Women in Islam

Current issues, news and ethics
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kmaherali
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Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

The following is an obituary of the mother of Mowlana HazarImam. As we reflect on the 50 years of Imamat, her life is a striking example of the role of women in shaping important socio-economic aspects of our community.

OBITUARIES - JOAN LADY CAMROSE

Joan Lady Camrose, mother of the Aga Khan, died on April 25 aged 89. She was born on April 22, 1908.

A RENOWNED beauty of her day, Joan Lady Camrose was to play host to a circle of socialites, intellectuals, politicians and diplomats in London.
Her list of acquaintances was as eclectic as it was sophisticated, including
as it did such figures as Evelyn Waugh, Randolph Churchill, Margot Fonteyn, Nancy Mitford, Lord Birkenhead, Malcolm Muggeridge, Freya Stark, Harold Acton, Edward Heath and Cecil Beaton ­ she was instrumental in launching the photographic career of the last. Her choice of companions reflected her own wide range of interests.

Joan Barbara Yarde-Buller was the eldest daughter of Lord and Lady
Churston. Her mother, who later remarried to become the Duchess of Leinster, was a talented musician. One of her sisters, Primrose, married the Earl of Cadogan. Another, Lydia, became the Duchess of Bedford. She herself married three times.

The first marriage was to Thomas Loel Guinness, of the banking family. A son, Patrick, was born but died in a car accident in the 1960s. The second was to Prince Aly Khan, son of Sir Sultan Mahommed Shah, Aga Khan III, renowned as Imam of 15 million Ismaili Muslims, twice president of the League of Nations and five times winner of the Epsom Derby.

Prince Aly and Joan married in Paris in 1936 and had two sons, Karim and Amyn. When war broke out in 1940, Prince Aly joined the French cavalry and served throughout the Middle East while Joan based herself at the Anglo-French Hospital in Cairo after setting up home for her two boys in Kenya. It was during this period that she got to know and admire her father-in-law, Aga Khan III. It was he who used her knowledge of hospitals and nursing to the benefit of his followers. In 1944 he appointed her health and education commissioner in East Africa and she helped introduce his plans for the management of Ismaili schools and clinics.

The marriage, however, did not survive the stress of the five-year
hostilities of the Second World War. Princess Joan moved to a new home in Eaton Square, London, and opened her doors to a glittering array of
diplomats, politicians, ambassadors, writers, musicians and journalists.

Meanwhile, her two sons were growing up rapidly. The old Aga's regard for her had not been affected by the divorce and it was entirely on his advice that her sons were educated at Le Rosey in Switzerland and at Harvard in America, thus by-passing the conventional British upper-class equivalents of Eton or Harrow and Oxbridge. But in 1957 Aga III died and surprised the world by selecting in his will his 20-year old elder grandson, Karim, rather than either of his sons, Aly and Sadruddin, to succeed him as Imam or Spiritual Leader of the Ismaili Muslims scattered through 22 countries all over the globe.

Karim, still a junior at Harvard, had now to undertake a world tour when he would be formally installed as the Ismaili's 49th Imam. Princess Joan found herself caught up in a whirl of preparations for a long and
complicated journey, the first stage of which was to the three territories
of East Africa (still very much under the British colonial wing). They
involved meetings with the Ismaili leaders from the region and making
arrangements for the entire family including Prince Aly himself (who bore
any eventual disappointment with remarkable fortitude and whose loyalty to his son was exemplary).


Without once stepping on her son's toes, Princess Joan helped smooth his path with the media, accompanied him to Buckingham Palace where the Queen passed on the title of "High Highness" originally bestowed on his grandfather by Queen Victoria.

The arrangement of the "Takht-nashinis", or accession ceremonies which followed in Dar-es-Salaam, Nairobi, Kampala, Karachi and Bombay were her next task. But whether the young Aga Khan was meeting the Kabaka of Uganda or Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in New Delhi, Princess Joan was always discreetly at hand. Once the tour was completed, however, and as her son became more closely involved with Ismaili affairs, she largely withdrew.

Even so, along with other members of the family, she accompanied him on several overseas visits well into her 70s. Most often she joined the family holidays with innumerable grandchildren at the Aga Khan's villa in Porto Cervo, Sardinia. Meanwhile she was free to indulge her other interests at the opera and ballet at Covent Garden, in health and hospitals and in archaeology. She played a leading role in stimulating interest in the former Hellenic sites on the southern coast of Turkey, most particularly in raising funds for the restoration of the ancient city of Aphrodisias.

In 1986 she married again, late in life, to her long term companion, the
late Seymour Thomas Berry, Viscount Lord Camrose, former chairman and then director of The Daily Telegraph. She was to preside with as much grace and skill over his family home in Hackwood as she had done over Prince Aly's house at Maison Lafitte in Paris. Above all she was able to enjoy her other passion in life; landscape gardening. She researched the original plans and completely transformed the glorious woods and grounds at Hackwood, personally supervising its opening to the public.
Her third husband predeceased her. She is survived by her two sons.
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

The Algerian experience of the integration of women in mainstream socio/economic/political life as alluded to in the following article can serve as a model for other Arab countries to follow. It is also interesting to note that Algeria with it's strong mystical/esoteric undercurrents provided the fertile soil in which the seeds of the Fatimid empire germinated. Esoteric inclined traditions are more versatile and adaptive to change.

There is an illustrative multimedia in connection with the essay linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/world ... &th&emc=th

May 26, 2007
A Quiet Revolution in Algeria: Gains by Women
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

ALGIERS, May 25 — In this tradition-bound nation scarred by a brutal Islamist-led civil war that killed more than 100,000, a quiet revolution is under way: women are emerging as an economic and political force unheard of in the rest of the Arab world.

Women make up 70 percent of Algeria 's lawyers and 60 percent of its judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more to household income than men. Sixty percent of university students are women, university researchers say.

In a region where women have a decidedly low public profile, Algerian women are visible everywhere. They are starting to drive buses and taxicabs. They pump gas and wait on tables.

Although men still hold all of the formal levers of power and women still make up only 20 percent of the work force, that is more than twice their share a generation ago, and they seem to be taking over the machinery of state as well.

"If such a trend continues," said Daho Djerbal, editor and publisher of Naqd, a magazine of social criticism and analysis, "we will see a new phenomenon where our public administration will also be controlled by women."

The change seems to have sneaked up on Algerians, who for years have focused more on the struggle between a governing party trying to stay in power and Islamists trying to take that power.

Those who study the region say they are taken aback by the data but suggest that an explanation may lie in the educational system and the labor market.

University studies are no longer viewed as a credible route toward a career or economic well-being, and so men may well opt out and try to find work or to simply leave the country, suggested Hugh Roberts, a historian and the North Africa project director of the International Crisis Group.

But for women, he added, university studies get them out of the house and allow them to position themselves better in society. "The dividend may be social rather than in terms of career," he said.

This generation of Algerian women has navigated a path between the secular state and the pull of extremist Islam, the two poles of the national crisis of recent years.

The women are more religious than previous generations, and more modern, sociologists here said. Women cover their heads and drape their bodies with traditional Islamic coverings. They pray. They go to the mosque — and they work, often alongside men, once considered taboo.

Sociologists and many working women say that by adopting religion and wearing the Islamic head covering called the hijab, women here have in effect freed themselves from moral judgments and restrictions imposed by men. Uncovered women are rarely seen on the street late at night, but covered women can be seen strolling the city after attending the evening prayer at a mosque.

"They never criticize me, especially when they see I am wearing the hijab," said Denni Fatiha, 44, the first woman to drive a large city bus through the narrow, winding roads of Algiers.

The impact has been far-reaching and profound.

In some neighborhoods, for example, birthrates appear to have fallen and class sizes in elementary schools have dropped by nearly half. It appears that women are delaying marriage to complete their studies, though delayed marriage is also a function of high unemployment. In the past, women typically married at 17 or 18 but now marry on average at 29, sociologists said.

And when they marry, it is often to men who are far less educated, creating an awkward social reality for many women.

Khalida Rahman is a lawyer. She is 33 and has been married to a night watchman for five months. Her husband was a friend of her brothers who showed up one day and proposed. She immediately said yes, she recalled.

She describes her life now this way: "Whenever I leave him it is just as if I am a man. But when I get home I become a woman."

Fatima Oussedik, a sociologist, said, "We in the '60s, we were progressive, but we did not achieve what is being achieved by this generation today." Ms. Oussedik, who works for the Research Center for Applied Economics and Development in Algiers, does not wear the hijab and prefers to speak in French.

Researchers here say the change is not driven by demographics; women make up only a bit more than half of the population. They said it is driven by desire and opportunity.

Algeria's young men reject school and try to earn money as traders in the informal sector, selling goods on the street, or they focus their efforts on leaving the country or just hanging out. There is a whole class of young men referred to as hittistes — the word is a combination of French and Arabic for people who hold up walls.

Increasingly, the people here have lost faith in their government, which draws its legitimacy from a revolution now more than five decades old, many political and social analysts said. In recent parliamentary elections, turnout was low and there were 970,000 protest votes — cast by people who intentionally destroyed their ballots — nearly as many as the 1.3 million votes cast in support of the governing party.

There are regular protests, and riots, all over the country, with people complaining about corruption, lack of services and economic disparities. There are violent attacks, too: bombings aimed at the police, officials and foreigners. A triple suicide bombing on April 11 against the prime minister's office and the police left more than 30 people dead.

In that context, women may have emerged as Algeria's most potent force for social change, with their presence in the bureaucracy and on the street having a potentially moderating and modernizing influence on society, sociologists said.

"Women, and the women's movement, could be leading us to modernity," said Abdel Nasser Djabi, a professor of sociology at the University of Algiers.

Not everyone is happy with those dynamics. Some political and social analysts say the recent resurgence in radical Islamist activity, including bombings, is driven partly by a desire to slow the social change the country is experiencing, especially regarding women's role in society.

Others complain that the growing participation of women in society is a direct violation of the faith.

"I am against this," said Esmail Ben Ibrahim, an imam at a neighborhood mosque near the center of the city. "It is all wrong from a religious point of view. Society has embarked on the wrong path."

The quest for identity is a constant undercurrent in much of the Middle East. But it is arguably the most complicated question in Algeria, a nation whose borders were drawn by France and whose people speak Berber, Arabic and French.

After a bitter experience with French occupation and a seven-year revolutionary war that brought independence in 1962 at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, the leaders here chose to adopt Islam and Arab identity as the force to unify the country. Arabic replaced French as the language of education, and the French secular curriculum was replaced with a curriculum heavy on religion.

At the same time, girls were encouraged to go to school.

Now, more than four decades later, Algeria's youth — 70 percent of the population is under 30, researchers said — have grown up with Arabic and an orientation toward Middle Eastern issues. Arabic-language television networks like Al Jazeera have become the popular reference point, more so than French television, observers here said.

In the 1990s radical Islamist ideas gained popular support, and terrorism was widely accepted as a means to win power. More than 100,000 people died in years of civil conflict. Today most people say the experience has forced them to reject the most radical ideas. So although Algerians are more religious now than they were during the bloody 1990s, they are more likely to embrace modernity — a partial explanation for the emergence of women as a societal force, some analysts said.

That is not the case in more rural mountainous areas, where women continue to live by the code of tradition. But for the time being, most people say that for now the community's collective consciousness is simply too raw from the years of civil war for Islamist terrorists or radical Islamic ideas to gain popular support.

There is a sense that the new room given to women may at least partly be a reflection of that general feeling. The population has largely rejected the most radical interpretation of Islam and has begun to return to the more North African, almost mystical, interpretation of the faith, sociologists and religious leaders said.

Whatever the underlying reason, women in the streets of the city are brimming with enthusiasm.

"I don't think any of this contradicts Islam," said Wahiba Nabti, 36, as she walked through the center of the city one day recently. "On the contrary, Islam gives freedom to work. Anyway, it is between you and God."

Ms. Nabti wore a black scarf covering her head and a long black gown that hid the shape of her body. "I hope one day I can drive a crane, so I can really be financially independent," she said. "You cannot always rely on a man."
kmaherali
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Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

Hopefully with the increased participation of women in Saudi society as alluded to in the following artcile, there will hopefully be a more progressive and humane interpretation of faith to bring it in line with modernity - a hopeful sign for the Arab World and Islam.

One-Third of Government Jobs for Women: Sultan
P.K. Abdul Ghafour, Arab News



JEDDAH, 27 May 2007 — Crown Prince Sultan yesterday announced plans to allocate one third of government jobs to Saudi women and to create additional job opportunities for them. “The government depends on women for one third of its jobs,” the prince said. Prince Sultan underscored the government’s efforts to provide advanced education to Saudi women. “Saudi leaders have given women the right to education and employment within the Kingdom’s basic principles,” he explained.

The government has established hundreds of schools and colleges for girls in different parts of the Kingdom. Last year a women’s university was established in Riyadh. Women graduates currently outnumber their male counterparts, constituting 56.5 percent of the total.

Women’s employment has previously been limited primarily to education and health. A Cabinet decision issued some three years ago expanded job opportunities for women.

The Kingdom’s 8th Five-Year Development Plan (2005-2009) aims at increasing the percentage of women in the Saudi work force from 5.4 percent to 14.2 percent.

According to the latest study by the General Statistics Department, there are nearly 470,000 unemployed Saudi men and women, accounting for 12 percent of the total Saudi work force. “The number of unemployed men is 292,905 or 9.1 percent of the total number of Saudi working men while the number of jobless women is 176,113 or 26.3 percent of the total number of working women,” said the study conducted last year.

The UN Development Program (UNDP) says that the lack of optimum employment of human resources, including women, has led to an increased reliance on foreign manpower. The number of non-Saudi workers in the Kingdom is estimated at 8,024,885 including 6,780,550 men and 1,244,335 women. Of the 3,900,589 in the Saudi work force, 3,230,201 are men and 670,388 were women, the study said.

Prince Sultan also spoke about the Kingdom’s requirement of skilled and experienced foreign labor to carry out various development projects and run new companies and industries. However, he pointed out that the employment of foreign labor would not be at the expense of Saudis. There are over eight million expatriates in the Kingdom and the majority of them work in the private sector.

He said the Kingdom’s universities and institutes of higher learning would focus on science and technology in the coming years in order to meet job market requirements. Efforts are under way to establish a university of science and technology (named after King Abdullah) north of Jeddah.

The crown prince reiterated the government’s plan to establish new welfare projects in various parts of the Kingdom. Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah recently visited the northern regions and launched a large number of educational, health and infrastructure projects at a cost of billions of riyals.

The crown prince also disclosed plans to purchase more dates from farmers and distribute them among Arab, Islamic and other friendly countries as gifts. He commended the Saudi security forces for their success in the campaign against terrorists. He also called upon Saudis and expatriates to use water prudently, without wasting the valuable resource. “Excessive use of water for agriculture will endanger the Kingdom’s water security,” he added.






With Kind Regards

Mohammad Usman

Jeddah

SAUDI ARABIA
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

The following article illustrates the extremes in the Islamic World on the issue of hijab. Whereas Iran is enforcing hijab, Tunisia is persecuting women wearing the hijab. The key is to make it a personal choice and not to enforce it either way. Tunisia is also a country where the Fatimids took root before they flourished across North Africa.

By Yvonne Ridley
Date: 2007-05-29

Why do journalists choose to ignore the Amnesty International report which outlines in clinical detail how the Tunisian authorities have increased their "harassment of women who wear the hijab"?I have a bee in my bonnet – or hijab to be more precise.

On an almost daily basis there are horrific stories pouring out of Tunisia about how the state police are ripping off the hijabs of women living there.
Some of these women, who are merely fulfilling their religious obligation to wear a hijab, have been assaulted, sexually abused and even locked up in prison by the authorities.

Unbelievable when you consider western tourists are topless sunbathing on the coastal resorts, soaking up the Tunisian sun.

So it is okay to get your kit off if you are a western tourist who pays handsomely for sun, sand, sex and sangria …but try wearing a hijab and see what happens in this so-called liberal, Muslim country.

At the moment I am in Tehran where Iranian police are occasionally stopping women in the streets to remind them of their religious obligations by wearing a full hijab.

There's been an outcry in the Western media about how the Iranian authorities are fining women who fail to wear their hijabs correctly in public.

I call these women the half-jabis – you know the ones, they balance their designer scarfs precariously on the back of their heads and spend the rest of the day adjusting and picking their scarfs from the nape of their necks.

It might have endeared Princess Diana to half the Muslim world when she 'covered' in Muslim countries, but most women who try and emulate the Di style just look plain stupid.

But what a pity those same journalists don't travel to Tunisia and write about a real story like the human rights abuses against women in down town Tunis instead of focusing on Tehran.

Why do journalists choose to ignore the Amnesty International report which outlines in clinical detail how the Tunisian authorities have increased their "harassment of women who wear the hijab"?

Is it because the Tunisian government is a craven devotee of the Bush Administration whereas Iran was identified as the now infamous Axis of Evil?

Surely the media is not that fickle? (Rhetorical question merely for the benefit of the mentally challenged).

The actions of the Tunisian regime make Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his government look like a group of Tupperware party planners.

For instance, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and the Interior and the Secretary-General of Tunisia's ruling political party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally, have stated they are so concerned about rise in the use of the hijab by women and girls and beards and the qamis (knee-level shirts) by men, that they have called for a strict implementation of decree 108 of 1985 of the Ministry of Education banning the hijab at educational institutions and when working in government.

Police have ordered women to remove the head scarfs before being allowed into schools, universities or work places and others have been made to remove them in the street.

According to Amnesty's report, some women were arrested and taken to police stations where they were forced to sign written commitment to stop wearing the hijab.

Amnesty International states quite clearly it believes that individuals have the right to choose whether or not to wear a headscarf or other religious covering, consistent with their right to freedom of expression.

They have called on the Tunisian government to "respect the country's obligations under both national law and international human rights law and standards, and to end the severe restrictions which continue to be used to prevent exercise of fundamental rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly".

They have even kindly asked President Ben Ali's government to "end the harassment and attempted intimidation of human rights defenders".
I would like to be more forthright with Mr Ben Ali and remind him of his Islamic obligations as a Muslim.

I doubt if Zine Alabidin Ben Ali would take much notice. The man is clearly an arrogant fool and somewhere in Tunisia there is a village which is missing its idiot (Hamman-Sousse in the Sahel, actually).


This is the man who once said the hijab was something foreign and not part of Tunisian culture. Hmm, he obviously has not seen pictures taken before he came to power, clearly show Tunisian women going about their business fully covered.

He has a history of despising the French colonialists who occupied his country, but at least under the French, the Tunisian people had more freedom than they do now.

And since I have no family, friends or connections in Tunisia I write this without fear or favour.

Also, there is no rank in Islam so I care nothing for his title nor do I have any respect for him as a man. I would certainly never doff my cap to this particular President of Tunisia and would happily spit in his face if he told me to remove my hijab.

Perhaps those Muslim women in Tehran might like to consider the plight of their sisters in Tunisia before trying to balance their hijabs on the backs of their heads. And I would ask them to read the harrowing report below before bellyaching to more journalists about their rights to parade around like Diana-look-a-likes.

It was written by an imam from Tunisia who had it smuggled out and given to me because he wants the world to know exactly what is happening to the women in his country.

Here is a snippet: "The police will randomly make their way into markets and rip the hijabs from women's heads as well as take away any fabrics being sold to make hijabs.

"They will also go into factories where women are working and rip the hijabs off women's heads. This is the least of what they have done.
"I will give you just one example of what these dogs with Arab faces but the hearts of devils, have done to our sisters. They have, at one time ordered a public bus to halt in the middle of the road while two plain clothes detectives went inside. The buses are similar to the ones in the west except they will usually have three times more people inside it.
"They grabbed one women wearing hijab and took her outside of the bus. This was a sister who they had warned before. They brought her into the side of the street and began slapping her across her face and cursing at her with the worst language you could think of.

"They took her hijab off and the main policeman said, "When are you going to stop wearing this ****. She said she would never stop and she was crying. The men took her around the corner by a public bathroom.

"They ripped her clothes off. They grabbed a soda bottle, these bottles are made of glass, and they raped her with it. They were laughing and they were many people around but no one did anything. When they were done they made her wear a short skirt and a sleeveless shirt and made her walk home to her husband like this. I swear by Allah that this is true".
The time is fast approaching when sisters across the world have to unite and come together in defence of the hijab and in defence of the Muslim sisterhood.

My appeal goes out to feminists of all faiths and no faith but please don't think Muslim women are weak because the reality is that Islamic feminism can be just as radical as western feminism.

Our parameters and values are slightly different as Muslims but that does not make us any better or lesser human beings than western feminists. There is certainly no room for sectarianism in the Muslim sisterhood and we have no time for petty squabbles, divisions, cultural or tribal affiliations.

The bottom line is that we need to show solidarity with our sisters in Tunisia … it is a very small country which makes it easy for the army to control the people and brutally squash any signs of resistance.
Even those Tunisians living abroad have a fear in their eyes because while they may be safe, members of their families left behind are often held to account for any actions overseas regarded as subversive.
The brutality of the regime, combined with the happy clappy clerics and their narcotic-style preachings in praise of the Sufi-style government have also collectively subdued parts of the Tunisian population.
No wonder the Muslim youth no longer clamour to get into masjids on Fridays to listen to these khateebs who spend half the khutbah praising the President and his followers.

Which is why I salute the bravery of those sisters in Tunisia who are fighting for the right to fulfill their religious obligation as Muslim women, to wear the hijab.

If you want to help, then copy and paste this article and send it to the nearest Tunisian Embassy demanding that Muslim womens' rights to wear the hijab are respected.
kmaherali
Posts: 25108
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

There is an interesting multimedia linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/world ... ref=slogin

June 22, 2007
Muslims' Veils Test Limits of Britain's Tolerance
By JANE PERLEZ

LONDON, June 16 — Increasingly, Muslim women in Britain take their children to school and run errands covered head to toe in flowing black gowns that allow only a slit for their eyes. On a Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park, groups of black-clad Muslim women relaxed on the green baize lawn among the in-line skaters and badminton players.

Their appearance, like little else, has unnerved other Britons, testing the limits of tolerance here and fueling the debate over the role of Muslims in British life.

Many veiled women say they are targets of abuse. Meanwhile, there are growing efforts to place legal curbs on the full-face Muslim veil, known as the niqab.

There have been numerous examples in the past year. A lawyer dressed in a niqab was told by an immigration judge that she could not represent a client because, he said, he could not hear her. A teacher wearing a niqab was dismissed from her school. A student who was barred from wearing a niqab took her case to the courts, and lost. In reaction, the British educational authorities are proposing a ban on the niqab in schools altogether.

A leading Labor Party politician, Jack Straw , scolded women last year for coming to see him in his district office in the niqab. Prime Minister Tony Blair has called the niqab a "mark of separation."

David Sexton, a columnist for The Evening Standard, wrote recently that the niqab was an affront and that Britain had been "too deferential."

"It says that all men are such brutes that if exposed to any more normally clothed women, they cannot be trusted to behave — and that all women who dress any more scantily like that are indecent," Mr. Sexton wrote. "It's abusive, a walking rejection of all our freedoms."

Although the number of women wearing the niqab has increased in the past several years, only a tiny percentage of women among Britain's two million Muslims cover themselves completely. It is impossible to say how many exactly.

Some who wear the niqab, particularly younger women who have taken it up recently, concede that it is a frontal expression of Islamic identity, which they have embraced since Sept. 11, 2001, as a form of rebellion against the policies of the Blair government in Iraq, and at home.

"For me it is not just a piece of clothing, it's an act of faith, it's solidarity," said a 24-year-old program scheduler at a broadcasting company in London, who would allow only her last name, al-Shaikh, to be printed, saying she wanted to protect her privacy. "9/11 was a wake-up call for young Muslims," she said.

At times she receives rude comments, including, Ms. Shaikh said, from a woman at her workplace who told her she had no right to be there. Ms. Shaikh says she plans to file a complaint.

When she is on the street, she often answers back. "A few weeks ago, a lady said, 'I think you look crazy.' I said, 'How dare you go around telling people how to dress,' and walked off. Sometimes I feel I have to reply. Islam does teach you that you must defend your religion."

She started experimenting with the niqab at Brunel University in West London, a campus of intense Islamic activism. She hesitated at first because her mother saw it as a "form of extremism, which is understandable," she said, adding that her mother has since come around.

Other Muslims find the practice objectionable, a step backward for a group that is under pressure after the terrorist attack on London's transit system in July 2005.

"After the July 7 attacks, this is not the time to be antagonizing Britain by presenting Muslims as something sinister," said Imran Ahmad, the author of "Unimagined," an autobiography about growing up Muslim in Britain, and the leader of British Muslims for Secular Democracy. "The veil is so steeped in subjugation, I find it so offensive someone would want to create such barriers. It's retrograde."

Since South Asians started coming to Britain in large numbers in the 1960s, a small group of usually older, undereducated women have worn the niqab. It was most often seen as a sign of subjugation.

Many more Muslim women wear the head scarf, called the hijab, covering all or some of their hair. Unlike in France, Turkey and Tunisia, where students in state schools and civil servants are banned from covering their hair, in Britain, Muslim women can wear the head scarf, and indeed the niqab, almost anywhere, for now.

But that tolerance is slowly eroding. Even some who wear the niqab, like Faatema Mayata, a 24-year-old psychology and religious studies teacher, agreed there were limits.

"How can you teach when you are covering your face?" she said, sitting with a cup of tea in her living room in Blackburn, a northern English town, her niqab tucked away because she was within the confines of her home.

She has worn the niqab since she was 12, when she was sent by her parents to an all-girl boarding school. The niqab was not, as many Britons seemed to think, a sign of extremism, she said.

She condemned Britain's involvement in Iraq, and she described the departure of Mr. Blair at the end of this month as "good riddance of bad rubbish." But, she added, "there are many Muslims like this sitting at home having tea, and not taking any interest in jihad."

The niqab, to her, is about identity. "If I dressed in a Western way I could be a Hindu, I could be anything," she said. "This way I feel comfortable in my identity as a Muslim woman."

No one else in her family wears the niqab. Her husband, Ibrahim Boodi, a social worker, was indifferent, she said. "If I took it off today, he wouldn't care."

She drives her old Alfa Romeo to the supermarket, and other drivers take no exception, she said. But when she is walking she is often stopped, she said. "People ask, 'Why do you wear that?' A lot of people assume I'm oppressed, that I don't speak English. I don't care. I've got a brain."

Some British commentators have complained that mosques encourage women to wear the niqab, a practice they have said should be stopped.

At the East London Mosque, one of the largest mosques in the capital, the chief imam, Abdul Qayyum, studied in Saudi Arabia and is trained in the Wahhabi school of Islam. The community relations officer at the mosque, Ehsan Abdullah Hannan, said the imam's daughter wore the niqab.

At Friday Prayer recently, the women were crowded into a small windowless room upstairs, away from the main hall for the men.

A handful of young women wore the niqab, and they spoke effusively about their reasons. "Wearing the niqab means you will get a good grade and go to paradise," said Hodo Muse, 19, a Somali woman. "Every day people are giving me dirty looks for wearing it, but when you wear something for God you get a boost."

One woman, Sajida Khaton, 24, interviewed as she sat discreetly in a Pizza Hut, said she did not wear the veil on the subway, a precaution her husband encourages for safety reasons. Sometimes, she said, she gets a kick out of the mocking.

" 'All right gorgeous,' " she said she had heard men say as she walked along the street. "I feel empowered," she said. "They'd like to see, and they can't."

She often comes to the neighborhood restaurant along busy Whitechapel Road in East London for a slice or two, a habit, she said, that shows that even veiled women are well integrated into Britain's daily life.

"I'm in Pizza Hut with my son," said Ms. Khaton, nodding at her 4-year-old and speaking in a soft East London accent that bore no hint of her Bangladeshi heritage. "I was born here, I've never been to Bangladesh. I certainly don't feel Bangladeshi. So when they say, 'Go back home,' where should I go?"
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Women in Islamic Society — 23: Important Role of Mosques
Dr. Abd Al-Haleem Abu Shuqqah



The mosque is the most important institution in Islamic society. It is the center of worship, education as well as social and political activity. It is also the place where public meetings take place, and it serves as a sports arena when necessary. Therefore, during the lifetime of the Prophet (peace be upon him), women were welcome in the mosque whenever they wished to come. As women frequented the Prophet’s mosque, they were able to directly participate in public life, in addition to taking part in worship, listening to the Qur’an as it was recited in prayer, attending lectures and classes and taking interest in the Muslim community’s social or political concerns. Moreover, women met in the mosque and were thus able to strengthen their ties of friendship. What this means is that during the Prophet’s lifetime, the mosque was a very active center of worship, cultural and social activities for men and women alike. Therefore, no one may deprive women of their right to frequent the mosque. To force women to pray at home, claiming that this is preferable constitutes a sinful practice, since it means disobeying the Prophet who ordered us not to prevent women from visiting the mosque. When a woman goes to the mosque for worship, or to listen to words of wisdom, attend a public activity, meet other Muslim women to strengthen ties with them, or help in some good thing, then that benefit will be hers. Her good action may be obligatory or recommended. The Prophet says: “Whoever comes to the mosque for a particular purpose will have the benefit of that purpose.”

The Prophet says: “Prayer offered in congregation in the mosque is rewarded 25 times more than the same prayer offered at home or in the market place.” Commenting on the Hadith, Ibn Daqeeq Al-Eid says: “When a person performs ablution well at home and goes out to the mosque, for no purpose other than offering prayer, for every step he makes he is given a credit and one of his sins is erased. When he prays, the angels will pray for him throughout his prayer, saying: ‘Our Lord, bless him, forgive him and bestow mercy on him.’ While waiting for the prayer to be called, he is deemed to be in prayer. We need to look at the qualities mentioned in the Hadith to be sure of its applicability. Although the Hadith speaks of a man going to the mosque, but since women are also encouraged to go to the mosque, the Hadith applies equally to them. No sex discrimination is valid with regard to the reward attached to good actions.”

During the Prophet’s lifetime, women did not only attend the Prophet’s mosque, they also attended mosques in other areas and outside Madinah, as clearly appear from the following reports: Abdullah ibn Umar says: “When people were offering the Fajr prayer at Quba’s mosque, someone told them: ‘The Prophet received Qur’anic revelations tonight commanding him to turn his face to the Kaaba in Makkah. So, turn toward it. They were facing Jerusalem, and therefore, they turned their face toward Makkah.” (Related by Al-Bukhari). In his commentary on this Hadith, Ibn Hajar writes: “The way this took place is explained in a Hadith related by Thuwaylah bint Aslam in which she says: ‘Women moved to take the place of men and men moved into the women’s place. We offered the two remaining prostrations facing the Sacred Mosque in Makkah.’”

The Prophet emphasized women’s right to attend the mosque, making it absolutely clear that no one should deprive them of this right. Abdullah ibn Umar quotes the Prophet as saying: “If your women request your leave at night to attend the mosque, grant them their request.” (Related by Al-Bukhari and Muslim).

Abdullah ibn Umar reports: “A wife of Umar used to attend the Fajr and Isha prayers with the congregation in the mosque. People said to her: ‘Why do you go out at night when you know that Umar does not like that?’ She said: ‘What prevents him from telling me?’ They said: ‘The fact that the Prophet ordered not to prevent women from attending mosques.’” (Related by Al-Bukhari).

Women’s right to attend the mosque continued to be fully respected even after a woman was raped when she was walking toward the mosque to attend Fajr prayer.

Since the mosque was, as we have described, a very active center bustling with worship, cultural and social activities, women naturally attended it for no less than 12 different purposes, some of which were recommended, and some obligatory. We will begin today discussing the first purpose, which is prayer, and will continue this discussion over the next few weeks.

Lady Ayesha reports: “Women believers used to attend Fajr prayer with the Prophet covering themselves with their shawls. They would return home when the prayer was over. They could not be recognized because of the darkness.” (Related by Al-Bukhari and Muslim.) Ibn Hajar explains that the reference in this report is to leading figures among Muslim women.

Ibn Abbas reports that his mother said to him after hearing him reciting Surah 77, Al-Mursalat: “Son, your recitation has reminded me that it was the last I heard the Prophet reciting and that was in Maghrib prayer.” Another version of this Hadith adds: “He did not lead us in prayer after that until he passed away.” (Related by Al-Bukhari and Muslim.)

Ayesha reports: “One night the Prophet was late for Isha prayer, until Umar called out to him saying: ‘Women and children are overcome by sleep.’ The Prophet went to the mosque to lead the prayer. He said: ‘No one on the face of the earth is waiting for this prayer other than you.’ At the time, Madinah was the only place where people prayed. They used to offer this prayer between the disappearance of the bright horizon and the end of the first third of the night.” (Related by Al-Bukhari and Muslim.)

Jabir ibn Abdullah reports: “We were with the Prophet during Friday prayers when a caravan laden with food arrived. People went to it and only 12 people were left with the Prophet. God then revealed the verse that says: ‘When people become aware of (an occasion for) worldly gain or a passing delight, they rush headlong toward it, and leave you standing.’” (Related by Al-Bukhari and Muslim.) Ibn Hajar quotes Al-Tabari adding: “The Prophet asked the ones who remained how many were they. They counted themselves and were 12 men and women.”

Amrah bint Abd Al-Rahman quotes her sister as saying: “I learned the surah starting with ‘Qaf. By the glorious Qur’an,’ from the Prophet as he used to read it on the pulpit every Friday.” (Related by Muslim.)

These reports mention women attending prayers in the mosque at various times, for Fajr which is offered at dawn, Maghrib offered after sunset, Isha offered well into the night, and Friday prayer offered at noon on Fridays.

With Kind Regards

Mohammad Usman

Jeddah

SAUDI ARABIA
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Indian lawmakers elect first woman president

CanWest News Service


Sunday, July 22, 2007


Lawmakers elected India's first female president, officials announced Saturday, in a vote seen as a step forward for the millions of Indian women and girls who face bitter discrimination in everyday life.

The position is largely ceremonial, but observers said the selection of Pratibha Patil, 72, in a vote by the national parliament and state politicians will widen the role of women in the country's often male-dominated political scene.

"This is a victory of the principles which the Indian people uphold," said Patil, wearing her signature oversized glasses and a red and gold celebratory sari, as she waved a V-for-victory sign on television.

Patil had been expected to win because of her support from the governing Congress party, and her deep political ties and friendship with Sonia Gandhi, leader of the party and the powerful Gandhi dynasty. Patil is a steadfast loyalist of the Gandhi family, which has a long, strong hold over Indian politics.

Patil took in nearly two-thirds of the votes, defeating Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the candidate of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist party.

Over four decades, Patil has held various political offices.

© The Calgary Herald 2007
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Muslim Women from Around the World Join a Leadership Program in Washington

By Mohamed Elshinnawi
Washington
23 July 2007

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A group of Muslim women from around the world is participating in a summer leadership program at the U.S Congress and George Washington University. The program is designed to educate the participants about legal issues and conflict resolution techniques with the aim of empowering Muslim women to promote peaceful change in their communities. Mohamed Elshinnawi has more.

At the opening of the program, 25 Muslim women from various countries listened to presentations about how Islamic law provides for principles such as freedom of expression, freedom of association and the right to own property regardless of gender.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr -- a renowned scholar of Islam at George Washington University -- told the audience that violations of women's rights in many Muslim countries should not be blamed on Islamic law, but on undemocratic governments.

But he also said there needs to be a new conceptualization of the role of women in Islamic countries. "What we need is a kind of Islamic feminine movement, not feminist, to clarify, first of all, what are the Koranic and Hadith rights of Muslim women. Secondly, how Islam sees the function of women. They do not have to be like in the West. Nobody said that American women are very happy to be superwomen, doing ten things at the same time."

He says when women in Iran were forced to remove their veils, there was a backlash decades later that forced every woman to be veiled. Nasr went on to call on the West not to make the same mistake by making the way Muslim women dress a major issue.


Aziza Al-Hibri
Aziza Al-Hibri, law professor at the University of Richmond, is the founder and President of Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights. She says the leadership program is designed to educate Muslim women about legal issues of importance to them. "We teach them not only Islamic law because some of them do not know it as they should, but also we teach them leadership skills that allows them to go back to their communities and converse positively towards change."

The training program focuses on traditional Islamic jurisprudence and how Muslim women around the world can deal with issues such as domestic violence and other abuses against women.


Nadia Mohamed
Nadia Mohamed is a second-generation Muslim American participant in the program. "I think it is very important, especially in this day and age, where you hear a lot in the news about abuses of human rights in Muslim countries, abuses of human rights in this country, to be able to understand that from an Islamic perspective and what the Islamic views are on that."

Other participants have similar goals. Anissa Auhanoaf, a second-generation Muslim immigrant to Belgium, hopes the leadership program will equip her with a comparative perspective on human rights in Islam. "I need to know more just to compare with human rights as I know them from my knowledge because of my Masters degree in political sciences, but next to that I would like to know more to apply in my responses in debates and dialogues."

Ghada Ghazal, a member of the Islamic Studies Center in Damascus, Syria finds an added value to the leadership program. "We have a lot of misconception on both sides and this is due to many factors, one of them is the media. So I think meeting person to person will give many solutions to many problems."

Sponsors of the program are hopeful that these Muslim women will eventually be able to articulate and defend Muslim women's rights within their own cultural and institutional contexts.

http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-07-23-voa37.cfm
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Husband accused of forcing female abortions

JEREMYPAGE
TIMES OF LONDON DELHI

The wife of a millionaire industrialist has shocked Indian high society by accusing her husband of forcing her to abort two baby girls after taking illegal tests to determine their gender.

Pooja Salotia even accused her husband, Chirag, of trying to force her to have sex with his two brothers to conceive a male heir for the family machinery business hi the state of Gu-jarat. Police arrested her husband, his two brothers and seven other relatives after Mrs Salotia, 32, filed an official complaint in the city of Ahmedabad on Saturday.

Her allegations against 18 people have sent shockwaves across India by breaking a strict code of silence on such matters and exposing the extent of female feticide among the urban middle and upper classes.

"This is a common thing even in rich families — a lot of them get their women to abort girls," Salotia told The Times from Gujarat, where she has gone into hiding after the release on bail of everyone except her husband. "In our culture, girls are not important. But I can't tolerate it any more because it's insulting."

The killing of newborn girls has been common ii rural India, where a daughter is seen as a financial burden because her family has to pay a hefty dowry when she is married.

But since the advent of ultrasound technology, abortion of female fetuses has become increasingly prevalent, not just in rural communities but also among the urban middle classes.

An international team of researchers estimated last year that 10 million girls had been aborted hi India over the past two decades, while the Indian Medical Association says five million are aborted annually.

The result is an increasingly severe gender unbalance, with only 927 women for every 1,000 men in India, according to the 2001 census, down from 945 women a decade earlier.

The worst unbalance, however, is in Indian cities where those with money have ready access to private doctors, who take bribes to skirt a 1994 ban on ultrasound gender tests.

A recent survey indicated that there were only 882 women for every 1,000 men in Defence Colony, one of Delhi's upmarket districts.

Pratibha Patil, India's first woman president, called for an end to female feticide at her inauguration on Wednesday, two days after police found 30 female fetuses dumped in a well in the state of Orissa. However, Salotia is the first woman from Indian high society to publicly admit to the forced abortion of a girl.

Calgary Herald, 29/07/2007
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Need to rethink laws, attitudes

Elizabeth Hudson
For the Calgary Herald


Saturday, July 28, 2007


When I do a presentation on the street sex trade, the majority of listeners are surprised to learn prostitution is legal in Canada.

What is illegal is for either the sex-trade worker or the client to speak of it. This seems to be a unique and most Canadian way to deal with this social problem. Yes, do it, but don't dare speak of it.

I am tired of silence and I am speaking of it. The mounting deaths of sex-trade workers began in the early 1980s when the communicating law was enacted. John Lowman, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University, discovered the death rate in British Columbia alone climbed a staggering 500 per cent in the year after the law was passed.

Its effect in Alberta has been no less grim with the murders of dozens of women in Edmonton and the appalling regularity of newspaper headlines marking the deaths of sex trade workers all across our province. Each death is a red flag that something is terribly wrong with our system.

Courageous MP Libby Davies spearheaded action to raise awareness and to help reduce the harm, and the horrific slaughter on our streets.

I had the honour of presenting to her parliamentary committee. I felt for the first time there might be hope for some positive re-thinking of our laws and how they impact this largely voiceless segment of society.

Unfortunately, there have been no new laws to protect or shelter those involved in the sex trade. In Alberta, there is just another punitive law. Since police now have the authority to seize johns' cars, it should not come as a surprise that sex-trade workers have disappeared into trick rooms. There, we cannot even offer outreach programs. Unseen, they become even more vulnerable to attack and abuse.

If you wish to approach harm reduction in another way, it must be noted in Calgary there is a critical lack of treatment beds. For those seeking a way out of the sex trade, there are even fewer agencies than treatment beds working with this population.

If one is over the age of 29, there is only one agency with a long wait list that might consider them. When I was involved in the sex trade, I thought escape was impossible. With inadequate resources, underfunding to outreach agencies, lack of easy accessibility to treatment facilities, and hobbled by the communicating law, I believe I would think the same today.

If prostitution is legal in Canada, then we must begin discourse and move towards harm reduction for those seeking escape and those still engaged in the sex trade.

We need to begin by looking at our laws and their unforeseen negative impacts on this population. To do this successfully, we must also examine our own attitudes that perpetuate marginalization, degradation, deprivation and stigma towards those in the sex trade, and we must remember that sex-trade workers have paid with their lives for our silence and our inaction.

Elizabeth Hudson is the author of Snowbodies: One Woman's Life of the Streets. She has been published in Maclean's and Avenue Magazines. She is a public speaker and activist.

© The Calgary Herald 2007
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THE QUEST FOR GENDER JUSTICE

Who is to say if the key that unlocks the cage might not lie hidden inside the cage? If justice and fairness are inherent in Islam – as fuqaha claim and all Muslims believe – should they not be reflected in laws regulating relations between men and women and their respective rights? Why have women been treated as second-class citizens in the fiqh books that came to define the terms of the Shari‘a?

These are the questions that I came to confront in 1979, when my personal and intellectual life was transformed by the victory of Islamism –

that is the use of Islam of a political ideology - in my own country. Like most Iranian women, I strongly supported the 1979 Revolution and believed in the justice of Islam. But I soon found out that in an Islamic state - committed to the application of the Shari‘a – the backbone of the Islamist project – I was a second-class citizen. This brought the realization that the justice of Islam in modern times cannot be achieved

wi thout the ‘modernizat ion’ and ‘democratization’ of its legal vision.

For this, Islamic discourses and Islamists must come to terms with the issue of rights – especially those of women. The justice of Islam is no longer reflected in the laws that some Islamists are intent on enforcing in the name of the Shari‘a.

A Painful Choice to Make

This takes us to the vexed relationship between Islam and feminism, and the complex relation between demands for equal rights for women and the anti-colonial and nationalist movements of the first part of the twentieth century.

At a time when feminism, both as a consciousness and as a movement, was being shaped and making its impact in Europe and North America, as Leila Ahmed and others have shown, it also “functioned to morally justify the attacks on native [Muslim] societies and to support the notion of the comprehensive superiority of Europe.”

With the rise of anti-colonialist and nationalist movements, Muslims were thrown on the defensive in relation to traditional gender relations.

Muslim women who acquired a feminist consciousness and advocated equal rights for women were under pressure to conform to anticolonialist

or nationalist priorities.Western feminists could criticize patriarchal elements of their own cultures and religions in the name of modernity, liberalism and democracy, but Muslim women were unable to draw either on these external ideologies or on internal political ideologies (i.e. nationalism and anticolonialism) in their fight for gender justice. For most modernists and liberals, ‘Islam’ was a patriarchal religion that must be rejected. For nationalists and anti-colonialists, ‘feminism’ – the advocacy of women’s rights – was a colonial project and must be resisted. Muslim women, in other words, were faced with a painful choice.

They had to choose between their Muslim identity – their faith – and their new gender awareness.

A Paradoxical Outcome Produced

But as the twentieth century drew to a close,this dilemma disappeared. One neglected and paradoxical consequence of the rise of political Islam is that it has helped to create a space, an arena, within which Muslim women can reconcile their faith and identity with their struggle for gender equality. This did not happen, I must stress, because the Islamists were offering an egalitarian vision of gender relations. Rather, their very project – ‘return to the Shari‘a’ – and their attempt to translate the patriarchal notions inherent in orthodox interpretations of Islamic law into policy, provoked increasing criticism of these notions among many women, and become a spur to greater activism. A growing number of women have come to see no inherent or logical link between patriarchy and Islamic ideals, and no contradiction between Islam and feminism, and to free themselves from the straitjacket of earlier anti-colonial and nationalist discourses.

A New Gender Discourse is Born

By the late 1980s, there were clear signs of the emergence of a new consciousness, a new way of thinking, a gender discourse that is ‘feminist’ in its aspiration and demands, yet is ‘Islamic’ in its language and sources of legitimacy. Some versions of this new discourse have been labelled ‘Islamic Feminism’, a term that continues to be contested by both the majority of Islamists and some feminists, who see it as antithetical to their respective positions and ideologies, according to which the notion of ‘Islamic feminism’ is a contradiction in terms.

What, then, is ‘Islamic feminism’? How does it differ from other feminisms?

In my view, any definition of ‘Islamic feminism’, rather than clarifying, may cloud our understanding of a phenomenon that, in Margot Badran’s words, “transcends and destroys old binaries that have been constructed.

These included polarities between religious and secular and between ‘East’ and ‘West’.”

To understand a discourse that is still in formation, we might start by considering how its opponents depict it. Opponents of the feminist project in Islam fall into three broad categories: Muslim traditionalists, Islamic fundamentalists and ‘secular fundamentalists’. The Muslim traditionalists resist any changes in what they hold to be eternally valid ways, sanctioned by an unchanging Shari‘a. Islamic fundamentalists - a very broad category - are those who seek to change current practices by a return to an earlier, ‘purer’ version of the Shari‘a. Secular fundamentalists – who can be just as dogmatic and as ideological as religious fundamentalists – deny that any Shari‘abased law or social practice can be just or equal.

Though adhering to very different positions and scholarly traditions and following very different agendas, all these opponents of the feminist project in Islam share one thing in common: an essentialist and non-historical understanding of Islamic law and gender. They fail to recognize

that assumptions and laws about gender in Islam – as in any other religion – are socially constructed, and thus open to negotiation and historically changing. Selective in their arguments and illustrations, the three kinds of opponents resort to the same kinds of sophistry, for example seeking to close discussion by producing Qur’anic verses or hadiths, taken out of context. Muslim traditionalists and fundamentalists

do this as a means of silencing other internal voices, and abuse the authority of the text for authoritarian purposes. Secular fundamentalists

do the same, but in the name of progress and science and as means of showing the misogyny of Islamic texts, while ignoring both the similar attitudes to women in other religious scriptures, and the contexts of the texts, as well as the existence of alternative texts. What is often missing in these narratives is a recognition that gender inequality in the Old World was assumed, and that perceptions of women in Christian and Jewish texts are not that different from those of Islamic texts. What transformed women’s situation in the Christian West were new social conditions that were shaped by and in turn shaped new political and socio-economic discourses – and new understandings of religion .It is against this backdrop that activities of the so-called ‘Islamic feminists’ should be reviewed. By both uncovering a hidden history and rereading textual sources, they are proving that the inequalities embedded in Islamic law are neither manifestations of divine will, nor cornerstones of an irredeemably backward social system, but human constructions. They are also showing how such unequal constructions go contrary to the very essence of divine justice as revealed in the Koran, and how Islam’s sacred texts have been tainted by the ideology of their interpreters.





Un-reading Patriarchy in Sacred Texts

The ideals of Islam call for freedom, justice and equality, Muslim social norms and structures in the formative years of Islamic law impeded their realization. Instead, these social norms were assimilated into Islamic jurisprudence through a set of theological, legal and social theories and assumptions. Salient among them were propositions such as: “women are created of men and for men”, “women are inferior to men”, “women need to be protected”, “men are guardians and protectors of women”, “marriage is a contract of exchange”, and “male and female sexuality differ and the latter is dangerous to the social order.” These assumptions and theories are nowhere more evident than in the rules that define the formation and termination of marriage, through which gender inequalities are sustained in present-day Muslim societies.

Such an approach to religious texts can in time open the way for radical and positive changes in Islamic law to accommodate concepts such as gender equality and human rights. Whether this will ever happen, and whether these concepts will ever be reflected in state legislation, depends on the balance of power between Traditionalists and Reformists in each Muslim country, and on women’s ability to organize and participate in the political process, and to engage with the advocates of each discourse.

But it is important to remember three things. First, Islamic law – like any other system of law – is reactive, in the sense that it reacts to social practices and people’s experiences. Secondly, Islamic law is still the monopoly of male scholars. This monopoly must be broken; this can be done only when Muslim women participate in the production of knowledge, when they are able asks new and daring questions.

Finally, there is a theoretical concord between the egalitarian spirit of Islam and the feminist quest for justice and a just world.



* Ziba Mir-Hosseini(PhD) –Research Associate- Centre for Islamic & African Studies- University of London –UK. She is also the Visiting Professor in the Hause Global Law program, New York University, Spring 2004
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/world ... ?th&emc=th

September 28, 2007
Saudis Rethink Taboo on Women Behind the Wheel
By HASSAN M. FATTAH

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Sept. 27 — In a recent episode of Saudi Arabia’s most popular television show, broadcast during Ramadan this month, a Saudi man of the future is seen sitting in his house as his daughter pulls into the driveway, her children piled into the back of the car.

“Where have you been?” the father asks.

“The kids were bored, so I took them to the movies,” she replies, matter-of-factly, as she gets out of the driver’s seat.

The scene may appear mundane, but in Saudi Arabia, where women are forbidden to drive — and, by the way, where there are no movie theaters, either — the skit portends something of a revolution. From a taboo about which there could be no open discussion, a woman’s right to drive is becoming a topic of growing and lively debate in Saudi Arabia.

Coming after other recent changes — women may now travel abroad without male accompaniment (though male permission is still required), seek divorce and own their own companies — the driving discussion is noteworthy. Whether it signals that women will actually be driving soon or merely talking about it openly remains to be seen.

“We are telling everyone this is coming, whether today or tomorrow,” said Abdallah al-Sadhan, producer, writer and host of “Tash Ma Tash” (“No Big Deal”), a variety comedy show that is broadcast during Ramadan and tackles controversial social issues in Saudi Arabia. Other episodes have also shown women driving in what Mr. Sadhan says is a deliberate message. “There will be a time we will accept it, so now is the time to get prepared for that.”

In another popular Saudi show, “Amsha Bint Amash” (“Amsha, Daughter of Amash”), a woman who loses her father is forced to move to the city, where she masquerades as a man to become a taxi driver.

Saudi newspapers have begun writing about the implications and acceptability of having women drive. The Saudi National Human Rights Association has begun researching the effect of women’s driving on families and Saudi society, activists said.

A group of Saudi women have led a petition drive asking the king to repeal the ban on driving by women, placing the issue at the heart of a discussion about modernity and Saudi Arabia’s place in the world. And the government, which was hostile toward the last such petition in 1990, now seems mildly receptive.

“You get the feeling that they are preparing the population for this issue,” said Wajeha al- Huwaider, 45, one of the organizers. “It is just like the decision to allow women education. They resisted it, but now it’s a reality.”

On Sunday, Ms. Huwaider and some 1,100 other women sent the petition to King Abdullah.

Some Saudi officials and religious men agree with the women that Islam does not forbid women to drive. In the past, Saudi women were able to move freely on camel and horseback, and Bedouin women in the desert openly drive pickup trucks far from the public eye.

Clerics and religious conservatives maintain that allowing women to drive would open Saudi society to untold corruption. Women alone in a car, they say, would be more open to abuse, to going wayward, and to getting into trouble if they had an accident or were stopped by the police. The net result would be an erosion of social mores, they say.

In 1990, a group of prominent Saudi women seized on the presence of Western news media covering the first Persian Gulf war, boarded cars and drove through a Riyadh boulevard. Several of the women were jailed briefly; many lost high positions in schools and universities, and others were forced to leave the country for some time.

This time, however, the women are being given wide latitude to make their case, Ms. Huwaider said. She believes that this is because the case is being made in pragmatic social and economic terms, not purely as a matter of women’s rights.

Because of the rising cost of living in Saudi Arabia, women have been entering the work force in large numbers. That in turn has given them new economic clout in the family and greater leverage.

Ebtihal Mubarak, another organizer of the petition drive, who is an editor at Arab News, an English-language daily newspaper, said the cost of a driver had begun to impinge on Saudi families. “Most middle-class people can’t afford drivers anymore,” she said.

Saudi women say the seeming momentum behind the issue is fueled in part by what they can now see and read about the freedoms of women abroad on satellite television and the Internet. They also feel they have become more sophisticated in dealing with the Saudi system.

“This is more organized and is a real campaign,” said Khalid Al-Dakhil, professor of political sociology at King Saud University in Riyadh. “They have been on the Net, sending out e-mails.”

Still, few expect any change to come soon. Ms. Huwaider said the group had so far received no reply from the palace to the petition. Even women’s rights advocates said lifting ban would mean much preparation and public education, for women and men.

“Fifty years ago, we rejected the mail and then we advanced,” said Mr. Sadhan, the television producer. “We refused radio, only to accept it, and then rejected TV, and only to accept that, too. We will accept women driving some day all the same, and the environment has to be prepared for it.”

Rasheed Abou-Alsamh contributed reporting from Jidda, Saudi Arabia.
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Printed from
The Times of India -Breaking news, views. reviews, cricket from across India

Pakistani woman astronaut gears up for spaceflight
21 Oct 2007, 1530 hrs IST,PTI

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Namira Salim is poised to become the first Pakistani woman astronaut (Agencies Photo)

ISLAMABAD: Namira Salim is poised to become the first Pakistani woman astronaut, having successfully completed her space flight training at a facility in the US ahead of blasting off into space in the world's first commercial space liner in 2009.

Salim, 35, made her name as a sculptor, musician, designer and poet before she was chosen in March 2006 by entrepreneur Richard Branson from among 44,000 candidates to be one of the first 100 space tourists for flights to be offered by his firm Virgin Galactic.

She was trained in the STS-400 simulator, the world's most advanced high performance centrifuge, under the supervision of Virgin Galactic after clearing medical tests. The training assessed Salim's ability to tolerate and adapt to gravitational forces and motion sickness during a sub-orbital spaceflight.

"I am very happy. These are unforgettable moments," Namira said from the US on completing her training.

"I am not only proud to be the first Pakistani, but particularly proud to be the first female from Pakistan to have had such a phenomenal experience."

Salim has said that she hoped her achievement would break "new ground for Muslim and Pakistani women" to enter fields that were hitherto closed to them.

She has encouraged others, particularly women, to open their minds to the vast potential and opportunities the world offers and excel in all spheres of lives.

"It was an unforgettable experience and makes one very excited for the actual space flight now that I know that I am qualified to fly to sub-orbital space," she said.

Women in Pakistan, especially in rural and tribal areas, are victims of discrimination and violence. Pakistan's former tourism minister Nilofar Bakhtiar had to resign in May after hardline clerics accused her of obscenity for hugging an instructor after making a charity parachute jump in France. She was also sacked as head of the women's wing of the ruling PML-Q party.

"There is no limit to positive accomplishment and if one heads in that direction, one would only conquer the stars," Salim said.

Salim was born in the port city of Karachi but now lives in Dubai and France. Her father hails from Pakistan's Punjab province while her mother was born in Allahabad and brought up in Delhi.

Her fascination with space began at the age of 14 when she got her first telescope. Two years later, she became the first female member of Amastro Pak "Pakistan's first astronomy society" and maintained an interest in space through her university years.

She moved to the US, initially to study international business at Hofstra University in New York and then international relations at Columbia University. While in the US, she also learnt to fly.

Salim's multi-dimensional mixed media art has been exhibited at summits of the UN, UNESCO and SAARC and she will publish her first book of English poetry this year.

During her recent training in the US, Salim was exposed to the gravitational forces and weightlessness she will experience during the launch and re-entry of the Virgin Galactic space liner designed by legendary aviator Burt Rutan.

She was exposed to the same gravitational forces that are experienced by astronauts who have been launched into space.

"The complete spaceflight experience, along with the full visual simulation of the space environment, was a taste of what it's like to launch into space, be weightless in zero gravity and re-enter into the earth's atmosphere safely," she said
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October 27, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Today’s Hidden Slave Trade
By BOB HERBERT

The woman testifying in federal court in Lower Manhattan could hardly have seemed more insignificant.

She was an immigrant from South Korea and a prostitute, who spoke little or no English. She worked, she said, in brothels in New York, Philadelphia, Georgia, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

She did not offer a portrait of the good life. Speaking through an interpreter, she told about the time in D.C. when a guy came in who looked “like a mental patient, a psycho.” Weirded out, she wanted nothing to do with him. But she said the woman who ran the brothel assured her everything would be fine.

It was fine if you consider wrestling with Hannibal Lecter fine. The john clawed at this woman, gouging her flesh, peeling the skin from her back and other parts of her body. She was badly injured.

According to the government, the woman was caught up in a prostitution and trafficking network that ruthlessly exploited young Korean women, some of whom “were smuggled into the country illegally.”

In prior eras, the slave trade was conducted openly, with ads prominently posted and the slaves paraded and inspected like animals, often at public auctions. Today’s sex traffickers, the heirs to that tradition, try to keep their activities hidden, although the rest of the sex trade, the sale of the women’s services, is advertised on a scale that can only be characterized as colossal.

As a society, we’re repelled by the slavery of old. But the wholesale transport of women and girls across international borders and around the U.S. — to serve as prostitutes under conditions that in most cases are coercive at best — stirs very little outrage.

Leaf through the Yellow Pages in some American cities and you’ll find pages upon pages of ads: “Korean Girl, 18 — Affordable.” “Korean and Japanese Dolls — Full Service.” “Barely Legal China Doll — Pretty and Petite.”

The Internet and magazines have staggering numbers of similar ads. Thousands upon thousands of women have been brought here from Asia and elsewhere and funneled into the sex trade, joining those who are already here and in the business but unable to keep up with the ferocious demand.

This human merchandise — whether imported or domestic — is still paraded, inspected and treated like animals.

What’s important to keep in mind is the great extent to which the sex trade involves real slavery (kidnapping and rape), widespread physical abuse, indentured servitude, exploitation of minors and many other forms of coercion. This modern-day variation on the ancient theme of bondage flourishes largely because of the indifference of the rest of us, and the misogyny that holds fast to the view of women — all women — as sexual commodities.

The case in Manhattan federal court involves a ring that, according to prosecutors, used massage parlors and spas as fronts for prostitution. Some of the women were in the U.S. legally. Others, according to the government, were brought in by brokers (more accurately, traffickers or dealers in flesh), who provided false passports, visas and other documents.

Elie Honig, an assistant United States attorney, said women brought in illegally were pushed into prostitution to earn money “to pay back the tens of thousands of dollars that the brokers charged the women as quote, unquote, fees for bringing them into the United States.”

He told the jury: “We are talking about a regional network of businesses throughout the Northeast United States and beyond involved in transporting and selling women.”

A jury will decide whether the five defendants in this case — all Korean women, and accused of running a prostitution enterprise — are guilty. But the activities alleged by the government mirror the sexual trafficking and organized prostitution that is carried out on a vast scale here in the U.S. and around the world.

There is nothing benign about these activities. Upwards of 18,000 foreign nationals are believed to be trafficked into the U.S. each year. According to the State Department, 80 percent of trafficked people are women and children, an overwhelming majority of whom are trafficked for sexual purposes.

Those who think that most of the women in prostitution want to be there are deluded. Surveys consistently show that a majority wants very much to leave. Apologists love to spread the fantasy of the happy hooker. But the world of the prostitute is typically filled with pimps, sadists, psychopaths, drug addicts, violent criminals and disease.

Jody Williams is a former prostitute who runs a support group called Sex Workers Anonymous. Few women want to become prostitutes, she told me, and nearly all would like to get out.

“They want to quit for the obvious reasons,” she said. “The danger. The physical and emotional distress. The toll that it takes. The shame.”

Gail Collins is off today.
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Why British Women are turning to Islaam
THE SPREAD OF A WORLD CREED
The Times (London) - Tuesday, 9th November 1993 -Home-news Page
Lucy Berrington finds the Muslim Faith is winning Western admirers despite hostile media coverage

Unprecedented numbers of British people, nearly all of them women, are converting to Islam at a time of deep divisions within the Anglican and Catholic churches.

The rate of conversions has prompted predictions that Islam will rapidly become an important religious force in this country.[1] "Within the next 20 years the number of British converts will equal or overtake the immigrant Muslim community that brought the faith here", says Rose Kendrick, a religious education teacher at a Hull comprehensive and the author of a textbook guide to the Koran. She says: "Islam is as much a world faith as is Roman Catholicism. No one nationality claims it as its own". Islam is also spreading fast on the continent and in America.

The surge in conversions to Islam has taken place despite the negative image of the faith in the Western press. Indeed, the pace of conversions has accelerated since publicity over the Salman Rushdie affair, the Gulf War[2] and the plight of the Muslims in Bosnia. It is even more ironic that most British converts should be women, given the widespread view in the west that Islam treats women poorly. In the United States, women converts outnumber men by four to one, and in Britain make up the bulk of the estimated 10, 000 to 20, 000 converts, forming part of a Muslim community of 1 to 1.5 million. Many of Britain's "New Muslims" are from middle-class backgrounds. They include Matthew Wilkinson, a former head boy of Eton who went on to Cambridge, and a son and daughter of Lord Justice Scott, the judge heading the arms-to-Iraq enquiry.

A small-scale survey by the Islamic Foundation in Leicester suggests that most converts are aged 30 to 50. Younger Muslims point to many conversions among students and highlight the intellectual thrust of Islam. "Muhammad" said, "The light of Islam will rise in the West" and I think that is what is happening in our day" says Aliya Haeri, an American-born psychologist who converted 15 years ago. She is a consultant to the Zahra Trust, a charity publishing spiritual literature and is one of Britain's prominent Islamic speakers. She adds: "Western converts are coming to Islam with fresh eyes, without all the habits of the East, avoiding much of what is culturally wrong. The purest tradition is finding itself strongest in the West."[3]

Some say the conversions are prompted by the rise of comparative religious education. The British media, offering what Muslims describe as a relentless bad press on all things Islamic, is also said to have helped. Westerners despairing of their own society - rising in crime, family breakdown, drugs and alcoholism [4] - have come to admire the discipline and security of Islam. Many converts are former Christians disillusioned by the uncertainty of the church and unhappy with the concept of the Trinity and deification of Jesus.

Quest of the Convert - Why Change?

Other converts describe a search for a religious identity. Many had previously been practising Christians but found intellectual satisfaction in Islam. "I was a theology student and it was the academic argument that led to my conversion." Rose Kendrick, a religious education teacher and author, said she objected to the concept of the original sin: "Under Islam, the sins of the fathers aren't visited on the sons. The idea that God is not always forgiving is blasphemous to Muslims.

Maimuna, 39, was raised as a High Anglican and confirmed at 15 at the peak of her religious devotion. "I was entranced by the ritual of the High Church and thought about taking the veil." Her crisis came when a prayer was not answered. She slammed the door on visiting vicars but travelled to convents for discussions with nuns. "My belief came back stronger, but not for the Church, the institution or the dogma." She researched every Christian denomination, plus Judaism, Buddhism and Krishna Consciousness, before turning to Islam.

Many converts from Christianity reject the ecclesiastical hierarchy emphasising Muslims' direct relationship with God. They sense a lack of leadership in the Church of England and are suspicious of its apparent flexibility. "Muslims don't keep shifting their goal-posts," says Huda Khattab, 28, author of The Muslim Woman's Handbook, published this year by Ta-Ha. She converted ten years ago while studying Arabic at university. "Christianity changes, like the way some have said pre-marital sex is okay if its with the person you're going to marry. It seems so wishy-washy. Islam was constant about sex, about praying five times a day. The prayer makes you conscious of God all the time. You're continually touching base.

Footnotes

1 This is one of the reasons why there is an onslaught of bad press against Islam and the Muslims. Whoever considers Islam carefully with its principle belief Tawheed (the Uniqueness of Allaah, His and His sole right to subservience, worship and legislation), the sum total of its injunctions, formulated by Allaah (which are harmonic and define the true nature, position, rights and responsibilities of both sexes), and its justice in every sphere of life (social, economical and political) for all categories of people - wives, husbands, children, orphans, women, the poor and indigent, the poverty-stricken - will realise why it poses a threat to the leading elite of the western civilisations (i.e. those who benefit most from the unfair and unjust forms by which the people are governed). It is in the hands of such people that the control of peoples beliefs and ideas lie (via television, Magazines, Films, Education) and naturally this advantage is used to maintain the existing status quo. Muslims are not governed by and enslaved the false beliefs and ideas of humans, they are enslaved to and governed by Allaah alone. This is the essence of Islam - That enslavement is to none but to Allaah alone and everything besides Him is undeserving of worship and subservience.

2 It is now an established fact that around 5,000 of the US Troops who were stationed in Saudi Arabia became Muslims during and shortly after the Gulf War.

3 Much of the alleged oppression of women is due to localised culture which is based on a superstition that is more akin to Hinduism. It is, however, portrayed as being Islamic in origin which in turn seriously affects the 'independence of thought' of those who do not bother to pursue the matter in an objective manner - which includes most people.

4 One of the biggest industries in the West is that of entertainment and amusement. This is essential to maintain the false idea of progress, that what comes next is better and worth enduring for. Peoples minds are preoccupied with their own pleasures and other pursuits while others are being murdered, slaughtered, women raped, innocent babies and children butchered with axes and knives, innocent by-standers in robberies and muggings killed, the aged battered to death by adolescents, thousands dying of drug abuse, thousands of innocent lives destroyed by the consumption of alcohol, drunkards beating their women and children... the list is endless. The entertainment industry is one of the effective tools in the 'normalisation of the thought process', the 'desensitisation of the humanistic concern', and the intensification of the 'my pleasure and gratification is what is most important' syndrome.
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A British Woman on a Mission

Sidra Khan reports on Aisha Bhutta's bid to convert the world to Islam
The Guardian Newspaper, London
Thursday 8th May 1997

http://www.islamfortoday.com/scottish30.htm

Aisha Bhutta, also known as Debbie Rogers, is serene. She sits on the sofa in big front room of her tenement flat in Cowcaddens, Glasgow. The walls are hung with quotations from the Koran, a special clock to remind the family of prayer times and posters of the Holy City of Mecca. Aisha's piercing blue eyes sparkle with evangelical zeal, she smiles with a radiance only true believers possess. Her face is that of a strong Scots lass - no nonsense, good-humoured - but it is carefully covered with a hijab.

For a good Christian girl to convert to Islam and marry a Muslim is extraordinary enough. But more than that, she has also converted her parents, most of the rest of her family and at least 30 friends and neighbours.

Her family were austere Christians with whom Rogers regularly attended Salvation Army meetings. When all the other teenagers in Britain were kissing their George Michael posters goodnight, Rogers had pictures of Jesus up on her wall. And yet she found that Christianity was not enough; there were too many unanswered questions and she felt dissatisfied with the lack of disciplined structure for her beliefs. "There had to be more for me to obey than just doing prayers when I felt like it."

Aisha had first seen her future husband, Mohammad Bhutta, when she was 10 and regular customer at the shop, run by his family. She would see him in the back, praying. "There was contentment and peace in what he was doing. He said he was a Muslim. I said: What's a Muslim?".

Later with his help she began looking deeper into Islam. By the age of 17, she had read the entire Koran in Arabic. "Everything I read", she says, "was making sense."

She made the decision to convert at16. "When I said the words, it waslike a big burden I had been carrying on my shoulders had been thrown off. I felt like a new-born baby."

Despite her conversion however, Mohammed's parents were against their marrying. They saw her as a Western woman who would lead their eldestson astray and give the family a bad name; she was, Mohammed's father believed, "the biggest enemy."

Nevertheless, the couple married in the local mosque. Aisha wore a dress hand-sewn by Mohammed's mother and sisters who sneaked into the ceremony against the wishes of his father who refused to attend.

It was his elderly grandmother who paved the way for a bond between thewomen. She arrived from Pakistan where mixed-race marriages were evenmore taboo, and insisted on meeting Aisha. She was so impressed by thefact that she had learned the Koran and Punjabi that she convinced the others; slowly, Aisha, now 32, became one of the family.

Aisha's parents, Michael and Marjory Rogers, though did attend the wedding, were more concerned with the clothes their daughter was now wearing (the traditional shalwaar kameez) and what the neighbours would think. Six years later, Aisha embarked on a mission to convert them and the rest of her family, bar her sister ("I'm still working on her). "My husband and I worked on my mum and dad, telling them about Islam and they saw the changes in me, like I stopped answering back!"

Her mother soon followed in her footsteps. Marjory Rogers changed her name to Sumayyah and became a devout Muslim. "She wore the hijab anddid her prayers on time and nothing ever mattered to her except her connections with God."

Aisha's father proved a more difficult recruit, so she enlisted the helpof her newly converted mother (who has since died of cancer). "My mumand I used to talk to my father about Islam and we were sitting in the sofa in the kitchen one day and he said: "What are the words you saywhen you become a Muslim?" "Me and my mum just jumped on top of him." Three years later, Aisha's brother converted "over the telephone - thanks to BT", then his wife and children followed, followed by her sister's son.

It didn't stop there. Her family converted, Aisha turned her attentionto Cowcaddens, with its tightly packed rows of crumbling, gray tenement flats. Every Monday for the past 13 years, Aisha has held classes in Islam for Scottish women. So far she has helped to convert over 30. The women come from a bewildering array of backgrounds. Trudy, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow and a former Catholic, attended Aisha's classes purely because she was commissioned to carry out some research. But after six months of classes she converted, deciding that Christianity was riddled with "logical inconsistencies". "I could tell she was beginning to be affected by the talks", Aisha says. How could she tell? "I don't know, it was just a feeling."

The classes include Muslim girls tempted by Western ideals and need ingsalvation, practicing Muslim women who want an open forum for discussion denied them at the local male-dominated mosque, and those simply interested in Islam. Aisha welcomes questions. "We cannot expect people blindly to believe."

Her husband, Mohammad Bhutta, now 41, does not seem so driven to convert Scottish lads to Muslim brothers. He occasionally helps out in the family restaurant, but his main aim in life is to ensure the couple's five children grow up as Muslims. The eldest, Safia, "nearly 14, alhumidlillah (Praise be to God!)", is not averse to a spot of recruiting herself. One day she met a woman in the street and carried her shopping, the woman attended Aisha's classes and is now a Muslim.

"I can honestly say I have never regretted it", Aisha says of her conversion to Islam. "Every marriage has its ups and downs and sometimes you need something to pull you out of any hardship. But the Prophet Peace by upon him, said: 'Every hardship has an ease.' So when you're going through a difficult stage, you work for that ease to come."

Mohammed is more romantic: "I feel we have known each other for centuries and must never part from one another. According to Islam, you are not just partners for life, you can be partners in heaven as well, for ever. Its a beautiful thing, you know."
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November 11, 2007
Two Faiths Divided on Women’s Ordination Ceremony
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ST. LOUIS, Nov. 10 (AP) — The Archdiocese of St. Louis and the Central Reform Congregation are on the same side when it comes to advocating for immigrants and the poor, often finding common ground in a zeal for social justice.

But when the Jewish congregation offered its synagogue for an ordination of two women in a ceremony disavowed by the Roman Catholic Church, it drew the ire of archdiocese officials, who vowed never again to work with the congregation.

The two women, Rose Marie Dunn Hudson, 67, of Festus, and Elsie Hainz McGrath, 69, of St. Louis, are scheduled to be ordained Sunday by a former nun as part of Roman Catholic Womenpriests, a small movement that began in 2002 and is independent from the Roman Catholic Church.

The Reform congregation’s rabbi, Susan Talve, informed the Rev. Vincent Heier, director of the archdiocese office for ecumenical and interreligious affairs, of the decision.

Mr. Heier told her it was unacceptable. “It’s not appropriate to invite this group, to aid and abet a group like this, which undercuts our theology and teaching,” Mr. Heier said he told Ms. Talve.

The Roman Catholic Church is framed in hierarchy, which sets rules and offers guidance for the faithful. The Jewish tradition has no centralized leadership, and congregations operate autonomously, answering to their own mission statement.

It was that mission that Ms. Talve and her congregation’s board relied on when considering the issue.

Ms. Talve said the women approached her this fall. “They said they were looking for a sanctuary, and that got my attention,” she said. “As Isaiah said, we are a house of prayer for all people.”

The congregation’s board voted unanimously to serve as host.

But the ceremony defies Catholic Church doctrine that allows only men to be ordained as priests and deacons.

The women are ignoring the warnings of Archbishop Raymond Burke, who said they would be excommunicated if they proceeded with the ceremony.

Of the roughly 100 women who have been ordained as priests or deacons worldwide in the Womenpriests movement, including 37 in the United States, only the first seven were officially excommunicated by the Vatican, said a spokeswoman for the group, Bridget Mary Meehan.

Mr. Heier and Archbishop Burke pressed Ms. Talve and the board to withdraw their offer, saying the act would “cause pain” to the church.

“It’s akin to us inviting a group that is contrary to Jewish life,” Mr. Heier said.

Ms. Talve said she regretted that the church was pained by the decision, but added that denying the women would have hurt others. She said hundreds of practicing Catholics have called to thank her for taking a stand.

But the archdiocese has clearly drawn a line with Ms. Talve and her congregation.

“This is not a lack of forgiveness,” Mr. Heier said, “but we have to stand for something. It’s a matter of principle.”
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http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pageto ... 095388.stm

Upwardly mobile Afghanistan
By Lyse Doucet
Special Correspondent, BBC News

The mobile phone has boosted the incomes of African women farmers and
empowered poor Muslim women in Bangladesh. But can it also change
women's lives in a conservative country where, only six years ago, a
Taleban government confined women to the home?

"Absolutely," insists Shainoor Khoja, who heads social programmes for
Roshan, one of the biggest mobile telephone networks now operating in
Afghanistan.
But she admits it is still a "monumental task" to get women into the
workforce.

In a country with few landlines, nearly four million Afghans now have
mobile telephones and the number keeps rising.

It is big business and there are now four mobile phone companies in
Afghanistan.

All have social programmes including projects to distribute telephones
free to women, especially in even more conservative areas outside Kabul.

Women's businesses

Suhaira, 27, is one of the success stories. Married at 14, and now
mother to five children, she runs a fruit and vegetable stand in her
Kabul neighbourhood.
Inside her crowded shop, there is a phone box, essentially a
pay-per-call mobile telephone for public use.

"I wanted to be the first woman shopkeeper in Afghanistan," she declares
as she serves customers wearing a black scarf that covers her head and
half of her face.

Her eyes shine with conviction. A sympathetic government official agreed
to give her a licence. Roshan helped - through its programme to
subsidise phone bills for women's businesses. And her husband gave her
permission.

That did not stop rumours circulating at the local mosque about her
talking to men outside her family circle. "At the beginning people would
come and warn my wife, 'We will kill you'," says her husband Meraj.

"But the government of Hamid Karzai says women can work... we do not
care what people say about us."

Shahnaz says the mobile telephone has changed her work "100%."

She sits on the floor of her dark two-room concrete block of a home in a
Kabul slum, stitching goods on an old hand-operated sewing machine.

By night, it is also the bedroom for her and her children, plus three
grandchildren.

She and her daughter Najla have both been abandoned by their husbands. A
mobile phone lies on the thin carpet next to the sewing machine.

It has brought more customers, more orders, and more income.

Opportunities calling

Call centres run by the mobile companies, who are now some of
Afghanistan's biggest employers, also provide new opportunities.

At the Roshan call centre in Kabul, young men and women work side by
side, answering calls from customers across the country, including from
southern provinces where the Taleban remain strong.

"Taleban call in and the women talk to them," says Zermina with a
giggle. At only 23, she is the call centre's operations manager and says
that even in her dreams, she would not have imagined Afghanistan would
have opportunities like this for women.

Many women at the Call Centre, including Zermina, are Hazara, a less
conservative community than some of Afghanistan's other major ethnic
groups.

And many Hazaras are Ismaili Muslims, a moderate Shiite sect headed by
the Aga Khan whose worldwide business empire includes companies like
Roshan which have a strong social mandate.

Shainoor Khoja denies claims Roshan is favouring this community. She
points out that in call centres outside Kabul, the ethnic balance is
different, but concedes Hazaras have been easier to fit into a Western
business model because they are relatively more open to change.

So are all these brave women exceptions in their society? "Everything is
setting an example in Afghanistan," says Meryem Aslan, who has headed
the UN's Development Fund for Women in Afghanistan for the last five
years.

"We should use these successes to change attitudes and behaviour, but it
is going to take a very, very long time."

Drive down most streets in Kabul, and you will see huge billboards with
smiling Afghans hailing the magic of being connected by telephone in a
shattered country struggling to overcome the legacy of a quarter century
of war.

With women's illiteracy at around 86%, and with many still confined to
their homes, connecting them is still a struggle.

But even in this closed world, technology is widening horizons.

"Fifteen years ago, Dubai was nothing," points out a determined Zermina,
who is now able to dream. "Now Dubai is a business centre and we hope
our country will grow like that."
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November 23, 2007
Careers Give India’s Women New Independence
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

BANGALORE, India — Not long ago, an Indian woman, even a working Indian woman, would almost always have moved from her parents’ house to her husband’s. Perhaps her only freedom would be during college, when she might live on campus or take a room for a year or two at what is known here as the working women’s hostel.

That trajectory has begun to loosen, as a surging economy creates new jobs, prompts young professionals to leave home and live on their own and slowly, perhaps unwittingly, nudges a traditional society to accept new freedoms for women.

The new opening has hardly rubbed away old restrictions. As they wrestle with new uncertainties and new choices, many young Indian women are embracing the changes tentatively, tinkering for the time being with the customs of the past.

The changes are sharpest in the lives of women who have found a footing in the new economy and who are for the most part middle-class, college-educated professionals exploring jobs that simply did not exist a generation ago.

High-technology workers and fashion designers, aerobics instructors and radio D.J.’s, these women in their 20s are living independently for the first time, far from their families. Many are deferring marriage for a year or two, maybe more, while they make money and live lives that most of their mothers could not have dreamed of.

Bangalore, also known as Bengaluru, the capital of India’s technology and back-office business, is the epicenter of these changes. Once a quiet, leafy city favored by retirees, it now crawls with young people, with more than half of its 4.3 million residents under the age of 30, according to the 2001 census.

Posters advertise rooms for men and women living solo. Coffee bars are packed in the evenings. Vegetable vendors ply their wares late into the night.

So when Shubha Khaddar, 23, trudges home from work and stops to pick up something for dinner, she rarely finds herself alone. “You’ll find 10 other girls like you coming back with sabji,” Ms. Khaddar said, sabji being Hindi for vegetables.

As she left one recent morning for the public relations firm where she works, her parting words to Pallavi Maddala, 23, her roommate and a software engineer, were to bring back some idlis, or steamed rice cakes, for dinner. She would be home late. Besides, idlis would be a low-fat option.

Ms. Khaddar had been on a diet, partly egged on by her mother, who is trying to improve her marriage prospects from across the country, in Delhi. On the refrigerator, she had pasted a snarky yellow note to herself: “Lose Weight, You Fat Pig.”

In November, Ms. Khaddar gave notice at work, because she could no longer stand the job. She said she was stressed out at the prospect of finding nothing in Bangalore and having to return to life with her parents in Delhi. “I don’t think I’m prepared to go home,” she said.

Both women were trying to stave off their mothers’ intervention in the marriage department, though not entirely. Ms. Khaddar had been seeing someone but had yet to tell her parents, nor completely closed the door on her mother’s plans.

Ms. Maddala, for her part, welcomed the prospect of having a husband chosen for her but not now, and not the overseas Indians for whom her mother has an affinity.

Not long ago, Ms. Maddala showed Ms. Khaddar a photograph of one such prospect, a young man living in the United States. “The picture just freaked me out,” Ms. Khaddar recalled this morning, while getting herself ready for work. “I said, ‘Dude, you’re not getting married to that.’”

Ms. Maddala laughed at the memory. She agreed that he was too big and tall for her tastes. A couple of months later, another marriage prospect fell through because the young man’s family demanded a hefty dowry that gave Ms. Maddala pause.

More than anything, Ms. Maddala said, she wanted to savor her independence a bit longer. She moved here from Hyderabad, about 300 miles away, earlier this year. She described the lessons of freedom this way: “What is me? What is myself? How can I manage? We come here, we realize we are strong.”

“Confidence,” she went on. “As a woman nowadays, really it is a must.”

In this deeply traditional society, accustomed to absorbing influences of all kinds over the centuries, change comes slowly, if at all. And so the new economy, and the new lifestyle it has engendered, has hardly wiped away the old values, particularly with respect to marriage.

Public opinion polls in recent years routinely have revealed that young people, men and women both, still cling to ideas of virginity before marriage, and fairly large numbers say they prefer to marry within their own caste and community. The great big Indian wedding is bigger than ever. Dowry — and deaths at the hands of women’s in-laws who consider their dowries to be inadequate — prevails.

Yet, for women like these, freedom has brought new choices, new problems and as Ms. Khaddar puts it, new guilt.

Should she stay here and enjoy her independence for as long as she can? she sometimes asks herself. Or should she return home to Delhi, find a job, and allow her parents to fix a match with a young man from a north Indian Brahmin family like her own?

She is in transition, she said, between being “completely independent” and “a homely chick,” meaning, in Indian English, a life of domesticity.

Ms. Khaddar knows what her parents know, and it makes her nervous: that finding a match will be difficult for a woman like her, a student of philosophy, who thinks for herself, lives apart from her parents and likes classic rock.

A bigger fear, she confesses, is not being married at all.

“I’m torn about this whole independence thing,” Ms. Khaddar said.

Indian women are marrying later, though still relatively young compared with the West. The mean age of marriage inched to 18.3 in 2001 from 17.7 years in 1991, according to the census, and as late as 22.6 years for the college-educated.

Nearly a third of the work force is female, with rural women employed mostly in agriculture and urban women in services. Although their ranks are minuscule at the top rungs of corporate India, it is common to see women in jobs that either did not exist a generation ago, or in jobs that would rarely be filled by women, whether gas station attendants or cafe baristas, magazine editors or software programmers.

Every now and then, a high-profile crime against a woman prompts new hand-wringing and outcry over women working at night. But the young working woman living on her own is now firmly part of the urban mainstream.

Apartments are easier to rent, unlike when accommodations were limited to a room in the home of a nosy landlord who would cluck her teeth if a boyfriend spent the night, and radio talk shows feature callers talking about the pros and cons of a live-in boyfriend.

“I think it’s a very significant shift,” said Urvashi Butalia, publisher of Zubaan Books, based in New Delhi, which promotes women’s writing. “It signals a kind of change and acceptability. It testifies to women’s desire and wish to be economically independent, to be able to interact in public space and be in the same world as men.”

Equally important, she said, is the attitude adjustment among elders. “For families to accept that women will remain single, that they will live on their own, that they will work and defer marriage, is a very, very significant shift,” she said. “Even if it’s very small, it’s beginning to happen in a society where before, if you wanted to do that you’d be out on a limb.”

Ms. Butalia, 55, went out on that limb herself. Thirty years ago, she joined a New Delhi publishing house where she recalls being told that women were not welcome in executive positions because they inevitably married and quit. As it happened, she remained single, becoming one of the best known figures in Indian publishing.

Women in the younger generation, like Cauvery Cariappa, find themselves still bucking their elders on the subject of living alone. She broke the news to her parents after graduating from a Bangalore college in 2000 that she would not be returning home to Ooty, about 180 miles away. Instead, she would work and rent a place here.

“People will talk,” was her parents’ first reaction. They coaxed her to come home. Then they threw what she called “emotional tantrums.” Then they asked her to meet prospective husbands. She refused.

“The trend is once you’re 21, once you graduate, if you’re not doing something productive, you get married,” she said. “‘Productive’ according to your parents is very different from your own terms. For them, back then, it was a doctor or some other known job.”

Ms. Cariappa, now 28, went through a gamut of jobs, all of them fruits of the new economy: first at an advertising agency, then a call center, a bank, and finally she decided she would try her hand at designing clothes.

The apartment she shares now with two roommates is mostly bare, with a shelf loaded with shoes in one corner, cushions on the floor, and empty liquor bottles lined up smartly on a ledge, which made her mother gasp on her first visit. Ms. Cariappa said she assured her they had not all been consumed in one go.

Here, her boyfriend can come and go without anyone asking questions. She can go out with friends. For safety, she carries mouth spray as a substitute for mace. One of her roommates carries a long dog chain, which she once had to use to repel a man.

“I get to live how I want,” she said. “There’s nobody telling me I can’t.”

But after fighting so hard for her independence, even she could not resist the pull of tradition. In November, Ms. Cariappa announced that her freewheeling days were coming to an end.

She and her boyfriend of seven years had decided to marry. That, too, was a break with her family’s tradition, because he is from another community, from another part of the country.

She would soon move out of the apartment. “Yeah, eventually most of us get there!” she said in a text message. “The same thing’s happened 2 my roomie, hence the msg. R u or any of your friends looking 4 a place 2 stay?”
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Post by kmaherali »

Desperate Afghan women choose fiery death

Kelly Cryderman
Calgary Herald


Monday, November 26, 2007


The building is only six weeks old, but already the burn unit in Herat is saturated with the dizzying smell of antiseptic and charred human flesh.

A single gruesome scream is heard from a side room as nurses change a woman's bandages. Other patients occasionally cry out "Allah" as they stare up at the ceiling.

Beside a sunny window in the women's section lies Afsana, 16, who says she was burned when kerosene splashed out of a lamp she was passing to her sister-in-law. Her burns are so deep her nerve endings are damaged.

"I don't have any pain," Afsana insists in a weak whisper to her mother and the doctor.

She has been in the unit for almost a week, and the doctors didn't think the teen would survive this long given the extent of her injuries. They also don't believe that Afsana is telling the truth about what happened, and in fact think she set herself on fire -- a shameful but not uncommon act among young women in Afghan society.

Why do they suspect a self-inflicted burn? Because Afsana is scorched all over her legs, torso and neck -- more than 60 per cent of her body is affected. The watchful burn unit staff presume that the wider the area of burns, the more likely that it was on purpose.

"When an accident happens, they try to stop it," said Dr. Ghafar Bawar, a Canadian citizen who has lived in Ottawa for more than a decade, and has recently returned to his home country of Afghanistan to work as a plastic and reconstructive surgery consultant.

"In self-inflicted burns, a high percentage of the body surface area is affected. When it is more than 40 per cent of body surface area burnt . . . it's usually self-inflicted."

Herat in western Afghanistan has the only dedicated burn unit in the country, in part because this is where the need is greatest. Setting oneself on fire, or self-immolation, is the preferred method of suicide for the women of Afghanistan under 20 -- it's increasingly seen in Kandahar in the south, but it's especially common in Herat.

This year alone the Herat unit has seen about 70 cases of women setting themselves alight. Self-inflicted burns make up about 20 per cent of the cases the unit doctors see.

A burn unit at the Herat Regional Hospital has been up and running for four years, but just last month the new building opened. It was an international effort -- built with U.S. government dollars, furnished by Italians and operated and supplied by the French organization HumaniTerra. The Afghan government pays some of the staff.

The new facility is clean and bright, with three storeys and three dozen beds, and is a significant improvement over older, cramped facilities where doctors did their operations in the washing room.

But the pleasant new surroundings can't soothe the worst human suffering.

Self-immolation is commonly seen among girls and women who have a forced engagement to a man they don't want to marry, or have married into a family where they are beaten or intimated.

Across the country almost three in five Afghan girls are married before the legal age of 16, according to statistics from the Ministry of Women's Affairs and Women's Organizations. And between 60 and 80 per cent of all marriages are believed to be "forced."

"The accessibility of fuel or petrol, the high incidence of women suffering post-traumatic stress and the apparent lack of alternatives are some of the causes which drive these women to commit this violent and excruciatingly painful act," said a recent report from Medica mondiale, a German-based international nongovernmental organization.

kcryderman@theherald.canwest.com

For more of Kelly Cryderman's impressions of Afghanistan, visit: CalgaryHerald.com

© The Calgary Herald 2007
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Post by kmaherali »

First MicroFinance Bank’s Client Wins
"Best Micro-Entrepreneur" Award


Islamabad, Pakistan, 27 November 2007 – The First MicroFinance Bank’s client, Ms. Sifat Gul from Gharam Chashma, Chitral won the “Best National Micro-Entrepreneur Award Female” at the recently organised Citi-PPAF Micro-entrepreneurship Awards 2007 ceremony in Islamabad. Dr. Ishrat Hussain, former Governor State Bank of Pakistan was the Chief Guest for the occasion where Sifat Gul was awarded a cash prize of Rs. 115,000. The objective of the Citi-PPAF Micro-entrepreneurship Awards Programme 2007 is to illustrate and promote the effective role that micro-finance plays in poverty alleviation. It recognises the extraordinary contributions that individual micro-entrepreneurs have made to the economic sustainability of their families as well as their communities.

The award winner Sifat Gul, faced with economic problems, began her journey a couple of years ago by approaching The First MicroFinanceBank Ltd (FMFB) for a loan to purchase a sewing machine and become a tailor. However, she was soon able to diversify her small home-run business into a full training institute to harness the sewing and embroidery skills of the young women in her community. Today, she plans to construct a separate building for her training institute and has partnered with other organisations that purchase her products and exhibit them in city centres.

Her association with the Bank not only helped her in increasing her own household income and savings and but also empowered her to play a positive role in mobilizing her community to bring about a social change in their surroundings. Today, not only does she have the basic amenities of life including good quality access to education, housing and health facilities for her entire household but also trains and empowers many young women to earn their livelihoods. Coming from the remote, mountainous area of Chitral, hers is a story of true woman empowerment as she stepped up to earn a livelihood and was later elected as a female councillor revolutionizing the surroundings by playing a pivotal role in mobilising common interest projects such as Community Based Schools, village pipeline repair and road repair projects. Initially faced by strong resistance and opposition from her family to start a business, Sifat Gul with the support of The First MicroFinanceBank and her sheer commitment, confidence and hard work succeeded in bringing a positive change in her household and continues to be a social change agent.

The First MicroFinanceBank, a part of the Aga Khan Development Network, has played an instrumental role in reaching out to the poor segments of society by enabling individuals to strengthen their entrepreneurial base and build capital for a sound and secure future. The Bank strives to alleviate poverty through sustainable economic development by offering credit, savings and life insurance services and an efficient and low cost funds transfer service to its target populations. With over 70 fully automated branches all over Pakistan, FMFB has disbursed 170,000 loans and has achieved 64% rural outreach in a short span of six years.

For further details, please contact:

Mubeen Muhammad
Assistant Manager, Brand Development
Email: mubeen.muhammad@mfb.com.pk
http://www.akdn.org/news/2007nov27_microfinance.htm
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Post by kmaherali »

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7147632.stm

Saudi king 'pardons rape victim'

The Saudi king has pardoned a female rape victim sentenced to jail and 200 lashes for being alone with a man raped in the same attack, reports say.

The "Qatif girl" case caused an international outcry with widespread criticism of the Saudi justice system.

The male and female victims were in a car together when they were abducted and raped by seven attackers, who were given jail sentences up to nine years.

Press reports say King Abdullah's move did not mean the sentence was wrong.

Quoted by the Jazirah newspaper, Justice Minister Abdullah al-Sheikh said the king had the right to issue pardons if it served the public interest.

Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to mix with men who are not close family members.

The custodial sentence plus 200 lashes was imposed after the woman, who has not been named, appealed against an earlier sentence of 90 lashes.

'Astonishing' case

The Saudi king frequently pardons criminals at the Eid al-Adha festival which takes place this week, but correspondents say that is usually announced by the official press agency.

The BBC's Heba Saleh says the king's decision to pardon the woman victim is already arousing controversy with some contributors to conservative websites, who say he has breached the rules of religion in order to appease critics in the West.

The US had called the punishment "astonishing", although it refused to condemn the Saudi justice system.

Human rights groups had been calling on King Abdullah, who has a reputation as a pro-Western reformer, to change it.

The justice ministry recently rejected what it saw as "foreign interference" in the case and insisted the ruling was legal and that the woman had confessed to having an affair with her fellow rape victim.

Earlier, the woman - who is a Shia Muslim from the Qatif area - had reportedly said she met the man in order to retrieve a photograph of them together, having herself recently got married.

She says two other men then entered the car and took them to a secluded area where others were waiting, and both she and her male companion were raped.

The woman's companion was sentenced to 90 lashes. It is not known if his sentence was also lifted.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/m ... 147632.stm
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Post by kmaherali »

December 18, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
The Mourning After
By CHERIE BLAIR
London

LIKE many people nowadays, I’m the product of a single-parent family. My sister and I were brought up by my mother after my father deserted us when we were young. It must have been very tough for my mother but we children thrived because of a huge amount of support from a big extended family.

When I reflect on the plight of millions of widows across the world, I realize just how fortunate we were. Although we were surrounded by love, widows and their children in many societies are shunned, abused and exploited.

The centuries-old practice of suttee — a widow burning herself alive on her husband’s funeral pyre — has all but vanished. But the few cases of self-immolation that do occur are a reminder of how bleak the future is for many widows. After a shocking case just five years ago in rural India, a sociologist in Delhi, Susan Visvanathan, explained that the widow who set herself on fire “would have assumed her life would be one of isolation and despair and shame and suffering.”

In rural areas of Nepal and India, widows may still be expected to shave their heads, sleep on the floor and hide from men for the rest of their lives.

In Afghanistan, where two million women have lost their husbands in decades of fighting, widows are prevented from working and have no way to provide for their children. In Tanzania, among other countries, the legal system makes it difficult for widows to inherit their husband’s property.

The result is that many widows and their children are kicked out of their homes, forced to live in abject poverty on the fringes of society, and are prey to abuse, violence and sexual exploitation. With no money to pay for education, the children of widows are pulled out of school. With no education, these children are doomed to spend their lives in the most menial of jobs, if they can find work at all.

This is a huge problem. In India alone, there are estimated to be some 30 million widows struggling to bring up children. Across the developing world, there may be as many as 100 million in a perilous state. Conflict, ethnic cleansing and AIDS are increasing these numbers by the day and creating younger widows. In countries where disease or conflict are most rife, half of all women can be impoverished widows.

Given the scale and nature of this injustice, it’s disturbing that this problem has remained largely invisible. Statistics are too often not kept by national governments. And despite the United Nations’ welcome focus on tackling global poverty and gender inequality, there is no specific mention of widows in its Millennium Development Goals — an oversight that makes it that much more difficult for the international campaign to work.

Improving the situation of widows and their children, however, won’t be easy. A much greater effort is needed from national governments, including, where necessary, an overhaul of legislation to protect the inheritance rights of widows. It would help as well, where possible, to raise the minimum age for marriage. Children of 14 or even younger should not be married off to men as many as 40 years older, not least because they will soon join the ranks of widows.

Governments must be prepared as well to stand up to cultural pressures, however strong, to enforce existing legislation. Many of the countries where widows are treated worst have good laws in place to protect them. The problem is that they are routinely ignored by local communities and seldom enforced.

Any government efforts will have to go hand in hand with a sustained education campaign, letting women know their rights, explaining to local elders the legal protections that exist and informing communities of the long-term damage these injustices are causing to the health and wealth of their societies.

In the end, it is not just widows who lose out because of this damaging prejudice and discrimination. We all do. Only with determination and courage will we be able to save widows and their families from lives of stigma, harassment and humiliation.

Cherie Blair, a human rights lawyer, is the president of Loomba Trust, a charity that campaigns for the rights of widows and their children in the developing world.
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Post by kmaherali »

More women losing battle with the bottle
Higher incomes and stress levels feed addictions

Sharon Kirkey
CanWest News Service


Tuesday, December 18, 2007


Second in a CanWest News Service series

- - -

The last thing V. remembers of the night she hit bottom was calling 911. She came to tied to a stretcher in an emergency ward.

She climbed down and disconnected the tubes, "because I'm a nurse, I know how to do it." Then she saw the patient chart next to her bed. What she read astounded her: It had taken six orderlies to hold her down so a tube could be put down her nose to pump her stomach.

B. played games. She knew her limit was a litre of wine, so she would buy a 750 ml bottle on the way home from work, and then drink it within an hour and a half. Finished, she would think, "I'd like another glass of wine," then drive, immaculately dressed, and drunk, to the liquor store.

J.'s shyness drained away with that first drink. She felt gregarious, at ease. She never had more than a few drinks with friends, and then she would go home and finish drinking until she passed out. If it was a good drinking day, she could make it to midnight. By the end, it took 12 bottles of beer and whisky or bourbon to get there.

V. has a management position with the federal government. B. is a recently retired school administrator. J. is a former navy officer. All are smart, capable women who on the outside looked as if they were winning in life, while inside, their lives were coming undone.

Their realities were nothing like the images in the glossy ads, the pictures of gorgeous women sipping martinis, with captions like: Cocktails, anyone?

Women raised in wealth. Women raised on reserves or high-crime neighbourhoods. Mothers who wait to drink until their children are in bed then drink until three in the morning.

Experts say more women appear to be drinking, and drinking heavily.

"Women are drinking more. They're drinking more like men, sadly, and they're drinking more often and heavier when they do drink," says Tim Stockwell, director of the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C.

Stockwell attributes the number of women under the influence to rising stress levels and broad social changes sweeping modern societies. "The workforce is much more gender balanced. The divisions and distinctions that used to apply -- the classic stereotypes of the passive, feminine female and the macho, hunter-gatherer male -- don't apply so much."

Women are earning more, and have more to spend on alcohol, the female drug of choice. There are more professional women in their 20s and 30s who have high disposable incomes and no children to rush to pick up at day care. Bars, offering designer drinks, have become more female friendly.

"I treat a lot of women who are affluent businesswomen and they're increasing the business dinners they're going out to, they're getting into wine tasting, they're starting to get into martini bars. They're telling me stories, 'I went to a luncheon or dinner and I drank too much,' " says Harris Stratyner, an associate professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and vice-president of Caron New York, an addiction treatment centre in New York City that has treated Canadians.

He sees women who use alcohol as a social lubricant, a mood disinhibitor, and a way for newly single women to cope with the stress of dating.

"And then I'm hearing, I had too much to drink. I slept with him the first night," Stratyner says.

"I'm hearing about blackout sex, which is very, very disturbing. When you're in a blackout, you literally have no recollection of what went on. You could be raped and not have a recollection of it."

Sue Lingl hears it, too.

"It's not uncommon here for women to say they've never danced or had consensual sex clean and sober," says Lingl, a counsellor at Aurora Treatment Centre for women at BC Women's Hospital and Health Centre in Vancouver.

Women drink to feel better, faster -- whatever "better" means, she says.

"It doesn't matter whether it's an anxiety attack or insomnia, or to have the courage to become angry."

Women quickly learn it's not socially acceptable to show anger. The message instead: Suppress. Internalize. Deny.

Alcohol addiction in women knows no socio-economic boundaries. There are single mothers on welfare, sex-trade workers and physicians' wives, trust-fund babies and lawyers, and women from the suburbs who've lost jobs, partners and children to alcohol.

"The old stereotype used to be, 'I'm not a wino if I'm not drinking out of a brown paper bag in the alley,' " Lingl says.

In reality, little separates the woman "who stands at the corner of Main and Hastings at 11 o'clock at night and gets into a car and exchanges sexual favours for money, and the woman who lives in an emotionally bankrupt marriage who only stays to have a roof over her head and money," Lingl says.

"It's just a matter of degree."

© The Calgary Herald 2007
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Post by kmaherali »

Syrian First Lady

Story by Alison Thomson


There’s a quiet revolution going on in the Middle East, and it’s being driven
by women. When Asma al-Akhras married the president of Syria in December 1999, she joined an elite group of first ladies who are educated, glamorous and prepared to stand up and be counted. They are ardent campaigners on humanitarian and social issues, and for them, taking a back seat is not an option. It is a group that includes Queen Rania of Jordan, Suzanne Mubarak of Egypt, Andree Lahoud of Lebanon and Queen Salma of Morocco, and together they are sending out a message to the rest of the world that the modern Arab woman
is intelligent, independent and at the cutting edge of fashion to boot.

Mrs. Assad, now 29, was brought up in London but spoke only Syrian at home – “I didn’t realise until I was seven that my parents could actually speak English,” she says – and spent each summer in her home country. She kept a low profile for the first few months of her new, married life, not, she insists, because she was in hiding, but because it gave her a chance to get to know her people before they knew her. “I was able to spend time meeting other Syrian people,” she recalls. “Because people had no idea who I was, I was able to see what their problems were, their hopes and aspirations.”

Incognito, she joined up with various United Nations-backed programmes being implemented in the rural areas of Syria. Thus, she was able to get a good grasp of the real issues affecting the Syrian people – and no doubt report her findings back to her husband. Three months later, her face would be instantly recognised by everyone, everywhere. “To be honest,” she says, “I wanted to meet ordinary citizens before they met me. Before the world met me.”

And when the world did meet her, in March 2000, it was a groundbreaking moment. Mrs. Assad stepped out in public for the first time with her husband to meet the president of Bulgaria. She was without a veil and wore an above-the-knee skirt. This was not the first country in the region to witness a president’s wife asserting herself as a modern, working woman, but it was not what Syria was used to. In the past four years, however, they have embraced their first lady, who has become a symbol of the efforts of her husband to modernise and reform the country.

Like her counterparts elsewhere in the region, she quickly espoused
humanitarian and social causes and has since been a tireless campaigner on various issues, not least education and, most particularly, the advancement of women. Understandably for a woman who herself has a degree in computer science from Kings College London, Mrs. Assad’s interest in the development of her country went straight to the very heart of its potential future. In February last year, to mark Arab Woman Day, she hosted a forum in Damascus, Women and Education – The Development Of A Nation, at which she declared that a woman’s
education and work were “an integral part of her identity and national duty. They are not just a fulfilment of economic needs.”

“I WANTED TO MEET ORDINARY CITIZENS
BEFORE THEY MET ME. BEFORE THE WORLD MET ME”

The conference, drew an impressive turnout from the region’s first ladies, many of whom are also educated to degree level – Queen Salma of Morocco, for example, has a degree in engineering and Suzanne Mubarak has a masters in sociology. The forum gave these women a chance to exchange expertise, as well as discuss the means to enhance the role of women in the educational process and in the overall development of their communities. Mrs. Assad’s commitment to improve education standards was further emphasised during her first visit back to the UK as the president’s wife in December 2002, when she discussed literacy
programmes with ministers from the department for education and skills.

Economic issues have also been a major focus for Syria’s first lady, inspired by her own experience working as a financial analyst for global institutions such as JP Morgan in London. For example, she took the opportunity on the same trip to the UK to visit a Prince’s Trust scheme for business start-ups. Her conviction that women can and should play a major role in boosting the country’s economy has resulted in her setting up a non-governmental organisation to introduce microfinance to Syria. In June last year, her efforts came to fruition in Yarmouk, in the southwest near Jordan, where she met local entrepreneurs to launch the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa)’s microfinance and microenterprise programme, which loans working capital to
small businesses, to give a financial boost to Syria’s least well-off.

The way the loan programme works is to provide credit for those who would not ordinarily be eligible for it – largely because they do not own land that can act as collateral – to start or improve existing businesses. The aim of the programme is to improve the quality of life of these small business owners, sustain jobs, decrease unemployment, reduce poverty, empower women and open up new income-generating opportunities.

Mrs. Assad is also working closely with other development organisations, such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which has built on the framework of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) of the '90s to help small businesses get off the ground. Her early excursions 'tagging along’ incognito around the country with development agencies have obviously stood her in good stead and she continues
tirelessly to campaign, with her husband, for modernisation and greater
opportunities for the average Syrian.

Mrs. Assad shares these goals with her fellow first ladies across the region, and together these women are helping to modernise their countries. But they are doing more than that – they are building bridges with the West in terms of culture and understanding, as well as forging closer links between their own countries. The first ladies frequently attend forums to discuss regional issues, most recently in Beirut at the Women and Armed Conflict conference in March.

It was a two-day meeting, attended by the first ladies of Lebanon, Syria,
Egypt, Sudan, Jordan and Bahrain, as well as the sister of King Mohammed VI of Morocco. During the proceedings, the Syrian minister of emigrant affairs Buthaina Shaaban – one of two women appointed to the cabinet by President Assad – called upon women in decision-making positions to play a leading role in spreading peace. The conference concluded with several motions demanding that women be granted an active role in the Arab League and trained to plead for the Arab cause in international organisations. It also called on governments to set up programmes that raise awareness on the destructiveness of wars and how they affect women, children and families.

Amazingly, in the midst of all this activity, Mrs. Assad has had time to start
a family: Hafez, named after his grandfather, was born in December 2001. And it is not just Asma who has adopted

“I WAS BORN IN LONDON. I SPENT 25 YEARS IN LONDON.
BUT I ALSO KNOW I’M SYRIAN. I AM BRITISH AND
I AM AN ARAB. I AM PART OF BOTH WORLDS"

a modern approach – her husband is right there with her. The lifestyle they lead in Damascus could not be more different from that of his father. For example, the couple do not live in the presidential palace, but have a modest home in the city centre. And in terms of equality, Asma is said to have her own office in the palace and attends ministerial meetings.

The couple had been friends for years in London, where they were both students, although, Asma insists, it was never anything more than friendship. Bashar was studying ophthalmology until the tragic death of his older brother Basil in a car accident in 1994, when he returned to his homeland to be groomed for presidenthood. Asma’s evolution from
West London girl to Syrian First Lady could not have been speedier. When asked how soon she knew that Bashar intended to marry her, she replied: “The day before.” Since his accession to power, President Assad has been a keen advocate of women in public service, and as well as appointing two female ministers, he has also overseen 24 women legislators arrive in the 250-member parliament. Neither does he underestimate the importance of women in the private sector – no less than nine businesswomen accompanied the couple on their official trip
to the UK.

These efforts to promote the role of women in Syria’s future are not going
unnoticed. Leading businesswoman Khulud Halaby – who runs the franchise for DHL in Syria, the first company in the country to receive ISO certification – recognises Mrs. Assad’s contribution: “Thanks to all her support, women today have an opportunity to build a solid basis for themselves and their daughters in the business world.”

Mrs. Assad continues to exercise huge influence on both the regional and
international stage, and her role is crucial in terms of the development of
women at home, as well as in strengthening ties with the west. On her last
official visit to Britain, she emphasised her status as First Lady of Syria by
travelling under her Syrian passport, despite the fact that she holds a British one, too. “I was born in London. I spent 25 years in London,” she says. “But I’m also Syrian. I am British and I am an Arab. I am part of both worlds.”

Syria could not wish for a finer ambassador.
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Post by kmaherali »

World outsources pregnancies to India

By SAM DOLNICK, Associated Press Writer Sun Dec 30, 3:02 PM ET

ANAND, India - Every night in this quiet western Indian city, 15 pregnant women prepare for sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession of ballooned bellies, to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills.

A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world.

The small clinic at Kaival Hospital matches infertile couples with local women, cares for the women during pregnancy and delivery, and counsels them afterward. Anand's surrogate mothers, pioneers in the growing field of outsourced pregnancies, have given birth to roughly 40 babies.

More than 50 women in this city are now pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Taiwan , Britain and beyond. The women earn more than many would make in 15 years. But the program raises a host of uncomfortable questions that touch on morals and modern science, exploitation and globalization, and that most natural of desires: to have a family.

Dr. Nayna Patel, the woman behind Anand's baby boom, defends her work as meaningful for everyone involved.

"There is this one woman who desperately needs a baby and cannot have her own child without the help of a surrogate. And at the other end there is this woman who badly wants to help her (own) family," Patel said. "If this female wants to help the other one ... why not allow that? ... It's not for any bad cause. They're helping one another to have a new life in this world."

Experts say commercial surrogacy — or what has been called "wombs for rent" — is growing in India. While no reliable numbers track such pregnancies nationwide, doctors work with surrogates in virtually every major city. The women are impregnated in-vitro with the egg and sperm of couples unable to conceive on their own.

Commercial surrogacy has been legal in India since 2002, as it is in many other countries, including the United States. But India is the leader in making it a viable industry rather than a rare fertility treatment. Experts say it could take off for the same reasons outsourcing in other industries has been successful: a wide labor pool working for relatively low rates.

Critics say the couples are exploiting poor women in India — a country with an alarmingly high maternal death rate — by hiring them at a cut-rate cost to undergo the hardship, pain and risks of labor.

"It raises the factor of baby farms in developing countries," said Dr. John Lantos of the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, Mo. "It comes down to questions of voluntariness and risk."

Patel's surrogates are aware of the risks because they've watched others go through them. Many of the mothers know one another, or are even related. Three sisters have all borne strangers' children, and their sister-in-law is pregnant with a second surrogate baby. Nearly half the babies have been born to foreign couples while the rest have gone to Indians.

Ritu Sodhi, a furniture importer from Los Angeles who was born in India, spent $200,000 trying to get pregnant through in-vitro fertilization, and was considering spending another $80,000 to hire a surrogate mother in the United States.

"We were so desperate," she said. "It was emotionally and financially exhausting."

Then, on the Internet, Sodhi found Patel's clinic.

After spending about $20,000 — more than many couples because it took the surrogate mother several cycles to conceive — Sodhi and her husband are now back home with their 4-month-old baby, Neel. They plan to return to Anand for a second child.

"Even if it cost $1 million, the joy that they had delivered to me is so much more than any money that I have given them," said Sodhi. "They're godsends to deliver something so special."

Patel's center is believed to be unique in offering one-stop service. Other clinics may request that the couple bring in their own surrogate, often a family member or friend, and some place classified ads. But in Anand the couple just provides the egg and sperm and the clinic does the rest, drawing from a waiting list of tested and ready surrogates.

Young women are flocking to the clinic to sign up for the list.

Suman Dodia, a pregnant, baby-faced 26-year-old, said she will buy a house with the $4,500 she receives from the British couple whose child she's carrying. It would have taken her 15 years to earn that on her maid's monthly salary of $25.

Dodia's own three children were delivered at home and she said she never visited a doctor during those pregnancies.

"It's very different with medicine," Dodia said, resting her hands on her hugely pregnant belly. "I'm being more careful now than I was with my own pregnancy."

Patel said she carefully chooses which couples to help and which women to hire as surrogates. She only accepts couples with serious fertility issues, like survivors of uterine cancer. The surrogate mothers have to be between 18 and 45, have at least one child of their own, and be in good medical shape.

Like some fertility reality show, a rotating cast of surrogate mothers live together in a home rented by the clinic and overseen by a former surrogate mother. They receive their children and husbands as visitors during the day, when they're not busy with English or computer classes.

"They feel like my family," said Rubina Mandul, 32, the surrogate house's den mother. "The first 10 days are hard, but then they don't want to go home."

Mandul, who has two sons of her own, gave birth to a child for an American couple in February. She said she misses the baby, but she stays in touch with the parents over the Internet. A photo of the American couple with the child hangs over the sofa.

"They need a baby more than me," she said.

The surrogate mothers and the parents sign a contract that promises the couple will cover all medical expenses in addition to the woman's payment, and the surrogate mother will hand over the baby after birth. The couples fly to Anand for the in-vitro fertilization and again for the birth. Most couples end up paying the clinic less than $10,000 for the entire procedure, including fertilization, the fee to the mother and medical expenses.

Counseling is a major part of the process and Patel tells the women to think of the pregnancy as "someone's child comes to stay at your place for nine months."

Kailas Gheewala, 25, said she doesn't think of the pregnancy as her own.

"The fetus is theirs, so I'm not sad to give it back," said Gheewala, who plans to save the $6,250 she's earning for her two daughters' education. "The child will go to the U.S. and lead a better life and I'll be happy."

Patel said none of the surrogate mothers has had especially difficult births or serious medical problems, but risks are inescapable.

"We have to be very careful," she said. "We overdo all the health investigations. We do not take any chances."

Health experts expect to see more Indian commercial surrogacy programs in coming years. Dr. Indira Hinduja, a prominent fertility specialist who was behind India's first test-tube baby two decades ago, receives several surrogacy inquiries a month from couples overseas.

"People are accepting it," said Hinduja. "Earlier they used to be ashamed but now they are becoming more broadminded."

But if commercial surrogacy keeps growing, some fear it could change from a medical necessity for infertile women to a convenience for the rich.

"You can picture the wealthy couples of the West deciding that pregnancy is just not worth the trouble anymore and the whole industry will be farmed out," said Lantos.

Or, Lantos said, competition among clinics could lead to compromised safety measures and "the clinic across the street offers it for 20 percent less and one in Bangladesh undercuts that and pretty soon conditions get bad."

The industry is not regulated by the government. Health officials have issued nonbinding ethical guidelines and called for legislation to protect the surrogates and the children.

For now, the surrogate mothers in Anand seem as pleased with the arrangement as the new parents.

"I know this isn't mine," said Jagrudi Sharma, 34, pointing to her belly. "But I'm giving happiness to another couple. And it's great for me."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071230/ap_ ... eyl.YDW7oF
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January 4, 2008
Editorial
Saudi Arabia’s Promised Reforms

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia did the right thing when he pardoned the “Qatif girl.” The perfect injustice of the case, in which a young woman was gang raped and then sentenced to 200 lashes for being alone in a car with a man to whom she was not married, left him no choice. Now another ugly face of Saudi justice has been revealed, one that cannot be explained by religion, ancient tradition or culture. The detention last month of an outspoken blogger, Fouad al-Farhan — only confirmed by the Interior Ministry this week — is an act of thoroughly modern despotism and one the king should immediately overrule.

Mr. Farhan’s Web site, www.alfarhan.org, has posted a letter from him in which he said he was being investigated because of his writings about political prisoners. If King Abdullah is really serious about reforming his kingdom’s legal system, as he has indicated that he is, then he must change not only the Sharia-based courts but also the organs of state security that silence critics in his name.

King Abdullah’s announced reforms include the creation of a Supreme Court as well as specialized courts for criminal, commercial, labor and family matters, and the training of legal staff. These plans have been especially welcomed by foreigners doing business in Saudi Arabia, who have been hamstrung by the capriciousness of the religious judges.

The case of the woman from the Eastern town of Qatif should make clear to the king that his reforms cannot stop at making life easier for businessmen. They must also make life far better for women, who are denied basic legal and social rights, and they must give more legal protection to those who criticize the government.

Defenders of the existing Saudi system argue that change in this traditional society must come slowly. Many Saudis are clearly eager for more and faster change. A Gallup poll conducted last year showed that a majority want more freedoms for women. King Abdullah has demonstrated a laudable desire for reform. He must understand that cruelty, sex discrimination and censorship cannot be part of a modern legal system or a country that wants to participate in the modern world.

When President Bush visits Saudi Arabia this month, he should remind the king of that.
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There is a related slideshow linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/magaz ... ?th&emc=th

January 20, 2008
A Cutting Tradition
By SARA CORBETT

When a girl is taken — usually by her mother — to a free circumcision event held each spring in Bandung, Indonesia, she is handed over to a small group of women who, swiftly and yet with apparent affection, cut off a small piece of her genitals. Sponsored by the Assalaam Foundation, an Islamic educational and social-services organization, circumcisions take place in a prayer center or an emptied-out elementary-school classroom where desks are pushed together and covered with sheets and a pillow to serve as makeshift beds. The procedure takes several minutes. There is little blood involved. Afterward, the girl’s genital area is swabbed with the antiseptic Betadine. She is then helped back into her underwear and returned to a waiting area, where she’s given a small, celebratory gift — some fruit or a donated piece of clothing — and offered a cup of milk for refreshment. She has now joined a quiet majority in Indonesia, where, according to a 2003 study by the Population Council, an international research group, 96 percent of families surveyed reported that their daughters had undergone some form of circumcision by the time they reached 14.

These photos were taken in April 2006, at the foundation’s annual mass circumcision, which is free and open to the public and

held during the lunar month marking the birth of the prophet Muhammad. The Assalaam Foundation runs several schools and a mosque in Bandung, Indonesia’s third-largest city and the capital of West Java. The photographer Stephanie Sinclair was taken to the circumcision event by a reproductive-health observer from Jakarta and allowed to spend several hours there. Over the course of that Sunday morning, more than 200 girls were circumcised, many of them appearing to be under the age of 5. Meanwhile, in a nearby building, more than 100 boys underwent a traditional circumcision as well.

According to Lukman Hakim, the foundation’s chairman of social services, there are three “benefits” to circumcising girls.

“One, it will stabilize her libido,” he said through an interpreter. “Two, it will make a woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband. And three, it will balance her psychology.”

Female genital cutting — commonly identified among international human rights groups as female genital mutilation — has been outlawed in 15 African countries. Many industrialized countries also have similar laws. Both France and the U.S. have prosecuted immigrant residents for performing female circumcisions.

In Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, a debate over whether to ban female circumcision is in its early stages. The Ministry of Health has issued a decree forbidding medical personnel to practice it, but the decree which has yet to be backed by legislation does not affect traditional circumcisers and birth attendants, who are thought to do most female circumcisions. Many agree that a full ban is unlikely without strong support from the country’s religious leaders. According to the Population Council study, many Indonesians view circumcision for boys and girls as a religious duty.

Female circumcision in Indonesia is reported to be less extreme than the kind practiced in other parts of the globe — Africa, particularly. Worldwide, female genital cutting affects up to 140 million women and girls in varying degrees of severity, according to estimates from the World Health Organization. The most common form of female genital cutting, representing about 80 percent of cases around the world, includes the excision of the clitoris and the labia minora. A more extreme version of the practice, known as Pharaonic circumcision or infibulation, accounts for 15 percent of cases globally and involves the removal of all external genitalia and a stitching up of the vaginal opening.

Studies have shown that in some parts of Indonesia, female circumcision is more ritualistic — a rite of passage meant to purify the genitals and bestow gender identity on a female child — with a practitioner rubbing turmeric on the genitals or pricking the clitoris once with a needle to draw a symbolic drop of blood. In other instances, the procedure is more invasive, involving what WHO classifies as “Type I” female genital mutilation, defined as excision of the clitoral hood, called the prepuce, with or without incision of the clitoris itself. The Population Council’s 2003 study said that 82 percent of Indonesian mothers who witnessed their daughters’ circumcision reported that it involved “cutting.” The women most often identified the clitoris as the affected body part. The amount of flesh removed, if any, was alternately described by circumcisers as being the size of a quarter-grain of rice, a guava seed, a bean, the tip of a leaf, the head of a needle.

At the Assalaam Foundation, traditional circumcisers say they learn the practice from other women during several years of apprenticing. Siti Rukasitta, who has been a circumciser at the foundation for 20 years, said through an interpreter that they use a small pair of sterilized scissors to cut a piece of the clitoral prepuce about the size of a nail clipping. Population Council observers who visited the event before the 2003 study, however, reported that they also witnessed some cases of circumcisers cutting the clitoris itself.

Any distinction between injuring the clitoris or the clitoral hood is irrelevant, says Laura Guarenti, an obstetrician and WHO’s medical officer for child and maternal health in Jakarta. “The fact is there is absolutely no medical value in circumcising girls,” she says. “It is 100 percent the wrong thing to be doing.” The circumcision of boys, she adds, has demonstrated health benefits, namely reduced risk of infection and some protection against H.I.V.

Nonetheless, as Western awareness of female genital cutting has grown, anthropologists, policy makers and health officials have warned against blindly judging those who practice it, saying that progress is best made by working with local leaders and opinion-makers to gradually shift the public discussion of female circumcision from what it’s believed to bestow upon a girl toward what it takes away. “These mothers believe they are doing something good for their children,” Guarenti, a native of Italy, told me. “For our culture that is not easily understandable. To judge them harshly is to isolate them. You cannot make change that way.”
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Exploring the Status of Muslim Women in Europe
French Muslim Women Forge New Islam, Activism

by Sylvia Poggioli

Interesting photographs and related articles linked at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... d=18119226


Morning Edition, January 25, 2008 · France is Europe's most rigidly secular society, relegating religion to the sidelines.

Paradoxically, of all the Muslims in Europe, it's the French ones who most closely identify with France's values, despite widespread social discrimination.

And it's French Muslim women who are in the forefront of grassroots political activism and in forging their own interpretation of Islam.

Muslim Women Leading the Charge

After taking office, President Nicholas Sarkozy announced the appointment of the first Muslim — who is also a woman — as justice minister. Rachida Dati, 41, was the 12th child of a Moroccan laborer and an Algerian mother.

And she is not the only Muslim woman with a senior portfolio.

The foreign undersecretary for human rights is Senegal-born Rama Yade. The undersecretary for urban affairs is Fadela Amara, an activist from the immigrant housing projects.

Amara is visiting Epinay Sur Seine, one of the many immigrant ghettoes that encircle Paris. Here, poverty, unemployment and youth violence are endemic.

Amara, 43, known as the ghetto warrior, organized the first town hall meeting in this desolate, graffiti-laced project. Facing a mostly female audience, Amara lashed out at sexist patriarchal cultures that, she says, harm young women.

She tells the audience members that they must speak out and denounce violence against women in the ghetto — and against the growing number of forced marriages. And, Amara warns, they must be more vigilant against Islamist preachers who pollute the heads of young men with fundamentalism.

The daughter of Algerian immigrants, Amara was a political activist as a teen.

After a young Muslim girl was burned alive by a Muslim thug who thought she was too independent, Amara founded a movement with a provocative name: Ni Putes Ni Soumises, or Neither Whores Nor Submissives.

It put the spotlight on abuse of women in the high-rise ghettoes.

Searching for Inclusion

Amara is a firm believer in the secular values of mainstream French society, and she demands that France live up to its ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood for all its citizens.

One young woman echoes the challenge.

"Nouveau Francais" is the latest hit single by 22-year-old Amel Bent, the French-born daughter of North African parents who became famous on the French version of the U.S. reality television program American Idol.

Her tune echoes the national anthem and describes the desire of immigrants to be accepted under the same flag.

"We don't ask for special recognition," Bent sings. "We're neither more nor less a child of France."

In fact, rioting ghetto youths don't brandish religious symbols but rather their French ID cards.

This desire for inclusion was also expressed by French Muslims surveyed in a major Pew poll in 2006, in which 78 percent said they want to adopt French customs.

And the 2004 law banning headscarves in schools was much more sharply criticized abroad than by French Muslims.

Today, the presence of minority women in Sarkozy's cabinet shows young Muslim women it's possible to make a mark in France.

Gap Between Aspirations and Reality

But Sihem Habchi, the new president of Ni Putes Ni Soumises, laments the wide gap between aspirations and reality. None of the ministers were elected. There's only one Muslim representative in parliament and no Muslim mayors.

Habchi says discrimination against men and women of foreign origin is widespread.

"We don't understand why they want to build this wall between us and the rest of society," she says. "I can represent all the French. I am French since long time, and I can defend the values of progress also."

Habchi believes the only outlet for women in the ghettoes is political activism.

Empowerment Through Religious Study

But some French Muslim women are following another path.

Nadia, a young woman whose head is covered with a tightly folded black headscarf, glides over the smooth marble floor in the grand mosque of Paris toward the woman's gallery.

She says she does not feel better represented now that there are three minority women in the cabinet.

"It is a real choice of faith to be Muslim, and it is not enough to be just of Arab origin," Nadia says.

Nadia is among a growing number of French Muslim women who are seizing the Koran for themselves.

The grand mosque made an unprecedented move five years ago. Courses were introduced to train young Muslim women as spiritual counselors for hospitals and prisons.

Today, most students in France's Islamic studies institutes are women.

One graduate is Noura Jaballah, mother of five and spokeswoman for the French League of Muslim Women.

She wears the Islamic headscarf, but she has no patience with certain traditional interpretations of Islam.

"I don't know how in the world they came up with the claim that women were created to stay home and take care of household chores and cooking. It's absolutely false," she says. "Women, like men, have the responsibility to make order reign on earth."

Jaballah is proud of her achievements and the fact that, at home, she's the one who leads family prayers.

The 'New Female Islamic Consciousness'

Dounia Bouzar, a sociologist and a Muslim, studies the new female Islamic consciousness, in which, she says, the Muslim woman has discovered her individuality and learned to say "I."

Bouzar believes that by growing up in a secular society, French Muslim women have shared experiences and blended with the rest of the French population.

"By working side by side with men, with non-Muslim women, with people who do not believe in God, by being friends with an Elizabeth who might be Buddhist … well, this totally contradicts traditional teachings," Bouzar says. "No preacher or father can convince you that your close friend Elizabeth is an infidel. This kind of argument just doesn't carry weight anymore."

Bouzar says it's not religion but social and economic discrimination that threatens this society's cohesion.

France's immigrant suburbs are social, economic ghettoes, she says, not separate Islamic enclaves such as those that exist in Germany and Britain.

This has enabled France's high intermarriage rate between Muslim women and non-Muslim men, which is taboo under strict Islamic practice.

Bouzar believes Muslim women can become the engine of integration.


Related NPR Stories
Jan. 21, 2008
Muslim Women Behind Wall of Silence in GermanyJan. 22, 2008
Muslim Activist Critical of 'Multicultural Mistake'Jan. 23, 2008
Many British Muslim Women Embrace Political IslamJan. 24, 2008
British Warn of Growing Female Islamic RadicalismDec. 13, 2004
Europe, Islam's New Front LineNov. 20, 2006
Europe's Right Turn
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7265021.stm

US Muslim women seek active faith role
By Robert Pigott
Religious affairs correspondent, BBC News



See the Akhtar family at a weekend lunch, and the renewal of Islam in America seems inevitable and irresistible.

Shahid and Mino Akhtar were born in Pakistan and, like their son and three daughters, they are devout Muslims who attend the mosque regularly.

Meeting them at their house in a quiet tree-lined street in Emerson, New Jersey, it soon seems clear that they, and their progressive Islam, are as perfectly adapted to life in modern America as their Christian neighbours.

Shahid is a hands-on dad. While his wife pursued a career as a lawyer he took charge of raising the children. His son Reza, a hospital doctor, is following his example by being the one who cooks dinner and does the dishes as his wife, Amna, also works.

The Aktar daughters are pursuing careers as a lawyer, businesswoman and dentist. Their emancipation has not diluted their sense of being Muslim, but it has changed it.

Sheema wears shorts to play soccer, but sees no conflict with the duty to behave modestly. They feel bound by the duty to pray, for example, but not at five set times each day.

Mino Akhtar says connection with God is what counts.

"In terms of the daily practices, when I travel on business I don't get to get to pray five times a day," she says. "It's my connection with the creator that's more important than how I do it."

"Absolutely," says her daughter Sheema. "We're just adapting to the surroundings. As long as you have the basic principles, and you abide by them and remember Allah every day."

Women 'reclaiming Islam'

American Muslims' determination to grasp the basic principles of their religion - rather than the sometimes harsh rules contributed by other cultures during its long history - grew out of the wreckage of the World Trade Center towers.


We've been working with a variety of organisations on really taking the teachings of Islam and delivering them without the baggage of tradition
Lena Alhusseini


Shahnaz Taplin Chinoy stands on Brooklyn Heights and surveys the southern tip of Manhattan. She recalls the events of 11 September 2001, and the moment she made it her mission to reclaim the Islam of her childhood.
"I was bombarded by questions from friends," she says. "They kept saying, 'why does Islam suppress women? Why does Islam condone violence?' I was flabbergasted at the Islam of the hijackers which was so disconnected with the Islam of my youth - which was not extremist at all."

'Baggage of tradition'

Lena Alhusseini, whose origin is Palestinian, runs a family support centre for Arab-Americans in Brooklyn. She says women are leading the renewal of Islam because they have the most to gain.

"Oftentimes we get women who are illiterate. They come from tribal societies and in their understanding of Islam it's okay to be beaten by a man. Their role is to be subservient and that's the mark of a good Muslim woman - which is very different from what Islam teaches.

"So we've been working with a variety of organisations on really taking the teachings of Islam and delivering them without the baggage of tradition. And telling them this is what Islam is all about - Islam gives you rights, Islam doesn't allow you to be treated this way."

Laleh Bakhtiar is a Muslim scholar who has translated the Koran, making controversial changes in standard translations which she says more accurately reflect the original spirit of the religion.


Dr Bhaktiar's English text has removed derogatory references to Christians and Jews. It changes many of the most important words, even substituting the word "God" for "Allah", which she says is more inclusive. Most controversially, her Koran rejects the idea, in Chapter Four, verse 34, that men may beat their wives.
"The word for "beat" has 25 meanings", she says. "We need to look therefore at what Muhammad did. He didn't beat but walked away. So why are we saying 'beat' when we can say 'go away' - which is what he did."

Modern mosques

Muslim women have also been demanding changes in the way mosques are run. Daisy Khan was among the designers contributing to the plans for Long Island Mosque in Westbury, a suburb of wide roads, trees and clap-boarded houses. She quickly discovered that the draft design confined women to a basement.

"Women were out of sight... the design was done in such a way that women were supposed to be downstairs with no access to the main prayer space," she says.


You're talking about a country [the US] which is based on the principles of freedom and democracy, equality, justice - all these are Islamic
Imam Shamsi Ali

Now women worship in the prayer hall behind the men, a step that seems radically modern to some new immigrants.
"There's no provision in Islam which says women can't pray in the same space," insists Ms Khan. "These are just traditions we've adopted over the years because of the practice in certain countries."

Among the Sufi Muslims of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi order at their meeting in Yonkers, men and women mix freely. The spiritual director is a woman. Shaykha Fariha occasionally leads both men and women in prayers, an act which has scandalised traditionalists but which she says is appropriate in America.

"In the West I'm more free about leading prayers" she says. "I think the tendency against it is mainly a cultural one."

At the New York Islamic Cultural Centre, a group of high-spirited girls is studying alongside boys on a Saturday morning. The mosque's imam, Muhammad Shamsi Ali, says educating girls is vital to developing Islam in the West, and is true to Islam's original purpose.


"Prophet Mohammed stated clearly that women must learn - they must be equal to the male intellectually, they have to improve themselves intellectually," he says.
Imam Shamsi Ali says he sees no incompatibility between the US and Islam. "You're talking about a country which is based on the principles of freedom and democracy, equality, justice - and all these are Islamic."

Shaykha Fariha says that apart from these shared principles, Islam has what the founder of her order described as the ability to behave like water - taking on the shape of the vessel into which it is poured.

She says Muslims in many parts of the world are shedding the cultural restrictions inherited from male-dominated and conservative societies.

"Islam is undergoing a huge reformation and self questioning, and certainly 9/11 has [led to] people looking at their religion and asking what has led to this," she says. "So I think what we're seeing today within the Islamic tradition is comparable to the Christian reformation in the sense of the dimension of its impact on the religion, its impact on individuals and its impact on the world as a whole."

Traditionalist critics say those who seek revolutionary change in Islam are diluting its teaching. They say that adapting the religion to contemporary mores progressively undermines its ability to give moral guidance to society.

But the Akhtar family insist that their modern lifestyle in secular America does not stop them practising what they call "the beautiful values of Islam".

Mona Akhtar, a lawyer, bubbles rose-flavoured smoke through an after-lunch shisha, and contemplates her emancipated sisters.

"We're living examples of the importance of women taking a more active role in Islam," she says. "We're following the spirit of the Koran."


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/a ... 265021.stm
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