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She had been handled for endometrial most cancers, stated her son, Ramsi Woodcock.
Dr. Lazreg’s books and lectures over 5 many years roamed throughout historical past, spiritual expression and ways in which energy is wielded — politically, culturally and intellectually. She ranked among the many most revered educational voices on girls’s affairs in North Africa and helped increase Arab viewpoints in Western feminist scholarship.
Her work additionally carried autobiographical underpinnings. A few of her most acclaimed analysis and writing had roots in her witnessing of brutality and repression in Algeria’s warfare for independence, and mirrored her private stance — at the same time as a preteen — of rejecting the billowing fabric coverings generally utilized by Algerian girls on the time.
“My work,” she as soon as stated, “displays my horror of dogma, be it theoretical, methodological or political.”
Dr. Lazreg constructed her educational profession in america, however Algeria remained a polestar. She typically recounted the enjoyment and pleasure the nation felt in 1962 after victory in Algeria’s lengthy and bloody battle for independence, which claimed a whole lot of hundreds of lives.
“We had this unimaginable awakening,” she stated in a 2011 interview at a discussion board for the Metropolis College of New York system, the place she had led the Hunter Faculty girls’s research program because the late Nineteen Eighties. “You awakened and also you stated, ‘Ha, it’s going to be totally different.’”
What changed French rule, nevertheless, was practically three many years of a single-party state after which, after multiparty elections in 1991 had been suspended, virtually a decade of civil warfare in search of to crush the rising political affect of Islamists. The symbolism of these eras from the Nineteen Fifties to the Nineteen Nineties — resistance, then hope, then sectarian turmoil — pulsed by means of a lot of Dr. Lazreg’s analysis.
Her contributions to the historic file of Algeria embody “The Eloquence of Silence” (1994), a survey of how Algerian girls navigated greater than a century from pre-colonial instances to the combat towards French rule. Dr. Lazreg asserted that one of many pernicious legacies of European management was the “colonial mythification” of Arab girls as passive spectators to historical past.
As a strong counterpoint, later editions of the e-book famous the waves of girls within the Arab Spring uprisings in North Africa and elsewhere. “These occasions,” she wrote in an essay in 2012 throughout the top of the protests, “ought to be a chance for social scientists, particularly these finding out girls, to pause and assume.”
In “Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad” (2008), Dr. Lazreg detailed French repression in Algeria and drew parallels with the “wanton abuse of prisoners” in locations that grew to become synonymous with the U.S.-led wars, together with Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay. (France in 2018 acknowledged its use of systematic torture in Algeria.)
She described the e-book as a cautionary story. “A democratic nation,” she stated, “is at all times at risk of reverting to torture as a result of it’s a supply of completely boundless energy.”
But the query of “the veil,” the varied Islamic coverings wore by many ladies throughout the Muslim world, grew to become maybe Dr. Lazreg’s defining challenge. As a woman, she stated she refused to put on the coverings utilized by practically everybody round her, together with her sister, mom and grandmother. “It controls a lady as an alternative of being managed by her,” Dr. Lazreg wrote in a 2009 essay, “it defeats her energy to decide on.”
Her e-book “Questioning the Veil” (2009) was constructed as a collection of arguments for Muslim girls — and males — trying to dismantle causes for the veil, or hijab, together with modesty, to keep away from sexual harassment or as a show of piety. In Dr. Lazreg’s view, the hijab was primarily a device of misogyny that has no grounding in Quranic teachings.
“I can now not keep quiet on a problem, the veil,” she wrote, “that lately has turn into so politicized that it threatens to form and deform the id of younger girls and ladies all through the Muslim world in addition to Europe and North America.”
The e-book was banned in nations with strict enforcement of Islamic morality codes equivalent to Saudi Arabia and Iran. Protests and threats by some Muslim college students at Hunter compelled Dr. Lazreg to maneuver her workplace contained in the college to a safer location.
For Dr. Lazreg, her resolution to interrupt from household and native traditions involving the carrying of the hijab was one her first acts of independence. She additionally by no means forgot the picture of her mom, who couldn’t come to her support when a boy was harassing her when she was about 7. Her mom didn’t have her hijab close by and refused to go away the home. She hurled a wood clog as an alternative.
“The clog landed on my brow, making a bloody gash,” Dr. Lazreg remembered. “I had a half-inch scar for a few years to recollect the incident by.”
Marnia Lazreg was born in Mostaganem, on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast, on Jan. 10, 1941. Her father offered dry items at an area market, and her mom was a homemaker.
Beneath the colonial system, practically all Algerian college students had been despatched to what had been referred to as “native colleges.” At one level, the younger Marnia got here down with a chilly that her mom blamed on the drafty classroom. Marnia was allowed to attend the college for kids of French households till the climate warmed. She by no means left, and graduated in 1960.
After independence, her household moved to Algiers and took over an residence vacated by French tenants who fled the nation. She labored within the municipal administration of Algiers however was being denied a move to go away the federal government constructing throughout the day for non-job actions. She solid the doc and enrolled on the College of Algiers. She graduated with a level in English literature in 1966.
She took a job with Sonatrach, the nationwide oil firm, and was assigned in 1967 to open its first workplace in america, in New York’s Rockefeller Heart. She acquired a grasp’s diploma in sociology from New York College in 1970 and a doctorate in 1975. Dr. Lazreg’s first e-book, “The Emergence of Lessons in Algeria” (1976), was based mostly on her dissertation about class variations rising in postcolonial Algeria after many years of collective subjugation.
Her different books embody a groundbreaking research on the French thinker Michel Foucault, “Foucault’s Orient” (2017), which put ahead a case that Foucault possessed robust Western bias and regarded the mental traditions in Asia, the Arab world and elsewhere incapable of full rational thought.
She taught at Brooklyn Faculty, Hunter Faculty and the New Faculty for Social Analysis in New York within the Seventies after which took affiliate professor positions at numerous intuitions, together with Sarah Lawrence Faculty in Bronxville, N.Y. Dr. Lazreg returned to Hunter as a professor of sociology in 1988 and remained there till her demise.
Exterior academia, she performed a job in constructing packages on the World Financial institution from 1999 to 2000 to introduce growth loans that gave extra consideration to increasing alternatives for girls and ladies. Dr. Lazreg was additionally a longtime adviser to the U.N. Improvement Program.
As a novelist, she wrote beneath the title Meriem Belkelthoum. Her 2019 French-language novel, “The Awakening of the Mom,” was based mostly on her household’s life in Algeria.
Her marriage to Mark Woodcock led to divorce. Survivors embody two sons, Ramsi and Reda; and a granddaughter.
Dr. Lazreg described her books and analysis as a means of excavating the tales of her homeland. Beneath colonial rule, solely French historical past and French views had been offered in colleges.
“Writing about Algeria,” she stated, “is an countless discovery of a historical past I used to be by no means taught.”
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