I agree that many Muslim women are empowered. Many are highly educated, informed, politically aware, have careers and family, get to make important decisions about their lives, bodies, family, marriage, children etc.
However, there ARE millions of Muslim women who ARE oppressed. We need to develop a move complex, critical and sophisticated awareness of the ways in which women in the Middle East, Asia and Africa are oppressed. Over a 100 million women are forced into FGM each year, many, many of them being Muslim women, reproducing the culturally ill informed notion that women should not have sexual freedom, pleasure, rights etc (a view which is incidentally against Islam’s view of women’s right to sexual pleasure and rights). Millions more are forced into marriages, many as child or under-age brides. Many Muslim women wish to have a greater level of control over what they wear, for instance, the hijab- in all its many varieties across the Muslim world- but in many instances cannot due to cultural, religious, political and legal reasons, and the literal threat of death. Not all Muslim women wish to wear the hijab. Many wish to make their own choices about their families, marriage, education, and that of their children but cannot! Many women in the Muslim world do not have access to health care, to birth and reproductive control, do not have the right to divorce or have child custody rights; many cannot get a job without the permission of the father, brother, husband, uncle, tribe, or the state. Many cannot speak about the high levels of domestic and sexual violence that they experience in their families, homes, community, place of work or in public. Killing women in the name of honor still remains a serious issue, that is not addressed by communities, the religious sphere or by the state. Muslim women who are members of the LGBTQAI+ communities cannot even speak of, be visible or express their true identity for fear of being raped and murdered, imprisoned, hanged or executed by their society and/or state. Many women in the Muslim women do not have their basic human rights protected legally, socially, culturally. Many are deeply exploited, live in degrading social and political environments.
All of these forms of oppression, marginalization and silencing occur daily because conservative and often religious men are in positions of power and determine and produce policies every day that negatively impacts women’s rights, freedom, choices and bodily integrity. The degrading postion that MANY Muslim women are forced into is often directly as a result of the way in which religion is interpreted, selectively used and applied and used by Muslim men and conservative Muslim women at the top.
The discussion should be more that “not all Muslim women are oppressed, but man, MANY are deeply oppressed and silenced”. A basic account of an either/ or, as the above post, ignores the complexities of Muslim women’s lives and their daily lived experiences of oppression, violence, sexual abuse, harassment, rape, and murder.
Finally, if SOME Muslim women are empowered and liberated, how can we say that they genuinely are when every day they are assaulted by the abuses that their Muslim sisters experience, in their own homes, in their communities, families, societies and region…?
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