Meeting in New York over the weekend, Muslim women from 25 countries began laying groundwork for the first international all-female council formed to issue fatwas, called the Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity. Their idea: to ensure that women's perspectives on Islamic law become part of religious deliberation in the Muslim world - particularly on issues such as domestic violence, divorce, and inheritance. --Christian Science Monitor
"There's this growing sense on the part of literate Muslim women ... that there is a vital need for women to confront the Islamic tradition and to work on a par with men in interpreting the sources," says Ann Mayer, an expert in Middle Eastern law at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. "Otherwise you end up with a very sexist bias in the readings."
The number of women officially sanctioned to issue fatwas is hard to pin down, but certainly tiny. The emergence of such women, known as muftias, usually makes headlines: A religious school in India installed three in 2003, and the Turkish government last year hired two assistant muftias, its first. Governments and schools try to license who can issue fatwas, but Islam stipulates only certain prerequisites, such as knowledge of the Koran and Arabic. As a result, the ranks of unofficial authorities are deeper and the barriers to women surmountable.
Whether the opinions of a women's council will carry any weight, especially in conservative cultures, is another matter. (read more)
Most are against any voice for the Muslim women, saying things like 'it will be portrayed as part of "a Western cultural invasion", and we all know all things Western are evil. See...
"It should not have happened in New York, because it will set back the agenda of women given the current political upheaval [over the Iraq war]," says Mohammad Reda, a Syrian-American Muslim in the Boston area often sought out for his religious opinions. He supports the idea that "women should stand up and give their own opinions on women's issues," but says American efforts to force change in the Muslim world, as in Iraq, mean reformers now must avoid links to the US. The New York conference used money from nongovernmental foundations, some based in the US.
All things Western, specifically AMERICAN, are wrong, evil, to be shunned .... Unless it happens to be living here, using American funding, American facilities, American freedoms, .... Other than THAT, America is EVIL.
Still, Muslim women have recently brought change by citing the Koran and other Islamic sources:• In Malaysia, a group called Sisters in Islam used Koranic scholarship to rebuff efforts to exclude Muslims from a domestic-abuse law.
• In Saudi Arabia, an effort this summer to push women further back at a crowded holy site in Mecca was thwarted with the help of a female Islamic scholar's arguments.
• In the United States, the forthcoming English translation of the Koran by a woman, the first ever, finds an alternate meaning in a verse widely interpreted to give husbands authority to beat their wives as a last resort.
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Cop The Truth, Muslim Imams detained
Ahhhh. Gotta love the liberal and feminist viewpoint. Shouted: "Freedom for women!" whispered: "as long as their in America and not Muslim".
It's the same with abortion "rights". They say that a women has the right to choose what to do with her own body. But what about those unborn children? Many of them are women too. Why aren't they defending that woman's rights?
Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Posted by: RoadKnight | November 21, 2006 at 07:48 PM