Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1997, Pages 75-76
Human Rights
THE SISTERHOOD IS Global Institute, in conjunction with The Center for the Global South at American University, hosted “Rights of Passage: An International Conference on Women’s Human Rights Education,” Sept. 26 and 27 at the AU campus in Washington, DC. Attended by an international audience of women representing the public and non-profit sectors, academia and the media, the conference was both a follow-up to the U.N.’s Fourth World Conference on Women and an opportunity to discuss and assess Claiming Our Rights, SIGI’s educational manual and program recently field-tested in Bangladesh, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia and Uzbekistan. Although all predominantly Muslim societies, the six countries are culturally distinct, as the field experiences confirmed, and SIGI’s innovative program is designed to encourage and allow for the expression of these distinctions.
The two-day program was divided into panels on “International Human Rights Education: Dilemmas and Developments,” “Reports From the Field,” “Strategies That Work,” and “Women’s Human Rights Across Cultures and Religion.” Participants in the latter panel were moderator Barbara Stowasser, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies; Vasudha Narayanan, professor of religion at the University of Florida; Dr. Diana Hayes, assistant professor of theology at Georgetown University and author of And Still We Rise: An Introduction to Black Liberation Theology; Letty Cottin Pogrebin, activist and author of Debora, Golda, and Me: Being Jewish and Female in America, among many other works; and Nawal Ammar, assistant professor of criminal justice studies at Kent State University and author of such articles as “Discrimination Against Women Under the Nationality Laws: Case Studies from Egypt and Lebanon.”
Narayanan gave an engaging account of traditional Hindu myths, in which “the woman always dies”—that being “the way the man the story to end,” she noted wryly. Not so well known are tales which feature a strong woman, such as Goda, who, if she must marry, insists on marrying a god, and who has become the inspiration for the “Goda Mandalay,” a group of women who sing and dance in public, something previously unheard of in India. Indeed, Narayanan observed, it is the performing arts rather than the written word that is the medium for the dissemination of new feminist ideas there.
Dr. Hayes, speaking as an African American and as a woman, stated that “the Christian church has been complicit” in social restrictions and barriers holding back those two groups. The teachings of the Catholic church, however, do equate women’s rights with human rights—an underlying tenet of the conference itself. Hayes cited Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech as an example of “black women’s understanding of Christianity,” adding that Mary had much in common with “young, unwed mothers of today” and that Jesus, her son and the first Christian, was known for his “revolutionary temperament.”
Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founder of Ms. magazine, described the “love/hate relationship” between Judaism and feminism. Noting that Judaism’s five branches range from Reform to Orthodox, she confined her remarks to the latter, “by-the-book” version, particularly as it is practiced in Israel rather than in the U.S. In a comment that any of the speakers might have made, Pogrebin described the fundamentalist religious view that “when a man is oppressed, it’s a tragedy, but when a woman is oppressed, it’s tradition.” Indeed, many of the “traditions” Orthodox Jewish women must observe—from covering their hair, arms and legs to not participating in a minyan—are similar to what many Westerners consider Islamic practices.
Pogrebin asserted, however, that the solution to these inequities can be found within Judaism itself, it being “most of all an ethical system” based upon the “pursuit of justice.” She also cited the Hebrew version of the Golden Rule (“Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you”), the Passover command to empathize with the stranger, and the concept of tikkun olam or “repair the world.”
Alluding to a dilemma cited by many minority women, Pogrebin said Jewish women experience a double identity between their gender and their culture. Jewish women, along with Jewish men, face the “common enemy of world anti-Semitism,” an acceptable form of which, according to her, are “JAP [Jewish-American princess] jokes and Jewish mother jokes.” Jewish feminist strategies, Pogrebin said, are based upon a “refusal to walk away from our religious heritage.”
Prof. Nawal Ammar, a native of a village near Aswan in Upper Egypt who earned her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, opened her remarks by saying she was glad not to be the only Muslim woman speaking at the conference. Addressing the debate between cultural relativism and universalism in the struggle for human rights, she stated her preference for the latter approach rather than “dividing the world into bipolar categories,” such as the West being “progressive” in human rights and the East “barbaric.” To do that, she maintained, is to fall into the “Orientalist trap.” Many leaders, moreover, hide behind cultural relativism when challenged on their countries’ human rights record, using the argument that one can’t apply another culture’s values to their society as a way to legitimize their own power.
Ammar described the “concept of categorical male superiority over women” as “un-Islamic,” stating that the “gap between the Qur’anic ideal” and the current Islamic process in many countries is a “consequence of male power.” She advocated the inclusion of women’s human rights issues in general educational curricula, it being an issue for males and females alike, and an emphasis on “internal dialogue and cross-cultural discourse,” leading toward the “modern wholeness” of globalization.
—Janet McMahon
