Demonstrating Islam

ORIGINAL
Blackwell
Oxford,
The
MUWO

1478-1913
0027-4909
XXX 2009
Muslim ARTICLE
Hartford
UKPublishing
WorldSeminary
Ltd

Demonstrating Islam:
TDhe
emonstrating
Muslim World
Islam
V olume 99 January 2009

the Conflict of Text and the

Mudawwana Reform in
Morocco
Josep Llus Mateo Dieste
Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona
Spain

T
hroughout the twentieth century, the connections between Islamic
jurisprudence and the regulation of social relationships (muamalat),
especially kinship, have acquired explicit political connotations. In
colonial times, family law was defended by the nationalists and the ulama
as a forbidden garden for Europeans; after independence the new
nation-states once again tried to monopolize this regulation. Since the
expansion of the Islamist protest, family law has also become an object
of debate and appropriation by different political parties and principally
by the state.
The mass demonstrations that took place in March 2000 in Morocco, both
in favor of and against a reform of the Personal Status Code (Mudawwana),
illustrate the struggle for the control of textuality in contemporary Muslim
societies. The first question suggested by these events is why a simple attempt
from within the political arena to discuss some of the contents of that family
code provoked such an impressive social reaction in the name of Islam,
agglutinating, with the government groups apparently opposed, such as the
diverse branches of political Islam, both inside and outside the political system,
and the guardians of religious law, including the most critical ulama, and
those ulama close to the Ministry of Habus (religious property) and Religious
Affairs. The second question is why all of these excitable voices fell silent
when the Moroccan King Muhammad VI promoted the reform of the
Mudawwana until his official approval in February 2004.
2009 Hartford Seminary.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148 USA.
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 Demonstrating Islam

These avatars of the code have inspired all kinds of analysis based on
simplistic or new evolutionist approaches to Muslim societies defined as being
opposed to modernity. In fact, the events that are described in this article
reveal the competition for a socio-political market, through religious language
and its textual sources, used both by critical Islamism and by the Sharifian
Monarchy.

Politics of Textuality and Family Codes

Since the 1970s, a significant change has been taking place in the
methodology used to analyze Islamic law, and consequently, to cope with
family law. Anthropologists and historians have broken the monopoly of
Orientalism, managing from another perspective sources such as court
records,1 and questioning the relationship between text and social practice, as
well as the supposed rigidity or unalterable nature of Muslim family law. This
new approach has also stressed the active role of social agents, especially
women, before the courts, and their diverse strategies.2 The discontinuity
between rule and practice is now emphasized, as along with older
assumptions such as the existence of diverse traditions (Islamic law,
consuetudinary law or European codes), divergent ways of interpretation and
application, and relevant differences between sunna and shia, and between
the canonical schools.3
Family law has become a sphere that has been extremely politicized both
by the nation-state in the Middle East and North Africa,4 and also by those
social and political movements that have attempted to address the rapid
transformation within the realm of kinship over the last two decades, such as
changes in gender roles, decrease in birth rates or the raising of the age for
marriage.5 In historical terms, growing European pressure from the nineteenth
century onwards shaped the reform of juridical codes in several spheres, such
as trade or property rights, which were crucial for the processes of material
colonization. But family jurisprudence was virtually entirely left in the hands
of the local authorities, with the exception of the protgs. In the Moroccan
situation, this formal independence was maintained by the colonial authorities,
except for mixed marriages and other special cases that affected Europeans.6
From the end of the nineteenth century, we can distinguish three main
phases in this political and legal management of kinship, with a progressive
restriction on the definition of the family as a conjugal sphere designed for
procreation, and the identification of women as symbols of Muslim society:
1. Reform and colonialism: In those colonized countries such as Morocco, the
independence of the sharia became a theoretically untouchable sphere for
colonizers, though in practice they supervised access to judicial posts and the
rulings of the judges. With Western intervention, family and women became

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symbols of anti-colonial resistance used by nationalists and conservative

religious agents.7 Until that moment, kinship relationships were regulated by
legal codes inspired by the sharia and the various different juridical schools.
Throughout the twentieth century, a process of centralization of the new
nation-states led to a general codification of national family laws. In the
Turkish case, this national codification was followed by a unique process of
secularization. In 1926, Atatrk substituted the Ottoman Law of Family Rights
(1917) with a civil code, inspired by the Swiss code. Similar changes took place
in Iran, over a longer period of time. The code of 19281935 promoted by
Reza Shah Pahlavi was inspired by the shii school, and a reform in 1967
introduced radical changes alien to the sharia.
2. From independence to the Islamic Revolution of Iran: The majority of the new
independent regimes established new codifications of family law. These were
almost all inspired by Islamic sources of law, but at the same introduced
several reforms and local adaptations that simultaneously implied the adoption
of elements belonging to the prevailing school, and the exclusion of those
items considered as customary law that might hinder the process of national
unity. The new states created instruments and institutions to homogenize the
country, and in this sense, family codes were a product of this modern process
of bureaucratization. But codifications by the independent states differed in
each country and depended on different political contexts. For instance, the
Tunisian family code of 1956 was the most innovative of its time, while the
Mudawwana of Morocco (19571958) meant the instauration of the more
conservative Maliki conception of family law. The Tunisian code promoted by
Burguiba in 1956 derogated the role of the wali or legal tutor in matrimonial
decision-making, polygamy and unilateral repudiation, and it raised the legal
age for marriage to 18 and 20 years for men and women, respectively,
recognizing adoption and the common exercise of custody (hadana).8 In
contrast to this code, Algeria and Morocco did not introduce all of these
innovative measures and their codes reproduced a more conservative
approach.
3. Islamism and the re-Islamization of the state:9 With the spread of Islamism as a
kaleidoscope of socio-political movements and as an everyday cultural setting,
some states undertook new reforms and codifications of family law in order to
appear more Islamic. After the Iranian Revolution, the new regime rejected the
previous reforms, and extended certain rights for the husband in terms of
divorce, polygamy and custody (Special Law of Civil Courts, 1979). In other
cases, codification arrived later, such as in Algeria (1984). After long internal
discussions, the conservative sectors in that country consolidated a model that
highlighted the obedience of women to their husbands, polygamy and the
figure of the wali, paradoxically under a socialist regime and in a modern
process of industrialization that required women have free access to the labor
market.10 Thus in the Maghreb, the differences between countries are highly
illustrative of the political circumstances that have conditioned the codification
of family law, in spite of the preeminence of a common juridical school such
as the Maliki.

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 Demonstrating Islam

This brief historical summary of certain family law codifications illustrates that
the socio-political actors update, reinterpret and make use of legal texts, while
at the same time representing them as inalterable entities based on inalterable
sources. As I will explain through the Moroccan Mudawwana, reactions in
favor of or against the maintenance of family codes show that texts as such are
used and adopted in different ways according to the context. As Messick has
described in the case of Yemen,11 textuality is a kind of capital fashioned by
the states, jurists or politicians. Even the sharia has to be understood as a
common root that is then adapted to local processes where the claimants of
authenticity provide different contents.

The Context of the Mudawwana

This variety of interpretations and appropriations of the sharia can also
be observed in family codes, as far as they are based on multiple original
sources.12 In practice, these codes have implied important innovations in
the history of Islamic law, because every nation-state imposed a different
application of the sharia. This new order of law was different from previous
uses of the sharia in the hands of scholars clearly determined by their
respective schools or political authorities, such as the sultans of Morocco,
but not in the hands of a state judicial bureaucracy.13 Consequently,
the legal model was transformed by new processes of centralization and
homogenization under the auspices of the state. In Morocco, the
standardization of law was established through a kind of hybridization of local
and European codes (mainly French). The family realm was apparently an
exception to this process of mixtures. The Moroccan Code of Personal
Status was written after independence and represented a formal return to
the Maliki tradition, although in practice the procedures of the fiqh were
overlooked in a new process of standardization that fixed a set of norms,
certainly inspired by the Maliki school, but also imported European ideological
notions, such as the image of marriage as the union of two persons to create
a family.14
The Moroccan code, reformed in 1993 and 2004, was written and enacted
between 1957 and 1958 in the form of five decrees, under the name of
Mudawwana al-ahwal al-shakhiyya (Personal Status Compilation).15 The
Muslim sources of this code were officially the sharia and the sunna,
within the Maliki school variant, but, in fact, its content reflects the political
interpretation of its time. According to Charrad,16 the Mudawwana was the
result of concessions by the monarchy to its tribal allies, which had given it
support. This explains why the text finally reinforced a perspective based
on patrilineal links, opposed to the conjugal family model shared by certain
sections of the main nationalist party, the Istiqlal. According to Chekroun,17 the
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Mudawwana tempered the rural powers and minimally satisfied the liberal
bourgeoisie. Allal al-Fasi, leader of the Istiqlal party, hoped to introduce a new
conjugal nuclear family model and to eliminate consuetudinary law, although
he predicted that it would be impossible to transform traditional large-kinship
structures. Due to this disparity of ideological conceptions of the family, the
content of the code generated a certain political debate. The more liberal
sectors of the Istiqlal discussed the use of the veil, child marriage or
repudiation. This approach provoked reaction from the more conservative
groups. In his book Self-criticism (Al-Naqd al-DhaRi, 1952), al-Fasi defended
a reformist project that tried to reconcile Islam and modernity from a dynamic
interpretation of religion.18 The use of reason had to reach the sharia, through
ijtihad, and oppose stagnation (jumud ).19 Al-Fasi applied this reformist
approach to family matters and considered certain aspects of the Maliki
doctrine as inadequate, such as the restriction imposed on women to choose
a husband. He also claimed that decisions had to be taken by individuals and
not by families.20 Nevertheless none of these ideas found any support during
the elaboration of the Mudawwana.
From a political point of view, the implantation of a text in a territory, in
the framework of post-colonial nationalism, also contributed to creating the
idea of nation-state. The unification of law within the same territory was
possible through an elimination of local codes and consuetudinary law. This
process was similar to that of the creation of works on grammar, which only
appear in the context of the belief in a national unity that excludes local
particularities such as dialects.21
The elaboration of the Mudawwana started in August 1957 and concluded
in 1958. The king created a commission to draw-up a code according to
Islamic sources. In spite of the presence of Allal al-Fasi, the text was the
product of people very close to the king: two ministers, five high officers
of the Islamic court, a kings counselor and a member of the consultative
assembly. In practice, the formal sources of the Maliki school relegated
some of the reformist proposals of the Istiqlal, in contrast to the case of other
social spheres regulated by laws inspired by French codes. The question is
why the family received a halo of local authenticity and why women were
exclusively identified with domestic roles, precisely after a process of
independence in which the role of women was particularly active.22 The new
code imposed gender and kinship conceptions supported by a basically
patrilineal vision of descent, and a vision of marriage as an alliance between
families and not between individuals. The code was therefore inspired by
religious arguments that contradicted various points included in the future
constitutional text of 1962, which declared the equality of men and women
before the law.23
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The Changing Context of Text

We now turn to those changes that have taken place in the Moroccan
political and religious arena since the 1980s in order to understand the struggle
concerning the family code and the paradoxical responses by the state to the
progressive process of Islamization.

The monarchy and the organic ulama

Some authors have used the notion of Moroccan Islam to define the local
religious context, viewed as a tension between textual and orthodox forms and
other heterodox Islamic expressions. This bipolar approach is in some ways
an inheritance of French colonial ethnography that distinguished between an
Arabic textual Islam and a Berber popular Islam.24 Berque had challenged this
approach showing the continuity between these two ideal types in a kind of
syncretism.25 This tension between orthodox Islam, Sharifism and Sufism had
been historically documented before the colonial period.26 During the colonial
era, the rise of Salafi reformism challenged the role occupied by the
brotherhoods and the shurfa, but far from making these institutions disappear,
the nationalist movements inspired by reformism adopted some of their
elements.27 After independence in 1956, reformist nationalism acknowledged
the weight of Sharifism, and in a certain sense the sultanate was reinvented as
a symbol of the nation-state,28 creating a monarchy based on a traditional and
charismatic system of authority, combined with a parliamentary party system.
The constitution of 1962 (art. 19) established the divine character of the king,
according to the genealogical source of legitimization, as a descendant of the
Alawi branch. Since then, the monarchy has monopolized the leadership
of the religious community, and after the Iranian revolution and the spread of
Islamism, has made continuous efforts to control religious discourse, shutting
out discrepant voices such as Abdeslam Yassine, or organizing public rituals
representing monarchic authority in the mass media, such as the annual
theological conferences during Ramadan.29 The retransmission of these
conferences on public television depicts the figure of the king as a pious head
of Islam, a fact that has been repeatedly criticized by the Islamists.30 Abdeslam
Yassine has even defined these conferences as an act of idolatry towards the
king.31 The cult of the king has perhaps found its most relevant expression in
the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca, constructed with compulsory donations
from every Moroccan family, who then obtained a certificate of subscription in
which the monument was defined as the divine throne set on the water,
according to a Quranic verse.32 Other practical policies have been
implemented to ensure the definition of the king as commander of the faithful
(amir al-muminin), controlling all preaching in the mosques (decree of 1981)
or withdrawing khtba permits from critical preachers. The terrorist attacks of
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May 2003 in Casablanca have reinforced this control of the religious field
by the Makhzan. The Ministry of Habus and Religious Affairs was reformed
and many changes were introduced in order to monopolize the control of
preaching in mosques, the education of the imams and the issuing of fatwas.33
A repeated argument against monarchic monopoly by critics such as
Yassine is that the title of commander of the faithful contradicts the
egalitarian spirit of Islam, as Yassine set out in a letter to the king in November
1999.34 The leaders of political Islamism, such as the Party of Justice and
Development, criticized this letter and the official ulama of the Ministry of
Habus and Religious Affairs wrote a counter-fatwa citing a Quranic saying that
declares obedience to the amir al-muminin. The discussions about the
Mudawwana can only be understood in this climate of religious protest.

The Islamist agencies

Faced with the hegemony of the monarchy and the Makhzan, Islamist
discourses have been developed as a kind of counter-culture that questions the
political system, censuring the moral decadence of society, and attributing this
to the excessive influence of the West. In this sense, the growth of Islamism
means not only religious competition for the state in the religious field, but
also the expression of social movements that promote a new social order,
sometimes in millenarian terms. It would be misleading to simplify under the
umbrella term of Islamism a diverse universe of movements and ideologies.
Following Dialmys classification,35 we can distinguish four main groups in
Morocco, three of whom participated more or less directly in the public debate
on the Mudawwana, supporting those critical of its reform: (1) the critical
ulama, outside the official networks; (2) the derivations of Shabbiba al-
Islamiyya, with branches first oriented towards radical and violent options, and
other branches subsequently integrated into the political system, such as the
Party of Justice and Development; (3) the association al-Adl wa al-Ihsan, led
by Abdeslam Yassine, which counts the highest number of followers. Other
groups such as the Tabligh did not participate in the public debate about the
Mudawwana, as far as I am aware.

The preaching of the critical ulama

The Makhzan has also defined the licit ways of becoming and being an
alim, excluding all those ulama who do not participate in the League of
ulama or the Ministry of Habus and Religious Affairs. In this sense, some of
these excluded ulama, such as Abdelbari Zemzami, Abdelaziz bin Saddiq or
Driss Kettani, do not constitute an organized movement, in spite of being
opinion leaders also in the field of family matters and the debate on the
Mudawwana. Their discourses represent a reaction against the control of
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religion by the state, through dawa or Friday preaching of khtba or fatwas

published in Islamist journals and reviews. In any case, their critiques are not
new, and they constitute a kind of genre, already exercised by other ulama
of contemporary Moroccan history. And some of them are not causally
precursors of the current critical ulama.
The present critiques focus on political corruption and moral deviation
from the correct path of Islam, attributing this decadence both to Muslims and
also to Western influence, which is more visible in the mass media. For this
reason, the media are accused of diffusing jahiliyya and generating a moral
disorder or fitna. Within this critique, the family occupies a privileged position.
In the 1990s, one of the most successful television series, the Mexican soap
opera Guadalupe, received several critiques from the ulama, especially when
Princess Lalla Amina invited the protagonist, Adela Noriega, to Morocco.
Noriega was described by an Islamist newsweekly as a shameful example for
Moroccans, and they wondered how much money it would cost Muslims to
pay for the whisky drunk by this unfaithful libertine.36 Little wonder that in the
future debate on the Mudawwana, the ulama attributed the reform to foreign
interests. This attribution of Muslim decadence to external influences was
exacerbated by ulama such as Abdelbari Zemzami, whose fatwas justified a
boycott of the francophone press.37 One of the most controversial fatwas was
issued by Driss Kettani, founder of the League of Ulema in 1961, and now
openly critical of Moroccan policy. In his fatwa of September 18 2001, he
criticized an ecumenical act for peace organized at the Saint Pierre church
in Rabat.38

Islamists incorporated in the political system

Paradoxically, the faction that now participates in the party system, the
Justice and Development Party ( JDP), arose out of a radical and violent group
founded in 1969 by Abdelkrim Muti, known as al-Shabbiba al-Islamiyya. In
1983, the group was divided in many factions, with a moderate group, led by
Abdelillah Benkiran, acknowledging the monarchy and opting for participation
in the political system. The association of Benkiran, al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya,
brought together other parties such as the conservative Democratic
Constitutional Popular Movement of Abdelkrim Khattib, but in 1999 they
finally created an independent party. In spite of its political participation, the
JDP defends an Islamist project that proposes the purification of Moroccan
society through an application of the sharia. This explains why the group of
Benkiran has been one of the most active agencies against the reform of the
Mudawwana, and especially against the left-wing feminist movements, not
only in 2000 but ever since 1985, when such feminist movements supported
various different campaigns to promote a change of the code.
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Al-[Adl wa al-Ihsan: a challenge to the monarchy from

welfare-Islamism
Although there are no credible statistics on religious affiliation, we can
affirm that al-Adl wa al-Ihsan association is the largest Moroccan religious
grouping in number of followers. The weight of this organization has been
publicly projected in demonstrations, occupations of beaches or activities of
social assistance. In spite of its influence, the association has adopted an
explicit strategy of non-participation in the political system, attributed to the
absence of real democracy. In order to understand the remarkable attraction
of this association and its social influence in the Mudawwana discussion, we
need to analyze its hybrid characteristics. Al-Adl wa al-Ihsan integrates the
Islamist discourse that calls for a return to the correct path drawn by Islam,
but its organizational structure follows that of the Muslim brotherhoods.
The founder of the association, Abdeslam Yassine, symbolizes this religious
syncretism. Born in Marrakech in 1927, he became a member of the Tariqa
Butshishiyya but finally founded his own association, following a common
pattern of schism repeated in the history of Moroccan Sufism. Secondly, he
also adopted the role of the critical alim, sending several letters to the king,
reproducing a classical genre known as nasiha (advice). Since his first letter
sent to Hassan II in 1973, he has been arrested several times, was detained
between 1974 and 1978 in a psychiatric hospital, and was placed under house
arrest between 1986 and 2000, this time at his house in Sal, which became an
authentic center of pilgrimage for his followers, reproducing the popular
pattern of the cult of saints.39
The current name of the association, adopted in 1987, indicates its
purposes but also its syncretic nature as a reformist and Sufi movement:
al-adl, justice, claims for social equality; al-ihsan is a polysemic term that
embraces spiritual connotations and an ethical beneficence towards kin, the
helpless and Muslims in general. The success of the organization resides in
effective techniques of initiation that establish ties between master and
disciple. The first base of the association is called an usra (family), which
is then articulated in higher sections. The association is far from being a
traditional movement; absolutely on the contrary, it is based on a strategy of
adaptation to modernity. Inasmuch as it is an urban phenomenon, the follower
has to observe individual discipline, and the naqib of each section organizes
leisure activities such as excursions, martial arts or football matches. Even the
religious activities of the association, such as prayer, lessons or debates, are
always accompanied by sports activities.40
In his books, Yassine has defended a project of the Islamization of
modernity in order to fight inequality and injustice. Islam is the panacea for
the problems generated by modernity. Nevertheless, he combines Muslim
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rhetoric with eclectic arguments taken from the sociological critique of

modernity in terms of North-South inequalities, milieu contamination,
neo-liberal policies, American imperialism, etc. Yassine uses the idea of the
disenchantment with the modern world formulated by Weber, and describes
Islam as the window that allows an exit from the iron cage.41 Islam would
fill the emptiness of modern society and counter its rebellion against god.
Consequently, the family also has to be defended from the dangerous
influences of modernity, such as demographical decline or the progressive
acceptance of homosexuality.
The position of the association against the Mudawwana reform has to be
understood in the framework of this lengthy struggle on the part of Yassine
with the legitimacy of the monarchy. In 1999, he sent another letter to the new
king, Muhammad VI, in which he disqualified the idolatry of Hassan II. He also
used the exemplary khalifa Omar who had restituted his properties from
outside the country, in a clear reference to Hassan II.42 This letter was quickly
replied to by the League of Ulema and the Ministry of Habus and Religious
Affairs. In their arguments, the ulama quoted a hadith stating that obedience
to God means obedience to those who hold power.43 In this example, we can
appreciate that both Yassine and the ulama resorted to the text, to the Muslim
sources, from very different points of view.

Womens Movements vs. the Guardians of the Text

The discussion of the Mudawwana in Morocco has mainly been promoted
by left-wing feminist movements. It has to be pointed out here that these
movements have not defined their demands as contradictory to Islam. Quite
the contrary, they have rather criticized the instrumental use of the Islamic
sources made by androcentric interpretations in the name of tradition.44 The
first womens political organizations were created in the 1940s, integrated in
the nationalist party, and their claims were not far from a model close to the
dominant interpretation of Islam. Since 1962, the movements followed two
main paths, one close to the conservative sectors, and another more linked to
the left-wing parties and the trade-unions. The monarchy supported the
creation of a third faction, the Womens National Union (1969), in order to
counterbalance the other organizations. With the growth of Islamism in the
1980s, some feminist associations arose within the language of Islam and
sharing notions of womanhood based on sexual difference, spatial segregation
and the role of women as mothers, at the same time as they defended the right
of education and equality. This Islamist feminism has also provoked open
debates on the licit use of the term feminism.45 Some currents have discredited
the feminist label, since these movements are not considered emancipatory.
The debate is wide and rich,46 but what seems quite clear is that these
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movements also exercise an appropriation of modernity, in the sense that they

do not defend reclusion but instead claim, among other things, an instrumental
use of the hijab as a means of access to the public sphere and to the
expression of a cultural identity. They also make the paradoxical adoption of
spatial policies to ensure womens participation and gender segregation.47
The ulama have accused leftist womens movements of promoting a
libertine and dubious morality and of trying to break down the family as a
basic institution. The language used by the ulama or the Islamists again
appropriates modern terminologies such as womens rights or the feminism
of Islam. As Munson remarked several years ago, all these discourses
apparently focused on tradition condemn certain secular ideologies whose
language has been partially appropriated by the new Islamic movements:
They typically incorporate bits and pieces of the secular ideologies they
condemn into their interpretation of sacred scripture. Over and over
again, for example, we are told that the true form of a religion does not
permit any form of social injustice or even inequality. The fact that until
recently all the world religions tolerated slavery and countless other
forms of injustice and inequality is ignored. Rather, we are presented
with images of a utopian golden age.48
And so do popular Islamism and many feminist Islamists, declaring the feminist
character of the golden age of Islam. Islam is perfection but humans have
corrupted it.
Paradoxically the effort of ijtihad and change to the religiously inspired
family code was not generated by these Islamist movements, but by the leftist
feminist movements. In 1985, the Womens Democratic Association (Party for
Progress and Socialism) promoted a first revision of the Mudawwana in order
to improve the access of women to the public sphere. In 1987, the Union of
Feminine Action embarked upon a new strategy known as the one million
signatures campaign for a reform of the Mudawwana that was effectively
carried out in 1993. This campaign focused on the following points:
suppression of the wali, acknowledgment of the legal age for women at 21,
substitution of repudiation by a divorce supervised by a court, suppression of
polygamy, and empowerment of womens access to education and work.
These proposals were not supported by most parties, including the Socialist
Union of Popular Forces. It is important to remember that the parties attitude,
one that was contrary to change, would be similar throughout the next process
of reform in 2000.
In spite of political resistance, in 1993 a National Council for the
Modification of the Mudawwana and the Defense of Womens Rights was
created. The strategy of Hassan II at that time would be repeated by his son
Muhammad VI in 2004. The king acquired the role of judge in order to exercise
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 Demonstrating Islam

his power as the highest religious authority, giving certain concessions to the
left and showing the conservatives that only the amir al-muminin can
authorize reforms49. At that time, the Islamist group of Benkiran, called al-Islah
wa al-Tawhid, was extremely active and radical against this campaign.50
Benkiran declared a jihad against the reforms and called on the ulama to
react. For example, Habib Tajakani, professor of Islamic law in Tetouan, issued
a fatwa in the periodical Ar-Ray in April 1992 against the feminist campaign
and accused the signers of apostasy and heresy for wanting to change the
Quran and the hadith. Such opinions have modeled a discourse focused on
the family as a Muslim fortress besieged by heretical and Western dangers. The
same arguments have been defended by critical ulama who have warned of
the danger of an introduction of laicism in the Mudawanna, conceived as the
last bastion of Islamic textuality.51 The reaction of the conservative sectors in
1993 was very similar to what would happen in March 2000. In 1993, the
ulama and the Islamists collected three million signatures against the feminist
campaign defined by them as anti-Islamic. I would emphasize that the attitude
of the left-wing parties was very ambiguous regarding the reform, especially
among the Socialist Union of Popular Forces.

A Conflict Concerning Text: from the

demonstrations of March 2000 to the reform of 2004
In January 2000, the state secretary of social protection, family and
childhood, Said Saadi, presented a project called Plan for Womens
Integration. Saadi was member of the Party for Progress and Socialism and
had proposed the plan as a global strategy to improve the situation of
Moroccan women. The project embraced 215 measures on health, labor and
education, and only 14 of the measures were related to the personal status of
women. The most controversial measures, for its detractors, concerned raising
the legal age for marriage to eighteen years, a suppression of repudiation, an
instauration of divorce performed in the court, suppression of polygamy, the
possibility of marriage without the permission of a wali, and equal rights of
custody. These proposals unleashed a political storm illustrating that the
political distance between the parties is rather narrow when gender inequality
or conservative conceptions of the nature of women are challenged by
reforms of that kind.
The ideological struggle was finally carried out in public demonstrations,
which became a sort of barometer of the Moroccan political climate regarding
gender and family issues. Furthermore, the demonstrations confirmed the
consolidation of a new effort by the opposition movements to occupy the
public sphere. The sectors in favor of reform, such as the Party for Progress
and Socialism, several trade-unions and 60 feminist associations, organized a
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demonstration in Rabat on March 12 2000. The reaction of the detractors to this

reform was impressive.52 The same day another demonstration was organized
in Casablanca by the Organization in defense of the Moroccan family, which
gathered together not only the two main Islamist organizations, the Party of
Justice and Development and al-Adl wa al-Ihsan, but also the main political
parties, including members of the multi-party government that was promoting
the reform.53
The spectacular social mobilization generated by this reform project
proves the political relevance of defining and controlling gender and kinship
relationships. In this definition and control we can appreciate a remarkable
convergence and coincidence between the inheritors of modernist reformism
and the new Islamist currents. It is worth mentioning that the reform proposal
was not even supported by a government that included a wide spectrum of
political tendencies. The first to discuss the initiative was the minister of Habus
and Religious Affairs, Abdelkabir Mdaghri Alawi, who denounced a campaign
to alter the immutable aspects of the sharia. The political parties of the
government did not openly support the reform, and some of its members
clearly discouraged it. The promoter of the reform, Said Saadi, was very
disappointed by the fact that the empowerment of women was being rejected
also by the left.54 The Istiqlal Party officially supported the demonstration in
Rabat, but its leaders were rather closer to the critical positions, and in fact
none of the five nationalist ministers attended the demonstration. And old
militants such as Mohamed Belbachir organized an association against the
plan.55 The prime ministers socialist party was clearly divided on this question.
Habib Forqani, one of its leaders, had led public propaganda against the
reform some months earlier, and the day before the Rabat demonstration he
participated in an Islamist meeting at the Muhammad V pavilion in Casablanca,
where he criticized the attitude of the government for its adoption of a policy
that benefited the imperialist and Zionist offensive.56 The meeting had been
organized by the Constitutional Party, with the leitmotif of A united family, a
healthy family, stigmatizing the plan of Saadi as anti-Islamic. But this multi-
party convergence was no spur-of-the-moment improvisation: in October
1999, many different conservative parties had already supported the creation
of the Organization in defense of the Moroccan family, which was the formal
organizer of the Casablanca demonstration.
This political mobilization against the plan was led by the main Islamist
organizations, the Party of Justice and Development and al-Adl wa al-Ihsan,
which identified the initiative as a Western imposition, as one of the placards
at the head of the demonstration stated. Among other things the demonstration
in Casablanca impressed public opinion by its effective and disciplined
organization, principally undertaken by Al-Adl wa al-Ihsan. They brought
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demonstrators in on buses from around the whole country and a security and
health service followed the demonstration to avoid incidents. The
demonstration itself was spatially organized, following the criteria of sexual
segregation: first the leaders of parties and associations, many ulama, both
official and peripheral, followed by the women, led by Shaykh Yassines
daughter, Nadia.
The first effect of the demonstrations was the suspension of the project and
the postponement of the reforms, although the Makhzan created a
commission of experts in April 2001, in response to repeated requests from a
group of feminist organizations called Printemps de lgalit.57 Thus the state
reacted with caution, given that opposition to the project was actively
maintained by the majority of political parties and other social sectors, with the
king avoiding a confrontation with the religious ideologues of the country. The
consequences of the Mudawwana affair showed the difficulty of talking about
social reforms such as the promotion of gender equality without the support
of a religious discourse, at a time when Islam is becoming a central plank of
political programs, in the sense that everyday life is being conformed by a
process of re-Islamization in a particular way: the success of an Islamist
marketing of aesthetics, food, clothes and cultural consumption that implies an
Islamization of modernity, expressed in a love of rule, as Benkheira has
defined it.58 This amour pour la loi works as a new utopia that is supposed to
solve the socio-economical problems of modern Moroccan society. Social
decadence is perceived precisely as the consequence of a withdrawal from
Islam.59 According to this point of view, discrimination against women consists
of taking them outside Muslim rules. Failures are displayed in Muslims but
never in the rule. Societys big mistake is thus a deviation from the law and
the text. In this line, the most well-known voice of Moroccan Islamist
feminism, the daughter of Abdeslam Yassine, Nadia, declared that the
Mudawanna was not a sacred text, and recalled that the main problem for
women was not to be found in texts but in discriminatory practices by men,
which are factual deviations from the law and that frustrate a true development
of women.60 In a paper sent to a conference at the Zentrum Moderner Orient
in Berlin, at which she was forbidden to participate by the Moroccan
authorities, she wrote that we were the first to challenge the alleged
sacredness of the Mudawana (charter for personal status), seeing that it is
based on the same jurisprudence that legitimizes the present rgime.61
The reform was frozen in the commission until the monarchy was able to
confirm its power as the highest religious authority legitimized to adapt the
text without contradicting its sacred foundations. This moment arrived
precisely after the Casablanca terrorist attacks of May 2003, when the Makhzan
initiated a policy of repression towards Islamism. The king as amir
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al-muminin needed to display his religious and political authority and

surprised everybody by ordering the reform of the Mudawwana. He
announced the reform in his opening speech of the parliamentary year on
October 10 2003, in which he claimed the need for modernization in Morocco
at the same time as he insisted that reform would scrupulously follow Islamic
law, in a licit interpretation or ijtihad of religious textuality. In his unexpected
announcement, the king supported his argumentation with the fidelity of the
reform to the original sources and pleaded for an open interpretation of such
sources; through this strategy, the king silenced those critics who had qualified
the reforms as non Islamic. But it would be misleading to look only at the
official discourse of the king, ignoring the fact that his symbolic authority is
ultimately based on other sources of power, such as surveillance, persecution
or repression. This observation has already been brilliantly forwarded by
Munson in his critique of Geertz and Combs-Schillings argument about the
symbolic authority of the king. In fact, this authority was also or especially
based on material and physical violence.62
The main points reviewed in the reform of 2004 were almost the same as
those that unleashed the wave of critiques in 2000: restriction of the walis
functions; raising the minimum age for marriage (18 years); restriction of
polygamy, justified only before a judge; equality between men and women
when asking for divorce, restriction of unilateral divorce; equal rights of
inheritance received by the grandsons, indistinctly through paternal or
maternal line. It is also remarkable that the new code received a new name,
now no longer defined as a Personal Status Code but rather as a Family Code.
Thus, the official acceptance of the reform by Islamist movements or by
conservative parties such as the Istiqlal is very revealing in the sense that these
had been openly reluctant to accepting any change in the Mudawwana. They
were obliged to admit the arguments presented by the king in that they were
supported by textual authority and especially by the political authority of the
state; and we should recall that the state increased its pressure and control on
preaching and religion after May 2003. The Party of Justice and Development,
for instance, had been one of the groups most critical of an eventual reform,
although they publicly respected the kings proposal and praised the effort of
adapting reform to the precepts of Islamic law.63 In the same way, the general
secretary of the Istiqlal Party, Abbas al Fassi, declared his satisfaction with the
reform, in spite of having been opposed to it for years. In fact, M. Bouceta, a
member of the Istiqlal, participated in the commission for the reform, despite
being considered highly conservative by the feminists.64
With the growth of Islamism, the political regimes of the Arab world are
progressively adopting symbolic instruments and weapons of repression in
order to monopolize the religious field and to restrain critical political
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movements. Moroccan reform has to be understood in this general context.

This also means that the monarchy put forward the image of an open and
liberal regime in the western media, while internally trying to win the
competition to define and occupy a position of more legitimate authority. And
it represented the triumph of the king as the final guarantor of the sharia
and as a political arbiter.65

Concluding Remarks
The 2000 demonstration in Casablanca gathered together social sectors of
divergent political approaches. In spite of their differences, the conservative
parties in the government, the ulama and the main Islamist associations
coincided in defending the inalterability of the Mudawwana, although as
we have seen, Nadia Yassine was against the reform while defending the
changeability of the text. This contemporary text was considered as the
prolongation of the foundational sources, and the reform was identified as a
strategy of Westernization, Christianization and the introduction of secularity.
Even critical preachers, censured by the state on other occasions, were authorized
by the Ministry of Habus and Religious Affairs to disqualify the reform.66 It is
additionally remarkable that the Casablanca demonstration led by the Islamists
was also attended by people belonging to parties and movements not directly
related to the Islamist associations. One possible explanation for this elective
affinity may be the existence of a shared perception of social phenomena
considered as inalterable, such as gender relationships as supposedly defined
by the foundational texts (Quran and hadith). In this sense, the Islamists and
other non-Islamist groups used arguments that recall colonial discussions of
authenticity and modernity and the use of women as a cultural symbol of
change or inalterability.67 This debate actually reflects the notable changes that
have been taking place in kinship and gender relationships over the last four
decades: the access of women to education and work outside the household,
the raising of the age for marriage, reconstitution of the extended family in
new urban structures determined by migration patterns, etc. These
transformations have also led to new elaborations of gender conceptions. The
novelty is that the traditionalists enact a kind of aggiornamento conducted
within the language of Islam and try to appropriate modernity with symbols
and discourses defined as Islamic through the tools of the new mass media.
People do not question whether social rules have to be inspired by religion;
rather, they argue over the way such religious inspiration should be applied
and interpreted. Even those secular approaches inspired by leftist arguments
cannot deny the strong bond between Islam and social regulation, although
gender inequalities are explained not only by religion but also by other factors
such as social-class inequalities, educational issues or androcentric patterns.
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The monarchic blessing of the reform illustrates the prevailing power of

textuality in contemporary society, both by the ruling forces and the critical
currents.68 Far from being a phenomenon of tradition, textuality is being
reoriented by the use of new technologies, progressive literacy or the flow
from traditional oral culture to new audio-visual media. Internet, satellite
preachers and the new audio-visual physical media give a new impulse to
textual legitimacy. The religious field is open to new forms of authority, but
this contemporary competition consolidates the value of textuality and
introduces a new scope in the sense that texts such as the hadith are to
be found on internet, displaying new textualist concerns. The Moroccan
Makhzan attempts to control this new framework, and the Mudawwana
reform is the best illustration of this effort to manage textual authority. As Asad
wrote some years ago, social practices are not Islamic because they fit into
some kind of essences such as tradition; instead, they are considered by
people as Islamic because there are certain discursive traditions and
institutions of socialization and knowledge transmission that give them
such authority.69
Finally, I would like to emphasize that the Mudawwana conflict
dramatizes various different conceptions of social change regarding gender
and kinship relationships. The Plan for womens integration of 2000 was
inspired by a notion of change based on progress and modernization, as
defined by international programs and development policies. On the other
hand, the diverse Islamist and conservative agents proclaimed a paradoxical
notion of change based on past foundational myths. This exercise does not
consist of a banal repetition of the past, but rather, as Marshall Sahlins
explanation about the Maori myths tells us, it works as a functional
revalorization of categories, based on current political interests.70 Like the
Maori mytho-praxi, the Muslim genealogies of text are revitalized in the
present. And this approach does not mean that Muslim societies are mired in
the past; quite the opposite. Western chronocentrism should not forget that
the reforms of European family codes are as recent71 as prominent conceptions
of women as dependent individuals closer to nature than men, and that this
process has been contemporary with the social changes that have been taking
place in the Arab world since the nineteenth century.72

Endnotes
1. Judith Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Syria and
Palestine, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Beshara Doumani (ed.), Family History in the Middle East. Household, Property and Gender
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).

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 Demonstrating Islam

2. Annelies Moors, Debating Islamic Family Law: Legal Texts and Social Practices,
in A Social History of Women & Gender in the Modern Middle East, M. L. Meriwether, J. E.
Tucker, eds. (Boulder, Oxford: Westview Press, 1999), 141175; Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Marriage
on Trial. A Study of Islamic Family Law (London & New York: I. B. Tauris, 1993); Lawrence
Rosen, The Anthropology of Justice: Law as Culture in Islamic Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
3. Noel J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law (Edinburgh: University Press, 1964),
Conflicts and Tensions in Islamic Jurisprudence (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1969); Daisy Dwyer, ed., Law and Islam in the Middle East: An Introduction (New York:
Bergin and Garvey, 1990).
4. Annelies Moors, Debating Islamic Family . . . 150; John Esposito, Women in
Muslim Family Law (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982).
5. Philippe Fargues, Gnrations arabes. Lalchimie du nombre (Paris: Fayard, 2000).
6. Josep Llus Mateo Dieste, Pourquoi tu ne mcris plus? Les rapports mixtes et les
frontires sociales dans le Protectorat espagnol au Maroc, Hawwa. Journal of Women in
the Middle East and the Muslim World 2/1 (2003): 241268.
7. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam. Historical Roots of a Modern Debate
(New Heaven & London: Yale University Press, 1992).
8. Sophie Bessis, Souhayr Belhassen, Mujeres del Magreb. Lo que est en juego
(Madrid: Las femineras, 1992) 8283.
9. Gema Martn Muoz, El estado rabe. Crisis de legitimidad y contestacin
islamista (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 1999).
10. Mounira M. Charrad, States and Womens Rights. The Making of Postcolonial
Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California
Press, 2001), 21.
11. Brinkley Messick. The Calligraphic State. Textual Domination and History in a
Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
12. Mounira M. Charrad, States and Womens.
13. The relationship between the new independent governments and the ulama, for
instance, is very heterogeneous, as illustrated by Malika Zeghal, Gardiens de lislam: les
oulmas dal Azhar dans lEgypte contemporaine (Paris: Fondation nationale des sciences
politiques, 1996). In pre-colonial Morocco, some ulama had criticized the sultans, but the
majority had served them in a kind of contractual bond. Henry Munson Jr., Religion and
Power in Morocco (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 45. This is also why in
independent Morocco the king has tried to empty the ulamas factual power, relating them
to the legitimating of the king as amir al-muminin. See Malika Zeghal, Les islamistes
marocains. Le dfi la monarchie (Casablanca: Le Fennec, 2005) and Mohamed Tozy,
Monarchie et islam politique au Maroc (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale de
Sciences Politiques, 1999).
14. Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Reform of Personal Status Laws in North Africa: A Problem
of Islamic or Mediterranean Laws?, Middle East Journal 49/3 (1995): 432446.
15. Maurice Borrmans, Statut personnel et famille au Maghreb de 1940 nos jours
(Paris: Mouton, 1977); Mohamed Mouaqit (ed.), La rforme du droit de la famille.
Cinquante annes de dbats. Recueil de documents, Prologues. Revue maghrbine du livre,
Hors srie 2 (2002).
16. Mounira M. Charrad, States and Womens Rights. The Making of Postcolonial
Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California
Press, 2001).
17. Mohamed Chekroun, Famille, tat et transformations socio-culturelles au Maroc
(Rabat: Okad, 1996).

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18. According to al-Fasi, Islamic thought includes haraka (motion) and tajdid
(renovation). For this reason, modernity is not exclusive to the West, as far as rationality is
also inherent to Islam. And this modernization is possible without a compulsory process of
secularization.
19. Almudena Ruiz Ibez, Islam y pensamiento poltico en Marruecos. nacionalismo
y reformismo islmico, pilares ideolgicos del Partido Istiqlal, Ph.D. (Madrid: Universidad
Autnoma de Madrid, 2001), 103114.
20. Almudena Ruiz Ibez, Islam y pensamiento, 174175.
21. Pierre Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire: lconomie des changes linguistiques
(Paris: Fayard, 1985).
22. Alison Baker, Voices of Resistance, Oral Histories of Moroccan Women (New York:
State University of New York Press, 1998).
23. Yolanda Aixel, Mujeres en Marruecos. Un anlisis desde el parentesco y el gnero
(Barcelona: Bellatera-Alborn, 2000), 184.
24. Dale F. Eickelman, Moroccan Islam. Tradition and Society in a Pilgrimage Center
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976).
25. Jacques Berque, Structures sociales du Haut-Atlas (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1978 [1955] ), 323336; Leif Manger, Muslim Diversity. Local Islam in Global
Contexts (Richmond-Bergen: Curzon Press-Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 1999).
26. Vincent J. Cornell, Realm of the Saint. Power and Authority in Moroccan
Sufism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Mercedes Garca-Arenal, Imposture et
transmission gnalogique: une contestation du sharifisme?, in mirs et prsidents. Figures
de la parent et du politique dans le monde arabe, dir. P. Bonte, E. Conte and P. Dresch
(Paris: CNRS ditions, 2001), 111136.
27. Henry Munson Jr., Religion and Power, 149179.
28. Hassan Rachik, Symboliser la nation. Essai sur lusage des identits collectives
au Maroc (Casablanca: Editons le Fennec, 2003). Many Moroccan hills are decorated with
a trilogy of words around a crown: al-waan, Allah, al-malik (Nation, God, King).
29. Abdessamad Dialmy, Lislamisme marocain: entre rvolution et intgration,
Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 110 (2000).
30. Mounia Bennani-Chrabi, Le Ramadan au Maroc: sacralisation et inversion, in
Ramadan et politique, eds., F. Abdelkhah and F. Georgeon (Paris: CNRS ditions, 2000),
4550.
31. Abdeslam Yassine, Mmorandum. A qui de droit, November 14, 1999: 14.
32. Bernab Lpez Garca, Marruecos en trance. Nuevo rey, nuevo siglo, nuevo
rgimen? (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2000), 6267.
33. On April 30 2004 the king announced the creation of a new High Council of
Ulema. Maroc-Hebdo International, May 713 2004, n 604. The new Council of Ulema
published a new review entitled Bulletin of imams and preachers. Its first number was
devoted to legitimizing the figure of the king as amir al-muminin and as the highest
religious authority in the country.
34. Abdeslam Yassine, Mmorandum . . ..
35. Abdessamad Dialmy, Lislamisme marocain.
36. La Vanguardia, 30-06-1996.
37. Abdelbari Zemzmi, un alem indpendent au centre de la polmique,
Maroc-Hebdo International (484), November 2 2001.
38. Dr. Driss Kettani, lauteur de la fetwa anti-amricaine, Maroc-Hebdo
International, October 26 2001.
39. Mohamed Tozy, Monarchie et islam . . . 154. The ziyara to the saint is even
preceded by a purification ritual by visitors at the entrance to the building. Youssef Belal,

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Mystique, politique et normes prescriptives chez Abdessalam Yassine et ses adeptes (Rabat:
Centre Jacques Berque, 2005).
40. Interview with Abdelwahid, follower of the association, resident in Catalonia
(Manresa, April 20, 2002). He says that one of the reasons to explain why Yassine remained
healthy during his house arrest is that he did sport and everyday exercises.
41. Abdeslam Yassine, Winning the Modern World for Islam (Iowa: Justice and
Spirituality Publishing, Inc., 2000).
42. Abdeslam Yassine, Mmorendum, 19.
43. Communiqu de la Ligue des Oulma du Maroc, Secrtariat gnral, Rabat,
10-02-2000.
44. For example, the determination of the legal age to marry. The Maliki
jurisprudence did not fix a particular age, although it referred to the first menstruation. The
figure of the wali is not mentioned in the Quran. And the trade code of 1913 that made a
husbands permission compulsory for all women wanting to work or carry out trade, a rule
that has no Quranic fundament. Sophie Bessis, Mujeres del Magreb, 87.
45. Valentine Moghadam, Islamic Feminism and its Discontents: towards a Resolution
of the Debate, Signs 27 (2002): 11351171. In the early 1990s, the word nisawiyya started
circulating in Egypt as a local expression for feminism, in Margot Badran, Toward Islamic
Feminisms: A Look at the Middle East, in Hermeneutics and Honor. Negotiating Female
Public Space in Islamic/ate Societies, ed. A. Afsaruddin (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 163. For the Moroccan case, see Zakya Daoud, Fminisme et politique au
Maghreb. Soixante ans de lutte (Casablanca: ditions Eddif, 1993); Laura Feliu, ngeles
Ramrez, Mujeres y derechos humanos en el Magreb, Quaderns de la Mediterrnia.
Cuadernos del Mediterrneo 23 (2001): 6380.
46. While some authors argue that feminism can only be understood as a universal
movement inspired by Western tradition, others defend the possibility of recognizing local
feminisms and criticize the ethnocentric view of the first approach. Another problem is that
feminism has been identified in Muslim countries as a Western movement alien to Muslim
society; so feminists have been labeled as Western partisans, and this is probably why
the new movements arising from Islamist associations have tried to give indigenous
interpretations of feminism in order to avoid this identification with alien influences. In
Morocco, the most well-known figure following this strategy is Nadia Yassine. She founded
the feminine section of al-Adl was al-Ihsan, and has published Toutes voiles dehors
(Casablanca: Le Fennec, 2003). Her articles and conferences are available at
http://nadiayassine.net.
47. Yolanda Aixel, Mujeres en Marruecos, 243247.
48. Henry Munson Jr., Religion and Power, 151.
49. The main effects of the 1993 reform were the following: compulsory presence of
the woman at the marriage contract signature (until that moment, only the presence of the
wali was required); in case of polygamy, the husband must show the notary the judges
authorization; in case of separation, the custody of the children depends firstly on the
mother. In spite of these reforms, the Mudawwana maintained several discriminatory
aspects, such as the right of a husband to repudiate his wife in front of a judge, without
the obligatory presence of the woman (art. 48).
50. Mohamed Tozy, Monarchie et islam, 201.
51. Mohammed Saghir, Pour quelle modification de la moudawana marocaine? Cri
dalarme en 7 points, Jamais sans lIslam de mes enfants (2001) [http://www.safinah.net].
52. As usually happens in these kind of events, the estimation of the number of
demonstrators in Rabat and Casablanca depends on the sources: between 20,000 and
100,000 for Rabat; between 100,000 and 500,000 in Casablanca. There is no doubt, however,

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that the Casablanca demonstration was the most well-attended. The most comprehensive
and detailed comments on the juridical and political context of those events can be found
in Lo Buskens, Recent Debates on Family Law Reform in Morocco: Islamic Law as Politics
in an Emerging Public Sphere, Islamic Law and Society 10/1 (2004): 70131.
53. Istiqlal, Socialist Union of Popular Forces, Popular National Movement,
Constitutional Union, Democratic National Party.
54. Souad Eddouada, Feminism and Politics in Moroccan Feminist
Non-Governmental Organisations, Post Colonialisms/Political Correctnesses (Casablanca,
April 2001) [http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg].
55. Dploiement de force islamiste, Maroc-Hebdo International 410, March 17 2000.
56. Rissalat al-Oumma (March 13 2000), Journal of the Constitutional Union Party.
The socialist Forkani was president of the National Instance for the Protection of the
Moroccan Family, created in October 1999.
57. This movement included the most influential feminist associations such as the
Association Dmocratique des Femmes Marocaines, Union pour lAction Fminine, Ligue
Dmocratique pour la Dfense des Droits des Femmes. The commission, created on April
27, 2001 was also described as inefficient by those associations. Moudawana: la rvision se
fait attendre, La Vie conomique 4139, October 26 2001.
58. Mohammed Hocine Benkheira, Lamour de la loi. Essai sur la normativit en
Islam (Paris: PUF, 1997).
59. Henry Munson Jr., Religion and Power, 150.
60. Le Journal, October 713 2000.
61. Nadia Yassine, Justice and Spirituality: theory and practice, February 21, 2006
[http://nadiayassine.net].
62. Henry Munson Jr., Religion and Power, 121125. His critique refers to
M. E. Combs-Schilling, Sacred performances. Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989).
63. At-Tajdid, October 11 2003.
64. La Nouvelle Tribune, October 16 2003.
65. Alain Roussillon, Rformer la Moudawana: statut et conditions des Marocaines,
Maghreb-Machrek 179 (2004): 97.
66. Maroc-Hebdo International 403, January 27, 2000.
67. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender.
68. Islamism is therefore a recurrence of regeneration from the sources. The
movement Justice and Spirituality places itself in the continuity of this recurrence. We have
a specific term in our Islamic referential for this phenomenon: the Tajdid. Tajdid mean the
renewal (by going back to the sources). Hence, It is automatically opposed to the concept
of Taqlid (blind imitation of previous jurisprudence), but it is also reliant on Ijtihad
(continuous adaptation of texts to contexts), Nadia Yassine, Justice and Spirituality.
69. Talal Asad, Genealogies of religion. Discipline and reasons of power in
Christianity and Islam (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1993).
70. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
This kind of approach has also been used by other anthropologists analyzing genealogy in
Muslims contexts. For instance, Mondher Kilani, La construction de la mmoire. Le lignage
et la saintet dans loasis dEl Ksar (Gnve: ditorial Labor et Fides, 1992).
71. Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Reform of Personal . . .
72. Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking women: feminism and modernity in the Middle
East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

154 2009 Hartford Seminary.