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Asian women still face religious discrimination
Jakarta Post - July 16, 2011
Representatives from Indonesia, Afghanistan, Australia, Bhutan, Cambodia, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Timor Leste and 13 observers from UN organizations gathered in Jakarta on Thursday and Friday to share their experiences in fighting for gender equality.
Reports from Indonesia compiled by the National Commission on Violence Against Women showed that in the past 10 years, laws regulating "morality" for women by the government had increased.
Commissioner Andy Yentriyani said that since 1999, local governments had issued 206 regulations that discriminated against women. "It is clear that patriarchal values dominate society," she said at the conference.
The regulations, mostly inspired by Islamic sharia law, regulate dress codes for women, criminalizing women and limiting freedom of religion.
Farida Shaheed, a UN expert in the fields of cultural rights, said every woman had her own right to decide what culture she belonged to and the rights to criticize regulations she found restrictive. "The world's dominant culture is male-dominated and has patriarchal aspects. So women should be urged to challenge it," she said.
A leading activist from Malaysia, Zainah Anwar, said the Koran had values conveying justice for women, but patriarchal cultures championed interpretations that favored men.
"We can find ideas about compassion in the Koran. Equality between men and women is there. Unfortunately, it is the culture of patriarchy that dominates the society," she said Friday.
Zainah said that male-dominated culture used religion to perpetuate control over women's lives and even over public life. "It is only clerics who are granted the right to speak about Islam and its concepts," she said.
With the ideas of justice from the Koran, Zainah said gender equality could be reached by allowing the participation of critical scholars, because they were important figures who could possibly bring about change in Islam and in women's rights.
Ziba Mir-Hosseini, an Islamic scholar from the University of London, said justice between men and women was a very contextual value. The notion of justice itself changes from time to time. "Now one of the problems that Muslims have is that Islamic legal tradition still has the old notion of justice," she said.
Ziba said gender equality today still stressed concepts from pre-modern times, where women could have justice without equality. "That is why slavery existed. But now you could not have justice without equality. And in Islam, the principle of justice is extremely important," she added.
Therefore, human rights and new ideas are keys to changing old perceptions in society, as reality today was different, Ziba said. "We should not see religion as an obstacle but as a source of empowerment," she added.
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