|
11 November 2003 Muslims
transforming the world
|
Iranian lawyer and human rights activist Shirin
Ebadi
|
I RECENTLY organized a Southeast Asian training workshop on research
methods for sexuality and can say with confidence that the most
outstanding students were two Muslim women, one from Thailand and the
other from the Philippines.
Both women are devout Muslims, wearing their hijab (head veil)
throughout our training workshop and fasting during the day as part of
Ramadan. They are being considered for possible research grants to look
into sexual cultures in Muslim communities and throughout the workshop,
you could see how quickly they were processing new perspectives and
methodologies, eager to apply these toward understanding their
communities within the context of Islam.
The two women reminded me that Islam is a living faith and that all
throughout the world, within the Islamic ummah (community), women and
men are intensely involved in looking at Islam's place in the 21st
century.
I've written in the past about "Islamaphobia" in the west, in
the way the mass media (including movies) depict Muslims, especially
Arabs, as backward, fanatical and violent. But there is also a more
subtle but terribly dangerous trend and this is western leaders like
Bush prescribing "democracy" and "human rights" to
Muslims. The rhetoric is of course often a way to justify US
intervention in the affairs of Muslim countries. In a speech last
Thursday Bush proclaimed that "the establishment of a free Iraq at
the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global
democratic revolution."
It is such arrogance that alienates the world from the US government,
with its insinuations that Arabs and the Muslim world need the west to
teach them democracy and human rights.
Bush is probably unaware that from the 8th to 13th centuries, while the
western world came under the authoritarian control of the Catholic
church, one which discouraged any kind of critical thinking, Islamic
scholars were developing science, technology, medicine, mathematics to
new heights, taking seriously the Quran (Koran)'s injunction: "Seek
knowledge, from the cradle to the grave."
One Muslim leader talks about how this golden age was reversed:
"Halfway through the building of the great Islamic civilization
came new interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge
by Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology. The study of
science, medicine etc. was discouraged. Intellectually the Muslims began
to regress. With intellectual regression the great Muslim civilization
began to falter and wither…"
That passage comes from a recent speech by former Malaysian Prime
Minister Mahathir Mohamad, the very same speech attacked by the western
press for carrying anti-Semitic (anti-Jewish) remarks. I was able to
track down the full text of the speech and realized, after reading it,
that it was in fact more of a harsh critique of what Muslims had done to
Islam.
"Today," Mahathir lamented, "we, the whole Muslim ummah
are treated with contempt and dishonor. Our religion is denigrated. Our
holy places desecrated. Our countries are occupied. Our people starved
and killed."
It was in this context that Mahathir called on Muslims to shape up. He
cites examples of strategizing by the prophet Mohammed, and decries the
present: "We fight without any objective, without any goal other
than to hurt the enemy because they hurt us. Naively we expect them to
surrender. We sacrifice lives unnecessarily, achieving nothing other
than to attract more massive retaliation and humiliation."
He goes on to deliver the controversial paragraph: "We are actually
very strong. 1.3 billion people (Muslims) cannot be simply wiped out.
The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the
Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for
them."
I am not trying to justify the anti-Jewish remarks, as well as another
passage where he claims Jews "invented and successfully promoted
socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting
them would appear to be wrong…" There Mahathir goes off track,
but I can see his point arguing that Muslims have lagged far behind the
world, and need to introduce reforms.
Mahathir can be offensive and bigoted but his trenchant critique of
fellow Muslims shows that Islam is not a monolithic and dogmatic
community. Muslims themselves are urging reforms, and that includes the
area of women's rights, another favorite excuse of Bush and other
western leaders to justify their interference with Muslim affairs.
No doubt, men have had a powerful hold over Islamic institutions but the
western media rarely talks about how Muslim women have also been able to
create space and to fight for their own rights. In fact, women's
movements for literacy and for the right to vote emerged in Arab
countries far ahead of many western countries.
It is not surprising that the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this year to
Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and human rights activist who has a
brilliant grasp of law, theology, and history. For example, in one of
her essays on children's rights, she notes that under Iran's penal code,
which is strongly drawn from Islamic religious jurisprudence, a girl
aged nine and a boy aged 15 can be punished as adults for crimes. She
asks why a 9-year old girl can be thrown in jail while a woman of 40,
even if a university professor, will still need her father's permission
to marry. Rather than proposing an overhauling of Islamic laws, she
points out how, in history, Islamic jurisprudence has actually been very
progressive, adapting to the needs of the times, and that Iranian law
needs to carry on this progressive legacy to correct today's injustices.
All throughout the Muslim world, including Mindanao, Muslim women and
men are asking bold questions and proposing even bolder answers. They
will transform the Muslim world, and if we listen hard enough to them,
Americans and Filipinos just might learn a few lessons too as we try to
overcome the oppressive dogmatism of our own religious and political
ideologies.
|
