Muslim Women’s Rights Movement Gains Strength

In Iran, Azar Nafisi, a professor of English, writes about the strong and clever women in Persian classical literature and the pallid female characters in contemporary Iranian fiction.

In Bangladesh, Yasmeen Murshed, chairwoman of an Asia-Pacific network for women in politics, teaches women how to run for office and write legislation enhancing their rights.

In Malaysia, Norani Othman, an anthropolgist, leads a movement to reinterpret Muslim law and strip it of centuries of accretions that discriminate against women.

Throughout the Islamic world, from North Africa and the Middle East to Southeast Asia, a diverse assortment of individuals and women’s rights groups, different in cultures but sharing a powerful faith, are creating a momentum for change that few would have predicted only a few years ago.

While the status of women can vary widely from country to country in the Islamic world, advocates of Muslim women’s rights share a core group of demands.

They want the right to education, both secular and religious, which is often denied to girls. They seek changes in economic practices to allow them to own and inherit property, enjoy the freedom to start businesses and share in decisions on the distribution of family income.

They also want reform in Muslim family laws that often leave them at the mercy of men who can divorce them without warning, take away their children, deny them the right to travel and bequeath them as chattel to the next male relative.

“It’s actually a much stronger movement than people realize,” said Roslyn Hees, a Canadian who is the World Bank’s division chief for human resources operations in the Middle East and North Africa.

As part of a move toward more open societies in some Islamic countries, she said, “women’s issues have started to take on a greater prominence.”

This weekend in Washington, these issues are being discussed at an international conference on Muslim women, with speakers from more than 20 countries. The conference is being sponsored by the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, a private international organization in Bethesda, Md., that was founded in 1984 to promote women’s rights.

Women in the Islamic world say they draw on universal concepts of human rights - and often on Western educations - while insisting that they are Muslims first and that this will always affect their thinking and methods. Many, including women who might consider themselves secularists, defend others who chose to veil themselves and adopt a conservative theology.

Murshed of Bangladesh, who was denied a Saudi visa to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca because she planned to travel alone and not with a man, says she and others want more than equality under secular law; they want a more active role in Islamic religious life.

“We have to claim our rights as Muslim women,” she said. “We have to claim our Muslimhood. We cannot be set aside. We cannot be ignored. We cannot be outside that system or its religious observances.”

Some see themselves as the best line of defense against Islamic fundamentalism. Others believe that they and the fundamentalists must become partners in building more democratic societies. Either way, they cannot ignore Islamic militancy.

“One of the things the fundamentalist movement has done - whether they wanted to do it or not - was to bring these debates about women to the forefront,” said Mahnaz Afkhami, an Iranian who directs the Sisterhood Is Global Institute.