In nineteenth-century colonial Algeria, access to political and legal rights was premised on both religion and sex; Muslim Algerians and Christian settlers were treated under two distinct legal systems, and in each, men and women possessed a differentiated set of rights. Conversion thus signified the passage from one cultural world to another, and with it, the crossing of the multiple social boundaries that made up the imperial world. This paper explores the case study of an Algerian convert to Christianity in an attempt to grasp the significance of conversion to questions of political status and gender. In Septembr of 1834, ‘Aisha Bint Mohammed showed up unannounced to the residence of the highest-ranking general in Algeria to ask to be converted to the Christian faith and to fall under the purview of the French legal system. When the general learned she was recently divorced from an abusive husband, he felt confident her embrace of the new faith would not compromise the patriarchal rights of her former spouse while it would, at the same time, place her under the more benevolent paternalism of the French. News of her conversion, however, provoked vivid reactions in local society, culminating with the resignation of the qadi, and sparking a political scandal among the French political class. Accusations that ‘Aisha is both mad and a woman of little virtue, evidence that she is having an affair with the domestic worker of the French police commissary, and finally indication that she has bribed the interpreter of the French general all complicate the plot, revealing intricate links between racial, gendered and political elements in the story of Aisha’s conversion. Based on the military archives located in Vincennes, my presentation will unpack Aisha’s story of conversion, seeking to understand how categories of religion, race and gender intersected in nineteenth-century colonial Algeria to create discourses of exclusion, but discourses that if subtly reworked could also be manipulated by those such as Aisha who stood on the lower rung of society. In addition, I argue that French attempts to intervene on behalf of a Muslim woman (the “rescue” motif) was central to constructions of colonial masculinity. I argue that conversion in early colonial Algeria was a deeply political act that threatened to upset existing social distinctions.