Mindful in Morocco
Our journey began in Tetouan, a rugged and mountainous city in Northern Morocco. Just a few miles due south of the Strait of Gibraltar, the region’s obscure terrain was once the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. Apart from the geographically distinct landscape, the north is generally considered by Moroccans as more conservative than the south, a sociocultural phenomenon I had been oblivious to before I arrived in Morocco for a study abroad program in January 2019.
Now, three months later in early April, I was traveling there with my reporting partner Zakaria El Kouzani, a Moroccan native from the southern city of Agadir; we were in pursuit of elusive interviews for a reporting project. I had booked us two rooms at the Hotel Marina for 433 Dirhams, the equivalent of $45. Upon checking in, we were placed in rooms on separate floors, something we initially paid little attention to. Our big interview was the following morning, so we decided to refine our game plan that night in Zakaria’s room. Shortly into our meeting, a sudden, violent and persistent knock began thundering from the door. We both froze. A short man with dark hair who appeared to be the manager was shouting at Zakaria — I couldn’t understand a word of his Darija, the colloquial Moroccan Arabic dialect.
The shouting really only lasted about two minutes, but with every passing second I could feel myself growing progressively numb, my mind’s attempt to distance me from the situation as much as possible. The language barrier and cultural norms I was isolated from made me feel helpless. My eyes widened as Zakaria turned around to look at me.
The manager, he told me, was concerned we were violating the “no sex before marriage” rule by being in the same hotel room. Once Zakaria explained we were colleagues planning out a project, the manager asked us to leave the hotel door open if we were together. Zakaria couldn’t shake the way he was spoken to: “That’s not how you talk to people,” he kept repeating. He assured me that nothing like this had ever happened to him before. We switched hotels the next day, but the experience foreshadowed the difficulties to come.
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When I’d first ventured to Morocco in January, I was a fresh-faced 21-year-old, eager to immerse myself in a new country and become a temporary international journalist. Writing had always been a passion of mine, and so had the topic of women’s rights, as I had found in my studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. I wanted to write a story that gave voice to the voiceless; I thought I could do that by writing about Moroccan Muslim women. Over the next three months, I would discover how complex of a task this was.
I enrolled at the Center for Cross Cultural Learning (CCCL) in Rabat, the capital city. The Center is located in the heart of the medina, the old part of the city, and I often became disoriented in the walled and narrow, winding streets. Luckily the extraordinary number of stray cats made for good company. In Rabat I lived with a host family, including my host mom, Nezha, my host dad Rachid and Halima, my 16-year-old host sister. Their home was a short walk from school. I slept in the living room with a curtain for privacy at night. We spoke broken French to each other and shared a large bowl of couscous every Friday at 1 p.m.
Morocco is a Muslim-majority kingdom in North Africa, and is considered a more stable nation than other Arab countries in the Middle East. Under the French protectorate from 1912 to 1956, the Moroccan government today has a notorious record of corruption and brutality. I wanted to write about how the country’s laws and societal norms affected women; based on U.S. media coverage, I believed these women to be systematically oppressed, veiled by their hijabs and lack of rights. In Morocco, sex outside marriage is illegal and it is socially expected that men and women remain sexually modest before marriage. That really interested me. Growing up in relatively liberal suburb near Chicago and now attending school in the even more progressive Boulder, I was interested in the sexual culture of a conservative country, especially one so far away from home.
Virginity testing for the purpose of obtaining a medically approved virginity certificate is a custom widely practiced in Morocco. I first learned this in a narrow lecture room adorned with mosaic tiles at the CCCL presented by Dr. Adessamad Dialmy, a sociologist of sexuality, gender and religion. He discussed the sociocultural origins of the norm, presenting the continued social significance of the certificates as a historical function of a ubiquitous theme in Islam: the preservation of a female’s sexual purity prior to marriage. For many Moroccans, virginity certificates serve as proof for potential husbands that the sanctity of marriage will be retained in accordance with the principles of the Quran. After providing a holistic depiction of the custom’s religious genesis, Dr. Dialmy, a distinguished-looking professor with thick, dark eyebrows and classically intellectual glasses, proceeded to describe the importance of the certificates from the female perspective; this included a discussion regarding the common reliance of Moroccan women on hymen reconstruction surgery. In detailing the overlap of the social norm with traditional Islamic conceptions of marriage, as well as the value women themselves place on such sanctity, Dr. Dialmy unveiled my own virgin eyes to the complexity of the issue I had initially opposed so passionately.
Many of the program’s advisors warned me of the difficulties of covering the sensitive topic of Muslim women’s virginity. This made sense given the background Dr. Dialmy provided; not only would it be extraordinarily difficult to find women willing to talk given the sensitivity of the issue, but also many Moroccan women support the practice along with the associated religious values. Yet I decided to pursue the story anyway — it felt like there was something left unsaid about the certificates.
The program partnered me with Zakaria, who was 22 years old at the time and a student at the Connect Institute in Agadir, a post high school or college institution aimed at empowering the region’s young adults. Agadir is along the Atlantic Coast and 45 minutes from the city of Oulad Teima, a metropolitan area of about 80,000 people. The day we met he told me he dreamed of reforming Morocco’s education system. I asked him if he’d want to help me with a story on virginity certificates. To my surprise, he didn’t seem reluctant at all. He said he was up for the challenge, or “mission” as he called it, with a broad grin. A few weeks later, Zakaria and I were working relentlessly trying to secure interviews with women who had undergone virginity testing and obtained a certificate — and, most importantly, who were willing to talk about it.
In early April, Zakaria contacted a women’s rights organization in Tetouan who promised us interviews with women who fit the bill. We were ecstatic. With stipend money from the CCCL, I was able to fund our travel. That’s how we ended up in the hotel where the manager’s reaction to our collaboration so vividly illustrated the culture.
Once we’d moved to a new hotel, we spent hours walking around Tetouan’s city streets the next day trying to find the organization — it had no address we could locate. Zakaria called them dozens of times and no one answered. When we finally found the organization (about three frantic taxi rides later), the door was locked. It appeared closed. I was too tired to even feel the full defeat of it.
We went back to the new hotel empty-handed. That night, Zakaria’s contact told him our topic was inappropriate and that the women had changed their mind about the interviews. In the morning Zakaria traveled back home to Agadir, a 14-hour bus ride, and I to Rabat, around two and a half hours via bus and train.
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I’d hoped to be transcribing interviews the next day, but instead I found myself still researching the certificates. I went to my favorite spot in Rabat at Hotel Oudais — practically the only solid Wifi hub I’d found in the whole city. I practiced ordering in Arabic: bghit atay binaenae bilah sukkar? (Can I have mint tea without sugar?). I browsed the internet and sipped the scorching hot drink. I felt my pulse quicken and my focus sharpen as my eyes stopped on a new piece of information: that blood was traditionally used as an indicator of virginity the night of Moroccan weddings, and if a woman didn’t bleed on her wedding night, Moroccan men have the right to annul the marriage. There are accounts of women in rural families who were ostracized from their family and community based on such evidence. This new information only further demonstrated Dr. Dialmy’s earlier complex outline of the relationship between Moroccan culture’s heavy emphasis on virginity and traditional Islamic thought.
While Zakaria was back in Agadir, I traveled to Casablanca to interview Rachid Aboutaieb, doctor of urology and head of the Moroccan Association of Sexology. In February 2018, the organization called on the Moroccan Ministry of Health to forbid the medical distribution of virginity certificates to young women. Dr. Aboutaieb and I were able to conduct our interview in English, where he shared the following with me:
A 12-year-old Moroccan girl was pulled into his office by her mother early last winter at a hospital in Casablanca. She had fallen down at school and something landed between her legs. After a check-up, he reported to the woman that her daughter was “just fine.”
Yet, the mother feared the injury took her young girl’s virginity. She asked Dr. Aboutaieb to check again more thoroughly, this time to see if her daughter’s hymen, the thin piece of tissue that surrounds or partially covers the external vaginal opening, was still intact.
Aboutaieb said he didn’t want to traumatize the young girl from the invasive virginity test. So, he told the mother she’d have to go to another doctor.
“She’s young, she has to go back to school and not think about this,” he said.
The girl and her mother left Aboutaieb’s office. He doesn’t know whether the woman found another doctor; he says he knows of colleagues that are asked to write virginity certificates two to three times a week.
I left his office having a clear idea on the negative consequences of the practice — but no closer to finding women’s voices to include in my story.
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Two weeks after our failed interview expedition and with just two weeks before the end of the semester, Zakaria called me via WhatsApp with good news: He had found women for us to interview near his home. The next day I took a four-hour train to Marrakech followed by a three-hour bus to Agadir.
Upon arrival, Zakaria took me to a women’s shelter where we were greeted by the director, Aicha Belhssain. I didn’t see much of the space as we were rushed to a small room with a big brown couch. Aicha was surprised when she heard our topic, but still eager to help. She called in two women to speak with us, who each asked to remain anonymous. Both avoided eye contact while speaking; we later learned this was largely because Zakaria, a man, was in the room as translator. Their stories were of sexual assault, and how they had been ostracized from their communities since the attacks. I didn’t understand the full gist of their stories until Zakaria transcribed them later to me.
“For women, our vagina is our honor,” one of the woman in the shelter had said. Eyes red with tears, her voice was barely audible over the hum of conversation in the hallway. Her fiancé drugged and assaulted her months before their wedding. She got a certificate to prove she was still a virgin and could get married. She ended the interview after disclosing this information. At the time I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but I felt the interview abruptly end. My heart sank towards my toes.
I learned the double standards around virginity and sexual assault play off each other. Criminalizing sex outside marriage is a barrier to women reporting rape, who risk prosecution as criminals themselves if they admit to premarital sexual intercourse, even if it were forced up on them. Some doctors are paid off by the defense to give virginity certificates to prove the accused innocent. Plus, Morocco’s narrow definition of rape leaves out that there are other ways to be raped besides vaginal penetration.
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The following morning Zakaria and I took the 45-minute taxi ride from Agadir to Oulad Teima to interview a handful of women at a local women’s club in town, where some worked as cooks and others as seamstresses. With one interview under our belts, we came better prepared: this time we’d bring along a female translator, a friend of Zakaria’s named Fatima who would meet us there.
While cramped into the front passenger seat with Zakaria, I looked outside the taxi’s window — not only to avoid breathing on his face, but to also situate myself with the changing surroundings. My eyes flashed over Moroccan villages, each a dynamic and uniquely vibrant hub of people, their children, and animals interspaced with open land. Zakaria and I had another 20 minutes remaining on our 45-minute ride when a heavy-set woman in the backseat hollered in Darija for the taxi driver to pull over at the curbside of what appeared to be a portable outdoor market fully decorated with bodies of chickens. She handed him 10 Dirhams (about $1) and we set off on our way again.
I readjusted my maroon scarf and green jacket, wondering why Zakaria and I were staying in our front row seats even though the car now had an empty seat in the back. Zakaria didn’t usher me to move so I stayed put, unsure of how to navigate the shared taxi culture. Zakaria’s hands were resting on his slim-cut blue jeans. From time to time we’d converse on music or our plan for the day in English, but we let silence dominate the majority the stuffy ride.
The landscape grew increasingly urbanized as we drew closer to our final destination. Zakaria swiftly said shukran, thank you, to the taxi driver as we exited. We puzzled through some winding streets to meet up with Zakaria’s friend, Fatima Ezzahra Larheryeb. She was wearing a grey hijab and a long black dress; her eyes were big, brown and soft; she greeted me by kissing my left cheek and then my right. A friend of Zakaria’s and a nearby resident of Oulad Teima, she had no experience in translating, but had generously offered to do her best.
As we approached the women’s club, which looked vastly different than the shelter in Agadir, filled with chatty voices and outdoor leisure, I explained to Fatima the nature of the story and thanked her countless times for her help. I explained that the women at the club only spoke Darija — having a female translator was essential to facilitate meaningful and authentic dialogue, especially on the sensitive topic of Muslim women and their sexuality. Though we had just met a few minutes ago, Fatima would be my major link to these women and their stories. It felt fast. As a man, Zakaria waited outside for hours while we did our work.
As I began the interviews, time and distraction fell away. Nothing else mattered in that moment but my recorder, pen and paper. I didn’t drink water or think of anything else — it was the most present I’d been in this country, almost in my life. Fatima and I were ushered into the club director’s office. Just outside of it women of all ages were talking and praying and eating in the open air common space. Most of them wore djellabas, the long, loose, traditional dress I’d seen my host mom wear most days.
I sat down with five women over the course of two hours. I started a new recording on my iPhone for each interview — some were five minutes; some were 35 minutes. I asked Fatima to ask them to describe their virginity examination at the doctor, to tell me about their relationship with their husband, and their opinions on the practice and organizations trying to stop it. Fatih Alaoui, Ghizlan Machouch, Khadija Akroro, Fatima Argaz and Fatima Maata Lah all independently shared similar ideas to me: they saw nothing wrong with virginity examinations.
In fact, quite the opposite, they told me. I learned that many Moroccan women find empowerment in the practice and choose to undergo the examination as a form of protection from annulment. Khadija, 31, said, “All girls should get it for themselves — to guarantee you are good person.” More stories emerged as we spoke, but none of the women expressed discomfort or disapproval of the examination or the certificate. In response to my questions, several of the woman asked me this: If the government were to suddenly make certificates illegal, how would they protect themselves and prove their purity?
I asked Fatima to be as accurate as possible when translating their shared words so as to ensure proper quotations in the piece. Still, I could tell by the fourth or fifth interview some of the dialogue was being simplified in translation. The women were discussing their marriages and experience growing up in a small town; It became difficult for both of us to balance the translation while also trying to be sensitive to the women and their time. But we did it to the best of our ability, all of us beginners to the situation.
After our interview, the club director sat Fatima, Zakaria and I down for tea and cookies. I finally gulped water and relaxed my shoulders from my ears. Then I began to think: If Morocco banned the certificates, where would women go for protection? The problem, I began to see, was not about the legality of the certificates; it was the fact that sex before marriage is illegal, and social norms of purity have stemmed from that, enforced by decades of colonial input. Banning certificates wouldn’t make a difference if women’s sexuality were still stigmatized. Legal change wouldn’t help without social change. I had found my angle on the story, and had Fatima and Zakaria to thank for it. Through our experiences we had developed a friendship that extended far beyond my stay in the country.
On the taxi ride home from the interviews, Zakaria looked at me. “Mission accomplished,” he said, with a wide toothy smile. Instead of looking out the window, we spent the ride home sharing headphones and listening to his favorite Arabic music. I felt relief in that moment, feeling like I proved all those who warned me wrong — I got the interviews.
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As it turned out, however, getting the interviews was just the beginning. The writing required a new level of intercultural understanding. Holding these women’s stories in my heart and trying to write about them was an emotional experience, and much more difficult than I had expected. I found that not one source explained what was going on. Dr. Dialmy’s background on the subject was valuable, but not representative of the actual realities on the ground, for these women. I also found that you couldn’t base the entirety of the story off the Quran, the Islamic sacred text.
My early drafts, I quickly learned, didn’t strike an accurate balance. Even though I now knew better than to equate Muslim religious practices with local national culture, I still found myself conflating the two. Aida Alami, Moroccan New York Times foreign correspondent and journalism advisor at the CCCL, firmly edited me, removing correlations of Islam to the practice of virginity certificates. Aida explained to me how the common misrepresentation of Muslim women in Western news is because cultural and social issues are blamed on Islam, when the Quran has little to do with it — the oppressive government and social expectations influence practices such as virginity certificates and premarital sex laws.
In other words, while the basis of the oppressive laws can be connected to religious ideals as Dr. Dialmy pointed out, the current practice is a consequence of oppressive government interests. Yet, if the government made certificates illegal, the practice would probably go underground and be performed in unsanitary conditions unless social changes were first implemented to reduce the stigma surrounding women’s virginity. In the editing process, I learned how to balance what I’d observed with an understanding of cultural and religious norms.
I opened the story with the physical and emotional discomfort of the inspection, and how many Moroccan women reported it to be invasive. I added the voice of activists and doctors who reject the practice. Then I transitioned, adding the voices of the five women I interviewed in Oulad Teima. Following Aida’s advice, I tried to let their voices speak for themselves. Western feminists often project the assumption that journalism is a way of saving Muslim women through sharing the injustices they experience with the world. But these injustices are often presented in direct comparison to Western notions and conceptions of society, and do not truly depict the women’s subjective experience of the topic. My own view of virginity certificates, and especially the means by which I initially intended to present the topic, drastically changed when I listened to the women share their side of the story.
It was tough love learning the way I first wrote the story was not an accurate representation of the lived Muslim women experience, but with help from my advisor (and many revisions later), the finished piece felt authentic and true, a sensitive story told entirely from Muslim women themselves. (That piece, included as an appendix to this thesis, has been provisionally accepted by Newsweek). This process changed my outlook on judging the lives of others, especially when they are from a culture that is not my own. It opened the doors for me to think about how all it takes to understand to is to ask, and more importantly, to listen.
READ: Virginity Certificates Persist in Morocco Despite Calls to End a Discriminatory Practice
