Morocco’s Family Code: Islamic Feminism & Legislative Reform

This thesis examines how Islamic feminist reinterpretations of the Qur’an and hadith provide the Islamic legal foundation for future reforms to the Moudawana, Morocco’s 2004 Family Code. Although the groundbreaking 2004 reforms to the Moudawana increased women’s formal equality under the law, it failed to produce substantive change on the ground. I identify two major barriers to the implementation of the reforms. First, I contend that the vague wording of the law provided judges with excessive discretion, allowing them to apply the law according to their own interpretations of Islamic law. Second, women’s economic dependency on their spouses in many Moroccan families prevents women from accessing their rights under the new reforms. Through interviews with Islamic feminists, Moroccan legal experts, and textual analysis of both the Moudawana itself and Islamic feminist written works, I examine how Islamic feminist ideas could produce further legal change to the Moudawana to close the gaps in its implementation. This thesis investigates how Islamic feminist approaches of historical contextualization, intratextual analysis, and the tawhidic paradigm, produce new interpretations of Islamic law. I argue that Moroccan legislators can use Islamic feminist hermeneutical methods to close the gaps in the implementation of the existing code. Furthermore, this thesis seeks to transcend the false binary that scholarship in this field typically creates between secular feminism and Islam. Within this framework, scholars argue that liberal ideas such as gender equality can only be achieved through secularization, and, therefore, are fundamentally incompatible with and antithetical to Islam. This thesis rejects this model by highlighting the ways in which Muslim women seek to establish their agency not in spite of their religion but rather through the existing structures of the Islamic legal tradition.