COVER STORY Standing Up for Islam
Muslims are fighting back—not just against the West but also against the militancy in their midst. A TIME Special Report on the diversity of Islam in Asia
I am a Muslim woman. I believe in God and the prophet Muhammad. I pray, I fast, I read the Koran, I've been to Mecca for umrah (the mini-hajj pilgrimage) and hope to go on the big one soon. I also love the Beatles, I dance, swim, dive, hug and kiss my bosom buddies—male and female. I am a feminist and I am an activist. I see no contradiction in being a Muslim and being a modern person who leads a joyous and meaningful life inside and outside the home.
In my world of Islam, I witness both the progressive and the regressive. There are women who are better educated than men and men who are better educated than women. There are husbands who maintain their wives and wives who maintain their husbands. There are men who love to cook and stay home, and women who prefer to eat out and hang out. But I also encounter women who yearn for husbands to share the housework and child rearing, just as they, as wives, share the financial burdens of the family. I meet women who cannot accept that their husbands have taken second wives, women who cannot believe that God has given the husband the right to beat his wife, women who cannot fathom how they, as long-suffering dutiful wives, are only entitled to one-eighth a share of their deceased husband's estate while other family members get more.
But the mullahs tell me of a different world of Islam. The mullahs say all men are superior to all women and therefore women cannot be regarded as equal to men. They tell me that a Muslim man has the right to divorce his wife at will, the right to take second, third and fourth wives, the right to demand obedience and the right to beat his wife if he thinks she is misbehaving. They say I cannot question these rules as they are God's law.
As a thinking and believing woman, I cannot accept such pronouncements made in the name of my faith and my God. What the mullahs are doing is using God and religion to justify patriarchy—and they don't like it when someone questions what they preach. Last year, a group that called itself the Ulama Association of Malaysia tried to get me charged for insulting Islam. They claimed that I, and the group I represent, Sisters in Islam, question the word of God when we assert that polygamy is not a right in Islam, and that the mullahs do not possess a monopoly on understanding, interpreting and codifying religion into law.
What I and my sisters are actually guilty of is asserting that there are deep differences between the revealed word of God and human (read: male) interpretation of the message. For centuries, men interpreted the Koran and codified Islamic rules that defined for us what it is to be a woman and how to be a woman. The woman's voice, the woman's experience, the woman's realities have been largely silent and silenced. This absence of the female voice in the interpretation of the Koran is mistakenly equated with the voicelessness of the Koran itself on female concerns. And this voicelessness is perpetuated these days by men who not only isolate Koranic verses from the sociohistorical context in which they were revealed but also isolate them from the context of the contemporary society we live in today.
Where Koranic verses appear to discriminate against women, I read it within the sociohistorical context of revelation. It is not God's intent to perpetuate injustice and discrimination. But how justice was served in 7th century Arabia was specific to that time, place and circumstance. Thus asking a woman to assist another woman as a witness in a contractual transaction was never meant to lead to the eternal principle of two women equals one man but to ensure that justice was done at a time when few women were managing their own businesses.
Women can no longer leave it to a God appropriated and defined by men to solve the problems and conflicts they face in their daily lives. So what is the choice before me? Rejecting religion so that I can live my life as a feminist is not an option. I am a believer, and I want to find solutions from within my own faith. So I have gone back to the Koran to search for answers. The Koran I read talks about love, mercy and equality, justice, freedom and dignity. It talks about equal responsibility of men and women in this world and equal rewards in the afterlife. The Koran says, "Be you male or female, you are members, one of another." In the final verse revealed by God on the relationship between men and women, it says we are "each other's protecting friends and guardians." I do not read of the superiority or inferiority of either sex in the Koran I know.
The more I read the Koran, the stronger my faith becomes. It is this conviction in a God who is just that gives me the courage to speak out and to try to end the injustice women suffer in the name of religion.
Zainah Anwar is executive director of Sisters in Islam, an ngo fighting for women's rights within an Islamic framework
