Fatima Sadiqi is a former Fulbright Scholar and recipient of a Harvard Fellowship. She is Senior Professor of Linguistics and Gender Studies at the University of Fez, director of the Isis Centre for Women and Development, and co-founder of the International Institute of Languages and Linguistics (INLAC). Fatima Sadiqi has written extensively on Moroccan languages and Moroccan women’s issues. She is the author of Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco (Brill, 2003), Grammaire du Berbère (L’Harmattan, 1997), Images on Women in Abdullah Bashrahil’s Poetry (The Beirut Institute: 2004).  She edited and co-edited a number of volumes, among which Migration and Gender in Morocco (with Moha Ennaji, Red Sea Press: 2008). Her article on “Morocco” in Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa (Freedom House and Roman & Littlefield) to be published in March 2010, and her co-edited volume Women in the Middle East and North Africa: Agents of Change” to be published by Routledge in May 2010.

Website:  www.fatimasadiqi.on.ma

Email : sadiqi_fatima@yahoo.fr

 Abstract

     Amazigh language and culture are “native” or “indigenous” in North Africa, especially in Morocco and Algeria.  Amazigh is an Afro-Asiatic language, largely attested to be the oldest language in Morocco and North Africa. Although this language has never been associated with a ‘divine’ written text, it has survived for over 3000 years. Arabs and Islam came to Morocco hand in hand in the 8^th c. By the 11^th c., Morocco was completely Islamized but even today, it is not completely Arabized. Today, there are three major dialects of Berber in Morocco and a unifying Amazigh script. Many factors have contributed to the extraordinary maintenance of Amazigh in Morocco:  the mother tongue status of the language, female illiteracy, male migration from rural to urban areas or Europe, and French.

            The history and present of the Amazigh Language and culture and that of Amazigh women have had a common fate. Both have been marginalized in the public spheres of power until the last decade of the last century, and both were propelled to the forefront of the Moroccan political scene, almost synchronically, at the beginning of the present century.  Amazigh was officially recognized in 2001 by the creation of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture, and women’s rights were officially recognized by the royal promulgation in 2003 of the new (and progressive) Moroccan Family Law.  The two have been attributed tremendous symbolic value inside and outside the country. The spectacular change in Amazigh and women’s fates has, in turn, propelled Morocco to the forefront of the Arab-Muslim world with respect to cultural rights and women’s rights.

            I deeply relate to both in my personal life and in my scholarly work. When I was studying linguistics as an undergraduate student in the 1970s at the University of Rabat, I often heard from my fellow students that Amazigh was not a language because it did not have a grammar book and a dictionary.  I then promised myself to find out.  Most of the then available literature was in French and hence tainted with colonial ideology. I then decided to search further and was most attracted by Chomsky’s idea that languages are by definition grammars and that we come to the world with a mental equipment to acquire any human language.  The idea that the grammar of Amazigh was in my mind and that I only needed to bring it out was thrilling.  I wrote my MA thesis on the Verb in Amazigh and my PhD thesis on the sentence (the verb and the sentence constituting the backbone of grammar). In 1997, I finally wrote “Grammaire du Berbère” in French and co-authored “Amazigh Grammar” in 2004.

            In a quest for my cultural and personal rights, I added a sociolinguistic perspective to my writings on Amazigh grammar and embarked in the study of women and gender studies.  I think the presence of Amazigh opens the door to a larger-than-Islam framework for women’s agency not only in Morocco but in the entire North Africa. When I started writing about the Amazigh language and culture in the 1980s and about Moroccan women issues in the 1990s, I was attracted to both, but as two “separate” domains of reflection.  From the mid-1990s onward, I gradually began to sense the extraordinary link between the two, not only in theory but also in my own life.