Empowerment

Reaching Out, Changing Our Lives, Outreach Strategies and Women Living Under Muslim Laws

Based on the sharing that took place at the 1999 WLUML Outreach Strategies Exchange Programme meeting, this tool documents some of the network’s experiences of outreach and identifies the basic principles that underlie outreach activities – no matter how diverse the actual activities have been across the Network With the aim of inspiring experimentation and dialogue among groups conducting outreach activities, it shared strategies at both general and specific illustrative levels.

Dossier 23-24: Constructing Identities - Culture, Women’s Agency and the Muslim World

The Muslim world in context

Internationally, it has become quite fashionable to speak of living in a global village. The expression is usually intended to positively express the linkages now established throughout the world, the similarities of issues confronting the different people who inhabit it and our ability, therefore, to connect with one another.

Dossier 22: Palestinian women’s model parliament

The decision stunned even its leaders. During their model parliament held last April in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian women's rights activists first recommended that laws be enacted to restrain and regulate polygamy; that it be allowed only in exceptional cases and with the first wife being offered a divorce. But after the 126 "delegates" confirmed the vote, they dramatically invalidated the decision.

Worldwide: Women and leadership in Muslim societies - voices for change

On November 25, 2002 WLP brought together an international group of women leaders to discuss the constraints and opportunities Muslim women face in expanding their political participation and leadership opportunities.

Dossier 5-6: Turkish Feminism: A Short History

Introduction:

In many ways, it is possible to say that feminism has erupted onto the Turkish political scene in the latter half of the 1980’s. Since 1983, a number of publications and public meetings organised by feminists have already made an impact on political and intellectual circles in Istanbul and Ankara (cf. Tekeli 1986 and forthcoming). The general public heard of these women on two separate occasions.

Dossier 5-6: Women, Religion and Social Change in Pakistan: A Proposed Framework for Research - Draft

The research project on Women, Religion and Social Change in Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka currently being undertaken by ICES provides a unique opportunity to explore the cross-cultural dimensions of continuing tradition and the process of change as these relate to women and in this the role of religion. A grey area of uncertainty, prejudice, and very little research, the role of religion in determining the possible for individual actors, particularly women, has rarely received the attention it deserves.

Dossier 14-15: From Confiscation to Charges of Apostasy

Freedom of Academic Research

CHRLA is greatly alarmed by the Cairo Court of Appeals ruling of June 14, 1995, which ordered the divorce of Nasr Hamed Abu-Zeid (the Cairo University professor) from his wife, Dr. Ibthal Younis, on the grounds that he was an apostate because of the opinions contained in his published research.

The argumentation of the ruling raises problems related to freedom of thought, religious interpretation and belief, and the privacy of family relationships.

Dossier 4: Debates on feminism in Senegal - visions vs nostalgia

Throughout the world, and particularly in Third World countries, feminists have been sounding the alarm about the rise of religious and political fundamentalism. Historically, fundamentalism has always been a move to strengthen patriarchal authority and maintain the "moral order" of society. Patriarchy, understood as the relations of domination and subordination that pervade human gender relations, takes different forms in different historical periods depending on the prevailing material conditions.

Dossier 21: Muslim Women on the Threshold of the 21st Century

In the West, Islam has come to epitomize the worse kind of oppression of women, usually symbolized by the veil, polygyny, and more recently, by stoning.

Dossier 3: Memorandum submitted to the committee on proposed reforms to Muslim personal law

The Muslim's Women's Research and Action Front considers the appointment of a committee to examine Muslim Personal Law in the light of reform as a positive step in the socio-legal and cultural upliftment of the community.

MWRAF as a group of committed and concerned Muslim women wishes to suggest a basis for reforms, though we would like to reiterate the fact that our framework is within the Qur'an and Sharia and the proposed changes would in effect be implementation of not only the letter of the law but also the spirit of the law- in other words the essence of the Qur'an