Hicham Houdaifa

Hicham Houdaifa (Casablanca, 1969) is a journalist and has worked for several Moroccan media outlets like Al-Bayane, where he had a column in the social affairs pages. From 1999 to 2002, he was the Afrique Magazine correspondent in New York. He also worked with the social affairs pages of the Journal hebdomadaire from 2004 to 2010 and has written on many occasions for the weekly La Vie économique. He has always been concerned with social questions like freedom of religion, women’s rights, the situation of sub-Saharan migrants, and school dropouts.

Together with the journalist Kenza Sefrioui, he is founder of En toutes lettres, a publishing house that specialises in journalistic essays where he is director of the “Enquêtes” collection, which is devoted to investigative reporting. In his own writing, he discusses the various forms of malaise in present-day Morocco, including economic exploitation, absence of a civil state, sexual violence, arranged marriages, and religious extremism. In 2017, he published Extrémisme religieux, plongée dans les milieux radicaux du Maroc (Religious Extremism: Investigating Radical Milieus in Morocco, En toutes lettres) and, in 2020, Enfance au Maroc, un précarité aux multiples visages (Childhood in Morocco: Precariousness with Many Faces, En toutes lettres), books in which he analyses the processes of religious radicalisation that are occurring in Morocco, and the vulnerability of children in the country. In Spanish, he has published A la mujer y a la mula, vara dura. Las olvidadas del Marruecos profundo (With Women and Mules, Don’t Spare the Rod: The Forgotten Women of Heartland Morocco, Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo, 2017).