Tangled layers

Women’s bodies are used everywhere to symbolise and project collective ideals. Perhaps nowhere has this been more the case than in the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) where women’s bodies, women’s dress and women’s presence in particular spaces have always been used as a way of characterising a host of religious, moral and political notions. This chapter seeks to explore some of the religious, historical and cultural embodiment practices that have had an impact on the perception and representation of women’s bodies, gender and sexuality in the region today. It considers the impact of colonialism, the post-independence nationalist ideologies which created new mechanisms to control women’s bodies and sexuality, and the rise of institutionalised Islam, which has placed the construction of an ‘Islamic’ sexual identity of women at the top of its agenda. Because religion is often misused by patriarchy as a powerful instrument of control with the goal of legitimising violations of women’s rights, this chapter also delves into the construction of the female body and sexuality in the Qur’an and ‘Shari’a’ law, and into the question of ‘the veil’ or ‘hijab’ which is now one of the prominent contentious issues in the contemporary Maghreb. Focus is placed on the works of some Maghrebi women writers who provide feminist readings of Islam’s conceptions of gender and sexuality in order to resist phallocentric interpretations of the Qur’an. Some of these works include Lamrabet’s Women in the Qur’an, Mernissi’s book (which she wrote under the pen name Fatna Ait Sabbah) Woman in the Muslim Unconscious (1984) and her Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (1987), and Lazreg’s Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women (2009), along with other feminist texts which attempt to retrieve women’s voices and bodies from the grips of an objectifying male discourse.