Rehmat
17th October 2007, 06:50 AM
Within the Qura'nic tradition and the life of the Prophet (pbuh) lie the rights and inspiration a woman needs to achieve her full potential - the challenge ahead is to educate Muslim girls and women so that they have that knowledge. They justify wearing the hijab, either as a public statement of their own spiritual quest, or of their political identity in a world where Islam perceives itself as under threat, or both.
What women such as Shagufta, Maha, Soraya, Fareena and Jasmin want is to return to the freedoms that Islam brought women in the 7th century and beyond, when women became prominent Islamic scholars, poets and thinkers. "We need a reformation in this global community," said Fareena. "We need to go back to the Islam of the golden age from the 7th to the 13th century." Soraya recognizes that this desire to return to the 7th century is paradoxically close to the avowed aims of the Taliban and other fundamentalist groups, but the struggle is over interpretations of what is the true Islam, and British Muslim women are all too well aware of how fragile their position is, defending themselves against criticism from all sides - both from the westerners who accuse them of being oppressed and from the traditional Muslim cultures shocked by their independence and "westernization".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4314573,00.html
What women such as Shagufta, Maha, Soraya, Fareena and Jasmin want is to return to the freedoms that Islam brought women in the 7th century and beyond, when women became prominent Islamic scholars, poets and thinkers. "We need a reformation in this global community," said Fareena. "We need to go back to the Islam of the golden age from the 7th to the 13th century." Soraya recognizes that this desire to return to the 7th century is paradoxically close to the avowed aims of the Taliban and other fundamentalist groups, but the struggle is over interpretations of what is the true Islam, and British Muslim women are all too well aware of how fragile their position is, defending themselves against criticism from all sides - both from the westerners who accuse them of being oppressed and from the traditional Muslim cultures shocked by their independence and "westernization".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4314573,00.html