She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Future Is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria is a shockingly good introduction to the book as a whole. The page opens, “Discussions about women were a forum to assert not only compatibility between Islam and women’s rights but also their ability to access progress as Muslims.” The page goes on to explain how Algerian commentators used news from the Middle East and new readings of Islamic knowledge to claim Europe had no monopoly on women’s rights. As one Algerian author wrote which is quoted on page 99, “The progress of civilization is not Christian, not Oriental or Occidental, but universal.”Visit Sara Rahnama's website.
This is a great introduction to some of the major themes of the book, as the book explores not just Algerian Muslim feminism itself, but how Algerians used feminist discussions as a way to push back against French colonial claims that Muslims deserved their secondary status as colonial subjects because of their misogyny. The book is equally about the feminism itself, as well as the ideological moves the feminism enabled Algerian commentators to engage in wherein they reordered the world on their own terms. While the book focuses on interwar colonial Algeria, it remains relevant today, as commentators globally continue to traffic stereotypes about Muslims. The idea of a clash of civilizations between the civilized West and barbaric East, in which the East’s barbarism is reflected by their treatment of women, thus remains in circulation when politically convenient. The Future is Feminist offers a closer look at a historic moment when Muslims in Algeria wrote back against these depictions through articulations of their own Muslim feminism.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
