No Conflict At All: Promoting Women's Rights Through Religion

Sometimes it is worth flying 28 hours (including 8 hours' transit) to go to a conference when you come out of it feeling inspired. I was invited to represent Musawah at a human rights defenders conference at the Carter Centre in Atlanta recently. This is an annual conference that the centre organises together with Emory University and this year, the theme was 'Of Heaven and Earth:Religion, Belief and Women's Rights'.

I already wrote a short summary of it  in my column this week. The conference was actually preceded by a two-day workshop. The first day we got to know one another through small group discussions around our work. Participants came from several countries, mostly Africa and the Middle East plus academics from various universities in the US, and representatives from some UN agencies. There were presentations from various NGOs working with religious leaders to change society's attitudes towards women and eradicate violence against women in various forms.(For information on Tostan, see here.)

On the second day there were presentations on how to use the Internet and social media for social change. One of the most interesting was RisingVoices which is part of GlobalVoicesOnline which is an international community of bloggers writing on various issues around the world. RisingVoices provides grants and training for groups wanting to learn how to use the internet and start blogs. For instance, in Egypt a group of women in the village of Minya were given classes on how to use the internet and started a blog about their daily lives, providing an insight which would otherwise be neglected by most media. Many of the participants in the conference were quite new to blogging so I was asked to talk about my blog a little bit as well.

Another interesting presentation was by David Kobia, one of the founders of an internet platform called Ushahidi, which uses crowdsourcing to gather information. Ushahidi was begun to monitor the elections in Kenya and now it has been used to do the same in many countries as well as for disaster relief work, for example in Haiti, Queensland and Japan. In Egypt, it has been used to develop a map to monitor cases of street sexual harassment. (I have been wondering if anyone used Ushahidi in the Sarawak elections. If not, this is something that Bersih 2.0 should consider for the next GE.)

The actual conference was chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and Prof Abdullahi An-Naim of Emory University, with a keynote speech by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navenethem Pillay. At 86, President Carter is still sharp and speaks eloquently about how his beliefs as a Christian necessarily makes him a human rights defender. He was a very involved Chair, asking many questions from presenters. Prof Abdullahi is very familiar to us at SIS, having been here several times for various seminars and workshops.

Listening to the presenters, you become filled with hope that change can actually happen. One of the most impressive presentations was by Rana Husseini, a Jordanian journalist whose writings on honour killings in her country finally resulted in tougher punishments for perpetrators. (yes, there are journalists who actually work to change society for the better...).

Sindhi Medar-Ghould from BAOBAB Nigeria talked about the work they do to promote women's rights in that country, also often working with religious leaders. Bishop Timothy Njoya from Men for the Equality of Men and Women in Kenya talked about the research his organisation has been doing on men and boys and what constitutes masculinity. He kept us very entertained with his findings as to why women live longer than men ( "because women nowadays do more work with their hands than men, and this stimulates the brain"). But he also talked about some interesting studies on animals.Apaprently animals are incapable of either rape or child marriage because they cannot have sex before reaching a particular physiological age and male animals can never have sex without being invited by their female partners. Therefore his conclusion was that violence against women is entirely a human affliction.

There were actually three participants from Malaysia, Ratna Osman, Acting Executive Director of Sisters in Islam, Zarizana Abdul Aziz, Chair of Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) and myself. Ratna shared SIS' work while I talked about Musawah, the global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family. We all felt very proud when Navi Pillay, the UN Human Rights Commissioner mentioned the work of Musawah in her opening keynote speech and when President Carter told me that he had actually read one of SIS' publications.

Myself, Fulata Mayo, Jane Connors and Pres Carter on our panel.

One of the benefits of these meetings is really meeting some incredible people. I shared a panel with the irrepressible Fulata Moyo from the World Council of Churches who talked about the gender rights work done by the WCC with great fluency and humour. One of the most impressive speakers was Rev Alison Boden, who is the Dean of Religious Life and the chapel at Princeton University, who started off as an actress, worked with paediatric AIDS patients and does a lot on interreligious work. She spoke with such quiet authority and wisdom that you just had to pay attention.

Other people who were there were Bani Dugal, the principal representative of the Baha'i International Community to the UN, Jane Connors, from the Office of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights and Jasmeen Patheya from Blank Noise, an organisation in India who uses the arts to fight street sexual harassment, or 'eve-teasing'. Pamela Scully, the chair of the Department of Women's Studies at Emory University, and Fatma Emam, from Nazra Feminist Studies in Cairo, which is responsible for the Harassmap I mentioned above, were both tweeting up live along with me during the conference.

Me and the Prez!

And of course, meeting President Carter and his wife Rosalyn was a big treat. A truly lovely couple, very dedicated to each other (about to celebrate their 65th anniversary this year!) and to human rights.

Mrs Carter, Fulata and me!

For the concluding session, I was asked to speak once again on the panel with President Carter and some of the other participants. Here's the text of my statement:

My summary of Heaven and Earth - Marina Mahathir, Musawah

I have to start by stating that although I belong to an organisation that works from within religion to address gender inequality and injustice, and I think of myself as a believer, I cannot say that my experiences with religious leaders, particularly from my own religious tradition, have been happy ones. As Azza Karam mentioned earlier, in 2003 I had the privilege of chairing a conference on Islam and AIDS attended by both religious leaders and activists which to this day I think of as the most traumatic five days of my life, despite some very good outcomes from it. I have been repeatedly deeply hurt and mystified as to why the religion that I was born into could be so cruel towards those who are oppressed, poor and marginalised when I was always brought up in my family to believe that it is above all a compassionate one. After all we are taught to begin everything by invoking the name of Allah the Beneficient and the Merciful.

However one of the things that happened to me when I worked in HIV was that I found myself being drawn more and more towards religion rather than away from it. How could this not be when HIV deals every day with life and death, the 2 things over which I believe are in the hands of our Creator. So it was AIDS that brought me to my faith. And it was AIDS that brought me to human rights and of course gender equality.

Along the way my greatest challenges were when I came across men and sometimes women supposedly of faith who thought of human rights as alien to my faith. Who manipulated compassionate precepts in order to justify stigma and discrimination. For instance a mufti once said to me that yes we are enjoined to visit and care for the sick. But we should ask how they got it first. The implication was that if it was their own fault, then there was no need to visit them. Similarly there were ulama who were completely indifferent to the plight of women and children infected by HIV because they thought this is what they deserved because their husbands and fathers had sinned.

I don't have a lot of religious education but I instinctively knew this was wrong. But I was also blessed to have met compassionate scholars who gave me interpretations that I could use to actually help people, rather than harm them. What a revelation this was!

And it was the same with women. How is it possible that this religion which originally brought so many rights for women could now be the basis for so much abuse and violence? It was the pioneering work of Sisters in Islam, which I have been affiliated with since its inception, that changed, or rather confirmed my view of my own religion, that it did include and value me and my sisters and daughters and not the other way round.

Still my encounters with Muslim religious leaders were almost universally disappointing.

Until I came here. For these few days I have listened with astonishment at one after another, religious leaders from all faith traditions who are with all humility admitting that their own traditions have not supported half their congregations, who are not only completely immersed in human rights work but also in promoting gender equality. When I listened to the work of Toscan in Senegal, it made me wonder, which is the more developed country, Senegal or my country, Malaysia where the National Fatwa Council recently issued a fatwa to say that female circumcision is a must for Muslim women, especially since you can have it done in perfectly sterile environments in hospitals.

Not only have I been encouraged by religious leaders from my own faith, listening to religious leaders from other faiths and traditions has made me have faith in my own. Because it made me feel we are all one, we all believe in the same Creator, even if we do it in different ways.

I do know we still have a long way to go. As my Indonesian sister has pointed out, many of us live in far from ideal political systems and religion is no less influenced by politics as anything else. So in promoting equality and justice in religion, we must also promote justice and equality in our political environment because even as we may want to separate secular spaces from religious spaces, in real life there is much overlap. Equality and justice thus has to permeate all spheres of life in order for us to have the holistic enjoyment of human rights.

So I leave here with much hope. I have been so happy to meet so many good people here and I hope we continue to stay in touch and support one another. And one day, insyaAllah, our work will become less and less needed.



I left the conference feeling hopeful and exhilarated by the discussion. There are actually religious leaders who believe in human rights and women's rights! It makes me wish I could drag a neanderthal like this one in front of them and get him to defend himself against them!