Muslim Women are a diverse group.  The Muslim Times has the best collection to promote women rights

Source: Open Democracy

By Nandini Archer 7

From France to Malaysia, Muslim women’s rights activists are challenging those who ask them to ‘choose between being a Muslim and a feminist’.

“Muslim women are stuck between Islamophobes on the one hand and Islamic fundamentalists on the other”, Suri Kempe, an outspoken rights activist from Malaysia, told a packed room at the Council of Europe late last year.
“For too long”, she said, “Muslim women who have demanded reform to discriminatory laws and practices” have been accused by other members of their own communities “of being westernised elites, anti-Islam, anti-sharia, people who have deviated from our faith”.

At the same time, “in Europe, we’re seeing rising right-wing populism”, along with “nationalist sentiment and xenophobia”. Kempe pointing to Islamophobic claims to care for the rights of “poor Muslim women” and “hysteria” over “is sharia [law] going to take over”.

Amidst these dynamics, she warned, it’s ultimately “women and the most marginalised, who are pushed into smaller and smaller spaces”.

Kempe made these comments at the Council of Europe’s annual World Forum for Democracy (WFD) in Strasbourg, France. She spoke on a panel at the gender equality-themed event which asked: “Can women gain greater power in religious communities?”

She described how women’s rights advocates need to engage with communities and individuals working from within religious frameworks as “a way out of this deadlock” which leaves Muslim women squeezed between Islamophobia and fundamentalism.

But one of the key challenges, she said, is that many human rights activists and western feminists see religion as an inherently patriarchal construct.

There are “valid concerns” about the power held by religious institutions, she said. But, refusing to work with Muslim feminists ironically leaves “wide open the most conservative within the Muslim community to define what Islam is… what makes a good Muslim woman, a good Muslim wife and so on”.

Religion has “a huge influence on public policy and personal laws”, that affect the lives of women, Kempe added. “To continue to willfully ignore it… [is] irresponsible and self-defeating”.

“Religion has a huge influence on public policy and personal laws. To willfully ignore it is irresponsible and self-defeating”

Kempe works at Musawah, a global organisation promoting women’s equality in Muslim family laws. The group is also part of the Observatory on the Universality of Rights (OURs) project that is monitoring the international backlash against sexual and reproductive rights.

She told me about ongoing efforts to create “new feminist knowledge within Islam”, describing, for example, feminist theologians challenging ‘male guardianship’ (qiwama and wilaya) concepts in Islamic legal tradition.

Last year, the Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA) women’s group in India used Musawah’s material to successfully petition that country’s supreme court, leading to its banning of ‘triple talaq’ divorce (whereby a Muslim man could independently, instantly divorce his wife by saying talaq three times).

At the WFD I also met Hiba Latreche, an activist with the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations (FEMYSO).

She referred me to 2016 research from the Collective Against Islamophobia in France that found women comprised 82% of the victims of Islamophobic acts, from hate speech to physical violence.

She also described a “hysteria” around the hijab in France. In May 2018, for example, student Maryam Pougetoux wore a headscarf on national TV and received a tirade of online abuse – while the equality minister Marlene Schiappa argued it was a “form of promotion of political Islam”.

“She doesn’t have the same rights. We only have one specific view of how a woman should be and how she should be emancipated”

Latreche said Pougetoux’s case shows that “we only have one specific view” of “how a woman should be and how she should be emancipated”. Wearing a hijab, “she is not considered a woman, she doesn’t have the same rights”.

Read further

Suggested reading and viewing

BBC Big Questions – Are Religions Unfair To Women?

Quebec status of women minister calls Muslim head scarf symbol of oppression

Ted Radio Hour: Gender, Power, and Fairness

Gender Equality in the Holy Qur’an – In the Beginning Man and Woman Were Equal

The holy Quran speaks more often to men than women

Three Hijabis: The Three Muslim Women, Who Received Nobel Prize

Hijab: Quran is to be Understood in the Context of Time – Every One Knows It But Does Not Say It

Judge Kavanaugh, Drunk Birds and Islam