Islamic feminism in Morocco: the discourse and the experience of Asma Lamrabet

Based on the analysis of her five books about personal identity, women’s rights and Islam and on the direct observation of her work during a long fieldwork in Morocco, this paper focuses on the experience and the discourse of Asma Lamrabet, a Moroccan intellectual that defines herself as Islamic feminist. “Islamic feminism” can be defined as the “liberal” theoretical approach that claims the “de-pathriarcalization” of Islam (Badran, 2011) through the recovery of what is perceived as the Qur’an’s original message of gender’s equality and social justice. The practical counterpart to this position is to empowers Muslim women to read and reinterpret the Qur’an and Sunna, to help realize a “cognitive subversion” (Barazanji, 2006) instrumental in discontinuing male hegemony (Mernissi, 1991) in the religious exegesis, and consequentially in the collective imagery that structures the gender imbalance in Islamic societies (Wadud, 1999; Lamrabet, 2007). Recently Asma Lamrabet was appointed as Director of the Centre for Women Studies in Islam of the National Ligue of ‘Ulamā’ in Rabat. Here her gender-oriented scholarly work represents a surprising element that calls for an examination of the potentialities of self-negotiated religious authority that can challenge the classical bases of Islam in the Monarchy. In this paper, I will explore some aspects of her method of exegesis and of her adaptation of Islam to the respect of women’s rights in particular during the contemporary historical phase. The first one is linked with an autonomous method of “embodied tafsir” (Shaikh, 2011) based on an individual appropriation of classical sources of Islamic tradition without having an official qualification in Islamic Studies. The second one concerns her aim to demonstrate the Qur’anic legitimation of gender equality, within the framework of Islamic ethics, sources, and vocabulary (Lamrabet, 2007, 2012). These interesting aspects let me to consider Asma Lamrabet as one of the most important representatives of the Islamic feminism in Morocco and of the vague of critical feminist voices in Islamic world, active to reform Islam from whitin