The Moroccan Women's Rights Movement

4. Framing Mudawwana Reform

176| 4| Framing Mudawwana Reform Re f o r mi ng a l e ga l co de is not a simple, top-down process. The process of reforming the Mudawwana, as described earlier in the book, began in earnest in 1992, with the collection of signatures demanding that King Hassan II reform the Mudawwana. The next step in the process was the 1999 Plan of Action for the Integration of Women in Development , which spurred the two marches for and against the plan. The newly enthroned King Mohammed VI formed a commission to advise him on Mudawwana reform and announced the reform in October 2003. Parliament discussed and debated the king’s plan and approved the end result unanimously, after a great deal of heated discussion and disagreement about, and veto of, individual provisions. The new Mudawwana was implemented in February 2004, along with a series of plans for carrying out the new legislation, including retraining for judges, the establishment of courts devoted solely to family law issues, and new, streamlined processes. Throughout every step of this process, the conversation continued, and women’s rights associations and their allies worked to convince the public of the worth of Mudawwana reform. One of the significant changes between the 1999 Plan of Action and the 2004 Mudawwana was the increasing use of religious texts and justifications as support of key changes within the reform document itself, as well as in speeches made by the king. Yet underlying this was a constant reference to equality, women’s human rights, and the need to have a Mudawwana Fr aming Mudawwana Reform · 177 that “tak[es] into consideration the spirit of our modern era” (Moroccan Family Code 2005).1 This chapter complements the previous one by looking closely at how the notions of “equality” and “women’s human rights” show up repeatedly in conversations about the 2004 reform and its implementation. The women’s rights movement has used these frames successfully to bring a host of women’s issues to public attention and to link these issues to the need to reform the Mudawwana. Underlying these applications is an acknowledgement that society follows the family and that women cannot secure equality and human rights politically or legally until they have them in the family as well. Thus the movement has increasingly directed these frames toward the call for Mudawwana reform. As will be revealed, however, addressing the laws that regulate family relationships in Morocco is tricky because of their relationship to Islamic law, or Shariah. This chapter looks at how activists have addressed the use of religious texts and traditions to support their frames of “equality” and “women’s human rights” and attempted to superimpose these two frames onto discourses about women and the family that are claimed to derive from religious texts and traditions. Because of the relationship between the Mudawwana and religious texts, references to Islamic law (Shariah) in the following section require some explanation. The term “Shariah” itself has multiple resonances. First, the word simultaneously refers to the ideal path (shari’a) that God has laid out for Muslims and is used a catch-all term for a compilation of centuries of jurisprudential writings and decisions (fiqh) that have led to very different legal codes in various Muslim communities. In Islam, there 1. All excerpts from the February 5, 2004, version of the Moroccan Family Code (including the Preamble) are from an unofficial English translation provided by the international NGO Global Rights. See http://www.globalrights.org/site/DocServer/Mudawwana -English_Translation.pdf?docID=3106, accessed August 2011. The translation was developed by American and Moroccan lawyers and a professional Arabic-English translator. Every time I quote from the Mudawwana, I have matched the unofficial English translation to the official French and Arabic versions to my satisfaction, and I feel confident using it as is. 178 · Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement are multiple sources of textual authority. The first is the Qur’an, believed to be the divine word of God as revealed to the Prophet Mohammed and shared by him with the Muslim community. The second is the Sunna, the recorded sayings and deeds of the Prophet Mohammed. While the Qur’an is unassailable as the revealed word of God, the Sunna is acknowledged as being slightly more open to interpretation because it was reported by humans, the men and women closest to Mohammed during his lifetime. Even Mohammed...