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Statement by Zainah Anwar : Creating a Public Voice and Claiming Authority on Women’s Rights in Islam

For the CSW59 session on

Political Will & Public Will – Fine Tuning for Gender Advocacy

 

Muslim women today live in an era in which women’s rights have been asserted and recognised as part of international human rights standards. Constitutions and national laws in many Muslim majority and minority countries guarantee equality and non-discrimination to all citizens regardless of gender. Vast socio-economic changes have transformed the daily lives of Muslim women. Muslim women’s tangible contributions to their families as providers and protectors are growing and are increasingly being recognised.

However, growing conservatism and extremism in many parts of the Muslim world have impacted Muslim women and their rights in many adverse ways. Women’s demands for law reform to end discrimination are resisted by forces claiming that they are against the teachings of Islam. The limited space for debate on matters of religion makes it particularly difficult for women’s rights activists to advocate for change and to get their concerns reflected in the decision-making process. They are often demonised and sometimes their lives are threatened for challenging the discriminatory and obscurantist views of those in religious authority and the political Islamists. Very often they are told, ‘this is God’s law’ and therefore not open to negotiation and change. To question, challenge, or demand reform will supposedly go against Shari‘ah, weaken their faith in God and lead them astray from the straight path. Such Muslim women are often accused of being westernised elites, agents of the West, anti-Islam, anti-Shari‘ah, infidels, and women who have deviated from their faith.

This problem is compounded by the fact that most Muslims have traditionally been educated to believe that only the ulama (religious scholars) have the right and the expertise to talk about Islam. Thus, very few Muslims, including human rights advocates, are willing to engage publicly in a debate on religion. Some feel they do not have enough knowledge to speak about Islam. Others take a strategic position not to engage with religion, believing that religion is inherently unjust and patriarchal, and that to engage with religion is to strengthen the power of the ulama and to validate the legitimacy of religion in the public space.

This fear or reluctance to engage with religion has left the field open to the most conservative forces within Islam to define, dominate and set the parameters of what Islam is and what it is not. They defined for us what Islam means, how to be a Muslim, how to be a ‘good’ Muslim woman, wife and daughter and then prescribe laws and policies that keep women shackled as second class Muslims and second class citizens.

I believe that to remain silent is to cede the space and the discourse on Islam to those who believe men and women are indeed unequal, that Muslims must live in an Islamic state and be governed by Islamic laws that often discriminate against women and violate fundamental liberties, and that there can only be one truth and one interpretation of Islam that must be codified into law and any digression from it must be punished.

Today, many women’s rights activists living in Muslim contexts have begun to recognise the strategic need to understand Islam better, acquire the knowledge and courage not just to challenge the ways Islam is used to discriminate against women, but to offer an alternative vision that reconciles religion with human rights and women’s rights. In countries and communities where Islam is used as a source of law and public policy and shape culture and tradition, this is an imperative.

In Malaysia, the women’s rights group Sisters in Islam has successfully created a public voice and public space for debate on matters of religion. They have broken the hegemony of the religious authorities and publicly challenged the ways Islam is used to justify laws, policies, statements that discriminate against women, violate fundamental liberties, and undermine the democratic processes.

Through letters to the editor, press statements, public education, memorandums on law reform, and easy-to-read publications, they have promoted an alternative discourse on an Islam that upholds equality and justice and argued for the possibility and necessity for reform.

In so doing, they have been accused of insulting God, Islam, Islamic law. They have had scores of police reports lodged against them, their book has been banned, and now a fatwa hangs over their existence. They have been declared “deviant” and accused of subscribing to religious “pluralism and liberalism”.

But strategically, Sisters in Islam regard every attack against them as an opportunity to widen the public space for debate and build support for the Islam of justice and equality that they believe in. They are now taking to court the state religious authority that issued the fatwa, challenging it on constitutional grounds, including freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of religion.

Such public challenges raise awareness among more and more Malaysians of the threat posed by ethno-religious supremacists who fly the flag of race and religion to maintain their power and control over an increasingly critical public.

Today, more and more groups are being formed, more voices are heard to challenge the extremists, and putting pressure on the government to take action to stop these attempts to undermine Malaysia’s constitutional democracy. 

At the international level, Musawah, the global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family, an initiative of Sisters in Islam launched in 2009, is making waves. Its activities include producing ground breaking feminist scholarship in Islam, courses on women’s rights in Islam in different parts of the Muslim world and direct engagement with the CEDAW process by challenging the ways governments use Islam to justify their reservations and non-compliance with their treaty obligations and offering the possibilities of reform towards equality and justice.

Obviously, there are not too many leaders in the Muslim world with the courage or the will to deal with the challenge posed by political Islamists and the ways Islam is used as a political ideology. But Muslim women are saying enough is enough and they are taking the lead in challenging the rising conservatism and extremism.  It is their hard earned rights and freedoms that are most affected, and it is they who have to take the lead in challenging these Islamist forces that are trying to turn back the clock.

In spite of risks to their own lives and liberty, Muslim women today are asserting that if Islam is used as a source of law and public policy, then everyone has a right to speak out on the religion and the ways it is understood, practiced, codified into laws and enforced in ways that often discriminate against them. Their experience of living Islam in Muslim contexts give them the authority and the right to speak out, to shape, define, and influence the meaning of what it means to be Muslim in the 21st century. 

 

Zainah Anwar is a founding member and former Executive Director of Sisters in Islam  and current Director and co-founder of Musawah.