WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT AND ISLAM - 3

[Introduction]    [Our Contemporary World ]   [The Problem ]    [Is empowerment the Solution ]   [What has Islam to offer ]   [Islam's own empowerment ]   [Clarification of certain issues ]   [Would Muslims allow.... ]  The Problem The plight of women in the middle ages, when Europe was in the full grips of Christianity, is fairly explicable, for the Bible seem to have placed the entire blame for the descent of man at the door of the woman. In the popular literature of the middle ages, the woman was likened to the Satan who worked day and night for the destruction of the man. The Church in Europe remained stuck with its misogyny up through the 18th century when it presided over the famous debate in France on whether a woman had a soul or not. What appeared inexplicable was the continuation of these prejudices well after the renaissance and the weakening of the grip of the Church and the liberalisation of thoughts and ideas. It was even more surprising that a whole century after the French revolution of 1789, with its promise for people’s rights and democracy, women in the West remain suppressed. Writing in 1866, George Eliot observed, "A woman can hardly ever choose ... she is dependent on what happens to her. She must take meaner things, because only meaner things are within her reach." One can feel the sense of frustration in this remark. What is news, however, is not the remark , but the fact that George Eliot is a pseudonym of an English woman novelist Mary Ann Evans (1819-80), who apparently dared not use her proper feminine name in a society so dominated by men that works like hers could only be taken seriously if they were to come from men. She had six years earlier written that, "the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history", in her book, ‘The Mill on the Floss’, where she "portrayed rural Victorian society, particularly its intellectual hypocrisy". This situation seemed to have continued unabated well in to the second half of this century and seem to have given impetus to what is commonly referred to as feminism. The lives and works of three prominent Western feminists summarises the situation. Virginia Woolf, (1882-1941) a British novelist, philosopher and critic took the themes of the tensions for combining marriage and career in her book The Voyage Out and pursued the issue of economic independence for women in her book The Years 1928. That she tragically ended her life through suicide by drowning herself may not be unconnected with the tensions of her times. Gloria Steinem, (1943- ) an American journalist and liberal feminist emerged as a leading figure in American new women’s movement in the late 1960’s, co-founded the women’s action alliance in 1970 and also co-founded the Ms Magazine. She was one of those who gave feminism a concrete shape, betraying the cumulative oppression and frustration of women behind the thin veneer, or as we may prefer in Nigeria, behind the smoke screen of freedom and equality. Her perception of feminism is captured in her oft quoted statement "We are becoming the men we wanted to marry" and another attributed to her, "a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle". Yet another woman in this class is Juliet Mitchell, a British psychoanalyst and writer. She took feminism further first by her article titled The Longest Revolution, in 1966 and later her books titled, Women’s Estate (1971) and Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974). She seemed to have been the first to combine socialism and feminism and to use Marxist theory to explain some of the reasons behind women oppression in the West. Juliet Mitchell has had tremendous influence on feminist thinking and one could see her hands in to a lot of the women struggles against oppression in the West. The influences of these and other feminists writers can easily be detected in the current debate on gender equity. We must not make the mistake that many pious Muslims make of dismissing feminism. One does not have to like feminism to appreciate the situational problems that brought it about. Dismissing it, as many Muslims are apt to doing, is ignoring the circumstances, which is neither fair nor panacea. If nothing else, in feminism we have a lesson to learn and that is: if we are not prepared to allow equity, then we should be prepared to live with anarchy. And one should quickly add, single parent family, which had been a phenomenon restricted to non-Muslim communities is slowly creeping in to the Muslim community. This is only one form of anarchy. Lesbianism is another. And one could go on. In the Muslim world the literature on this subject, especially authored by women, may not be as rich, but that is not to say the oppression was any less. Here in pre-Jihad Hausaland, presently Northern States of Nigeria, reading the works of Shehu Usman Dan Fodio, particularly his Nurul-al-Bab one can see a lot parallel with the misogyny of the Victorian days in Europe, in spite of the equitable and humane provisions made by the Sharia. The presence of the Sharia, undoubtedly, made the difference. Even as the provisions of the Sharia did not stop the oppression, they made Shehu Usman’s case easier, for all he needed do was to enlighten the society and draw attentions to these provisions. Of course, even then it was far from easy, not only because of the opposition he faced from nor other than scholars themselves, but also because no sooner had the tempo of the jihad began to wane and ignorance started to creep, the situation reverted, gradually, back to the pre-Jihad periods. Today the situation of Muslim women, in terms of rights and equity is very much close to the pre-Sokoto Jihad period. It may at first sound like an exaggeration until we visit the Area Courts in the North and perhaps the customary courts in the South. Or better still until we allow the women to tell their tales. Many Muslim women will today find the offer of the UN and the host of NGO’s quite attractive, not so much because Islam has not given her something better, but rather because they are either not sufficiently aware or the men, better still, Muslim scholars, are not quite ready to concede to them what Islam has given them. But coming from the West, such offers of emancipation are, rather naturally, rooted in the rebellion of the renaissance, imbued with a consuming hedonism and embellished in a rhetoric that is designed, like a bait, to capture a prey. The social context of the offer itself presents some problems for Muslims, for our contemporary modern world, having made the search for pleasure a major, some would say, the major, objective in life, has predicated gender relationship on sheer lust. Modelling, fashion and advertising agencies are up and about exciting our base desires and making lust a major consideration in our decisions in life including the important institution of marriage. The institution of marriage itself has lost its sacredness in the West, it is, in fact, fast loosing its meaning, so such offers tend not only to ignore Muslim sensibility, invert Muslim scale of priority, but may actually find no place to accommodate religion, having completely dispensed with it a long time ago. It is worth recalling that the globilisation of gender equity started quite recently, with the United Nation declaring 1975 as the International Women’s Year. Sequel to this the decade 1976-1985, was declared the Decade for Women, during which international agencies as well as some governments focused attention on what came to be popularly referred to as ‘women issues’. This decade was crowned by the Nairobi conference on women in 1985 in which forward-looking strategies for women to be implemented by the year 2000, were adopted. Then came the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 which seemed to focus on the independence and autonomy of women even with a family context. Indeed several conferences, conventions and activities of a host of international agencies took place during the 1985-1994 period to prepare the grounds and minds for the famous Beijing Conference in 1995. It was in Beijing more than anywhere the issue of empowerment was focused and made such an indispensable condition for world progress and development. These two decades, during which the UN championed the globilisation of the women issues, happened to be the two decades during which the UN became increasingly a tool in the hands of a few Western nations who were using it to achieve their selfish political goals. The role of the UN in the Palestinian Crisis, its role in the Gulf War and its performance, or lack of it, in Bosnia, left many in no doubt that someone was using the UN to subvert Islam and Muslim body politic. This left many Muslims unsure about the role of the UN in respect of the women issues.