Professional Affiliation

Senior Professor of Linguistics and Gender Studies, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Morocco

Expert Bio

Fatima Sadiqi is a recipient of a Harvard Fellowship. She is Professor of Linguistics and Gender Studies, author and editor of, among other works,  Moroccan Feminist Discourses (2014), Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco (Brill, 2003), Gender and Violence in the Middle East  (Routledge 2011), and Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region (The Feminist Press, 2009).   Sadiqi is an international speaker on a various topics dealing with Moroccan (and North African) women and languages. She was Director General of the Spirit of Fez Foundation (which, among other things, organizes the Fez Festival of Sacred Music), a member of the Board of Administration of the Royal Institute of the Amazigh Culture, and a UN Gender Expert. Sadiqi founded the first Moroccan Centre for Studies and Research on Women in 1998 and the first Graduate Program on Gender Studies in 2000 at the University of Fez. In 2006, she founded Isis Centre for Women and Development.

Wilson Center Project

“Jihadism and the Escalation of Violence Against Women and Girls: Towards a Formulation of Policies Combating Gender-based Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region”

Project Summary

This project has two central aims: a specific aim and a more general one. The specific aim is to document and unveil the new types of violence that women are subject to, link them to the familiar types, understand their social, economic and political ramifications, dig out their surface and deeper underpinnings especially in relation to Jihadism, propose strategies to stop them, and seek short- and long- term policies that would implement these strategies. As for the general aim, it is to highlight the relevance of the project for the broader issues of women’s economic and political empowerment, the reform of education, the reform of the religious field, the enhancement of an inclusive democracy in the region, the separation of religion from politics, the role of the media, and the heterogeneous nature of political Islam. The project seeks to integrate Islam as part of the solution not the problem.

Major Publications

Moroccan Feminist Discourses (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).

Women Writin Africa. The Northern Region (ed) (2009, The Feminist Press).

Women, Language and Gender (2003, Brill Academic Publishers