M U S A W A H

Contributed by www.awid.org

Last month, Musawah, a global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family was launched at a meeting in Kuala Lumpur.
By Kathambi Kinoti
In February of this year, about 250 scholars, lawyers, journalists and women’s rights activists from 47 countries met in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to launch a global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family. This global movement initiated by Sisters in Islam is called Musawah, an Arabic word which means “equality.” According to Zainah Anwar one of the protagonists of the movement “there is nothing more powerful that an idea whose time has come.” [1] The demands for women for justice and equality within Muslim laws are gaining momentum all over the world signalling what some are calling a “paradigm shift” in Muslim theological and legal scholarship. [2]
AWID’s Shareen Gokal participated in the Musawah launch. She says: “The dominant theme of the meeting was the assertion that not only are equality and justice possible within Islam, but that women are demanding that Muslim family laws respond to their lived realities and their call for equality and justice. Participants at the meeting emphasized that Musawah is about equality, universality, diversity and dignity – concepts that guarantee full rights for women and not about equity, complimentarity or reciprocity.” [3]
Musawah rests on the assertion that equality, justice, fairness and human dignity are concepts central to Islam. According to Gokal advocates at the meeting made a clear distinction between two elements in Islam: Shariah and Fiqh. Shariah (or “the path”) as derived from the Quran and Sunnah, provides a broad set of values to which Muslims should adhere. Fiqh is the “science of legal jurisprudence,” [4] or “the process by which humans attempt to derive concrete legal rules from the two primary sources of Islamic thought and practice.” Currently, a large part of the body of family laws for Muslims in many parts of the world is based on interpretations made by Muslim jurists in the past, that is to say it is the collective outcome of a male dominated process that was influenced by the power structures of the day. As a result, Muslim laws are largely “laws made by men in the name of God” and must be exposed as such.
Since Fiqh is a man- made and patriarchal process, it is open to challenge by more feminist interpretations without violating Shariah or the Quran. Contemporary knowledge and discourse on human rights can inform interpretations of Shariah that promote women’s rights without digressing from Quranic teachings. The Musawah movement claims that the bases for full citizenship of women and non-discrimination are present in Islam and in the Quran but have been cast aside and not given any emphasis in Muslim jurisprudence.
Laws formulated during colonial periods in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia tended to calcify jurisprudential interpretations and post-colonial regimes often entrenched these laws. [5] This has led to numerous injustices against women that touch on rights to do with labour, property ownership, citizenship and nationality, marriage, mobility, dignity and political participation. Musawah advocates assert that this has to change, and that it is well within the teachings of Islam that it should change.
Challenging the secular/religious divide
According to Gokal, the fact that Musawah acts as an umbrella for advocates from many different traditions and ideological perspectives to call for an end to injustice in the Muslim family is one of its strengths. By giving equal emphasis to human rights principles, national and constitutional guarantees against discrimination, lived realities and Islamic principles that show equality to be necessary and possible, Musawah is able to challenge the secular/religious divide that has long been a backdrop to this debate among feminists. This is not to say that certain ideological tendencies did not manifest as an undercurrent to the meeting. There was an on-going debate about the usefulness of secular approaches, which threw up differences in historical experiences of women’s rights advocates from different countries. In her opening address to the meeting, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Yakin Erturk said that there are two prevailing culturally restrictive interpretations of women rights. One is cultural relativism whose proponents claim that international human rights norms originate from the North and are not necessarily appropriate in Southern contexts. Another, which primarily originates in the North, is cultural essentialism in which ‘other’ women are seen as victims to be saved. Often, discourse on the rights of Muslim women is based on either of the two assumptions. The reality however, is that the basic tenets of Islam mandate equality and the realities of women living in Muslim contexts (like in other contexts) necessitates positive change.
Looking aheadParticipants at the Musawah meeting urged the movement to take collective responsibility to build the feminist knowledge base within Islam that can respond to the challenges that women are experiencing in Muslim contexts and to further disseminate this knowledge. More activists need to consider Islamic texts and alternative jurisprudence as well as documenting the realities of people’s lives as a way to lobby for equality. Women’s knowledge and experiences need to be valued, prioritised and contexualised. [6]
Participants also agreed that Musawah would be located within the broader context of democracy, and they need to address issues such as occupation, conflict and authoritarian rule. Another issue that was raised was the need to recognise that non-Muslims may also be affected by Muslim family law issues – either because of being married to Muslims or as non-Muslim minorities in a Muslim majority context. There was a broad consensus that violence against women needs particular attention and responses from within an Islamic framework as do inheritance and divorce laws. Musawah brings together women from diverse parts of the globe. What they have in common is their demand for equality and justice within the Muslim family and their commitment to the principle that all human beings are equal in rights and dignity. Gokal is emphatic that despite the diverse needs and realities of Muslim women around the globe, there is common ground. She stresses that it is imperative to “preserve the plurality and diversity of the movement and yet find ways to build on the synergies.”