Violence Against Women in Muslim Families Essay Example for Free

Violence Against Women in Muslim Families Essay Nasim Basiri Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, declared in a 2006 report posted on the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) website that: Violence against women and girls is a problem of pandemic proportions. At least one out of every three women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime with the abuser usually someone known to her, (Kofi Annan 2006) One of the key issues addressed at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing was the elimination of violence against women. Violence affects the lives of millions of women worldwide, irrespective of their socio-economic status. It cuts across ethnic, cultural and religious barriers, impeding the rights of women to participate fully in the society. The urgency of addressing this global problem is tragically illustrated by the treatment of women in conflict or crisis situations, where various forms of harassment, intimidation, rape and forced pregnancies are being used as instruments of war, especially by the opposing forces or the supposed peacekeepers. The recent incident in the Darfur region of Sudan, where women were violently abused both physically and sexually and some killed, is typical. However, it is not only in times of war that women are vulnerable to abuse. Throughout the world, women suffer untold violence in the family, at work and in the wider community, while the perpetrators include individuals and the state apparatus. Women worldwide remain vulnerable to life-threatening conditions and abuse of physical and psychological integrity. Although violence against women is highly under-reported, its prevalence is high in many cultural settings both in the developed and developing countries. For instance, studies indicate that 10-58% of women have experienced physical abuse by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Furthermore, cross- sectional studies show that 40% of women inSouth Africa, 28% in Tanzania and 7% in New Zealand reported their first sexual intercourse was forced. 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.The policing of Muslim communities in the name of gender equality is now a globally organized phenomenon and one that has become even more pronounced after the events of September 11, 2001 when the United States began its ‘War on Terror’ in response to the terrorist bombings of the World Trade Centre and Pentagon. The policing is organized under the logic that there is an irreconcilable culture clash between the West and Islam with the latter bent on the West’s destruction. (Huntington 1997) They are tribal and stuck in pre-modernity, the argument goes, possessing neither a commitment to human rights, women’s rights nor to democracy. It is the West’s obligation to defend itself from these values and to assist Muslims into modernity, by force if necessary, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq both underline. The body of the Muslim woman, a body ï ¬ xed in the Western imaginary as conï ¬ ned, mutilated, and sometimes murdered in the name of culture, serves to reinforce the threat that the Muslim man is said to pose to the West and is used to justify the extraordinary measures of violence and surveillance required to discipline him and Muslim communities.( Jiwani) THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN ISLAM Some scholars have argued that MPL cannot be effectively recognised and implemented by the South African government because Islamic law conflicts with gender equality. Since the height of the feminist movement in the late 70s, a magnifying glass has been placed over the status of Muslim women. Unfortunately, the magnifying glass used is an unusual one. Unusual in the sense that it is highly selective about which items to magnify; other items it distorts to such a degree that they no longer look familiar (Ellison, 2004). The image of Islam is portrayed (Khalid and Tucker, 1996:9) as the: fount of unmitigated oppression of women, as the foundation of a gender system that categorically denies women equal rights and subjugates them to men, this recurs in the movies, magazines, and books of our popular culture as well as in much academic discourse. I concede that many rules, as they exist within the Muslim community, have been interpreted by males and, therefore, are patriarchal. However , it is hard to conclude that Islam itself is antipathetical to equality of the sexes. I will briefly discuss the elevated position of women in Islam. In post-apartheid South Africa, women are only now really able to have their voices heard. The issue of gender equality has become central to the development of constitutional democracy in South Africa. But what is gender? It is usually described as the way society understands the differences between men and women. This can be extended to what can be identified or recognized as masculine or feminine in a socio-cultural sense. Gender is indeed socially constructed and determined by things such as culture and religion. It is also not fixed in time and place, and is, therefore, subject to change. In Islam it is important to note that the word gender has no corresponding current term in the Arabic language, the language of the Quran. The word gender is general, and reference to men and women is made by the reference to the word sex, which is believed to be value free. The Quran bears evidence to the forgoing in its reference to the story of creation where it purposely employs gender neutral terms (Hassan, 1998). According to Seedat (2000), some of the concerns and experiences emerging from Muslim women are as follows: * Women are often merely verbally informed by their husbands of their being divorced, without any sort of written legal documents; * Imams often grant talaqs without any consultation with the wives; * Women who spend their lives cooking, cleaning and looking after the children, are often left destitute at the end of the marriage. Those who find themselves financially dependent on their husbands, are unable to secure their own economic development, and are less likely to leave an unhappy or abusive marital relationship. * Many women also find it difficult to negotiate contracts due to the stigma attached, ie that she will be branded a modern Islamic feminist filled with western ideas. CONCLUSION Domestic violence is deep-rooted in many African societies Arab societies and etc, where wife beating is considered a prerogative of menand a purely domestic matter by the society. Domestic violence is one of the greatest barriers to ending the subordination of women. Women, for fear of violence, are unable to refuse sex or negotiate safer sexual practices, thus increasing their vulnerability to HIV if their husbands are unfaithful. A more productive approach, it seems to me, is to ask how we might contribute to making the world a more just place. A world not organized around strategic military and economic demands; a place where certain kinds of forces and values that we may still consider important could have an appeal and where there is the peace necessary for discussions, debates, and transformations to occur within communities. We need to ask ourselves what kinds of world conditions we could contribute to making such that popular desires will not be overdetermined by an over whelming sense of helplessness in the face of forms of global injustice. Where we seek to be active in the affairs of distant places, can we do so in the spirit of support for those within those communities whose goals are to make womens lives better . REFERENCES ^ a b c d e Moradian, Azad. Domestic Violence against Single and Married Women in Iranian Society. Tolerancy International. September 2009. Retrieved 16 Nov. 2011. Popularly referred to as the ‘‘clash of civilizations’’, the phrase and the argument can be found in Huntington (1997) For critique and examination of its widespread inï ¬â€šuence and appeal, see Said (2001). For a discussion of how the culture clash thesis inï ¬â€šuences feminists see Razack (unpublished). For a discussion of how the Muslim woman’s body has been represented in the press post 911 see Jiwani (forthcoming). Abdo, Nahla, and Ronit Lentin, eds. Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation:Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. Abdullah, Ustaz Yoonus. Sharia in Africa. 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