Thursday, March 21, 2002, the first day of spring and a beautiful cherry blossom day in Washington, DC. At midday, a panel on “Securing Legal Rights of Afghan Women” spoke at the Washington College of Law, led by the law professor Azizah al-Hibri, who has taken a leading role in founding Karamah: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights http://www.karamah.org/ and participated in the Brussels Summit on planning a role for women in the future Afghan government. She introduced the basis of Islamic law, interpretation of the Qur’ân, and ijtihâd (interpretation of the law). She explained how important it is, in reforming women’s rights in Islam, to derive it from the Qur’ân and the sources of fiqh (jurisprudence) as a basis; otherwise it will not fly with the Muslims. Dr. Azizah told how scholars like her have been painstakingly going back through the development of fiqh and identifying the point at which extraneous patriarchal influence was inserted; removing that can bring out the original intent of the Qur’ân as supportive of women’s rights.
Mariam Nabawi, an attorney who was born in Afghanistan, spoke next about the process of rewriting the Afghan constitution, and the need for explicit protection of women’s equality in it. The 1964 constitution that the country is revisiting provided for the rights of all citizens without specifically mentioning gender equality; it had been applied to bring about more gender equality, but now there is a need to use exact language to guarantee it. She didn’t mention the E.R.A., but that’s in effect what she was aiming at. The Afghanistan constitution needs an E.R.A.
Hibaaq Osman, Founding Director of the Center for Strategic Initiatives of Women, told of the difficult post-Taliban conditions for women she found during her recent visit to Afghanistan, and the shameful extent to which the Ministry for Women’s Affairs has been neglected in the new government. You hear of all these millions of dollars in aid going to Afghanistan. How much did the Ministry for Women’s Affairs receive of this? A measly nine thousand. The schools have nothing to operate with.
The speakers emphasized that the wearing of the burqa is not the important issue that Westerners have made of it; what matters for Afghan women is establishing legal rights, economic assistance, education, health care. They reported the accusation that a high official in the interim government is alleged to have been a rapist. The Northern Alliance includes guys who think it’s all right to rape the wives of defeated Taliban. This shows how the situation for women there still has far to go toward improvement and security. The upcoming Loya Jirga to form the new government is supposed to include women, but it still hasn’t achieved gender parity. Out of 800 members, maybe 100 will be women. The speakers reiterated that Western feminists need to understand the issues for Muslim women from the Islamic feminists’ point of view: positive change can only come about through Islam, not in opposition to Islam. The sources of Islam contain the basis for women’s rights and gender equality, and Islamic feminist scholars are working to bring that dimension to the forefront.
Next came Fatima Mernissi’s visit to Washington.
Professor Mernissi spoke in the evening at the Politics and Prose bookstore. Because of another engagement, I was only able to arrive late near the end of her talk. She was relating her current research in civil society. Although she’s famous for her important work in Islamic feminism, she said she left women’s issues and began work on civil society during the Gulf War, when Arab dictatorial governments became discredited for allying with the United States. She turned to studying civil society when she observed how the people on the fringes of Moroccan society had learned to manage their own affairs. Not people in Rabat or other major cities, but desert and mountain villagers who got connected to the Internet, are Muslims learning to democratize themselves. She learned from women of Pakistan while conducting writing workshops there. Actually, her work in Islamic feminism flows into her current research, given that the new developments in Muslim civil society include gender equity. She also found that Sufism is key to bringing out the recent liberal developments in Islamic society, including grass roots democracy and gender equality.
Mernissi analyzed how in the Muslim world, men control women through space. The space (harem or public) in which women can exist is tightly regulated: mostly in men’s harem fantasies, but it became reality under the Taliban. Whereas in the West, they proclaim freedom for women’s space while they use time to control women: only when they’re young are they valued, and when they age they’re devalued and thus limited. So “Size 6 is the Western harem”—this brought a laugh. The first part of her talk had been introducing her new book, Scheherazade Goes West, about the contradictions between the Western Orientalists’ unreal fantasies of harem women, and the reality of the harem which forced Muslim women to develop their intellects. One of her main points is that Muslim culture, far more than the West, values learned, intellectual women who use their brains to get ahead in life.
She has her own web site now: http://www.mernissi.net/