MAINTENANCE. The historian Pierre Vermeren is one of the guests of the debate that “Le Point” and the Charente bar are organizing this Friday, August 30, as part of the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival.
The Moroccan Family Code (Moudawana), promulgated in 2004, has enabled several advances for women but this major reform has encountered, in practice, numerous obstacles, thus revealing its weaknesses. To “correct these imperfections”, particularly with regard to the ban on polygamy and the marriage of minors, King Mohammed VI appointed a few months ago a commission responsible for making proposals for reform.
The prescriptions of this assembly, made up of government representatives, senior magistrates and religious figures, are now in the hands of the sovereign, whose arbitrations are awaited. Nothing has filtered out about the intentions of the monarch, who has nevertheless expressed his desire to “remove certain obstacles”, while recalling, in his capacity as “Commander of the Faithful”, that he “would do nothing to authorize what God has prohibited”. Therefore, equality between boys and girls in matters of inheritance, and the decriminalization of sexual relations outside of marriage are not on the agenda. For Pierre Vermeren, professor of contemporary history at Paris Panthéon Sorbonne, specialist in the Maghreb and Arab societies, this situation “perfectly illustrates the paradoxes” of Morocco, between the desire for openness, emancipation and modernity, on the one hand, and respect for tradition and religious precepts, on the other.
