The Justice

A few weeks back, a friend of mine, a fellow Muslim, described Islam as "not liberal" enough to allow complete gender equality. In my experience at Brandeis, I have found among Muslims and non-Muslims the ideology that the religion of Islam promotes a constrictive form of life, especially for women. After seeing images in the media of scared women, covered from head to toe, being stoned to death in Muslim countries such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, many people, including Muslims, come to the conclusion that the tenets of Islam call for women to be treated as second-class citizens.

However, to assume that Islam is not a "liberal" religion is to affirm years of misinterpretation and abuse of the religion by political forces.

What most people also fail to recognize is that other religions are plagued with similar exploitations; there is just often less light shed upon them. After working for and discussing with visiting scholar at the Brandeis University's Women's Research Center Dr. Ashmita Khasnabish, I learned that the religion of Hinduism also suffers from the misconstruing of its texts and customs by powerful patriarchs. About 5,000 women are killed each year in India because their in-laws considered their dowries-a tradition prescribed originally by Hinduism-inadequate. The mistake many people make is to blame religion and its practices instead of taking a closer look at original texts and understanding that they have been misinterpreted by subjugating powers.

In Saudi Arabia women cannot legally work, study or travel without explicit permission from a male relative. The legal system claims to be based on Islamic law, or Shariah. However, the form of Shariah adopted in Saudi Arabia is based on a fundamentalist interpretation that has more political clout than a traditional Islamic scholarly basis. The laws imposed on women's freedoms are nowhere to be found in the Quran and its accompanying authoritative Islamic texts.

One of the few verses regarding men and women in the Quran states in chapter two, verse 187: "They are your garments and you are their garments." This verse metaphorically implies that men and women share an equal role in protecting and taking care of one another; it does not say that men must act as the larger protective garments of women. There are a couple of other verses in the Quran which discuss the roles of men and women, but none can derive the types of explicit guidelines found in "Islamicly"-ruled countries-the truth is that these countries have used their own politically and socially motivated discretions to make rulings and have labeled them as "Islamic."

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