Ever since the term “gender” was coined back in the twenty century, it has evolved into a set of currently very well acquainted with phrases such as gender equality, gender mainstreaming -–which, as per the USAID definition, treats gender as a critical consideration in policy formulation, planning, evaluation and decision-making procedures– and gender-responsive or gender-sensitive approaches.
Many people, literate or not, conflate gender with the biological differences between males and females. This leads us to the instant misunderstanding that we are referring to the physiological specificities of each category known as “sex”, while in fact, gender, in the words of the World Health Organization (WHO), “refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.”
The definition shows that, though the word emerged a few decades ago, the concept itself is not alien to modern societies, including Arab ones. Awareness of gender-based differences and the unfair distribution of roles and duties triggered a backlash from women and took concrete substance via some basic demands advocated by feminism movements bearing different names, mainly women’s rights and gender equality.
Before delving into the annals of feminism in Morocco and tracing back its beginnings– which historians agree to be the seventies– we have to bear in mind that education, let alone book writing and authoring, was elitist at the time. It was a closed, restricted circle that only the bourgeoisie and the middle class had access to. So has this hurdle hampered uneducated poor females from expressing themselves? In fact, women who could not put pen to paper to write resorted to their oratory skills to assert themselves in public places.
Moroccan linguist Fatima Sadiqi stated that female oral genres encompassed poems, folktales, halqa (marketplace oratory) and gossip.
In this regard, eloquent speech used by articulate illiterate women when talking with their peers or in public was a ticket for condemning, directly or indirectly, the oppression they were subjected to.
Allal El Fassi
As French colonialism was nearing its end in Morocco, several Moroccan intellectuals, mostly men such as Allal El Fassi and Mohamed Hassan El Ouazzani, decided to take up the challenge of reforming the Moroccan society and obliterating the colonizer’s impact.
During the protectorate era, the situation of women was used by the colonizer as a pretext to have control over the North African country. For Moroccan writer and sociologist Fatima Mernissi, the Western occupier used all available means to persuade Muslims of their inferiority and dismiss them as promiscuous. “Many crocodile tears were shed over the terrible fate of Muslim women,” she said in one of her books.
This inferiority idea was deeply-rooted and instilled into the Moroccan collective subconscious during the long years of colonialism but had to leave with the French intruder. So, Allal El Fassi, an eminent scholar and politician, turned to the precepts of Shari’a (religious law based on Islam’s scriptures) to restore the image of Moroccan women, which was damaged under the French rule. The move was not done for the sake of women’s liberation or emancipation, but to remedy a situation that was used to justify the French invasion.
As explained by political activist Ahmed Maaninou, taking interest in women was “not dictated by a genuine will to improve women’s condition as women, but part of the larger modernizing process which viewed women’s illiteracy as a cause of Morocco’s backwardness.”
Allal El Fassi took it upon himself to call for upholding women’s rights as stated in Quranic verses and Hadiths. It was part of his attempts to redress the injustice that befell the Moroccan society, knowing that women are the backbone of any given community and that enabling them to get back their rights was, in fact, a key-ingredient to a better Moroccan society. In his book “Anaqd Adhati” (self-criticism), he asserted that “Women are the cornerstone of family, and every building which does not stand upright will eventually fall. For ages, humanity was incapable of solving the family’s dilemma because it refused to recognize the rights of women which nature granted and reason acknowledged.”
Though speaking in favor of women, El Fassi was not interested in gender equality but rather in preparing the generation of independence to shoulder the responsibility of building the modern Moroccan State, through the promotion of education, politics, human rights, economy… and women’s rights. Illustrative of this is his widely-acclaimed book which devoted only few pages in its fourth chapter to tackle, only superficially, the thorny issue.
Leila Abu Zaid
Leila Abu Zaid, a trilingual writer and journalist, was the first female to pick a pen and write in the lingua franca of most Arab and Islamic states about what really matters for Moroccan women. The choice to write in Arabic was for Leila a means to assert her identity and a symbol for resistance which is quite understandable once we analyse the wave of Arabicization that swept over Morocco after the protectorate. US author Elizabeth Warnock Fernea had explained that the choice of Arabic was opportune as the language held a second or third class status at the time and was relegated to the areas of religious affairs under the French protectorate.
In her trailblazer book “Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman’s Journey Toward Independence,” Abu Zaid interwove the issues of feminism and the need to reform the family law. She paid tribute to average people who endeavoured, silently, for the independence of Morocco but were not given credit after the resistance’s triumph, like the case of Zahra, the novel’s female protagonist, who was discarded and divorced by her spouse, regardless of her unwavering support for him while he was incarcerated on the charges of participating in the resistance movement.
Fatima Mernissi
Fatima Mernissi, a prolific Moroccan writer was heavily influenced by the Arab-Islamic and Western cultures and chose to write in French to deconstruct the power relation between men and women and secure better conditions for the fairer sex.
As an Islamic feminist, Mernissi was interested in how women’s potential is limited by a set of rules that are unrelated to religion but linked to entrenched customs and traditions due to the ruling patriarchal system that made sure women’s mobility and free movement depend on men’s will. This is made clear in Mernissi’s autobiographical account “Dreams of Trespass” –a narrative about her childhood in what used to be the Moroccan traditional harem (domestic space reserved for women inside a house)–in which she argued that space frontiers are man-made and have nothing to do with the religion of Islam.
Soumaya Naamane-Guessous
Soumaya Naamane-Guessous, a Moroccan sociologist and feminist, was the first female writer to go beyond borders set by social conventions and tackle the “unsaid” in relation with the sex life of Moroccan women. In her controversial book “Au-delà de toute pudeur: la sexualité féminine au Maroc,” she tried to unravel the word ‘Hchouma’, a widely-used term in the Moroccan dialect associated mainly with maidens and which means literally shame. This word dictates behaviours and bans what is considered by society as deviation from accepted social norms.
Naamane-Guessous carried out a poll that involved 200 Moroccan women from different social segments. According to Soumaya, oppression builds up since childhood until girls become grown up women and get married. The husband, immersed in this culture of male superiority and female subordination, will carry on the duty of taming his spouse.
Tahar Benjelloun
Tahar Benjelloun, a famous francophone writer not only in the Arab world but also in Europe, is known for his audacious and bold writings that touch on the most sensitive issues regarding the Moroccan society.
In his novels, Ben Jelloun unearths the most forgotten ancestral myths to come up with his outcast characters and enthrone them as heroes and heroines. Though his accounts are fictional, he succeeds in capturing some of the prevailing social practices that are unfair to women and minority groups. The themes of slavery, polygamy and women’s rights are all inter-connected in Benjelloun’s novels. The author even attacks the institution of concubinage -–which is the state of cohabitation between a man and a woman without the full sanctions of legal marriage as per Encyclopedia Britannica—for dehumanizing black women and reducing them to mere merchandises.
Moroccan writers and academic figures taking interest in gender issues are many, however, one might argue that the Moroccan feminism movement is still in its infancy and needs to make a quantum leap to take center stage. Hopefully, with the family law review which is under way, things will change for the better.