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Emancipation is a thing of the past for Muslim women

A 1957 Time cover story said the prophet Mohammed was actually an "emancipator of women."

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published July 24, 2005

While cleaning out a chest the other night, I found an old Time magazine I bought at a garage sale, stashed away and forgot. The cover story: "The Emancipation of Moslem Women." The date: Nov. 11, 1957.

In part a profile of Morocco's Princess Aisha - described as "unveiled and unashamed" - the story showed how women's "drive for emancipation" was keeping pace with the nationalism sweeping the Muslim world.

A decade before Morocco won its freedom from France in 1956, the teenage Aisha shocked the country's religious establishment by dropping her veil and urging other Moroccan women to "participate ardently and usefully in the life of the nation."

Since that daring act, Muslim women "have achieved a greater change in status in 10 years than in the preceding ten hundred," continued the 1957 story, which also had photos of a leggy Beirut college student and a Malaysian movie star in short shorts.

What a coincidence that Time should resurface now, just as Iraqi women are protesting a draft constitution that would set back their rights nearly 50 years.

Not so long ago, Iraq was one of the most enlightened Muslim countries in terms of women's rights. Now, under a government dominated by conservative Shiites, even secular women shroud themselves in black and fear a future in which they could be stripped of their right to choose their own husbands and have equal protection with men in matters of divorce and inheritance.

"Is this the result that American soldiers, men and women, are sacrificing their lives for?" asked the New York Times.

Indeed, you could argue that life for many Muslim women is no better today than it was in 1957; in some cases it's worse.

In Pakistan, which elected a woman president almost two decades ago, politicians in Peshawar this month banned women from running for even local offices. Throughout the country, hard-line Islamic political parties have stopped women from participating in outdoor sports.

In the Gaza Strip, as Hamas fundamentalists gain greater power, women are increasingly pressured to stick to traditional roles.

And nearly a half-century after Princess Aisha was tooling around Morocco in her own car, women in Saudi Arabia still are forbidden to drive.

Even in Muslim countries where women's lives have improved, there are vast distances to go. Afghan women, virtually confined to their homes under Taliban rule, are now working and attending school. But violence and extremism keep many isolated.

Millions of Muslim women live in Arab countries, which have the world's worst record of utilizing the brains, talents and energies of their female inhabitants, according to the Arab Human Development Report. As of 2002, women held just 3.5 percent of all parliamentary seats in Arab nations, compared with 11 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and 13 percent in Latin America.

"Society as a whole suffers when half of its productive potential is stifled," the report said. "These deficits must be addressed in every field: economic, political and social."

The problem, one expert contends, isn't Islam but how Islam is interpreted by the people in charge (most of them men).

"It's what they take out of Islam," says Amira A. Sonbol, a professor at Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. "It's laws that are applied at different times and in different communities, and when you say "Islam' you give the laws a certain holiness, which makes it impossible to change them after that.

"This is the biggest enemy women have: You have to fight the mullahs and this and that when the laws by which women live have very little to do with Islam."

By the standard of his day, as my old Time notes, the prophet Mohammed was actually an "emancipator of women" who outlawed unlimited polygamy, infanticide of girl babies and other abuses.

Fast forward to Morocco in 1957 and its progressive king, who encouraged daughter Aisha to express her opinions and pursue a career.

Wrote Time: "The king has dedicated himself and his daughter to the proposition that the Koran is a living creed, that if Mohammed were alive today, he would be shocked at the uses to which his words are being put by rigid reactionaries."

You have to wonder what Princess Aisha would think about the plight of her Muslim sisters now.

-- Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Susan Taylor Martin can be reached at susan@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 24, 2005, 13:01:02]