Asma Lamrabet

Personal life

Asma Lamrabet was born and currently resides in Rabat, Morocco. She considers her education to be occidental. She is fifty-four years old and married with one child.

Career

Trained in medicine, she worked as a volunteer doctor in Spain and Latin America. Mainly she worked in Chile and Mexico for eight years starting in 1995. She came into contact there with Liberation Theology, which caused her to examine her own religion.

From 2004 until 2007, she returned to Morocco, where she organized a group of Muslim women interested in researching and reflecting upon Islam and intercultural dialog.

In 2008, she became president and a board member of International Group of Studies and Reflection on Women and Islam (GIERFI), based in Barcelona. GIERFI has members and experts from at least eight different countries including England, France, the United States and Morocco. Their mission is to help create a new female Muslim consciousness.

Throughout this period, she continued to work as a physician, specializing in blood disorders at the Rabat Children’s Hospital.

In 2011 she became Director of Studies and Research Center on Women’s Issues in Islam of Rabita Mohammadia des Ulemas under the patronage of King Mohammad VI. As director, she organized an international seminar for women across the three large Abrahamic religions.

She is the author of five books (in French). She is best known for Musulmane tout simplement. She published English and French articles that explore contentious issues, such as interfaith marriage and religious reform, in a Muslim context.

She is a third-way feminist who revises sacred Islamic texts. She has been compared to Amina Wadud and Margot Badran due to their shared belief that the interpretations that underlie Islamic Law from the 9th century were excessively patriarchal and must be reinterpreted. Lambaret has also cited Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as intellectual inspiration to resist the hegemony of Western feminism.

Third way feminist

"Third-way" is a term coined by Doris H. Gray and is a humanistic approach to Islamic feminism. It attempts to reunite the two Islamic sects that “presuppose the existence of a basic set of human values that reaches across borders and cultures”. Currently, it is used mainly by Moroccan feminists. Lamrabet and her peers re-interpret the sacred texts in order to show women as independent beings rather than relational to men. Lamrabet’s works are an example of how to apply third way feminism, because she examines the sacred texts in a scholarly manner, while remembering the cultural context in which they were written. Lamrabet also believes in a particular type of secularism that is based in Islam, rather than Western conceptions of it. She believes that religion should not be used for personal or political gain.

Criticism

Her work provoked critics who argued that this approach does not tackle the important issues, such as violence towards women and polygamy sufficiently. Another critique held that third-way feminists lack sufficient theological knowledge and background to correctly interpret the texts. Her work has been described as conceptually and methodically weak. Her work was said to “border on the kind of Islamic fundamentalist propaganda familiar from the Moroccan Islamic political activist, Nadia Yassine” and her work in identity is “antiquated in the relevant sociological debates”.

Awards

In 2013, she was awarded the Social Sciences Award by the Arab Woman Organization for her book, Femmes et hommes dans le Coran: quelle égalité?.

Books

Lamrabet wrote five books: