For many feminists, the headscarf is a glaring symbol of male oppression and the patriarchal power of religion. However, there is now a small, but growing number of Muslim women looking to take their places in Britain’s rapidly expanding women’s movement.
A new project to connect Islam to feminism has been launched to tackle long-standing concerns that religious women are excluded from the women’s rights debate.
In what is a deeply controversial area for many in Islamic communities and for many mainstream feminists, the linkup between a Muslim charity and the UK Feminista group is seen as a pioneering step in bringing women from different cultural backgrounds together in the battle for sexual equality.
The social enterprise Maslaha, established by the Young Foundation to work on improving social conditions in Muslim and minority communities, said the program had attracted a huge response in the past few days.
“An awful lot of Muslim women have felt excluded from the debate about women’s rights and this project really focuses on bringing ordinary women into a debate about Islamic feminism that has so far only really been heard in academic circles,” Latifah Akay of Maslaha said.
She said the online resource islamandfeminism.org was bringing out some extraordinary responses from British Muslims who reported feeling previously isolated.
“This is really taking off,” she said. “Islamic feminism is not a new thing, which will probably surprise most people, but Muslim women have the same core concerns as white, secular, British women: the workplace, discrimination, childcare. And also they have different layers of struggles and different layers of oppression, just as a black lesbian will have different struggles to white disabled women, and none of them should be excluded just because they are diverse. There has been a dire lack of spaces for women within Islam to have these kinds of conversations and they have felt very much that their religious beliefs exclude them.”
Islamic feminism has been on the rise over the past few years in various countries around the world, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran, but it remains a taboo in many more traditional communities who fear that it will lead women away from religion.
“The Internet will help Muslim women find each other, just as it has for young secular women in Britain, and start a real conversation,” Akay said.
While a number of new books on Islam and feminism have been appearing around the world in recent years, the UK has been slow to catch up.
Last year, when a University of Derby lecturer, Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor, published Muslim Women in Britain: De-mystifying the Muslimah, she said she believed that many of the misconceptions around Islam were directly linked to how people believed the faith treated its women.
“The media portray Muslim women as oppressed and subjugated and Islam is often presented as misogynist and patriarchal,” she said, and her book was intended as an antidote to that.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
The US government has banned US government personnel in China, as well as family members and contractors with security clearances, from any romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, The Associated Press (AP) has learned. Four people with direct knowledge of the matter told the AP about the policy, which was put into effect by departing US ambassador Nicholas Burns in January shortly before he left China. The people would speak only on condition of anonymity to discuss details of a confidential directive. Although some US agencies already had strict rules on such relationships, a blanket “nonfraternization” policy, as it is known, has