Women Empowerment in the Islamic World

The German Foreign Ministry invited delegations from 20 Muslim countries to a conference dealing with women empowerment in the Islamic world. Hardy Graupner reports from Berlin

Almost all of the Muslim women represented at the conference hold important posts in the social and political spheres of their society. They were invited by a special task force in the German Foreign Ministry responsible for the dialogue between the Muslim and western worlds, as Gunter Mulack, the foreign office's special envoy for the Islamic world, explains.

"This conference should serve our aim to work against stereotype pictures of Muslim women being just kept in a harem," explains Gunter Mulack. "This shows us that women do actually play a very active role in their society which, naturally, varies from country to country. A woman in Indonesia, for instance, has very different opportunities to engage in social processes than a women in, say, Saudi-Arabia."

Women must not be seen as the ultimate symbol of subjection

Omaima Abu Bakr is a Muslim professor at Cairo University in Egypt. She deplores the fact that the role of Islamic women is more often than not misunderstood in western nations. She says that Muslim women are still widely seen as the ultimate symbol of subjection to male dominance, seemingly encouraged by religion itself. But she maintains that there's little truth if any in such stereotype assertions.

"We don't feel like that. We really don't feel like that," says Abu Bakr. "Living in that culture, belonging to it, we feel that problems are more legal, political, societal, which is different from talking about religious texts."

The rights are there, but must be implemented

The conference participants listened to reports about the situation of women in Afghanistan following the ousting of the Taleban regime. Marzia Basel from Kabul, a member of the Loya Jirga, heads a women empowerment organisation in Afghanistan. While she's content with current legislation concerning women's rights in her country, she says that there's still a bumpy road ahead as far as the implementation of these rights on a daily basis is concerned:

"Customary law is very strong, which is not part of Sharia law," says Basel. "Therefore we have to bring changes in that area." Basel furthermore explained that according to Islam, men and women do have equal rights, but that that's a question of interpretation. It is important, Basel asserts, that equal rights are implemented within the Islamic belief system.

There was agreement that more programmes for education at grassroots level were absolutely vital to put women in Muslim countries in a better position to make active use of their rights. But for others, such as the head of the Sakakini Centre of Culture in the Palestinian Territories, Raeda Taha, there are other priorities for the time being.

"Our priority now is to stop the occupation, regain our freedom, and to have our independent state and to improve our social situation through legislation later on."

German Foreign Ministry under-secretary Kerstin Mueller emphasised that Muslim women had a pivotal role to play in normalising relations between the west and the Islamic world after 9/11. She said both the foreign office and the development ministry would continue to pump resources into women empowerment programmes in Muslim countries despite budget restraints at home.

Hardy Graupner

Read Kerstin Mueller's conference opening speech, "Women in the Islamic World - Muslim Women in Germany: Positive Role Models"