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La montée persistante de la menace des courants extrémistes religieux politisés et leur projet d’imposer une vision particulière de l’Islam par le biais de l’institution d’un Etat théocratique et/ou par l’usage de la violence et la terreur.

In October 1997 35 active networkers from 18 countries met in Dhaka to develop the third WLUML Plan of Action. We re-examined old concerns and identified emerging ones. We strategized about how best we could answer these needs knowing that we must act in the face of odds that sometimes seem overwhelming in our own specific locations.

Women, their roles and above all, their control, are at the heart of the fundamentalist agenda. That they should conform to the strict confines of womanhood within the fundamentalist religious code is a precondition of maintaining and reproducing the fundamentalist version of society.

Subtitled 'The Right of the Divorced Muslim Women to Mataa', this is the case of an Indian Sunni woman who filled a petition in the Supreme Court arguing that the Muslim minority law applied to her in her divorce denied her rights otherwise guaranteed by the Constitution of India to all citizens.

Submitted to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), this Shadow Report focuses on one of the central obstacles to women’s equality and advancement: the rise and ongoing threat of politicised, violent religious fundamentalism and its project to impose its particular view of Islam through the theocratization of the State and/or through violence and terror.

This book analyses legal campaigns and cases in a number of Asian, Middle Eastern and North African countries, and describes a strategy for challenging these laws – delegation to the wife of the right to pronounce divorce on the behalf of her husband on their marriage – to equalise the right to divorce.

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.

The paper thus outlines the social and political conditions that have led not only to the development of secular feminist perspectives in Iran, but to the emergence of woman-centred Islamists and their strategies which aim, thus far with considerable success, to fundamentally challenge conventional gender visions often presented as "Islamic." This analysis of the gender debates in Iran, and by extension elsewhere in the Muslim world, reiterates that Islam, particularly as a political ideology, is far from static and unchanging; it is a dynamic and evolving ideological force that
Revealed narratives and legislation are then pursued through their medieval, modern, and contemporary interpretations. The theological exegetic sources here chosen, all Sunni, include the major classical works as well as, for the modern period, examples of modernist, traditionalist, and fundamentalist exegesis. For Hadith materials beyond the theological tafsir, Stowasser analyzes both popular narratives of the "tales of the prophets" genre and representative samples of the classical historical and legal hadith.

Interview and articles from Riffat Hassan, the progressive theologian and academic specialized in Islamic sciences. Riffat Hassan defends a more humane, democratic and feminist interpretation of Islam in general and of the Quran and other sacred texts in particular (in French).

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