empowerment and enforce social control around them. The
most effective means to this end, it seemed, was to encourage polygamy so as to
ensure the permanence of the extended family, and, henceforth, the primary role
and status of women as reproducers.
In most of its provisions pertaining to marriage, divorce, child custody and
inheritance, the 1984 Family Code was a moribund reproduction of Shari’a
injunctions, without a specific reference to the Maliki trend, which has deeply
informed the socio-legal organization of the Maghreb at large. However, while
leaving most of the provisions of the Shari’a intact, the government bill made
polygamy conditional upon the consent of the first wife as well as the second.
This was sufficient to provoke so great an uproar in the Assembly that the debates
were virtually turned into a conference on polygamy.
The minutes of the Journal Officiel of the National Popular Assembly,
reporting the plenary sessions of April 23-24, 1984,8 disclose a veritable
“crusade” against Article 8 and a staunch defense of polygamy. There was no
trace of interventions by secularist members. Of 60 interventions reported in the
minutes, 45 stood against the conditional terms on polygamy.
Of the most significant interventions, one could hardly miss the idiosyncratic
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Polygamy is not to be disputed, whatever the case, for a Muslim state is one
based on Jihad, and this calls for the involvement of men alone. To whom
will the women be left in case of Jihad, and how to protect society from
subsequent depravity, if widows cannot find parties to marry. Polygamy is
therefore a must.9
This intervention remains very eloquent with regard the super-structural
paradigm informing conservative public opinion in Algeria, be it in relation to
social actors (women as reproducers, men as Mujahidin) or political legitimation
(the state is implicitly based on Jihad, in reference to Article 2 of the Constitution).
The idiosyncratic logic of patriarchal conservatism has had the last word.
Nevertheless, despite the aforementioned hysteria over the adoption of
162 SECULARISM, WOMEN & THE STATE: THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN THE 21ST CENTURY
sells these packages as “constitutional rights,” but uses them as “favors,” and they
are perceived as such by a majority of women, who face a very reluctant, if not
hostile, social context. In exchange, women are expected to endorse citizenship
as a commodity, and not as an inalienable right, by accepting their effacement
from the major decision-making processes, especially those decisions pertaining
to personal status and family legislation.
Interestingly enough, female citizens tend to look upon the state as a
liberator, despite the formidable regressions it has engendered in matters related
to personal status. Today, feminists in Algeria continue to call upon the state to
intervene by halting the fundamentalist upsurge and implementing a model of
universal citizenship within the framework of the Republica. However, state
legitimation has been seriously undermined by the more universal appeal of
the pan-Islamic revolution. Accordingly, one might expect that the dominant
national elite, in a last bid to maintain its political power, will continue to
maneuver and cooperate within the realm of patrimonial and clientelist relations
with the feminists and democrats alike.
Nevertheless, sooner or later, bids for power will have to come from various
social groups within civil society at large, groups that will discard the state as the
omnipotent decider-protector in Algeria. It is then that the bid for citizenship
will be open for all. For women, this means a long and painful birth, but after
all…a birth!
ENDNOTES
1. Hisham, Sharabi, Oxford University Press, 1988.
2. For a detailed account of the debates which surrounded the Family Code, see
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Democracy” in J.P. Entelis, and Naylor, P.C., State and Society in Algeria, Westview
Press, 1992, pp. 171-215, with specific reference to the contestants involved in the
legal battle over personal status, see pp. 188-192.
3. Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society,
Al Saqi Books, London, 1985.
4. See Cheriet and Naylor.
5. Abdel Hameed al-Shawaribi, al-huquq al-siyassia lil-mar’a fil-islem (Women’s Politi-
cal Rights in Islam), Mansha’at al-Ma’arif, Alexandria, 1987.
ɨFEPDVNFOUTVTFEGPSUIFQSFTFOUBSHVNFOUJODMVEFLe Journal Officiel de la Re-
publique Algerienne Democratique et Populaire, Loi no. 84-11 du 9 Juin 1984 portant
Code de la Famille, no. 24, 12 Juin 1984, Imprimerie Officielle, Alger.
7. The Koran, translation by N.J. Dawood, Penguin Books, 1981.
164 SECULARISM, WOMEN & THE STATE: THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN THE 21ST CENTURY