12:01am BST 26/04/2008 | in Telegraph

Morocco has recently started recruiting and training mourchidat, female Muslim clerics whose role is to help usher in a more moderate Islam. Sally Williams talks to some of the students and watches the mourchidat at work in the community

Just inside Rabat’s walled medina - with its market stalls selling fake Gucci sunglasses and bzeghir, traditional Moroccan pancakes - stands the Dar al-Hadith al-Hassania, an octagonal building resplendent with bougainvillaea and a fountain. This is the seminary where a revolution is under way. Two hundred student imams sit in long rows in disciplined silence as their tutor, Hussein Ait Said, addresses them. All the students are wearing robes and have a copy of the Koran on their desk, but 50 of them also have handbags and, more surprising still, a pair of white slingbacks is just visible in the fifth row. These are the women who are training to be mourchidat - female priests - the second intake at the seminary.

The mourchidat (meaning ‘female guide’) first made news in April 2006 when the Moroccan government announced with great fanfare that the first 50 had graduated. Funded by the government, the initiative is part of a wave of liberal reform begun by King Mohammed VI in 2004. ‘This is a rare experiment in the Muslim world,’ Muhammad Mahfudh, the centre’s director, says. The mourchidat will help women with religious questions, with their education and give support in schools and prisons. The long-term hope is that by working face-to-face with the community, they will help foster a more moderate Islam.

At the western edge of the Arab and Muslim world, with only six miles of sea separating it from Europe, Morocco is a Muslim country - Islam is the state religion - led by a king, not an imam. It was an early ally in America’s ‘war on terror’ and the only Arab country to hold a memorial service for the victims of September 11, 2001. But on May 16, 2003, suicide bombers killed 45 people in Casablanca, heralding a resurgence of radical Islamic fundamentalism. In Europe 80 per cent of those arrested since 2003 on terrorism charges have been Moroccans. The conservative Istiqlal party may have won the parliamentary elections last September, but the election itself, with its record low turnout of only 37 per cent, was a clear rejection of the political system, which Islamic fundamentalists have exploited in order to recruit militants.

In the Dar al-Hadith al-Hassania, the female student priests are taking a morning break. More than 400 women applied for the 50 places. The prerequisites are an exam, an interview and a BA. Candidates are also required to have a life grounded in the Koran, by which is meant memorizing it, and an understanding of tajwid, the art of Koranic recital. Men have to know the entire text by heart; women, half of it. Once accepted on the course, students are given a grant of 4,000 dirhams (£360) a month. To rent a room in a shared house, as many students do, costs about a quarter of that. The youngest woman on the course is 22 - ‘baby mourchidat!’ - the oldest nearly 40. Lessons include Islamic studies, psychology, sociology, computer skills, economy, law and business management, plus three hours of homework a day.

‘We want to help people know the Koran and to promote flexibility, and there are a lot of problems in our society - social, political, all,’ one student, Halima Kachkach, 29, explains. With her is Zakia Haddad, who has a BA in English from the University of Fez, where her family live. Her father is a retired shopkeeper, her mother a housewife, and she is one of six children. After university she worked as an administrative assistant on a news-paper, taught in a school and studied in a Koranic school, where it took her five and a half years to learn the Koran by heart. For her interview at the Dar al-Hadith al-Hassania, she was asked to recite passages aloud, with examiners checking for pronunciation, elongation, word stress and intonation. All students live outside the seminary, so Haddad now lodges with her sister in Rabat.

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