ABSTRACT
A debate over gender has raged in Algeria ever since the 1984 adoption of the Family Code. This legislation unleashed the wrath of a feminist movement then still in its infancy, and brought aid and comfort to a fundamentalist Islamist claim that was beginning to gain strength. At the time, all this seemed to be taking place in the midst of an ongoing, creeping crisis of legitimacy for the one-party technocratic regime in power. The promulgation of the Code and its subsequent adoption by the one-party National Popular Assembly looked like nothing so much as a barter transaction between the national political elite on the one hand, and its pervasive, internal, conservative constituency on the other. The efforts to placate this constituency later broke loose to establish a clear, unambiguous Islamist political claim of its own, ultimately resulting in the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS, Islamic Salvation Front).
