Ink on Paper? The Moroccan Moudawana’s Shortcomings
The Moroccan Parliament in Rabat, Morocco, where debates over the Moudawana reform continue to shape the future of women’s rights. Photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons.
In the 1950s, Morocco was just starting to free itself from the vestiges of French colonial rule. Under the former French Protectorate, religious Sharia courts adjudicated matters pertaining to marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Morocco’s newfound independence in 1956 inspired hopes that there would be broader social reforms and natural advances to women’s rights. Nowhere were these hopes more deeply invested than in the creation of a national family law. For many, the Moudawana symbolized the potential for gender equality–even if in practice, it codified women’s subordination. Decades later, even after a major reform to the Moudawana, Morocco continues to struggle to uphold the constitutional guarantees of gender equality as enshrined in its 2011 Constitution. Although the Moudawana is very often praised as the epitome of progress in the broader Arab World, in actuality, it remains hollowed out by selective enforcement and judicial discretion. Failing to constitute concrete change in Morocco, the Moudawana is an empty promise of legal reform for Moroccan women.
The original Moudawana, Morocco’s personal status code, was commissioned by King Mohammed V and drafted by ten male religious scholars in 1956. Rooted in the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, the Moudawana was heavily shaped by traditional interpretations of Sharia–a system of Islamic religious law. For women’s rights activists who had been fighting for decades for legal recognition, the Moudawana, when it was eventually codified in 1958, was a grave disappointment. The code preserved practices like male guardianship over women, gave women no rights to divorce, and enshrined unequal access to child custody and inheritance. Rather than the opportunity to advance gender equality, the Moudawana codified women’s legal subordination to men and denied them independent personhood in matters of family law. Despite Morocco’s new emergence as a sovereign state, women’s liberation was never a central goal of the postcolonial project.
Scholars like Zakia Daoud note that the newly independent Morocco seemed mostly uninterested in women’s rights. The prevailing assumption was that gender equality would merely come about as a result of broader projects that the state pushed alongside modernity and democracy. Another scholar, Latifa Jbabdi, wrote that the “women’s question” was folded into nationalist agendas instead of being treated as a political priority. What manifested in the personal status code in 1956 were deeply conservative laws that cemented women’s legal dependency on men, rendering them passive citizens of the state.
In 1992, a shift took place in Morocco as women’s rights activists broke years of silence with a demand: full legal equality. The One Million Signatures campaign was launched by a group of women’s rights activists who were a part of l’Union de l’Action Féminine (the Women’s Action Union). Their aim was to collect a million signatures to fight for a reform to the Moudawana, which they succeeded in doing– an incredibly impressive feat, as Morocco’s population in the 1990s was only 24 million. They enacted a reform that would guarantee that women, like men, would be fully recognized as legal adults with equal rights in marriage, family, and autonomy. The quiet years of frustration turned into mass mobilization, and the monarchy had no choice but to respond, setting the stage for the 2004 revision under King Mohammed VI.
The reformed Moudawana was widely celebrated as one of the most progressive legal frameworks in the Arab world. As a result of the 2004 reform, the age of marriage for girls was changed from fifteen to eighteen, marriage became contingent on mutual consent, and there was a weakening (although not an elimination) of male guardianship. The Moudawana reform seemed to signal the country’s commitment to modernity, gender equality, and progress. The laws were finally in place, but there was a new issue that activists, lawyers, and ordinary citizens alike had to face: implementation. Moroccan women would soon be forced to reckon with the reality that justice must be more than symbolic.
Nearly 20 years later, it has become clear that the reforms were more symbolic than transformative. An idiomatic Arabic phrase حبر على ورق, transliterated as hbr ala-waraq in Moroccan Darija, means “ink on paper.” The phrase is used to describe something that appears good on paper, but has no tangible effect in practice—an apt reflection of the kind of experience women are having with the Moudawana. Without actual enforcement or accountability, the law is merely decor. And where enforcement fails, judicial enforcement fills the gap—often reinforcing the very patriarchal norms the law claimed to dismantle in the first place. The Moudawana falls short in two central ways: its hollow implementation and the unchecked authority of judges who undermine it. Currently, the Moudawana is simply a gesture towards equality with nothing to show.
Take divorced mothers in Morocco, for instance, who, under the reformed code, are granted the ability to gain custody of their children. Yet, women report being unable to obtain passports for their children, open individual bank accounts, or approve school transfers without their ex-husband’s permission, regardless of whether they have court orders granting primary custody. In many cases, officials at schools and banks refuse to honor these orders unless the father is present, exemplifying how legal rights are completely undermined by weak state enforcement. Legal custody can only mean so much under the constraints of a system where guardianship (wilaya) continues to default to the father, formally and informally. The law even goes further in restricting women’s autonomy: Article 175 removes a mother’s custody if she remarries and her child is over the age of seven. A lawyer specializing in divorce cases, Ali Kettani, says this provision has no basis in the Qur’an, proving that it is not a reflection of religious doctrine. The provision is an institutionalized patriarchal chokehold on legal authority. The lack of rights and support of women in practice reveal the hollow promises in Morocco’s 2004 family code reform. On paper, progressive statutes exist, but in practice, they falter because of weak enforcement and patriarchal norms.
The gap between law and reality is widened by unchecked judicial discretion. Judges in rural areas frequently override the written law with patriarchal customs or conservative interpretations of Sharia law. Despite statutory changes, male relatives often retain de facto control over decisions related to women, including marriage, divorce, and childbearing. The reality of judicial discretion is that two women with identical cases might face outcomes that are entirely different, solely because one court is located in the countryside and the other is in the nation’s capital. When interpretation trumps text, women’s rights are left at the mercy of individual judges.
In 2023, King Mohammed VI announced that he directed the government to revise the Moudawana once again. Will this time be mere symbolism once more? To avoid repeating the same hollow reforms from 2004, the government must go beyond legal language. It must embed strict enforcement mechanisms, curb unchecked judicial discretion, and ensure that any person violating women’s rights is held accountable. Meanwhile, women’s rights organizations should be directly consulted in the process in order to ensure the law reflects much more than state image-making. Until these guarantees are in place and a reform meets their demands, women will continue to bear the brunt of the Moudawana’s failures.
Women’s rights activists are fighting more than poor enforcement, however, as they confront a state that uses legal reform to project an image of progress without really intending to change society. Abroad, the symbolic concessions in the Moudawana are applauded, but back home, the foundations of gendered power remain intact. However, the state can only rely on appearances for so long. When the law protects women only on paper, the legitimacy of that law—and the institutions like the Moroccan parliament that continue to uphold it—begin to erode before our eyes. Morocco must look directly at the structural roots of its legal hypocrisy before failing another generation. If it does not, the Moudawana will continue to be a symbol of Morocco’s betrayal of the 18 million women who inhabit it.
Kaitlyn Sullivan (CC ‘27) is a staff writer at CPR and a sophomore at Columbia College studying Middle Eastern studies and political science. Her interests include comparative politics, linguistics, and U.S.-Middle Eastern relations.