Renata Pepicelli is the Head of Research at Bologna University and an expert on genre issues and Islam. She has supervised the Resetdoc dossier entitled "What (Arab) Women Wants".
The articles published in this report offer differing viewpoints of cross sections of the female condition within Islam. They also dismantle a series of prejudices deeply rooted in the West’s mind. Four female scholars, the jurist Valentina Donini, Suad Eddouada, an expert on such matters, sociologist Monica Massari and historian Margot Badran, speak of the variety of women’s situations in the Islamic umma, the Muslim community that extends from the East to the West, from South to North. In other words, they write about how it is impossible to speak of the Muslim woman in the singular. The female condition in fact changes in individual cases, and in some cases greatly from one country to another, depending on individual national history and the laws resulting from the past.
Donini illustrates this point extremely well in her paper, describing the profound diversity of Family Law that regulates in different ways the status of women in the countries of the Arab world. While Tunisia has equipped itself with an avant-garde code since 1956, Saudi Arabia still today makes no reference to modern law and applies the Shari ‘a. While Iraq appears to be moving backwards, in 2004 Morocco amended its Code, ensuring women had greater rights within the family. The expression of a singular synthesis between feminist issues and Islamic demands, the new Moroccan Code of Family Law expresses the current changes within the Maghreb monarchy and the renewal ambitions of a country attempting to merge social change with Islam reinterpreted in compliance with 21st century requirements. As Eddouada proves, Moroccan women today are considered the standard-bearers of a national project for modernisation and change affecting the entire community and all sectors of society. Women, in fact, are increasing their power not only within the family as well as the social and political sphere – their numbers are rising in parliament, in political parties and associations – but also in the religious sphere. The government’s choice to create the position of the murchidates, experts on religious matters with the task of advising and guiding women towards a more aware approach to Islam, is emblematic in this sense.
However, the diversity of the female condition is not restricted to the borders of countries with a Muslim majority. It is also present in the West, where, following migrations and conversions, a new Islam is taking shape that is not longer attributable to the migrants’ countries of origin, but has its own characteristics. Muslim women who live in Europe, or the United States, have multiple identities and senses of belonging, and with their active participation in the societies they live in, prove they can no longer be restricted to one monolithic label describing them as submissive and condemning them to being a symbol of ‘otherness.’ Islam, especially after 9/11, frightens people and many would like to delete it from the West. In Europe, Muslim women, Massari in writes, have become the main victims of the verbal and physical violence of xenophobes. More visible and recognisable than men, they are the first victims of Islamophobia, a growing phenomenon that according to Massari is not simply religious intolerance, but a new and dangerous form of racism.
As Badran says, in spite of the attacks they are subject to, and in spite of stereotypes portraying them all as subjugated women and victims, Muslim women are more active than ever in claiming their rights at a local and a global level, in searching for their own path to emancipation, not necessarily linked to western values, but created on the basis of a reinterpretation of their own culture and religion.
Translation by Francesca Simmons