The Family As a Political Tool: Divergent Post-Islamist Women’s Rights Discourses in Morocco

Women’s rights have long been a source of religious and political contention, a matter that is particularly pronounced in post-colonial contexts where religion and gender matters are heavily politicized. In these settings, attempts to legislate and implement women’s rights can present a challenge as these processes are often met with opposition from politically active religious actors. This paper focuses on the Moroccan case, where the state is in the process of reforming the religiously sanctioned family code (Moudawana). This paper seeks to analyze how different Islamist actors, namely individuals active in the Justice and Development Party (PJD) and the Justice and Charity Movement (JCM), as well as the movements as a whole, react to the ongoing reform, to shed light on post-Islamist reactions to nationalized religious regulation. As such, it seeks to examine how women’s rights are utilized by such religious movements to present and to maintain a politically relevant religious identity, and to review how the movements instrumentalize the emerging points of contention to signal their opposition to religious regime-policies and to reinforce their ideological stance. Furthermore, this study aims to understand how Islamist movements engage in oppositional politics on gender matters to regain or to maintain their Islamist appeal to a larger followership or constituency. Accordingly, this study critically engages with the notion of the post-Islamism paradigm, by elucidating the different ways in which post-Islamist movements navigate gender politics, and by shedding light on instances in which they may even return to more conservative ideology in an attempt to maintain their political relevance. This analysis is based on qualitative data drawn from social media and from interview and document data gathered through fieldwork conducted over several months in Morocco.