Post-jihad Algeria: The women seem to be taking over

The New York Times reports that in Algeria, women often earn more than their husbands, have higher education levels, and professions such as law and medicine are dominated by women. They can be found waiting tables, driving taxis, pumping gas, and in government posts. As the New York Times reports:

“If such a trend continues,” said Daho Djerbal, editor and publisher of Naqd, a magazine of social criticism and analysis, “we will see a new phenomenon where our public administration will also be controlled by women.”

Why is this happening? Algerians spent most of the 1990s caught in a violent struggle between radical Islamists and government. Some 100,000 people were killed, many had their throats slit by the radicals.

Men stopped attending university when higher education was no longer a sure path to a secure career. For women, however, the university remained a sure way they could at least get out of the house.

To navigate a safe path around the radical elements, women became more overtly religious in recent years, attending mosque and donning the hijab. As the Times reports:

Sociologists and many working women say that by adopting religion and wearing the Islamic head covering called the hijab, women here have in effect freed themselves from moral judgments and restrictions imposed by men. Uncovered women are rarely seen on the street late at night, but covered women can be seen strolling the city after attending the evening prayer at a mosque.

“They never criticize me, especially when they see I am wearing the hijab,” said Denni Fatiha, 44, the first woman to drive a large city bus through the narrow, winding roads of Algiers.

The net effect of this, say the Times sources, is that the average age of marriage for Algerian women is now 29 as opposed to 17 or 18 as it was prior to the jihad. This means that Algerian women are having fewer children too, as is evidenced by the smaller class sizes in elementary schools throughout the country.

While most women see their prospects improving in this post-jihad Algeria, the men are often purposeless:

Algeria’s young men reject school and try to earn money as traders in the informal sector, selling goods on the street, or they focus their efforts on leaving the country or just hanging out. There is a whole class of young men referred to as hittistes — the word is a combination of French and Arabic for people who hold up walls.

Al Qaeda is reportedly trying to establish a foothold in Algeria, but according to the Times, Algerians are unlikely to find its message appealing:

[The] collective consciousness is simply too raw from the years of civil war for Islamist terrorists or radical Islamic ideas to gain popular support.

There is a sense that the new room given to women may at least partly be a reflection of that general feeling. The population has largely rejected the most radical interpretation of Islam and has begun to return to the more North African, almost mystical, interpretation of the faith, sociologists and religious leaders said.

Whatever the underlying reason, women in the streets of the city are brimming with enthusiasm.

“I don’t think any of this contradicts Islam,” said Wahiba Nabti, 36, as she walked through the center of the city one day recently. “On the contrary, Islam gives freedom to work. Anyway it is between you and God.”