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DRAFT: PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION

Failures of Solidarity, Failures of the Nation State: Moroccan Women’s NGOs

by Rachel Newcomb
Rollins College, U.S.A.

In one of the lower-middle class suburbs of the Ville Nouvelle of Fes, Morocco, set back from a busy street filled with taxi stands, drygoods stores, and discount clothing shops, the Nawal Belhamr Center was located in a small, two-story apartment building, identical to the other buildings surrounding it. Throughout the day, women trickled in. They were lawyers rushing from the courthouse to offer free legal advice sessions, women arriving to ask questions about the type of evidence needed to secure a divorce from an abusive husband, or women coming to find out more about the Center’s initiatives to teach divorced women with few resources a new trade. Frequent visitors to the Center often stopped by just to chat, to update the volunteers on the status of a case they were involved in, or just to share some hot doughnuts purchased from a street vendor outside. The Center boasted notable successes, but there were also many interactions that clients or volunteers deemed as failures. Sometimes clients arrived at the Center assuming volunteers would give them money, intervene in a family dispute, or offer shelter from an abusive husband. Volunteers were frustrated by assumptions that the Center had unlimited resources, and by the fact that clients seemed determined to enact patron-client relationships with the volunteers (a hierarchical interaction common to Moroccan social situations in which petitioners seek to perform some sort of service in exchange for money). Solidarity was ephemeral and momentary, usually accomplished during brief transactions rather than sustained within long-term social relations. Were these failures merely products of entrenched class relations, or did they reveal something more?

Initially opened in 2000 to provide legal advice for women in matters of marriage and divorce, the Center Nawal Belhamr gradually came to deal with issues ranging from domestic abuse to job training. During my dissertation fieldwork in Fes , Morocco from 2001-02, I spent many afternoons at the Center, observing the interactions between the Center’s clients and its volunteers. The first of its kind in Fes , the Center was not directly associated with a political party or religious organization. The volunteers, mostly middle-upper class female professionals and academics, perceived their center as existing “outside civil society,” asserting that the term “civil society” had been co-opted by male elites, both secular and religious. They expressed their desire to transcend divisions of social class and forge links among all Moroccan women, hoping that the women who visited the center would also be able to envision this possibility of solidarity. However, clients and volunteers were often at cross-purposes, and efforts to establish links across social classes that might lead to larger structural changes improving the status of women often failed. These failures cannot be attributed to insurmountable class differences but must be considered in the light of the problematic role of the nation-state in an era of globalization.

A productive examination of the relationships of NGOs to their clients, the local community, and to the nation-state sheds light not only on specific processes of association but also on how domains of the national overlap with the global. As in other regions of the Global South, globalization in Morocco has been accompanied by increasing market liberalization, involving deregulation, privatization, and an increase in consumption. IMF-led Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the 1990s have led to declines in government spending and high rates of unemployment, with no safety nets to assist those who fall deeper into poverty (Pfeifer 1999, p. 25). In response, the Moroccan government has encouraged the formation of NGOs to ameliorate resulting social problems. In an era in which globalization has supposedly undermined the nation-state’s hegemony, NGOs represent one among many possibilities for community and solidarity. However, my research with one NGO in Fes , Morocco indicates that NGOs are often overstretched and understaffed, in addition to facing resistance both from within and outside the larger community in which they are based. These resistances and failures of solidarity demonstrate not that NGOs are not useful or necessary but that they are only capable of doing so much. The struggles of one NGO indicate not that the nation-state is disappearing or powerless but that it is simply evading its responsibilities to its citizens. In the case of the Nawal Belhamr Center of Fes, the NGO’s attempt to assert a vision of community encompassing all women met with both local and class-based resistance. Much of this resistance, I argue, stemmed from core structural issues that demand the intervention of the nation-state. While NGOs can certainly serve as agents of change, the assumption that NGOs can solve major social problems allows the state to evade its responsibilities for suffering brought on by cuts in government spending as a result of SAPs or by government laws and policies that legitimate discrimination against women.

National Contexts

The Center Nawal Belhamr opened at a time of intense debate about the role of women in Moroccan society. From 2000- 2003 in Morocco , discussing women’s legal rights was neither a neutral nor an apolitical endeavor. In March of 2000, a government-sponsored plan to alter the mudawana, the personal status codes legislating a woman’s rights in marriage and divorce, met with mass demonstrations both in support of and against the plan. Titled “the integration of women in development,” the proposed reforms would have altered the existing mudawana in several areas, including giving women the right to a judicial divorce and substantially restricting men’s unilateral freedom to repudiate their wives. Opponents argued that the plan was anti-Islamic, while those in favor claimed that the existing laws denied women their basic human rights and violated the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which Morocco had signed. The outcome of this debate was also viewed as a litmus test for King Mohammed VI’s nascent rule, since the legitimacy of the Moroccan monarchy rests in part on divine sanction. The government’s careful straddling of both sides of this debate reflects inherent contradictions in government policy, which has over the past several years attempted to placate “traditional conservative Islamist interests, while at the same time projecting a modernist progressive image” (Naciri 1998, p. i).

Although religion lies at the core of Moroccan family law and is frequently used in defense of its immutability, a society organized around patriarchal family structures provided the social context for the mudawana’s initial codification in the 1950s. The mudawana was the only area of Islamic jurisprudence maintained when Morocco became independent in 1956-- all criminal and business laws were modeled on European legal codes. Signaling its intentions to change these laws opened the current government up to considerable criticism, particularly from Islamist parties.

Arguments for maintaining the law in its original form were not merely about religion, but also about vestiges of male familial authority that some male elites wanted to maintain, although many in Moroccan society had long since lost the benefits and protections these laws might once have afforded. At the time of my fieldwork in 2001-02, many of the difficulties reported by clients at the Center Nawal Belhamr related specifically to laws that favored male authority above all other interests. However, many of the original safety nets that were designed to balance out the laws’ uneven effects were missing, particularly for lower-class women. For example, in the past, a woman entering a marriage contract could count on a strong extended family structure to support her should the marriage fail. A sufficient dowry negotiated by a woman’s family acted as insurance against a bad marriage, and the necessity of maintaining harmonious group relations among families led to greater pressure for the husband to treat his wife with dignity. If a couple divorced, the woman could usually return to her family, counting on male family members to wield sufficient influence to ensure that she left the marriage with all her dowry.

However, women in Morocco today, particularly from lower socio-economic groups, are less likely to have this community support. Structural adjustment programs have contributed to rapid modernization and a deterioration of extended family structures, and the laws have made women the most vulnerable. The declining need for rural agricultural labor has led to mass urban migrations, high levels of unemployment, and as a result, the disintegration of local networks and familial resources that are a woman’s first recourse in the event of a divorce. Women who came to the Center for help often lived far from their families, in addition to lacking the literacy to negotiate the law and the job skills to enable them to support themselves and their children once divorced. NGOs such as the Nawal Belhamr Center quickly moved to serve as a resource for all these problems, but as a nonprofit were unable to tackle some of the basic structural causes that have led to a rise in marital problems as well as to the community fragmentation that resulted in women’s loss of support.

The Moroccan government has nonetheless placed its support behind the creation of nongovernmental organizations designed to tackle a range of problems from orphans to women’s rights. Movements of association have a long history in Morocco , although in recent decades, they have taken new forms and begun to deal with issues such as human rights. It was not until the 1980s that national women’s associations, such as the ADFM (Association Démocratique des Femmes du Maroc), began to appear outside the political parties, and not surprisingly, many of these associations were founded by women who felt their concerns had not been addressed in the political arena. Mudawana reform has been a primary goal of many of these groups. As of 1990, there were twenty-nine formal women’s associations in Morocco , sixteen created in the past decade (Belarbi 1992, p. 187). Since then, many more have appeared, although the most recent government statistic lists thirty-four associations in 1997 (Population et Developpement Au Maroc 1997, 153). The creation of so many organizations since the 1980s has been attributed to a number of factors, including new political openness on the part of the monarchy and a growing awareness among citizens that existing societal structures are insufficient to address social problems among the poor and disenfranchised (Belarbi 187).

Most of the Moroccan women’s associations were and are concerned with the “promotion of the Moroccan woman,” ameliorating social hardships as well as helping to obtain a better standard of living. In addition to humanitarian, political, and feminist organizations, there are also professional associations for women in different high-status careers, including administration, law, and business. Some areas of activity among the organizations overlap, for example, both political parties and feminist groups offer activities such as literacy training, prenatal care, and legal awareness seminars. Other organizations focus both on reforming the mudawana as well as sensitizing Moroccans to a variety of social issues. “Their objective,” writes Aïcha Belarbi, “is not to integrate women into a system of production which rarely benefits them, but to increase awareness, to arm them to become active and effective agents in the dynamic of social transformations” (Belarbi 192).

Often funded by governments and organizations throughout Europe and the United States , many Moroccan NGOs have a degree of independence from the state that allows them to operate without excessive recourse to bureaucratic procedures. The literature on NGOs reveals two general trends in the perception of their effectiveness: either NGOs are contributing to the workings of the nation-state in an era of neo-liberal capitalism, or they work outside the state in processes that will hopefully transform society (Fisher 1997, p. 445). To proponents of the first viewpoint, NGOs provide evidence of a strong civil society, one in which citizens are actively engaged in renegotiating the relationship between individuals and the state, and in the process, reimagining forms of community and creating new arenas to support those whom the system has failed. Some analysts have pointed to the importance of the role of NGOs in an era of neoliberal capitalism, whereby NGOs are expected to contribute more rapidly and efficiently to processes of “development” than governments (Fisher 1997, p. 444). Their presence is believed to offer evidence of democracy, and in the case of women’s associations, to indicate the participation of women in Moroccan society. Proponents of the second viewpoint argue that NGOs offer what Foucault calls an “insurrection of subjugated knowledges,” politicizing previously taboo subjects and demanding radical societal change (Foucault 1980, p. 81). NGOs like the Center Nawal Belhamr fit neither of these paradigms perfectly. The presence of NGOs offers a positive international image for the Moroccan government, giving the appearance of a strong civil society in the absence of real democracy. However, while the Center promoted many initiatives related to the government’s plan to integrate women in development, the Center was unable to efficiently solve the overwhelming number of problems brought by clients. In terms of its politicization, as I will show, the Center felt compelled to tone down radical elements in its discourse in order to try to gain acceptance by a locally conservative society.

The volunteers at the Center asserted that their goals were strictly apolitical. They wanted to stay outside the domain of politics while quietly working to “inform” women of the inadequacy of their legal rights. They asserted that all Moroccan women were victims of violence: juridical, physical, or structural violence. This broad stance allowed them to assert solidarity across social classes with their clients, most of whom were lower class, economically disenfranchised, or illiterate. Rather than interacting in typical patron-client patterns, at the Center, volunteers and clients could meet on more neutral grounds, united by the shared theme of “violence” inflicted by patriarchal social interests. Legal, physical, and economic concerns were perceived as intertwined. Grants from foreign NGOs and governments allowed the center to operate, and various programs aimed to train women who had no resources to work for themselves, frequently in nontraditional positions. With control of an income, female dependence on the quixotic whims of husbands would decline, women would become savvier about their rights, and some of the social structures that continued to replicate this dependence on men would themselves dissolve, whether or not the laws themselves followed suit.

Despite volunteers’ insistence that these concerns were not political, to many Fassi Moroccans, they appeared to be explicitly so. Some of the Center’s failures were rooted in Fassi rejections of the Center’s claims that challenged entrenched notions of patriarchy, class and social structure. Seeking to create a distinctive space for women outside the confines of civil society and the nation state, the forms of solidarity the Nawal Belhamr Center attempted to forge were often fleeting, dissolving in the face of other cultural and class-based pressures.

While public debates over changing the mudawana focused upon law, Islam, and the permissibility of new interpretations of the religion, within the NGO activists were working to effect change by encouraging women to see themselves as sharing common concerns with all Moroccan women. Rather than criticizing the mudawana, the volunteers at the Nawal Belhamr Center avoided publicly taking sides by arguing that within the existing laws, there was room to maneuver. Additionally, the Center’s official position that all women were united by gendered experiences of legal, physical, or psychological violence, led them to consider women’s legal rights as related to larger issues of inequality in Moroccan society. This shared experience of what the Center’s president called “juridical violence,” and the attempt to make client-volunteer interactions as equitable as possible, were two examples of strategies employed to promote solidarity among women. Volunteers insisted that visitors to the Center understand that volunteers were not interested in perpetuating the patron-client relationship, in which people seek a benefactor in exchange for services.

However, there were limits to these attempts to create solidarity. Activists at the Center distanced themselves from personal experiences of physical violence, identifying with the more abstract notion of “juridical” violence and with the sexual violence that comprised basic street harassment. Although volunteers often cited the statistic that domestic violence crosses class lines, the volunteers were quick to point out that they themselves had never been physically victimized. Physical violence was perceived as a problem specific to lower socioeconomic groups, a problem that could be ameliorated with access to education and employment. Bringing poor women to the centers to discuss physical and sexual abuse was touted as progress, as “lifting the veil of shame on this taboo subject,” as one of the volunteers once said to me. Yet the subject of violence among the middle and upper classes remained a taboo among the educated volunteers, as if it were presumed not to exist at all.

The volunteers’ distinguishing among their experiences of violence (juridical) from those of the women who came to the Center (physical) contributed to the perpetuation of class divisions within the Center, while outside of it, the majority of middle and upper class Fassis I interviewed still felt that marital problems should be resolved within families. Many of my middle class informants considered it shameful that the women who visited the Center aired intimate details of their domestic life before an audience of strangers. They doubted the honest intentions of the Center’s volunteers and asserted that the volunteers must be pocketing their grant money. The Center also met with resistance among some academics, who saw the creation of the NGO as a blatant ploy to influence the mudawana debates. Driss, an English professor at the university, described the work of local NGOs to me as “cultural imperialism,” equating it to “missionary work. They want to accomplish legal reform to give Moroccan women the same rights as European women,” he told me. “But they’re ignoring our traditions, and our heritage.” This was also a common argument against altering the mudawana—that any changes to the existing laws somehow threatened to destroy Moroccan culture. Issues of violence and poverty, or more significantly, the structures of patriarchal social relations and patron-client ties, are effaced in favor of a view that sees Moroccan women as repositories of traditional culture. Culture, like religion, was very difficult to argue against.

In addition, the center faced difficulties recruiting professionals interested in volunteering their time, which made the task of solving such a wide range of problems even more overwhelming. Volunteering in the Western-sense of donating one’s time to help strangers in an impersonal location with no expectation of personal gain did not fit in with standard notions of aid, many of which revolved around the mutually beneficial idea of patron-client relations. Fassis are accustomed to dispensing aid through preexisting social or kin-based networks, a practice unavailable to rural-urban migrants who typically arrive in the cities with no such networks in place.

In this respect, the comments of Khadija, a lawyer who had refused an invitation to volunteer at the Center, were telling.

“To be honest, I don’t think I would benefit from helping them,” Khadija told me. “The women who go there do not actually want help. They want money, or else a lawyer they do not have to pay for, and as soon as they understand that the Center is not going to give it to them, they will stop coming. If you have time, it is better to help someone you know, especially if they are in the family. You will see the results [of your assistance], and you can be sure they will be grateful.”

In fact, many of the interactions I witnessed between clients and volunteers did seem to draw on this patron/client model. Women often recounted long and painful sagas of abuse, divorce, and expulsion from the marital home, which ended with a plea for the Center help them with a free lawyer or money. Occasionally clients tried to offer their services as maids in exchange for a lawyer. Ideally women would come to the center to gain a better sense of the path they needed to take in the judicial system; they might also take advantage of literacy or job training classes and then promote themselves as entrepreneurs. However, upon hearing that the Center was not offering money or free lawyers, many women left the center and never came back.

Class differences—here exemplified by the promotion of solidarity with distinctions, the sense among Fassis that only the poor and uneducated would air their marital grievances at an impersonal NGO, and the difficulties of convincing educated professionals to volunteer—mask a larger problem. This is that the Moroccan government itself has in some sense contributed to the creation of these problems, and by encouraging NGOs to solve them, is ignoring the larger structural causes. The structure of social relations has broken down due to rapid modernization brought on by economic policies, and the government, rather than developing social services to aid in the resulting societal transformations, has actually taken them away. Expecting one non-profit to bear the burden for an entire city’s problems with domestic violence, illiteracy, divorce, abandonment, and blaming these problems on a lack of education, poverty or social class, tends to abstract these issues from their true causes. The illusion of a flourishing civil society, in which impartial, uncoerced NGOs stand between the government and the population, allows the government to receive accolades from human rights groups for its openness, obscuring the true causes of human suffering.

As labor and global capital cross borders with increasing ease, unimpeded by traditional regulations such as tariffs or labor laws, the provocative idea of the “death of the nation-state” has often been asserted as a byproduct of globalization. According to this formulation, nations have lost their ability to legislate and are made irrelevant by powerful flows of global capital. Economic deregulation leads to higher corporate profits, as companies relocate to areas in the Global South with weak unions, low wages, and the fewest restrictions on labor practices. Within Global South economies, IMF-led programs of structural adjustment promote globalization by offering loans on the condition that recipients privatize public assets and cut government spending. However, structural adjustment programs, rather than leading to economic growth and improvement, often result in economic recessions, greater unemployment and poverty, particularly for women. The loss of public sector jobs and an accompanying shift from formal to informal employment have increased women’s work while failing to improve their decision-making power in the household. With less education and lower status than men, women find themselves in lower-paid, riskier, more labor-intensive jobs. Employment instability and job loss contribute to marital tensions and an increase in domestic violence. As the weakened nation-state is no longer able to offer services to combat issues related to the feminization of poverty, we see a rise in the number of nongovernmental organizations devoted to addressing women’s concerns.

Yet globalization does not simply happen to passive, helpless actors, whether nations or individuals, and assertions about the death of the nation-state are perhaps premature. Saskia Sassen has noted that globalization requires active implementation on the part of nation-states to facilitate the movement of capital and labor, and that globalization is, in fact, embedded in the national (Sassen 1998, p. 217). In Morocco , structural adjustment programs have led to an improved standard of living for some, but in other respects have hurt many citizens. An IMF study of the effect of SAPs from 1980-96 shows that Morocco did not improve in the rate of exports of goods and services or in its trade balance (Pfeifer 1999, p. 24). Debt rose in the 1990s, the rate of investment continued to be low, and most significantly, unemployment increased.

The efforts of the Nawal Belhamr Center to attack a wide range of social problems met with resistance from well-meaning volunteers, clients, and citizens. Effacing class differences was difficult when volunteers distanced themselves from the problems particular to the lower classes, or when clients affirmed these class differences by attempting to seek a patron-client relationship with the volunteers. Middle-upper class Fassi observers who benefited from the patriarchal social structures in place to resolve marital differences within the family disapproved of the NGO’s perceived intervention in marital disputes. The Moroccan government, it would seem, offers the least resistance, as it allows the NGO to operate with considerably leeway, pursuing an agenda deemed important not by the government but by its founders.

Yet blaming the failures of solidarity on the NGO’s founders, volunteers, clients, or local citizens obscures the fact that many of these problems might not be so pronounced had the underlying economic causes not contributed to them. In 1983 the monarchy signed on to structural adjustment programs without consulting the people, and to this day economic reforms are a result of top-down, hierarchical state policy. The flourishing of NGOs conceals the absence of a strong democracy. Rather than disappearing, the nation-state still plays a very pronounced role in the lives of citizens. On a local level, NGO solidarity failed for two reasons: one, that divisions of social class created obstacles to solidarity, and two, that these class-based divisions often existed as a direct result of state policies that undermined the core issues the NGOs attempt to address. These policies included legalized inequality between men and women, structural adjustment programs leading to “official” unemployment rates as high as 25%, and finally, the failure of government to offer creative solutions to the feminization of poverty. NGOs in the Global South, while making a valiant attempt to address these issues on a small scale, must not be seen as the sole recourse for marginalized citizens: the state must do its part to address the crucial issues that contribute to poverty, marginality, and disenfranchisement. These insights into the failure of solidarity at the hands of the state can be used to develop new strategies to create solidarity and bring about social change, in North Africa and beyond.

REFERENCES

Belarbi, Aïcha. 1992. Mouvements des Femmes au Maroc. In La Societe Civile Au Maroc, pp. 186-96.

Ed. Noureddine El Ayoufi. Rabat: Imprimerie El Maârif Al Jadida.

Fisher, William F. 1997. Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices. In Annual Review

of Anthropology, Vol. 26: 439-64.

Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. C. Gordon. New

York : Pantheon.

Guehenno, Jean. 1995. The End of the Nation State. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.

Joseph, Suad. 1996. Gender and Citizenship in Middle Eastern States. Middle East Report, No. 198: 4-10.

Naciri, Rabéa. 1998. The Women’s Movement and Political Discourse in Morocco . Occasional Paper 8,

March 1998: i-28. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.

Ohmae, Kenichi. 1996. End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies. New York : Touchstone.

Pfeifer, Karen. 1999. How Tunisia , Morocco , Jordan and even Egypt became IMF “Success Stories” in the 1990s. Middle East Report , No. 210: 23-27.

Sassen, Saskia. 2000. Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a

Theorization. Public Culture 12(1): 215-232

NOTES

First established in 789, Fes lays claim to being the oldest city in Morocco , and with a total population of 946,815 inhabitants, it is the third largest city in the country. The “Ville Nouvelle” refers to the newer parts of Moroccan cities, constructed by the French during the Protectorate (1912-56). In most large Moroccan cities, the Ville Nouvelle is contrasted with the medina, the Arabic term for the old cities built by Moroccans over the centuries. In Fes, the “Ville Nouvelle” and “medina” have come to bear the markers of social class, as the Fes medina, although once occupied by urban Arab aristocracy, is now inhabited primarily by poor, rural-to-urban migrants.

The headquarters were named Center Nawal Belhamr, after a Moroccan activist for Amnesty International who was killed in a car accident.

“Social class” is a problematic term with meanings ranging from a group’s objective relation to the means of production to a social position determined by inequalities of race, education, or economic status. This is further complicated by the fact that theories about class formation cannot be applied uniformly to every society, since a variety of other “cultural” factors both affect and are intertwined with social position. Thus, I use “middle” or “middle-upper class” here with full acknowledgment of the complicated associations of this term. The growth of a substantial middle class in MENA societies is a relatively recent phenomenon, stemming from increased access to education and economic development in the region, particularly since independence.

I define nation-state in its broadest sense, as sovereign territory ruled over by a government whose population is constituted as citizens. Morocco is a constitutional monarchy led since 1999 by King Mohammed VI after the death of his father, Hassan II, who ruled since 1960. The ruling Alaoui family has been in power since the 1600s until the French Protectorate (1912-56), during which time the family maintained its legitimacy by associating with the Moroccan nationalist movement.

The government-sponsored plan was announced by former Prime Minister Abderrahmane Youssoufi, who heads an elected parliament that does possess some decision-making capabilities. The government’s stance on women’s issues can be perceived as symbolic of its modernizing, Western-leaning approach, with women’s participation in society used as an indicator of supposed progress toward democracy. But as Suad Joseph has pointed out, patriarchy is central to social organization in Middle East and North African societies, and women are almost always recognized as embedded in familial structures before they are considered as individuals. (Joseph 1996, p. 7) Family rather than the individual remains paramount in articulating the core unit of society.

On October 13, 2003 , the King finally announced that he would revise the mudawana, easing women’s abilities to obtain a divorce, raising the age of marriage to 18, and placing restrictions on polygamy, including the approval of a judge and the first wife. The revisions further assert that men and women are equal in marriage, and that the wife will no longer be considered a minor under the guardianship of her husband. Divorce will supposedly require mutual consent, unlike the prior practice of unilateral repudiation, and in the event of a divorce, the revisions encourage a fair division of property acquired after the marriage. Despite the enthusiasm that greeted the revisions, many women’s and human rights groups asserted that the revisions did not accomplish as much as they had hoped, especially since polygamy was not banned and the question of equality in inheritance had not been addressed. Criticism was muted on both sides, undoubtedly because the King had announced that the reforms agreed with principles for interpreting the Koran, stating in his address to Parliament, “I cannot authorize that which God has prohibited, nor prohibit that which the Almighty has authorized.” As for the two primary Islamist groups in the country, the PJD (Party of Justice and Development) and Al-adl wal-ihssane (Justice and Charity), both were said to have backed away considerably from criticism of the reforms since the terrorist attacks in Casablanca of May 16, 2003 had led to a backlash against Islamist groups. Enforcing the new laws was expected to be difficult, especially among conservative judges or in far-flung locations (See Le Journal hebdomadaire, nos. 129 (11-17 Oct. 2003), 130 (18-24 Oct. 2003), for a survey of reactions.)

For more on how a conservative mudawana legitimates patrilineal social organization and supports the authority of husbands and male-centered patrilineages over women’s marriages, see Mounira Charrad, 2001. States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco . Berkeley : University of California Press.

This has been a common strategy of the women’s movement in Morocco since the 1980s, since early efforts to politicize women’s issues were suppressed by elites. Instead, women’s associations have sought to become part of the domain of civil society while quietly working to draw attention to the state’s duplicity in asserting its progressive aims while continuing to appease patriarchal interests in practice (Naciri 1998, p. 1).

Term given to a resident of the city of Fes .

See, for example, Guehenno 1995, Ohmae 1996.

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