Muslim women take charge of their faith

By Marlise Simons International Herald Tribune

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2005

PARIS Hanife Karakus, the soft-spoken daughter of Turkish immigrants, is a thoroughly European Muslim. She covers her hair with a veil, but she also has a law degree and married the man of her choice. There was no pressure from matchmakers. The couple met on the Internet.

Adding to this mix, Karakus recently became the first woman to preside over one of France's 25 regional Islamic councils.

"At first, the men didn't speak to me," she said. "They were uncomfortable - they didn't know how to work with a woman."

Karakus, 24, does not call herself a feminist; she simply says she is a French lawyer. But she qualifies as part of the quiet revolution spreading among young European Muslim women, a new generation that claims the same rights as their Western sisters while not renouncing Islamic principles.

For many, the key is education, an option often denied their mothers and grandmothers. These daughters of the poor immigrants from mostly Muslim countries are moving into universities, studying law, medicine and anthropology. They are getting jobs in social work, in schools, offices, business and media. French, English, German or Dutch may be their native languages.

Unlike their homebound elders, these emancipated Muslim women use the Internet and spend hours in the proliferating Islamic chat rooms. Web sites are now favorite trysting places, a chance for risk-free "halal dating" - that is, interacting with men in a way that violates no social or religious codes.

In the crowded immigrant suburbs ringing Paris, the scene of recent riots mostly led by young Muslim males, teachers say female students are the most motivated because they have the most to gain. This mirrors findings in young Muslim communities throughout Europe.

In interviews in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, young women repeat this like a mantra: studying offers an escape route from the oppressive housing projects, from controlling young Muslim fanatics and from strict social codes enforced by fathers and brothers.



"We all understood that education was our passport to freedom," said Soria Makti, 30, who left her Marseille housing project and now works as a museum curator.

The emancipation of Muslim women, like that of Western women before them, is uneven in its progress, often slow, sometimes deeply painful when women feel they have no choice but to break with their families. But some changes are pointing to a new form of Islamic feminism.



Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of religion, the centuries-old domain of men. Young women have begun carving out their spaces by following Islamic studies, a fast-growing field across Europe that offers a blend of theology, Koranic law, ethics and Arabic. Diplomas from the two-year courses allow women to teach in mosques and in Islamic schools or to act as religious advisers.



"This is a big shift," said Amel Boubekeur, a social scientist writing her thesis on Europe's "new Islamic elites."

"Instead of having to be passive, women become teachers. It used to be taboo for women to recite the Koran," she said.

Boubekeur has interviewed scores of Islamic studies graduates in France and elsewhere and said many felt that the knowledge of religion was empowering them.

"It offers them a new prestige, new jobs and, not least, it gives them a stronger voice in dealing with their parents, brothers and husbands," Boubekeur said. "To defend their rights, these women find that arguments based on religious texts have more effect than secular ideas."

Today, Islamic studies, often taken on weekends and accessible to secondary school graduates, are expanding in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. An informal survey for this article of France's six Islamic studies institutes showed that of this year's near 1,000 students, almost 60 percent are women.

La Grande Mosquée in Paris, a large white and green compound from the 1920s with a finely chiseled minaret, is France's leading Islamic religious institution. It has its own theological school, largely financed from Algeria. On a recent Saturday, students were milling around under the arcades for a mint tea break from psychology classes.

Abdelkrim Bekri, the director, said that in 2002, the school had begun a new program, unavailable elsewhere, to train young women as spiritual counselors for hospitals and prisons, much like the ministry of Christian chaplains. Twenty have already graduated and other women are in training. "There is a great need here," he said.

Religious tasks are low-paying, even for male clerics, and women are not allowed to perform the most prestigious ritual of leading the mosque in Friday prayers. Boubekeur said that for now women care about having a voice, participating in the debate. "What is new is that they want direct access to religion, without depending on the rigid views of the clergy," she said.

Change can be measured in other small steps. At the Islamic University of Rotterdam, a small group of theology students, most of them speaking Dutch but all tightly veiled, chatted after classes about Islamic segregation of men and women. They said that in Europe it was important to end this.

"In class we sit anywhere we choose," said a student who gave her name only as Aisha. "In the mosques we don't want to sit in separate or hidden spaces."



Ertegul Gokcekuyu, the university registrar, said more than 60 percent of his students were female. "The motivation of the girls is very remarkable."

As educated Muslim women assert their place, they appear to be forging a strand of Euro-Islam, a new hybrid that would at least attempt to reconcile the principles laid out in the Koran with life in a secular, democratic Europe.

They draw ideas from various Muslim writers and philosophers.

Among them is Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss university professor whose grandfather founded Egypt's Islamic revival movement, the banned Muslim Brotherhood. While Washington revoked his visa last year to teach in the United States, Ramadan has a large following in Europe. He urges Europe's Muslims to make their mark as active citizens rather than get trapped in a what he calls a "victim mentality."

Fatema Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist, is read for her defense of women's rights and her writing on early Islam, when women, she argues, held a more favorable position than they do today.

In France, Dounia Bouzar, a respected anthropologist who is both Algerian and French, is following in Mernissi's footsteps. "I tell women, 'we can honor the Koran from our perspective and apply it to our experience today,"' she said in a recent conversation.

"Women now have access to knowledge, so we must recover the religious texts. We have to free them from an exclusively male interpretation that belongs to the Middle Ages. Most important right now is that women get into the universities."

The implications of women flocking to Islamic studies are disturbing to some, who see a potential for more radicalization. Tokia Saïfi, a former deputy minister for development and one of the few women of Arab descent to reach a high post in the French government, said she worried that many young women were flocking to religion as a refuge.

"I see it as a regression," she said. "It means we need less discrimination, more ways to promote integration."

Such debates are far from the concerns of Muslim girls who are abused by their brothers because they are not submissive enough, or who are pressed into marrying virtual strangers because it suits their parents. In France's large housing projects, home to many immigrants, jobless young men often take out their frustration on women, the latest trend being gang rape. Rape in the housing projects has increased 15 percent per year since 1999, according to the government.

Theology has meant little to Latifa Ahmed, 25, who arrived in the Netherlands from a Moroccan village when she was 8. As she grew up near Amsterdam, her family turned against her because she preferred her Dutch classmates.

"They were bad, they were infidels, I was told," she said. "My parents and my brothers started hitting me." She was told she could study as long as she eventually married a Moroccan.

At home until she was 23, Ahmed said, "I was going crazy from all the fights and the lies, but I was afraid to run away and lose my family." One evening, returning from a concert with a Dutch friend, her father yelled: "Let's take a knife and we'll finish with her," she recalled. "He didn't kill me, but he put a curse on me. It was very frightening."

Now living alone in another city, she is hiding from her brothers, who have sworn to kill her. She has put herself through college doing odd jobs and does not care about religion. "I don't feel discriminated here," she said. "Moroccan girls can find work easier than Moroccan boys. Boys have a bad name."

Changes in the lives of Muslim women in Europe come at different speeds, at different places. They are hard to gauge in France, where the law forbids the census to collect data by ethnic origin or religion. One telling signal is the rise in divorce among immigrants in the Netherlands. According to Dutch government statistics, divorces among Moroccan families have increased by 46 percent since 2000 and in Turkish families by 42 percent, with a majority believed to be instigated by wives.

Some daughters of immigrants, now educated and well-placed to throw light on practices little understood in Europe, have begun to study the obstacles and abuse women face. Seyran Ates, a Turkish-born German lawyer, and Necla Kelek, a Turkish-born sociologist, have both recently published widely read books on the fate of Muslim girls in Germany. Kelek's "The Foreign Bride," a best-seller, denounces the plight of often illiterate girls, brought in from the Turkish countryside "as modern slaves" to act as obedient servants to their husbands and in-laws.

Other immigrant women are fighting for change through parliaments. In Belgium, Mimount Bousakla, whose family is from Morocco, and in the Netherlands, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, are both members of Parliament who were raised as Muslims. They are pressing for changes in policies affecting women, including tougher sentences for men who kill women to "save the honor" of their families. In France, a movement called "Neither Whores nor Doormats," created in 2003, addresses the problems of underclass women who suffer violence or discrimination.

At the group's spartan office in eastern Paris, Algerian-born Sihem Habchi said conditions were improving, but that many young women still had to lead double lives. "They feel they have to lie all the time, put on head scarves not to be hassled," she said. "It's very hard to become an adult. Many girls have psychological problems." Now working in multimedia, Habchi, 30, recalled her own efforts to leave home, which took years of begging and negotiation.

Reminded that even French women do not enjoy full equality in the workplace, she said: "Immigrant women have to fight even harder because we are doubly discriminated," she said. "We are not fully accepted in France. But we are beginning to be everywhere; there are many of us now."

As Muslim women take advantage of democracy and civil liberties in Europe, the question remains whether the impact of an educated minority will be continually blunted by the arrival of often poorly educated young brides from North Africa, Pakistan or Turkey.

And as Europe rethinks its faltering integration policies, the question of importing brides is a new target of scrutiny. Critics, including immigrants themselves, argue that importing young women who are kept in the home perpetuates segregation. They say that such marriages violate European standards of freedom for women and are used as false pretexts for family reunion permits.

In Germany, Kelek said, up to 15,000 such girls are "imported" every year through arranged marriages and she is now campaigning for a new law to set age limits.

A study prepared for France's Council for Integration in 2004 says that about 70,000 young women are living in France in arranged or forced marriages. In Denmark, the Institute for Social Studies found that in recent years, 90 percent of the immigrants had imported a spouse from their homeland, and a Dutch study put that figure at 70 percent in the Netherlands. In Britain, bringing a bride from the homeland is still the norm for many Pakistanis. Several European countries have recently raised the age limit for "imported spouses" - in the case of Denmark and Sweden to 24.

"Obviously women are a key to integration," said Senay Ozdemir, an opponent of importing spouses and forced marriages. She is the editor of SEN, a Dutch magazine aimed at immigrant women. "If the woman cannot or will not integrate in a new country, it affects the whole family. She will isolate her children."

Karakus, the lawyer, believes more change will come. When she arrived in Limoges, in central France, she was the first law student to wear a veil, and was asked to remove it. Now, as a lawyer with a veil, she is accepted by both the men of the Muslim Council and the local French authorities with whom she negotiates.

This fall she was working on obtaining plots for Muslim burials at the local cemetery and arranging the site for the slaughter of sheep for Eid-el-Kebir, a major Muslim holiday. She is now helping to organize courses for imams arriving with little knowledge of French or French traditions.

How does she feel about being the first woman to head a Muslim council? She hesitates, then replies: "I'm pleased if my work helps change the image of women."