Muslim scholar researches gender equality

BANGOR – Riffat Hassan is a Muslim woman and a feminist.

The two concepts don’t meld in the minds of conservative Muslims in Asia, where she was born, or in America, where she has worked for the past 26 years.

They don’t meld in the minds of many Christians and Jews, either.

Despite the popular notion that Muslim women are inferior to men, the basic teachings of Islam promote the equal status of women and men in all life activities, Hassan told Maine audiences this week.

A professor of religion and humanities at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, Hassan came to Bangor in observance of March as Women’s History Month. She gave talks at the Peace and Justice Center in Bangor, the Bangor Theological Seminary and the University of Maine in Orono on such topics as working against violence toward women in Pakistan, her home country.

On Monday, she spoke to an audience of two dozen at the seminary. Despite the lecture’s broad title – “Feminist Theology in the Context of the Islamic Tradition” – Hassan, a personable woman, quickly got the attention of men and women at the session by blending extensive knowledge of the topic with her own life stories.

Hassan’s research on Islam “is so intertwined with my own life story, I can’t separate the two,” she said.

The daughter of a traditional Muslim father and a feminist Muslim mother, Hassan was one of nine children and the first girl in her family to escape the tradition of becoming engaged at 16 to a man whom her father picked for her. Instead, she fled to a school in England, eventually receiving a doctorate from the University of Durham in that country.

She is the single mother of a grown daughter who is trying to become a movie actress.

Her life, however, is dedicated to feminist activism, particularly in support of downtrodden women in Pakistan and other Asian countries.

Her studies of the Quran, the Islamic holy book, led Hassan to the point of anger in the early 1980s because reality did not match theology, she said. “There is a great gap between what the Quran says about women and what really happens to Muslim women,” Hassan said.

For one thing, the ancient creation story of Adam and Eve – not mentioned specifically in Muslim religious texts – is popular in the Muslim world and leads almost automatically to believing women are weak yet evil, she said.

Bolstering that idea are other ideas prevalent in literature that appeared in the early centuries of Islam, according to Hassan. These ideas were cited in two Islamic books that are exceeded in authority only by the Quran.

They focus on women being created from a curved portion of the rib – and that any attempts to straighten the rib could result in breaking it.

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider that a compliment,” Hassan said, a comment that generated laughter from her seminary audience.

The reaction against women also reflects the fear of some Muslims of modernization, and an overriding fear of Western culture, which is perceived as drug-infested and evil, Hassan said.

It also reflects a basic belief that women’s bodies arouse sexual feelings – even in holy men – and therefore should be kept cloistered.

“Isn’t that the man’s problem?” Hassan asked.

The fascinating and frustrating fact about these ancient anti-female beliefs is that none are found in the Quran, she said.

In her studies, Hassan said, she has come across at least 30 passages in the Quran that uphold gender equality. Every man and woman has the right to develop “aesthetic sensibilities and enjoy the bounties created by God,” she said. Both genders have the right to work and earn money, the right to be protected against slander and ridicule, the right to education, the right to the good life, and the right to leave one’s homeland under oppressive conditions, Hassan said.

Yet Muslim women in Asia and the Middle East often are denied education and subjected to honor killings, which occur when husbands murder wives for some perceived wrong without fear of reprisal.

Female infanticide has been abolished, but “female children are discriminated against from the moment of birth for it is customary in Muslim societies to regard a son as a gift and a daughter as a trial from God,” Hassan wrote in one of her many research texts.

In addition to her teaching and research, Hassan is the founder of an international group working against violence aimed at Pakistani women.

There are pockets of change, according to Hassan. In Pakistan, where she still maintains a summer home, “women are bankers and lawyers. They appear in public every day. They ride motorcycles.”

Despite the backward step women’s rights took under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Hassan said there are reasons to believe conditions will improve for Muslim women.

Muslim women now attend international conferences that promote basic human rights. They appeared in record numbers at the 1994 United Nations Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, and challenged a panel of men speaking on “Muslim viewpoints,” demanding and getting equal time.

These pockets of challenge to the traditional viewpoint “indicate that Muslim women are no longer nameless, faceless or voiceless and that they are ready to stand up and be counted,” Hassan said.