Bøger af Fatima Sadiqi

Using a multi-disciplinary approach to the Amazigh art of weaving, the author argues that women's ancestral rug designs inspired the Amazigh alphabet Tifinagh. In doing so, the book sheds new light on the active role women played in the process of codifying the Amazigh language.

This volume deals with the complex but poorly understood relationship between women, gender, and language in Morocco, a Muslim, multilingual, multicultural, and developing country. The hypothesis on which the book is based is that an understanding of gender perception and women's agency can be achieved only by taking into account the structure of power in a specific culture and that language is an important component of this power. In Moroccan culture, history, geography, Islam, orality, multilingualism, social organization, economic status, and political system constitute the superstructures of power within which factors such as social differences, contextual differences, and identity differences interact in the daily linguistic performances of gender. Moroccan women are far from constituting a homogeneous group, consequently the choices available to them vary in nature and empowering capacity, thus 'widening' the spectrum of gender beyond cultural limits.

This book is a tribute to the memory of Sadiqi''s father Mouhamd ou Lahcen (around 1919-2005), a rural, illiterate, self-made Berber man who served in the French army before joining the Moroccan army after independence in 1956. In addition to the Sadiqi family s recollections, the author interviewed twenty-five Moroccan women of her generation whose fathers were in the military and who are now feminist leaders in various fields. In so doing she seeks to both honour the memory of her father and his generation of military rural Berber men, and draw attention to the forgotten role of these men in opening the door of education to the second generation of Moroccan feminists. Marginalised in both the colonial and Moroccan narratives, as well as in the Moroccan feminist discourses, the legacy of these men deserves recognition in the social history of modern Morocco.

Both a scholarly and personal critique of current feminist Moroccan discourses, this book is a call for a larger-than-Islam framework that accommodates the Berber dimension. Sadiqi argues that current feminist discourse, both secular and Islamic ones, are not only divergent but limit the rich heritage, knowledge, and art of Berber women.