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International Women's Day Address by Joumanah El Matrah
Great Hall, Parliament House
8 March 2006
Thank you. I’d like to thank the Minister for inviting a Muslim woman to present on this day, and so my presence here is fantastic for all Muslim women probably more for them than me because I’m a little bit nervous about presenting, but let’s see how we go.
I think it was Socrates who said that the most powerful people in a nation are its storytellers, and that has always resonated with me, partly because I come from a family of women who love to tell stories and partly because so many stories are actually told about Muslim women in Australia. As women we tell stories all the time. We tell stories mostly to give comfort, but sometimes we tell stories of despair. And because a story of despair is told by a woman, it has the capacity not only to immobilise a community and a family, but also generations to come.
As a Muslim woman one such story of despair might go something like this. For those of us who still identify as Muslims because of religious conviction or cultural resonance this is a truly difficult time. In our name and without our consent innocents are slaughtered over issues they have no knowledge of and certainly no power to change. The legacy of a young Muslim today is famine, poverty, civil war, dictatorships, and imprisonment for dissent. There have also been countless sanctions and occupations that seem to know no end – ongoing wars that seem to have no prospect of peaceful resolution.
To date Muslim women continue to face discrimination on all levels within the law and those laws are designed specifically to keep them as second-class citizens. They also face appalling forms of crime – honour killing, racial vilification and discrimination, imprisonment and violence arising from misogynistic interpretations of Islam. This is an unambiguous reality of Muslim women and it should never be minimised that as a loosely affiliated group of women Muslim women are probably one of the most persecuted groups in the world.
In western nations the fear of Muslims is now so profound that it emanates from every cultural and political space of a nation. Many women – many Muslim women and actually non Muslim women, have simply felt paralysed by the sheer enormity of the challenges that we’ve inherited at this point in time. It is not hard to feel dispirited and clearly many Muslims have collapsed under the weight of this story and that has really gone out in the media that is surrounding us today. Clearly this story demonstrates that stories not only create people but they also destroy them. They have the potential to liberate and the potential to oppress. The stories bring much emotional richness and treasures into our life, but they also sometimes dispossess us from our history and those who are around us, and the questions that are currently facing us.
If we were to let this story of despair perhaps fragment a little we would then hear another story of Muslim women. We would hear of other women’s voices that are equally truthful and equally compelling. We might hear that from the moment the first misogynistic interpretation of Islam was uttered women intervened, and Muslim women have continued to intervene and continued to struggle, even when there was little prospect of success.
Muslim women do have a proud tradition of seeking their rights, and among every generation of Muslim women since the first Muslim women existed, Muslim women have not been passive by standards to injustice. We have not all fought in the same way but we have all fought. Sometimes we have used the human rights perspective. Other times some of us have fought for our rights from an Islamic perspective and others have asserted their rights to religious expression without discrimination, and some have formed part of a generic human rights movement.
Muslim women have also worked on cutting edge issues, some associated with Islam such as polygamy or misogyny – misogynistic Islamic practises, while others have worked on issues pivotal to all women, sexual reproductive health rights being one such issue and political participation and the right to form part of a government being another issue.
The struggle for Muslim women’s rights is an uphill battle and there is still such a long way to go, but the improvements are becoming obvious. For example since Egypt has signed onto the various UN conventions relating to women’s’ rights I think up to a third of the legal system has actually changed for the betterment of Muslim women, and those laws have basically looked at increasing the rights of women to an income, looking at the right of women to have child support, the right to divorce which was previously not a right that Egyptian women enjoyed, and the right to have custody of children.
In Malaysia Muslim women have worked with governments to hold back misogynistic interpretations of Islam taking hold of the legal system in the country. And in Australia we have the first Muslim women’s organisation which delivers programs that are now globally distributed and are considered the benchmark for good practise. And we also have an organisation based on the right to diversity of religious expression and the right in fact not to be religious – the right to wear the Hijab and the right not to wear the Hijab. And we also have benchmarked an approach to Islam that can only be defined as feminist and one that is more consistent with the Australian context without being labelled as heretics.
Australian Muslim women, once they are able to get beyond the secondary school system, acquire one, two, three degrees and will generally move onto a doctoral level of education. Once women are able to just get beyond a certain point Muslim women tend to be fairly high achievers.
I want to strengthen these stories in Australia. I want more of us to be speaking about them and not just Muslim women. I want our resistance to be a matter of fact for every woman in Australia. But I also want to introduce some new stories or perhaps emphasise a bit more on the stories that we never seem to tell anymore.
The feminist space in Australia is a fairly big space and it has always been characterised by diversity. In the sphere of women in their work diversity is not a cultural battleground in which some people win and some people lose. Feminism has not only taught us about power but it has also taught us about difference. It has also taught us about respect and working with diversity, and I believe that women have always been much better at that space than men.
Muslim women and non Muslim women, in Australia anyway, are not opposites and we desperately need to escape this simplicity. Our gender gives us all the burden and the benefit of one heritage, and irrespective of our religious affiliation or non religious affiliations or when we came to this country, our common heritage binds us to a common cause and that is the cause for women and a cause that I’m very proud to be fighting for.
There is a need to support Muslim women no doubt, sometimes in a very practical way, but sometimes in also bringing Muslim women into a conversation about empowerment and rights and what those things mean for them. Sometimes empowerment is a consequence of our work and we never have that discussion with women. Sometimes giving women a home to live in, an income to finance their life is enough. But other times it is actually important to have that conversation. And there are times in which empowerment and the basic human rights of women have to be at the centre of the exchange with women. And just as we enter that exchange with responsibility, with care and with sound ethics, so too women need to take responsibility of at least recognising their basic human rights, and in all my years of working with Muslim women I have never seen them back away from this invitation. And while I have seen Muslim women bide for time, I have never seen a Muslim woman retreat from that basic question of rights.
The continual rumination on the vulnerability and oppression of women is not helpful any more and I think that in some ways we’re a bit stuck on it. I don’t want to be nonchalant about it, but the reality is okay, so we know Muslim women do face significant forms of oppression and vulnerability. Surely now the point is to fix it. We understand structural inequities, we know how men have exploited Islam to benefit them, we know Muslim women see integration and participation in Australian society as a basic right – not as an unpalatable obligation, and we understand the barriers that they face for successful integration. Most importantly we actually know quite a lot about what to do about these issues and we need to get our head down and do the work as the women before us have always done.
As an organisation of Muslim women we are driven by the belief that purposeful and meaningful power, enacted for the collective good, is the domain of women. It is the form of leadership that they are interested in. I know that there are exceptions to this of course, but it is … meaningful leadership that contributes to everybody is a form of leadership that I think belongs mostly to women.
The collective good describes both the process by which women have exercised leadership and the desired outcome of their leadership. This capacity is actually an invaluable resource which we must use more often. It not only benefits Australia as a whole but also the individual woman who has given her basic right to engage in a conscious, reflective, humane manner for everybody.
We owe Muslim women their inclusion as much as they owe us their participation. Thank you.