Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age : Towards an Intellectual History of the Present (9781108148078) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781107193383
Publisher: CambridgeUP
Published: 2018-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

In February 1958, the National Union of Tunisian Women (Union Nationale de la Femme Tunisienne, UNFT, created in 1956) had attended the Afro-Asian women’s conference in Colombo, leading a minute’s silence in support of the Algerian people, in protest against the destruction of schools and healthcare facilities and the ever increasing numbers of Algerian refugees forced to flee to Tunisia’s borders.58 That same month, the bombing of the village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef, on the Algerian border by French warplanes had led to Bourguiba taking a much more openly supportive stance in favor of the FLN.59

The Tunisian press regularly ran images of Algerian women, both as fighters and as victims, as well as interviews with Algerian women who were engaged in the struggle.60 On December 17, 1956, the women’s page in Action, “Action féminine,” declared, “Algerian women have brought something new in the history of North Africa: they are fighting within the maquis, caring for the injured, fulfilling dangerous missions, carrying out liaison activities and surveillance, spying, and above all, participating in combat. Well done Algerian women!”61 The torture of Djamila Bouhired in the hands of the French army was extensively reported. Léïla penned an article with the deeply sarcastic headline, “An Algerian Among the ‘Civilized’.”62 The women’s pages of L’Action discussed Algerian women’s “promotion by arms”: “[Algerian] women have conquered their place and their responsibilities, and therefore the respect of their male compatriots.”63

Based on his study of the internal documents of the FLN, Gilbert Meynier argues that traditional gender roles were reinforced in Algeria rather than challenged during the war: women were not given leadership positions, marriage was tightly controlled by the military hierarchy, there were instances of young female recruits being subjected to virginity tests, women accused of adultery risked the death penalty, and, at the end of 1957, the decision was taken to remove women from the maquis and send them to the Tunisian and Moroccan frontiers. Meynier concludes, “the ALN [the National Liberation Army, or armed branch of the FLN] thus replaced the father in the management of the gentler sex.”64 Attempts by some Algerian female students in the FLN’s metropolitan French wing (Fédération de France, Federation of France, FF-FLN) between 1961 and summer 1962 to create a women’s section that would place women’s rights at the heart of the program for the soon-to-be independent state petered out when the FF-FLN was sidelined during the internal power struggle of spring and summer 1962.65 Nevertheless, the egalitarian, fraternal language of brothers and sisters in arms remained important, as we shall see in the next section, as it shaped the way in which many educated urban women who participated in the independence struggle would consider “the woman question” after independence.

In 1962, nationalist leaders in Tunisia and Algeria imagined the future in different ways. Tunisia, it was claimed, was speeding along the route of a Western-style “modernity.” In Algeria, 1962 was presented as “year zero” of a revolution during which a new path would be forged. At the same

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