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| By Magdi Abdelhadi, BBC Arab affairs analyst
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| A leading Islamist activist in Morocco says she is eagerly awaiting her trial on charges of insulting King Mohammed VI. |
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| Nadia Yassine, of the outlawed but widely-popular Justice and Charity Group, could face up to five years in jail if convicted. |
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| She was put on trial earlier this year for saying that she would prefer a republican system to Morocco's hereditary monarchy. |
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| It is difficult not to be impressed by Nadia Yassine. She is anything but the stereotypical picture of an oppressed Muslim woman. |
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| Politically active, articulate and well-educated, she is already a grandmother at 46. Her four daughters are, like her, committed Muslims pursuing academic careers. |
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| Her husband is a university professor and also a senior member of the organisation. |
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| She says he helped her bring up the children and is anything but a traditional Arab husband. |
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| She lives with her family in Sala, a small town outside the capital Rabat and a stronghold of her group, which was created some 20 years ago by her father - the charismatic chief ideologue of the movement, the septuagenarian Sheikh Abdulsalam Yassine. |
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| Women's rights campaigner |
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| Nadia Yassine belongs to a new generation of Islamists: western-educated but not westernised. She quotes from the Koran and French sociologists in one breath. |
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| Artist as well as activist, sitting in front of her own modernist painting of the name of Allah, she tells me that she has done nothing wrong. |
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| "I will never regret what I have said. I am a free woman. I live in a country which claims to be democratic," she said. |
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| "Freedom of speech is fundamental to democracy. Freedom of speech is a positive thing, not only for the Moroccans, but for all Muslim peoples who, for 14 centuries have been living the tragedy of silence, criminal silence." |
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| Justice and Charity is Morocco's biggest Islamist organisation. |
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| The group campaigns peacefully for the creation of an Islamic state, and derives its power and popularity from helping the poor through a network of charities across the country. |
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| Nadia Yassine's political views are not only too radical for the Moroccan establishment, but her stance on women's issues is far too liberal for hard-line Islamists. |
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| She believes that "Muslims have inflicted a terrible injustice on women in the name of Islam". |
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| She says that there is an urgent need for re-interpreting Islamic tradition, and unless women are involved in that process they will never come out of their trap. |
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| Muslim women should have the right to divorce their husbands, she says, and should be consulted before their husbands take another wife. |
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| "The Koran is clear cut on the issue of polygamy. No Muslim can change that text. |
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| "But women also have the right in principle to refuse polygamy, because marriage in Islam is a civil contract... and in a civil contract the woman has the right to include any conditions she likes." |
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| Islamist values |
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| But despite that, she demonstrated against recent reforms of family law giving Moroccan women precisely these rights. |
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| She says the demonstration was political in nature, and not religious. |
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| The government's reforms were cosmetic and mainly intended to improve its international image rather than helping women, she adds. |
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| She says legislation alone will not change the reality of women, unless backed by socio-economic reforms that empower women. |
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| It is not entirely clear whether the trial of Nadia Yassine for allegedly insulting the Moroccan king will resume. |
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| She suggests that US pressure may have led the government to drop the case altogether. |
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| But she is not grateful, because there is no love lost between Islamists like her and Washington. |
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| "It is freedom of speech itself which is being put on trial. I challenge them to try me," she says, gesticulating defiantly with a smile on her face. |
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