Learned women: three generations of female Islamic scholarship in Morocco

Abstract

There has been a living tradition in Morocco of educating women in the religious sciences since at least the eleventh century. The absence of acknowledgement of this tradition is evidenced by the international praise the 2005 government-sponsored murshidat, or 'women preachers' programme received as a breakthrough for women. This paper utilises fieldwork done during a year in Morocco (2007-2008) on a Fulbright grant to highlight three women who belong to the academically rigorous side of female Islamic learning in Morocco: Fatima al-Kabbaj, one of the first women to have studied at the Qarawiyyin University; Farida Zomorod, the only full-time female professor at Dar al-Hadith seminary, and Naemmah Ben Yaeesh, who began laying the ground work for an all-female Islamic institute in the 1980s. In examining the lives of these women, we understand developments in the field of female Islamic learning in Morocco in the last 50 years and fill an important lacuna in the history of the...