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Reforming Islamic family law within the religious framework: the « best practices » strategy
by Khalid Chraibi

Many people in the Muslim world believe, wrongly, that shari’ah is a compilation of legal rules which are uniformly applied in all Muslim countries. But, the facts are otherwise: these rules vary significantly from one country to another, as well as over time. As a result, the status of women in Muslim countries, which is ruled by shari’ah, differs in many ways from one country to another. On any given issue, some national “personal status codes” grant more rights to women or better protect their interests than other codes.

According to feminine NGOs working in the field of Muslim women’s rights, if Governments accepted to apply the more favourable rules on any Islamic family law issue (designated as the “best practices”), this would contribute significantly to the reform of family law “within the religious framework”, bringing it closer to contemporary international standards. (more…)

Cyberspace is increasingly crowded with videos, the virtual youtubization of the internet. This is especially the case for documentaries. Youtube has a wide range of videos on Islam, from professional films to homemade khutbas and television reruns. The diversity of Muslim practice is available, as is the worse Islamophobia, with just a click of the mouse and a wifi point. This ease of access is also convenient for professors, who can often find relevant video excerpts to power point into their lectures. Of the numerous videos out there, here is one well worth watching: Sufi Soul - The Mystic Music of Islam, a 50-minute film directed by Simon Broughton for Channel 4 in the U.K. To watch it, click here.

Here is a brief description of the film: (more…)

[The following is a review by Omar El Kouch of Al-Madina al-Islami wal-Ouçoulya wal-Irhab: Muqaraba Jinsya, (Islamic City, Fundamentalism and Terrorism: a Sexual Approach), Beirut, Arab Rationalist League, Dar Es Saqi, 2008, 208 pages, ISBN 978-1-85516-287-7 by Abdessamad Dialmy. The review is translated here from Arabic into English by Said Allibou and Imad Mahhou (Mohamed V University, Rabat, Morocco).]

The new book of Prof. Dr. Abdessamad Dialmy holds a new treatment and handling, where the author attaches a particular importance to the sexual factor in the composition and the reasoning of a fundamentalist, radical and terrorist personality. This is a factor which is absent in the various studies on fundamentalist and radical movements in the Kingdom of Morocco and witnessed in the rise of radical movements and incidents of violence and bombings, fields of study and research. (more…)

A year ago from August 8-13 an international conference on “Music in the World of Islam” was held in Assilah, Morocco, jointly sponsored by The Assilah Forum Foundation (Assilah, Morocco) and the Maison des Cultures du Monde (Paris, France). The papers from this conference are now available in pdf format online. Music and dance are described for Afghanistan, Algeria, Andalusia, Azerbeijan, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Central Asia, East Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Kuwait, Liberia, Malaysia, Morocco, Russia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey and Yemen.

A description of the conference is described by its main organizer, Pierre Bois: (more…)

One of the most important German geographers of the late 19th century was Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), whose three-volume Völkerkunde (Leipzig and Vienna, Bibliographisches Institut, 1890) is one of those encyclopedia cultural accounts that circulated just as the discipline of anthropology was getting off (in this case literally “on”) the ground. While now a text for curiosity rather than critical scholarship on peoples and cultures, Ratzel’s work is still a fascinating portrayal of cultures being colonized for both revealing the biases of the day and the then-contemporary illustrations of people and material culture. My university library recently divested itself of uncirculated books in storage and one of these was an 1890 edition of the third volume on “Die Kulturvölker der Alten und Neuen Welt.” Whether it was the eye-watering althochdeutsch script of the volume or the mere fact it was written in German, no student or professor at Hofstra ever checked this volume out.

In salvaging a third of Ratzel’s opus for a mere dollar, I could not help but be drawn to the illustrations, mostly lithographs but with a few beautiful color plates. (more…)

Scene in Meknes, Morocco

by Emilio Spadola
Colgate University
Dept of Sociology and Anthropology

Recently, my efforts to think on Moroccans’ quality of modern (i.e., mass-mediated) life have turned on violence both there and in the US, and, especially, to two forms of youth violence: suicide bombings and suicide shootings. In 2007 Moroccans witnessed separate bombings in Casablanca and Meknes; in separate cases Moroccan state intelligence traced other accused suicide bombers to one neighborhood in Tetouan. In the US in December an Omaha teenager with an automatic weapon shot and killed eight mall goers, then himself; four deaths shortly after in Colorado added to the long year of suicide sprees by young men: six deaths in a Utah mall in February, 33 deaths on the Virginia Tech campus in April.

Emphasizing putative differences, cultural pundits habitually link suicide bombings to the Middle East, and, specifically, to an Islamic culture of violence. And shooting sprees seem typically, if pathologically, American. They are nonetheless strikingly redolent. Yet to compare them, that is, to abstract them from their separate contexts, takes special care. In so doing one faces what Benedict Anderson calls the “specter of comparisons,” that is, the distinctly modern moment in which persons appear, like commodities and print, as serial copies. Yet it is precisely this imagined quality of commensurability—when “anyone” rather than a specific someone can be a target (of mass-mediated messages)—that marks as contemporary suicide bombing and suicide shooting. (more…)

[Interior of the Ryad Mabrouka, a restored guesthouse in Fez medina.]

A trivia question: what may have been the largest city in the known world in 1180 CE? Would you believe Fez (also spelled Fes) in modern day Morocco? Less famous today than Casablanca (thanks to Humphrey Bogart) or Marrakesh, Fes is fascinating for its long history and extraordinary architecture. The Qaraouiyine Mosque, built in 859, boasts the oldest university in the world. The mosque/university library held an estimated 320,000 volumes by 1613 CE. Then there are the palaces of various sultans, the schools, the market and craft buildings, most enclosed within a medina of narrow allies that no cars can penetrate. Here was the a refuge for the 12th century scholar Maimonides, who lived in Fez with his family for five years after being forced to leave Cordoba in Andalusia. Not surprisingly the heritage of Fez makes it a protected World Heritage city of UNESCO. Exactly a week ago, I was visiting Fez as a tourist, an outsider entering a world dedicated to the inside. (more…)

Moroccan Village Funnels Suicide Bombers to Iraq
NPR Morning Edition, April 25, 2007

Moroccan authorities believe the village of Tetuan has sent as many as 30 suicide bombers from the North African village to Iraq. Scott Atran, senior fellow at City University of New York’s Center on Terrorism, briefed the National Security Council on the issue in March.

Click here to hear the story.

More details were provided at a recent conference, including: (more…)