Faith and Freedom

Mahnaz Afkhami, President and CEO of WLP
Presentation at the Musawah Conference, Kuala Lumpur, February 2009

Over a decade ago I edited a book titled Faith and Freedom, subtitled Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World. The contributors, coming from across the Muslim world and beyond, discussed the lives of over half a billion Muslim women living in diverse geographical, social, and cultural conditions. They agreed that though the women they studied were different from one another, they all shared one over-arching characteristic: for most of them modernity meant conflict—a spectrum of values and forces that compete for their allegiance and beckon them to contradictory ways of looking at themselves and at the world that surrounds them. The most intractable contradiction they face is between the demands of living in the contemporary world, and the requirements of tradition as determined and advanced by the modern Islamist world view. At the center of this conflict is the dilemma of Muslim women's human rights—whether Muslim women have rights because they are human beings, or whether they have rights because they are Muslim women. At the center of this dilemma is woman in the family—her rights and her obligations. The conclusions they then drew still hold; the challenges and the potentials still exist, though both have become more pronounced since then because of the global events in the past two decades. The challenges we face have been exacerbated, but our potential and capabilities have also increased dramatically. Faith and Freedom, my subject today, addresses these issues.

Before I move on this point, let me recall what I believe is critical for Muslim women—that it is not Islam that holds us back; rather it is the path history of patriarchy in Muslim-majority societies has taken that limits our freedom. Otherwise, the status of women in society has been fundamentally the same across history for a majority of the world’s population regardless of religion, creed, ethnicity or nationality. Except for surface differences in manner and style, the basic arrangements for division of labor and power between men and women have been the same across the world. A woman’s rights over major decisions about her children’s future, place of residence, marriage, inheritance, employment, and the like, have been severely curtailed in most of the world during most of human history. Until the turn of the 20th century, when New Zealand became the first country to give women the right to vote, there was no place on earth where women shared in the political process. Nor did they have the same chance to train for a job, get a job, or, once having gotten a job, receive equal pay. Indeed, in some socio-economic fields, for example ownership, especially ownership of land, Muslim women fared better than women in the West.

It is also interesting to note that the first fundamentalist movement was Christian Protestant, launched in the United States early in the 20th century very much in response to a particular aspect of modernity, namely, a new energetic mobility and visibility of women. As in the case of fundamentalist Protestantism, Islamism is also a reaction to change. As was true in the case of fundamentalist Protestantism, Islamism is also fundamentally political, focusing on the status of women. Indeed, for Islamists every domestic issue is negotiable except women's rights and their position in family and society. They insist on singling out women's position in the family and their relation to society as the supreme test of the authenticity of the Islamic order.

We know that traditionally all religions—from Shinto and Buddhist and Confucian to Zoroastrian and Abrahamic—considered woman a complement of man. Insofar as it pertained to gender relations, the idea defined patriarchy. Naturally, the patriarchal order jealously safeguarded this key to its core identity. When societies set out on the path to modernization, family relations were last to change. Woman continued to remain man’s other half: man the master; woman man’s complement. The framework assigned a highly valued position to woman, but the value was qualitatively different from the value assigned to man. Patriarchy abstracted women’s identity and honor, concretizing them in the thought, judgment, and behavior of men—fathers, brothers, and husbands. Women’s actions expressing even a modicum of individual freedom almost always contradicted the governing social norms, vitiating men’s honor, making life routinely hazardous for women. Historically, this dualism was so strongly entrenched in culture that men and women equally considered it self-evident.

Today, however, women see the contradiction in the self-evident belief because they have become conscious of their individual identity. Individual consciousness, as distinguished from communal consciousness, is a discovery that comes with time as science and technology provide the foundations for doubt about unchanging communal law—that is, law that springs directly or indirectly from God or nature. In this sense, history moves from law to right as the individual begins to perceive that she has a right to participate in the making of the law rather than submit to the existing law as immutable and eternal. In this, all societies that develop and change move in the same direction, though not every move has the same shape or takes place at the same time or proceeds at the same speed. That is why we have fundamentalist reactions of various sorts in all societies and all religions. Contemporary Islamic fundamentalism is also a reaction by a section of society to inevitable change, taking naturally an Islamic hue, rather than being an innate or exclusive property of Islam. Women are its key victims, their plight worsening when religion becomes political.

(contd..)

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