Allan Christelow examines the Muslim courts of Algeria from 1854, when the French first intervened in Islamic legal matters, through the gradual subordination of the courts and judges that went on until World War I. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This account of Algeria through its migratory history begins in the last quarter of the eighteenth century by looking at forced migration through the slave trade. It moves through the colonial era and continues into Algeria's turbulent postcolonial experience.

This is a masterful study of the ways in which sex and law were inextricably intertwined in the elaboration of French rule in Algeria. Its great virtue is to demonstrate in careful detail, with an impressive range of material (from court records to novels), exactly how the conquest of Algeria repeatedly challenged the very ideals of the secular universalism in whose name colonization was carried out.― Joan Wallach Scott, author of Sex and Secularism During more than a century of colonial rule over Algeria, the French state shaped and reshaped the meaning and practice of Muslim law by regulating it and circumscribing it to the domain of family law, while applying the French Civil Code to appropriate the property of Algerians. In Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, Judith Surkis traces how colonial authorities constructed Muslim legal difference and used it to deny Algerian Muslims full citizenship. In disconnecting Muslim law from property rights, French officials increasingly attached it to the bodies, beliefs, and personhood. Surkis argues that powerful affective attachments to the intimate life of the family and fantasies about Algerian women and the sexual prerogatives of Muslim men, supposedly codified in the practices of polygamy and child marriage, shaped French theories and regulatory practices of Muslim law in fundamental and lasting ways. Women's legal status in particular came to represent the dense relationship between sex and sovereignty in the colony. This book also highlights the ways in which Algerians interacted with and responded to colonial law. Ultimately, this sweeping legal genealogy of French Algeria elucidates how "the Muslim question" in France became—and remains—a question of sex.

"This thesis examines Muslim personal status law reform and family litigation in colonial Algeria from the advent of the French Third Republic until the centenary of the colonial presence (1870-1930). By focusing on this largely overlooked era in Algerian history, and through the use of untapped judicial archives, this dissertation dislodges a number of assumptions about the consolidation and operation of French colonial power after 1870 that have been projected in both French and Algerian memory. This study revises our understanding of the deployment of colonial law as a field of knowledge and power by, first, framing the evolution of "Muslim personal status law" within a wider Muslim Mediterranean sphere of influence, and second, by bringing to light the experiences of non-elite Algerian women and their impact on these processes. Though I examine the elaboration of colonial Algeria's heterogeneous legal system as it emerged through a triangular relationship between French administrators, Islamic legal modernizers, and colonized subjects, my analysis is mainly guided by the experiences and perspectives of the latter. This argument follows two streams: the first uses legal, political, and intellectual historical methodologies to demonstrate how the "Muslim family" was produced as an object of knowledge and governance through the construction of "Muslim personal status" law under the colonial legal regime. The second uses social historical approaches to analyze the ways in which colonized subjects navigated these encounters between French, customary, and Islamic legal regimes and discourses as they descended "from above," and highlights their influence on colonial law "from below." This study thus elucidates the interplay that took place between the wider forces of "family" law reform and the interests and arguments of Muslim litigants, particularly women, as they were mediated by colonial courtrooms. " --

Covering a period of five hundred years, from the arrival of the Ottomans to the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, James McDougall presents an expansive new account of the modern history of Africa's largest country. Drawing on substantial new scholarship and over a decade of research, McDougall places Algerian society at the centre of the story, tracing the continuities and the resilience of Algeria's people and their cultures through the dramatic changes and crises that have marked the country. Whether examining the emergence of the Ottoman viceroyalty in the early modern Mediterranean, the 130 years of French colonial rule and the revolutionary war of independence, the Third World nation-building of the 1960s and 1970s, or the terrible violence of the 1990s, this book will appeal to a wide variety of readers in African and Middle Eastern history and politics, as well as those concerned with the wider affairs of the Mediterranean.

This book traces Christianity's change from European imperialism's moral foundation to a voice of political and social change during decolonization.

A comparative study based on extensive fieldwork, and an original database of gender-based reforms in the Middle East and North Africa, Aili Mari Tripp analyzes why autocratic leaders in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia adopted more extensive women's rights than their Middle Eastern counterparts.