Female religious agents in Morocco: Old practices and new perspectives

This doctoral thesis deals with female religious agents in Morocco’s past and present. More specifically, it investigates historical women saints and their reception today by Moroccan women in general and by Moroccan feminist activists in particular. Despite the fact that women saints impacted their communities and marked Moroccan history with their legacy, little is known about them. Their lives, practices, and participation in their religious communities and society are rarely studied by social scientists. This thesis addresses women saints’ construction of sainthood within the context of Islam as a religion and Sufism as the mystical dimension of that religion and the significance of this construction for broader discourses on gender and feminism in Morocco. The results of this research challenge the conventional image of passive Moroccan Muslim women and the depiction of women as victims of patriarchal religious ideologies. Instead, this thesis draws an alternative discourse that presents women, whether in the past or in the present, as religious agents, who are actively engaged in creating, re-defining, re-interpreting and transforming their religious roles both in the private and the public sphere.