Promoting women’s rights from any perspective is requisite. An Islamic perspective is just one of many avenues. But for Muslim women’s rights, this avenue is crucial, because Muslim women need to know that their religion gives them rights that their patriarchal culture often takes away. Malaysia’s WISE conference, which gathered Muslim women activists from around the world, is helping demonstrate this.
Read MoreFor all those politically correct folks who wonder whether it’s OK to ban Muslim women from wearing the face veil, consider this headline in Pakistan’s The Daily Times: “Al-Azhar Plans to Ban Face Veil.” Yes, indeed, the news spreading through the Muslim world is this: Al-Azhar University, the Harvard of Islamic theology in mainstream Sunni Muslim circles, is planning to ban its female students from covering their faces with the face veil, commonly called the niqab.
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In the years since 9/11, Muslim men and women have responded to nativist hate mongering by working within the American legal framework. Muslim women have made the hijab a civil rights issue; similarly, the fight for the human rights of detainees has been going strong for some time. An additional response – one that is more nuanced to the gendered aspects of the problem – is to use gender and Muslim notions of femininity and masculinity as the focal point of cross-cultural dialogue.
Read MoreAlong with first-hand accounts and statistics, husband and wife team Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn offer practical solutions to alleviate the multiple obstacles that women face in their new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. With a multi-pronged approach to enhance the state of women, their proposals draw from various disciplines, including education, health care and law.
Read MoreUntil the Western world stops obsessing about the clothing choices of Muslim women, we need to continue explaining the social and religious reasons for the hijab. The fact that a noted American feminist like Naomi Wolf wrote an article on the issue is highly encouraging. Now let us hope that many more will follow in her footsteps, and include the nuances of these issues so that the arguments can be truly persuasive to a highly skeptical Western audience.
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Although we should consider all parties innocent until proven guilty, the most likely culprit in the case of Rifqa Bary, the 17 year-old who ran away from her Ohio home in fear of her father, is the Xenos cult, a group that specifically emphasizes Biblical verses where Jesus tells the disciples to leave their family, disown their loved ones. Xenos tears families apart.
Read MoreNon-Muslim women who desire to build a sense of solidarity with Muslim women need to know that it is absolutely possible to speak out against gross human rights violations within global Muslim communities, and yet avoid the multiple traps of cultural reductionism that we are so bombarded with in the mainstream media. Judy Bachrach’s article, Twice Branded: Western Women in Muslim Lands abounds with examples of what not to do when striving for an authentic sense of sisterhood.
Read MoreBy recognising the nikah as legally valid, subsequent links in the marriage chain will be forced to deal with legal protection issues with higher standards and in line with legal norms, thereby respecting the religious wishes of the Muslim woman, and at the same time affording her full protection in the law.
Read MoreAn apparent defense of women from sexual harassment in the UAE is encouraging – until you notice that it is directed at the lower class immigrants who make up the bulk of the Emirates population. Richer Arabs harass women too, and should be called out on it.
Read MoreA new policy by the Obama Administration has provided an opportunity for abused women, including those under threat of death from karo kari, to claim asylum in the United States. Concerns about notions of Western patriarchy should be seen in the context of the lack of options that hundreds of thousands of women, from Mexico to Pakistan, currently have.
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