[Marxism] Muslim Women Take Charge of Their Faith

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

<blockquote>Hanife Karakus, the soft-spoken daughter of Turkish  
immigrants, is a thoroughly European Muslim. She covers her hair with  
a veil, but she also has a law degree and married the man of her  
choice. There was no pressure from matchmakers. The couple met on the  
Internet.

Adding to this mix, Karakus recently became the first woman to  
preside over one of France's 25 regional Islamic councils.

"At first, the men didn't speak to me," she said. "They were  
uncomfortable - they didn't know how to work with a woman."

Karakus, 24, does not call herself a feminist; she simply says she is  
a French lawyer. But she qualifies as part of the quiet revolution  
spreading among young European Muslim women, a new generation that  
claims the same rights as their Western sisters while not renouncing  
Islamic principles.

For many, the key is education, an option often denied their mothers  
and grandmothers. These daughters of the poor immigrants from mostly  
Muslim countries are moving into universities, studying law, medicine  
and anthropology. They are getting jobs in social work, in schools,  
offices, business and media. French, English, German or Dutch may be  
their native languages.

Unlike their homebound elders, these emancipated Muslim women use the  
Internet and spend hours in the proliferating Islamic chat rooms. Web  
sites are now favorite trysting places, a chance for risk-free "halal  
dating" - that is, interacting with men in a way that violates no  
social or religious codes.

In the crowded immigrant suburbs ringing Paris, the scene of recent  
riots mostly led by young Muslim males, teachers say female students  
are the most motivated because they have the most to gain. This  
mirrors findings in young Muslim communities throughout Europe.

In interviews in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, young women  
repeat this like a mantra: studying offers an escape route from the  
oppressive housing projects, from controlling young Muslim fanatics  
and from strict social codes enforced by fathers and brothers.

"We all understood that education was our passport to freedom," said  
Soria Makti, 30, who left her Marseille housing project and now works  
as a museum curator.

The emancipation of Muslim women, like that of Western women before  
them, is uneven in its progress, often slow, sometimes deeply painful  
when women feel they have no choice but to break with their families.  
But some changes are pointing to a new form of Islamic feminism.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of religion, the  
centuries-old domain of men. Young women have begun carving out their  
spaces by following Islamic studies, a fast-growing field across  
Europe that offers a blend of theology, Koranic law, ethics and  
Arabic. Diplomas from the two-year courses allow women to teach in  
mosques and in Islamic schools or to act as religious advisers.

"This is a big shift," said Amel Boubekeur, a social scientist  
writing her thesis on Europe's "new Islamic elites."

"Instead of having to be passive, women become teachers. It used to  
be taboo for women to recite the Koran," she said.

Boubekeur has interviewed scores of Islamic studies graduates in  
France and elsewhere and said many felt that the knowledge of  
religion was empowering them.

"It offers them a new prestige, new jobs and, not least, it gives  
them a stronger voice in dealing with their parents, brothers and  
husbands," Boubekeur said. "To defend their rights, these women find  
that arguments based on religious texts have more effect than secular  
ideas."

Today, Islamic studies, often taken on weekends and accessible to  
secondary school graduates, are expanding in Britain, France,  
Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. An informal survey for this  
article of France's six Islamic studies institutes showed that of  
this year's near 1,000 students, almost 60 percent are women.

La Grande Mosquée in Paris, a large white and green compound from the  
1920s with a finely chiseled minaret, is France's leading Islamic  
religious institution. It has its own theological school, largely  
financed from Algeria. On a recent Saturday, students were milling  
around under the arcades for a mint tea break from psychology classes.

Abdelkrim Bekri, the director, said that in 2002, the school had  
begun a new program, unavailable elsewhere, to train young women as  
spiritual counselors for hospitals and prisons, much like the  
ministry of Christian chaplains. Twenty have already graduated and  
other women are in training. "There is a great need here," he said.

Religious tasks are low-paying, even for male clerics, and women are  
not allowed to perform the most prestigious ritual of leading the  
mosque in Friday prayers. Boubekeur said that for now women care  
about having a voice, participating in the debate. "What is new is  
that they want direct access to religion, without depending on the  
rigid views of the clergy," she said.

Change can be measured in other small steps. At the Islamic  
University of Rotterdam, a small group of theology students, most of  
them speaking Dutch but all tightly veiled, chatted after classes  
about Islamic segregation of men and women. They said that in Europe  
it was important to end this.

"In class we sit anywhere we choose," said a student who gave her  
name only as Aisha. "In the mosques we don't want to sit in separate  
or hidden spaces."

Ertegul Gokcekuyu, the university registrar, said more than 60  
percent of his students were female. "The motivation of the girls is  
very remarkable."

As educated Muslim women assert their place, they appear to be  
forging a strand of Euro-Islam, a new hybrid that would at least  
attempt to reconcile the principles laid out in the Koran with life  
in a secular, democratic Europe.

They draw ideas from various Muslim writers and philosophers.

Among them is Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss university professor whose  
grandfather founded Egypt's Islamic revival movement, the banned  
Muslim Brotherhood. While Washington revoked his visa last year to  
teach in the United States, Ramadan has a large following in Europe.  
He urges Europe's Muslims to make their mark as active citizens  
rather than get trapped in a what he calls a "victim mentality."

Fatema Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist, is read for her defense of  
women's rights and her writing on early Islam, when women, she  
argues, held a more favorable position than they do today.

In France, Dounia Bouzar, a respected anthropologist who is both  
Algerian and French, is following in Mernissi's footsteps. "I tell  
women, 'we can honor the Koran from our perspective and apply it to  
our experience today,"' she said in a recent conversation.

"Women now have access to knowledge, so we must recover the religious  
texts. We have to free them from an exclusively male interpretation  
that belongs to the Middle Ages. Most important right now is that  
women get into the universities."

The implications of women flocking to Islamic studies are disturbing  
to some, who see a potential for more radicalization. Tokia Saïfi, a  
former deputy minister for development and one of the few women of  
Arab descent to reach a high post in the French government, said she  
worried that many young women were flocking to religion as a refuge.

"I see it as a regression," she said. "It means we need less  
discrimination, more ways to promote integration."

Such debates are far from the concerns of Muslim girls who are abused  
by their brothers because they are not submissive enough, or who are  
pressed into marrying virtual strangers because it suits their  
parents. In France's large housing projects, home to many immigrants,  
jobless young men often take out their frustration on women, the  
latest trend being gang rape. Rape in the housing projects has  
increased 15 percent per year since 1999, according to the government.

Theology has meant little to Latifa Ahmed, 25, who arrived in the  
Netherlands from a Moroccan village when she was 8. As she grew up  
near Amsterdam, her family turned against her because she preferred  
her Dutch classmates.

"They were bad, they were infidels, I was told," she said. "My  
parents and my brothers started hitting me." She was told she could  
study as long as she eventually married a Moroccan.

At home until she was 23, Ahmed said, "I was going crazy from all the  
fights and the lies, but I was afraid to run away and lose my  
family." One evening, returning from a concert with a Dutch friend,  
her father yelled: "Let's take a knife and we'll finish with her,"  
she recalled. "He didn't kill me, but he put a curse on me. It was  
very frightening."

Now living alone in another city, she is hiding from her brothers,  
who have sworn to kill her. She has put herself through college doing  
odd jobs and does not care about religion. "I don't feel  
discriminated here," she said. "Moroccan girls can find work easier  
than Moroccan boys. Boys have a bad name."

Changes in the lives of Muslim women in Europe come at different  
speeds, at different places. They are hard to gauge in France, where  
the law forbids the census to collect data by ethnic origin or  
religion. One telling signal is the rise in divorce among immigrants  
in the Netherlands. According to Dutch government statistics,  
divorces among Moroccan families have increased by 46 percent since  
2000 and in Turkish families by 42 percent, with a majority believed  
to be instigated by wives.

Some daughters of immigrants, now educated and well-placed to throw  
light on practices little understood in Europe, have begun to study  
the obstacles and abuse women face. Seyran Ates, a Turkish-born  
German lawyer, and Necla Kelek, a Turkish-born sociologist, have both  
recently published widely read books on the fate of Muslim girls in  
Germany. Kelek's "The Foreign Bride," a best-seller, denounces the  
plight of often illiterate girls, brought in from the Turkish  
countryside "as modern slaves" to act as obedient servants to their  
husbands and in-laws.

Other immigrant women are fighting for change through parliaments. In  
Belgium, Mimount Bousakla, whose family is from Morocco, and in the  
Netherlands, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, are both members of  
Parliament who were raised as Muslims. They are pressing for changes  
in policies affecting women, including tougher sentences for men who  
kill women to "save the honor" of their families. In France, a  
movement called "Neither Whores nor Doormats," created in 2003,  
addresses the problems of underclass women who suffer violence or  
discrimination.

At the group's spartan office in eastern Paris, Algerian-born Sihem  
Habchi said conditions were improving, but that many young women  
still had to lead double lives. "They feel they have to lie all the  
time, put on head scarves not to be hassled," she said. "It's very  
hard to become an adult. Many girls have psychological problems." Now  
working in multimedia, Habchi, 30, recalled her own efforts to leave  
home, which took years of begging and negotiation.

Reminded that even French women do not enjoy full equality in the  
workplace, she said: "Immigrant women have to fight even harder  
because we are doubly discriminated," she said. "We are not fully  
accepted in France. But we are beginning to be everywhere; there are  
many of us now."

As Muslim women take advantage of democracy and civil liberties in  
Europe, the question remains whether the impact of an educated  
minority will be continually blunted by the arrival of often poorly  
educated young brides from North Africa, Pakistan or Turkey.

And as Europe rethinks its faltering integration policies, the  
question of importing brides is a new target of scrutiny. Critics,  
including immigrants themselves, argue that importing young women who  
are kept in the home perpetuates segregation. They say that such  
marriages violate European standards of freedom for women and are  
used as false pretexts for family reunion permits.

In Germany, Kelek said, up to 15,000 such girls are "imported" every  
year through arranged marriages and she is now campaigning for a new  
law to set age limits.

A study prepared for France's Council for Integration in 2004 says  
that about 70,000 young women are living in France in arranged or  
forced marriages. In Denmark, the Institute for Social Studies found  
that in recent years, 90 percent of the immigrants had imported a  
spouse from their homeland, and a Dutch study put that figure at 70  
percent in the Netherlands. In Britain, bringing a bride from the  
homeland is still the norm for many Pakistanis. Several European  
countries have recently raised the age limit for "imported spouses" -  
in the case of Denmark and Sweden to 24.

"Obviously women are a key to integration," said Senay Ozdemir, an  
opponent of importing spouses and forced marriages. She is the editor  
of SEN, a Dutch magazine aimed at immigrant women. "If the woman  
cannot or will not integrate in a new country, it affects the whole  
family. She will isolate her children."

Karakus, the lawyer, believes more change will come. When she arrived  
in Limoges, in central France, she was the first law student to wear  
a veil, and was asked to remove it. Now, as a lawyer with a veil, she  
is accepted by both the men of the Muslim Council and the local  
French authorities with whom she negotiates.

This fall she was working on obtaining plots for Muslim burials at  
the local cemetery and arranging the site for the slaughter of sheep  
for Eid-el-Kebir, a major Muslim holiday. She is now helping to  
organize courses for imams arriving with little knowledge of French  
or French traditions.

How does she feel about being the first woman to head a Muslim  
council? She hesitates, then replies: "I'm pleased if my work helps  
change the image of women."

(Marlise Simons, "Muslim Women Take Charge of Their Faith,"   
International Herald Tribune, 4 December 2005, <http://www.iht.com/ 
articles/2005/12/01/news/islam6.php>)
</blockquote>


Yoshie Furuhashi
<http://montages.blogspot.com>
<http://monthlyreview.org>
<http://mrzine.org>



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