NINE

MOROCCO

The Compromises

All governments—indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act—is founded on compromise and barter.

—BRITISH PHILOSOPHER EDMUND BURKE

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.

—AMERICAN LAWYER CLARENCE DARROW

The great debate in the Middle East is whether the region is really ready for democracy. It has become a chicken-and-egg argument.

Almost all leaders argue that conditions are not yet ripe for big change: Countries are either not stable enough for the initial shocks of democracy, or economies are not rich enough to meet expectations, or societies are not developed enough to wisely use democratic rights, or the region is simply too volatile to introduce a new political order.¹ They contend that voters will merely elect new tyrants or undemocratic populists—as Germany did in electing Adolf Hitler in 1933 or Venezuela did in voting for Hugo Chavez in 1998.²

Yet public-opinion polls, academic discourse, newspaper editorials, and overwhelming anecdotal evidence all indicate a yearning for real political change. Some call it reform. Others call it democracy. All agree it must be more than token or tepid steps. Their driving fear is what will happen down the road in the absence of change.

The debate is likely to rage for years to come.

Yet it is already clear that governments in the Middle East will have to cultivate compromise—now, or very soon—to survive in any form. Initiating action on three controversial issues—political prisoners, women’s rights, and political Islam—can start the process. Cooperation will signal intent to change. It will require ceding some power. And it will redefine the social contract between ruler and ruled.

It will still mark only a beginning, however. Without serious follow-up on other fronts, governments will only be buying a bit more time.

Morocco is the only country that has attempted action on all three—although largely in reaction to imaginative local actors and strong outside pressure.

The first compromise is for regimes to account for the secrets and abuses of their past. Reforms for the future will not be enough. They must also come clean about decades of injustice to build credibility and establish trust. The old adage can be adapted: The truth will set societies free.

Morocco took the first step in 2004, when Driss Benzekri received a summons from King Mohammed VI. The dapper young monarch wanted to discuss human rights abuses in Morocco, particularly during the rule of his father and grandfather.

The invitation, Benzekri later told me, was the last thing he expected.

Born in 1950, Benzekri was one of Morocco’s most noted political rebels. He was a wanted man by the time he turned twenty-five. Benzekri is a tall, trim man who wears rimless glasses and has a translucent white mustache. He has the long, lean face of many who live in the Maghreb, the vast region of arid desert and spiny mountains stretching across North Africa from the Nile River to the Atlantic. He also has the frail physique and hunched weariness of a survivor. His manner is subdued; he responds to questions in a quiet voice and not at great length. You have to keep asking to get him to tell a little bit more of his story. He expresses himself best, he says, through poetry. He seems to vent by chain smoking.

Benzekri grew up during what Moroccans call the Years of Lead, a notorious era of rule by the gun, when King Hassan II dealt ruthlessly with opposition by labor activists, leftists, tribal rebels, and his own military. He imposed a state of emergency in the mid-1960s that lasted five years. In the 1970s, the king survived two assassination attempts and a failed coup by military officers that deepened repression by the ruling clique in Morocco, which is known as the makhzan, Arabic for “storehouse”—as in storehouse of power.

During the Years of Lead, the monarchy’s secret police arrested, abducted, or executed thousands who dared to criticize or challenge the king. The plotters of the 1972 coup attempt were executed by firing squad, live on national television.

A linguistics student, Benzekri became a Marxist and youth activist who organized protests against autocratic rule on campuses across the country.

“I was the generation that came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s. We were the first generation after the independence of Morocco, and there was a need to do something,” he told me. “We came to Marxism through the literature of what was happening in France at the time and in San Francisco during the war on Vietnam.

“So we decided,” he said, drawing quietly on a cigarette, “that we wanted to make a proletarian revolution.”

In 1975, secret police went after Benzekri too. On a cold January day, they tracked him down to a hideout in Casablanca.

Over the next eighteen months, he endured prolonged solitary confinement and frequent torture—beatings, electric shock on the genitals, hanging for hours by rope, head immersed in buckets of chemicals or dirty water, and the rest of the time living with his head hooded, his hands tied tightly behind his back, his body left prone on the ground.

“There was a rhythm to it. The technique depended on the questions they asked and the answers they wanted,” Benzekri recalled, without emotion. “Sometimes they wanted a confession or specific information. Other times they wanted to humiliate and break your will.”

Benzekri was eventually tried for belonging to a subversive group and plotting against King Hassan II. He was sentenced to thirty years. He ended up at Kenitra Central, a prison notorious for its filthy conditions and ruthless guards. It was built for 5,000 but it held almost twice as many. Kenitra has often been called the Abu Ghraib of Morocco.³

“One day, they put us in a common room to shave our heads, and while I was waiting my turn I saw one of the guards beating a young boy brutally. I was really outraged, so I detached myself and pushed the guard away from the boy,” Benzekri recounted three decades later.

“To punish me they tied me like a lamb, with four limbs together, and beat me until I was hemorrhaging. They tore the muscles in my leg. My feet were so swollen and bleeding I couldn’t walk. I had to be hospitalized.”

Benzekri languished in prison for the next eighteen years. He was released in a 1991 amnesty by King Hassan after pressure by international groups about Morocco’s political prisoners. When he was freed, he established the Moroccan Organization for Human Rights and an association for former political prisoners.

Thirteen years later, in 2004, the palace called.

King Hassan, who took only tepid moves to improve human rights toward the end of his reign, had died in 1999. When Mohammed VI assumed the throne, he immediately pledged major reforms. In one of his boldest steps, the new king told Benzekri that he wanted to establish an Equity and Reconciliation Commission to investigate abuses by secret police, intelligence, and the military from 1956 until 1999. The four-decade period began with Morocco’s independence from France. It covered both the five-year rule of his grandfather, Mohammed V, and the thirty-eight-year reign of his father, Hassan II.

The idea was unprecedented in the Middle East. It was modeled on similar panels in other countries coming out of repressive eras, most famously the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that addressed the atrocities and assassinations during the apartheid era. Argentina and Chile conducted similar probes into torture and disappearances after their military dictatorships ended.

But no Arab government had ever confessed to widespread abuses, much less tried to investigate the past or reconcile with its victims.

The young king asked Benzekri to be president of Morocco’s commission.

So in 2004, Benzekri went back to prison—in fact, every prison, detention center, and major jail in Morocco—this time to document the abductions, disappearances, torture, and executions of thousands of Moroccan political prisoners. He and sixteen other former political prisoners and human-rights activists on the new commission investigated more than 20,000 cases.

At times, it was a journey into his own past. With other former prisoners, Benzekri went to the detention center where he had first been tortured. Several of his friends broke down and wept. Benzekri did not.

“Now they are only walls,” he told me several months after the visit.

“The jail is in a poor neighborhood in Casablanca. The area is very famous for its cultural richness. It gave birth,” he added, with a rare grin, “to many bands that play music like Bob Dylan. So in collaboration with the police and the local people, we agreed to turn it over to be used as a community center.”

Benzekri also met his torturers. He knew most of them only by their voices, since prisoners were usually blindfolded or hooded. Some of them apologized and said they were only executing orders.

I asked if he believed them.

“It has no importance for me any longer,” Benzekri replied. “They had lost their humanity.

“The important thing is that there is no longer the same culture of impunity, no executive privilege for top officials—not even for the king. In the past, the king was sanctified. No longer.”

“This is not the same Morocco that arrested, tortured, and oppressed me,” he said.

The commission then heard testimony—some of it broadcast live on Moroccan television and radio—from victims who detailed torture, families who recounted deaths of loved ones in prison, and wives and children who appealed for help in tracking down loved ones who had simply disappeared one day.

The testimony that gripped Benzekri the most, he told me when we first met in 2006, was from a woman in her seventies who was still searching for her husband. He had disappeared in 1957. She recounted to the commission every detail, every appeal, every official she talked to for almost a half century to find her husband.

Through official documents, Benzekri discovered that the man had been abducted by Morocco’s secret services and murdered. He made it a personal mission to find out where her husband had been secretly buried.

When we talked a second time several months later, Benzekri said the commission had recently located the concealed grave and matched the DNA.

In the end, the two-year probe concluded that the state had systematically used torture as part of deliberate political repression and “gross” violations of Moroccan law. Benzekri and his colleagues uncovered the fate of almost 800 political prisoners who died from torture, many after being abducted—the so-called “forced disappearances.” Prisoners who died or were executed were usually buried at night, without notification to families of their deaths or burial places, the commission revealed. Many families had not even known that their relatives had been seized by security services.

The reconciliation commission, its final report concluded, “achieved a substantial leap forward in establishing the truth about many events in this period of time, as well as about violations which had remained until then marked by silence, taboo, or rumors.”

To make amends, the commission proposed that the monarchy pay compensation to almost 10,000 victims or their beneficiaries.

Among the most poignant cases for compensation was Ahmed ben Saleek, whose father and grandfather both disappeared in the 1950s. Saleek went to search for them when he was thirteen, but he, too, ended up detained and tortured.⁴ The two older men never returned home.

The commission called for many victims to be covered in a special health-care program because of their permanent injuries or disabilities. It also proposed a system of collective reparations—in the form of economic projects—to revive communities particularly affected by government abuses.

Finally, the commission recommended bold steps to ensure that the Years of Lead were truly over. It called for a legal ban on arbitrary detention, disappearances, torture, cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees, and all other crimes against humanity. It recommended that international human-rights law should have priority over Moroccan law. It demanded constitutional amendments to separate government powers, particularly to ensure an independent judiciary. It proposed massive revisions in the penal code, including the basic assumption of innocence until proven guilty. It called for an overhaul in the training and oversight of the nation’s diverse security services.

And, to get the ball rolling, the commission created a new body to track the government’s performance and monitor future abuses.

“To create a democratic society, people have to know the truth and their history. This is the only way to achieve a culture of transparency and the only way for people to know how to choose their future,” Benzekri said. “The report marked a fundamental rupture with Morocco’s past.”

But that was also the commission’s biggest limitation. Its mandate was restricted to the past—and just documenting it, not doing anything about it. Former political prisoners were not allowed to name specific guards, officials, or other individuals who engaged in abuse. Victims could detail the most gruesome torture. But they were barred from identifying or describing their jailers.

Benzekri also had no legal power to hold anyone to account once their abuses were revealed. The commission could not refer torturers for investigation, charges, or trial.

The commission also had no power to compel testimony from people in high places to answer questions. There was no penalty imposed on institutions or individuals who did not come forward with the truth. And there was also no incentive to cooperate, such as the amnesty granted by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The final report in 2006 complained about inadequate cooperation, “deplorable” records, and the failure of key officials to come forward.

The government clearly had no interest in trying anyone for abuse or breaking the law, according to several former political prisoners I visited in Rabat, the Moroccan capital. As a result, many political prisoners opted to stay away.

Among them was Ahmed Marzouki, one of fifty-eight junior officers charged with a minor role in the 1972 coup plot. He was sentenced to five years, but King Hassan ignored the judgment. Marzouki ended up in prison for almost nineteen years, all in solitary confinement. The king had had a secret desert prison especially constructed in Tazmamart for the perpetrators of the coup. It became the toughest prison in Morocco.

In his book Tazmamart, Cell 10, Marzouki graphically describes the decay of unwashed bodies, the slide toward insanity, and the deterioration from untreated disease.

For almost two decades, King Hassan denied that the Tazmamart prison existed. Under pressure from international human-rights groups, the government finally acknowledged the secret facility. When the military officers were released, less than one half of the men emerged alive.

Marzouki opted not to testify on grounds that his account would have no impact.

In the end, the reconciliation commission found out only part of the truth about Morocco’s past. No officials stepped forward to admit wrongdoing, name wrongdoers, or provide evidence of wrongdoing. The commission merely confirmed what most already knew: Morocco abused, horrifically. It was just no longer an official secret.

In 2006, in front of an audience of victims and families of the disappeared, King Mohammed VI accepted the report. Moroccans, he said, “must all of us draw the necessary lessons from it in a way that will shield our country from a repetition of what happened and make up for what was lost.” He called for full implementation of the commission’s recommendations.

But the king did not apologize. And many of Morocco’s human-rights activists claimed the outcome fell far short of its promise.

In Rabat, a city of wide boulevards and whitewashed buildings, I called on Mohamed Sebbar, a short man with a bushy black mustache who chews gum with vigor to cut down on cigarettes. A lawyer, he heads the Forum for Justice and Truth, the group of former political prisoners founded by Benzekri before he left to head the reconciliation commission.

Sebbar believes the commission failed. “We had to bargain to get this much truth,” he told me. “What we got is the truth decided and provided by the state.

“The process failed to create a new climate for the future,” he said.

“We wanted boundaries on the king’s powers. But, instead, we are still living with the same regime and the same state that the commission was investigating. In other countries that went through this process, in South Africa and Latin America, they have a different kind of government. We don’t.”

“And,” he sighed, “there are still many secrets out there.”

I asked if he felt that he was still under scrutiny from the Mukhabarat, or secret police.

“Of course,” he said, laughing at the question. “The Mukhabarat is still listening to my phone.”

Since assuming the throne, King Mohammed has made more promises of change and introduced more reforms than any of his predecessors and most other leaders in the region. In a 2004 address marking his fifth anniversary on the throne, he used the word “democracy” eighteen times to describe his hopes for Morocco’s future.⁵

But even under a younger and more open-minded king, Morocco remains an absolute monarchy run by the oldest dynasty in the Arab world. Monarchy dates back 1,200 years in Morocco. The current Alouite dynasty dates back to the seventeenth century. Morocco’s king is arguably the most powerful Muslim leader in the Middle East because of his multiple sources of authority. He is head of state. He is commander-in-chief. He appoints the prime minister and his cabinet. Both foreign and domestic policy comes from the palace. Judges are appointed on the recommendation of the Supreme Council, which is presided over by the king. The rubber-stamp parliament debates, but it has little power and even less oversight of government performance. The king can legislate new laws without parliament. And he can dismiss it at will.⁶ He still has the powers of a despot.

Morocco’s monarch has another whole separate set of powers, however. The royal family descends from the Prophet Mohammed and has for centuries invoked its religious position. King Mohammed, who is widely referred to as “His Majest-ski” for his love of jet-skiing, carries the title of Commander of the Faithful. It is Morocco’s top religious position, and he has supreme religious authority.

To prepare his son for a religious role, King Hassan enrolled him in Koranic school at the age of four in 1967. Mohammed’s official biography says he memorized the entire Koran.

No other Middle East leader holds total powers of state and mosque, even in Saudi Arabia. Only Iran’s supreme leader comes close. Iran popularly elects its president, however, and its parliament has oversight rights, which it has frequently used to reject cabinet appointments, question ministers in office, or dismiss them.

Masmuh is the Arabic world for “allowed” or “permissible.” It reflects the central flaw in the commission—and Morocco’s broader attempt to open up.⁷ Change is only what is masmuh, or what the king permits.

The king has acknowledged that he does not intend a political overhaul.

“One should not think that a new generation will turn everything upside down or bring everything into question. Let us not forget that in our countries, tradition is very strong,” he told Time in 2000, in a rare interview the year after he assumed power.⁸

“Trying to apply a Western democratic system to a country of the Maghreb, the Middle East or the Gulf would be a mistake. We are not Germany, Sweden or Spain. I have a lot of respect for countries where the practice of democracy is highly developed. I think, however, that each country has to have its own specific features of democracy…. There should be a Moroccan model specific to Morocco.”

After the commission’s report was released, the seventeenth king of the Alouite dynasty did nothing significant to share power. The traditional power brokers, including the king’s court, the intelligence and security services, and an oligarch elite—continued to dominate Moroccan politics. The king did not significantly strengthen other branches of government, at least in ways that checked his own. And the electorate still had little leverage through independent institutions.

Even as the king invited Benzekri to probe the past, the Moroccan regime was again secretly engaged in many of the same human-rights abuses used during the Years of Lead—this time to face a new threat.

On May 16, 2003, twelve suicide bombers struck targets throughout Casablanca, Morocco’s bustling commercial and industrial center. It was the largest terrorist attack in the country’s history. Dozens were killed, more than 100 injured.

The single deadliest bombing was at a Spanish restaurant, but the Islamist extremists also hit a five-star hotel, a Jewish community center, and a Jewish-owned restaurant. Most of the targets had Western or Jewish ties. The bombers allegedly belonged to an offshoot of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group and had links to al Qaeda. The bombings followed a broadcast from Osama bin Laden in which he branded Morocco an “apostate nation.” The bombers were all Moroccans, most in their early twenties, and all from a Casablanca shantytown.

In the biggest sweep since the Years of Lead, the government arrested up to 5,000 Moroccans. The government later confirmed that more than 2,000 people—including more than 400 who were already in detention centers on other charges when the bombs went off—were charged with trying to subvert the state. More than 900 were convicted. Seventeen were sentenced to death.⁹

Moroccans again whispered tales of torture and additional mysterious deaths.

“The May 16 bombings were the beginning of the period of regression on human rights,” said Sebbar, the gum-chewing lawyer and human-rights activist. “The government again started illegal detentions and torture. Many were arrested simply because they had beards.

“We also had problems again with freedom of speech, as the government arrested journalists accused of giving false information on the events.”

I later asked Benzekri about the criticism—and if he had any fears that he and the reconciliation commission had been used by the palace.

“I am not a marionette, a puppet,” he replied, drawing on a cigarette. “The truth is that the violations committed while arresting the Islamists were not systematic or deliberate repression, as they were in our day.” He paused briefly, then added, “We are concerned about this issue, although we consider these two distinct eras.

“Look,” he said, “what is passionate about our experience is that we have moved from a stage of nurturing ideals or dreaming about what it is to be a democratic state to a phase of concrete initiatives.”

In a theme I heard on every stop, in every country, Benzekri anguished over how long change will take in the Middle East.

“There is a new dynamic within society, but it is limited in its advocacy power. It doesn’t have a voice yet,” he explained, “There is a decision in Morocco to go ahead with democratization and reform, including separation of powers, but we are still debating a time frame and how to go about it.

“Look at Spain,” he said, referring to the democratic transition after the 1975 death of General Francisco Franco ended a long dictatorship.

“It took a decade to become a sustainable democracy, as it separated powers and established checks and balances. It’s the same with South Africa. It didn’t happen suddenly in 1993 with the end of apartheid. It took the rest of the decade, and South Africa is still struggling.”

Yet in Morocco, progress also does not seem inevitable: Under King Mohammed, local and international human-rights groups again began to document charges that the secret police were engaging in arrests without warrants, and abductions. Held incommunicado, many suspects were put on a fast track to conviction after torture forced false confessions, human-rights groups complained.

Morocco also reportedly collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency in holding terrorist suspects that the United States had apprehended abroad. The monarchy allowed U.S. intelligence to use at least one Moroccan facility as part of a covert foreign prison system set up after the September 11, 2001, attacks.¹⁰ As the reconciliation commission released its report, Morocco was secretly detaining not only its own citizens but also suspects from other countries.

“Morocco’s campaign against suspected Islamist militants,” Human Rights Watch concluded, “is undermining the significant human rights progress the country has made in recent years.”¹¹

 

The second compromise is removing restrictions on women. No government in the twenty-first century can claim legitimacy without giving its female population personal and political rights.

On their own steam, women are already an imaginative force for change in the Middle East. Some of the transitions are quite stunning.

Fatima Mernissi grew up in a harem.

“I was born in 1940 into a traditional house, a harem, which was a luxury of the bourgeoisie,” she told me, when I visited her in Morocco. Mernissi talks and writes about her life with a storyteller’s delight, re-creating the innocence of her childhood and another way of life practiced not so long ago. She grew up in Fez, a city founded in the ninth century that is still the cultural heart and center of Islamic orthodoxy in Morocco. Many doors and walls in Fez’s fabled Old City are painted green, the color of Islam.

Hers was not the exotic imperial harem of bygone dynasties, with eunuchs, slaves, and concubines reclining on pillows. She was raised in the traditional harem of an extended family; it was a place of seclusion for a patriarch, his adult sons, and all their wives and children residing together. Harem life was contained behind the hudud, or sacred frontier, protected by high walls and strong iron gates. Ahmed, the doorkeeper, was the enforcer. The layout reflected life’s hierarchy: Formal events, dining, and the men’s world played out in salons on the ground floor, around the courtyard with Arabesque pillars, tiled archways, and a fountain. The two sons’ family quarters were on the second floor. Widows and divorced women lived on the third.

Mernissi’s early life was confined to the women’s quarters with her mother, aunts, cousins, and a grandmother who had been one of her grandfather’s nine wives—some, but not all, at the same time. The females rarely went out, usually just for religious festivals, only with permission, and always veiled and escorted by a male family member. They otherwise kept busy with beauty rituals, sewing, and creating little plays of what they imagined the outside world to be. They performed for each other.

As a child, Mernissi was told by her father that the sexes, rightly, had been segregated by God. Harmony required that each gender respect the prescribed limits of the other. Trespassing, he warned her, would lead only to sorrow.

“We live in difficult times, the country is occupied by foreign armies, our culture is threatened,” he told her, during the days Morocco was still ruled by France. “All we have left is these traditions.”¹²

For the women, however, life’s obsession was escape. “Ahhh,” Mernissi recalled, “but we dreamed of trespass beyond the gates all the time.”

In her memoir, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, Mernissi recounted her mother’s yearning.

“I would wake up at dawn,” mother would say now and then. “If I only could go for a walk in the early morning when the streets are deserted. The light must be blue then, or maybe pink, like at sunset. What is the color of the morning in the deserted, silent streets?”¹³

The women’s view of the sky was confined to a patch visible by looking up from the courtyard. Most windows were shuttered or draped so the outside world could not peek inside.

Their one connection to the outside world was a large radio. It was supposed to be for the men’s ears only; it was locked in a large cabinet when they were out. But the girls eventually found the key and, when the men were away, they turned it on—and danced to local music, sang along with a Lebanese chanteuse, or listened to the news on Radio Cairo.

“The news became very important to me,” Mernissi recalled, as she sipped a cup of sweet mint tea. She still remembers hearing on the radio about World War II for the first time.

“They were killing each other on such a big scale! This is why we were scared of the Europeans,” she told me.

Her father eventually found out about the females’ secret pastime. He grumbled that they would next find a key to open the front gate.

That’s exactly what Mernissi did—with her mother’s help.

Mernissi’s mother was illiterate, but she was an independent spirit. She rejected restrictions on her life as an absurdity, and male superiority as anti-Islamic.

“Allah made us all equal,” she would say, with indignation.

“My mother didn’t know the alphabet, but that didn’t make her ignorant. She knew A Thousand and One Nights by heart,” Mernissi told me. “She was very clever.”

Her mother ensured that Mernissi, from the age of three, was enrolled in Koranic school. It was the only form of education for females at the time. The family was devout. She shared her first name, Fatima, with one of the Prophet Mohammed’s daughters. Many revere Fatima as the greatest Muslim woman who ever lived.

“I memorized many parts of the Koran as a child,” Mernissi told me. “I say to women to this day: Swallow history and use it. You have to sing the Koran. It gives you a good memory.”

She rose off a little divan and, in full theatric voice, recited from the forty-first chapter, or sura, of the Koran. “Respond to aggression with softness,” she said, “and you will see your worst enemy become your fervent partner.”¹⁴

The key out of the front gate—and eventually the harem—was education. When the Moroccan government opened public education to girls in the 1950s, Mernissi’s mother pleaded with her husband to let their only daughter attend the new school. That meant learning arithmetic and foreign languages and even playing sports in shorts, none of which was allowed in religious school.

It also meant crossing the hudud, the sacred frontier, after which there was no going back.

Mernissi’s father called a family council of senior male members. Debate was heated, but the council eventually decreed that Mernissi—as well as her ten female cousins—could go to public school.

“If I had been born two years earlier,” Mernissi told me, “I would not have obtained an education.”

Modernization only went so far; tradition still restricted personal freedom. When the Mernissi women were allowed to attend their first movie, the men bought tickets for four rows, so all the seats both in front of and behind the females were empty. The women spent hours doing their makeup and hair for the outing—only to have to don veils, or hejab, to cover it all.

Her mother once tried to change their hejab, replacing the heavy white cotton that impeded breathing with a lighter, sheer black chiffon. But her father resisted, Mernissi wrote.

“It’s so transparent! You might as well go unveiled. It is like the French women trading their skirts for men’s pants. And if women dress like men, it is more than chaos, it is the end of the world.”¹⁵

Mernissi’s mother was never able to break out of the harem prison. When she appealed for permission to attend literacy classes, the family council turned her down. So she turned around and advised her daughter to learn to “shout and protest” just as she had learned to walk and talk.

“She would turn to me and say, ‘You are going to transform this world, aren’t you? You are going to create a planet without walls and without frontiers, where the gatekeepers have off every day of the year,’” Mernissi recalled.¹⁶

At the time, the Middle East offered few feminist role models for its women. Indeed, the groundbreaker was arguably a man.

Qasim Amin was an Egyptian judge, cofounder of Cairo University, and an activist in Egypt’s nationalist movement. He is also considered the father of Arab feminism. He wrote The Liberation of Women in 1899 to argue that the education and liberation of women were pivotal in ending British colonial rule. In The New Woman, published in 1900, he then boldly condemned Arab societies for their attitudes and treatment of females. The book resonates with a single word—slavery.

The woman who is forbidden to educate herself save in the duties of the servant or is limited in her educational pursuits is indeed a slave, because her natural instincts and God-given talents are subordinated…. The one who is completely veiled—arms, legs, body—so that she cannot walk, ride, breathe, see, or speak except with difficulty is to be reckoned a slave.¹⁷

It was much harder for women to campaign for their rights. Among the early critics was Aisha Taymour, an Egyptian born in 1840 who was never able to leave the harem. She spent her life penning angry poems against the veil in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish—languages otherwise largely useless since she could not leave her confinement to speak them in public.

Zaynab Fawwaz grew up in a Lebanese village. Through self-instruction and the men she married, she eventually became a noted literary figure. In the 1890s, she wrote a 500-page volume of women’s biographies entitled Generalizations of Secluded Housewives.

Hoda Shaarawi was married at thirteen and lived sequestered for years in an Egyptian harem, yet she dared to gradually challenge convention. She organized the first lectures for women, founded the Intellectual Association of Egyptian Women, led women’s street protests against British occupation in 1919, campaigned successfully to have the age of marriage raised to sixteen, and, in 1923, dared to publicly remove her veil. Shortly before her death, in 1947, she founded the Arab Feminist Union.

In the 1950s, Mernissi’s mother was dogged about her daughter’s future. She prodded her husband to allow Mernissi to go on to high school, then college, and next to the Sorbonne in Paris for graduate work. Mernissi ended up working on a doctorate at Brandeis University, where she began to write about the Middle East’s harem culture—and, more to the point, how to break out of it.

Along the way, Mernissi told me with a chuckle, she also got her own radio.

Mernissi was in the last generation born into the traditional Moroccan harem and the first to break out of it. She soon emerged as one of the most audacious feminists in the Arab world.

Mernissi has grown into a defiantly flamboyant woman. I first met her in the mid-1990s. She generates energy, speaks in long, rambling, stream-of-conscious sentences that cover many subjects in a single breath, and is usually an idea or two ahead of most people around her. She is as sure of herself as any woman I’ve ever met. She is larger-than-life physically, too. She has high cheekbones and a long leonine nose; her hair is a mass of frizzy curls, rinsed in warm, auburn henna. She dresses in the deep, bright colors of Morocco, rich dark red, burnt orange, or dark violet. She is usually adorned with big jewelry, long dangling earrings, a chunky Bedouin necklace, and large rings. She wears neither scarf nor veil.

Her modest apartment in Rabat is filled with Berber carpets and big pillows. But when I visited her in 2006, what struck me the most were the big windows.

“Yes,” she laughed, “I paid a lot to have this view. I love to see the sky. I have to see it, especially the moon.”

Liberated from harem traditions, Mernissi now has the certainty of a convert. She has poured her obsession into a torrent of books that are the essential feminist primers in the Middle East. The Forgotten Queens of Islam chronicles the lives of fifteen female rulers in the medieval Islamic world—from Asia to North Africa, from Queen Arwa of Yemen to the sultanas of India and Persia—to refute misogynist claims that it is un-Islamic for women to lead. The Political Harem: The Prophet and the Women tackles the taboo subject of human sexuality.

Her most ground-breaking works challenge traditional interpretations of women’s rights. In The Veil and the Male Elite, Mernissi offers a feminist interpretation of Islam. Most Arab governments have banned it. In it, she argues that the Prophet Mohammed actually sought equality between the sexes and gave a place to women in public life for the first time. In the period before Islam—known as the Jahaliya, or period of ignorance—females were treated brutally. They could claim no rights. They could be sold, stolen, abandoned, or claimed as booty in warfare. Female infanticide was common; unwanted baby girls could be buried alive.¹⁸

Islam revolutionized the treatment of women with new laws. It gave females the right to inherit, divorce, own and operate businesses, have partial custody of children, and pray in mosques.

“You can’t blame the repression of women on the Prophet,” Mernissi told me. “By comparison, he liberated women!”

And just how were women of other faiths treated in the eighth century? she asked.

In Women and Islam, Mernissi applied the mores of the early Islamic era to the present—with a vastly different spin than the region’s conservative sheikhs and imams.

Women fled aristocratic tribal Mecca by the thousands to enter Medina, the Prophet’s city in the seventh century, because Islam promised equality and dignity for all, for men and women, masters and servants. Every woman who came to Medina when the Prophet was the political leader of the Muslims could gain access to full citizenship, the status of “sahabi,” companion of the Prophet. Muslims can take pride that in their language they have the feminine of that word, “sahabiyat,” women who enjoyed the right to enter into the councils of the Muslim umma [community], to speak freely to its Prophet-leader, to dispute with men, to fight for their happiness, and to be involved in the management of military and political affairs. The evidence is there in the works of religious history, in the biographical details of sahabiyat by the thousands who built Muslim society side by side with their male counterparts….

We Muslim women can walk into the modern world with pride, knowing that the quest for dignity, democracy, and human rights, for full participation in the political and social affairs of our country, stems from no imported Western values, but is a true part of Muslim tradition.¹⁹

Practices discriminating against women, she told me with dismissive self-confidence, are misinterpretations of the Koran and Muslim traditions added by despots, dynasties, sheikhs and sultans, fundamentalist preachers—and husbands—over the centuries.

“You find in the Koran hundreds of verses to support women’s rights in one way or another and only a few that do not. They have seized on those few and ignored the rest,” Mernissi said.

The first convert to Islam, she noted, was Khadija, a prominent businesswoman who ran trade caravans across the Middle East. She hired Mohammed, eventually proposed marriage to him, and after his revelations became a Muslim. After his death, his third wife Aisha provided roughly one-quarter of the hadith, the traditions of the Prophet that are still considered as authoritative as the Koran in guiding the way a good Muslim should live. Aisha also raised an army, gave fiery speeches, and even went to the battlefield in a litter behind a camel.

Islam’s original egalitarian values, Mernissi insisted, are actually the best vehicle for change in the Middle East.

“Equality isn’t a foreign idea and doesn’t need to be imported from other cultures. It is at the heart of Islam, too. Allah spoke of the two sexes in terms of total equality as believers,” she said. Muslim politicians who scream that equality for women is alien to Muslim tradition, she added, are like those who protested a century ago that banning colonial slavery was anti-Islamic.

It does not bother her that many Muslim scholars, past and present, interpret Islamic history and the Koran differently than she does. “Men have no monopoly on knowing what is right.”

The first United Nations report on the status of Arab women, published in 2006, called Mernissi’s work “pioneering” and described her as a “luminary” in the Islamic world.²⁰ Yet the same report also revealed how far Arab women still have to go. More than five decades after Morocco’s public schools were opened to girls, over sixty percent of its female population still could not read and write—even though public opinion overwhelmingly supported equal education.²¹

Morocco is not an exception. Across the region, almost one half of all Arab females, almost seventy million, were illiterate in 2006—even though females in the Middle East outperform their male counterparts when given the chance. “Arab girls are the better learners,” the United Nations report concluded.

In her indomitable way, Mernissi told me that she believes women in the Middle East have at least turned a corner.

“It’s very simple, really. I reduce everything to information,” she said, tossing her hennaed head. “Historically, only the king and his advisers had information, and beyond that everything was rumor. But technology brought us access to information. In 1991, I got a satellite dish. It brought CNN, but it was also the year of the first Arab satellite stations, and suddenly all the boundaries between private and public, between palace and street, and all the other dichotomies vanished.

“In A Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade told the stories at night, as the daytime was the period of men’s power. Women had influence only in the night. Now, Scheherazade can speak at any time! There’s no more separation of day and night. And the number of women on television—it’s amazing,” she continued.

“The change that took centuries in the West took only a decade in the Third World because of technological advances. And no one can stop it. When I brought a fax here from Paris, I put a scarf on the machine when the telephone guy came to put in a line. But six months later, the government couldn’t ban the fax.

“You know,” she mused, “I recently asked the young woman working for me what she likes to do as a pastime. She told me she listens to tapes to learn French. She was almost illiterate, but with technology she is becoming self-taught. She chats on the Internet.

“Women ten years younger than I am,” Mernissi said, “are from another planet!”

Family harems may have largely disappeared, but the rules that spawned them have not. Most Middle East countries still have two sets of separate and often conflicting laws. One set governs society; the other dictates to women.

After it became independent in 1956, Morocco adopted many French laws inherited from colonial rule. Article Eight of its constitution, for example, stipulates that men and women “enjoy equal political rights.” In 1957, King Mohammed V also unveiled his eldest daughter—though not his wife—in public to signal that the next generation of women need not be hidden away.

At the same time, however, the new government passed a separate set of laws to codify traditions that had governed private life for centuries. It was the king’s compromise: He adopted certain civil and criminal laws to modernize. But under pressure from traditional clerics who wanted a complete restoration of Islamic law once the French left, the king also agreed to enshrine in the law Muslim cultural practices about personal life.

In Morocco, the second set of laws is called the Moudawana, or Code of Personal Status. It relegated females to haremlike status.

The two sets of laws meant that women could vote under the constitution, but remained lifelong minors under the Moudawana. Fathers, husbands, brothers, and even sons were their legal guardians. Females needed written permission to open a business, obtain a passport, or leave the country. A woman could be divorced at the whim of her husband, without a reason, by simple public repudiations without going to court—and even without her knowledge. An unmarried woman who gave birth was sentenced to six months in jail, and the baby was put in an orphanage.

Often referred to simply as “family law,” the Moudawana has been the biggest legal impediment to empowering women.

In the 1980s, an iconoclastic Moroccan dissident named Latifa Jbabdi decided to take on the Moudawana. It became an epic battle. I first heard about Jbabdi in a footnote on page thirty-seven in Mernissi’s memoir. I finally met her in 2006. She is a striking woman, tall and big-boned but largely unadorned. Her jaw is strong; her brown eyes are piercing. She dresses with handsome femininity. She was in a blue suit with soft pinstripes, and a silk blouse. She was wearing no makeup and no jewelry beyond small stud earrings, and her short, brown hair fell in a natural wave. She, too, lived in Rabat.

If Mernissi is phase one, then Jbabdi is phase two.

Jbabdi started out as a communist in the 1970s. As a teenager, she organized strikes by high school students and factory workers.

“We dreamed of revolution,” she told me. “We wanted a rupture with the past. It was the seventies—the traumatic time after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and during the Vietnam War and dissent worldwide.

“We even raised money for Angela Davis,” she chuckled.

Jbabdi read Lenin and Sartre and, for a while, attended meetings of a secret communist cell. “I was looking for a magic formula to change the world. But this group of old men was too Soviet. When it rained in Moscow, they took out their umbrellas in Morocco,” she said, laughing again. “They focused on the elites. It was not what I was looking for to help the working class.” She soon dropped out and joined an emerging group of leftists.

Jbabdi spent more than a decade being tailed, harassed, or hunted by Morocco’s security forces for her dissident activities and strike mobilizations. Once she hid in a Christian cemetery for twelve days, relying on a graveyard worker to bring her bread and tea. Another time she hid in the mountains.

“We lived like wild animals,” she told me, matter-of-factly.

Eventually captured, she was in and out of prison from 1977 until the early 1980s. Occasionally, she was detained preemptively until a protest strike was over. Her worst stint was six months in Casablanca’s notorious prison. Torture was routine; she was blindfolded the entire time.

“They erased completely your femininity. They gave each of us a man’s name,” she recalled. “I was called Saeed.”

Jbabdi was released on medical grounds for heart trouble; she received a pacemaker while still in her twenties. She remained on parole until she was granted an amnesty in 1990.

As she continued to push for political change, however, Jbabdi again grew frustrated with her political allies.

“There was a generation of young women born on the eve of Morocco’s independence or shortly afterwards. We really believed we were equal, but even progressive parties and unions weren’t open to the issue of women’s rights,” she told me. “They all proved to be misogynist.

“That,” she added, “is when we came up with our own initiative.”

In 1987, Jbabdi founded the Union of Feminine Action to confront the taboo of family law.

“You can’t have a constitution that says we can be elected to parliament and decide the direction of the country, but under the Moudawana we have to have a guardian and can’t make basic decisions on the most intimate issues of our lives,” she told me.

In the Middle East, where mosque and state are still deeply intertwined, the Moudawana is the essence of the conflict between modernity and tradition, secular and religious. Unlike civil or criminal law, family law is based on interpretations of the Koran, which is quite specific on subjects ranging from a woman’s menstrual cycle to suckling a baby and the taboo of incest. Conservative clerics argue that, as sacred text, the Moudawana cannot be altered because it is the literal word of God.

The Moudawana’s holy origin has made the status of women the most intractable issue of change in the Middle East.

Jbabdi had to start from scratch. The Union of Feminine Action launched a newsletter that evolved into a magazine. It lobbied lawmakers. It held workshops for women in cities, villages, and shantytowns across Morocco to explain that poverty, domestic abuse, illiteracy, and dependence on men for the most basic decisions were tied to the Moudawana.

“Illiterate women and mothers and housewives came to our meetings in the poorest homes of a shantytown, and when we explained how the Moudawana ruled their lives, a lot of them started knocking on doors too,” Jbabdi told me. “Many became even more active than we were.”

To prove growing support for their cause, the movement launched a petition to demand change. By 1990, it had accumulated one million signatures—forty percent of them from men.

But the petition also sparked the first serious backlash. Conservative clerics preached against the Union of Feminine Action in mosques, appealed to the prime minister to ban it and punish its members, called for police to block the women’s activities—and even issued a fatwa condemning Jbabdi to death.

“We were getting death threats all the time,” she said. “It’s hard to make progress when you’re worried about your life.”

In 1992, King Hassan intervened. In a nationwide television broadcast, he acknowledged that women had legitimate complaints, agreed to meet with them, and pledged to amend the Moudawana.

He also admonished the clerics, “Do not mix religion and politics.”

A year later—after consulting with an all-male panel of senior clerics—the king announced reforms. They were few and modest. Among them: Brides had to consent to marriage. Husbands needed a wife’s permission to take other wives.

More important was the principle. “The Moudawana was no longer so sacred. It could be debated and changed, like any other law,” Jbabdi explained. “We had opened the door.”

Peaceful change rarely comes with a single act or decision, particularly in the Middle East and particularly on women’s rights.

Jbabdi persevered, as did a burgeoning array of women’s groups that had sprung up among the middle and lower classes. She also adapted her tactics. As a former communist, Jbabdi initially blended Marxist ideas, the tactics of Western feminists, and the principles of international laws, including the 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Then she added Islam.

“We realized the movement would not be successful if it was based on women’s rights alone. We began to repossess our Islamic heritage and to read the Koranic texts again, this time from a feminist perspective,” she told me. “We did this for more than two years, and we found many verses that emphasize equality.”

Like other sacred texts, the Koran offers a variety of messages about everything from personal relations to peace. A lot depends on how it is read—or who reads it.

The fourth chapter of the Koran, for example, is entitled “Women.” Verse thirty-four says that men are “maintainers of women.” But verse thirty-two also decrees, “Men shall have the benefit of what they earn and women shall have the benefit of what they earn.” And, although their shares are not equal, verse seven requires, “Men shall have a portion of what the parents and near relatives leave and women shall have a portion of what the parents and the near relatives leave, whether there is little or much of it.”

On the sensitive subject of polygamy, for which Islam is most criticized by the outside world, Muslim feminists now interpret the Koran as preferring one wife—and more than that only in a certain context.

Verse three stipulates, “If you fear that you cannot act equitably towards orphans, then marry such women as seem good to you, two and three and four; but if you fear that you will not do justice, then marry only one or what your right hands possess; this is more proper, that you not deviate from the right course.”

On divorce, longstanding custom allows a man to end his marriage by simple repudiation, repeating “I divorce thee” three times. But the Koran also says, “If you fear a breach between the two, then appoint a judge from his people and a judge from her people.”

The new generation of feminists argues that the Koran may even be an ally.

“We discovered that Islamic law is really a set of guiding principles open to interpretation,” Jbabdi told me. She is as slow and deliberate in her speech as Mernissi is fast and frenetic.

“After that,” Jbabdi added, “we tried to build all our arguments around Islam and prove that all change was rooted in Islamic principles.”

For another seven years, Morocco’s feminists continued to mobilize other women, lobby publicly, and pressure the monarchy to act. Then in 1999, King Hassan died. In one of his first acts, Morocco’s new young monarch promised changes for women, whose “interests are still denied.” His prime minister soon introduced a 118-page plan to address illiteracy, poverty, political discrimination, and reproductive health problems among women.

The plan polarized Moroccans, however. Feminists and modernists were pitted against conservatives and fundamentalists—and their differences spilled over onto the streets.

On March 12, 2000, Morocco witnessed two of the biggest demonstrations in its history. In Rabat, sixty women’s groups, unions, and human-rights organizations rallied more than 300,000 people to support the government plan. Jbabdi was the coordinator. Six government ministers participated.

“No to reactionaries. Yes to equality,” they shouted, as they streamed down the capital’s tree-lined boulevards.²²

In Casablanca, conservative Islamist groups mobilized at least one million Moroccans to protest the plan. They marched down the streets of Morocco’s commercial center in separate columns, men in one, women in hejab in the other.

“The feminists said it was all or nothing—and the fundamentalists said it was nothing,” Jbabdi recalled. “This was our period of labor pains.”

The plan was shelved. As a compromise, King Mohammed formed a royal commission to come up with its own reforms to the Moudawana. Jbabdi was one of three women—out of fifteen members, including theologians—appointed by the king.

“Three is nothing for Americans,” she recalled. “But for us this was revolutionary because we were going to be changing what was accepted as Islamic law. This was almost inconceivable.”

The commission labored two years and produced almost 100 proposals.

Jbabdi worked outside the commission too. To pressure male members, she orchestrated an intensive lobbying campaign by women’s groups.

They tracked down abused women and conducted a statistical analysis of the violence—and sent copies of their findings to the commission members.

They identified more than 10,000 women whose court cases for domestic abuse, financial abandonment, homelessness, and other family problems had lingered for up to fifteen years—and then flooded commission members with thousands of postcards detailing each case and its court number.

They held and videotaped mock trials, showing the problems women face with real lawyers, juries, and judges, to illustrate the legal limbo for women—and sent the videos of the proceedings to commission members.

“We became quite creative as lobbyists,” Jbabdi recalled. “It had an extraordinary impact.”

In 2003, Morocco’s feminists got an unexpected break from an unlikely source—al Qaeda. The Casablanca bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack in Moroccan history, put all Islamist groups on the defensive. It changed the political atmosphere completely. Women were among the first to take to the streets to protest against extremism. The government soon cracked down on extremists, introduced education reforms, and moved on the Moudawana.

Five months later, King Mohammed VI took the royal commission’s recommendations and proposed far-reaching changes in family law.

“The proposed legislation is meant to reconcile lifting the iniquity imposed on women, protecting children’s rights and safeguarding men’s dignity,” he said in a speech to the opening of parliament.

This time, there was little resistance. Parliament passed the law in 2004.

The new Moudawana raised the minimum age of marriage from fifteen to eighteen. Marriage became an act of free will, and women could wed without consent of a male family member. Men and women entered marriage with equal rights, and husbands and wives were equally responsible for their households and families. The language requiring a wife to obey her husband was abolished. Marriage was certified by a judge, not a religious clerk—as was divorce. Men could no longer simply abandon their wives.

After a twenty-year battle, Moroccan women became among the most legally protected females in the Middle East—at least in theory.

Jbabdi called the new Moudawana “the moment of enlightenment, the harvest, not just for women. It is the biggest democratic step forward for Morocco.

“The family space is the heart and anchor of society, the place where behaviors and values and societal norms are established, and now the Moudawana will educate future generations on equality. This is the seed for everything else in democracy.”

In a touch of irony, the women’s movement had taken a toll on Jbabdi’s personal life. The mother of two teenage boys, she was going through her own divorce as the new laws passed.

The new Moudawana opened the way to other changes. In 2006, Morocco graduated its first class of fifty female Muslim preachers, or guides, to work among the poor, bring women into a sacrosanct profession, and help counter the drift toward Islamic extremism.²³

In practice, however, most Moroccan women still faced serious disadvantages. Women still had unequal access and grounds to divorce. Polygamy was still legal, although it had to be authorized by a family judge. Sexual relations outside marriage still made women liable for up to a year in jail, and criminal prosecution of a pregnant unmarried mother was still on the books—while the father faced no penalty. Unequal inheritance traditions did not change. A divorced woman could still lose custody of her children over the age of seven if she remarried. And illegitimate children still had citizenship problems.²⁴

The bigger problem was that women had little access to information about the new laws. With up to eighty percent of rural women illiterate, they could not even read them, much less take action. And the government did little to educate women about the changes. Several judges stuck to traditional ways. And many families adhered to the old rules, including virginity tests before marriage.

Millions of Moroccan women also remained trapped in poverty. In 2005, Human Rights Watch reported that some 600,000 female children, some as young as five years old, worked as domestic help. Morocco’s labor code did not regulate domestic work, nor did inspectors enter private homes to check.²⁵ The idea of girls assuming control over their lives remained a far-fetched dream.

Morocco’s new feminist movement and the Moudawana reforms it produced were a starting point, not an end.

 

The third great compromise is détente with Islamists willing to work within the system and with other parties. It is also a risky step—for both sides.

Political Islam, in its disparate forms, will be the most energetic idiom of opposition in the Middle East for at least the next generation. Governments will pay a growing price for ignoring, isolating, or persecuting nonviolent movements, which could end up making them even more popular. The Islamist trend will only evolve or burn out under two conditions: When parties willing to work within the system and with other parties are allowed to participate, and when the desperate problems that fuel political unrest are addressed.

More than thirty years after the rise of political Islam, a growing number of Islamic movements have begun searching for compromise with Middle East governments. They need to be given political space. Some may be, in the end, the most effective barrier against the Jihadi militants. Secular and liberal and pro-Western forces clearly have proven that they, together, cannot defeat bin Ladenism.

“Islamists on principle and on pragmatic grounds must be included in any democratic transformation of the region,” Egyptian democratic activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim said at a 2005 briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington.

They are substantial. They are on the ground. They are disciplined. They are committed. And they have been performing very important social services for the poor, for the needy. And they have managed to project an image of a corruption-free political force in contrast to regimes that are plagued by corruption…. They are substantial constituencies and they have to be included in any scheme for political governance.²⁶

One of the most interesting experiments in compromise is the Party of Justice and Development in Morocco. It may offer a new model.

“We are a political party, not a religious party,” Saadeddine Othmani, the party chairman, insisted with the same hand-waving insistence the first, second, and third time we talked. “We are the most moderate party in the Arab world with an Islamic reference,” he said. “But we are not Islamist!” He makes the point repeatedly in speeches, interviews, and private discussions to counter stereotypes that any party with an Islamic base automatically has a religious agenda, is made up of fanatics, and is inherently undemocratic.

Othmani cofounded the party. Born in 1956, he is a thin man who moves and speaks with quick energy. His face is narrow; his dark hair is very, very short, as is his beard. He grins easily and often, revealing a row of pearly white teeth. He is a psychiatrist by training; he worked for many years in a government hospital.

The party’s headquarters is in a converted home set behind a tawny-gold stucco fence on a tranquil, tree-lined street in Rabat. It has no security at the door, no bodyguards for officials, no searches, no metal scanners, no monitoring cameras. The understated office has no posters of religious sheikhs, no framed Koranic verses written on black velvet, no models of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The walls are decorated instead with large drawings of the party symbol—an old-fashioned kerosene lamp, a light burning in its belly. A floor-to-ceiling version dominates the conference room.

The only picture on any wall is of Morocco’s king.

The Party of Justice and Development, popularly called the PJD, is trying to carve out a new political niche in the Middle East as a Muslim movement neither militant nor assertively Islamist. It is not trying to topple the monarchy. It acknowledges the king as Commander of the Faithful. It accepts his power to handpick the entire government. It does not seek to impose Islamic rule. Women members do not have to wear hejab. Members do not even have to be Muslim.

The Party of Justice and Development grew out of Islamist organizations formed in the 1970s, when Islam moved into the political arena regionwide. They metamorphosed in the 1980s and then merged into a conservative party with Islamic values in 1992.

“You could compare us with the Christian Democratic parties in Europe,” Othmani explained, switching from Arabic to French. “They base their goals on principles in their faith, but their platforms center on civil, not religious, issues.”

The party takes a similar approach to the contentious issue of imposing Islamic law. “Unfortunately, to many people, Sharia has come to mean only the penal code,” Othmani explained. “We derive our principles—justice and dignity and human development—from the essence of Islamic law. But we’ve moved away from using it explicitly in the party charter.”

The party has redefined Morocco’s messy political landscape, which teems with more than two dozen political parties. Most are built around political cliques. The majority are socialist or liberal—and fairly unproductive. Many have been co-opted by the monarchy.

In its electoral debut in 1997, the party deliberately limited the number of races it contested to prevent a political panic. But it still shook up—and shocked—the system by winning fourteen seats in parliament.

At the next election in 2002, the party tripled its numbers. It came in third in a huge field, even though it ran in only sixty percent of electoral districts. When the top two winning parties joined a coalition government, the Party of Justice and Development became the official opposition—arguably the first serious opposition since Morocco gained independence.

Like most other Middle East countries, Morocco’s political parties are all ultimately beholden to the same autocratic leader. Since independence, parliament has never dared to test either the monarchy or its own powers because the king has the right to dissolve the legislature at his discretion. Under King Hassan, every parliament in four decades was either suspended or indefinitely “extended” to defer an election.²⁷ The idea of having a genuinely diverse, independent, and outspoken parliament as a check and balance on the executive has been virtually alien.

But the PJD injected momentum and a new discipline into Moroccan politics. For one thing, its legislators actually showed up—in a body rife with absenteeism. Legally, legislators are supposed to provide written excuses for absence or be docked pay, but the rule had long been ignored.

“If we didn’t attend sessions, nobody would be in parliament,” Othmani said, with a chuckle.

Among its own members, each of the forty-two legislators is required to draft one question about government performance to be asked orally in parliament each week, to submit one written question monthly for a ministry to formally answer, and to propose one new bill each year. It also requires all its legislators to give twenty percent of their government paychecks back to the party—one half for local party work and one half for national activities.

“We are a poor party,” Othmani said, with a shrug and another grin.

The party focused heavily on three issues central to real change in Morocco: dirt-poor poverty among more than ten million Moroccans, corruption endemic among the political elite, and constitutional reform to empower parliament as a separate body not controlled by the monarchy.

“We have no problem with the king, but we do need to have a balance between powers in the state,” Aziz Rebbah explained the day I visited party headquarters. Rebbah is a Canadian-educated information technology engineer who heads the party’s youth organization.

“That’s why we’re trying to start a national debate on constitutional reform,” he said. “The objective is not to limit the power of the king, but to enhance the ability of the government and the prime minister to act.”

Public-opinion polls regularly predict steady growth for the PJD—potentially even winning the largest vote in future elections. A 2006 poll by the International Republican Institute in Washington showed that up to forty-seven percent of Moroccan voters leaned toward the PJD—a huge number in a field of more than two dozen parties.²⁸ Getting even twenty percent could provide a decisive plurality.

The party has since scrambled to emphasize that a victory would not lead to an overhaul of Moroccan politics.

“Parties like ours have a duty to take part in political reform, but not to impose religious solutions,” Othmani told me.

Elected to head the party in 2004, Othmani campaigned both at home and abroad to allay fears. He outlined the party’s vision at a 2006 speech in Washington, D.C.

The state in Islam can by no means be described as a religious type…. In Islam, the ruler does not derive legitimacy from some supernatural force. Rather, the ruler is an average individual, who derives power from the nation that willingly selected him and to which he is responsible in this world….

Islam has no fixed form of governance or of citizen participation. Instead, this has been left for human creativity and to be decided by man’s ever-changing circumstance…. The people’s will is the decisive criterion.²⁹

Among Middle East parties, the difference between fundamentalist, Islamist, and an “Islamic reference” can seem a semantic shill to skeptics. The differences often seem nuanced. Definitions also vary by party; context varies by country. But the distinction is the essence of an emerging political trend in the Middle East.

“If you compare us with the Muslim Brotherhood, there is a big difference. Oh, yes!” Othmani told me. “The leader of the Brotherhood has the job for life. In our party, I can serve only two terms.”

“We’re also democratic in the way we elect our officials and decide policy,” he added. “Every official is selected from a local, regional, or national conference, not picked from the top.” Othmani was elected in a three-way contest by 1,600 members of his party.

“All together, we vote on policy, too!” he said.

The search for compromise by Islamic parties began in the late 1990s. Among most, it is still at a tentative stage. Reasons for a shift range widely.

The first major factor is the reaction to past confrontations.

In Algeria, a civil war between Islamic extremists and the military government killed almost 200,000 people between 1992 and 2002—and solved little. The war erupted after the 1992 military coup aborted Algeria’s democratic transition, just as a nonviolent Islamic party running in a field of fifty-four parties was about to sweep parliamentary elections. The popular Islamic Salvation Front was banned, and its leaders were detained. The Islamist trend then splintered, spawning extremists who fought the military, sabotaged its government, and terrorized the public. The violence was often bestial. No one was safe.

A stark message rippled through the region: Confrontation can be costly in human life and to the cause of change. When the war ended, an autocratic government was still in place. And the chronic problems of the poor were only worse.

Morocco, which shares a 1,000-mile border with Algeria, shivered as Algeria was badly shaken by turmoil and brutality.

“Our party is trying to do something good for the country. That’s why you’ll hear our members talk a lot about not wanting Morocco to repeat the Algerian experience,” Abdelkader Amara, a young member of parliament and head of the party’s political section, told me.

Other Islamist movements—Egypt’s Center Party and Muslim Brotherhood, the Iraqi Islamic Party and Dawa, Jordan’s Islamic Action Front and Center Party, Kuwait’s Islamic Constitutional Movement, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, and Yemen’s Reformist Union—have begun running for office and working within government institutions. Even groups with provocative names, such as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, now participate in secular politics. Their transition is only beginning. But they have rejected violence and distanced themselves from extremists.

A second factor is the rise of reform movements.

The 1997 surprise victory of reformers in Iran, where the revolution had launched political Islam a generation earlier, gradually inspired rethinking regionwide. Even though reformers were ousted in 2005, the mere fact of diversity in Iranian politics demonstrated the possibility of options. Reform entered the Islamist lexicon.

Philosophically, Othmani identifies with Soroush, Iran’s leading philosopher, but he goes one step further. “We want renewal, which goes beyond reformation,” Othmani told me. “Reform means using what you have and making small new interpretations. Renewal means radical change, to produce whole new ideas, not just to fix the core.”

He takes an especially bold stand on the relationship between mosque and state. Jihadists want to blend the two after ousting the autocrats. But Othmani argues that the Prophet Mohammed had separate roles as religious leader and political chief of the new community of Muslims. “When we distinguish between these two behaviors, it gives us the precedent to separate political and religious institutions,” Othmani explained.

The third factor is the reaction to al Qaeda.

After September 11, 2001, the gap widened among Islamists. Activists were forced to take a definitive stand on terrorism. Public alienation also increased as extremism took a mounting toll on Muslims themselves. Between 2002 and 2005, public-opinion polls found opposition to violence against civilians in the name of Islam had soared. Disapproval grew in pivotal countries such as Morocco, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Lebanon, according to the Pew Research Center.

Opposition was highest in Morocco, where it more than doubled—to almost eighty percent. The shift followed the 2003 Casablanca bombings by an al Qaeda ally. The survey also found support waning in most countries for Osama bin Laden.³⁰

A fourth factor is the impact of the stunning Islamist upset in the Palestinian elections.

The Hamas victory in 2006 scared many Islamic groups. Its win only deepened Palestinian problems. The cutoff of international aid left seventy percent unemployed, sparked deadly new clashes with Israel, and ended up threatening the existence of the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas made a mistake, several officials in Morocco’s Party of Justice and Development told me.

“It would have been much better for the Palestinians, and also for the situation in the Middle East, if they had come into government gradually,” said Amara, the parliamentarian, who is also a veterinary specialist in the pathology of ornithological diseases, such as bird flu.

“I think they were taken to power by what we call The Wave. The same thing could happen in Morocco. It’s the reason that we ran candidates in only sixty percent of the districts in 2002,” Amara explained.

“We did it deliberately to prevent being taken to power by The Wave.”

Other factors foster political compromise: Geographic proximity to democratic governments, notably Mediterranean countries close to Europe; historic political experience and ties to the outside world, even through colonialism; cultural diversity that exposes communities to each other; and economic need.

Morocco reflects a special confluence of factors.

A country slightly larger than California with a 1,200-mile coast bordering both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, Morocco straddles two worlds. It is both Arab and African. In the seventh century, the invading Arabs called it the Farthest Land of the Setting Sun.

To this day, Morocco remains the westernmost outpost for both Islam and the Arab world.

It is also the closest Arab gateway to Europe, just fourteen miles from the Strait of Gibraltar. Ties between Arab and Western cultures date back to the eighth century—via Morocco.

After sweeping across North Africa, the Arab army used Morocco as a base and Morocco’s Berber tribes as recruits to move into Europe. The Arabs penetrated the Iberian Peninsula, then came within 200 miles of Paris. They controlled the region for the next 500 years. The rich Moorish culture that took root in Spain borrowed heavily from the Berbers as well as the Arabs. Andalusia eventually declared its independence from the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad and established its own caliphate in Córdoba in the tenth century. It was the largest and the most culturally sophisticated polity in Europe at the time.

Morocco’s proximity to Europe has had an enduring impact. Spain occupied northern Morocco in the nineteenth century. Morocco then became a French protectorate in 1912. Since independence in 1956, Morocco’s troubled economy has been dependent on tourism by Europeans and Americans plus remittances from Moroccan workers in Europe.

The crosscurrents remain strong.

Morocco is also the least Arab country in the diverse Arab world. The vast majority of Morocco’s thirty-three million people are also at least part Berber, a non-Arab ethnic group that can be traced to North Africa since Neolithic times. Up to one half are pure Berber, and Berber is still widely spoken. The king’s mother was Berber. Othmani is Berber. Driss Benzekri is part Berber. The Berber roots reflect the country’s African identity. Morocco is as much of a player in the African Union as it is in the Arab League.

Morocco is also far from the front lines of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the main reason that the monarchy has been willing to deal with Israel and mediate peace talks. King Hassan broke with the Arab world to host Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in 1986. Israel opened a small diplomatic mission in Morocco in 1994. King Hassan also brokered talks between Israel and Yasser Arafat in 1995. And when the king died in 1999, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Moroccan-born Foreign Minister David Levy attended the funeral.

Morocco is, in many ways, one the most obvious places for a compromise to flourish.

But compromises also come down to making choices—and to leadership.

Othmani was among Morocco’s early Islamic activists. He came from a religious family. His father was a professor of Islamic law. As a student, Othmani was a leading figure in Islamic Youth, the first major Islamist movement in Morocco. Founded in 1972, its focus was Sunni students. Its agenda was antiregime. When the youth group spawned a militant wing in 1981, however, Othmani quit.

“It embraced violence and undemocratic activities,” he told me, “so many of us split off and organized ourselves in the Islamic Association.”

He paid a price for his activism. He was jailed for almost five months in 1981, while still in medical school. After he was released, he spent the next decade organizing Islamic activists in civil-society groups, running an Islamic magazine, and exploring ways to form a legal Islamic party.

“I never, never envisioned I’d be in parliament,” he told me.

But in 1992, the groups he helped pull together took over a moribund party that still had legal status and turned it into Morocco’s first Islamic political party. He was one of fourteen who won a seat in parliament in 1997.

Othmani has since been a consensus builder, crafting compromises on issues that make Islamic parties most controversial—and preventing the party from being outlawed.

Women’s rights is one of the most contentious issues. The party helped to mobilize almost one million men and women to protest changes to the Moudawana in 2000. It labeled the initial draft “a bid to corrupt Moroccan families” that would foster a “culture of dissoluteness” by eliminating Islam-inspired provisions in Moroccan law.³¹ But when the king made it part of his 2003 agenda, the party debated it—heatedly, Othmani conceded—and in the end supported the new Moudawana.

Ironically, the Party of Justice and Development is among the most inclusive to women. It has a fifteen-percent quota for women in all branches, the highest of any party. Among the forty-two party members who won seats in parliament in 2002, six were women, matched only by the Independence Party. And after the 2003 local elections, it had the highest number of women in local councils.

The most contentious foreign-policy issue for Islamic parties throughout the Middle East is Israel. In a 2006 speech in Washington, Othmani spoke at length about Islam’s early relations with Jews. He cited the Medina Charter, often considered the first constitution in Islam. It was enacted by the Prophet Mohammed following his migration to Medina in 622. The Charter, Othmani noted, stipulates:

Any Jew who may follow us shall be supported and treated equally and fairly…. The Jews may pay as much as the Muslims shall pay at times of war. The Jews of Bani-Auf are a believing nation. The Jews have their own religion and the Muslims likewise. This goes for themselves, goes for their followers, save whoever may commit a crime.³²

Islam intends to insure, Othmani concluded, that “Every man has the right to believe in any religion and shall not be harassed.”

I asked Othmani if his party was willing to accept Israel’s right to exist—or even use the word Israel, which Islamist parties elsewhere refused to do.

“Yes, yes, we use the word Israel. Israel exists, of course,” Othmani said. “What we need to find is a solution for both parties.”

A two-state solution? I asked him.

“Why not?” he replied. “We need mutual recognition.”

The party’s biggest compromise is its go-slow policy. Under pressure from the government, it agreed to run candidates for only one quarter of city council seats in the 2003 local elections. Autocratic governments are often most wary of devolving power because Islamist groups build strong local bases; they often deliver more of what they promise in terms of local services and development.

When I visited party headquarters, the leadership was in the midst of a similar debate—over how many seats to contest in 2007 national elections for parliament. Othmani favored running a full slate. Aziz Rebbah, the Canadian-educated engineer, argued against it.

“The population’s expectations from our party are bigger than our capacity,” Rebbah told me. “We also need time to create trust between us and other actors in the country, like the business community.

“We should have at least five more years in government, to create more confidence at home and to convince American and French decision makers that we are not dangerous and can discuss mutual interests between us,” he added. “So I think we need to be one of the main parties, but not the main party.”

The party’s compromises, however, have made it vulnerable to charges of being co-opted by the monarchy—and failure. It has not only stood by the king; several PJD officials work in government ministries.

“The monarchy has the support of the Moroccan public. We feel it doesn’t contradict democracy,” Othmani told me. “There are many monarchies in Western democracies.”

The compromises, so far, have been largely one-sided. The monarchy has given the Party of Justice and Development a bit of public space but retained all power. Even if it won a parliamentary election, the PJD might not be able to either lead a government or pass legislation, since the king appoints the prime minister and can dissolve parliament at his whim.

The failure to share power or enact political reform puts the monarchy in a precarious position, for the Party of Justice and Development is neither the largest Islamic movement in Morocco nor the biggest threat to the royal palace.

Despite its traditionally moderate brand of Islam, Morocco has several other more hard-line movements. The most militant is the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, an ally of al Qaeda sired by Moroccan dissidents trained in Afghanistan. In the 1990s, many of its members returned home and cultivated new cells, particularly in the cinder-block slums of Casablanca that teem with more than 300,000 people.

The group also has cells in Europe. Besides the 2003 Casablanca attacks, the group’s militants are linked to the 2004 bombings in Madrid, when ten bombs went off simultanteously on four commuter trains at rush hour. Almost 200 were killed, almost 2,000 injured. It was the worst terrorist attack in Spanish history.

The Moroccan militants want an Islamist regime to replace the monarchy. They also support al Qaeda’s confrontation with the West.³³

The largest and most popular Moroccan Islamist group is Justice and Charity. The movement is nonviolent but refuses to participate in politics.³⁴ It was founded by Sheikh Abdesalam Yassine, a charismatic cleric, who is widely compared to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. Both led campaigns against powerful monarchies in the 1960s and 1970s. Both called for a monarchy to be replaced by a republic. Both men also went to jail, fueling their popularity.

Yassine launched his party with a 120-page open letter to King Hassan in 1974. It accused the monarchy of tolerating corruption. It condemned the regime for allowing Western-style moral decay. And it warned that an Islamic deluge would sweep the monarchy from power.

For much of the next quarter century, Yassine was intermittently locked up in a state psychiatric hospital, imprisoned, or under house arrest. His message of good works for the poor nevertheless tapped into deep discontent among the poor and triggered a groundswell of support, as his daughter carried on the campaign in his absence.

In 2000, shortly after his father died, King Mohammed released Yassine and other political prisoners. But the sheikh did not repent. He penned another long open letter charging that the late king had looted billions from the national treasury and calling on the King Mohammed to save his father from eternal damnation by returning the people’s “legitimate belongings” to alleviate Morocco’s enormous poverty.³⁵

Yassine’s powerful challenge has given Justice and Charity credibility among Islamists—and posed the biggest challenge to both the monarchy and the PJD.

When he inherited power, King Mohammed VI pledged to become the “king of the poor.” “We are firmly determined to lead our people to a democracy which involves all participants and incites everybody to take part in the economic and social Jihad,” he told parliament in 2000.

But little changed. One third of Moroccans still live below the poverty line. One in five is still unemployed. Infant mortality rates are very high. And prospects for rapid improvement are limited, because roughly one half of Moroccans are still illiterate, putting significant progress a generation away, at least.

The young king also tightened the cordon around political Islam after the Casablanca bombings. In 2003, the government introduced an antiterrorism law that allows it to monitor mosques, religious leaders, and the religious content of textbooks. “Apologizing for terrorism,” widely interpreted as explaining it in terms of local conditions, became a crime.³⁶

In 2005, the regime proposed another law that barred all religious and ethnic references in party platforms. It effectively blocked any group more ambitious than Othmani’s movement—and even put it on notice.

Othmani acknowledged the tensions—and the growing limitations. “As an opposition party, we have no ability to get our bills enacted,” he told me. “Our approach is to have gradual progress and avoid haste and shortcuts, which is a major mistake committed by many leftists, nationalists, and Islamist movements over the decades.”

“The strategy for us is to be patient,” he said. “The question now is whether the population has enough patience to stick with us.”

In Morocco’s 2007 parliamentary elections, in a field of thirty-three parties, the PJD did not do as well as it had expected. Yet the Islamists won more votes than ever. And the PJD improved its position in parliament. It officially became Morocco’s second most popular party.