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| Africa: North | |
| Morocco tempers Islamists | |
| 2004-07-19 | |
| In a fiery sermon last month, an influential state-appointed cleric declared it a sin for women to work. He condemned the "intermingling of sexes in civil services" and chastised the "scantily dressed women" on Moroccan beaches. The sermon at Morocco's largest and most prestigious mosque has sparked a war of words between modernists and Islamists as Morocco tries to modernize without isolating its conservative religious base or emboldening a growing number of radical Islamists. "The problem is that there is a discrepancy between the official religious speech and the popular speech of the Islamists," says Islam specialist Mohamed Darif, noting that Moroccan authorities have vowed to rein in radical clerics and revise religious rhetoric to spread a more moderate Islam. The growing popularity of ultraconservative Islam has the government worried that moderate Islam is slowly losing ground to radical Wahhabism, which many fear could turn Morocco into a breeding ground for terrorists.The spreadof radical Islam also makes it more difficult to institute modern reforms, such as implementing the country's relatively new women's rights law. In recent years, the Internet and satellite TV have made it possible to package and sell to a broader audience the austere theories of foreign Wahhabi clerics like Hassan Yacoubi, Youssef al-Qardawi, and Moroccan and Saudi-educated Omar al-Qazabri. In response, Moroccan authorities are trying new tacks to clamp down on extremism. The Ulema Councils, which have always been a tool to legitimize the religious status of the king, have been reorganized to spread the government-approved version of Islam among Moroccans and to put the country's 32,000 mosques - which are both state-controlled and privately funded - under tight scrutiny. In a speech last April before the country's most renowned ulemas, King Mohamed VI vowed to "revamp the domain of religious affairs in order to shield Morocco against the perils of extremism and terrorism."
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| Posted by:Dragon Fly |