Musawah

Arabic term for equality, and the name of an Islamic equal rights organization.

Sabrina Tavernise described in The I.H.T. how proponents of “Feminist Islamic scholarship” are searching within the Koran for arguments supporting gender equality, having become exasperated by religious rulings on subjects as diverse as dress codes and yoga:

It was frustrations like those that drew several hundred Muslim women to a conference in this Muslim-majority country [Malaysia] over the weekend. Their mission was to come up with ways to demand equal rights for women. And their tools, however unlikely, were the tenets of Islam itself.

“Secular feminism has fulfilled its historical role, but it has nothing more to give us,” said Ziba Mir-Hosseini, an Iranian anthropologist who has been helping to formulate some of the arguments. “The challenge we face now is theological.”

The advocates came from 47 countries to participate in the project, called Musawah, the Arabic word for equality. They spent the weekend brainstorming and learning the best Islamic arguments to take back to their own societies as defenses against clerics who insist that women’s lives are dictated by men’s strict interpretations of Islam.

Musawah’s Web site states the organization’s “framework”:

Musawah declares that equality in the family is necessary because many aspects of our current Muslim family laws and practices are unjust and do not respond to the lives and experiences of Muslim families and individuals. Musawah declares that equality in the family is possible through a holistic approach that brings together Islamic teachings, universal human rights principles, fundamental rights and constitutional guarantees, and the lived realities of women and men today. Musawah builds on decades of tireless effort by women’s groups and activists in Muslim countries and communities to campaign for reform of Muslim family laws that discriminate against women and to resist regressive amendments demanded by conservative groups within society.