Muslim feminists battle against 'macho' views

[Al-khiyal]

Fighting stereotypes, home and away

Muslim women from around the world Friday took up the fight against a "macho" interpretation of Islam's Qur'an at the opening of an international conference on Islamic feminism.

"Islamic feminism is necessary for a proper image of women, for their dignity and their place in culture and politics," said Mansur Escurado, president of Spain's Muslim organization La Junta Islamica, whose Catalan branch organized the event in Barcelona.

"It will come into full force when women are able to make choices in life with their own consent," Escurado said.

The three-day conference was called to "support women who are fighting for recognition of their rights in the Islamic world" and rising up "against the long-established supremacy of men", he said.

The Islamic feminist movement has slowly emerged in the Muslim world, which comprises some 29 countries with more than one billion people.

The advocates - mostly well-educated, urban women versed in the Qur'an - argue that Islam must not be a pretext for cultural practices denigrating women, dictated by men with a monopoly on interpreting Islam's holy book.

The Barcelona meeting drew than 400 participants from Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria and from such European countries as Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Norway, as well as Mexico and the United States.

While some women wore Muslim veils, and others steered away from traditional dress, the participants had in common a desire to listen and share their experiences and bring what they learned to the women back in their homelands.

"Nothing can really begin until women start to talk to other women," said Pilar Vallugera, director of the department on women and rights at city hall in Barcelona.

Besides the disapproval of some men, the pioneers of Islamic feminism also face the rejection, incomprehension and anger of some of their Islamic sisters.

The meeting, considered part of a "jihad for equality of the sexes", will also address such fundamental topics as codes in Sharia laws, polygamy, sexual rights, as well as "the intellectual role of women", said Abdennur Prado, one of the organizers of event, which runs through Sunday.

For a young mother from Lahore, Pakistan, the conference in Spain is a way "to fight the cliches about the conditions of women in the Muslim world".

But for her and most of the Muslim feminists, overcoming stereotypes is a monumental task.

"An enormous number of things must be done in this situation because the liberation of women is also a fight for all humanity," said the Pakistani participant.

"We live for the most part under rules which were handed down in Saudi Arabia centuries ago, and there are still too many unenlightened mullahs who direct our lives."

Muslim feminists battle against 'macho' views

[sania]

Great..!

Every sentence of this post is a gem of truth.

The last one is a bold statement.

Untill the Muslim women are liberated from the shackles of orthodox oppression,
and have equal freedom, rights, education, job opportunities, social status as that of their men;
The Muslim community cannot hope to give a standard of life for themselves
as equal to that of the Christian West.

[Bent_Bladi]

YAY! gO wOMEN!!!

I just hope that ALL the women (and men) will begin to think like this and stop thinking that they need men for everything....

[Algerian Mami]

Great..!

Every sentence of this post is a gem of truth.

The last one is a bold statement.

Untill the Muslim women are liberated from the shackles of orthodox oppression,
and have equal freedom, rights, education, job opportunities, social status as that of their men;
The Muslim community cannot hope to give a standard of life for themselves
as equal to that of the Christian West.

I agree. It is such a shame & after watching the 'Woman Only Jihad' I would really like to get involved somehow.

[Al-khiyal]

Islamic feminism is a rising current of political activism in Europe, North Africa, and Asia, and a force for changing the image of Islam. Next weekend in Brussels sees the fifth meeting of some of its protagonists under the heading: "Towards an emerging Islamic feminist consciousness in Europe".

In Europe's divided cities, after the bombings of Madrid and London, the cliche of desperate, young, marginalised, Muslim men ready to commit suicide bombings, a different image of Islam has never been more relevant.

Muslim societies, from Afghanistan where female teachers are singled out for killing by a resurgent Taliban, to Saudi Arabia where women are not allowed to drive or travel alone, reinforce for the western media the stereotypes of Muslim women's inferior place. All this comforts a certain western notion of superiority. Tell people you are going to a conference on Islamic feminism, and the response is mocking laughter.

However, Islamic feminism is alive and well, from Western Europe to Malaysia, and from North Africa to the US - far from the stereotypes of Islam and of feminism as a western movement.

But the powers of conventional Islam, and western media preconceptions, both have their own reasons for ignoring the phenomenon of strongly Muslim, very activist women who claim that complete equality for women both in private life and in public, and a host of other radical reforms, can be read in true Islamic scholarship.

In the Quran, they say, men and women are both equal, and complementary, with the same rights to education and self-fulfillment. "Islam gives women a very high position and a lot of rights, but over the years the patriarchal system and political power have marginalised women and made them invisible - it's a gross misunderstanding which has to be corrected. Women should reclaim their rights given by Islam," says the Malaysian artist, Yati, whose group is called Sisters in Islam.

Malika Hamidi, coordinator of the European Muslim Network, and the main speaker next weekend, is a young academic. She underlines the complexity of the emerging current and the "pluralism in the Muslim women's movement - as in western feminism". Most of these women wear headscarves, but not all of them, nor all the time.

Not all these activist women accept the "feminist" tag: to some its image is too white, or too western, or too secular, or simply too American. But Ismahane Chouder, vice-president of the Collectif des Feminists pour l'Egalité (Feminist Collective for Equality), says, "I'm a western, Muslim, feminist, and I work on campaigns across the board for all women's rights."

And in the UK, the Birmingham councillor and vice-chair of the Stop the War Movement, Salma Yacoob, speaks for many when she says she feels "a debt to an earlier generation of women who struggled for their rights - it would be disrespectful to ignore them ... so, despite 'feminist' being a loaded word in the community, I do define myself as an Islamic feminist".

Embattled Muslim women, suffering the burdens of the worst cultural attitudes to rape and adultery enshrined in medieval laws in Pakistan and Northern Nigeria; or the sexual violence and rolling back of their rights, unleashed by the war in Iraq; or the targeted killings of women activists in Afghanistan, are turning for help to Muslim women's groups. From those in Morocco and Malaysia, in particular, the skills of self-help training, experience of long legal battles, linking scholars and activists, are in great demand.

At government policy levels some, Islamic women activists' campaigns are having successes large and small in some surprising places: Morocco's Moudawana (religious personal statute laws differing from civil law) have recently been revised after 30 years of struggle; in Turkey's Ministry of Religion there is a cautious beginning by some scholars to work on the highly sensitive area of questioning the historical basis of the hadith (sayings and deeds attributed to the Prophet) which seem misogynist; and in Indonesia's rural areas teaching materials are being revised.

Last autumn in Paris saw the first major discussion of the subject in France, hosted at Unesco's headquarters. Belgium and Spain held similar conferences in the last two years.

"We are living in an increasingly dangerous world, people are closing in on their own identities ... we are trying to build bridges," says Alain Gresh, president of Islam et Laïcité, one of the conference organisers, and a senior journalist who has written numerous books on the Middle East.

Islamic feminism is a decade and a half old. In the 1990s Iranian, Egyptian, Turkish, Moroccan, South African, American, feminists and religious scholars, among others, found they were all simultaneously working on reinterpretations of women's rights under Islam.

But long before the phrase, "Islamic feminism", was coined, leading Muslim women intellectuals like the Moroccan writer and academic Fatima Mernissi, and Dr Asma Lamrabat, a Moroccan paediatrician, were writing and speaking for muslim women's rights and equality, and for the re-reading of the Quran. Dr Lamrabat, greatly admired by the new generation of European activists for her work on the ground as well as for her intellectual leadership, points to "the disconnect between a discourse claiming to respect spiritual values, and a reality where the worst discrimination is justified - from horrific honour crimes, forced marriages, and antiquated tribunals responsible for keeping women in inferiority for life." To her, "Islamic feminism is very important - you cant just write off feminism as western."

Malika Hamidi, who is French, of Algerian origin, points to the practical needs of Muslim women in Europe on many fronts: "victims of domestic violence, polygamy, those threatened with honour killings, circumcision, discrimination of all sorts, forced marriages, with little Turkish and Moroccan girls in Brussels just disappearing to be married. Muslim women are not involved enough in these debates, but we have to denounce that these are traditional and cultural practices - it has nothing to do with Islam."

Hamidi describes how different educated activists like her are from her parents' generation - "we are claiming public space, affirming an identity beyond wives and mothers" - and she calls for education and consciousness raising for the older generation of Muslims in Europe.

Like Hamidi, Professor Nouza Guessous, a medical biologist, human rights activist and part of the advisory commission on the reform of Moudawana in Morocco, emphasises the working links with human rights groups and left women's groups which produced the major push on law reform.

"This has been 30 years of work by the Moroccan women's movement, but with even the secular reformers accepting the arguments had to be on a religious basis, against polygamy and forced marriage, and for giving women the majority at 18. In 1982 we got a million signatures. These movements are going on across the Magreb in different ways. In practice in Morocco there is Islamic feminism, though not we do not explicitly use the term. The central issues are justice, equality, freedom of thought."

Similarly in Europe many note the new converging of religious and secular women in practical human rights campaigns not only for women, not only for Muslims, in areas such as for refugee rights, for improved housing, for girls' education, and, one great unifier, against current western policy in the Middle East.

Salma Yacoob, in Stop the War, for instance, pays tribute to the "non-Muslims whose solidarity encouraged and empowered me to play a public role". And Malika Hamidi says: "In France feminists from different tendencies and the Islamic feminists work together on many joint projects. We Islamic feminists are in a small minority, but we are in a unique position in Europe to push for reform on many fronts."

These women, from such varied backgrounds and societies, pose the London-based Eqyptian writer Dr Haifa Khalafallah's challenge to face the "deteriorating chaos" of the current violence and destruction in the Middle East, and the widening gulf, which used to be a simple one of north/south, or rich and poor, but is now a much more complex one involving ideology and culture.

Islamic feminists on the move