[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 161 (Friday, November 7, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E2285]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       MOROCCAN KING COMMENDED FOR HIS CALL FOR WOMEN'S EQUALITY

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                          HON. ROSA L. DeLAURO

                             of connecticut

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, November 7, 2003

  Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Speaker, I would like to call your attention to the 
following column which ran in the Washington Post last month. Women's 
rights are a critical component of any nation's development, and I 
commend Morocco's King Mohammed VI for his call to improve the status 
of women in his nation.

               [From the Washington Post, Oct. 16, 2003]

                            A King's Appeal

                           (By Jim Hoagland)

       Western democracies won the Cold War by shaking open closed 
     societies and exposing their failures and crimes to citizens 
     who then refused to go on living that way. The great 
     political challenge of today is to induce similar change in 
     Arab nations and other Islamic countries that do not respect 
     the rights and dignity of their own citizens.
       Think of it as collateral repair: The coming wave of 
     epochal change must also be driven by internal forces, with 
     restrained but committed support from abroad. The ultimate 
     goal is reform within Islam conceived and carried out by 
     Muslim leaders, scholars and civic groups, substantively 
     welcomed by the West.
       And that reform must begin with the role and rights of 
     women in the Islamic world. A question posed last week in as 
     important a speech as I have read recently makes that 
     unblinkingly clear:
       ``How can society achieve progress while women, who 
     represent half the nation, see their rights violated and 
     suffer as a result of injustice, violence and 
     marginalization, notwithstanding the dignity and justice 
     granted them by our glorious religion?''
       The irrefutable logic about the high cost of 
     institutionalized gender discrimination was voiced by 
     Morocco's King Mohammed VI last Friday at the opening of 
     Parliament in Rabat. He then outlined far-reaching changes in 
     family and divorce laws for the kingdom that would 
     effectively lessen the intrusive reach of religious 
     authorities into gender issues.
       I am aware that speeches are given in the Arab world, as 
     well as in Washington, to postpone or avoid the actions they 
     describe. And in fairness to the globe's 1.2 billion Muslims, 
     it has to be noted that all religions have been used at some 
     point as a tool of control by unscrupulous political and 
     religious leaders, and misogynists of all stripes--as Islam 
     is used today far too often.
       But Mohammed VI outlined highly specific remedies and 
     committed both his religious and political authority to 
     getting them enacted. And he repeatedly invoked the language 
     of the Koran to denounce the unfairness of polygamy, marriage 
     contracts, guardianships and divorce laws as they are 
     practiced in his country and by implication elsewhere in the 
     Muslim world.
       As befits a 40-year-old monarch whose followers call him 
     ``the Commander of the Faithful'' and who claims descent from 
     the prophet Muhammad, the king argued that solutions can and 
     should be found in Islam. But his words also implicitly 
     acknowledged that Islam has been deformed into an instrument 
     of repression in much of the Arab world and elsewhere.
       Consider this: Two-thirds of all illiterate Arab adults are 
     women, who are kept out of schools by custom, lack of 
     resources and, in many places, by determined opposition from 
     religious authorities. The Moroccan king took aim at a 
     sickness that deprives many Islamic societies of the talents 
     and productive labor of half their populations.
       Morocco perches on the North African Atlantic shoulder of 
     the Arab world. The immediate, direct consequences of 
     Mohammed VI's words in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere may 
     be slight. (They went largely unreported in the United States 
     as well.) But the king's embrace of this cause represents 
     both catalyst and reflection of broader change that is 
     rapidly bearing down on the region.
       It is part generational change as aging autocrats give way 
     to younger leaders. Change is also being stirred by the 
     deposing of a uniquely evil regime in Iraq, a thunderclap 
     that is reverberating throughout the region, and by the 
     pressures of the shadow war being fought between global 
     terrorists and the U.S.-led coalition.
       Mohammed VI's speech makes clear that he was not 
     intimidated by the bombings in his country last May carried 
     out by Islamic fundamentalists tied to al Qaeda. Nor does he 
     seem cowed by the reactionary religious establishments that 
     have contributed so much to the backwardness and turmoil now 
     evident in Islamic nations.
       An effective reform movement is straining to be born. In 
     the same week the Moroccan king spoke, the Nobel Committee 
     awarded the 2003 peace prize to Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian 
     lawyer who leads the fight in her country for women's rights 
     and democracy--two causes that cannot be separated in the 
     Islamic world. This is a good example of collateral repair: 
     restrained but focused Western encouragement of reform.
       Mohammed VI provides a standard to which Arabs, Iranians, 
     Pakistanis and others can and should be held. They are not 
     being asked to live up to Western standards by improving the 
     opportunities and lives of ``their'' women. This is a 
     descendant of the prophet, not Gloria Steinem, who is telling 
     them that they must change or fall ever deeper into self-
     destructive decline.

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