Emerging feminist voices in Islam may influence a "much-needed paradigm shift" in Islamic law, an Iranian academic told an international conference at NUI Galway at the weekend.
Dr Ziba Mir-Hosseini said that one neglected and paradoxical consequence of the rise of political Islam was that it had helped to create a space within which Muslim women could reconcile their faith and identity with their struggle for gender equality.
A growing number of women had come to see no logical link between patriarchy and Islamic ideals, no contradiction between Islam and feminism, and were now able to "free themselves" from an earlier view that 20th century feminism was a "colonial project" which must be resisted.
Dr Mir-Hosseini, who is a research associate at the department of law in the school of oriental and African studies of the University of London, said she had strongly supported the 1979 revolution in Iran and believed in the justice of Islam.
However, she had soon found out that in an Islamic state committed to the application of Sharia law, she was a second-class citizen. The justice of Islam and the egalitarian nature of the Koran was no longer reflected in the laws which some Islamists were intent on enforcing in the name of the Sharia, she said.
Islamic feminist scholars, who had studied the Koran and various texts, were exposing the inequalities embedded in Islamic law and showing that these were not a manifestation of divine will but a construction by male jurists. Such an approach to religious texts could in time open the way for radical and positive changes in Islamic law to accommodate concepts such as gender equality and human rights, Dr Mir-Hosseini added.
US "rhetoric" on international human rights should be called into question when the right to safe drinking water was emerging as the most pressing global need, Prof Ann Mayer, associate professor of legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told the conference.
The US drive to privatise water and treat it like any other commodity in the marketplace could soon attract criticism from Muslim countries, where water was scarce, and could be seen as a violation of fundamental rights.
"Instead of Muslim countries, it may be the United States, with its growing estrangement from the UN human-rights system in many areas, that will be placed on the defensive by reason of breaching an emerging global consensus on the need to treat water as a human right," she said.
US policies towards Muslim countries could disrupt the trend towards the harmonisation of Islam and human rights. The treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay had caused widespread anger and the "rhetoric" of the Bush administration was becoming more closely associated in Muslim minds with attempts to "sugarcoat" neo-imperialist designs, she said.
"The heavy-handed US efforts to reduce the role of Islamic law and to enhance protections for a selective menu of human rights in the Iraqi constitution are likely to provoke a backlash," Prof Mayer said.
"One possible outcome may be that Muslims will be drawn to a combination of Islamism and nationalism that will serve to mobilise forces to counter US political pressures and military and economic predations."
Full texts from the conference are on www.reframingislam.org
