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Many doctors & psychiatrists pretended that France was fighting to liberate Muslim women, oppressed by Muslim men, in the North African colonies. In 1913, Trenga wrote that the subservient role of Muslim women "seems to us the true touchstone of the new Muslim spirit".
This justified the colonial presence & showed the allegedly failed assimilation of Muslim men: "A new society, made up of advanced Muslim men & backward Muslim women, that is the bizarre & absurd invention of these Neo-Frenchmen [... that they] would like us to accept!"
Quote from: Trenga, Victor. L’âme arabo-berbère. Étude sociologique sur la société musulmane nord-africaine. Algiers: Homar, 1913, p. 174f.