There was a documentary on PBS about Moroccan women on last night (sorry to be only telling you now, but it might repeat.) It looks interesting, if generally buying into Moroccan govt. PR.
I have a long article coming out soon about Adl wa Ihsan, the largest Moroccan Islamist movement. (It might be delayed a bit considering there’s other priorities in the region right now.) When it comes out I’ll publish a transcript of a long interview I did with Nadia Yassine, who is featured in the documentary. She makes for a very interesting Islamist.
I watched it last night, Issandr, and hope to have some comments up soon. Yassine was interviewed for the program, by the way.
In this Q&A on the film on the Post website, the filmmakers say they’ll have it available for online viewing very soon.
Q&A is interesting in itself, as much for what it says about the American perspective on Muslim women as for the discussion about women’s position in Morocco and the idea of Islamist feminists.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/07/24/DI2006072400448.html?nav=nsc
SP, you’re right! interesting questions and answers. I was really happy to hear that (according to the documentary makers) the current moudouana will not be deimantaled in favor of something more restricting. But what the filmmakers don’t say oin their answer about the King (and maybe there wasn’t time?) is that this practice of standrardizing Islam was practiced by MII and and is as much about political control is it is about “religious” control because many of the practices being constrained this way are those of the zaouias- whose leaders exercised such local polirticla control that the king was regardded as “over there somewhere.”
BTW, Laila over at moorishgirl.com had some interesting things to say. I think a good companion piece to this doc would have been the women who have run for parliament.
Great commentary by Laila! I wonder if there are Islamic women’s halaqat in Morocco as there are in Egypt, that might have been an interesting comparison – the state-certified vs the independent murshidah.
Despite the promise by the filmmakers in Q&A that the documentary would be available for streaming on the website “by tomorrow,” it seems to have been a “bokra insha’allah” sort of “tomorrow” because I’m not seeing it yet.