NATIONAL LAW INSTITUTE

UNIVERSITY
BHOPAL,M.P.

A Project On Human Rights Law On The Topic

Rights And Position Of Women In Islamic Nations

Submitted to, Submitted by,

Prof.U.P.Singh Ajita Nadkarni
2012 BA LLB 101
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 Acknowledgement
With my highest gratitude I would take this opportunity to thank all those people who helped
me in making this project.Firstly I would thank my parents who always supported me in all
my endeavours .Then I would thank Uday Pratap Singh Sir who guided me with the strategy
to make this project successfully.Without the direction of all the above mentioned people
,this project would have been incomplete.

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 Table Of Contents
Topic Page No:/Page No: Range
1.Introduction........................................................................................................4

2.Islamic law and women`s rights........................................................................4-7

3.Sultanhssein Tabandeh`s views.........................................................................7-9

4.UIDHR...............................................................................................................9

5.Sudan under Islamization..................................................................................9-10

6.Cairo Declaration................................................................................................11

7.Women`s rights in Islamic and

International Human Rights Schemes................................................................11-12

8.General observations..........................................................................................12-13

9.Legal context: Legal rights and position of Muslim Women.............................13-14

10.Demographics,health and education.................................................................14-15

11.Marriage,family,household and everyday life.....................................................15

12.Women and productive economy: Necessity or

Empowerment?.................................................................................................15-16

13.Women in Muslim states and politics................................................................16-17

14.Studies on women`s participation in informal economy....................................17-18

15.Women`s activism for nation building,development

And Human or women`s rights..........................................................................19-20

16.Conclusion............................................................................................................21

17.Bibliography.........................................................................................................21

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 Introduction
This project aims to examine the significance of Islamic human rights schemes for the status
of women.Some of the important facets of the Islamic law affecting that status and also the
problem of determing ,what constitutes Islamic Law on this topic is also addressed.Next
specific tenets of Islamic human rights scheme will be analysed to ascertain ,how they would
affect the status of the women in the contemporary Middle East.Actual state practice in the
area of the womens` rights is also highlighted.The relationship of the tenets of the Islamic
human rights schemes and the principals of international human rights law affecting womens`
status is complex.Because sex stereotyping is important ,though often only implicit ,feature in
Islamic human rights schemes,its treatment in international human rights law in very
important.

Islamic Law And Women`s Rights

The basic features of premodern Islamic law affecting the status of women will be
highlighted to put forth discussion of issues of women`s rights. Generalisations on where
Islam stands on questions of women`s rights can often be misleading.since even within the
law schools of teh Sunni Islam ,one finds a variety of opinions on the status of the
women.What Islamic sources are cited by one on the questions of women`s status is of
critical importance as there is a link between the early and the later juristic traditions.Quran
and the example of the Prophet provide provide a favourable material for feminist
positions .Whereas the juristic traditions and the linked cultural norms provide, provide
material for the opponents of Islam.

Sharia law is an Islamic legal system which provides an Islamic alternative to secular models
of governance. Women in societies governed by sharia typically have few fewer rights than
women in the West.
Muslim-majority societies have varying degrees of sharia integrated into their law codes, but
almost all use sharia to govern family affairs. Sharia courts also exist in a number of Western
countries, particularly to adjudicate family law for Muslim citizens.
There is no one overarching authority which determines sharia, nor is there one conception of
how women's rights fit into sharia law.
Different interpretations and laws depending on which of the four schools of Islamic
Jurisprudence is being used, and the customs of the sects and country in question.
Many Muslim feminists argue that current interpretations of sharia that persist in oppressing
women have no basis in Islam and are man-made misinterpretations of the sacred texts.

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"I argue that Muslim family laws are the products of socio-cultural assumptions and juristic
reasoning about the nature of relations between men and women. In other words, they are
‘man-made’ juristic constructs, shaped by the social, cultural and political conditions within
which Islam’s sacred texts are understood and turned into law." -  Mir Hosseini,
Ziba, Towards Gender Equality: Muslim Family Laws and the Sha'riah.

Marital Rights
Although various opinions exist regarding Islamic marriage laws, the following constants
remain:

 A man is entitled to up to four wives, but a woman may only have one husband. In
western societies a man typically only takes one wife.
 The husband (or his family) pays a “bride price” or "dower" (mahr), which is money
or property paid to the bride) which she is entitled to keep. This “mahr” is in exchange
for sexual submission (tamkin). Sexual submission is traditionally regarded as
unconditional consent for the remainder of the marriage.
 A man can divorce his wife by making a declaration (talaq) in front of an Islamic
judge irrespective of the woman's consent. Even her presence is not required. For a
woman to divorce a man (khula), his consent is required.
 The husband is responsible for the financial upkeep of home (nafaqa).
 “Temporary marriage” (even for less than a half an hour) is allowed by some scholars,
others regard it as a form of prostitution. A report by the Gatestone Institute charts its
development in Britain.
 Wife beating permitted according to some scholars.
 There is no joint property; the man owns all property, (except for what the woman
owned before the marriage).
 There is no specific minimum age for marriage, but most agree a woman must have
reached puberty. Marriage as young as 12 or 13 is not uncommon in Muslim-majority
countries. In Yemen in 2013, there was a highly publicized case of an eight-year-old
girl who died of internal injuries suffered on her wedding night. According to Al
Jazeera, "Nearly 14 percent of Yemeni girls [are] married before the age of 15 and 52
percent before the age of 18." The case prompted calls for Yemen to pass a law setting a
minimum age for marriage, although it has not yet done so.
Muslim Feminists such as Dr. Elham Manea argue that the interpretation of sharia in the area
of marriage amounts to discrimination, the type of which is prohibited under Western legal
systems.
 
Public Rights
Most Muslim-majority countries are not democracies, so issues of who can vote do not apply.
Nevertheless, women still have a significantly reduced role in the public sphere in these
countries compared to men.

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Conservative ideas of gender roles are taken very seriously in Islamic societies. Even in the
West, where Muslim women have the same legal rights as men, they have been prevented
from exercising those rights by their male relatives.
Under sharia, women have:
 Lesser inheritance rights compared to men
 Lesser status as witnesses
In Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to drive.
 
Modesty Laws
 Many Muslim women respect the requirement to dress modestly and choose to do so.
However, in Muslim-majority countries, women do not necessarily have the choice not to do
so. Failure to comply with modesty laws has been known to elicit extreme violence from
police in places like Iran, Afghanistan and Sudan.
Garments women are required to wear range from a hijab (a scarf covering the hair and
neck), an abaya (a cloak-like, loose-fitting overgarment), a niqab (a face veil worn in
addition to the hijab and abaya) to a burqa (a full-body and head cloak which includes a
netted rectangle over the eyes). Exactly what constitutes immodest dress is the subject
of much debate.
Violations of modesty laws are frequently met with violence in Muslim countries. Western
women visiting Muslim-majority countries – for example, Saudi Arabia -- are advised to
dress modestly and not to travel unaccompanied by a man.
Dubai has notoriously strict public indecency laws. Many Western tourists have fallen foul of
them in the past.
Iranian President Rouhani has recently halted the activities of the country’s modesty police,
but has handed over their remit to the Ministry of the Interior.
 

Male Guardianship

Male Guardianship applies to all women whether married or not according to strict
interpretations of sharia. In the event of the deaths of male relatives, it can result in mothers
being legally subservient to their sons. Under sharia:
 A woman becomes subservient to her husband and needs his permission to: "leave the
house, take up employment, or to engage in fasting or forms of worship other than what
is obligatory."
 An unmarried woman is under the guardianship of her nearest male relative.
Human Rights Watch has issued a 50-page report condemning the situation of women in
Saudi Arabia alone.
 

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Rights under International Law

International law currently exists in a grey area, as it is unclear to what extent states are
bound by international treaties regarding various rights, and which of those rights, if any,
international authorities have the power to enforce. The UN Declaration of Human
Rights includes equal rights for women and calls have been made for Muslim countries to
abide by these statutes.
UN supports equal rights for women and recently adopted a new campaign aimed at ending
violence against women. The Muslim Brotherhood issued a statement condemning this UN
declaration (for violating sharia principles).
 Any Muslim woman who undertakes to be married under Islam is bound to a greater or
lesser extent by sharia, depending on where they live. Muslim women living in Western
countries are bound by the laws of the countries in which they live as well, whereas women
living in countries such as Saudi Arabia are bound by sharia alone. In cases where sharia and
the law of the land conflict, a woman is bound by sharia.
 

Islamic Feminism

There are many different Islamic thinkers and activists campaigning on issues pertaining to
women's rights, most of whom are both female and Muslim. They come from a variety of
different Islamic groups and live in different countries. Some are line with Western feminist,
while others seek to address grievances from a more traditional angle.
Journalist Samira Shackle draws a distinction between "Islamic Feminists who explicitly
draw their feminism from their faith, and Muslim women who also happen to be feminists."
An international network of Muslim feminists has started an organization calledMusawah.
A directory of different Islamic Feminist groups is provided here.

Sultanhssein Tabandeh `s views

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
Sultanhussein Tabandeh of Gunabad, Iran, leader of the Ne'ematullahi Sultanalishahi Sufi
Order which was founded about 1400, wrote A Muslim Commentary on the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and had it delivered to every Islamic representative who
attended the 1968 Tehran International Conference on Human Rights.

Sultanhussein Tabandeh describes the Universal Declaration as "a masterpiece" of the United
Nations, but suggests "most of its provisions were already inherent in Islam."Denying any
involvement in politics and confessing ignorance as to the political implications of the
Declaration, he asserts his concern is "only the religious angle, and in particular the relation
to the sacred theology of Islam and of Shi'a belief." He suggests this is particularly

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appropriate, as the "Declaration was greeted by private individuals of all races as a gospel
proclaimed for their protection by the jurists and the liberals of the world."

After reviewing the "genesis" of the Universal Declaration, Sultanhussein Tabandeh

suggests:

The UN became the Ka'aba of peaceloving hopes. It has performed great services, one
of which was its publication of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Like any
human institution, this Declaration has its defects, as indeed at its very inception was
pointed out by the representative of Syria in the first debate in the General Assembly.
It does not guarantee all the longings of mankind: nonetheless it is a great step
forward in the right direction towards the foundation of the human society of peace,
freedom and equality which men of vision have aimed at through the millennia.

He then proceeds to discuss each article in detail "in order to show that what all good people
hold in common, Islam possesses in itself; and offers to humanity for the benefit of all."

Sultanhussein Tabandeh argues that occasionally the Declaration is at variance with Islamic
law. He asserts that Islam forbids the marriage of a Muslim to a polytheist, an idolater or an
infidel, and that a Muslim woman has no right to marry any non-Muslim man. Moreover, he
argues that Islamic law limits the right of divorce to the husband, and in other ways does not
recognize the equal rights of men and women who are naturally "adapted to different natural
functions, and capable of different duties in life." He defends the different rights and duties
assigned to husband and wife by Islamic law as necessary for the protection of the family,
which the Universal Declaration affirms is "the natural and fundamental group unit of society
and is entitled to protection by society and the State." Moreover, he is extremely critical of
Muslim representatives to the UN who agreed to the provisions of Article 16 of the Universal
Declaration, which affirm equal rights in marriage.

Freedom of thought, conscience and belief are acceptable within Islamic law, he notes, but
only to the extent consistent with Islamic teachings: "No one's freedom gives him the right to
blaspheme or to curse God, His Prophets or His Saints." Thus religious minorities "who
follow the one true God and the revelation given to a prophet of His," such as Jews,
Christians and Zoroastrians, can pursue their religious practice freely:

But followers of a religion of which the basis is contrary to Islam, like those who
demand Islam's extirpation, have no official rights to freedom of religion in Islamic
countries or under an Islamic government, nor can they claim respect for their
religion, any more than in certain countries definite political parties which are
contrary to the ideology of the regime can claim freedom since they are declared to be
inimical to the welfare of that land and people.

In addition to stressing that the common good limits religious liberty, Sultanhussein
Tabandeh argues—much as Augustine did in the fourth century—that freedom of religion

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should not be interpreted as allowing people to reject the truth, for no one would knowingly
endanger his or her salvation. Thus, conversion is restricted to giving up "some other religion
than Islam in order to accept Islam's sound faith."

The rest of the Declaration is found to conform to Islamic teaching. Sultanhussein Tabandeh
concludes:

the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has not promulgated anything that was
new nor inaugurated innovations. Every clause of it, indeed every valuable regulation
needed for the welfare of human society ever enacted by the lawgivers, already
existed in a better and more perfect form in Islam.

In faith he affirms that "Islam is the summit and nothing excels it.

UIDHR
UIDHR is an Islamic counterpart to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UDHR). It is prepared by the Islamic Council, affiliated with the Muslim World League. It
was ratified in 1981 and presented to UNESCO. UIDHR outlines human rights in criminal
cases, marriage, inheritance, divorce, and economic activities, and supports freedom of
religion based on traditional Islamic law.

Sudan Under Islamization

By imposing a particularistic Islamic worldview through state power, Sudanese Islamists
have since the coup d’état in 1989 turned religion into a source of both coercion and political
contention. Islamization from above has brought into being new modes of women’s activism
in the country, which in turn have changed the main arena within which gender politics is
played out: namely Islam itself. Women activists have learned to relate, adapt, accommodate,
subvert, resist, bargain, and negotiate with the Islamist state in new and perhaps unexpected
ways.

The Islamist state and its “civilization project” (al-Mashru al-Hadari) have gone through
various phases in the years since the coup d’état of 1989 until today. Many scholars have
noted the pragmatic and de-ideologized power politics adopted by the Bashir government
since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) with southern Sudan in
2005. By excluding gender, however, this analysis fails to consider the continued importance
of Islam in helping determine the position of women, both within the government and among
other contending political forces in Sudan. To date, arguments for the abolition of Sharia
have been successfully suppressed by an authoritarian state and are hardly visible in the
public debate, particularly with respect to the woman question. The paradox of the failed
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“civilization project” is thus the strengthening of Islam’s role in politics at a time when the
northern Sudanese state is emerging as a new political entity after southern Sudan decided by
a popular referendum to secede in January 2011.
The signing of the CPA in 2005 ushered in a relative degree of political pluralism and
freedom, which in turn allowed political criticism by many actors to come to the fore. This
has created space for political critique and debate on Islam and the politics of the state
generally, and on Sharia and women in particular. But the debate is intensely politicized and
polarized: the accusations of apostasy toward opposing political contenders show that
powerful symbols and fundamental values are at stake. In this thesis, I explore the politics of
Islam by analyzing three groups promoting competing gender ideologies for and against the
state: the Islamists advocating gender equity, the Islamic feminists promoting gender
equality, and the Salafists propagating gender segregation. The gender ideologies are all
framed within Islam and are linked to different Islamic groups and personalities with widely
different outlooks on women’s rights and Sharia and the role of Islam in the society and state
more generally.
Gender politics is perhaps the most politicized and polarized area in post-CPA Sudan. Recent
reports of public floggings, rapes, arrests, and harassment of women activists show an
Islamist state trying to brutally impose Islamic law on the everyday lives of its citizens at a
time when the government faces fierce national and international pressures. The treatment of
women has become one of the last Islamic markers of a corrupt and politically pragmatic
Islamist state struggling to uphold its Islamic identity and legitimacy. While women’s rights
activists in Sudan are engaged in resistance to, co-optation, and negotiation with the
authoritarian Islamist state, my findings suggest that this activism does not always take the
feminist direction that many scholars expect, policy makers demand, and Western feminist
activists wish for. Posing two alternatives to the official Islamist position of the state,
competing Islamic voices advocate, on the one hand, an “emancipated” Muslim woman,
framed within a rights-based approach which assumes that Sharia law agrees with
international women’s human rights (Islamic feminism); and on the other hand, a “protected”
Muslim woman, framed within a conservative, gender-segregated doctrine which refutes all
non-Islamic laws (Salafism). These may be seen as competing Islamic models for the future
of women in an emerging northern Sudanese state.
The findings thus suggest that the political life of women’s opposition to Islamist
authoritarianism is not to be found in blatant collective defiance of the state nor in complete
compliance, but in between the two opposites. This thesis is concerned with the entanglement
between domination and resistance and thus explores women activists’ strategies of
negotiation, bargaining, accommodation, and co-optation vis-à-vis the Islamist state.
Strategies of resistance do not necessarily take the form of “pure” opposition. Women’s and
men’s counter responses to the Islamist “civilization project” are fragmented  and thus do not
correspond to a collective, organized politics of protest. In post-CPA Sudan, different types
of women’s activism offer qualitatively different and competing gender ideologies within the
framework of Islam and Islamic law. Resistance to the Islamist state in Sudan, then, can be
seen as moving in two conflicting directions. It is thus important not to demonize the Islamist
state while romanticizing political parties, religious movements, and women’s organizations
in opposition as they can be just as discriminatory toward women as the state. While the

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Islamist state’s ideology does not provide full gender equality, resistant Islam is not
necessarily more inclusive with regards to women’s rights.

The Cairo Declaration

The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI) is a declaration of the member
states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference adopted in Cairo, Egypt, in 1990,
[1]
 which provides an overview on the Islamic perspective on human rights, and
affirms Islamic Shari'ah as its sole source. CDHRI declares its purpose to be "general
guidance for Member States [of the OIC] in the field of human rights".
This declaration is widely acknowledged as an Islamic response to the United
Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted in 1948. It guarantees
many of the same rights as the UDHR (cf. Liberal Islam), while at the same time reaffirming
theinequalities inherent in Islamic law and tradition in terms
of religion, gender, sexuality, political rights, and other aspects of contemporary society at
odds with Islamic law and traditions.

Women`s Rights In Islamic and International Human Rights

Schemes

One of the areas where the clash between traditional interpretations of Islamic principles and
international human-rights norms was most acute was that of women's rights. Although
conservatives propounded the notion that full equality for women violated Islamic precepts,
feminists argued that it was patriarchal attitudes and inadequate study of the Islamic sources
that led to the notion that Islam required keeping women in a subordinate position.

In the late nineteenth century, liberal writers like the Egyptian Qāsim Amīn (1865–1908) had
already propounded the thesis that certain problems facing Middle Eastern societies—
despotism, moral degeneration, and the degraded status of women—were not intrinsic to
Islam but were the products of corrupting influences and social customs. While not
advocating full equality for women, Amīn demanded that women's rights should be
enhanced. He also linked the cause of women's freedom to the realization of freedom and
rights for citizens in general. Feminists such as the Egyptian Hudā Shaʿrāwī (1882–1947)
became prominent advocates of women 's rights and emancipation. One of the boldest
attempts to reconcile Islam with full equality for women was offered by al-Ṭāhir al-Ḥaddād,
an Islamic reformer, who in 1930 published Imraʿatunā fi al-sharīʿah wa al-mujtamaʿ (Our
Women in the Sharīʿah and Society), which propounded the idea that Islam had envisaged a
progressive emancipation of women; he advocated the reform of Islamic laws to eliminate

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obstacles to male-female equality in the domestic as well as the public sphere. For the
boldness of its thesis the book was condemned with particular vehemence by conservatives
and its author denounced as a heretic.

Women's equality was also a common theme among Indian Muslim modernist reformers.
Mumtāz ʿAlī (1860–1935) wrote manifestos arguing for women's equality. A conservative
Muslim cleric, he broke with his traditionalist brethren to articulate an Islamic exegetical
basis for women's equality and founded, along with his wife, a journal on women's rights.

Unequivocal support for full equality for women came from Kemal Atatürk, who in the wake
of the Turkish war of independence proclaimed that women had the right to be equal; he
subsequently took measures to remove the disabilities imposed by Turkish custom and
Islamic law—without attempting to reconcile his reforms with Islamic precepts. In the Arab
world, the most dramatic reform was embodied in the Tunisian Law of Personal Status of
1956 promulgated by President Habib Bourguiba. Presented as an Islamic law, the code
undertook bold reforms improving women's status, such as abolishing polygamy and
establishing equal rights for men and women in divorce.

Into the late twentieth century, many Muslim countries preserved laws that discriminated
against women and denied them full civil and political rights, often in the face of
constitutional provisions mandating the equality of all citizens. In general, laws afforded
women considerable equality outside the family; it was in the area of personal status that
discriminatory features taken from traditional interpretations were retained. Saudi Arabia was
notable for its reliance on traditional Islam to justify its refusal to grant women rights and
freedoms widely enjoyed elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Few Muslim countries ratified the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women, and those that chose to ratify did so subject to reservations
regarding various central provisions. The reservations made by Bangladesh, Egypt, Libya,
and Tunisia were specifically justified by their need to adhere to Islamic law.

General Observations

• More than half a billion of the women in the world are Muslim. They are concentrated in
approximately 45 Muslim-majority countries in a broad belt from Senegal to the Philippines,
with the largest number on the South Asian subcontinent. The most populous single Muslim-
majority nation is Indonesia.

• Monolithic stereotypes of Muslim women have long prevailed in the West, distorting the
enormous interregional, intraregional, and class variations in their circumstances and status.

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• Serious social scientific scholarship on women worldwide was scarce until the 1970s. Since
then the study of women, including Muslim women, has exploded. The social science
literature on Muslim women is now voluminous and growing.

• The Western understanding of Muslim women remains unduly influenced by evidence from
a single region. The social science scholarship most familiar to the West about Muslim
women focuses disproportionately on the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA).
Often seen as the land of Muslims par excellence, MENA is home to fewer than 20 percent of
the world’s Muslims.

• Women in Muslim societies and communities face gender-based inequalities associated

with the so-called “patriarchal gender system.” Aspects of this originally pre-capitalist system
persist in rural areas across a wide swath of lands, both Muslim and non-Muslim, from East
Asia to North Africa. The system, regardless of religion, features kin-based extended
families, male domination, early marriage (and consequent high fertility), restrictive codes of
female behavior, the linkage of family honor with female virtue, and occasionally,
polygamous family structure. In Muslim areas, veiling and sex-segregation form part of the
gender system.

• Most current scholarship rejects the idea that the Islamic religion is the primary determinant
of the status and conditions of Muslim women. Because of the wide variation in Muslim
women’s status and conditions, researchers typically attribute more causal salience to
determining factors that themselves vary across nations and regions. To account for the
variable situations of Muslim women, scholars cite as causal factors, for example, variations
in the economic structures and strategies of nations, or variations in the preexisting cultural
value patterns of a given locale.

• The sacred writings of Islam, like those of the other Abrahamic faiths⎯Christianity and
Judaism⎯have been interpreted in ways that support patriarchal social relations. Until the last
two decades, Western observers of the plight of Muslim women have portrayed Islam as
uniquely patriarchal and incompatible with women’s equality. Most scholars now see Islam
as no more inherently misogynist than the other major monotheistic traditions. Library of
Congress – Federal Research Division Women in Islamic Societies .Many cultural practices
associated with Islam and criticized as oppressive to women are misidentified as “Islamic.”
Controversial or egregious practices such as female circumcision, polygamy, early marriage,
and honor killings are not limited to Muslim populations, and among Muslims such practices
are geographically specific or otherwise far from universal.

The Legal context: Women`s Legal Position And Rights

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The legal systems under which women live in Muslim countries are mostly dual
systems.They consist, on the one hand, of civil law, which is indebted to Western legal
systems, and on the other hand, of family or personal status law, which is mainly built upon
Sharia, Islamic religious-based law. The civil law as well as the constitutions of many
Muslim states provide for equal rights between women and men. However, Islamic family
law as variously manifested in Muslim nations poses obstacles to women’s equality.

• Islamic family law, which addresses marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance, has
long been a target for reform. Many state elites have pressed for family law reform to further
state interests by removing hindrances to women’s full participation in the labor force and
politics.

• Reforms of family law often have been limited by the state’s perceived need to appease
conservative social elements and, since the 1970s, growing Islamist movements. Islamist
movements, sometimes through outright state takeover, as in Iran, occasionally have
succeeded in rolling back “women-friendly” reforms previously achieved.

• Family law reforms continue, often thanks to the pressure of proliferating groups of Muslim
activists for women rights. In 2004, a major success was the overhaul of conservative family
law in Morocco, which now boasts a relatively progressive system.

• In many Muslim states, the substance of family law and its actual implementation differ in
ways that somewhat mitigate the gender imbalance of the laws on the books. Women are able
and sometimes officially encouraged to exploit rules and loopholes to plug discriminatory
provisions in the law. Women can, for example, write clauses into marriage contracts that
make taking another wife grounds for divorce and for post divorce division of marital assets.
A growing form of feminist activism at present aims to educate women about such strategies
and loopholes.

Demographics, Health, and Education: Ongoing “Sociological

Modernization”

• Whatever hindrances to equality Muslim legal systems pose for women, Muslim women
across all regions have made rapid progress in recent decades in a number of statistically
measurable aspects of life, notably education and health. In these areas, Muslim nations have
significantly reduced both gender gaps and the formerly wide differences in average
attainment between Muslim and non-Muslim societies. In education, for example, a
generation ago women in MENA had among the lowest levels of education in the world.
MENA females now have achieved parity with males at some levels of schooling. Library of

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Congress – Federal Research Division Women in Islamic Societies.Macro-level statistics also
show a rapid reduction in Muslim and non-Muslim differences in reproduction-related
behaviors. In the recent past, Muslim women exhibited comparatively high rates of fertility
and low rates of contraception use. They now are participating in the worldwide trend of
declining fertility. In some cases, such as in Iran, they have attained below-replacement
fertility. Iran, in fact, effected the most rapid demographic transition ever seen.

• Viewed in terms of large-scale statistical indicators, Muslim women are becoming ever
more like other women. This fact undercuts the assumption that “Islam” would inhibit
Muslim women’s participation in such worldwide trends as declining childbearing. On
average, broad social and economic forces for change override whatever special influence
Islam might have.participating in the worldwide trend of declining fertility. In some cases,
such as in Iran, they have attained below-replacement fertility. Iran, in fact, effected the most
rapid demographic transition ever seen.

• Viewed in terms of large-scale statistical indicators, Muslim women are becoming ever
more like other women. This fact undercuts the assumption that “Islam” would inhibit
Muslim women’s participation in such worldwide trends as declining childbearing. On
average, broad social and economic forces for change override whatever special influence
Islam might have.

Marriage, Family, Household, and Everyday Life

• Inthe sphere of the family, macro-level statistics indicate a shift to a nuclear family from a
pattern of extended family and multi-generational households. Statistics also indicate that
Muslims are delaying marriage and increasing their rate of non-marriage. Such shifts spell
erosion of the traditional kinship-based patriarchal family, which persists as an ideal among
conservatives.

• Caught between the traditional patriarchal family model and an egalitarian nuclear model,
today’s Muslim families have been called “neopatriarchal.” They continue to feature intra-
familial gender-based inequality.

• Scholarship within the last decade has begun to address the darkest aspects of such familial
gender-based inequality, including the hitherto taboo topics of domestic violence, honor
killings, and female circumcision. Such charged issues have figured prominently on the
agendas of women’s rights advocates in Muslim communities since the Fourth World
Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.

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 Women and the Productive Economy: Necessity Or

Empowerment?

• Establishing the levels of the labor force participation of Muslim women is a challenge to
researchers because a high proportion of women’s paid work, as in all developing economies,
occurs in the informal economy.

• In at least one heavily Muslim region, namely, MENA, female labor force participation
appears to be exceptionally low, although growing. In other Muslim-majority lands, for
example, Southeast Asia, it is high.

• The levels of Muslim women’s participation in the paid labor force are best explained by a
particular economy’s development strategy and consequent need for female labor, rather than
by, for example, religious ideology or cultural beliefs in male breadwinner/female-
homemaker roles. In the oil-boom years prior to the mid-1980s, the

oil-centered economies of MENA did not require female labor in order to grow. Thus, oil-
rich nations such as Saudi Arabia had few women in the labor force. By contrast, Library of
Congress – Federal Research Division Women in Islamic Societies .Muslim counties that
sought to develop through labor-intensive industrial production, such as Tunisia, Malaysia, or
Indonesia, feature high female labor force participation.

• The globalization of the past quarter century⎯i.e., the increasing international integration of
markets in the global capitalist economy⎯is a fundamental factor in the evolving role of
women in Muslim societies, as in others.

• Globalization increased economic and job insecurity and thus the need for more than one
breadwinner in a family. At the same time, in many national economies, globalization has
reduced the proportion of formal sector employment, which was in any case out of reach for
many Muslim women. Globalization also has prompted the withdrawal of the state from
service provision, thereby increasing women’s family burdens. The effect of globalization on
Muslim women thus often has been increased hardship. At the same time, many women have
reported an enhanced sense of empowerment as a result of their enlarged public role and
earnings.

Women in Muslim States and Politics

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• Women have gained basic political rights⎯the right to vote and to stand for office⎯in almost
all Muslim-majority states, with the last major holdouts, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, on the
verge of joining the others. Despite having such rights, Muslim women, like women
worldwide, are underrepresented in high office and legislatures. However, a number of
Muslim countries outside of MENA have seen women in high office in numbers that exceed
world averages. Such cases of above-average office-holding generally reflect quota systems
and/or the power of family ties in politics.

• Although Muslim women are underrepresented in formal politics, their activism within
Muslim states for the advancement of women’s rights and interests is widespread and
growing. Advocacy and activist groups have proliferated, exhibiting great variety in their
political complexion, in their avowal of religious commitment, and in the radicalism of their
demands for change.

• In the 1990s, secular feminists and so-called Islamic feminists, formerly at odds, achieved
some rapprochement. Secular feminists now recognize value in the other camp’s
preoccupation with providing woman-friendly “rereadings” of Islam’s sacred texts. Justifying
feminist activism in Islamic terms shields feminist demands from the charge that they are
alien Western impositions. Islamic feminists increasingly see Islamic precepts and universal
(e.g., United Nations) articulations of human/women’s rights as compatible.

• A significant development for Muslim women’s rights activists in the past decade has been
the growth of transnational networks, such as Women Living Under Muslim Laws and Sisters
in Islam. Exploiting the revolution in communications, these networks advocate legal reform
and organize resistance to Islamist threats to women’s progress.

Studies on Women’s Participation in the Informal Economy

All of the scholarly literature on the impacts of globalization and structural adjustment
programs agrees that a major consequence is the expansion of informal sector employment as
a proportion of total employment. In Muslim countries, as elsewhere, many of the growing
numbers of job-seeking women must settle for various kinds of casualized, irregular, and part
time employment. This growth of the informal sector has elicited increasing scholarly interest
among researchers on women, despite the challenges the sector poses for study. The
International Labor Organization has taken up the challenge of quantifying the growth of
informal sector employment worldwide for both women and men, providing published
statistical sources. Going beyond such attempts to grasp informal sector work statistically, a
body of studies is developing that illuminates the nature and conditions of women’s work in
the sector.

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Although women are most amenable to study when they are part of the formal economy
many researchers realize that the study of women’s informal work is crucial for a true picture
of their economic conditions and contributions. For that matter, many researchers argue, no
true picture of the functioning of any economy, particularly any developing economy, is
possible without taking into account both informal sector paid work and mostly female
unpaid work, work that is uncounted and out of sight at home or in family fields.

A useful collection of articles, edited by Richard Lobban, on the informal economy and
women’s participation in the Middle East covers women in numerous countries who work as
microentrepreneurs, domestic workers, home-based subcontractors, and sweatshop workers,
among other activities.

Within the body of work on the informal sector generally, there is also research that singles
out a particularly challenging type of informal work to study, namely, home-based wage
work. Located in the space of the family, work carried out at home for pay shares the
invisibility of unpaid housework. A number of articles in a collection edited by Eileen Boris
and Elisabeth Prügl on homeworkers worldwide focus specifically on home work by women
in Muslim communities.205 In that collection, Anita Weiss describes home-based work in
Lahore, Pakistian, Zohreh Ghavamshahidi examines the lives carpet weavers in Iran, and
Dewi Haryani Susilastuti analyzes home-based work as a survival strategy in rural Java.

The research on the informal sector includes studies of women in particular lines of work in
particular countries and localities, sometimes rural and sometimes urban. A high proportion
of such studies draw upon economically informed anthropological research. Several good
examples of such work focus on Turkey, which has among the highest proportions of
economically active women in the MENA region, with a particularly high number of women
in agriculture and carpet making, where they participate largely for informal compensation. A
well-regarded study by feminist economist Günseli Berik, for example, focuses on women in
farming households in rural Turkey who weave carpets that their husbands and fathers sell to
intermediaries or dealers. A study by economist Simel Esim on self-employed Turkish
women discusses the reasons for their relatively low earnings, as compared to self-employed
men. Aysenur Okten, focusing on urban Turkish woman, looks at the relationship between
their roles in production and political Islam.

Also focusing on Turkey, an anthropological monograph by Jenny B. White examines

women’s labor in poor, working-class neighborhoods in Istanbul, documenting how money
unites and liberates women. The small family-based enterprises that White observed were
often built upon kinship ties, required low capital, and had low risk. Such means, although
modest, allowed women to see themselves as productive and to enhance their status, despite
severe economic and cultural constraints. A similarly detailed anthropological monograph on
Jordan by Shirin Shukri offers a portrait of life for women, especially economic life, in a rural
village. On Palestinian women and the informal economy, several studies of note include one
by Simel Esim and Eileen Kuttab that discusses the levels of women’s informal employment

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and he struggles it entails. Another, by Rema Hammami, seeks to account for the absence of
Palestinian women from the formal labor force in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. An edited
collection on Indonesia by Kathryn Robinson and Sharon Bessell features articles on gender
and equity in development, including studies of women’s recent labor market experience.

Women’s Activism for Building the Nation, Development,

Human/Women`s Rights

Because Muslim women’s participation in formal politics as high officeholders and decision-
makers remains low, research on Muslim women and politics has generally given higher
priority to other forms of women’s political participation, for example, participation in
political parties and social movements⎯nationalist, feminist, or Islamist⎯and to the various
ways in which women have organized themselves for group action. Such scholarly work on
women in movements, organizations, and groups⎯often stretching the definition of the
“political”⎯is frequently carried out by researchers other than political scientists⎯historians,
sociologists, anthropologists, and researchers in interdisciplinary fields. Within conventional
political science, as in conventional economics, women in general and Muslim women in
particular remain understudied and relatively invisible.

A topic area comparatively well covered, chiefly by researchers whose home disciplines are
history, sociology, and anthropology, is that of women’s struggles within Muslim states for
the advancement of women’s rights and interests. In broad outlines, many researchers agree
upon a succession of phases in such struggles. In the first phase, whose timing varied but
everywhere antedated the past two decades, women were mobilized and incorporated in their
nation’s modern projects of decolonization, nation-state construction, and economic
development. In various locales across MENA, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, as Kumari
Jayawardena recounts, women, organized as groups, participated in national liberation and
nation-building and simultaneously engaged with the state and its gender policies topolitical
parties and social movements⎯nationalist, feminist, or Islamist⎯and to the various ways in
which women have organized themselves for group action. Such scholarly work on women in
movements, organizations, and groups⎯often stretching the definition of the “political”⎯is
frequently carried out by researchers other than political scientists⎯historians, sociologists,
anthropologists, and researchers in interdisciplinary fields. Within conventional political

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science, as in conventional economics, women in general and Muslim women in particular
remain understudied and relatively invisible.

In the first phase, whose timing varied but everywhere antedated the past two decades,
women were mobilized and incorporated in their Jayawardena recounts, women, organized
as groups, participated in national liberation and nation-building and simultaneously engaged
with the state and its gender policies to push for greater gender equality.240nation’s modern
projects of decolonization, nation-state construction, and economic development. In various
locales across MENA, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, as Kumari Jayawardena recounts,
women, organized as groups, participated in national liberation and nation-building and
simultaneously engaged with the state and its gender policies to push for greater gender
equality

In the second phase of struggles for women’s interests, however, women’s organized efforts
often became de-linked from state action. As of the 1980s, women in various Muslim
countries began to form autonomous groups whose mission was to advocate and work for
women’s advancement. These emerging groups varied greatly in their political complexion,
with secular leftists on one extreme, groups affiliated with Islamic or even Islamist
movements on the other, and many types of women’s advocacy groups in between. The
secular leftists, along with secular liberals, typically found the actions hitherto taken by states
on behalf of women too limited. While state interests prompted the mobilization of women in
the public sphere as either political or economic actors, state-initiated reformist actions
frequently allowed women’s fate in the private family sphere to remain the charge of
traditional patriarchal interests.

Secular advocates of women’s interests also grew alarmed about the detrimental effects on
women of two related phenomena increasingly evident in the 1980s, namely, globalization
and the growing power of Islamism. The inadequate defense by states of women’s right’s in
the face of these threats prompted secular women’s groups to formulate independent and
more avowedly “feminist” agendas. These agendas resembled and sometimes drew
inspiration from the agendas of what Nayereh Tohidi called “global feminism,” referring to
the international women’s movement that manifested itself in U.N.-sponsored venues as of
1975, such as world conferences and NGO forums. At the same time that groups of secular
feminists mobilized for change in various Muslim societies, religiously committed groups
emerged that sought to advance women’s interests within a faith-based framework. Such
groups, frequently identified as “Islamic feminists” by others, usually eschewed the label
“feminist” themselves, associating that term with the West and hostility to Islam.244 Still,
religiously-based groups often pressed for changes that overlapped with the changes sought
by feminists who accepted the label and spoke in secular terms.

A third phase of women’s struggle in Muslim lands has recently been singled out in the
scholarly literature on Muslim women and politics. As described by Valentine Moghadam,
Margot Badran, Nayereh Tohidi, and others, this phase, evident since the 1990s, is

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characterized by a certain rapprochement between ostensibly opposite types of activists for
women’s rights⎯the secular and the religious⎯as well as the growth of transnational networks
of women pressing for women’s advancement.The third phase also features continuing
proliferation of types of groups dedicated to improving women’s lives. The groups include,
as women’s organizations have in the past, all manner of charitable and women’s advocacy
organizations, as described by Dawn Chatty.In addition, a new and growing phenomenon,
particularly in the wake of the Fourth United Nations Congress on Women in Beijing in
1995, are numerous women’s NGOs, many with international linkages. A number of
observers regard this third phase of women’s activism as a seedbed both for the modernizing
reform of Islamic interpretation and practice and for contributions to the wider project of
democratization in Muslim contexts.

Conclusion

Born only in the past two decades, the voluminous and rapidly expanding social science
scholarship on women in Muslims societies offers an impressive corrective for the monolithic
stereotypes that have long prevailed about the world’s half a billion Muslim women. The
scholarly literature now begins to do justice to their national, social, ethnic, and political
diversity and to reflect the complexity of their lives. In so doing, the literature calls into
question simplistic assumptions about the salience of the Islamic religion in shaping Muslim
women’s lives. The enormous diversity of those lives belies the idea that the single factor of
“Islam” could be a primary determinant of Muslim women’s status and well-being. Rather,
Islam itself is caught up in, and colored by, the specific histories and socioeconomic
circumstances that shape the lives of Muslim women.

At the same time that the new scholarship underscores that Muslim women are enormously
diverse, it underscores that they as a population also participate in worldwide trends and are
not as distinctive among women as was formerly assumed. Across regions, Muslim women
are on average in better health and better educated compared to previous generations, and
more on a par with the men of their generation. Delaying marriage and having fewer children,
Muslim women are rapidly reducing or eliminating the distinction between their marriage and
childbearing patterns and those seen in non-Muslim societies of comparable levels of
development. Muslim women also are closing the gap between their rates of labor force
participation and those of non-Muslim women. In the realm of politics, they share with other
women the experience of marginalization, and, increasingly, the determination to mobilize
against it, as well as the other forms of disadvantage they experience as women.In the first
phase ,state building elites considered nation state construction and the improvement of
women`s legal and political right to be a piece.Greater gender parity was generally
considered with national development and progress.

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 Bibliography

1.Women And Islam: Critical Concepts Of Sociology – Edited and compiled by Haideh
Moghissi.

2.www.clarionprject.org

3.www.cmi.no

4.www.oxfordislamic studies.com

5.www.loc.gov

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