Bochish touches on women’s freedom between Islamic authority and international conventions

From Dar Al-Aman Publications, Rabat Edition 2024, the historian and academic Ibrahim Al-Qadiri Bouchich, honorary professor at Moulay Ismail University, has published a new book entitled: “Women’s Freedom in the Current History of Morocco between the Islamic Reference and International Covenants… A Community Dialogue in Light of the Plan to Integrate Women in Development and a Blog The Family,” in 280 pages divided into eight chapters.

The importance of this book is highlighted by the coincidence of its publication with the prevailing societal debate these days about amendments to the Family Code, and its compatibility with what the author seeks, which is the necessity for the historian to listen to the impulses of his society, to place its issues at the heart of his concerns, and to make his voice heard to public opinion, so that he has a foothold in thinking about… Current issues, and so that the discussion is not limited to religious scholars, politicians, lawyers, journalists, political parties and their advocacy arms, and women’s associations.

Dr. Bouchich believes that raising the question of Moroccan women’s freedom and its connection to the amendments to the Family Code calls for the presence of history in all paths and angles of consideration and analysis, as an interpreting cognitive capital, and a regulating thread for possible answers regarding the compatibility or clash of women’s freedom with positive laws and Islamic legislation, and the extent to which the cultural, historical and jurisprudential heritage is reflected. In creating the mentality that establishes or interprets legislative texts related to women; Rather, the usefulness of the historical approach also lies in its ability to read the provisions of Islamic law and the jurisprudential interpretations of women’s freedom in their history, and their interaction with the transformations of historical circumstances and the variables of time.

According to what was reported by the author, the study opens for the first time a file that has remained dimly lit in historical studies, and it is related to the file of women’s freedom in light of the loud controversy caused by the “National Action Plan for the Integration of Women in Development” project, and the resulting division in Moroccan society in terms of Late 1999 until the outskirts of 2004. Although this period was a short-term historical phase, it expressed the beginning of a shift in the way of thinking about women’s freedom and the multiplicity of its references. It raised burning questions that penetrated the space of freedom’s relationship with religion and the sacred, and still cast their shadow over written texts. Family. It also turned the Moroccan woman into a thinking subject, after having been an object of thought.

The author links the development of the way of thinking about women’s freedom in the present time with the emergence of modern philosophical theories in the field of liberation feminist scientific epistemology, especially the feminist hermeneutic approach liberated from the traditional literal reading of the religious text, and the gender approach rebellious against masculinity, then the “landscape” theory, or what has become known as In feminist geography.

Added to these changes is the boom witnessed by some new concepts in the field of women’s freedom, and the subsequent changes in its vocabulary. Such as body freedom, homosexuality, and other issues that occupied the space of cultural studies, postcolonialism, and postmodernism.

Hence, he believes that the “National Action Plan for the Integration of Women in Development” came in the context of these accelerating global and regional changes, to dig new paths in the concepts of women’s rights in Morocco, and to produce a new mental map, and a different and bridged awareness that carries troubling questions, and generated new concepts about individual freedom and the issue Women’s rights; But it encountered the pitfalls of the transition of the modern mind.

On the other hand, the draft “Plan for the Integration of Women in Development” was based on international agreements and instruments, which constituted a strong shake in the terms of reference for thinking about women’s freedom in Morocco, due to the clash of religious text and local customs with international law. At the same time, he posed a major challenge regarding the question of moving the issue of women from the sphere of local sovereignty and Moroccan privacy to the horizon of international sovereignty, which has begun to impose its globalized cultural pattern, and further fragment and narrow the space of national sovereignty.

Therefore, it was not a coincidence that this plan caused a societal uproar, division and controversy in the space of Moroccan public opinion, which reached the point of employing the battle of millions of demonstrations, human crowds, and pitting street against street, in two opposing marches that the history of Morocco had never witnessed before. Not to mention the conflicting writings and verbal exchanges that the event produced, reaching the point of excommunication, and lasting from the year 2000 AD until the beginning of 2004 AD, the date of the emergence of the new family code.

The author focuses on examining the content of the plan to integrate women into development and its demands to empower Moroccan women, studying the internal and external contexts of its emergence, then placing the ideas of the parties fighting around it, including Islamists and modernists, under the microscope of analysis and criticism, and diagnosing and analyzing the reactions and positions generated by it, through documents, documents, literature, and all Types of writings supporting or opposing it.

In the context of contributing to the vociferous debate that the plan sparked and which the current Family Code continues to arouse, the author sought to contribute to an attempt to bring the two viewpoints of the Islamic and modernist trends closer together, and to examine the opportunities that the clash between them provided to examine the proposals of each party, to find a middle area, and build a strategy. It is based on stripping the issue of women’s freedom from the political cloak, and ideological and partisan precedents, and disengaging from the logic of politics based on profit and loss, and relegating it to the arena of cognitive capital, and the results of the social and human sciences, anthropological and field research, along with the jurisprudential sciences, and investing the results of these sciences to liberate Mind and ideas, before the liberation of Moroccan women; Women’s freedom, as this author argues, is not only a jurisprudential or legal problem, as much as it is a crisis of a mental structure in which the cultural heritage interferes and is controlled by the male mentality and the customs and traditions embedded in the structures of the Moroccan mind. He also called for thinking with a collective, participatory, reciprocal mentality, to search for intellectual commonalities that allow for consensus, as long as freedom is the demand of all parties.

To make this consensual strategy successful, Dr. Boschich calls for renewing religious discourse, considering legal rulings as relative rulings that are subject to ijtihad, and working on cognitive facts and religious texts in their historicity, so that they keep pace with the transformations that the current world has witnessed. This is something that can be activated if we look at the legal rulings from a rational perspective, from the perspective of the jurisprudence of objectives, the jurisprudence of reality, and a concrete analysis of the specificity of Moroccan society, imbued with the religious spirit, in the interest of women and the development of Moroccan society. This will not be possible without establishing an accurate understanding of the human role in developing human civilization based on the principle of the humanity of women, and that they – like men – are religiously honored beings, and preferred over all other beings, without distinction between them.

In general, this new book is rich in sober ideas, suggestions and recommendations that are worth pausing and contemplating. It is not possible to fully do justice to it in these lines, and this is no substitute for returning to its pages, which stimulate intellectual discussion and provide the pleasure of reading and the pleasure of following.