Religion in cross-cultural perspectives

Religion in Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Salime's notion of the entanglement and interdependant trajectories of the feminist & Islamist movements in Morocco

Last century was spent fighting for human rights. Zakia Salime was among those who joined movements for women rights in middle east. She discusses how decades of fights over widening the expression and rights transformed Moroccan feminism and Islamism. She is active in feminist movement since 1990s. She wrote extensively on Moroccan feminism highlighting that here was not enough research on the topic already. There had been serious influence on feminism in Middle East and the efforts led to development of a clear gender policy. She showed light on how Islamist women influenced public representations of feminism and the rights of women (Salime, 2011). In her book "Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco" she defies approaches causing pressure on division of the women's movements on the lines of religion and secular parameters.

feminist & Islamist movements in Morocco

Morocco was a stage for discussion of making projects democratized during 1980's and that offered stage for feminist reverberations. Zakia puts light on how the reforms were resisted by women beleiving in political Islamic movement. She says that there is a critical tie between conceptual margins of feminist and Islamist politics in the country. She involved in feminist movement two decades ago and found a new dimension to women rights without entering into debate of side-lining of women in political Islam. She did deep analysis of how the two movements are heading towards common destiny proceeding in the directions of their own philiosophies.

Interdependent Trajectories

Zakia does not traditionally focus how the secular and Islamict movements undercut each other rathe she believes the two movements are mutually influential. She does not believe that the movement scan be polarised on the basis of the ideologies they follow rather there is interaction and interdependence between the two movements that helped bring positive changes in Moroccan feminism.

She focused on the interdependent trajectories of women rights movements. She found how the women rights movements were affected and did affect Islamist women's involvement. The concept of interdepedent trajectories suggest that The Islamist movement of feminism is much related as well as differs from the secular movement. The rationale was same but the inspiration was not religion. Zakia supports that both the Islamist and Secular feminist movements have succeeded somewhat in their objectives to achieve women rights of independence. She is of the view that there had been strong impact of both the Islamist and secular movements on each other. The trajectories for both the movements were different yet interdependent since the cause was same for which both the Islamists and seculars fought and that was to have their women their basic equal rights in the society and to stop the exploitation of women (Salime, 2011).

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