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Her son, Ramsi Woodcock, said she was being treated for endometrial cancer.
For more than 50 years, Dr. Lazreg’s books and lectures have traversed politically, culturally, and intellectually across history, religious expression, and ways of exercising power. She is considered one of the most respected scholars on women’s issues in North Africa and contributed to broadening the Arab perspective in Western feminist studies.
Her work also contained an autobiographical basis. Some of her most acclaimed research and writings are rooted in witnessing the brutality and oppression during the Algerian War of Independence, including her rejection of the billowing cloth coverings commonly used by Algerian women at the time. It reflected her personal position, even as a preteen.
“My work reflects my fear of dogma, whether theoretical, methodological or political,” she once said.
Although Dr. Razreg built his academic career in the United States, Algeria remained his north star. She often spoke of the joy and pride the country felt in 1962 after victory in Algeria’s long and bloody war of independence, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
“We experienced an incredible awakening,” she said in a 2011 interview at a forum at the City University System of New York, where she had led Hunter College’s women’s studies program since the late 1980s. “When you woke up, you said, ‘Oh, this is going to be different.'”
But French rule was replaced by nearly 30 years of one-party state rule, followed by the suspension of multiparty elections in 1991 and the growing political influence of Islamists. A civil war ensued for about 10 years to quell the situation. Symbols of the era from the 1950s to his 1990s – resistance, subsequent hope, and sectarian turmoil – pulsated through much of Dr. Lazreg’s research.
Her contributions to Algeria’s historical record include Silence, which examines how Algerian women have lived for more than a century, from pre-colonial times to the fight against French rule; Eloquence” (1994). Dr. Razreg argued that one of the harmful legacies of European domination was the “colonial mythologizing” of Arab women as passive bystanders of history.
As a strong counterpoint, later editions of the book focused on the wave of women in the Arab Spring uprisings in North Africa and elsewhere. “These events should give social scientists, especially those who study women, an opportunity to pause and reflect,” she wrote in a 2012 essay at the height of the protests.
In Torture and the Twilight of an Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (2008), Dr. Razreg details the French repression in Algeria and describes the “infliction of prisoners of war” in a place that became synonymous with the US-led war. He drew parallels with “unreasonable abuse.” Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay in Iraq. (France acknowledged systematic torture in Algeria in 2018.)
She described the book as a cautionary tale. “Democracies are always at risk of reverting to torture, because democracy is an absolutely unlimited source of power,” she said.
But the issue of the “veil,” a variety of Islamic coverings worn by many women in the Islamic world, became perhaps Dr. Razreg’s deciding issue. During her childhood, she said, she refused to wear the coverings that almost everyone around her used, including her sister, mother, and grandmother. “It controls women rather than being controlled by them,” Dr. Lazreg wrote in a 2009 essay, “and it negates women’s power to choose.”
Her book, Questioning the Veil (2009), is a book for Muslim women and men who seek to dismantle the reasons for wearing the veil or hijab, including modesty, to avoid sexual harassment and as a sign of piety. It was structured as a series of discussions. In Dr. Razreg’s opinion, The hijab is essentially a tool of misogyny and has no basis in the teachings of the Quran.
“I can no longer remain silent on the issue of the veil,” she wrote. “The veil has become highly politicized in recent years and threatens to shape and distort the identities of young women and girls, not only in Europe but throughout the Islamic world.”North America. “
The book was banned in countries where Islamic moral codes are strictly enforced, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. Protests and threats by some Muslim students at Hunter College forced Dr. Razreg to move his office on campus to a safer location.
For Dr. Razreg, her decision to break away from her family and local traditions surrounding the wearing of the hijab was one of her first acts of independence. She also never forgot how her mother failed to come to her aid when she was being harassed by a boy when she was around 7 years old. Her mother did not have a hijab nearby and she refused to leave the house. She threw her clogs in her place.
“The sock hit me on the forehead and caused a bloody wound,” Dr. Lazreg recalled. “I was left with a half-inch scar that haunted me for years.”
Marnia Razreg was born on January 10, 1941 in Mostaganem on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria. Her father sold dry goods at the local market and her mother was a housewife.
Under the colonial system, almost all Algerian students were sent to so-called “native schools.” One day, little Marnia caught a cold, and her mother blamed it on the drafty classroom. Marnia was allowed to attend a school attended by children from French families until the weather warmed up. She never left the university and graduated in 1960.
After independence, her family moved to Algiers and took over an apartment vacated by a French tenant who had fled the country. She worked for the city government in Algiers, where she was denied permission to leave the government building during the day for purposes other than work. She forged her documents and she enrolled at the University of Algiers. She graduated in 1966 with her degree in English Literature.
She went to work for the national oil company Sonatrach, and in 1967 was assigned to open its first U.S. office at New York’s Rockefeller Center. She received her master’s degree in sociology from New York University in 1970 and her Ph.D. in 1975. Dr. Razreg’s first book, The Emergence of Class in Algeria (1976), was based on her dissertation on the growing class differences in the postcolonial era. Algeria after decades of collective conquest.
Her other books include Foucault’s Orient (2017), a groundbreaking study of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, which argues that Foucault has a strong Western bias; It raises the claim that intellectual traditions in Asia, the Arab world, and elsewhere do not consider themselves fully rational. thought.
She taught at Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and the New School for Social Research in New York in the 1970s, and subsequently held associate professorships in various intuitive fields, including Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. I got a job. Dr. Lazlegg returned to Hunter as a professor of sociology. She remained there until her death in 1988, when she passed away.
Outside of academia, she played a role at the World Bank in 1999-2000 in building a program that introduced development financing that was more sensitive to expanding opportunities for women and girls. Dr. Lazureg was also a long-time advisor to the United Nations Development Programme.
As a novelist, she wrote under the name Meryem Berkertoum. Her 2019 French novel, The Awakening of the Mother, is based on her family’s life in Algeria.
Her marriage to Mark Woodcock ended in divorce. Her survivors include two sons, Ramsi and Leda; and her granddaughter.
Dr. Lazureg described her book and research as a process of unearthing the stories of her homeland. Under colonial rule, schools taught only French history and French perspectives.
“Writing about Algeria is a never-ending discovery of a history I was never taught,” she said.
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