Madeleine Burns
Scottish Refugee Council
Scotland Young Thinker of the Year, Summer Programme

Islam is a fundamental and terminal barrier to women's rights in the Middle East. In pursuit of the preservation of honour, it is permissible to stone an adulteress to death. Flogging is a standard punishment for immorality and a man may divorce his wife on a whim. We're all familiar with the extremes of gender based human rights abuses reported with such grim relish by certain media, whether out of well meaning pity or as an attempt to justify questionable wars as moral crusades. Women's rights in the Middle East are a sexy topic and one which has gathered patrons including Cherie Blair, keen to be seen to extend a maternal hand to fix 'This Islamic Problem'.
     The reality is however that woman across the Middle East have been petitioning for improved rights and a re-examination of the main religious texts since the 18th-century and have left in their wake a myriad of movements ranging from the strictly secular to the inherently Islamist.
     There are the Islamic feminists, pushing to 'critique the Islamic tradition and develop alternatives and solutions inspired by Islamic values'. They are not to be confused with the Muslim feminists for whom 'defence of women's rights is part of the defence of Islam' and who remain totally separate from the Islamist feminists who seek to find solutions within the text and within an Islamic context. Don't even get me started on the New feminist traditionalists, the Pragmatists and the Neo Islamists. My point is simple. Women in the Middle East are not unaware of their situation. They are not a passive collective waiting for the bra-burners to come and save them but nor has the work of 200 years liberated them from institutionalised rights violations.
     There are a number of reasons why Western feminism cannot be copied and pasted onto the Arab world, both historical and ethical. Historically, there is a deep mistrust of feminism and a perception that it is simply an Orientalist, colonialist left-over. 'Stories of the poor treatment of Muslim women were used by colonialist powers and missionaries to discredit Islam…proof of the inferiority of Islam and the justification of their efforts to undermine Muslim religion and society'. The result was inevitably reactionary, with the colonialist promotion of women's rights being used as a tool to justify suppression. Feminism quickly became seen as the weapon of the enemy and unsurprisingly a defiant attitude was forged and 'the Islamist position regarding women has become even more retrogressive and reactionary', a badge of honour worn as proof of post-colonialist resistance. By tarring feminism as a neo-colonialist weapon, it is easy for 'opponents of women's rights to rally opposition feminist ideas, while local development projects (such as N.G.O.s) find themselves open to accusations of betrayal.' There is an extended argument that 'feminism is an illegal immigrant and an alien import to the Arab world and as such is not relevant to the people and their culture'.
     Ethically, it is no easier to reconcile feminism and Islam. Islam does argue that there are differences between men and women, not negative or positive but rather a complementary coupling which celebrates the family/protector dynamic. This 'typecasting' is not popular with the feminists.
     The most enduring and challenging problem with feminism in the Middle East is that of adopting a secular position on matters which are traditionally dictated by religion and with asking Muslim women to ignore or even contradict their faith. Stripping women of their religion also strips them of their identity, their social network, sense of belonging and psychological support. 'Therefore secularist arguments will have little or no appeal to Muslim women'.
     Having established that secularist feminism is not the emancipative tool it has been heralded as in the West, let us look at the alternatives. The argument is that through reinterpretation of the central texts, new conclusions can be reached within an Islamic framework that promote women's rights and are sensitive to a culture dominated by family. According to some 'the Quran provides significant rights for women, which are often far more wide reaching than the rights which secular legal systems provide for the status of female citizens'. In Iran these techniques have been used with some effect. Feminist theologians there managed to use Islamic arguments to achieve greater restrictions of a man's right to repudiation and to establish a domestic wage. They argue that were women to have better access to education, they would have a better understanding of what rights they are afforded by the Qur'an.
     The reality is, however, that despite their best efforts, women in Iran are still flogged for accusations of immorality. The headscarf, while sliding back on their heads, is still mandatory and death by stoning was prevented only by international, not domestic intervention. In Jordan the honour killing, while condemned, is still legally sanctioned and female genital mutilation is still carried out on around 60% of middle-class Egyptian women. Most Muslim countries make the differentiation between family and civil law and where it is implemented, with the exception of Saudi Arabia and Iran, it is only implemented on family law, the area of law which most affects women. This means that while other areas of society are evolving and changing with the times, the laws which really have the power to make a difference to women's lives still have their feet firmly in thousand year old clay.
     I acknowledge and respect that there are women working with Islam to bring about change and I respect equally those who choose to leave God out of it. The fact is that there is more to this than religion. The practice of stoning is pre-Islamic, female genital mutilation is thought to be an African rather than an Islamic practice and the Prophet himself thought the act of arbitrary divorce was a shameful custom. But still they go on and still the active choice is made to use or manipulate Islam to sustain these ends.
     Feminism which was born and raised to another culture cannot overcome the barriers laid down under the banner of Islam and all the interpretation in the world is not going to unseat a fundamentally patriarchal religion 'which provides men with status, control and authority over women, and which supports a system of inequitable gender relations'. What lies at the heart of this issue is that women are actually fighting to overcome not just religion or poor interpretation, they are fighting against their society's choice to maintain a subjugative position for its women, whether as an anti-Western statement or from a genuine belief that it is God's will but always in the name of Islam. A third way, a new and organic way, is needed to bring real change to the region.
     While by no means perfect, when Tunisia, as part of a programme of modernisation, chose to secularise its law, polygamy was not even entertained as an option and abortion was legalised. Tunisia is no less of a Middle Eastern country but it hasn't lost Islam. It simply chose to separate state and private lives and in doing so, significantly improved the lives of its people. Feminism is not the answer. Islam is not the answer. If the Middle East truly wants to promote the development of women's rights, it must face major societal and institutional change which does not resist Islam as secular feminism does, nor work within impossible parameters as Islamic feminism does. Rather it must bypass Islam entirely and begin a movement that isn't tied to the past, but rather a movement that has an unjaded, uncompromised and egalitarian future in its sights.

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