Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (54 page)

Morocco is not an exception. Across the region, almost one half of all Arab females, almost seventy million, were illiterate in 2006—even though females in the Middle East outperform their male counterparts when given the chance. “Arab girls are the better learners,” the United Nations report concluded.

In her indomitable way, Mernissi told me that she believes women in the Middle East have at least turned a corner.

“It’s very simple, really. I reduce everything to information,” she said, tossing her hennaed head. “Historically, only the king and his advisers had information, and beyond that everything was rumor. But technology brought us access to information. In 1991, I got a satellite dish. It brought CNN, but it was also the year of the first Arab satellite stations, and suddenly all the boundaries between private and public, between palace and street, and all the other dichotomies vanished.

“In
A Thousand and One Nights,
Scheherazade told the stories at night, as the daytime was the period of men’s power. Women had influence only in the night. Now, Scheherazade can speak at any time! There’s no more separation of day and night. And the number of women on television—it’s amazing,” she continued.

“The change that took centuries in the West took only a decade in the Third World because of technological advances. And no one can stop it. When I brought a fax here from Paris, I put a scarf on the machine when the telephone guy came to put in a line. But six months later, the government couldn’t ban the fax.

“You know,” she mused, “I recently asked the young woman working for me what she likes to do as a pastime. She told me she listens to tapes to learn French. She was almost illiterate, but with technology she is becoming self-taught. She chats on the Internet.

“Women ten years younger than I am,” Mernissi said, “are from another planet!”

Family harems may have largely disappeared, but the rules that spawned them have not. Most Middle East countries still have two sets of separate and often conflicting laws. One set governs society; the other dictates to women.

After it became independent in 1956, Morocco adopted many French laws inherited from colonial rule. Article Eight of its constitution, for example, stipulates that men and women “enjoy equal political rights.” In 1957, King Mohammed V also unveiled his eldest daughter—though not his wife—in public to signal that the next generation of women need not be hidden away.

At the same time, however, the new government passed a separate set of laws to codify traditions that had governed private life for centuries. It was the king’s compromise: He adopted certain civil and criminal laws to modernize. But under pressure from traditional clerics who wanted a complete restoration of Islamic law once the French left, the king also agreed to enshrine in the law Muslim cultural practices about personal life.

In Morocco, the second set of laws is called the Moudawana, or Code of Personal Status. It relegated females to haremlike status.

The two sets of laws meant that women could vote under the constitution, but remained lifelong minors under the Moudawana. Fathers, husbands, brothers, and even sons were their legal guardians. Females needed written permission to open a business, obtain a passport, or leave the country. A woman could be divorced at the whim of her husband, without a reason, by simple public repudiations without going to court—and even without her knowledge. An unmarried woman who gave birth was sentenced to six months in jail, and the baby was put in an orphanage.

Often referred to simply as “family law,” the Moudawana has been the biggest legal impediment to empowering women.

In the 1980s, an iconoclastic Moroccan dissident named Latifa Jbabdi decided to take on the Moudawana. It became an epic battle. I first heard about Jbabdi in a footnote on page thirty-seven in Mernissi’s memoir. I finally met her in 2006. She is a striking woman, tall and big-boned but largely unadorned. Her jaw is strong; her brown eyes are piercing. She dresses with handsome femininity. She was in a blue suit with soft pinstripes, and a silk blouse. She was wearing no makeup and no jewelry beyond small stud earrings, and her short, brown hair fell in a natural wave. She, too, lived in Rabat.

If Mernissi is phase one, then Jbabdi is phase two.

Jbabdi started out as a communist in the 1970s. As a teenager, she organized strikes by high school students and factory workers.

“We dreamed of revolution,” she told me. “We wanted a rupture with the past. It was the seventies—the traumatic time after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and during the Vietnam War and dissent worldwide.

“We even raised money for Angela Davis,” she chuckled.

Jbabdi read Lenin and Sartre and, for a while, attended meetings of a secret communist cell. “I was looking for a magic formula to change the world. But this group of old men was too Soviet. When it rained in Moscow, they took out their umbrellas in Morocco,” she said, laughing again. “They focused on the elites. It was not what I was looking for to help the working class.” She soon dropped out and joined an emerging group of leftists.

Jbabdi spent more than a decade being tailed, harassed, or hunted by Morocco’s security forces for her dissident activities and strike mobilizations. Once she hid in a Christian cemetery for twelve days, relying on a graveyard worker to bring her bread and tea. Another time she hid in the mountains.

“We lived like wild animals,” she told me, matter-of-factly.

Eventually captured, she was in and out of prison from 1977 until the early 1980s. Occasionally, she was detained preemptively until a protest strike was over. Her worst stint was six months in Casablanca’s notorious prison. Torture was routine; she was blindfolded the entire time.

“They erased completely your femininity. They gave each of us a man’s name,” she recalled. “I was called Saeed.”

Jbabdi was released on medical grounds for heart trouble; she received a pacemaker while still in her twenties. She remained on parole until she was granted an amnesty in 1990.

As she continued to push for political change, however, Jbabdi again grew frustrated with her political allies.

“There was a generation of young women born on the eve of Morocco’s independence or shortly afterwards. We really believed we were equal, but even progressive parties and unions weren’t open to the issue of women’s rights,” she told me. “They all proved to be misogynist.

“That,” she added, “is when we came up with our own initiative.”

In 1987, Jbabdi founded the Union of Feminine Action to confront the taboo of family law.

“You can’t have a constitution that says we can be elected to parliament and decide the direction of the country, but under the Moudawana we have to have a guardian and can’t make basic decisions on the most intimate issues of our lives,” she told me.

In the Middle East, where mosque and state are still deeply intertwined, the Moudawana is the essence of the conflict between modernity and tradition, secular and religious. Unlike civil or criminal law, family law is based on interpretations of the Koran, which is quite specific on subjects ranging from a woman’s menstrual cycle to suckling a baby and the taboo of incest. Conservative clerics argue that, as sacred text, the
Moudawana
cannot be altered because it is the literal word of God.

The Moudawana’s holy origin has made the status of women the most intractable issue of change in the Middle East.

Jbabdi had to start from scratch. The Union of Feminine Action launched a newsletter that evolved into a magazine. It lobbied lawmakers. It held workshops for women in cities, villages, and shantytowns across Morocco to explain that poverty, domestic abuse, illiteracy, and dependence on men for the most basic decisions were tied to the Moudawana.

“Illiterate women and mothers and housewives came to our meetings in the poorest homes of a shantytown, and when we explained how the Moudawana ruled their lives, a lot of them started knocking on doors too,” Jbabdi told me. “Many became even more active than we were.”

To prove growing support for their cause, the movement launched a petition to demand change. By 1990, it had accumulated one million signatures—forty percent of them from men.

But the petition also sparked the first serious backlash. Conservative clerics preached against the Union of Feminine Action in mosques, appealed to the prime minister to ban it and punish its members, called for police to block the women’s activities—and even issued a fatwa condemning Jbabdi to death.

“We were getting death threats all the time,” she said. “It’s hard to make progress when you’re worried about your life.”

In 1992, King Hassan intervened. In a nationwide television broadcast, he acknowledged that women had legitimate complaints, agreed to meet with them, and pledged to amend the Moudawana.

He also admonished the clerics, “Do not mix religion and politics.”

A year later—after consulting with an all-male panel of senior clerics—the king announced reforms. They were few and modest. Among them: Brides had to consent to marriage. Husbands needed a wife’s permission to take other wives.

More important was the principle. “The Moudawana was no longer so sacred. It could be debated and changed, like any other law,” Jbabdi explained. “We had opened the door.”

Peaceful change rarely comes with a single act or decision, particularly in the Middle East and particularly on women’s rights.

Jbabdi persevered, as did a burgeoning array of women’s groups that had sprung up among the middle and lower classes. She also adapted her tactics. As a former communist, Jbabdi initially blended Marxist ideas, the tactics of Western feminists, and the principles of international laws, including the 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Then she added Islam.

“We realized the movement would not be successful if it was based on women’s rights alone. We began to repossess our Islamic heritage and to read the Koranic texts again, this time from a feminist perspective,” she told me. “We did this for more than two years, and we found many verses that emphasize equality.”

Like other sacred texts, the Koran offers a variety of messages about everything from personal relations to peace. A lot depends on how it is read—or who reads it.

The fourth chapter of the Koran, for example, is entitled “Women.” Verse thirty-four says that men are “maintainers of women.” But verse thirty-two also decrees, “Men shall have the benefit of what they earn and women shall have the benefit of what they earn.” And, although their shares are not equal, verse seven requires, “Men shall have a portion of what the parents and near relatives leave and women shall have a portion of what the parents and the near relatives leave, whether there is little or much of it.”

On the sensitive subject of polygamy, for which Islam is most criticized by the outside world, Muslim feminists now interpret the Koran as preferring one wife—and more than that only in a certain context.

Verse three stipulates, “If you fear that you cannot act equitably towards orphans, then marry such women as seem good to you, two and three and four; but if you fear that you will not do justice, then marry only one or what your right hands possess; this is more proper, that you not deviate from the right course.”

On divorce, longstanding custom allows a man to end his marriage by simple repudiation, repeating “I divorce thee” three times. But the Koran also says, “If you fear a breach between the two, then appoint a judge from his people and a judge from her people.”

The new generation of feminists argues that the Koran may even be an ally.

“We discovered that Islamic law is really a set of guiding principles open to interpretation,” Jbabdi told me. She is as slow and deliberate in her speech as Mernissi is fast and frenetic.

“After that,” Jbabdi added, “we tried to build all our arguments around Islam and prove that all change was rooted in Islamic principles.”

For another seven years, Morocco’s feminists continued to mobilize other women, lobby publicly, and pressure the monarchy to act. Then in 1999, King Hassan died. In one of his first acts, Morocco’s new young monarch promised changes for women, whose “interests are still denied.” His prime minister soon introduced a 118-page plan to address illiteracy, poverty, political discrimination, and reproductive health problems among women.

The plan polarized Moroccans, however. Feminists and modernists were pitted against conservatives and fundamentalists—and their differences spilled over onto the streets.

On March 12, 2000, Morocco witnessed two of the biggest demonstrations in its history. In Rabat, sixty women’s groups, unions, and human-rights organizations rallied more than 300,000 people to support the government plan. Jbabdi was the coordinator. Six government ministers participated.

“No to reactionaries. Yes to equality,” they shouted, as they streamed down the capital’s tree-lined boulevards.
²²

In Casablanca, conservative Islamist groups mobilized at least one million Moroccans to protest the plan. They marched down the streets of Morocco’s commercial center in separate columns, men in one, women in
hejab
in the other.

“The feminists said it was all or nothing—and the fundamentalists said it was nothing,” Jbabdi recalled. “This was our period of labor pains.”