Morocco's emerging Islamic feminism
The emergence of Islamic feminism is recent in Morocco, dating from the years 2000. This current operates alongside the historical left-wing feminism which is eying it with interest. What distinguishes it is the primacy of the religious frame of reference as a legitimating instrument for feminist demands, thrusting aside the primacy of the Human Rights frame of reference dear to universalist Arab feminists. The former makes two key demands: a) the right to a feminist revisiting of the scriptural texts, read, in an apologetic approach, as fundamentally egalitarian, notably bringing out the female figures extolled in the Quran and the wives of the Prophet of Islam, and b) the denunciation of patriarchal interpretations that run counter to an egalitarian Islam. The objectives of Islamic feminists lay with occupying the religious sphere at institutional and theological production level and deconstructing the demeaning stereotypes of Muslim women as well as the patriarchal discourse peddled by Islamist fundamentalists.
In the religious sphere, the presence of Islamic feminism in religious institutions brings about a change in gender relations, notably when it comes to the production of religious scholarship from a feminist angle, which is also relayed via a Website. Claiming gender equality, this Islamic feminism has resulted in the displacement of patriarchal representations that had underpinned Islam's prevailing “orthodox” discourse and scripture. And at the same time, it is party to the re-Islamisation phenomenon which has, over the last thirty years, affected all Muslim societies. Its champions, acting primarily in the sphere of religious discourse are well aware that by using the same legitimating instances as men, they enjoy a “sacralised” power.
Morocco's historical feminism, universalist and secular, has yielded real reforms, especially at the level of the Family Code whereas the emergence of Islamic feminism brings about a shake-up of the gender status quo within a religious realm which had been a male preserve for centuries. Universalist feminists disparage Islamic feminists, claiming that their project consists in highlighting egalitarian Quranic verses and hadiths whilst passing over those that endorse the hierarchical relation between sexes underpinning a social project founded in a patriarchal vision. Islamist feminists belittle universalist feminists whom they find in thrall to a “Western” feminism while claiming a social project founded in an “Islamic” gender equality.
In the context of the so-called Arab Spring, universalist feminists created the « Printemps féministe pour l'égalité et la démocratie », collective, an umbrella group for some twenty associations that calls for the incorporation of gender equality in the new constitution. It has since been adopted in July 2011 and its article 19 reads as follows: “Men and women have equal civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights and freedoms as listed in this article and in the rest of the constitution as well as the conventions and international treaties duly ratified by Morocco [...]”
