You Go, Grrrls

In my newly empowered frame of mind, I was very happy the other day to see some news stories about a new Muslim women's organisation, the Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity. They just had a conference which brought together Muslim women from the US, Canada, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia in pursuit of women's rights.

It must have been pretty high-powered. It included Baroness Uddin, the first Muslim woman to enter the British House of Lords, Special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General Dr Nafis Sadik, Saudi municipal candidate Fatin Bundagji, Malaysian Islamic feminist Zainah Anwar, Afghani presidential candidate Dr Massouda Jalal, the Nigerian advocate in the Amina Lawal stoning case Nogi Imoukhuede, and a number of distinguished women writers.

I went to a local Muslim women's forum a while ago that included women of other faiths. And what struck me was really the similarities between their experiences and mine, rather than the differences. There was that same mix of more othodox and traditionalist women who find that that kind of faith enriches their lives and seem comfortable with the patriarchal aspects of it, the more radical feminists and proto-feminists of liberal theological views, and the many, many women in between the two, grappling with questions of faith, their personal lives and their politics.

I have never felt the same about all the public debates about Muslims in Australia since going to that forum. Yes, like many people I often feel confronted when I see Muslim women wearing a veil - much more so when it goes beyond a simple headscarf and modest dress. And I am not alone. Frankly, in many Australian shopping centres, there are reactions when a Muslim woman walks in wearing a veil - a stony silence, a hostile comment or even just those carefully neutral expressions that say, "This is an issue". Recently, an Australian journalist tried walking in those women's shoes (actually, one of those women's veils) for a day, and she certainly didn't enjoy it.

And what she didn't enjoy was the reactions around her as much as the veil itself. At the forum I went to, I heard Muslim women talk about how they have been harassed - both into wearing veils they didn't want to wear and into discarding veils they wanted to keep. I heard about how sometimes people who damn Islam for its apparent attitude to women can feed into a hostility to Muslims that is itself more of a problem to those women that the patriarchal attitudes within their own communities.

What I feel, ultimately, is that this patriarchy/veil issue is one for Muslim women themselves to address. I am uncomfortable when public figures who are not Muslim women start railing at women for wearing the veil or for not wearing it, because I don't think anyone should be telling women what they can and can't wear. They have to work through this issue themselves. Theirs is not the only patriarchal religion in the world, and they have to find their own way, their own mixture of simultaneous devotion and critique, just as women of other faiths do.

But I saw a quote from Daisy Khan, an organiser of this latest conference, that "What you're seeing here is the emergence of an Islamic feminist movement."

And if that's the case, then all I can say is, "You go, grrrls..."