In Afghanistan, the Idea of Women’s Rights Starts to Take Hold - NY Times

[Yrys]

Changes in Iraq Election Law Weaken Quota for Women - NY Times
Afghan women, girls risk death for education
Grassroots Efforts With Support for Afghan Women and Girls


In Afghanistan, the Idea of Women’s Rights Starts to Take Hold

KABUL, Afghanistan — Mariam was 11 in 2003 when her parents forced her to marry a blind,
41-year-old cleric. The bride price of $1,200 helped Mariam’s father, a drug addict, pay off a
debt.

Mariam was taken to live with her new husband and his mother-in-law, who, she says, treated
her like a servant. They began to beat her when she failed to conceive a child. After two years
of abuse, she fled and sought help at a police station in Kabul.

Until only a few years ago, the Afghan police would probably have rewarded Mariam for her
courage by throwing her in jail — traditional mores forbid women to be alone on the street —
or returning her to her husband. Instead, the police delivered her to a plain, two-story building
in a residential neighborhood: a women’s shelter, something that was unknown here before 2003.

Since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, a more egalitarian notion of women’s rights has begun
to take hold, founded in the country’s new Constitution and promoted by the newly created Ministry
of Women’s Affairs and a small community of women’s advocates.

The problems they are confronting are deeply ingrained in a culture that has been mainly governed
by tribal law. But they are changing the lives of young women like Mariam, now 17. Still wary of
social stigma, she did not want her full name used.

“Simply put, this is a patriarchal society,” said Manizha Naderi, director of Women for Afghan Women,
one of four organizations that run shelters in Afghanistan. “Women are the property of men. This is
tradition.”

Women’s shelters have been criticized as a foreign intrusion in Afghan society, where familial and
community problems have traditionally been resolved through the mediation of tribal leaders and
councils. But women’s advocates insist that those outcomes almost always favor the men.

Forced marriages involving girls have been part of the social compacts between tribes and families
for centuries, and they continue, though the legal marrying age is now 16 for women and 18 for men.
Beating, torture and trafficking of women remain common and are broadly accepted, women’s
advocates say.

Until the advent of the shelters, a woman in an abusive marriage usually had nowhere to turn. If she
tried to seek refuge with her own family, her brothers or father might return her to her husband,
to protect the family’s honor. Women who eloped might be cast out of the family altogether.

Many women resort to suicide, some by self-immolation, to escape their misery, according to Afghan
and international human rights advocates. “There is a culture of silence,” said Mary Akrami, director
of the Afghan Women Skills Development Center, which opened the first women’s shelter in
Afghanistan six years ago. The majority of abuse victims, she said, are too ashamed to report their
problems.

As recently as 2005, some Afghan social organizations did not publicly acknowledge that they were
working in support of women’s rights, said Nabila Wafez, project manager in Afghanistan for the
women’s rights division of Medica Mondiale, a German nongovernmental organization that supports
women and children in conflict zones. “Women’s rights was a very new word for them,” Ms. Wafez
said. “But now we’re openly saying it.”

Women’s advocates insist that they are trying not to split up families, but rather to keep them
together through intervention, mediation and counseling. “Our aim is not to put women in the shelter
if it’s not necessary,” said Ms. Naderi, who was born in Afghanistan but grew up in New York City
and graduated from Hunter College. “Only in cases where it’s dangerous for the women to go back
home, that’s when we put them in the shelter.”

If mediation fails, Ms. Naderi said, her organization’s lawyers will pursue a divorce on behalf of their
clients. Cases involving criminal allegations are referred to the attorney general’s office.

Ms. Naderi’s organization has even taken the bold step of helping several clients find new husbands,
carefully vetted by the shelter’s staff. The men could not afford the customary bride price, making
them more accommodating of women who deviated from tradition.

When Mariam arrived at the Women for Afghan Women shelter in 2007, the group’s lawyers took her
case to family court. Her husband pleaded for her return, promising not to beat her again. Mariam
consented. In a recent interview, Mariam, a waifish teenager with a meek voice, said she had feared
that “no one would marry me again.” But soon after her return, the beatings resumed, she said.
She fled again.

Mariam’s case was moved to criminal court because she said her husband had threatened to kill her,
said Mariam Ahadi, the legal supervisor for Women for Afghan Women and a former federal
prosecutor in Afghanistan. At the shelters, others told still more harrowing tales. For the same reason
as Mariam, none wanted their full names used.

Nadia, 17, who has been living in Ms. Akrami’s long-term shelter since 2007, recounted that to avenge
a dispute he had with her father, her husband cut off her nose and an ear while she was sleeping.
She has undergone six operations and needs more, Ms. Akrami said. “I don’t know anything about
happiness,” Nadia said.

At 8, another girl, Gulsum, was kidnapped by her father, who was estranged from her mother. She
says she was forced to marry the son of her father’s lover. Her husband and her new mother-in-law
beat her and threatened to kill her, she said. Now 13, Gulsum said that before eventually escaping,
she tried to commit suicide by swallowing medicine and rodent poison.

Advocates say governmental response to the issue has significantly improved since the overthrow of
the Taliban. Judges are ruling more equitably, advocates say, and the national police have created a
special unit to focus on family issues. But women’s advocates say that even so, protections for women
remain mostly theoretical in much of the country, particularly in rural areas, where tradition runs
deepest and women have limited access to advocacy services and courts.

Mariam said she felt fortunate to have found refuge. Asked what she hoped for the future, she replied,
“I want my divorce, and then I want to study.” She was pulled out of school in the fourth grade.
Turning to Ms. Ahadi, she added, “I want to be a lawyer like her.”

But for all of Mariam’s suffering, her family apparently has not changed. Her younger sister was
married off a year ago, at age 9, in exchange for a $400 bride price that helped cover another drug
debt, Mariam said, and her youngest sister, who is 6, appears to be heading toward a similar fate.

 

[Yrys]

A woman’s place is in the mosque?

The role that women play in mosques varies substantially around the Muslim world. Visits
to two mosques in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, show just how different women's experiences
can be.

The al-Seddeeq mosque, in a prosperous suburb of Cairo, stands in front of a park - unusual
enough in an overcrowded city lacking much green space. The large mosque, built in the last
20 years, forms an impressive focal point in the local community. But it also represents one
potential vision of the future for Egypt's mosques - where women are heavily involved in
increasing aspects of the mosque's activities.

As I step inside, I hear sounds I had not been expecting - the raucous shouts of children
playing. About 250 young boys are surrounded by paint, glue, paper and old egg boxes -
making artwork from recycled materials. Earlier in the day, they had been learning to
recite the Koran, but by late afternoon it was time for a more hands-on task.

There is nothing unusual about mosques offering educational programmes. But at al-Seddeeq
mosque, all of the educational work is run by women.

A new role

On the day I visit, 35 female volunteers are involved - and 2,000 local children are on a
waiting list to join the programmes. Maha al-Mahy runs the mosque's work with children
as well as educational programmes for women.

She is clear that women's role in the mosque will continue to develop, just as opportunities
for women within Egyptian society also open up. "Other things will be changed. Maybe we
are going to have more work, more roles, in future," she tells me.

Would that mean, I asked her, that women might even fulfil some of the roles still only
undertaken by men? "Why not?" she answers. "Men are good - but also I think women can
do what men do. Some roles, it's better for women than men."

But you do not have to travel far to find very different attitudes to women's involvement.
In a poorer part of Cairo, I am driven through crowded streets past several mosques. Some
of those we pass do not have any facilities for women to pray, let alone be involved in other
activities.

But at one mosque, we meet Sabriah Ibrahim. She is the only woman involved with leadership
- and in this poorer area, no local women are wealthy enough to be able to volunteer. The
mosque could hardly be more different from the gleaming marble structure of al-Seddeeq,
in the more prosperous part of town.

Women in prosperous areas have
more time for mosque activities

Contrasting opportunities

Hemmed in by other buildings, it is a cramped building on a small site, with the men's prayer
hall as the main focus. There is one small office, which doubles up as an administrative base
and the place from which clothing is distributed to those in need. But there is not the capacity
to offer programmes like those that the al-Seddeeq mosque is able to offer to the hundreds
of children in the area.

But perhaps the most striking contrast is in the role that women play in the life of the mosque.
"Most of the week, women don't come for prayer, they only come for the Friday prayer, or when
there are lessons or certain activities," Sabriah Ibrahim says. "But other than this, very few women
come to the mosque, and most of them are older women."

The disparity between the two mosques I visited is striking.

In one, women play an active role and dream even of running those activities still the preserve
of men - perhaps, one day, even leading prayers. In the other, one sole woman tries to run
women's activities, but in an area where there is little tradition of women being involved in their
local mosque.

Some of the factors seem to be financial: Al-Seddeeq's volunteers are women who are wealthy
enough to be able to choose to spend time at the mosque rather than needing to work; in the
crowded streets of Old Cairo, few women have such an opportunity.

Later, I meet Dr Mohammed Abulaila, recently retired as head of Islamic Studies at Cairo's
al-Azhar University. He too believes that economic factors play a role in whether women attend
mosques - put simply, poorer women are more likely to have to stay at home with their families.
But he stresses that Islam itself makes no distinction between men and women, when it comes
to the importance of attending the mosque.

"Women, like men, are commanded to go the mosque," he tells me. "There is no discrimination
in Islam. Men are required to pray five times a day, and women as well."

The gap between Dr Abulaila's words and the reality for many women in Cairo is clear. But religion
is just one part of life where opportunities for women are changing dramatically. In the city's
mosques, that opening up of opportunity is happening at startlingly different rates.

Islam, like many other religions, is beginning to face questions about how long centuries of male
dominance will continue.