Fighting gender bias in Islam

Fighting gender bias in Islam

Muslim feminists believe that male values in the interpretation of Islamic teachings have given the religion a reputation for oppressing women. The Jakarta Post's Devi M. Asmarani talks to experts about the issue in conjunction with Kartini Day - the day commemorating the birth of Indonesian heroine of emancipation on April 21.

JAKARTA (JP): To be a Muslim has not been easy for Musdah Mulia. The core thing is to live a life fully without drifting too far away from the religious teachings. She learned the hard way from her grandfather, a traditional kyai (Muslim scholar).

"When I was growing up, I wasn't allowed to laugh freely, because it was seen as corrupted," she said.

She once won first prize for a Koran reading competition, but her grandfather forbade her from entering more contests after she reached puberty, "I was told a woman's voice is her aurat (the part of the woman's body that must not be revealed)."

But it was only after she finished elementary school and was told that a young woman must go to an Islamic school, instead of a public school, that Musdah felt her first twinge of unfairness.

Decades later, after years of extensive schooling in Islam and through academic researches and studies she has become an element that drives a movement promoting a new understanding of gender- sensitivity in Islamic teachings.

Musdah, now a senior researcher in the Ministry of Religious Affairs, is contributing something to benefit every Muslim woman in this country: a reinterpretation of Islamic teachings on women.

She is not alone. Along with her is a brave group of Muslim men and women who want to set the records clear. They see that centuries of male values in the interpretation of the religious teachings have given Islam a reputation as one that oppresses.

"The existing interpretations of Islamic teachings are infused with patriarchal values and gender bias," Musdah said.

Musdah said oppression and discrimination against women has been legitimized and justified by the understanding, or misunderstanding, of Islam.

The Muslim feminist movement is not something new. The world's Muslim societies have seen great female figures, including Fatima Mernissi and Riffat Hasan, pushing for reforms in religious teachings.

In Indonesia, the movement began in the late 1980s, but has gotten big again since Soeharto's resignation from 32-years of rule in 1998.

One of the promoters of the efforts to teach a women-friendly Islam is none other than the first lady herself, Sinta Nuriyah. Nuriyah is currently "reconstructing" a standard guidebook of religious edicts called the "yellow book", the content of which emphasizes a woman's obligations with little reference to her rights.

Muslim scholar Komaruddin Hidayat attributes the movement to tremendous progress in women's emancipation in the western world. Progress in the west influences women in Muslim society.

"This is a rebellion of existential conscience, a rebellion at the structural and cultural levels," Komaruddin, who chairs the Paramadina foundation, said.

Its progress has been hampered by the level of education and a religion that, in practice, excludes them.

"The first thing to do is change the mind-set, the ideological, theological and religious barriers," he said.

What has actually caused such a misperception in Islamic teaching?

The most dominant argument was that the holy scripture Koran and hadith, Prophet Muhammad's sayings and tradition according to the way the religion is practiced, were written at a time when society was driven by males.

"The Koran and hadith, although they are divine, were born in the rough regions of the desert, and many of the verses were descriptive, instead of prescriptive," Komaruddin said.

The Koran "prescribes" that man and woman are equal, he said, but the descriptive verses tell of how men are dominant because they have to conquer the savage nature of the desert and go to war.

Verses in the Koran can be separated into two groups. The first ones are those that have universal and absolute meanings, and the second ones are those that are open to contextual interpretation.

A research by the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs shows that verses that fall into the first category are smaller in number than the second. Because of this there are many books of interpretation or fikih on Islam.

The ministry's research of 100 Islamic fikih books published in this country, some originally written in Indonesia and others translated from Arabic, found that only 18 of the books were gender sensitive. The remaining 82 were written from the male's perspective. Unsurprisingly only eight of the books surveyed were written by women.

Islam

When Prophet Muhammad introduced Islam, he offered a religion that would free people from their societal shackles and eliminate immorality in the male-dominated tradition. The Prophet started a radical concept of treating women as a human beings.

Prior to this, women were commodities. They were something to buy or to inherit. Islam requires a man to give mahar (dowry) to his future wife instead of to her parents, thus the woman's status was no longer "something" but "somebody" who is entitled to property.

Musdah said in the Prophet's time Islam was practiced in its purest form. But after that, under the Umayyah and Abbasiyah dynasties, during which Islam was spreading to the regions of Persian, Greece and Rome, the religion started adapting local cultures that treated women as less than human.

"The Islam that came to Indonesia and that developed in Arabic countries is the Islam that no longer adopts universal values," Musdah said. There is a large gap between the universal values contained in Koran and sunnah and the interpretation that is rife with historical context, she said.

"What we know now is the historical/empirical context that is rife with exclusivism, small-mindedness and fanaticism," she said.

But her understanding of Islam is shared with only a handful of people, mostly from the academic and activist milieu. Musdah said that even at her office she is often labeled a "leftist" or "troublemaker" for her unconventional views.

But this she blames on poor religious education. Most Muslims only learn their religion from oral tradition, their Koran reading teachers or ulemas.

Komaruddin tells of the existence of a "comfort zone" in which men guard their security, domination and interests by using religious teachings. That is why the challenges to a woman's awakening in Islam would most likely come from the woman's own husband, he said.

Misperception

Musdah underlines three misperceived Islamic teachings on the relationship between man and woman. One is the creation of men and women.

"What we were taught is that women or Eve was created from Adam's rib. But the Koran said that men and women were created from one source, one essence. There was no text that said that woman was created from man," she said. This perception, she said, reduces woman to a second human being.

Her second argument is the verse on the fall of Adam and Eve from heaven.

"It is widely known that Adam was tempted by Eve, and this implies that women are weak, a human being that is easily tempted and swayed. And worse, women are viewed as seducers," she said.

Musdah said in the Koran, the verses that deal with Adam and Eve's fall from heaven actually uses the pronoun "they", meaning Eve should not be judged as the one who tempts Adam.

The third disputed teaching was the verse on man's leadership over woman.

"The Koran says that men are leaders to women, but this verse actually refers to the fact that man is at the helm of the family because he has bigger responsibility. Anyone who has bigger responsibility is entitled to more compensation."

The most radical of her points, however, is that being a man itself does not automatically make one the head of the family.

"It isn't the biological part of a man that gives him the right to head his family, but the sociological factors, that is being the one who earns the living," she said.

"Men shouldn't think that they are the leader because they posses all the biological traits of a man. They must first play their sociological role as a man."

Reinterpretation of these verses would bring radical changes to the teaching of Islam on women. Issues highlighted in the teachings like polygamy, women's obedience to her husband, female circumcision and even the headscarf now can be decided in the light of the historical context.

Some women, however advanced and open-minded, see that acceptance is sometimes the only way to make sense of the Islamic teaching. Jilliah Ardy, an Iranian native who was raised most of her life in the United States, said she has been a practicing Muslim all her life, and when she lived in a western civilization she did not always see eye to eye with her belief.

"The way that I've managed with Islam and with Iranian cultural things is that I don't question them," Jilliah said.

"The minute I question them, I would get angry and say why am I doing this. So I don't ask questions. It's a matter of respect, and I like it on a certain level," said Jilliah, a medical doctor who chairs the board of International Community Activity Center.