WUNRN
NIGERIA - SHARIA INTERPRETATIONS
& WOMEN'S RIGHTS - FUNDAMENTALISM - RELIGIOUS-POLITICAL DYNAMICS - STONING
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Impacts of economics and austerity
and plural legal systems on women's challenges to advocate for rights and
equality.
Externally
imposed economic austerities helped fuel fundamentalism and the application of
Muslim laws, says Karima Bennoune in this excerpt from "Your Fatwa Does
Not Apply Here." One activist and her colleagues helped women navigate
such laws and fight back.
August 25,
2013 - WOMENSENEWS)--"The baobab connotes spiritual strength . . . and
fortitude . . . in distressing times."
Ayesha Imam
and the women she worked with for years in the Nigerian organization BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights
possess those very traits. The group, founded in 1996, fights to protect
women's rights in the maze of the Nigerian legal system, with its overlapping
religious, secular and customary laws and courts.
Imam tells
me they use tools from whichever system can "recuperate rights,"
believing it is often possible to arrive at similar conclusions by working
through Muslim discourses or international human rights. "My issue,"
she underscores, "is not where you come from, but where you arrive
at."
With her
colleagues, she tried to "deconstruct what is Sharia (Muslim laws). How
does it get to be Sharia? Is it divine or is it merely religious?" In the
'80s and early '90s, some of the Sharia courts in Nigeria had come up with
"what we may call progressive" interpretations, "as opposed to
following somebody's idea of how it should have worked in 13th-century
Arabia." Imam's efforts to support women living under these Muslim laws
brought her, inevitably, to work on fundamentalism.
"Fundamentalism
hit us in Nigeria so it was absolutely necessary, because otherwise
fundamentalism was going to close us all down, close all the dreams down, close
all the hope down," she says.
The backdrop
for this, a resurgence of communalism, was sparked in part by the harsh impact
of structural adjustment and ensuing battles for resources. Structural
adjustment--economic reforms imposed on Nigeria by international financial
institutions--also meant there were many unemployed, uneducated young men
looking for something to do. For them, "this was an opportunity to have
power and assert themselves," as Imam sees it. "They told women in
taxis and buses that they had to sit in the back seats." There was
"general intimidation."
Mixed
Response
This in turn
led to greater emphasis on Sharia in Muslim majority segments of the population
in the late '90s in the north of Nigeria, and then to enactment of new
legislation in the early 2000s. "The reaction among the Muslim community
was really mixed. Human rights workers and those who identify strongly as
democrats argued that we need secular law. The laws being brought in under the
guise of Muslim laws are conservative, and detract from human rights."
Even some religious conservatives opposed Sharianization, Imam recalls, on the
grounds that you could not have Sharia before you have economic development so
that people can actually live good lives.
According to
their worldview, "You can't cut off people's hands for theft if they have
no other means of gaining a livelihood."
Any such
opponents, however, became targets of "vigilante responses." Death threats,
beatings, threats of being burned. In one state where the governor delayed
enacting a Sharia Act and set up a committee to study the matter, there were
even threats to his family. Imam recalls attending a meeting in Abuja with the
governor who started Sharianization. Young men throughout the hall were telling
women where they could and could not sit. "Every time a woman got up to
speak, they were yelling and drowning her out. It didn't matter if you were
wearing a hijab or not." This was new, Imam underlines. When she was a
younger feminist, "You didn't get shouted down. You were not in fear of
being physically attacked, or being burned or harassed. You'd go to public
meetings and people would get up and argue with you and they might laugh."
As fundamentalism
began to transform Nigerian lives, Imam and BAOBAB became involved in the cases
of women who were facing sentences of stoning. One of the first, that of Fatima
Usman, ensued when the woman's father took the man who fathered her baby to
court to get child support. "He had no idea he was going to set up his own
daughter for the possibility of being stoned to death." (Today Usman
remains technically out on bail, as the case has never been finally resolved.
Nor, thankfully, has the sentence been carried out.) Most such cases began with
vigilante groups forcing the police to prosecute and ended in "lots of
people convicted of Zina [unlawful sexual relations] and whipped because they
were not married." If people do not appeal, they are taken out and whipped
right away, Imam laments. "It was really important to establish the
principle that you can appeal. It's your right.
"It's
not anti-God to appeal."
Fighting
Back
However, it
was difficult to rally victims of such prosecutions to fight back. "They
thought, as Muslims, if they were charged under Muslim laws, they could not
defend themselves. It would be tantamount to arguing with God."
I had heard
those words before.
While
working on the case of a 13-year-old mentally disabled girl, Bariya Magazu, who
had been charged with Zina and faced public whipping, Imam's team had to spend
a week in the girl's village "arguing with her father, her family head and
the village head that it was not impious to file an appeal under Sharia
law." This is what law as sacrament does to people.
Though Imam
succeeded in convincing Bariya's family members, while the appeal was being
filed the nonliterate teenage villager who had just given birth was whipped
publicly for the sex she had been coerced to have. "Afterwards," Imam
wrote in an outraged statement for BAOBAB, "humiliated, bruised, crying
and in pain, she was left to make her way home alone." Imam points out to
me: "The dominant ideology is that good women are secluded, so to be
whipped in public view is a really horrible disgrace."
Imam was
also involved in efforts to defend Amina Lawal, a Nigerian woman famously
sentenced to stoning for adultery in 2002 (and later acquitted). Imam was
critical of parts of the Western response to the case, which ignored women's
rights advocates on the ground. Some Western advocates asked for a pardon,
which was neither possible nor politically feasible. Local activists instead
chose legal appeals that would immediately stay execution.
"If you
don't have an appeal, they can take action and you might win the principle, but
it's a little late for the person involved," she says. Another reason the
local women's rights defenders opposed pardons is that, "technically, you
are saying, 'Yes, we did wrong, but please forgive us anyway.' The point we wanted
to make was that there hadn't been any wrongdoing."
The women of
BAOBAB also raised money to support defendants who were unable to earn a living
while being prosecuted: "Having to hop off to court all the time, they
can't work in the fields, they can't go sell their stuff." Worse still,
"the stress of it is horrendous." So the activists try to offer the
psychological support needed to overcome the defendants' feelings that they are
challenging their own religion. BAOBAB's contribution was "to make it
known that you could fight and you could win. The more we did that, the more
people were willing to fight against it and the less people felt like, 'I am a
Muslim, I cannot criticize'."
Every one of
the Sharianization stoning sentences has been successfully appealed with the
support of women's human rights defenders, resulting in acquittals (or
nonperformance of sentence, as in Usman's case), and there have reportedly been
no new cases since Lawal's acquittal, though the laws remain on the books. In
the battle between stone and tree, it is the BAOBAB that has prevailed.
Excerpted
from "Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight
Against Muslim Fundamentalism" by Karima Bennoune. Copyright © 2013 by
Karima Bennoune. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton and Company,
Inc.
Karima Bennoune
is a professor at the UC Davis School of Law and sits on the board of the
network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws. "Your Fatwa Does Not Apply
Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism," her
first book, is based on nearly 300 interviews she conducted with people from
almost 30 Muslim majority countries, and recounts their stories of resistance
to fundamentalism.