The CQ Researcher: Women and Human Rights

From the April 30, 1999 issue of The CQ Researcher, Volume 9, No. 16, p. 358-360.

Is Islam inherently more oppressive toward women than other religions?

By Mary H. Cooper

The Taliban's treatment of women has drawn international attention to the plight of women and girls in many Muslim countries that have adopted Islamic law, or Shari'a, as the basis of their legal and judicial systems. Citing religious scripture that emphasizes the different roles of men and women in Muslim society, governments in much of the Islamic world hold women in subservient positions, forcing them to wear cumbersome robes, denying them full access to public life and in some cases subjecting them to outright violence.

In Afghanistan, the most extreme case of female subjugation under Islamic law, women must don a “burqa,” a dark robe with only a small, heavy mesh opening to see through, before venturing out of the house. Roving police physically punish any woman who calls attention to herself even by wearing shoes that squeak or click on the pavement. Worse punishment awaits a woman who is not escorted by a close male relative.

The many Afghan women whose fathers, husbands or brothers have died in the country's ongoing civil war live under virtual house arrest. They are even denied a view of the outdoors, as the windows of houses where women live must be painted over to prevent them from being seen from the street.

Afghan women are no longer allowed to work outside the home. Because male doctors are not allowed to care for females, this means that women and girls are routinely denied health care, even emergency operations such as appendectomies or cesarean sections. Female mortality is rising, partly from an increase in suicides by severely depressed women. Perhaps worst of all, girls may no longer go to school or even be taught at home. This means that if and when the veil of Islamic law finally lifts from Afghanistan, about half the population may be illiterate and unable to function in modern society.

Some aid workers in Afghanistan dispute the severity of conditions among women, especially outside the capital, Kabul. “Definitely women in Afghanistan are suffering tremendous abuses; their human rights are not being respected,” said Judy Benjamin, head of the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children. “But you need to put this in the context of what's happened to the country in the past two decades. Much of the grief and poverty is a result of conflict and war, not a result of the Taliban. There is suffering and poverty, but in most of Afghanistan people will say the Taliban have brought peace and security.” [1]

But many women's rights advocates say the situation is intolerable. Moreover, they say, women fare only somewhat better under Shari'a law adopted in other Muslim countries. “What's happening to women in Afghanistan is really just devastating,” says Mahnaz Afkhami, an international women's rights advocate and president of the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, a women's rights organization in Bethesda, Md. “But right after Afghanistan comes Saudi Arabia, where there is full gender apartheid. Of course, Saudi Arabia is a rich country, so women at least get services such as health care. Poor countries that try to maintain separate services can't afford to have full services given by females, so there often are not enough facilities, not enough nurses and no female doctors.”

But even the harshest critics of female oppression in some Islamic societies say that women and girls can thrive as practicing Muslims. “The way Shari'a law is now being incorporated into legal systems is generally very oppressive, but it needn't be,” says Afkhami, herself a Muslim and a former minister of state for women's affairs in Iran, whose 1979 revolution installed the first modern state based on Islamic law.

“There are perfectly wonderful passages in the Koran and other religious texts of Islam that support women's rights,” she says. “The prophet's wife, for example, was also his employer and a highly respected figure in the community. ”At the beginning of Islam a woman could be like that,“ Afkhami says. ”Current laws are just patriarchal ways of keeping women down by using religion as a pretext.“

Not only is there nothing in Islam that inherently violates women's rights, but Muslim women thrive in some countries that have not incorporated Shari'a law into their judicial systems. The Muslim state of Qatar in the Persian Gulf allowed women to both vote and run for public office when it held its first-ever elections in March. In Turkey, where Islam is the predominant religion, women are actually fighting the secular government's ban on wearing head scarves in schools and other state institutions. And in Pakistan, female government officials resigned en masse to protest a bill now before parliament that would make Shari'a law the law of the land.

“There is a huge diversity of ways of expressing yourself as a Muslim,” Afkhami says. “In India there are some 100 million Muslim women who go around with bare midriffs, and they are perfectly fine Muslims, just as are those who are covered head to foot. It is a mistake to think that the only authentic Muslim women are the ones who are veiled and crouching in the corners of cities in the Muslim societies.”

Countries that have adopted Islamic law are not the only ones that oppress women in the name of religion. Activists cite the denial of women's right to reproductive freedom in Ireland, Chile and other predominantly Catholic countries that ban abortion and limit access to contraceptive services as other examples of religious oppression.

“We should oppose not just Islamic laws, but also Judaic and Christian laws that violate the precepts of gender equality,” says Neuwirth. “Our standard of measurement is the basic principles of human rights set forth in the Universal Declaration, which have been reaffirmed by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. World governments have signed on to these, at least in principle, and we want to hold them to that commitment.”

[1] Quoted by Sharon Waxman, “A Cause Unveiled,” The Washington Post, March 30, 1999.