Women and Peace in the Islamic World

Gender, Agency and Influence

Yasmin Saikia, Chad Haines, Yasmin Saikia, Chad Haines

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857737250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

How realistic is the prospect of peace in the Muslim world? This question is the predominant focus for global analysis today, but its debate frequently ignores the cultural and social complexity of the Muslim world, reducing it into a system of states and select actors. This book addresses such a failing by exploring how the everyday interactions of women, in accordance with Islamic personal ethics, can offer the world a new interpretation of peace. In particular, it focuses on the women in Islamic societies, from Aceh to Bosnia, Morocco to Bangladesh, initiating a dialogue on the role of these women in peacemaking. This concentration upon the complex issues of the everyday both enables a detailed exploration of how people conceptualise peace and opens up new frameworks for conflict resolution. The discussions that emerge lead to a critical questioning of assumptions about peace as a state policy and cessation of violence.
Drawing upon original research from different parts of the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, including Iran, India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Egypt and Sudan, the contributors offer a refreshing new look at Muslim women as peacemakers, challenging any assumptions of Islam as an inherently violent religion. Such a timely work provides new and important analyses on the role of Muslim women in forging new pathways of peace in the contemporary world.

PART 1

DELIBERATIONS: QUESTIONING
THE NORMATIVE

CHAPTER 1

UNGENDERING PEACE TALK

miriam cooke

‘Bedell, meanwhile, is dressed in her desert camouflage. She has a Beretta M9 strapped to her thigh and an M4 rifle over her shoulder.’¹ Zoe Bedell, a 2007 Princeton graduate, is in charge of the US Marine Corps’ Female Engagement Teams in Afghanistan. Trained for ‘combat lifesaving techniques’, these female marines are part of the US military’s counterinsurgency project to reach out to Afghan women. Theirs is a new assignment – win the hearts and minds of the men through the women. Armed women marines like Bedell are complicating the usual association of women and peacemaking. While women’s groups and networks around the world have long worked for peace, other past and present women like the Amazons, Joan of Arc, Golda Meir and, most recently, women suicide bombers have not. Women are not created peace loving in utero; they are told they are. Sara Ruddick argues that women are not inherently peaceable.² Rather, they practice a form of maternal thinking that adapts women to violence on behalf of peace. Their special conflict resolution skills, she writes, are learned. The mother cares for her child often violently.

Are men – automatically associated with war – more engaged in peace building than women? In its 112-year history, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to 86 men – 4 of them Muslims – but only to 15 women – 2 of them women – a ratio of 1 woman to 7 men. Male poets from Homer to Osip Mandelstam have long sung odes against the reckless violence of war and advocated renunciation of arms. The heart-wrenching voices that called for peace in the early twentieth century were those of the young men who had been to the World War I front and fought in the trenches. Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Siegried Sassoon turned chemical warfare into passionate poetry that, until today, conveyed the freshness of the horror and the need for peace. These men did not use the language of peace to demand peace. They described the devastation of war so that its senseless destruction might provide instruction on how to cultivate its opposite.

Men’s principled objections to war, often articulated by those who have seen combat and its devastations have taught us that warmongering and peace building are not natural; they are learned behaviours. Men are not born violent; they have to be whipped into violent shape. Private Pyle in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Full Metal Jacket was a large man with the look of someone who could be shaped and trained into the ideal military agent. But no amount of abuse and punishment could turn him into the opposite of what he was born to be – a man who could not commit violence. To make any changes in the perception of men and women’s instincts and behaviour, this gendering must first be marked and then deconstructed. Only then can war and peace options begin to be ungendered and universalised. The acknowledgment of women’s potential violence and men’s peace-building work provides a corrective to the rosy picture of women waving white flags and men wiping blood off their blades. Depending on the context, Muslim and non-Muslim women, like Muslim and non-Muslim men, nurture and kill.

In what follows, I examine the disjuncture between expectations for how men and women should react to violence, and I question the instinctive gendering of war and peace activism with a focus on Muslim women.

War–Peace Continuum

Peace building is not only opposition to war; it is concerned with human rights, societal transformation, empowerment and dialogue. It is ‘designed to assist the warring parties in transitioning from a prolonged, violent conflict into a durable peace […] War is the product of the mind; it only looks as though it is the product of generals and weapons.’³ Peace and war coexist; they define each other negatively. Peace and war – like heaven and hell – are the outer limits on a continuum. To be more precise, peace should be thought in the felicitous terms coined by Johannes Galtung in 1964: ‘positive peace’ – the struggle for a constructive resolution of violence – and ‘negative peace’ – the absence of violence that does not, however, preclude its happening. The poles of the continuum would then be war and positive peace with negative peace bridging the divide.⁴

War is much more than the direct inflicting of physical harm, and peace is much more than stopping that violence. The technologies of war that have been domesticated for ‘peaceful’ purposes permeate the environment in which we live.⁵ Chemotherapy was developed out of chemical warfare, non-invasive pressure monitoring was a by-product of military submarine technology, and the Internet grew out of DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) data gathering for transnational espionage. Long before Eisenhower coined the term ‘the military–industrial complex’, war and technology were historically intertwined. Paul Virilio writes of the ‘pure war’ that marks the relationship between a state and its people, and McLuhan and Fiore elaborate on an analysis of what they call the ‘war environment’ in which we all live. This does not mean that bombs are constantly dropping. It means that even when bombs are not exploding, conflicts continue, and scientists imagine new and better weapons. Our thinking is still geared towards war, and at best we are enjoying negative peace.

The violence of war, Galtung theorises, is of two kinds (direct and indirect) that function at three levels: physical, cultural and structural.⁶ Direct-physical violence is the way we generally think of war – bombs and ‘rape and pillage’. Indirect-cultural violence varies socially and regionally in terms of what are considered to be acceptable levels of injury. It is at work in local forms of patriarchy. In many cultures, physical or epistemic violence against women is not coded violence but considered to be a part of the norms and values of that society. Structural violence is the most difficult to pinpoint and to eradicate because it is a systemic modus operandi. Structural violence is the war at home that is inherent in the military, but at home, it is carried out without all the gear and without calling what is being done ‘war’. In the heart of civilian society, structural violence shapes the ways misogynist religious authorities twist scriptures to privilege men at women’s expense. Sociologist Fatima Mernissi is unequivocal about how this works in Muslim societies. She shows that ‘not only have the sacred texts always been manipulated, but manipulation of them is a structural characteristic of the practice of power’.⁷ Citizens deprived of their human rights are suffering from structural violence. In other words, they are targets in the war the state has waged on some of its citizens. A case in point is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Prize laureate and judge at the age of 23, has devoted her life to fighting for peace in her native Iran. When she was stripped of her judgeship in 1979 because the Islamic authorities believed women to be incapable of practicing Islamic law, she determined that she would fight for her people’s rights in whatever way possible. During the eight years of war with neighbouring Iraq many Iranians fled the country, but she stayed. After Islamic authorities granted her permission to resume her legal practice, Ebadi defended the disenfranchised without thought of the personal cost.⁸ Law provided her with the weapon to fight the structural violence of the Islamic Republic of Iran.⁹ In 1988, the last year of the Iran–Iraq War in which hundreds of thousands were killed, 4500 dissidents were executed.¹⁰ The government’s goal, like all wars’ goal, was to ‘impose a climate of fear’.¹¹ During the 1990s Ebadi took on some very difficult cases that ‘illustrated the tragic repercussions of the theocracy’s legal discrimination against women’.¹²

In her memoir, she tells the story of the family of a girl who was raped and murdered, and her parents were expected ‘to finance the executions of their daughter’s convicted murderers’.¹³ The case involving a young man who killed his stepsister brought Ebadi to the world’s attention and gave her a voice with which to fight for peace and, in other words, to end the war the Islamic Republic of Iran was waging on its people, especially its women. She also refers to her work in military terms. ‘Is there an alternative battlefield?’ she asks when explaining the need to argue her cases from within an Islamic framework.¹⁴ She describes her legal work as ‘doing battle in the revolutionary courts of Tehran’ and ‘I have been under attack most of my adult life’.¹⁵ Use of the words ‘battlefield’ and ‘battle’ clearly indicate her understanding of the state of war she has lived and contested. Nor did the danger subside after she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 and became the first Muslim woman and only the tenth woman to have been awarded the honour. In fact, the threats accelerated, and to her dismay the Iranian government sent guards to protect (monitor?) her. The war goes on.

Nobel Women’s Initiative

Since structural and cultural violence are without clearly identifiable agents, they may be imperceptible and thus hard to fight; it is only at the physical level that we are fully aware of war’s violence. Although peace building needs to address each level, it has been direct-physical violence that has been the reason for peace initiatives. To posit peace as an achievable end and to plumb the depths of war’s imbrication in our lives as discourse and practice, these structural and cultural levels must be revealed.

This is what the Nobel Women’s Initiative has tried to do. In 2006, Ebadi joined the six living female Nobel laureates to create the Nobel Women’s Initiative. They insist on the connections between physical, cultural and structural violence. Their mission statement redefines peace as:

more than the absence of armed conflict. Peace is the commitment to equality and justice; a democratic world free of physical, economic, cultural, political, religious, sexual and environmental violence and the constant threat of these forms of violence against women – indeed against all of humanity.¹⁶

In 2007 the Initiative convened its first conference, Women Redefining Peace in the Middle East and Beyond, to:

compare successful strategies in countering violence against women and in promoting women’s human rights […] We came to understand that our work on women’s rights, religious fundamentalisms, nuclear weapons, government reform, corporate and media responsibility, and so on, is linked, whether we acknowledge the linkages or not, and that all of our work is contributing to building cultures of peace.¹⁷

The Initiative emphasised that women should be involved not only during peace negotiations, but also after in their implementation. The conferees called for support of the Iraqi people, an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, support for the Million Signatures Campaign (a grassroots petition to abrogate discriminatory laws against women in Iran), support for disarmament campaigns and support for the people of Darfur, Burma and the women peace activists in Serbia and Uganda.

Three years later, the Nobel Women’s Initiative held another conference on redefining peace. The 2009 conferees demanded an end to all state violence against women, protection of women and children in conflict situations and women’s greater participation in formal peace negotiations. A representative of UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women) ‘noted that worldwide, only 2.4% of signatories to the major peace agreements signed since 1996 are women, and women have made up less than 6% of the negotiating delegations in peace negotiations’.¹⁸ Women’s peace work, the female Nobel laureates insisted, should translate into participation in international conventions.

Sometimes, as in the tiny oil state of Qatar in the Arabian Gulf, it does. Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Misnad, the Emir’s consort, has been advocating the centrality of education and dialogue to peace building in a tumultuous Middle East. A woman’s face is the official look of peace to the world. She was instrumental in the 2005 launching of the post-9/11 Alliance of Civilizations Project (AOC). Addressing the structural and cultural levels of war’s violence, she works for the justice without which peace is impossible. In a November 2011 interview, she said ‘the mission of the AOC is to build bridges between people of different cultures to foster peaceful coexistence and cooperation via intercultural dialogue [to build] a better understanding specifically between the Muslim world and the West’.¹⁹ Sheikha Mozah is fighting for peace in the war-torn Middle East and for mutual cross-cultural understanding. Her weapons are education and dialogue.

Muslim Women Warriors

Women’s participation in their people’s wars is not new. Since the beginning Muslim women were involved in war. In the second chapter of the Qur’an, men and women are told that they must fight however loathsome they might find it to be:

Fighting is written for you even though you hate it. But it may well be that you hate what is good for you and that you love what is bad for you. God is the one who knows and not you. (Qur’an 2:216)

Women like Nusayba bint Kaab al-Maziniya should be added to the stories of nurses accompanying Muhammad and his followers to battle. During the 625 CE battle of Uhud between the Muslims and...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Situating Peace, Islam and Women in the Everyday
• Part 1: Deliberations: Questioning the Normative
• Part 2: Interventions: Claiming Public Space
• Part 3: Formations: Engendering Peace Dialogues
• Part 4: Relationships: Building Communities
• Conclusion: Gender, Peace and War
• Epilogue: Dialoguing Peace
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Back Cover