Dossier 27: Contributors

Pamela Cross
Legal Director, Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children (METRAC)
Pamela Cross is a long time feminist political activist with a focus on women’s equality-rights issues.

Pascale Fournier
SJD Candidate, Harvard Law School
Pascale Fournier has taught at the Institute for Women’s Studies and Research in Tehran, Iran, at McGill Law School, and at the University for Peace in Costa Rica. Her teaching and scholarly interests include comparative constitutional law, identity formation and the law, law and social change, human rights and Islam, critical legal studies, and family law in the context of globalization. She is actively involved in numerous NGO’s - she currently serves on the board of directors of Canada World Youth and Fondation Paul Gerin-Lajoie and works as a legal consultant for the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. Her publications include (co-authored with Gökçe Yurdakul), ‘Unveiling Distribution: Muslim Women with Headscarves in France and Germany’ in Y. Michal Bodemann and Gökçe Yurdakul (eds) Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos: Incorporation Regimes in Germany, Western Europe and North America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); ‘The Ghettoization of Difference in Canada: Rape by Culture or the Danger of a Cultural Defence in Criminal Law Trials’, Manitoba Law Journal, 29, 2002, p. 81-113; ‘The Erasure of Islamic Difference in Canadian and American Family Law Adjudication’, Journal of Law and Policy, 10, 2001, p. 51-95.

Imrana Jalal
Imrana Jalal is a feminist, a lawyer, a human rights activist and is the architect of Fiji’s new Family Law Act. She works nationally, regionally and internationally on human rights issues.

Professor Dr. Muhammad Khalid Masud
Chairman, Council of Islamic Ideology, Government of Pakistan, Islamabad
Formerly the Academic Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) in Leiden (the Netherlands), currently Chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology, Islamabad, Pakistan. Until 1999, he was a professor at the Islamic Research Institute in Islamabad (Pakistan). He obtained his PhD in Islamic Studies at McGill University, Canada. His publications include Shatibi’s Philosophy of Law (rev. ed. 1995), Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Ijtihad (1995), Islamic Legal Interpretation: The Muftis and their Fatwas (with B. Messick and D. Powers, Harvard, 1996), and the edited volume Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablîghî Jamâ’at as a Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal (Brill, 2000), Dispensing Justice in Islam, Qadis and their Judgments (co-edited with D. Powers and R. Peters, Brill, 2005). He has been an editor of the journal Islamic Studies.

Salma Maoulidi
Trained in law with a concentration on human rights and women’s law. On a voluntary basis Salma currently heads a Muslim women’s development network, the Sahiba Sisters Foundation with members in 13 regions in Tanzania with a mission to build leadership and organizational capacities. She also works as a development consultant on a professional basis and is an activist of long standing, affiliated to a number of local, national and international movements and organizations.

Hoda Rouhana
Hoda Rouhana is a Palestinian citizen of Israel. She is a Program Officer for networking in North Africa and the Middle East in the International Coordination Office (ICO) of WLUML.
Hoda has been involved with Palestinian feminist organizations in Israel since 1992, working mainly on violence against women and on Personal Status Laws. She worked as a social worker in Haifa Emergency Centre for Battered Women, with Essiwar; Arab Feminist Organization for Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence, and coordinated the Women and Religious Courts Project in Adalah - The Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

Yoginder Sikand
A freelance writer based in Bangalore, India, and who writes mainly on issues related to Muslims and Dalits in South Asia. Yoginder also edits a webmagazine called Qalandar at www.islaminterfaith.org

Isabelita Solamo-Antonio
Isabelita Solamo-Antonio is the Executive Director of PILIPINA Legal Resources Center (PLRC) from 1988 to 1990 and from 1996 until the present. She sits in the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) under the Office of the President of the Philippines as a Council member for Women and she is one of the Directors of PHILSSA (Partnership of Philippine Support Service Agencies) and MINCODE (Mindanao Coalition Of Development NGO Networks.) She is current chairperson of the women’s political party Abanse!Pinay - Davao Chapter. She was a member of the Board of Directors of CODE-NGO, a national coalition of NGO networks during the years 2000-2002.
As part of her social development work, she has visited other Muslim majority countries. She first went to study law at the Ateneo de Manila College of Law and then to the Ateneo de Davao University where she earned her Bachelor of Laws degree. She took graduate studies in Sociology at the University of the Philippines, Diliman and taught at the Philippine Normal University. She finished a Course on Gender and Development at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, Brighton, England and the 2004 Summer Institute on Sexuality, Culture & Society at the University of Amsterdam.

---

The Dossiers are an occasional publication of the international solidarity network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws. Conceived as a networking tool, they aim to provide information about lives, struggles and strategies of women living in diverse Muslim communities and countries. Women’s groups may freely reproduce material, however we would appreciate acknowledgements. For those articles previously published in other journals, permission should be sought directly from them.

Information contained in the Dossiers does not necessarily represent the views and positions of the compilers or of the network Women Living Under Muslim Laws, unless stated. The Dossiers are meant to make accessible the broadest possible strands of opinion within varied movements/initiatives promoting greater autonomy of women. The Dossiers seek to inform and share different analysis and experiences.

WLUML would like to acknowledge and thank the following foundations and corporations for their support: Ford Foundation, HIVOS, NORAD, Rights & Democracy, Sigrid Rausing and Swiss Development Cooperation.