the Mzab

I am just discovery bits and pieces of Algeria through my contacts with people at work. Of course what I find out is first limited to the knowledge held by people I befriend and then filtered by who they are and what they are willing to discuss with me.

One of those people is Y., a very nice guy from Ghardaia, and I am discovering a little about the mozabites through him.
Of course of particular interest to me is women's status. The Mozabite women are known for being entirely covered in white, unlike the black dress for women of most of the rest of the Middle East, and for only showing one eye, the left eye always.
Y's wife also covers herself and I asked him about it.
Keep in mind that he is saying this to a white woman working on an oil drilling rig.
He explained to me how from their point of view women are the keepers of the traditions. He tells me that women were not allowed to leave the Mzab (the area where they live) for quite a few years so that their culture, ethnicity and traditions would not be lost. He talked and talked about women not being allowed to do all kind of things, loosing what I considered some basic freedoms and described it as the wisdom, the gift of the chosen people, the Mozabites. He cries for the situation of some other men in Algeria who marry women who are not modest. He is horrified at the idea that some men in the rest of Algeria marry women who do not know anything about the story of their family, do not know where their grand parents came from, do not know where the roots of their family are.

As he was talking I was thinking that after all many men died in wars to keep their cultures safe and maybe the sacrifice the Mozabite women make is similar. Of course the big difference is that typically men choose to go to war -or do they?-, whereas the mozabite women were forbidden to leave the area.....I've never talked to one of them, and likely will never be allowed to do it, so I cannot say what the women think about it.

This man has a young daughter and we were talking about his relationship with her and his past and present relationships with women in general. For me there is a strange contrast between his personal life and his cultural belief, but he sees no contradictions in it.
This is a man who decided to become friend with me.

He says that the basis of their identity is the triangle with the "shops" at the base, the home above it and the mosque at the top. If I understand well this geometry also reflects their architecture, or at least this is the way he views it.