Family in Maghreb. The case of Mzabi Society in the Nahḍa Period.

In North Africa, and in the Arab world in general, the family is the basic unit of social organization and socioeconomic activities. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wave of nationalism and a rebirth of Islamic intellectual reflection invested the Arab world and, indirectly, the whole Maghreb area. Within the Maghreb, I choose to focus on the Mzab in southern of Algeria in order to understand the changes in family life and organisation, and other transformations concerning the everyday life of Mzabi women during the period of Nahḍa, as well as changes in the production and transmission of culture in the Mzab. The purpose of this study is to examine and understand the participation of Mzabi women in social processes, especially the changes in women’s education. This paper starts with an outline survey of the social structure and kinship specificities of North Africa, followed by a brief overview of some aspects of how Mzabi fought the colonial regime without assimilating and without delegitimizing traditional social structures.