Abderrahim El Ouali
CASABLANCA, Jan 26 2006 (IPS) – When the Moroccan Association for the Fight Against AIDS launched a campaign last month to raise money to fight AIDS, it had no idea it would have another kind of fight on its hands.
The association is now fighting Islamists who accuse it if spreading the culture of the condom through its telethon to raise funds.
The telethon was a live programme on the 2M TV channel Dec. 9 to raise funds for people suffering from HIV or AIDS. It followed two earlier telethons for the disabled and for children suffering from heart conditions.
The television campaign organised by the Moroccan Association for Fight Against AIDS (ALCS), an independent group, raised 240,000 euro (295,000 dollars).
The organisation says about 16,000 people in Morocco have either HIV or AIDS, mainly through heterosexual transmission. But no accurate official figures are available, and the incidence could be far higher. Morocco has a population of 32 million.
Many artists from Morocco and from other countries participated in the television campaign. Some people who are HIV positive came on air to tell their stories.
With the awareness the programme spread came also the opposition led by the Islamist Party (PJD). The telethon held up use of condoms as the best way to protect oneself from HIV, said a long article in the PJD daily Attajdid (The Revival). In promoting use of the condom, the association was copying foreign programmes and trying to implement them in Moroccan society without regard to Morocco as an Islamic country.
The article condemned the organisers over the condoms used in the telethon décor designed by a French architect who had been brought to Morocco especially for this.
The article said fidelity to religion and marriage are the way to fight AIDS, which it described as divine punishment .
Such suggestions have been strongly challenged. This is neither new nor accidental in our political and community life, writer Mohamed Janboubi told IPS. His recent work Marabouts in Morocco that shows that ancient religious leaders in Morocco fought against fundamentalism and obscurantism has been a bestseller in Morocco.
Whenever civil society starts a courageous initiative it has to face brakes through the mass media, he said. The Islamist opposition to the initiative, he said, is a too narrow comprehension of Islam, and is an attempt to impose this comprehension on others.
Janboubi added: The problem is not an event, a telethon, an initiative or even a condom or a sexual culture. It is deeper than that. The problem is the attempt to stop the evolution of society.
The new danger is Wahhabi thought, an extremist interpretation of Islam that originated in Saudi Arabia, he said. This is creating groups that are infiltrating popular environments, and especially young people with limited school levels in the marginalised areas.
Traditionally, Moroccan society has always been immunised against religious extremism, he said.
This is not the first such protest by Islamists. The PJD launched a similar campaign against a cartoon book produced to make youngsters aware of the danger of AIDS, and which presented the condom as a safe option. The publishers were condemned for using a mosque as a background to some of the cartoons.
That Islamist opposition has extended to tourism.. The Islamists blame sexual tourism for the spread of AIDS in Morocco. Morocco aims to attract 10 million visitors by 2010. Its economy rests considerably on tourism.
Over recent years Islamists have invaded beaches and countered sunbathing and swimming by organising collective prayers.. That came to be known as the war of the beaches. Now it is the war of the condoms.
