As a young girl growing up in colonial Algeria, Marnia Lazreg was enjoined by her grandmother to wear a veil, to “protect” herself. Ms. Lazreg refused. She didn’t feel the need for such protection, and the veil wouldn’t provide it anyway.
Decades later, as a Hunter College sociologist, she looked more deeply into an aspect of Muslim society that had haunted her since that childhood moment: Was the veil imposed on women really necessary, from either a religious or a security perspective?
The answer she came up with in a collection of five essays, “Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women,” published in 2009, was the same she had given her grandmother so many years before: a firm negative.
Ms. Lazreg died on Jan. 13 in Manhattan. She was 83.
Her death, in a hospital where she was being treated for cancer, was confirmed by her son Ramsi Woodcock.
Ms. Lazreg’s academic work revolved around the difficult history of her native land, which has struggled to free itself from the legacy of colonialism, the heritage of its bloody war of liberation against France, and the six decades of authoritarian rule still stifling it — rule that she, as a dedicated anticolonialist, was careful not to criticize overtly.
In books that also explored Algerian class structure (“The Emergence of Classes in Algeria,” 1976) and the use of torture by imperial powers (“Torture and the Twilight of Empire,” 2008), among other subjects, Ms. Lazreg grappled with both the complicated heritage of domination by France and the internal conflicts arising in Muslim societies.
Though not widely reviewed and often laced with academic jargon, Ms. Lazreg’s books were unusual because she herself was unusual: an Algerian-born scholar, from a working-class background, based in America and writing in English, from a feminist, anticolonial perspective.
Like other Algerian intellectuals, she was haunted by the continuing hold over her country of the colonial power, France, against which Algeria’s nationhood had shaped itself.
In contemporary Algeria, France remains an obsession. Ms. Lazreg was not immune.
“The only thing this Algerian wants is that we be left alone, that we be left to be, without having to remind you, French intellectuals and politicians, that we don’t belong to you, that we never belonged to you. So busy yourself with your own problems. Algeria is no longer one of them,” she said in an interview with the Algerian news website Toute Sur l’Algerie in 2009.
Yet her work was shaped by this twisted relationship. “Writing about Algeria is an endless discovery of a history I was never taught,” she wrote in the Journal of World Philosophies in 2020.
“Thinking I would come to terms with the colonial legacy, I first studied the emergence of social classes in the aftermath of the war of decolonization in Algeria,” Ms. Lazreg continued. She concluded that classes under the country’s regime at the time, which styled itself socialist, would “emancipate themselves from their dependency on the state.”
That argument, though, turned out to be incorrect in a country where everything, from business to social and intellectual life, still depends on the state.
“She was very anticolonial, and I think that made her reluctant to take too hard a line against the Algerian government, for fear of feeding Western narratives,” Mr. Woodcock, her son, said in an interview. “She was always very proud of Algerian independence.
Perhaps her best-known work was “Questioning the Veil,” in which she pushed back against the idea that the Muslim faith requires it, or that it represents an authentic expression of choice for women.
“Denial of a woman’s physical body helps to sustain the fiction that veiling it, covering it up, causes no harm to the woman who inhabits the body,” Ms. Lazreg wrote.
She suggested that social pressure from men was behind much of the push to re-veil. She recounted the poignant anecdote of a young woman whose systematic beating by her brother stopped only when she put on the veil.
Nonetheless, and in spite of these findings, “she always wanted to avoid playing into Western narratives that Islam is misogynistic,” Mr. Woodcock said. “On the one hand she was anticolonialist, but she was also a feminist. It was a tightrope she always had to walk.”
The Economist called the book “uneven and with a rather weak grasp of French secularism,” but nonetheless said it had “great merit.” Other judgments in the book have not worn so well, for instance her criticism of “the American-sponsored constitutions of both Afghanistan and Iraq,” which she said were “lauded as protecting the ‘rights’ of women in spite of evidence to the contrary.”
Ms. Lazreg’s abiding concern with colonialism spilled over into her 2008 book on torture, which in her vision became a kind of matrix for colonial society: “The history of torture becomes synonymous with the history of colonialism and war, with modern history itself,” the historian Priya Satia wrote in a review in the The Times Literary Supplement in 2009. “In Lazreg’s ethical vision, colonialism itself is a kind of torture chamber.”.
Among Ms. Lazreg’s other books was a novel, “The Awakening of the Mother” (2019); “The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question” (1994); “Foucault’s Orient” (2017), a critique of the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault; and “Islamic Feminism and the Discourse of Post-Liberation” (2021).
Marnia Lazreg was born on Jan. 10, 1941, in the Algerian coastal city of Mostaganem, east of the capital, Algiers, to Aoued Lazreg, who had a dry goods shop in the city’s market, and Fatima (Ghrib) Lazreg.
Through chance and good luck, Ms. Lazreg was able to attend a French school and obtain a baccalauréat degree — the equivalent of a high school diploma — even as Algeria was fighting for its independence, in 1960. It was a rare achievement for an Algerian woman at that time.
She received a degree in English literature from the University of Algiers in 1966, and, because of her proficiency in English — “she had studied English obsessively as a way of resistance” against the French, her son said — she became a valued recruit for the state oil firm, Sonatrach, which has recently been mired in corruption scandals.
In 1966 she opened Sonatrach’s first office in the U.S., in Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. She began attending classes at New York University and earned a Ph.D. in sociology there in 1974.
Alongside her academic career, Ms. Lazreg worked in international development for the World Bank and the United Nations, with a focus on women’s issues. She helped coordinate World Bank efforts to bring women into lending programs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and she was a consultant to the U.N. on development programs.
After an earlier teaching stint at Hunter College and spells at Sarah Lawrence and Hampshire, she returned to Hunter full time in 1988. She also taught at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
In addition to her son Ramsi Woodcock, Ms. Lazreg is survived by another son, Reda Woodcock, and a granddaughter. An earlier marriage ended in divorce.
After she received her baccalauréat, her son said, Ms. Lazreg had taught for a time in what were called “native” schools — a limited opening toward the future. Algeria’s independence in 1962, he added, opened up a new world for her.
“That experience of liberation was transformative for her,” he said, adding that it led her to bat away complaints about the long decades of oppressive rule Algerians have suffered under since then. “She would say: ‘Look, we’re free. You can’t put a price on that.’”
