Volume 9, Issue 1

During the 1980s, Morocco became a platform for discussion of democratization projects in North Africa and the Middle East. This served as fertile ground for feminist reverberations attempting to reform the mudawanna, or shari’a based family-law in Morocco, and consequential resistance to reform by women within the political Islam or “Islamist” movement. Feminist scholarship in Morocco, as is the case with other parts of the Middle East, is inevitably political. Zakia Salime’s book Between feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco problematizes the resulting conceptual boundaries of feminist and Islamist politics in Morocco. She became interested in the issue with her involvement with the feminist movement during the 1990s. Unlike other authors that discuss feminism in the Middle East, Salime is not interested in assuming any generalizations in discussion of marginalization of women versus political Islam. Rather, she aims to analyze in detail the dynamic relationship of feminist and Islamist movements.

Human rights in Islam is a complex issue on which influential Muslims have expressed diverse perspectives. This article identifies the different views held by several scholars, and examines the way in which those views are reflected or contested in contemporary Islamic discourses and particularly the discourses of Saudi scholars. It also argues that different opinions are not necessarily based on a specific Islamic sect but on the perception of international norms and on the readings and interpretation of Islamic texts as well.

This paper argues that a thorough discussion on women’s rights needs to go beyond progress in civil and political rights. Looking comparatively at Iran and Turkey, it posits that the legal and political context of secularism v. theocracy has much less of an impact than expected, and suggests that other variables offer much more compelling explanations. The paper combines feminist constructivist insights with the broader lens of world -system theory to hypothesize that the explanation for women‘s inequality in employment is found at the intersection of endogenous gender constructions heavily influenced by culture and religion, and of an international economic order that contributes to the reproduction of a patriarchal structure in poorer countries, regardless of their political system