Muslim women seek to lift the veils of prejudice

London, UK - The satellite link to Hollywood sputtered out, leaving only one producer onstage giving tips on pitching scripts to American movie companies. But the audience of Muslim women remained rapt, taking notes and asking questions on how best to get a hearing with the big California studios.

Muslim Women: Visibility and Leadership was a gathering of Muslim women, but not as we know it. Held not at a mosque, but the Royal Society of Arts, it was a multimedia day of films, panels, mentoring and networking for Muslim women ambitious to get ahead in media, business or the arts. There was little talk of the Koran or the Prophet Muhammad— save in the session entitled Islam: Liberator of Women. Sleek young hijabis swapped business cards and hustled to sessions with titles such as Positive Presence and Image. Would-be music journalists, film-makers and musicians scribbled notes on “how to harness the power of social media to create a brand and promote yourself”. Eighty attendees got one-on-one attention from luminaries ranging from social entrepreneurs to media consultants and leadership strategists.

Whirling through the RSA in a scarlet sequined shalwar kameez was 34-year-old Jobeda Ali, founder of Fair Knowledge, a media company devoted to channelling marginal voices into the mainstream media. The idea, said Ali, was to mix up the day, providing inspiration with practical tips. “To go outside your little world, and have 15 minutes with the media lawyer Richard Moxon, an upper-middle-class white man?” says Ali. “Even if you had the money, you couldn’t pay for that sort of thing.”

Ali is not particularly religious herself, but when her 11-year-old niece began wearing the hijab, she knew that the growing Islamic religious identity was one that she wanted to work with.

As Sajda Shah, a 26-year-old film-maker down from Bradford for the day, says: “There are loads of Muslim women out there, just doing their thing.” “Muslims are always in the media, but we shouldn’t just be marginalised and talked about. At the end of the day, we need to be telling our story in our own way.”

Suddenly, it looks as though Muslim women might get a chance to do more of the talking. Eight years on from 9/11, governments have discovered Muslim women as curbs to Islamic extremism. The Moroccans have trained up a cadre of women field teachers, trained in the rudiments of Islamic knowledge, to give advice to women on everything from reading the Koran to contraception. In 2008 the British Government started the National Muslim Women’s Advisory Group, designed to help to advise it on how to tackle extremism. Last month the group launched a project to get more Muslim women involved in public life. But more impressive than these state-sponsored initiatives are the grassroots movements that Muslim women are building themselves. These groups are stoked with ambitions stretching far beyond governmental goals of combating terror, helping women with careers and battling the inequalities enshrined in many Muslim-majority countries.

In Kuala Lumpur earlier this year the feminist group Sisters in Islam sponsored Musawah, which drew Muslim feminists from Fiji to Kazakhstan and United Nations officials to a launch of a global campaign against sexist family laws based on Sharia. In Afghanistan the veteran women’s group RAWA braved hails of stones when they marched against the country’s new Shia family law, which curbed women’s freedoms and, argued global human rights activists, legalised marital rape. Last week President Hamid Karzai yielded, agreeing to amend the law. And the Iranian Stop Stoning Campaign — a group of women lawyers opposing stoning sentences for adultery, which are overwhelmingly handed down to women — recently won another reprieve for a woman. The sentence reduced to 100 lashes.

A sleek networking day at the RSA is a far cry from these grassroots movements battling fundamentalist laws. But they are linked as part of the groundswell of Islamic feminism. From Kansas to Kuala Lumpur, Muslim women are going back to the Koran and the Hadith — the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad — and peeling back the layers of man-made scholarship to examine the principles beneath. For Muslim progressives, these are gender equality and justice.

Among the most popular sessions at the RSA was the session called Islam: Liberator of Women, in which Oxford-based scholar Taj Hargey was unequivocal: true Islam is not the sexist one often practised today, but a faith devoted to justice, equality and profound humanism. Ali, born in a mud hut in Bangladesh and raised in Tower Hamlets, London, believes that Muslim women are eager to break out of the narrow prescriptions of tradition from their own communities, and prejudice from mainstream non-Muslim society.

She knows — she was one of them. She received the highest grades that her East London comprehensive had ever seen, and yet when the offer came from Cambridge, her mother tried to talk her out of it. Nice Bangladeshi girls, it seemed, weren’t ambitious. She begged to differ, went on to get her degree, and then to get a master’s in world trade. After a decade working with the Government, she then went into the media, pitching to producers on economic subjects. She soon realised, however, that her Muslim surname and brown skin limited her ability to comment on global events, in the eyes of commissioning editors. “I was brown and I had breasts, so obviously my area of expertise was breasted brown people,” she observed.

Fair Knowledge tries to get away from that sort of cramped thinking. While the rise of the Muslim woman as an identity niche has been empowering, it can also limit, notes Ali. “There is a generation of 13-year-old Muslim girls thinking: ‘Oh, I’m a Muslim, that’s all there is to me’.” That’s unhealthy both for them and for society at large, leaving Muslim women to comment on Muslim women, and mainstream topics with an elite of white men.

In its mission to get marginal voices talking about mainstream topics, Ali’s company has had “black boys from the ghetto filming on climate change”, and Muslim girls making movies on genetic selection. If she has her way, Muslim women will increasingly go from being subjects — of articles, conferences and campaigns — to shaping not just how the rest of the world sees them, but to shaping the world they live in, and the faith they practise.