Her son, Ramsey Woodcock, said she was treated for endometrial cancer.
Over five decades, Dr. Lazraq's books and lectures have traversed history, religious expression, and ways of exercising power—politically, culturally, and intellectually. She has ranked among the most respected academic voices on women's affairs in North Africa and has helped expand Arab perspectives in Western feminist scholarship.
Her work also carried autobiographical underpinnings. Some of her most famous research and writings are rooted in her witnessing of brutality and oppression in Algeria's war for independence, and reflect her personal stance – even as a teenager – in rejecting the billowing cloth coverings used by Algerian women at the time.
“My work reflects my terror of dogma, whether theoretical, methodological, or political,” she once said.
Dr. Lazraq built her academic career in the United States, but Algeria remained a polar star. She often recounted the joy and pride the country felt in 1962 after victory in Algeria's long and bloody battle for independence, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
“We've had this amazing awakening,” she said in a 2011 interview at a forum for the City University of New York system, where she has led the women's studies program at Hunter College since the late 1980s. “I woke up and said, ‘Ha, this is going to be different.’”
However, what replaced French rule was nearly three decades of a one-party state, and then, after the suspension of multiparty elections in 1991, nearly a decade of civil war aimed at crushing the growing political influence of the Islamists. The symbolism of those eras from the 1950s to the 1990s – resistance, then hope, then sectarian unrest – pulsates through much of Dr. Lazraq’s research.
Her contributions to the historical record of Algeria include The Rhetoric of Silence (1994), a survey of how Algerian women navigated over a century from pre-colonial times to the war against French rule. Dr. Lazraq emphasized that one of the harmful legacies of European control was the “colonial myth” of Arab women as passive spectators of history.
As a strong counterpoint, later editions of the book have pointed to the waves of women in the Arab Spring uprisings in North Africa and elsewhere. “These events should be an opportunity for social scientists, especially those who study women, to pause and reflect,” she wrote in a 2012 article at the height of the protests.
In his book Torture and the Decline of Empire: From Algeria to Baghdad (2008), Dr. Lazraq detailed French repression in Algeria and contrasted it with the “deliberate abuses of prisoners” in places that became synonymous with US-led wars, including Abu Ghraib in Iraq. And Guantanamo Bay. (France admitted in 2018 that it used systematic torture in Algeria.)
She described the book as a cautionary tale. “A democratic state is always at risk of returning to torture because it is a source of power that has absolutely no limits,” she said.
However, the issue of the “hijab,” the various Islamic coverings worn by many women throughout the Muslim world, has perhaps become Dr. Lazraq’s signature issue. She said that when she was a girl, she refused to wear the coverings used by almost everyone around her, including her sister, mother and grandmother. Dr. Lazraq wrote in an article published in 2009: “It controls women instead of controlling them. It eliminates their ability to choose.”
Her book Questioning the Hijab (2009) was created as a series of arguments for Muslim women—and men—trying to deconstruct the reasons for wearing the hijab, or hijab, including modesty, to avoid sexual harassment or to display piety. Dr. Lazraq believes that The hijab has essentially been a tool of misogyny that has no basis in the teachings of the Qur’an.
“I can no longer remain silent on the issue of the hijab, which in recent years has become so politicized that it threatens to shape and distort the identity of young women and girls throughout the Muslim world as well as Europe and Europe,” she wrote. north america.”
The book has been banned in countries that strictly implement Islamic moral codes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. Protests and threats made by some Muslim students at Hunter forced Dr Lazraq to move her office within the university to a safer location.
For Dr. Lazraq, her decision to break away from family and local traditions surrounding wearing the hijab was her first act of independence. She also never forgot the image of her mother, who was unable to help her when a boy molested her when she was seven years old. Her mother did not wear her hijab near her and refused to leave the house. She threw on wooden clogs instead.
“The blockage fell on my forehead, creating a bloody gash,” Dr. Lazraq recalls. “I have had a half-inch scar for many years to remember the incident.”
Marnia Lazraq was born in Mostaganem, on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria, on January 10, 1941. Her father sold dry goods in the local market, and her mother was a housewife.
Under the colonial regime, almost all Algerian students were sent to what were called “native schools.” At one point, little Marnia caught a cold that her mother blamed on the drafty classroom. Marnia was allowed to attend school for the children of French families until the weather warmed. She never left, graduating in 1960.
After independence, her family moved to Algiers and took over an apartment vacated by French tenants who had fled the country. She worked in the municipal administration in Algiers, but was denied permission to leave the government building during the day to engage in non-employment activities. She forged the document and enrolled at the University of Algiers. She earned a degree in English literature in 1966.
She got a job at the national oil company Sonatrach, and in 1967 was tasked with opening its first office in the United States, at Rockefeller Center in New York. She received a master's degree in sociology from New York University in 1970 and a doctorate in 1975. Dr. Lazraq's first book, The Emergence of Classes in Algeria (1976), was based on her thesis about growing class differences in postcolonial Algeria after decades of mass oppression.
Her other books include a pioneering study of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, “Foucault’s Orient” (2017), which makes the case that Foucault possessed a strong Western bias and considered intellectual traditions in Asia, the Arab world, and elsewhere incapable of achieving full rationality. belief.
She taught at Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and the New School for Social Research in New York in the 1970s, then held associate professor positions at various colleges, including Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Dr. Lazraq returned to Hunter as a professor of sociology. In 1988, she remained there until her death.
Outside of academia, she played a role in building programs at the World Bank from 1999 to 2000 to provide development loans that paid more attention to expanding opportunities for women and girls. Dr. Lazraq was also a long-time consultant to the United Nations Development Programme.
As a novelist, she wrote under the name Maryam Belkalthoum. Her 2019 French-language novel, “Mother’s Awakening,” was based on her family’s life in Algeria.
Her marriage to Mark Woodcock ended in divorce. Among the survivors are two sons, Ramzi and Reda. And a granddaughter.
Dr. Lazraq described her books and research as a process of exploring the stories of her homeland. Under colonial rule, only French history and French perspectives were presented in schools.
“Writing about Algeria is an endless discovery of a history I never learned,” she said.
