Abstract

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.