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| MADRUD/RABAT, daily excelsior; Nov 1,2002 |
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| At a time when many people identify Islamic radicalism with presumed Saudi terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, Moroccan Nadia Yassine gives fundamentalism a strikingly different face. |
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| Wearing a tight headscarf and loose clothing, the 42-year-old spokeswoman of the Islamic movement Al Adl Wal Ihsane (justice and spirituality) looks like a traditional Moslem woman, but often sounds like a western feminist. |
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| Speaking perfect French and joking with journalists while her husband quietly serves tea, the university-educated mother of four dismisses Bin Laden as a "son of Islam who has got lost" and who has totally missed out on the essence of Islam. |
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| The real Islam is tolerant of other religions, is perfectly compatible with women's rights from divorce to contraception, and can learn from the western parliamentary system, Yassine told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur DPA. |
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| Nadia Yassine is internationally one of the best-known women in morocco. As spokesperson for the movement founded by her father, Sheikh Abdessalam Yassine, 73, she has received countless journalists at her home in sale, twin town of the capital rabat. "We are the only real opposition in Morocco," Nadia Yassine keeps repeating, and analysts agree that the country's biggest Non-Parliamentary Islamic Movement represents at least something of a challenge to the ruling class. |
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| Claiming to speak for the oppressed, justice and spirituality -which is still technically illegal - wields influence especially on university campuses and in city slums.Observers estimate that up to 20 per cent of Moroccans support fundamentalist ideas. |
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| Nadia Yassine explains that justice and spirituality shuns elections because it fears a repetition of the tragedy in Algeria, where the electoral success of Islamic radicals sparked a bloody civil conflict.Islam is a totally pacific religion, and people such as Bin Laden tarnish the reputation of other fundamentalist groups which follow a completely different path, she complains. |
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| Many educated middle-class Moroccans see justice and spirituality as a backward movement, yet Nadia Yassine believes that Islam holds the keys to the progress that the country yearns for.Neither Iran, nor Saudi Arabia nor Afghanistan provide an example to follow, because nobody has yet managed to create a state faithful to the principles of Islam, she explains. |
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| An Islamic state could learn from the west in creating a truly representative democracy, but would not separate religion from politics and would create its own model instead of aping the west, Yassine stresses. She took part in a huge march against a plan by the Moroccan Government to improve the judicial status of women, yet she claims that Prophet Mohammed was a feminist."I only opposed the plan because it focused on irrelevant things, such as the right of women to get passports without permission from their husbands, when most Moroccan women could not even dream of travelling abroad." |
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| Yassine explains that 20 per cent of the members of the leading organs of justice and spirituality are women.She finds the recent presence of Moroccan politicians at a memorial service for the American victims of the September 11 terror attacks inappropriate, not because it took place in a church - "I would go to a church or synagogue any time" - but because "morocco has become a US base." |
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| Nadia Yassine gives justice and spirituality a progressive face, but aren't most of its supporters conservatives who disagree with her ideas ? |
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| "I'm not saying that everyone in the movement thinks like me, but the movement is also seeking to educate people and to change their thinking," she replies. |
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| "My Moslem brothers are perfectly happy for a woman to speak for the movement," says this lively woman who has undoubtedly earned justice and spirituality a lot of additional publicity. (DPA) |
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