Indian Muslim Women’s Struggles for Equality, Justice and Empowerment She is demanding the prerogatives of men.

In honor of International Women's Day, leaders and rights activists have been prasing the role of women in the protests that toppled dictators in Tunisia and Egypt and appear on the verge of pushing through major changes in other nations in the Middle East and North Africa.

The movements have given the annual day a new energy this year, and as the National isreporting, the issues behind the protests were not about men and women, but rather about Tunisians and Egyptians and Libyans.

"The bodies of women, so often used as ideological battlegrounds, have withstood all kinds of police violence, from tear gas to live bullets," organizers of Egypt's Million Woman March are quoted by CNN as saying. "The real battleground did not differentiate between women and men."

Take a look at women involved in the protests in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and other nations here:

Are we so complacent that we feel we do not need to demand gender equality? Many women are convinced there is equality between men and women. The fact however is that the US has never had a female president and, in the UK there has been just one female prime minister out of 52 male leaders. Shouldn't this be a wake up call to all those who think we have achieved gender equality?

It is true that much progress has been made since the original march for IWD, and women are excelling in many fields. We may have different lives to those of our grandmothers and even our mothers but gender equality has far from been achieved.

Non-Violent Revolutions

In recent months we have seen women at the forefront of revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Asmaa Mahfouz, a 25-year-old Egyptian woman has been credited by some as sparking the revolution in Egypt when she posted a YouTube video calling for people to join her in Tahrir Square in a fight for democracy. Of the hundreds of thousands of people who joined Asmaa Mahfouz there was as many women as men. This is a pivotal time in history for the Middle East, and women are playing a significant role in its progression towards democracy and freedom.

After such progress, it was shocking to see this week, a peaceful march led by women in Tahrir square to mark International Women's Day met with aggression and sexual harassment from a gang of over 200 men.

In many countries around the world women have to physically fight for their voices to be heard. We in the west are lucky that we have a voice, but it must come with an obligation to fight for those women who don't.

As we see women around the world risk their lives to fight for fairness and freedom, we should be inspired to stand up for our rights, our right to be equal; a right which was passed in 1948, under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and is yet to be fully achieved.

In response to those who deny the existence of gender discrimination I let the statistics speak for themselves.

Gender Inequality

Women now carry out 60% of the world's work and produce 50% of the world's food but only earn 10% of the world's income and only own 1% of its property. According the UNwomen make up 70% of the worlds poorest. Two thirds of the 774 million illiterate adults worldwide are women. This is because 70 million girls each year are denied the right to the most basic education.

Women around the world face severe restrictions in freedom and in some cases are condemned to death for allegedly breaking bias moral and religious codes, enforced by men.

Death Penalty

In recent years many cases of gender discrimination, gender related violence and honor killings have been brought to public attention. Some of the most egregious cases I have come across are; Mosammet Hena a 14-year-old girl from Bangladesh, who was allegedly raped and was whipped to death for crimes against honour.

The disturbing case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother of two, who was sentenced to death by stoning in Iran for adultery and murder, crimes she has repeatedly denied. Death by stoning is a mandatory sentence for "adultery while married" in Iran. After intense public outcry and campaigning by the international community, human rights organizations including my own The Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, the Iranian authorities have since announced that her death sentence has been "suspended". At present, the outcome of her case remains unclear.

Honor Killing Honor killings are increasing in the western world, the recent cases of the television executive Muzzammil Hassan who was found guilty of beheading his wife in a suspected honor crime and the Iraqi father, found guilty of running over his 20-year-old daughter in a Arizona car park have shocked America. In 2009 police recorded over 250 incidents of "honor"-based violence in London alone, according to the Guardian.

Female Genital Mutilation and AIDS

Female genital mutilation and AIDS are another threat to women around the world. Action Aid estimates that 75% of all young people in Sub-Saharan Africa with AIDS or HIV are women. 92 million women and girls around the world are believed to have undergone female genital mutilation.

Rape as Weapon of War

Rape has long been used a weapon of war, during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, it is estimated between 250,000-500,000 women were raped. UN Special Reporter Rene Degnu-Segui stated, "rape was the rule, it's absence the exception". In 1993 I traveled with United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) personnel through Bosnia and Croatia on a fact finding mission to document the mass rape of women, I had been asked to testify before the Helsinki Commission in the US Congress. I listened to hundreds of shocking testimonies of women, who had been brutally raped. It is estimated that during the Bosnian war up to 50,000 women were systematically raped.

Although the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia issued arrest warrants based on the Geneva Conventions and Violations of the Laws or Customs of War, rape continues to be used as a weapon of war. In 2009 we learned of the brutal raping of8,000 women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Margot Wallstrom, the UN's special representative on sexual violence in conflict, described the country as "the rape capital of the world" speaking of the violence she explained "if women continue to suffer sexual violence, it is not because the law is inadequate to protect them, but because it is inadequately enforced."

In countries such as Saudi Arabia, women are not even allowed to drive, let alone vote. In Saudi Arabia and in places such as Chechnya, Afghanistan and Somalia women are routinely punished for not adhering to strict dress codes, and can be flogged in the street for showing their faces.

Seven UN member states have not signed the convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; Iran, Nauru, Palau, Somalia, Sudan and Tonga. The United States, along with Niue and the Vatican City have not yet ratified it!

Sexual Assault & Domestic Violence

These stories are not freak occurrences, every day women face gender related abuse. I was shocked to learn that globally 60 million girls are sexually assaulted on their way to school each year. In the UK only 7% of rape cases end in conviction and only between 10-20% of rapes are thought to be reported. In the US one in four women can expect to experience domestic violence, and according to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes each year.

Decision Makers

Globally there is severe disparity between men and women in parliament, and women make up only 19% of the worlds parliament seats. As of 2011 there were only 17 female Senators in the US out of 100 and 76 women in Congress out of 435. In the UK there are 144 members of parliament out of 650. In a world where leaders such as Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy, Burlesconi, Putin, Gaddafi, Mubarak make headlines daily, we hear relatively little of Gillard, Rousseff, Patil and Fernández de Kirchner, some of the world's 18 female heads of state. Is it perhaps because they make up such a small percentage of world power or is it because we underestimate the power of women in leadership positions?

The reason why I have emphasized the statistics in this article, is because they speak for themselves. Nevertheless they are easily ignored, but we cannot afford to ignore the reality they represent.

Call to Action We have the tools to change the world, we can make a difference, we can even change the course of history. The time for further excuses, postponement, or procrastination, for hesitation and prevarication has long passed. Now is the time for courage and leadership. We must take concrete steps to empower women, achieve gender equality, equal legal rights and justice.

We must demand that all countries adhere to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and meet the Millennium Development Goals to eradicate extreme poverty, achieve universal primary education, improve maternal health and reduce child mortality, and combat HIV/AIDS.

We can, and we must embark upon a non-violent revolution. We cannot afford to be apathetic, for the sake of the women suffering at the hands of violence, persecution and injustice. For the sake of our daughters and grand daughters we cannot sit still or we will jeopardize their future.

By M J Akbar

The Muslim elite seems caught in a bit of bind. It is beginning to look like the punter who lost a flutter on the football match and then a fortune on the action replay. Its original mistake was a misconception; its contemporary error is a misperception.

The historic flaw is its belief, at some gut level, that India is a secular country because the minorities want secularism. Indian Muslims do have a vested interest in secularism, since it ensures equality and democratic power, but that is less than half the story

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In 1947, a politicized Indian Muslim elite partitioned India to create Pakistan. Over the last six decades Pakistan has been unable to live with fellow-Muslims who happened to be Bengalis, driving them into a separate nation; marginalized minorities and turned the country into the Islamic Republic of Bloodistan. The obverse does not work in India, however much Rama Sene-style zealots might salivate at the prospect. The reason is quite simple. India is a secular country because Indian Hindus, who constitute the majority, and therefore have a proportional impact upon the political ethos, have created and defended a Constitution that is a remarkable triumph of reason over the temptations of sectarian passion. India is secular not because Muslims need it, but because Hindus want it. There is nothing new about it. The Hindu Mahasabha did not win a single Hindu seat in 1937, even in an age of separate electorates, and did not do much better in 1946 despite the fact that Muslim League swept the Muslim seats in an environment darkened by raging communal storms.

Logic suggests, therefore, that if the BJP wants to define itself as a “Hindu” party, it should tread the middle road of coexistence rather than the extreme path of discord. Harmony requires more courage, commitment and moral consistency than conflict.

The misperception arises out of a peculiar inability to comprehend the dimensions of an extraordinary Indian cultural revolution that has seeped across divisions of caste and community, with its epicenter located in Hindu society. The new Indian woman is all around us, seeking a place on a college campus, en route to the workplace; participating in television as activist, audience and artiste; on the sports field; on the street; she is everywhere you look — most of all, at home.

The revolution is not limited to the urban rich. A week ago we were forced, by that inedible curse called the traffic jam, to take a secondary road through villages from Dehradun airport to the academy in Mussoorie. Women, compelled by circumstance and male prejudice, were carrying large utensils of water on their head from source to home. The younger women were in jeans, or some variation of it. Women everywhere share the common aspiration for modernity and economic success.

The more ardent flag-wavers have missed this pervasive and continuing emancipation, which started tentatively in the 1980s but has acquired an unstoppable momentum now. There is change wherever the eye falls, in whatever the senses pick up: dress, public icons, shifting sexual mores — and examination results, where women are asserting their will to be future leaders. The new Indian woman has claimed the mantle of independence as the means of empowerment. She wants freedom, to choose, at a life-changing level; career above marriage if she so desires; or, at an incidental level, a pub over the confines of home. She is demanding the prerogatives of men.

Cinema, that persistent barometer of behaviour, has long abandoned the image of a sati savitri naari at the feet of her pati parmeshwar. The new Indian woman is increasingly contemptuous of any cage, gilded with gold or paste, in the name of tradition or any spurious ism. She barely bothers to hide her contempt. Fear, or trepidation, might make her hesitate occasionally, but this is a circumstantial restraint. Check her inner will.

One is not suggesting that this is true of everyone; but this is the role model that is influencing attitudes of decisive numbers. You cannot chase this generation out of a pub without sending a nationwide signal advertising your gender bias. The girls in the Mangalore pub did not go to drink senselessly; they went there to exercise the right to go there. Those who attacked the pub, incidentally, had the full support of conservative reactionaries from all religions. While reactionary politics might persist among some ethnic groups, it is becoming malodorous to the young. Religion remains an important aspect of Indian life; the Hindu young celebrate Durga Puja, Holi and Diwali with as much joy as their elders. But their faith, regrettable exceptions apart, is socially inclusive, not aggressively exclusive.

As India becomes an increasingly younger country, it is this culture that will tip power towards one party or another. If the BJP cannot get the vote of the young, modern Hindu woman, it has no future.

As numerous reports have shown, Muslims are among the most deprived and marginalised communities in India. Muslim women are triply marginalised: as Muslims, as women and as members of a community that, taken as a whole, is economically disadvantaged. If the state and the ‘mainstream’ media can be accused of being largely indifferent to the question of Muslim ‘backwardness’, Muslim ‘leaders’—political and religious—can rightly be accused of being indifferent to the specific problems of Muslim women that have, in part, to do with internal hierarchies often legitimised in the name of Islam. The subordination of Muslim women owes to a host of factors, including the social, economic, political and educational marginalisation of the Muslim community as a whole, as well as the indifference of agencies of the state as well as Muslim ‘leaders’ to the question of Muslim women’s subordination and the need for their substantive empowerment.

Debates about Muslims in contemporary India—and globally as well—generally focus on issues related to Muslim religious beliefs and identity. Although these questions are indeed pertinent, the framework of these debates is extremely limited, leaving out substantive issues of economic, educational, social and political marginality, without which the conditions of the community, including Muslim women, can hardly be properly understood. These debates routinely raise issues related to the conditions of Muslim women, linking their ‘backwardness’ simply to competing discourses about the normative status of women in Islam. Clearly, this is a very skewed and limited perspective.

By locating Muslim women’s status and conditions solely within a religious framework, the material causes for their overall ‘backwardness’, in which the state and wider society are also deeply implicated, is conveniently sidestepped.  Critics routinely argue that the ‘backwardness’ of Muslim women owes principally to Islamic scriptural prescriptions that, they allege, are inherently misogynist and patriarchal, while Muslim apologists insist that the contrary is true: that Islam provides women with all the rights they ‘need’, and that only if Muslims were to truly follow the prescriptions of Islam in the ‘right’ manner, the problems of Muslim women could easily be solved. But as to what constitutes Islamic normativity, including on issues related to gender, continues to be hotly debated among Muslims themselves. There being no church in Islam that can lay down doctrine for all Muslims to follow, there is a multiplicity of voices, each claiming to solely represent the ‘authentic’ Islam, offering diverse, indeed conflicting interpretations of precisely what Islam has to say about relations between the genders and about the status of Muslim women. On the one hand are a range of patriarchal voices that clearly subordinate Muslim women to men and narrowly circumscribe their social roles, all in the name of Islam, while, on the other hand, are a number of Muslim scholars and activists who insist that Islam stands for full equality for Muslim women, in the process articulating what has been called an Islamic feminist vision.

The Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, is hosting a two-day workshop on the 21st –23rd of May, 2011, to bring together activists and scholars working on issues related to Muslim women’s struggles for equality and justice and for their economic, educational, social and political empowerment. The aim of the workshop is to discuss ongoing initiatives and struggles, locate crucial issues that need to be foregrounded to galvanise such struggles and promote networking between activists and scholars working on these issues who are located in different parts of the country. The discussions would focus on the following issues:

1. Personal narratives: How participants’ interest in the issue of Muslim women’s subordination and the need for the empowerment evolved, and details of the initiatives they have been engaged in.

2. Reflections on the Muslim religious and political leadership, the Muslim and the ‘mainstream’ media, agencies of the state, political parties, NGOs, and ‘secular’ women’s groups and movements to issues of Muslim women’s marginality and the quest for their social, economic and educational advancement.

3. The need to critique and challenge patriarchal understandings of Islam, and to promote alternate Islamic discourses based on gender equality and justice, and the prospects as well as hurdles in the path of evolving such alternate discourses. Related to this is the issue of the limits of a single frame of reference—whether based on Islamic or secular human rights discourse—to articulate the agenda of Muslim women’s empowerment, and the need for synergy between Islamic and secular human rights or Constitutional frames of reference.

4. The task of foregrounding Muslim women’s concerns and issues at the policy-making level, in the media and in the agenda of Muslim organisations.

5. The task of linking Muslim women’s initiatives and struggles for justice and equality within the broader Muslim community to ongoing efforts to justice and empowerment for Muslims as a whole in the wider context of debates about democracy and social justice. This would include practical suggestions as to what can be done in this regard.

6. Linking Muslim women’s struggles for justice and equality to the need for reforms in the current regime of Muslim Personal Law, and how this task can be furthered with the help of experiences of reforms in personal law statutes in several Muslim countries. 

7. A critique of dominant notions of multiculturalism and minority rights that pay scant attention to internal hierarchies within marginalised communities (i.e. minorities within minorities), based on class, caste and gender,  and the possibilities of linking Muslim women’s struggles to those of other struggles within the broader Muslim community, such as that of Dalit and OBC Muslims.