December 19, 2001
Where Muslim Traditions Meet Modernity
By SUSAN SACHS
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| (Jean Blondin for The New York Times) |
| Nadia Yassine, right, a spokeswoman for a dissident Moroccan Islamist party and the daughter of its leader, giving advice to two men in Rabat. |
RABAT, Morocco — Islam preaches equality, yet in most Muslim countries a woman's place is determined by a man's will. It's the law.
A husband can prevent his wife from traveling abroad, and the police will back up his legal right to stop her. A father can marry off his daughter against her will, and she, by law, must obey. A woman is trapped in a loveless marriage; with few exceptions, her husband is free once he declares himself divorced.
But the days when Muslim women could be kept housebound, cosseted and remote from society are long gone in most parts of the Muslim world. As modernity collides with religious tradition, women have begun to demand a reinterpretation of the civil codes that presume a woman, in her private life, is a capricious creature in need of a man's guiding hand.
The agitation in countries like Morocco is coming from female scholars who are confident of their religious judgment and use the Internet as a forum to promote an alternative vision of the rights of Muslim women. It is coming, as well, from politically active women who push for change from within Islamist movements. It is coming from ordinary women who fear that legal strictures will prevent their countries from integrating into the modern world.
Their challenges to Islamic orthodoxy have placed these women at the heart of the main political battle in the Muslim world, where one side claims Islam as a shield against foreign culture and the other presents it as a road map for progress.
To the extent there is public debate over the role of Islam — as armor or emancipator — that debate often turns on the subject of women.
For many Muslim women, the religious laws that subordinate them to the authority of male relatives represent a final frontier. They already vote, unless they live in the gulf nations. They go to school, unless they lived under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. They choose whether or not to wear a veil, unless they live in Iran or Saudi Arabia.
But in the personal sphere, laws remain mired in patriarchal tradition and a medieval reading of Islam. To alter them, Muslim women face not only an entrenched religious establishment, but also a battle with fundamentalists in the political arena.
Many Muslim women say they do not want instructions for their struggle from the West. As they demonstrated at many international conferences on women's rights, they resent being told what it is they need.
Still, in many countries, Islamist movements have attacked those seeking change as Western stooges and enemies of Islam, and they have seized on resistance to women's rights as an issue in their power struggle with moderate Muslim rulers.
In Kuwait, Islamist members of Parliament rejected the emir's efforts to grant voting rights to women and pushed through a law to segregate Kuwait University. In Jordan, Islamists have campaigned successfully against the king's attempt to stiffen penalties for honor killings, or the murder of women whose behavior is deemed shameful to family honor.
Nowhere in the Islamic world does the conflict over women's rights come into sharper relief than in Morocco, where society has split in two over a government proposal to eliminate inequities in the kingdom's laws. Last year, in a remarkable public demonstration, more than 400,000 people took to the streets in response to the plan. Half of them, marching in Rabat, supported the plan for equal rights. The other half, in Casablanca, rallied against it as an attack on religious values.
The most contentious part of the proposal concerned the country's personal-status law, or moudawana, and the debate has become as much a political battle as a discussion of women's rights. The plan would raise the legal age for marriage to 18 from 15 for women (as it already is for men), outlaw polygamy in most cases and allow divorced women for the first time to retain custody of their children if they remarry. Women would also be granted equal rights to ask for a divorce and equal claims to assets acquired during the marriage, rather than just their personal property.
Invasion of Ideas
An Islamist dissident group, Justice and Spirituality, has organized the campaign against the plan. Led by Abdessalam Yassine, who accuses "Westernized elites" of destroying the Muslim world and its culture, the once-clandestine group has cast itself as the only line of defense against an invasion of foreign ideas.
"It's not that we don't want women to evolve," said Nadia Yassine, the leader's daughter and a spokeswoman. "But we can't accept a plan simply because Westernized women with a Western mentality proposed it."
Under Moroccan law, a man can divorce his wife by simply declaring it in front of a judge. A woman is entitled to file for divorce only if she can prove her husband abuses her or fails to support her. Otherwise, she must buy her way out of a marriage by paying her husband any amount of money he demands.
Unlike Mrs. Yassine, who said the moudawana does need adjustment, other Moroccan Islamists denounced the proposals as a threat to religion and family.
The vehemence of the opposition took many supporters of the plan by surprise. "The fundamentalists are fixated on the question of women, but they have no program," said Mohammed Said Saadi, a former minister of state and one of the authors of the plan. "Their preoccupation is morality and they put out a lot of lies about the plan, saying it would encourage homosexual marriage, make condoms available everywhere and encourage the debauchery of high school girls."
In Morocco, the king is called "commander of the faithful," making him the highest religious authority in the country. King Mohammed VI has called for the advancement of women. But he has not yet said whether he will endorse the plan on women, which would open a direct confrontation with the Islamist opposition. After the demonstrations in March 2000, he appointed a committee to sound out public opinion. It is still holding hearings. Many Moroccan women fear that the moudawana reforms will be put aside to avoid more political turmoil.
"And if you put that part aside, what's left?" asked Fatiha Layadi, a stylish young television reporter who drew stares for smoking cigarettes in public at an outdoor cafe in Rabat. "If it's not the whole package, then how are you going to talk about women's empowerment?"
Islam's Evolution
Her frustration says much about the evolution of Islam. Born in the tribal societies of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, Islam vastly improved the lot of women of that time. It instructed men that they could have up to four wives, but only if they treated all of them equally and had the means to support them. A woman could inherit wealth instead of being inherited as part of her husband's or father's estate.
As codified over the years, however, Islam eventually institutionalized the inferiority of women. The prophet Muhammad is said to have urged his followers to treat women with respect, but respect has come to mean control. And while some scholars have argued that Islam was meant to be flexible enough to adjust to a changing society, conservatives have held sway for centuries.
Muslim women now find themselves constrained by tradition as much as religious law. Saudi women are forbidden to drive, ostensibly to protect their Muslim honor, just as most Muslim women need a male relative's permission to get a passport.
"Our prophet made his own bed, sewed his own shirts, helped his wife at home," said Sibel Eraslan, a veiled Istanbul lawyer who once headed a women's committee in the Turkish Islamist party, Refah. "Today men don't want to follow Muhammad because it is easier not to. Even the hard-line Islamists ignore these details from our prophet's life."
She, at least, lives in a country that recently changed its laws to give women equal rights in family life. But Turkey did so to aid its application to join the European Union, leaving Mrs. Eraslan uneasy with what she called "imposed changes."
For women seeking change, however, there are reasons for optimism. Women's votes can count, as they did in bringing a moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, to power in Iran in 1997. And traditionalists no longer control all the religious debate.
"Educated women armed with computers have defeated extremists by denying them a monopoly to define cultural identity and interpret religious texts," said Fatema Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist who has written extensively on women and democracy in Islam.
"No extremist can say that women are inferior to men without being made a laughingstock on Al Jazeera," she added, referring to the Qatar-based satellite news channel. "Islam insisted on equality between everyone."
Islamic jurisprudence is based on the Koran, which Muslims consider the word of God, and on the hadith, the prophet's words and actions as recorded after his death. Koranic verse is the basis for giving a woman's testimony half the weight of a man's. Laws limiting women's political role rely on the hadith, particularly one that attributes to the prophet a particularly damning view of women's abilities to lead. "Those who entrust their affairs to a woman," he is believed to have said, "will never know prosperity."
Women, of course, have led Muslim countries in Asia. But they have advanced no higher than government minister in modern Arab countries, in part because Arab scholars have not strayed far from the most literal interpretation of that hadith.
Yusuf al Qaradawi, an Egyptian scholar whose opinions reach millions through his weekly call-in show on Al Jazeera television, has written that "a woman's first and greatest job" is to produce and raise children. If she must work, he says in his published religious rulings, it should only be in jobs where she would not spend time alone with a man or neglect her family duties.
In the context of traditional religious rulings, the sheik's views might be considered progressive. But some religious women have begun to push the boundaries of even modernist male scholars. Among them is Suaad Salih, a professor of religious jurisprudence at Al Azhar University in Cairo, who considers herself as capable of issuing religious rulings as any man with the title sheik, which she does in unofficial forums.
Last month, on Islam Online (www.islam-online.net), Dr. Salih tackled the Koranic verse about the testimony of women. The verse actually demonstrates Islam's respect for women, she wrote. "In cases of crimes like murder and adultery, Islam makes it clear that in principle, a woman should be kept safe from all these fields that may hurt her feelings," Dr. Salih wrote. "However, if no other one is there to witness except a woman, her testimony may be accepted in such cases in order to preserve the course of justice."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
