Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco (review)

Feminist scholars of the Middle East have struggled to situate women’s activism in relation to the state and Islam in ways that recognize the contravening commitments, constraints, and systems of power that may influence women’s articulation of their politics and identities. Such studies have had to grapple with representations of feminism and Islam as monolithic, diametrically opposed epistemologies. Zakia Salime’s study of Islamist and feminist mobilizations surrounding reformation of the mudawana (family code) in Morocco, Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco enters the debate at precisely this point. Eschewing constructions of feminism and Islam as inherently antagonistic doctrines, Salime focuses on the liminal spaces between feminist and Islamist activism, drawing on sociological, feminist, and social movement literatures and methodologies to highlight the overlapping and interconnected nature of these movements.

Salime organizes her text around three “movement moments” (xvii) that exemplify the conjunctural nature of feminist and Islamist mobilizations around mudawana reform. These movements moments are the 1992 One Million Signature Campaign, a feminist campaign in support of reforming the mudawana, an Islamist rally that took place in Casablanca in 2000, and the Casablanca bombings in May 2003 that galvanized feminist groups to position themselves as the alternative to Islamic radicalism and necessitated a semantic shift in Islamist discourse. Salime’s chapters treat each of these movement moments in turn, arguing that they must be understood in the context of both domestic and international politics.

The first chapter offers an overview of the politically and ideologically charged relationships between “gender and the nation state” (2), identifying key roles of Islamist parties, ulema (religious scholars), and the king in determining the discursive field in which feminist mobilization unfolded. Salime troubles the image of a unified group of ulema as “a monolithic body, co-opted by the makhzen (Moroccan state apparatus) and hostile to women’s rights” (5), instead dividing ulema into independent and state-affiliated groups. The independent ulema participated in the formation of Islamist parties which Salime introduces. After a brief discussion of Arabization in Morocco and its impact on women’s rights, Salime discusses the role of women in Islamist organizations before introducing several key feminist organizations. Finally, Salime highlights the impact of developmentalist and neoliberal feminist discourses in bringing individualized notions of “rights” to the fore in Moroccan politics.

In the second chapter, “Feminization of Islamist Movements,” Salime focuses on the intersection of Structural Adjustment Programs, liberal feminism, and Islamism. Salime emphasizes Moroccan feminist groups’ use of transnational discourses of rights to articulate their demands for mudawana reform during the One Million Signature Campaign. Feminist strategies, which were openly secularist in nature, prompted a response from Islamist groups and ulema that reframed the language of rights as one of shared responsibilities enshrined in the Qur’an and shari‘a (49). Salime refers to Islamist groups’ engagement with feminist arguments as creating an alternative discourse of rights grounded in Islam, which she terms the “feminization” of Islamist groups (68). Importantly, both feminist and Islamist arguments about women’s political and religious rights threatened to impinge on the Moroccan King Hassan II’s role as Commander of the Faithful, prompting his reassertion of his “exclusive rights regarding the application of the sharia, along with his role as supreme political arbitrator” (66) through the promulgation of limited reforms to the mudawana in 1993.

In chapter three, “Reversing Feminist Gains,” Salime turns her attention to the 2000 Islamist rally in Casablanca, a movement moment that, in her assessment, “captures simultaneously the tensions relating to political alternance and the new framework in which feminist groups had to operate” (69). After briefly explaining political alternance, Salime discusses the competition between feminist and Islamist groups to be recognized as politically marginal. While Islamist groups posited themselves as marginalized, anti-colonial, authentically Moroccan political and religious actors (82), feminists situated their movement within the overarching context of religious reinterpretation attempting to...