The book Muslim Women and The Challenge of Islamic Extremism, edited by Norani Othman and published in October 2005, is based on a project initiated by Sisters in Islam (SIS) in early 2003.
The collection of essays published in the book–describing women’s groups’ experiences in facing, engaging and challenging Islamic extremism (or, as scholars such as Prof. Bassam Tibi prefer to call it “Islamic fundamentalism”)–were originally “country research papers” prepared for the International Roundtable on Muslim Women and the Challenge of Religious Extremism: Building Bridges between Southeast Asia and the Middle East, held in Bellagio, Italy from 30 Sept. to 2 October, 2003.
The papers are the outcome of collaborative research, networking and co-operation among various Muslim women’s groups from Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, & Thailand) and the Middle East (Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Morocco, Turkey, & Saudi Arabia). The task given to the paper contributors was to identify the nature, implications and challenges that ordinary Muslim women, Muslim women’s groups and activists constantly face in their project to achieve justice for and promote the rights of women in their respective countries. The paper-writers were also asked to describe the strategies that were adopted by women’s groups (in their respective countries) in their efforts to overcome those challenges and the opposition that they faced.
The project was implemented in two stages. The first stage was the Regional Preparatory Consultation of Southeast Asian Muslim Activists & Scholars, in Kuala Lumpur held on 20-21 January 2003. The Bellagio Workshop and Roundtable was the second, and larger phase of the project.
The first meeting, attended by nine participants from Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Singapore, discussed (a) the challenges posed by Islamic extremism, or fundamentalism, and conservatism in these countries and their impact on the rights of Muslim women; and (b) the strategies adopted by women’s movements to deal with the challenges and the struggle for Muslim women’s rights and access to justice. The meeting also formulated the research plan and drafted in outline the country papers from Southeast Asia and the Middle East to be presented at the International Roundtable.
The second meeting was an International Roundtable of Muslim women scholars, activists, and scholar-activists from Southeast Asia and some selected Muslim countries in the Middle East. The three-day roundtable brought together 18 women activists and scholars from Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Morocco, Palestine and Turkey to discuss the impact of Islamic revivalism and resurgence on Muslim women; the strategies undertaken to deal with their challenge; and ways of engagement with various other Muslim groups and also co-operation among Muslim women activists and scholar-activists for the future.
In the Bellagio discussions many participants stated that the rise of political Islam and Islamic extremism in their respective countries is related to the increasing pressures of many Muslim countries to democratize in order to fully participate in global economic development. For example, the democratization process that began in 1989 in Jordan has enabled the Muslim Brotherhood there to organize itself as a legitimate political party. This has enabld them to promote actively and openly their Islamization agenda.
Many Islamist groups such as the Brotherhood often focused on areas in which the Jordanian government has displayed little interest–that is, women, the family and marginalized Muslim communities. The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan focused its energies on mobilizing Muslims in the general populace to embrace the lifestyle, family values and notions of gender and gender relations that, in its view, are consistent with the teachings of Islam. By the end of the 1990s more than 90 percent of Muslim women in Jordan had adopted the hijab and accepted fully, or at least became more sensitive to, neo-traditional values regarding women’s role and gender relations in the family and society.
Patriarchal tribal leaders, Islamic fundamentalists and other Islamists have also dominated democratic institutions such as the national Parliament. As law-makers and people’s representatives they have been opposed legislation or legal measures for the advancement of women. For example, when the government in Jordan tried to improve women’s status by introducing Personal Status Law and amending the Penal Code to provide for more severe punishments for violence against women and honour crimes, Parliament rejected these laws outright.
The general or common pattern found within Muslim states seems to be that women and women’s groups or organizations are often caught between, or in the midst, of political or social forces competing for state power and control. In many cases, these are the “westernized” or “secular” elites on the one hand and traditional Islamist/Islamic parties or movements on the other. For example, in the late 1970s Egypt, Anwar Sadat attempted to use Islam as a means of gaining much-needed political and popular support. The Sadat government began to fund the construction of new mosques, utilized Islamic rhetoric in its public statements, and promoted the formation of Islamic student organizations in schools and universities nationwide. But economic problems, such as a rise in the cost of living and increasing rates of unemployment, generated much discontent among the general populace and created a backlash against the government.
The Islamist opposition parties and their groups were able to seize the opportunity to mobilize grass-roots support from this disaffection. It was a combination of the government’s expedient policies in using an “Islamization agenda” and the oppositional politics of the other political parties and groups that created specific contexts for the emergence and spread of kinds of Muslim politics that almost always tend to focus on the control of women in competing for political and Islamic legitimacy.
Another example was Iran. During the period between late 1970s and summer of 1981, with the Islamic Revolution and the ensuing ascendancy of the clerical forces, hundreds of women’s groups surfaced all over the country–in mosques, government offices, factories schools, and so on. Two inclusive and largely moderate women’s groups, the Women’s Society of the Islamic Revolution and the National Union of Women, for example, played a major role in taking over the pre-revolutionary, state-sponsored Women’s Organizations of Iran, taking over their offices and communications facilities under the Islamic Revolution. But soon after, with the onset of the war with Iraq, radicals within these Islamic groups gained the upper hand, while the left, national and liberal Islamists were repressed. A process of Islamization of state institutions and society was begun; “reforms” were enacted and implemented that discriminated against women.
In Malaysia since 1989 Muslim women and Muslim NGO groups such as Sisters in Islam have been pre-occupied with the need to respond to, or manage the “fall-out” from, the introduction of a succession of new laws and administrative policies pertaining to Islam that, directly or by unrecognized implication, adversely affected women’s situation. Often these laws and administrative rules have diminished Muslim women’s full autonomy and undermined their citizenship rights under the Federal Constitution.
In the past decade or so–since the 1995 World Conference of Women in Beijing and with the application of the electronic mail (Email) and the Internet–much progress has been made by Muslim women in establishing communication for immediate networking, mutual support and for the exchange of information regarding their struggle: both against political Islamists and religious extremist groups that discriminate against, and impose violence upon, women; and in responding to the action of state agencies and instrumentalities that have been sensitive to agitation supporting the Islamist demands of those groups.
The Bellagio Roundtable participants were in full agreement that Islamic conservatism and extremism have developed concurrently with political independence and democratization. As nation-states face increasing pressure to democratize soon after achieving political independence and seek to participate in the world market and economy, various political groups and fundamentalist movements (which are basically undemocratic in nature or outlook) are able to seize the opportunity to expand their activities and their influence over the general populace. As “democratic space” opens up, the Bellagio group invariably found, it was the Islamic groups that were best organized, “closest to the ground”, and best positioned to grasp the new political opportunities. The spread of Islamic political movements since the end of World War II, the Bellagio scholars saw, is characterized by the use of Islam as both a political ideology and as a source of law and public policy.
That religion per se should have a public presence, animate key social values and enjoy public respect is itself not the problem. The increasing role of Islam as an enforced “public religion” in Muslim societies–whether formally implemented by the state or driven “on the ground” by political Islamists and religious fundamentalists–is a problem, especially when, as is often the case, it has a discriminatory impact on women.
“What is to be done?” is a recurrent and perennial question that Muslim women’s groups have to confront in their efforts to attain equal legal treatment and acquire justice for women under the laws that now exist in many Muslim states. But the problem goes further. Those laws feed upon, and are supported by, deep-seated social attitudes–attitudes of a religiously conservative kind reluctant to engage with modernity or else Islamist ideas advanced by activists uneasy with modernity and determined to counter it. These social attitudes, the Bellagio participants noted, and the system of Islamic education at all levels–in schools and the various madrasah, colleges and universities–that promote those entrenched attitudes give support to and so reinforce those laws that limit the legal rights and social participation of Muslim women in many countries. Those conservative and reactive “neo-conservative” attitudes endorse the restrictive thinking and worldview that are propagated by Islamic fundamentalists and political Islamists.
The project of an Islamic renewal, educational and social reform (tajdid)–of creating a Muslim culture of modernity–is the main prerequisite of the agenda of repairing those aspects of “conventionally-understood mainstream Islam” that are currently antithetical to the principles of gender equality and justice. The task here is not simply to reform the gender attitudes of contemporary Islamic law and society. It is to rescue Islam itself from its unwarranted subjugation to a political illiberalism that has no proper Islamic basis or justification. That is not just the view of SIS or the Bellagio participants. It is also that of the Malaysian government itself. Since 2004 those principles of justice and gender equality that were voiced by the Bellagio participants have been incorporated in this nation’s “Islam Hadhari” policy.
While the twentieth-century demand for democratization in Muslim states provided ample opportunity for political Islam to thrive and Muslim extremism to flourish and spread, it also gave impetus to the development of the Muslim women’s movement whose worldwide components, such as those that were represented at Bellagio, are committed to the renewal and rejuvenation (tajdid) of Islam from within. Muslim feminism is merely one form or dimension of this general impetus, going back to Afghani and Abduh and their successors, for the reanimation of modern Islam with authentic Quranic vision, for genuine tajdid. Central to this project of fashioning Islam in forms that are gentle, friendly, and civil towards women is the work to reform, improve and reformulate Muslim family law consistent with the contemporary reality and its social problems.
Questioning the “construction of gender” in Islamic legal theory or Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) is crucial to Muslim women’s agenda for change. Currently accepted conceptions of gender roles and the system of male marital privilege and supremacy embodying them were created by some of the influential classical jurists and then reshaped in the last century. They did not emerge simply and directly from the Qur’an. They emerged from the inescapably restricted understanding of life and, on that basis, from the process of Quranic interpretation of which people living within a foreshortened premodern intellectual horizon were then capable.
Such conventional understandings of gender identities, roles and rights do not therefore embody a perennial and immutable sacred truth. Rather, they were the results of numerous acts of interpretation by a particular class of men living and thinking at a specific time within Islamic history–in their own time remarkable men, but men of their time, not ours. Yet their conceptualizations of marriage, marital, family and social roles of women are what the Islamists’ agenda seeks to enact and enforce in legislation today. Those views are not only incongruent with today’s realities. They contravene the very notions of justice and fairness towards women that are articulated in the Qur’an and were practised during the formative period of Islam by the Prophet.
Gender rights as constructed in historical fiqh were a brilliant achievement of mediaeval Muslim legal minds and jurisprudential reasoning. But they will not enable contemporary Muslims to attain the objectives of justice, equality and fairness that are central to Quranic principles, the “social objectives” of the shari’ah (maqasid al shari’ah), that are so urgently needed in Islamic societies today. Contemporary Muslims need to formulate a new jurisprudence based on conceptions of marriage that are relevant to the changing roles and responsibilities of men and women today. These conceptions are not contradictory to the central and eternal principles of the Qur’an, as is often claimed by the detractors of the principle and notion of gender equality in Islam. To formulate such a conception today’s Muslims may have to set aside some of the necessarily “time-bound” views and conclusions of the classical Islamic jurists. But in doing so they will not be repudiating those great Muslim thinkers, only seeking conscientiously and responsibly to do in our time what they sought conscientiously and responsibly to do in theirs.
Initiating the work of reformulating Muslim family laws is the task of the Muslim women’s movement–throughout the Islamic world including here in Malaysia, so often the proving ground and showcase of successful Islamic modernization. That initiative requires long-term planning. It probably has to begin with women working in their respective countries while at the same time acting in concert: maintaining collaborative projects, organizing consultative meetings, reviewing their existing public education programmes, planning advocacy and framing policy formulation and intervention work at the local, regional and global levels. That is what the Bellagio meeting was all about, the challenge that its agenda addressed. States and governments in Muslim countries are still in the midst of amending and implementing their codes of family law. They are doing so in a contested political context where they are pressed to meet the diverse political demands arising from Muslim communities under their rule or jurisdiction.
Others, including the conservative (“modernity-uninterested”) and “neo-conservative” (“modernity-enraged”) Islamists have not been shy to register their demands. Muslim women’s organizations, too, and especially those concerned with legal reform, must also seize every opportunity to participate in that process. We cannot leave it just to the politicians and restrictively-minded Islamic activists to decide these matters. Unlike the women who came together to address these issues at Bellagio, they seldom consider a gender perspective as a basic requirement in the formulation of Muslim family law.
As is often the case, this book had to meet a deadline. It had to be sent for printing and publication by October 2005, without the revised or final drafts of the country papers from Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. As editor, I did my best to provide a summary and overview. I sought to include or incorporate the many interesting aspects–the various trends and counter-trends–of the politicization of Islam and the contemporary rise of political Islamist movements as they seek to achieve ascendancy and impose their own partisan views upon the state, political elites and ordinary faithful Muslims.
As an academic, it was my hope that the book would help shape a more sensitive and nuanced understanding of these issues than is generally current today in many parts of the Muslim world. My hope, and that of all the participants at Bellagio, was that our work and the publication emerging from our meeting would help clarify the challenges that contemporary Muslim women and Muslim women activists face in their pursuit of their rights, of equal and fair treatment under the law, and of that cardinally important principle of Quranic and classical jurisprudential Islam alike–justice.
As the book’s editor and as contributor to three of its chapters, I am, needless to say, both concerned and grieved that–seemingly without any proper or transparent process of review and consultation–a book such as this can be banned by a democratic government. When any book is banned it is a tragedy–in the case of a malign book without any redeeming features a perhaps bearable tragedy. But when a serious and responsibly-intentioned book such as this is banned by a government without it stating what its objections to the book are and on what principled and coherent grounds its objections are based, that is another matter.
When governments and public authorities accede to the zealous condemnation of books such as this one they are, one must suspect, simply pandering to prejudice and capitulating to ignorance. This, I suggest, is not–and cannot truly be–any part of realizing anew the glory of Islamic civilization that is the proclaimed agenda of “Islam Hadhari” and of the government that espouses that noble objective.