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2. Feminization of the Islamist Movements: The One Million Signature Campaign
- University of Minnesota Press
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2 Feminization of the Islamist Movements: The One Million Signature Campaign 30 In 1992 the feminist group UAF launched the One Million Signature Campaign. As its name indicates, this campaign aimed to collect one million signatures against the mudawwana. The petition contested this code’s consecration of gender inequalities and proposed an egalitarian codification based on equal rights and shared responsibilities of husbands and wives within the family. The UAF’s project of reform was inspired by the liberal discourse of women’s rights and by international treaties, notably the CEDAW. Since the early 1980s, the debate about the reform of the mudawwana had become more intense and widespread, but never were the controversies more vehement than during the UAF’s petition. As a movement moment, the UAF petition had a far-reaching impact on both feminist and Islamist women’s groups. Not only did this campaign send a powerful signal about the rise of the feminist movement in Morocco, it also demonstrated the scope of its mobilizing capacities. It is the goal of this chapter to illustrate how this mobilization also paved the way for Islamist women’s voices and discourse, and influenced their forms of organization. Perceived as an assault on the sharia, the petition campaign stimulated Islamist women’s interpretations of the “sacred history” (Zubaida 1987) of Islam as it pertains to women’s place in Islamic society.This mobilization by Islamist women raised questions: Who may speak on behalf of Moroccan women? Who may engage in ijtihād—a renewed interpretation of the sharia? Upon closer inspection, broader questions were also at stake: How did the feminist mobilization contribute to engendering the state liberalization that had been in progress since the mid-1980s? What was the impact of the UAF’s petition on the reframing of religion and politics at this juncture? This turn in the discussion relates to the emergence of women as political agents holding varied—and sometimes competing—definitions and agendas surrounding key issues such as democracy, citizenship, development, women’s rights, and Islam. I address these questions by emphasizing the impact of the UAF campaign on the feminization of Islamist women’s discourse and activism. I define feminization as, first, opening Islamist women to the discourse of “women’s rights”; second, their positioning within the women’s movement; and, third, their negotiations of leadership positions in the Islamist movements. I argue that the articulation of a politics of feminism by Islamist women did not occur in a vacuum. Besides the internal dynamics of change at work within the Islamist movements since the mid-1980s, the UAF’s petition gave these dynamics a significant external momentum. The point is when the UAF spoke on behalf of all women, the Islamist “sisters” had to reposition themselves as women advocates of an alternative discourse and agenda, rather than as simply members of Islamist male organizations . This meant a reconsideration of these activists’ positions vis-à-vis the women’s movement and a negotiation of their marginal location in the Islamist movements. Accordingly, Islamist women embarked on not only defending the sharia, but also rereading it as it pertains to their own marginalization in the Islamist movement. The “woman’s gaze” (al-’ayn al-nissāiyya) is the expression used by these activists to describe their particular understanding of the sharia from a woman’s standpoint. The “woman’s gaze” replaces the term “gender,” which these activists consider Western feminist terminology that divides society into two clashing components of men and women while also paving the way to gender crossing. The woman’s gaze stresses the unique location of women as negotiators and mediators of social relations, highlighting how this location shapes their perception of social, political, and economic issues. Suad al-Amari, an active member in al-Tawhīd wa-l-islāh and current deputy on the City Council of Casablanca, contends that the woman’s gaze was a “methodology” that instigated gender debates in the Islamist media and groups. I asked Suad to explain the difference between the woman’s gaze and a gender lens, since both seem to have similar effects. To her, it is the “colonial” baggage that comes with the term “gender ” that is most disturbing. At the same time, the woman’s gaze does not reduce “femininity” to a question of personal choice, but makes it the lens through which one perceives the world. These alternatives to the feminist discourse of gender equality...