Winner of the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize of the French Colonial Historical Society
Cowinner of the Nikki Keddie Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America

The Future Is Feminist by Sara Rahnama offers a closer look at a pivotal moment in Algerian history when Algerians looked to feminism as a path out of the stifling realities of French colonial rule. Algerian people focused outward to developments in the Middle East, looking critically at their own society and with new eyes to Islamic tradition. In doing so, they reordered the world on their own terms—pushing back against French colonial claims about Islam's inherent misogyny.

Rahnama describes how Algerians took inspiration from Middle Eastern developments in women's rights. Empowered by the Muslim reform movement sweeping the region, they read Islamic knowledge with new eyes, even calling Muhammad "the first Arab feminist." They compared the blossoming women's rights movements across the Middle East and this history of Islam's feminist potential to the stifled position of Algerian women, who suffered from limited access to education and respectable work. Local dynamics also shaped these discussions, including the recent entry of thousands of Algerian women into the workforce as domestic workers in European settler homes.

While Algerian people disagreed about whether Algeria's future should be colonial or independent, they agreed that women's advancement would offer a path forward for Muslim society toward a more prosperous future. Through its use of Arabic-language sources alongside French ones, The Future Is Feminist moves beyond Algeria's colonial relationship to France to illuminate its relationship to the Middle East.

Sara Rahnama is Associate Professor of History at Morgan State University. Her writing has appeared in both academic and popular spaces, including Gender & History and the Washington Post.

This is a groundbreaking book that critically reframes how scholars think about who engages with feminism and how, across local, regional, and global spaces, as well as how the history of modern Algeria has unfolded and been told. With its crisp, accessible prose and compelling stories of decentralised yet impactful feminist discourse, The Future is Feminist promises a better future for the field of Maghribi history.

2024 Andrew Alf Heggoy Prize Committee:

As she reconstructs this landscape of Muslim feminists that looked East, Rahnama changes our understanding of the relationship between gender, Islam, and the French Republic in ways that will prove important for a wide range of fields. Impressively researched and adeptly written, The Future Is Feminist is a model for how to integrate, without flattening, a rich cross-section of experiences and voices across multiple social categories into a compelling narrative of possibility.

Beth Baron, author of The Orphan Scandal:

In The Future is Feminist, Sara Rahnama explores the multiple futures that were possible in interwar Algeria. These imagined futures, she shows us, were to be ones of greater equity and freedom than experiences in the present, with improving women's status key to liberation. Drawing on Arabic language sources in the press and elsewhere, and decentering nationalism, Rahmana highlights women's multivocality. Theoretically rich and beautifully written, the book is a major contribution to scholarship on gender and feminism, Islam, and colonialism.

Todd Shepard, author of The Invention of Decolonization:

This is a beautifully conceived and timely book. Sara Rahnama's sources and methods allow her to do more than remind us that some Muslims could be feminists: she demonstrates that questions of women and gender were foundational to wide-ranging efforts by Muslims in interwar Algeria to define social as well as political projects. The Future is Feminist resituates Maghrebi politics and intellectual life in contexts that stretch beyond French rule, so that Algerian women emerge as crucial actors in discussions that stretched across the Arab world as well as the Mediterranean.

Natalya Vince, author of The Algerian War, the Algerian Revolution:

The Future Is Feminist presents important developments that uniquely move Algeria beyond the colonizer/colonized relationship to situate it within both Middle Eastern and European histories. Rahnama's analyses on the politics of future imaginings and multidirectional social histories using underused sources will make this a definitive work for years to come.

Elizabeth F. Thompson, author of How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs:

The Future Is Feminist sheds new light on the emergence of anti-colonial movements after World War I. Sara Rahnama powerfully illustrates how by the 1940s Algerians had envisioned multiple futures within a transnational space.