Muslims in Global Politics: Identities, Interests, and Human Rights

3. Gender, Identity, and Negotiating Rights

Chapter  Gender, Identity, and Negotiating Rights Historically regarded as cultural transmitters and protectors of national values, Muslim women have become a new subject of debate. This impassioned debate on women’s roles in Islam is also seen by many as a source of moral and social disorder. Defying both conventional and patriarchal ideologies, Muslim women today have become a powerful voice for change. Interestingly, certain elements of Islamic feminism and secular feminism are working together to push for legal and educational reforms. The spread of mass education and mass communication has facilitated a new awareness among Muslims, dissolving barriers of space and distance and opening new grounds for interaction and mutual recognition, both inside these countries and beyond. Increasingly, local issues have taken on transnational dimensions.1 This era of social transformation has profoundly impacted Muslim societies. No group has been more drastically and immediately influenced by such transformation than women, who have struggled to reform laws and construct new rules. By addressing shared problems, such as preventing domestic violence and gender discrimination, Muslim women have come into contact with women’s movements and organizations across the globe, developing transnational ties and identities. There clearly are some divisions among women ’s organizations and groups over issues such as hijab (Islamic dress code), which has become a symbol for the defense of the faith, family integrity, and Islamic identity as well as some religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the convergence between certain elements of Islamic feminists and secular feminists has pointed to the existence of pragmatic grounds for cooperation between the two. Muslim women encounter three fronts simultaneously. First, they represent an Islamic identity that more often than not is in conflict with modern political regimes and state elites. Second, they must fight against Islamic fundamentalists, whose ideas, institutions, and goals they vehemently reject . And finally, and just as important, they face a mundane confrontation  Chapter  with a prevailing patriarchal culture within which they live. Questions of women’s rights are exacerbated by difficulties Muslim women encounter in a patriarchal culture in which women are often characterized by stereotypes . The ‘‘borderless solidarity’’ has led to the promotion of women’s rights across and within cultures, but it stands in a problematic relationship to broader, more complex social issues. Although this global solidarity is resisted in many parts of the Muslim world, women’s empowerment is seen as the most effective antidote to extremism in the Muslim world. This chapter attempts to contextualize gender analysis in the cultural, economic, and political domains while addressing three questions: (1) Why have Muslim women become the agents of change, reform, and democratization in a globalizing world? (2) What impact has globalization had on Muslim women and the rise of Islamic feminism? (3) How can Muslim women maintain the integrity of their culture while at the same time remaining receptive to universal values, ideas, and institutions? Reconceptualization of Gender Identity Globalization has prompted the simultaneous but possibly contradictory emergence of transnational advocacy networks, which defend collective identity transcending national borders, and cross-national alliances, which challenge certain modern norms as false universalism.2 The gender-based divisions in the world conferences on women’s issues attest to this reality.3 At the same time, concerns with preventing domestic violence and improving the social-legal status of women have opened up a new discursive space for the dialogue between Islamic and secular feminists. This development has made resistance and empowerment central to any processes of change in women’s status and rights in the Muslim world. Many obstacles stand in the way of Muslim women’s struggle for equality, some of which are linked to the political economy and others to sociocultural contexts, religion, and cultural traditions. John L. Esposito points to the multitude of barriers: ‘‘Muslim women’s battle is about gender , class, and political and economic power as often as it is about religious faith and identity.’’4 The relationship between Islam, the state, and gender politics can be better understood as the various modes of control that states have either averted or established over local, kin-based, religious, and ethnic communities. The persistence of communal politics during the proc- Gender, Identity, and Negotiating Rights  esses of state consolidation tends to undermine women’s rights. The ‘‘Islamization’’ package—as a means of establishing Islamic credentials— introduced by General Zia ul-Haq conferred legal sanction on crude forms of sexual discrimination, against which Pakistani women’s...