Read Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East Online
Authors: Robin Wright
The plan was shelved. As a compromise, King Mohammed formed a royal commission to come up with its own reforms to the Moudawana. Jbabdi was one of three women—out of fifteen members, including theologians—appointed by the king.
“Three is nothing for Americans,” she recalled. “But for us this was revolutionary because we were going to be changing what was accepted as Islamic law. This was almost inconceivable.”
The commission labored two years and produced almost 100 proposals.
Jbabdi worked outside the commission too. To pressure male members, she orchestrated an intensive lobbying campaign by women’s groups.
They tracked down abused women and conducted a statistical analysis of the violence—and sent copies of their findings to the commission members.
They identified more than 10,000 women whose court cases for domestic abuse, financial abandonment, homelessness, and other family problems had lingered for up to fifteen years—and then flooded commission members with thousands of postcards detailing each case and its court number.
They held and videotaped mock trials, showing the problems women face with real lawyers, juries, and judges, to illustrate the legal limbo for women—and sent the videos of the proceedings to commission members.
“We became quite creative as lobbyists,” Jbabdi recalled. “It had an extraordinary impact.”
In 2003, Morocco’s feminists got an unexpected break from an unlikely source—al Qaeda. The Casablanca bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack in Moroccan history, put all Islamist groups on the defensive. It changed the political atmosphere completely. Women were among the first to take to the streets to protest against extremism. The government soon cracked down on extremists, introduced education reforms, and moved on the Moudawana.
Five months later, King Mohammed VI took the royal commission’s recommendations and proposed far-reaching changes in family law.
“The proposed legislation is meant to reconcile lifting the iniquity imposed on women, protecting children’s rights and safeguarding men’s dignity,” he said in a speech to the opening of parliament.
This time, there was little resistance. Parliament passed the law in 2004.
The new Moudawana raised the minimum age of marriage from fifteen to eighteen. Marriage became an act of free will, and women could wed without consent of a male family member. Men and women entered marriage with equal rights, and husbands and wives were equally responsible for their households and families. The language requiring a wife to obey her husband was abolished. Marriage was certified by a judge, not a religious clerk—as was divorce. Men could no longer simply abandon their wives.
After a twenty-year battle, Moroccan women became among the most legally protected females in the Middle East—at least in theory.
Jbabdi called the new Moudawana “the moment of enlightenment, the harvest, not just for women. It is the biggest democratic step forward for Morocco.
“The family space is the heart and anchor of society, the place where behaviors and values and societal norms are established, and now the Moudawana will educate future generations on equality. This is the seed for everything else in democracy.”
In a touch of irony, the women’s movement had taken a toll on Jbabdi’s personal life. The mother of two teenage boys, she was going through her own divorce as the new laws passed.
The new Moudawana opened the way to other changes. In 2006, Morocco graduated its first class of fifty female Muslim preachers, or guides, to work among the poor, bring women into a sacrosanct profession, and help counter the drift toward Islamic extremism.
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In practice, however, most Moroccan women still faced serious disadvantages. Women still had unequal access and grounds to divorce. Polygamy was still legal, although it had to be authorized by a family judge. Sexual relations outside marriage still made women liable for up to a year in jail, and criminal prosecution of a pregnant unmarried mother was still on the books—while the father faced no penalty. Unequal inheritance traditions did not change. A divorced woman could still lose custody of her children over the age of seven if she remarried. And illegitimate children still had citizenship problems.
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The bigger problem was that women had little access to information about the new laws. With up to eighty percent of rural women illiterate, they could not even read them, much less take action. And the government did little to educate women about the changes. Several judges stuck to traditional ways. And many families adhered to the old rules, including virginity tests before marriage.
Millions of Moroccan women also remained trapped in poverty. In 2005, Human Rights Watch reported that some 600,000 female children, some as young as five years old, worked as domestic help. Morocco’s labor code did not regulate domestic work, nor did inspectors enter private homes to check.
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The idea of girls assuming control over their lives remained a far-fetched dream.
Morocco’s new feminist movement and the Moudawana reforms it produced were a starting point, not an end.
The third great compromise is détente with Islamists willing to work within the system and with other parties. It is also a risky step—for both sides.
Political Islam, in its disparate forms, will be the most energetic idiom of opposition in the Middle East for at least the next generation. Governments will pay a growing price for ignoring, isolating, or persecuting nonviolent movements, which could end up making them even more popular. The Islamist trend will only evolve or burn out under two conditions: When parties willing to work within the system and with other parties are allowed to participate, and when the desperate problems that fuel political unrest are addressed.
More than thirty years after the rise of political Islam, a growing number of Islamic movements have begun searching for compromise with Middle East governments. They need to be given political space. Some may be, in the end, the most effective barrier against the Jihadi militants. Secular and liberal and pro-Western forces clearly have proven that they, together, cannot defeat bin Ladenism.
“Islamists on principle and on pragmatic grounds must be included in any democratic transformation of the region,” Egyptian democratic activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim said at a 2005 briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington.
They are substantial. They are on the ground. They are disciplined. They are committed. And they have been performing very important social services for the poor, for the needy. And they have managed to project an image of a corruption-free political force in contrast to regimes that are plagued by corruption…. They are substantial constituencies and they have to be included in any scheme for political governance.
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One of the most interesting experiments in compromise is the Party of Justice and Development in Morocco. It may offer a new model.
“We are a political party,
not
a religious party,” Saadeddine Othmani, the party chairman, insisted with the same hand-waving insistence the first, second, and third time we talked. “We are the most moderate party in the Arab world with an Islamic reference,” he said. “But we are
not
Islamist!” He makes the point repeatedly in speeches, interviews, and private discussions to counter stereotypes that any party with an Islamic base automatically has a religious agenda, is made up of fanatics, and is inherently undemocratic.
Othmani cofounded the party. Born in 1956, he is a thin man who moves and speaks with quick energy. His face is narrow; his dark hair is very, very short, as is his beard. He grins easily and often, revealing a row of pearly white teeth. He is a psychiatrist by training; he worked for many years in a government hospital.
The party’s headquarters is in a converted home set behind a tawny-gold stucco fence on a tranquil, tree-lined street in Rabat. It has no security at the door, no bodyguards for officials, no searches, no metal scanners, no monitoring cameras. The understated office has no posters of religious sheikhs, no framed Koranic verses written on black velvet, no models of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The walls are decorated instead with large drawings of the party symbol—an old-fashioned kerosene lamp, a light burning in its belly. A floor-to-ceiling version dominates the conference room.
The only picture on any wall is of Morocco’s king.
The Party of Justice and Development, popularly called the PJD, is trying to carve out a new political niche in the Middle East as a Muslim movement neither militant nor assertively Islamist. It is not trying to topple the monarchy. It acknowledges the king as Commander of the Faithful. It accepts his power to handpick the entire government. It does not seek to impose Islamic rule. Women members do not have to wear
hejab.
Members do not even have to be Muslim.
The Party of Justice and Development grew out of Islamist organizations formed in the 1970s, when Islam moved into the political arena regionwide. They metamorphosed in the 1980s and then merged into a conservative party with Islamic values in 1992.
“You could compare us with the Christian Democratic parties in Europe,” Othmani explained, switching from Arabic to French. “They base their goals on principles in their faith, but their platforms center on civil, not religious, issues.”
The party takes a similar approach to the contentious issue of imposing Islamic law. “Unfortunately, to many people, Sharia has come to mean only the penal code,” Othmani explained. “We derive our principles—justice and dignity and human development—from the essence of Islamic law. But we’ve moved away from using it explicitly in the party charter.”
The party has redefined Morocco’s messy political landscape, which teems with more than two dozen political parties. Most are built around political cliques. The majority are socialist or liberal—and fairly unproductive. Many have been co-opted by the monarchy.
In its electoral debut in 1997, the party deliberately limited the number of races it contested to prevent a political panic. But it still shook up—and shocked—the system by winning fourteen seats in parliament.
At the next election in 2002, the party tripled its numbers. It came in third in a huge field, even though it ran in only sixty percent of electoral districts. When the top two winning parties joined a coalition government, the Party of Justice and Development became the official opposition—arguably the first serious opposition since Morocco gained independence.
Like most other Middle East countries, Morocco’s political parties are all ultimately beholden to the same autocratic leader. Since independence, parliament has never dared to test either the monarchy or its own powers because the king has the right to dissolve the legislature at his discretion. Under King Hassan, every parliament in four decades was either suspended or indefinitely “extended” to defer an election.
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The idea of having a genuinely diverse, independent, and outspoken parliament as a check and balance on the executive has been virtually alien.
But the PJD injected momentum and a new discipline into Moroccan politics. For one thing, its legislators actually showed up—in a body rife with absenteeism. Legally, legislators are supposed to provide written excuses for absence or be docked pay, but the rule had long been ignored.
“If we didn’t attend sessions, nobody would be in parliament,” Othmani said, with a chuckle.
Among its own members, each of the forty-two legislators is required to draft one question about government performance to be asked orally in parliament each week, to submit one written question monthly for a ministry to formally answer, and to propose one new bill each year. It also requires all its legislators to give twenty percent of their government paychecks back to the party—one half for local party work and one half for national activities.
“We are a poor party,” Othmani said, with a shrug and another grin.
The party focused heavily on three issues central to real change in Morocco: dirt-poor poverty among more than ten million Moroccans, corruption endemic among the political elite, and constitutional reform to empower parliament as a separate body not controlled by the monarchy.
“We have no problem with the king, but we do need to have a balance between powers in the state,” Aziz Rebbah explained the day I visited party headquarters. Rebbah is a Canadian-educated information technology engineer who heads the party’s youth organization.
“That’s why we’re trying to start a national debate on constitutional reform,” he said. “The objective is not to limit the power of the king, but to enhance the ability of the government and the prime minister to act.”
Public-opinion polls regularly predict steady growth for the PJD—potentially even winning the largest vote in future elections. A 2006 poll by the International Republican Institute in Washington showed that up to forty-seven percent of Moroccan voters leaned toward the PJD—a huge number in a field of more than two dozen parties.
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Getting even twenty percent could provide a decisive plurality.
The party has since scrambled to emphasize that a victory would not lead to an overhaul of Moroccan politics.
“Parties like ours have a duty to take part in political reform, but not to impose religious solutions,” Othmani told me.
Elected to head the party in 2004, Othmani campaigned both at home and abroad to allay fears. He outlined the party’s vision at a 2006 speech in Washington, D.C.