News
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Muslim women battle against ‘macho’ viewsBARCELONA: Muslim women from around the world on Friday took up the fight against a “macho” interpretation of the holy Quran at the opening of an international conference on Islamic feminism.
“Islamic feminism is necessary for a proper image of women, for their dignity and their place in culture and politics,” said Mansur Escurado, president of Spain’s Muslim organisation La Junta Islamica, whose Catalan branch organised the event in Barcelona. “It will come into full force when women are able to make choices in life with their own consent,” Escurado said. The three-day conference was called to “support women who are fighting for recognition of their rights in the Islamic world” and rising up “against the long-established supremacy of men”, he said.
The Islamic feminist movement has slowly emerged in the Muslim world, which comprises some 29 countries with more than one billion people. The advocates - mostly well-educated, urban women versed in the Koran - argue that Islam must not be a pretext for cultural practices denigrating women, dictated by men with a monopoly on interpreting Islam’s holy book.
The Barcelona meeting drew over 400 participants from Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Norway, Mexico and the US. “Nothing can really begin until women start to talk to other women,” said Pilar Vallugera, director of the Department on Women and Rights at city hall in Barcelona.
The meeting, which considered part of a “jihad for equality of the sexes”, will also address such fundamental topics as discriminatory codes in Sharia laws, polygamy, sexual rights, as well as “the intellectual role of women”, said Abdennur Prado, one of the organisers of event.
For a young mother from Lahore the conference in Spain is a way “to fight the clichés about the conditions of women in the Muslim world”. “An enormous number of things must be done in this situation because the liberation of women is also a fight for all humanity,” she said. “We live for the most part under rules which were handed down in Saudi Arabia centuries ago, and there are still too many unenlightened mullahs who direct our lives.” afp
Courtesy DailyTimes.com.pk