Moroccan Feminists: The Innovators and Drivers behind the Push to Equality: Accomplishments, Shortcomings, and Future Priorities

Abstract

This project evaluates the effect of feminist activism to challenge discriminatory articles in the 2004 Family Law and 2003 Penal Code. The Moroccan women’s movement has been divided between competing feminist and anti-feminist coalitions regarding how best to promote gender equality and women’s rights in Moroccan society. Much of the friction between these coalitions can be explained by Sabatier’s Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), which delineates between coalitions based on conflicting core beliefs, policy core beliefs, and secondary beliefs. Whereas the feminists embrace the UN human rights discourse and concentrate on breaking down patriarchal hierarchies and male privilege, anti-feminists subscribe to complementary gender roles and the preeminence of religious legal references. This polarization limits the potential of feminist associations to effectively lobby the government for progressive legislative reforms. This project identifies two possible solutions to this dilemma. First, coalitions can inform and be informed by each other leading to policy-oriented learning. Second, the late Moroccan feminist scholar Fatima Mernissi and subsequent Islamic exegetes propose a potential synthesis of the dominant debates, an emancipatory progressive Muslim feminist discourse with an Islamic reference. Using a feminist intersectional approach and ACF, I interview stakeholders from across the Moroccan political and social spectrum: women’s rights, human rights, youth, Amazigh, and single mother associations to incorporate a broad cross section of marginalized groups in Moroccan society. I conclude that the 2004 Family Law, although revolutionary at the time, as well as the antiquated 2003 Penal Code, systematically disadvantage women and leave them vulnerable to various forms of violence. In addition, certain articles in the law, though explicitly indiscriminate, are implemented in a way that systematically disadvantages women. Furthermore, the legal codes are undergirded by complex, contested, and constructed patriarchal cultural norms and conservative religious interpretations that purport to protect women, yet instead, systematically disadvantage them and leave them vulnerable to precarious socioeconomic changes and various forms of violence. Finally, this project is broadly prescriptive in that Morocco is in many ways a regional leader in the advancement of women’s rights among Muslim-majority countries. Therefore, the case study identifies and details the most effective strategies, tools, and institutional mechanisms devised by Moroccan feminists to reform and implement discriminatory laws for potential appropriation by activists and advocates in other countries.