Under Islam, women are entitled to voting
rights. In fact, voting is seen as a religious duty for all
Muslims regardless of gender.
Yet as Huntington Beach resident Maria Khani
pointed out to me recently, had she lived in the United States
in 1908 instead of 2008, she, like other women in America,
would not have been allowed to cast a vote. Her religion’s
tenets would have been trumped by affairs of state.
And so it still is in some countries now,
even Islamic countries that are on record as having granted
women suffrage at an earlier time. But that doesn’t
change what the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet
teach about women’s rights.
In the 7th century, at a time when women were
often at the mercy of misogynist societies, Islam bequeathed
them rights equitable if not always equivalent to those of
men.
Today, how much a Muslim woman enjoys these
rights depends in part on where she lives. And living in the
United States may give her the best chance of gaining their
full advantage.
Here, women can safely champion their rights.
“In some countries if they stand for
their rights, they’re going to be in trouble,”
Khani acknowledged. “Some people will pay the price.”
As she sees it, that is all the more reason
for Muslim women like her to speak up. Slowly, she believes,
their voices can bring about change.
Khani, who was born in England and graduated
from Damascus University with a bachelor’s degree in
French literature, is dedicated to educating Muslims and non-Muslim
about the rights of Muslim women.
The rights she lists are those also enumerated
by Islamic scholar Sayed Moustafa Al-Qazwini in a book, a
dialogue between himself and a Muslim woman named Fatma Saleh,
titled “A New Perspective: Women in Islam,” published
in 2001.
Iraqi-born Al-Qazwini is the founding Imam
of the Islamic Education Center of Orange County and a graduate
of the Islamic seminary in Qum, Iran. Saleh, who describes
herself as “an average Muslim woman,” was born
in Lebanon and raised in Southern California.
In his introduction to their discourse, Al-Qazwini
writes that a Muslim woman is at liberty to own property as
well as to sell it of her own free will. She can inherit property
from her father, her mother, her siblings or her husband;
in marriage, her dowry is considered her own.
She can seek to be educated. She is permitted
to work and to manage her own income, but she is never obligated
or required to work.
In Islam, financial responsibility falls to
men: Husbands must provide for their wives; fathers must provide
for their daughters. If a woman has no father and no husband,
then her financial care rests with another man, a brother
or perhaps an uncle.
In our day and age and culture, this may strike
us as enforced dependency; but in “A New Perspective,”
Al-Qazwini tells Saleh, “Islam has preserved the dignity
of women by liberating them from the exceedingly great tasks
of physically laboring or mentally exhausting themselves in
their livelihood.”
This enables a woman, he explains, “to
pursue [her] most important job — to raise a morally
upright and respectable family.”
This, too, is Khani’s message: Raising
her children is a woman’s highest calling.
Yet when a reporter wrote recently that she
said the “Muslim culture encourages women to stay home
and cook, clean and care for their children, rather than find
a job, to keep the fabric of family intact,” Khani felt
she was misconstrued.
“I said,” she told me on the phone,
her frustration clearly evident, “women in Islam do
not have to do that.”
As with much in Islam, it’s nuanced,
a matter of priorities: The kids come first.
Mothering may be a woman’s paramount
role, but Islam does not limit her solely to it. And when
it comes to cooking and cleaning, as Khani understands the
Qur’an, if a woman’s husband can afford to pay
someone to do those things, he should.
“Women have the right to work outside
the house,” she insists. Al-Qazwini would add a footnote:
with her husband’s permission.
He tells Saleh in “A New Perspective”
that a man cannot prevent his wife from pursuing a religious
education. However, when it comes to seeking a degree or work
in her field of study, he says, a wife is not right to so
without her husband’s consent.
Even so, Al-Qazwini instructs, a husband should
try to accommodate his wife’s aspirations. He quotes
from the Qur’an: “Live with [women] on a footing
of kindness and equity.” And “treat [your wife]
in a just manner.”
In Islam there are rights, “haq,”
and also obligations, “hukom.” The latter, for
both genders, includes things such as prayer and fasting and
almsgiving.
For women, according to the traditions embraced
by Al-Qazwini, Saleh and Khani, hukom for women also includes
what is commonly called hijab, covering her body from head
to foot except for her hands and her face. Interpretations
of the ordinance as anything other than hukom, Al-Qazwini
describes as efforts to be “politically correct.”
In her introduction to “A New Perspective,”
Saleh writes that she once wondered whether there were “truly
such a concept as Muslim women’s rights.” She
saw Islam as many non-Muslim Westerners do, as “domineering,
circumscribable, and prejudicial against women.”
In her quest for understanding, she found
that isolated readings of Qur’anic verses often obscure
their intended purposes.
When, for example, restitution required for
the death of a woman is reckoned at half the sum mandated
for the death of a man, it is not because, Saleh explains,
the life of a woman is seen as inherently worth less.
It is because a man is responsible for the
livelihood of his family.
Should a woman by some turn of events be the
family’s breadwinner, restitution for her death would
be equal to that of a man.
“Ignorance about Islam has been a major
opponent of Muslim women,” Saleh writes. Muslim women
do have rights: Fatma Saleh and Maria Khani are urging them
to know them and to secure them.
