Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam (22 page)

There are also beneficial women’s N.G.O.s or auxiliaries funded or

supported by the government. They

retain some

semblance of

non-

government status but because of contributions and liaisons with govern- mental funds, their agendas are often applied under the umbrella of other government programs with realistic knowledge that women are productive members of the society and cannot be excluded from the development process if the nation-state hopes to compete in the global market.

Some Western feminists have posed several questions worth consider- ation with regard to women’s organizations. First, the status of women as citizens of the nation-state is historically and currently unequal to the status

of men. Attention drawn to transforming the definitions of citizen help to discern more conducive ways for women’s mainstreaming.
10
Second, the consequences of separate public and private spheres have dominated the

way public policies are formulated, invested in, or negated. Are such policies gender inclusive or not, and if so, to what extent? Is the private sphere the primary arena of women and a major factor excluding them from due recognition as agents in community life? By totally ignoring women’s work done in the private domain because it seems voluntary, such work is considered a by-product of women’s nature and not identified as reflecting the agency of the women contributing them. Consequently the significant values of these contributions are often ignored by the public sphere. With the devaluation of the private sphere comes the greatest determin- ant of women’s rights and status in society. Likewise, women are underpaid in public work, since they are not considered to be fulfilling their primary role. How can we utilize the relationships between public policy and women’s

Muslim Women’s Collectives
99

experiences in the private or domestic domain to help rearticulate the mutual value and limitations in different types of work? My particular con- cern with women’s work and the separation of public and private spheres in the context of “Islam” is both the conceptual framework of the tradition, primarily developed by men using the sources to conclude that male experi- ences and perspectives deserve the privileges given to them, and the resulting devaluation of women’s status, no matter what contributions they make. Whatever kind of work the men do, it is deemed the most valuable. If women do the agriculture and men take care of the animals, taking care of animals is more important. If women take care of the animals and men do the agriculture, then agriculture is more important. Furthermore, these general evaluations have interacted with major ideological, economic, and political themes exported from the West, especially since the Enlightenment and the movements of colonialism over the past two hundred years.

Another motivation and point of origin in focusing on women’s organ- izations is to draw attention to efforts made almost exclusively by women to address the needs of a silent and invisible female half of the population as well as the whole of the community, and the networks of inter-relations that assist in supporting women’s development of their human identity with faith in Islam demonstrated through agency and activism. First I will focus on those women collectives and organizations that do not receive funding from governments or national, international, and humanitarian funding agencies. It is women as moral agents of care who have given not only to their immediate families, but also to neighbors, communities, men, and children on a voluntary basis. Their experiences may prove to lead to the much-needed bridges between women’s issues and other agencies with social welfare agendas. However many contributions their ad hoc or quasi “organizations” generate, or however much they alleviate immediate family or local welfare matters or address crises, they may never receive public recognition, and remain silent or invisible at the government level. So much of Muslim women’s grassroots work remains behind this veil of silence and invisibility.

Simultaneously there has been an explosion of communal, national, regional, and international Muslim women’s organizations in the last two decades. In some cases these organizations merely reflect vagrant flaunting of selective tokens to help provide images for continuous justification and support of the organizations as actors or legitimate representatives of disadvantaged women, or at least as discussants on the realities of women’s inferior status vis-à-vis men in various communal contexts.

100
inside the gender jihad

Muslim Women’s Grassroots Initiatives

Muslim women’s grassroots collective care-taking is overwhelmingly affected by both gender and class issues. Women living in poor communities are not always accessible to state or international funders who must justify their contributions along the lines of larger development and social welfare issues. The maximum good of these contributions is measured best by the production of those organizations and collectives that can articulate their relationship to the development needs. Simply working to help move women from a second-class status to a status of access or to achievement of symbolic or real equality is not enough. Otherwise funders become charity organizations giving handouts just as invisibly devoured as the unmet and still mostly unacknowledged needs of the silent majority of Muslim women. This does not help improve systems or structures of victimization. Class issues and the construction of local, national, or internationally recognized Muslim women’s organizations deserve greater investigation in order for Muslim women’s efforts to be evaluated comprehensively. Yet the distinc- tions are obvious when we see the women whose works are acknowledged and those whose works go unacknowledged. Meanwhile, certain Muslim women’s organizations and networks are provided with large grants and support while they do little to actually provide direct benefits to the women whom they claim to represent.

This chapter looks at two distinct levels of indigenous Muslim women’s organizations. I start with local or grassroots organizations and further restrict them to the context of the African-American Muslim communities. Within this restriction I can still describe some features of networking in the context of Muslim communities. I have a particular interest in exposing some of the history, benefits, and developments of Muslim women’s organ- izations as they characterize agency in the complexities of modern Islam. I will not make a comparison between the grassroots organizations and the highly visible and internationally recognized organizations, but the distinc- tions will be glaring. The importance of incremental steps from obscurity to authority will also be demonstrated. I will not comment on women’s auxil- iaries to existing government and non-government male organizations.

In predominantly Muslim countries, status quo authorities and the insti- tutions created or run by them have used the moral force of Islam to manipulate women’s organized participation – even at its purely voluntary level. The women are supported to the extent to which they in turn support the status quo. Theoretically, N.G.O.s sustain the right and privilege to contradict the status quo and challenge government policies, if the status

Muslim Women’s Collectives
101

quo seems detrimental to their constituency or the citizens they represent.

In short, they

put a lid on

unfettered governmental control

over pri-

vate lives. Until the end of the twentieth century, women participating in

oppositional non-government organizations in

countries

with Muslim

laws were either non-Muslims, or were engaged without reference to Islam except as part of the problem. It was argued that facilitating and main- taining alternatives against oppressive Islamic regimes outweighed the loss of identification with the women they claimed to represent.

However, such denial or rejection of Islam causes most Muslim women clients to feel skeptical of these groups’ intent. This skepticism reduces the effectiveness of such groups because their women clients are reluctant to partici- pate in or support the group. They are even unwilling to speak to them about the nature of the problems they face for fear it will be exploited to demonize
“
Islam.
”
The overwhelming majority of Muslim women worldwide feel that their Islamic identity is integral to who they are and to who they wish to be. They are also increasingly aware of the tactics used by the West in exploiting the poor status of women as a weapon to stir up discontent, within Muslim communities as well as without, at the general level of Western citizens’ ani- mosity toward Islam. Although abuses experienced by Muslim women are real, they are decontextualized from the multiplicity of factors that helped to create them and instead
“
Islam
”
is pointed to as the single cause.

Sister to Sister: African-American Muslim Women’s Networks of Support and Empowerment

I have

never

been a Muslim except as an African-American. Despite

this fact, I have done very little academic work on the complex realities of African-Americans as Muslims. Most of my work has been focused on

theological premises that

are equally beneficial

to gender issues at both

my location in the African-American Muslim community and outside that location on the international level. Yet African-American Islam is unique especially because of the history of African-Americans. I am part of the awesome legacy of the soul and survival of African slaves brutalized by the dehumanization of the institution of slavery in its peculiarly cruel American racist form. The testament to the skill, morality, and excellence of our people is not only that we are still alive today, despite pervasive racism in America, but also in the ways we continue to struggle and prosper within the context of white domination. Whatever systems of institutionalized, social, and cultural racism that followed the legal eradication of slavery also form a part of the collective Black experience. In the early part of the

102 inside the gender jihad

twentieth century, around 1930, the first alternative religious movements for the unification and esteem-building of disenfranchised African-Americans came in the name of “Islam.” Again, its definitions and practices were varied. However, it was the first time that faith, spirit, and religion were considered integral to the total transformation in the oppression of Black people. Later, African-American Christians would draw from their religi- osity to resist racial injustices also.
11

With Islam the fastest growing religion in America, it remains a viable alternative providing religio-moral identity to a considerable number of

Black former Christians. Islam

in America was formed around what is

now the largest single ethnic group – more than forty percent of the total American Muslim population descend from African slave ancestry.
12
Despite the huge disparity in ethnic representation among Muslim American leadership against the actual percentage of African-American Muslims, one feature that was initiated by African-American women in all types of communities has continued and expanded on the American Muslim landscape – indigenous, grassroots women’s collectives. The origins of the grassroots organization are not exclusively Islamic, however. The lessons gleaned from the literal breakup of traditional families by slavery itself, and the coercive power of economic discrimination afterwards, taught African-American women an ethics of care indispensable to survival and empowerment. It was but a small step to initiate these same practices in our communities as Muslims. It comprises two dynamics: the need of one member, one family, or the communities; and the development of collective help and support. The insight required to coordinate between needs and means for providing support started long before the transatlantic slave trade as implied through the well-known African idiom, “It takes a village to raise a child.”

African-American Muslim women have been gathering collectively to directly address the everyday issues and needs of their communities. They have done so despite burdens in their own lives, under the moral imperative of mutual care as the cornerstone of human well-being. They operate primarily on a volunteer basis, whether with other collectives of women only or in concert with men’s collectives as well as the existing authorities and establishments. They endeavor to provide food, clothing, shelter, rehabilitation, upliftment, and education to other members of the community. They are rarely discussed at the level of local, national, and – least of all – international forums, which claim to represent Muslim women, because they work within the community with the goals promoted

Muslim Women’s Collectives
103

by an ethics of care but without a goal of recognition or of seeking funds, although their services would be greatly enhanced by both. If what they give could be bottled and handed out on the open market of humanity, it would contain the primal living example of whatever is most fundamental to a theory, a theology, or an ethics of care.

Care is a fundamental aspect of human life. Care consists of “everything we do to continue, repair, and maintain ourselves so that we can live in the world as well as possible.” . . . Most of us think about care in the intimate relationships of our lives: care for ourselves and our families and friends. In its broadest meanings, care is complex and multidimensional: it refers both to the dispositional qualities we need to care for ourselves and others, such as being attentive to human needs and taking responsibility to meet such needs, as well as to the concrete work of caring. To care well requires that both of these elements be present: a disposition to care and care work. Care thus always involves thinking about who is responsible for what caring, and about what that responsibility means. . . . As a perspective from which to think about social and political life, a care perspective demands that, as we try to make moral and political judg- ments, we use the concrete and contextual to support our more general political, social, and moral judgments. An ethic of care is in this way a subset of what Margaret Walker has called “an ethics of responsibility.”