I’ve just returned from being an honorary female feminist in Vienna for three days. Thanks to Madeleine Bunting’s recommendation, I found myself in a rare and precious world with women from all kinds of backgrounds discussing everything from US foreign policy to the possibility of multiple marriage partners (jokingly expressed, yet instructive nonetheless).
Women Without Borders brought together female imams from all-women congregations in Sweden, a female Muslim chaplain from England, grassroots-level women activists from the Arab world, politicians and diplomats from across Europe, Malaysia’s first female minister, and senior personnel from the US government. The very few men that were present, including the superstar Arab Muslim preacher, Amr Khaled, gave our discussions added impetus.
Set in the historical national library of a city that the Ottoman Muslims tried to conquer in 1529 and again in 1683, Vienna was the ideal venue in which to ask how Muslims were to live harmoniously in the West. For if we get this right now, in the heart of Europe, we offer hope not just for our own posterity but also our brethren in the Muslim East. Millions of young Muslims in Cairo, Riyadh, Amman, Damascus, Mogadishu and Rabat look to the West to learn how we coexist. How do we come to terms with Western liberty and perceived notions of Muslim inequality, particularly in areas of gender?
As with much else vis-a-vis Muslims and Europe, the discussions are taking place under the dark clouds of extremism and terrorism. So, often it becomes difficult to discuss existential questions, centuries-old inequities that we, Muslim and non-Muslim, need to raise candidly and renegotiate. Dealing with extremism, sadly, overshadows everything. Male, literalist readings of scripture and state economic failures that underwrite terrorism get ignored because we are in a “battle for hearts and minds.” Security issues take precedence and government announcements win headlines, while the male-dominated religious interpretation that promises 72 virgins for suicide bombers goes unchallenged. Male Muslim representatives dominate the airwaves and meetings with politicians and reassure us that there is no Muslim terrorism problem — it’s only a fringe minority. To cut a long story short, the Talebanization of Islam continues. But what do Muslim women think?
The Vienna conference gave a voice to Muslim women from across the world. But such initiatives are only the beginnings of a difficult, international conversation. The millions of Muslims now living in the West are at the front-line in carving out a new Muslim pathway, releasing the collective Muslim psyche from the shackles of a patriarchal cultural onslaught that still insists, for example, that many European mosques deny access to women. Or, females cannot travel unless accompanied by a male chaperone in many parts of the Arab world. Or, Italian courts accepting domestic violence because it is a “cultural matter.” The list goes on. For how much longer will Muslim men pretend that all is well, and Muslim women remain silent for fear of instigating an “Islamophobic backlash”?
Women’s issues, at whatever cost, must be raised. The suffragettes did not win their rights by being considerate to male sensitivities. Under pressure from Muslim women, when Muslim men become more tolerant of Muslim women in mosques and at home, releasing the energy and power of Muslim women into the workplace and beyond, then we begin to lay the foundations for a transferable tolerance that can also be extended to those of other faiths and lifestyles. When Arab drama series stop screening domestic violence as normative social behavior, we have hope that we can extend nonviolence to other social and political arenas. When Asian-dominated mosques in Europe welcome more women into mosques, we can expect greater tolerance of others.
I recently had my first child, a blessing of a baby daughter we named Camilla, or Kamilah in Arabic. At Vienna, I thought much about the world Camilla will inherit. Two decades hence, if she is a delegate at a Vienna conference that discusses similar issues, then we will have failed. I don’t want Camilla to grow up in a Muslim community that is dominated by those who are immune to the modern world. The prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) gave women rights when those around him were burying their daughters alive. Where women were chattel and sons inherited stepmothers, the Prophet awarded women full human status in the seventh century, receiving abuse from his pagan peers who mocked that he would say horses also had rights. And so he did. Modern Muslims need to adopt the spirit of the Prophet and transcend the malaise of male-dominated Muslim madness.
I don’t want Camilla’s generation to suffer the indignities of scripturally justified attitudes of domestic violence. Nor do I want to hear facile arguments that suggest Muslim women cannot be heads of state. We live in a new world. The Shariah is not ossified forever. It has always been a dynamic and flexible code of law that takes account of new realities and has always provided new, creative thinking. It is time to do so again.
Muslim scholars and thinkers across the world have a duty to break the mold, to develop a jurisprudence that is rooted in traditional Islam, but relevant and vibrant in a modern setting. Such moves are under way in Syria and Egypt, with several female scholars leading the way in interpreting texts within an orthodox paradigm, true to our tradition but relevant to our context.
The Vienna conference and others such events should embolden them. The literalism-dominated, context-vacuous Muslim male mob that seeks to silence these brave voices should be marginalized. What Muslim scholars freely concede in private, should now be made public.
