Changes In Radical Islam – Ida Lichter

In her book, Muslim Women Reformers: Inspiring Voices Against Oppression, Dr Ida Lichter gives voice to the courageous, and often overlooked, women reformers of the Muslim world. They speak out with passion, humanity and even humour, bringing alive the harsh realities of Muslim law for women. Ida Lichter, a practising psychiatrist, joined with Daniel Pipes to address The Sydney Institute on Thursday 5 November 2009, where she reflected on the opportunities and obstacles faced by Muslim women reformers in the twenty-first century.

CHANGES IN RADICAL ISLAM

IDA LICHTER

Thank you Anne and Gerard Henderson for giving me the opportunity to address The Sydney Institute, which provides such an important current affairs forum for ideas and debate.

Tonight, I am going to speak about a group of women in the Muslim world who are passionate and fearless reformers. What success have they had and how can they go forward?

But first, you may want to know why an Australian psychiatrist came to write a book about this subject. Until recently, I lived in London and, over many years, witnessed increasing Islamisation and got to know Muslim women colleagues. I also became aware of a growing number of Muslim women reformers who were virtually unknown. Muslim women dissidents like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Taslima Nasreen were newsworthy but they represented a much larger number of women reformers who were virtually unknown in the West. I was intrigued to discover that some were medical doctors like me. For example, Massouda Jalal from Afghanistan qualified as a psychiatrist and pediatrician but eventually stood as a candidate for President and later became Minister for Women’s Affairs. My aim has been to amplify the voices of these remarkable women.

These female activists are determined, intellectual and humorous, nothing like the stereotype of the submissive Muslim woman. They are leading the Muslim reform movement because they have the most to gain and also the most to lose if radical Islam, a heretical interpretation of the religion, strengthens. Some have risked their lives for reform and died as targets of jihad. Saudi Arabian Wajeha Al-Huwaider cannot understand why a world that was enraged by prisoners in Guantanamo is not enraged by the plight of Muslim women. She asks, “Why isn’t the cry of these millions of women heard, and why isn’t it answered by anyone, anywhere [in the world]? Why? Why? Why?” The laws that apply to Muslim women, she says, “are clearly no longer suited to an era in which cats and dogs in the developed world have more rights…”

The reformers represent many views and many Muslim countries with the most active residing in Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. Secular reformers among them would like to see separation of religion and state and they reject sharia in favour of civil law. A few like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan reject Islam outright because they believe it is not capable of reformation, only transformation. They have received death threats in response to their opinions.

In the religious group, which is the majority, most insist that women’s rights can be achieved within Islam through ijtihad, meaning critical reinterpretation of the holy texts in view of contemporary life. In their belief, it is the culture of male-dominated tribalism and patriarchy that distorted authentic Islam and produced sharia laws in favour of men.

What reforms are these women trying to achieve?

They want to abolish stoning to death for adultery, forced and child marriage, polygamy and temporary marriages. They want equal rights to divorce, custody, inheritance and court testimony. Of particular importance are rights to education, without fear of acid attacks and assassination.  They want domestic violence and ‘honour killings’ criminalised. In Saudi Arabia, they want the right to vote and drive a car.

They want freedom to choose their husbands and do away with male guardians – husbands or other male family members – who are legally bound to give permission for marriage, medical treatment, education etc. Their clothing is regulated in the public space and where sharia is strictly enforced, as in Iran and Saudi Arabia, the religious police can imprison women for infringements of Islamic dress. The niqab, which covers a woman’s face except for two slits for the eyes, might be considered extreme, but some religious authorities are still not satisfied; an influential Saudi cleric has ordered women to cover one eye so as not to be over-seductive.

Above all, reformers want to see changes in cultural attitudes that infantilise Muslim women as chattels and baby machines and they want to expose the hypocrisy of men who defend themselves against charges of misogyny by saying they really honour and respect women when their real agenda is a male-dominated society that keeps women subjugated.

Women reformers also make the point they are fighting for human rights for men as well, including the rights to freedom of speech, assembly and association and the freedom to change religion.

How are they going about reform and what gains have they made?

In the past, major reforms took place in Turkey and in North Africa. In Tunisia, the government’s use of ijtihad facilitated successive gender reforms. Currently, Muslim women are beginning to rise up world wide, aided by education and modern communication. I can’t do justice to the women in my book in a short time, so I will only mention a few.

Wahzma Frogh works in gender research and runs literacy programmes in Afghanistan where 13 per cent of women are literate. While preparing for a programme in the remote north-east, she heard that a local mullah was preaching a fatwa inciting the community to kill her. Summoning up the courage, Wazhma walked into the mosque, wearing a billowing black chador and asked the mullah for “five minutes” of his time. Then she recited verses from the Koran that praised tolerance, nonaggression and the benefits of education, and denounced child marriage, wife beating and forced illiteracy. To everyone’s surprise, the mullah backed down and said “God bless you, my daughter.” Wazhma believes that more Muslim women like herself must become knowledgeable in Arabic and Islam in order to lobby religious, local and government leaders to support reform. Her gender research in a south-eastern province, where early and forced marriage is common practice showed that 90 percent of families sold their daughters for about $300 to avoid “problems and burdens in the future.” Some of these girls were as young as three years old.

In Afghanistan, the basic tribal system was historically patriarchal and repressive but during the Taliban era, strict Islamic law was imposed. Due to the new Constitution under coalition forces and much determined lobbying by women reformers, more than half of the students enrolling for teacher training are women; many Afghan women have their own businesses; over 40 per cent of registered voters are women, and women are members of Parliament and ministers in the government. Female parliamentarians like Massouda Jalal, Suraya Parlika, Malalai Joya, Sima Samar and Shukria Barakzai have all been involved in promoting women’s rights. In addition, women have achieved senior positions in the police force and in Bamyan province, central Afghanistan, Habiba Sarabi is the first female Governor.

In Saudi Arabia, institutionalised persecution of women, including prohibition of the right to drive, has been part of state policy. Wajeha Al-Huwaider and Fouzia Al-Ayouni led a campaign to give women the right to drive, culminating in a petition to King Abdullah in 2007. The governing Shura Council eventually recommended they be allowed this right but they don’t have it as yet. Significant recent changes include the appointment in 2009 of the first woman minister, Dr. Noura Al-Fayez, removal of the hardliner chief of the Mutaween, the religious police, and a ruling that Saudi women could stay in a hotel alone, provided the police were informed.

These moves, which are part of King Abdullah’s reform program, have undoubtedly been influenced by women like Al-Huwaider. Earlier this year, she initiated a campaign against the Saudi Mahram or Guardian law with the slogan: “Treat us like adult citizens or we leave the country.” The campaign was launched at the bridge connecting Saudi Arabia and Bahrain where Al-Hawaider and fellow activists demanded to cross without a guardian. In her view, Saudi Arabia is “the world’s largest women’s prison” because the Mahram law dictates that women cannot leave their cells, that is to say their homes, without signed permission. Moreover, a Saudi woman who has committed a crime can’t leave prison after serving her sentence unless her guardian arrives to collect her. As some guardians refuse to collect these women, many languish in prison.

In pre-revolution Iran, there was a strong women’s movement. Women fought for the revolution in the name of more freedoms and less Westernisation but later felt betrayed because they were much worse off. Ayatollah Khomeini dismissed women judges, restricted female students to a 10 per cent quota, enforced Islamic dress and other strict sharia laws. Domestic violence became the leading cause of female suicide and in the absence of shelters, women had to enter brothels or go home to their abusers. The only right that remained was the right to vote and a small number of women have been in the Majlis or Parliament. Women also lobbied very hard to increase their rights to education.

Over the last few years, women activists in Iran have taken to the streets and were the vanguard for the reform rallies we have seen since the June election. Their aim is to force changes to discriminatory laws like polygamy and child marriage. With the same goal, they have canvassed people on the street, door to door and by email as part of their One Million Signatures Campaign.

For these activities, they were beaten by police and arrested on charges like “acting against national security” and “participating in an illegal gathering”. They have been jailed and sentenced to lashings. Some were young students; others were mothers and even grandmothers. Under President Ahmadinejad restrictive policies worsened, but in September 2008 reformers triumphed when the Iranian parliament denied the passage of a bill that would have facilitated polygamy by allowing men to take a second wife without consent of the first as previously mandated. They also managed to increase the minimum age of marriage for girls from nine to thirteen and lengthen custody of children in the case of divorced mothers.

According to Mohammad Javad Larijani, Secretary of Human Rights in the Iranian judiciary, stoning to death for adultery is lawful and no shame, but lawyer activist Shadi Sadr is committed to its abolition. This ancient custom was revived in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and most of those killed by stoning are women accused of adultery. When a woman is about to be stoned, she is ritually washed, dressed in a white kaftan and buried up to the neck in the ground. Then people from the community, including family, throw the stones, which must be neither too small so that they inflict too little damage, nor so large that the ordeal is over too quickly. Sadr has led the Campaign to Stop Stoning Forever which publishes news on the internet within hours. When two people were stoned to death in Mashad in 2006, the reaction by the international community forced the Iranian government to stop these public executions for two years.

Many reformers and their organisations are working on reinterpretation of Koranic scripture, rejecting the traditional patriarchal perspective. Scholars like Amina Wadud in the United States and the Rahima NGO in Indonesia have embarked on such projects.

In Bahrain, Wajeha Al-Baharna campaigned to give women the right to pass on citizenship to their children, and Ghada Jamsheer, President of the Women’s Petition Committee, filed hundreds of stories about women denied justice in sharia courts. This collection was part of her campaign to ban polygamy, temporary marriage and child marriage. She also pressed for reform of incompetence and corruption in sharia courts and replacement with civil courts. As a result, seven judges were dismissed although others were then appointed on the basis of political affiliation rather than competence.
Rola Dashti, suffragette for parliamentary reform in Kuwait, achieved a historic change by lobbying successfully to give women the right to vote. She was one of four women to win seats in the parliamentary elections in May 2009. Also in Kuwait, Nouriyah Al-Subeeh defied the Islamists in parliament when she arrived unveiled and wearing a floral printed skirt at her swearing in as education minister.

In the South-East Asia region, Malayisan reformer Zainah Anwar and her organisation, Sisters in Islam, were successful in repealing amendments to family law that would have facilitated polygamy and divorce for men. Anwar works on a global scale and in February 2009 launched Musawah, a Malaysian-based international movement to end discrimination and violence against women in Muslim societies.

The Rahima organisation in Indonesia is an Islamic NGO that advocates a moderate, democratic and progressive interpretation of sharia. Activists, who often rely on quotations from the Koran to refute the hard-line ideology of conservative Muslims, conduct training sessions for teachers and students at pesantrens, Islamic boarding schools.

A small but growing number of Muslim men are also wholeheartedly committed to furthering women’s rights. Raid Qusti, Saudi journalist, said his country is “a handicapped society . . . which [relies] on only half the country’s human resources-the male half”.

Reformers who are immigrants from countries where they have known radical Islam at first hand, warn us about its insidious dangers. For example, Homa Arjomand, who fled Iran for Canada, noticed that a new organisation, the “Islamic Institute of Civil Justice”, was attempting to influence Canadian Muslims to use sharia instead of Canadian courts for settling disputes. As she feared this could lead to a parallel legal system, Arjomand established the “International Campaign against Shari’a Court in Canada” and lobbied the then Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty. In the end, he banned all religious arbitrations and initiated new legislation mandating the sole use of Canadian law.

I want to briefly mention the role of the internet. There are now many reform websites that disseminate information in original languages and translations. In Iran, a breakthrough came when Hossein Derakshan, an Iranian journalist living in Canada, posted a “How to Blog” in Farsi on the internet. Now there are over 100,000 active blogs representing diverse interests. The Iranian government has cracked down on cyber journalists with arrests, beatings and solitary confinement. Charges have included “propaganda against the state” and “publication of lies”. The regime has also filtered and blocked reformers’ websites and, in July 2008, passed a new law to allow the death penalty for “online crimes”.

Most of the major drives have a strong internet component. In addition, there can be multiplier effects. In the Iranian One Million Signatures Campaign, for example, many of the forms which required to be signed online were forwarded to new potential signatories.

Social networking websites like Twitter and YouTube are popular. In 2008, one of Al-Huwaider’s campaigns entitled “No to Oppression of Women”, broadcast YouTube video interviews with Saudi women who testified anonymously to their plight. A similar campaign in 2009, focused on banning child marriage. The films featured newspaper headlines such as, “The Mufti of Saudi Arabia Permits Marriage of 10-Year-Old Girl” and “Attempt to Marry Off Two Children – One Aged Five – Thwarted”. These headlines were interspersed with interviews of girls on YouTube, many of whom cried they were too small to get married. One of the interviewees said, “We are still children, how can we raise children? I have aspirations … I would like to become a scientist.”

There are obstacles to overcome

Firstly, laws that are implemented nationally may not influence tribal courts which dispense customary law and enjoy rural support, for example in areas of Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Secondly, reformers’ voices are being stifled because some Middle Eastern countries have shut down websites and blogs, and also because our Western media is more sensationalist than serious. Furthermore, there is potential pressure from UN resolutions against defaming religions that could be used to silence reformers.

Women activists need to make alliances with men but patriarchal Muslim males can be unreliable allies when it comes to female rights. This lesson was learned in Algeria, Iran and Afghanistan.

Reformers are also hampered by governments like the Saudi monarchy, a regime not answerable to the people and prone to vacillate unpredictably between modernising and traditional perspectives.

In some Muslim countries like Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, the rulers are in favour of reforms but Islamist forces from within hinder women’s rights. For example, when Kuwaiti reformer Rola Dashti, together with 30 other women, decided to run for parliament in 2007, she had the support of the Emir but Islamists branded the women anti-religious, blasphemous, anti-patriotic, anti-family agents of the West. In addition, elections were held a year early, so that the women had insufficient time to prepare. However, in May 2009, Dashti was one of four women who won the first female seats in the Kuwaiti Parliament.

Many reformers avoid alliances with Western organisations because they fear being branded traitors or agents of the West.  There are many who would welcome Western support but have been disappointed by the silence of the feminist movement, caught in the dilemma of multiculturalism. You may well ask if culture can be changed. Veteran reformer Shirin Ebadi, Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Laureate, believes that changes in culture follow changes in the law. She gives the example of polygamy: before the Iranian revolution, polygamy was limited by law and became culturally unacceptable. When it was legal again, polygamy became more socially acceptable.

Apart from supporting Muslim women reformers on moral grounds, there are common interests we share with progressive Muslim societies. Firstly, the endorsement of international law as the highest set of legal and human values, above all religious and other considerations. In particular, this acceptance refers to The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). A second common interest is the advantage of unlocking the potential of half the population of the Muslim world. Once women are given a voice and an opportunity to make a social difference, they can bring positive change and progressive ideas to their societies, as in Northern Ireland and Argentina.

My research shows that Muslim women reformers are the flashpoints for their regions. As more people accept the need to alter the restrictive rules of Islamic culture in general and sharia law in particular, one would hope that the benefits to these nations would be considerable. Islam has hidden away a major social, political, and economic resource – its women.  As stated in the Arab Human Development Report 2005 “an Arab renaissance cannot be accomplished without the rise of women . . . Directly and indirectly, it concerns the well-being of the entire Arab world.”

For people of goodwill, empowerment of Muslim women should be an issue of consensus rather than controversy, and a bulwark against radical Islam. But the reformers can’t do it alone. As Algerian feminist Khalida Messaoudi said, “In order to secure women’s rights, we need a democratic international of women – otherwise we have absolutely no chance of conquering this beast.”