Commitment
A life for the human rights
In the 1998, Rita El Khayat created tha Association Aïni Bennaï to spread the culture of peace in Maroc and Maghreb and in 2003, she created also the Publish Company Editions Aïni Bennaï.
In the 1998, she was the first woman which came from Maroc and the Arabic world, who wrote a letter to a sovereign. The letter, addressed to the young king Mohammed VI 4 months after his coronation, was called Epitre d’une femme à un jeune monarque. The letter was translated after less than 2 months in 11 languages. The missive was written to show a set of appeals to change the Moudawana, “individual statute”, like a Family Code, which in Arabic and Islamic country, in exclusion of Tunisia, binds women to have very few rights.
Concrete Results
Many of the Rita El Khayat’s requests are been received, even after terrorist attempted in Casablanca in 2003. Below are some examples of changes:
The age of wedding is 18 year old even for women. Before that, the young lady have to get married with men older than them.
It is introduced the pohibition to repudiate women. The infertility was one of the causes to repudiate women. Now women can divorce and they can have the half of the goods.
It is forbidden to beat women and today who does it, he commit an offence. now widows can take care of their children, but in the past, when their husband died, the children were protected by their fathers’ family.
Public Letter to the West
Two months before th 11th September 2001, Rita El Khayat wrote a public letter to the West, which it would be published in France, with other writes of other people. But it was declared unpublished from the publish company.In this letter she said: “I’m due to Enlightenment and French Revolution for my power of protest. I belong to it as a French or westerner”. She also said: “The westerner don’t know how much I know West! I am ashamed for them beacuse they don’t know anything about my country, about Arabian people, about Moslems, about everything is not Western”.