She was sometimes called ‘Mother Teresa of Morocco’, because of her commitment to single mothers in her country. Or ‘Mother Courage’, for the fearlessness with which she took on the conservative-religious force. Both nicknames illustrate the hero status of Aïch Chenna, the women’s rights activist who didn’t let a fatwa or two stop him.
She died on Sunday after a short illness in Casablanca, the city where she was born 81 years ago. The death of the friendly-eyed woman in her determined face sparked a wave of support from fellow activists, artists and political leaders right down to the king. Mohammed VI has expressed his “deep condolences” to Chenna’s family, according to national news agency MAP.
The beautiful words also show how thinking about the position of women in Morocco has changed in recent decades, partly thanks to Chenna. How different was the society in which she herself was born in 1942. Morocco was then a French protectorate, but in reality Islam ruled. Disaster hit Aïcha, growing up in Marrakech, early on: at the age of 3 she lost her father, and then her only sister.
Saved from the veil
Her mother remarried a man who, when Chenna was 12 years old, thought she had gone to school enough. Henceforth she had to stay at home, sew clothes and wear a veil. But her mother, without her husband’s knowledge, put her daughter on a bus to Casablanca, where Aïcha went to live with an aunt. Her mother came over four years later. She had persuaded her husband to divorce her; A Moroccan woman herself could not file for divorce.
Chenna tells all this in a 2009 conversation with the American Berkley Center, where she also shares the rest of her life story. Thanks to the money her mother scraps together by selling her jewelry, she can continue studying. She works as a social worker. She is concerned with the suffering of single mothers, who are dismissed as prostitutes by strict believers.
One incident will haunt her for the rest of her life. Chenna has only had a child herself when another young mother, still a girl, steps into the room next to her study with her baby on her arm. She comes to give up her child, as ‘it was supposed to be at the time and even had to’. “When the social worker takes over the baby, a trickle of milk from the mother’s breast squirts into his face. The child starts to cry, the mother looks on desperately.’
No rain? Chenna’s fault
Chenna sets out to improve the lot of single women and their children languishing in orphanages. She works together with the French nun Marie-Jean Tinturier, as she often looks beyond the boundaries of her own faith. In 1985 they founded the Association Solidarité Feminine (ASF), the Association for Female Solidarity. They run a daycare center for single mothers out of a basement in Casablanca.
The ASF grows into an organization that takes care of fifty of these mothers every year. They receive psychological help and gain work experience in the restaurant, patisserie and hammam of the ASF, which provides childcare. In the media, Chenna becomes Morocco’s unofficial ambassador for women’s rights. She experiences it as a constant balancing act: to change the mentality of her country she has to speak out, but she also does not make the conservative Muslims too angry, for fear of a counter reaction.
It will come anyway: several times fatwas are pronounced against her. Like in 2000, after an interview with Al-Jazeera in which she says that her mothers do not have to wear headscarves. She would have aroused the wrath of Allah and thus had the lack of rain on her conscience. ‘I could easily answer that: in Europe the women are practically naked and there it rains all the time’, she tells two years later. The morning.
Money from the king
She finds a remarkable ally in King Mohammed VI, who ascended to the throne in 1999 with a strong drive to modernize his country. He gives the ASF money to expand. A donation of great symbolic value in Morocco, where the king is also spiritual leader. Mohammed VI reforms the family law, the Mudawana, and thereby strengthens the position of women. Among other things, they are given the right to file for divorce themselves, although the law is not always complied with.
That there is still a long way to go, becomes apparent in the week of Chenna’s death. In Morocco, there are fierce protests after the death of 14-year-old Meriem. The girl died after an illegal abortion that her rapist forced her to undergo. Women’s rights organizations demand revision of the strict abortion law.
No, her work was not finished, Aïcha Chenna knew that too. But the protest is not least thanks to Morocco’s own Mother Teresa.
3X Aïcha Chenna
Her god was the same as that of Christians and Jews, Chenna, a practicing Muslim, told the Berkley Center. ‘I don’t believe in an exclusive god, one for Muslims, or one for Moroccans.’
In 1996 she brought misery out, a book with testimonies of twenty battered and raped women. She won a prestigious Grand Atlas prize from the French embassy in Rabat.
She was awarded the American Opus Prize in 2009 for her humanitarian work. She would use the prize money, 1 million dollars, to keep her aid organization alive after her death.