Word: vi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...conservative Morocco, these female preachers could never have gained acceptance without a nod from King Mohammed VI, a progressive when it comes to women's rights. One of the monarch's first decrees on ascending the throne in 1999 was to throw open the doors of his father's harem in Rabat, pensioning off dozens of concubines who had rarely been allowed outside the palace walls. He later pushed for a reform in family law, giving women more rights than in most Muslim countries in matters of divorce, property and her husband's choice of subsequent wives. (Islam permits...
Jihadis challenge one of the pillars that have kept the Moroccan monarchy stable since independence in 1956: the idea that the King, as a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, is a Commander of the Faithful - a temporal and spiritual ruler rolled into one. When Mohammed VI first came to power, this exalted title jarred with his public image as a rather shy leader less enthused about statecraft than about computer games and the water sports that earned him the nickname His MaJetski. His relaxed behavior in the first years of his reign made him an easy target for jihadi...
...Mohammed VI predicted that the terrorist attacks in Casablanca would be the last to jolt the country. But that forecast proved overly optimistic, despite the jailing of more than 500 suspected Islamists. Moreover, says Hakim El Rissai, a senior researcher at the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, the police crackdown has only fueled resentment against the regime: "The police here aren't very methodical. They arrest 200 people to catch one terrorist." This repression, adds El Rissai, "is turning the jihadis into martyrs...
When her father, Imam Abdessalam Yassine, a respected Sufi cleric, made similar remarks during the reign of the last King, he was incarcerated in an insane asylum, and she concedes that political freedom has improved under Mohammed VI. Nadia Yassine also welcomes the fact that women are now allowed to conduct religious activities. "We need to restore a version of Islam that has less machismo," she says. After all, such efforts to bolster a gentler, more moderate form of Islam may stop Morocco turning into Iraq once Hollywood's cameras stop rolling...
...many liberal Catholics, July 25, 1968, was the day the music died. Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae, published 40 years ago today, reaffirmed Catholicism's absolute ban on birth control. Coming on the heels of the Second Vatican Council's unprecedented opening of the Church to modernity three years earlier, the Vatican's decision to stand by a doctrine that ever fewer Catholics were obeying would reverberate far beyond the bedroom...