ASMA SOCIETY | American Society for Muslim Advancement

International Day of Peace

WISE affirms gender equality is essential to peace building

September 21, 2010

NEW YORK — The Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality (WISE) commemorates International Day of Peace, September 21, and celebrates peace building efforts around the world. WISE promotes women’s empowerment as an essential aspect of defending universal peace and human rights.

“[T]housands of organizations led by Muslim women courageously and effectively tackle violence on a daily basis. We must support these efforts, unifying our individual efforts to ‘command the good and forbid the evil,’ as decreed in the Qur’an. Most importantly, we must affirm peace. We must think, speak, and act, both wisely and courageously, overflowing with a powerful spirit of mercy, justice, and peace,” state the WISE Muslim women’s Shura Council, an all-women’s advisory council that promotes women’s rights within an Islamic framework, in their first statement “Jihad Against Violence: Muslim Women’s Struggle for Peace.” The Council condemns all forms of violence, and in this statement, links violent extremism and domestic violence, two critical issues that are typically assumed to be separate.

WISE is also working on the ground to implement the Jihad Against Violence campaign. WISE is collaborating with an NGO in Giza, Egypt to eradicate Female Genital Cutting. Through the ongoing project, FGC practitioners, including barbers and midwives, receive educational training clarifying that the practice is un-Islamic and harmful to women and the broader society. They are also offered financial incentives and replacement economic activities in exchange for agreeing to stop performing FGC. For more than one year the first two project participants have refrained from conducting a single FGC procedure. WISE is currently working with three other practitioners to hopefully end the practice of FGC in Giza by 2011.

In Pakistan, WISE partnered with a women’s rights organization on a domestic violence awareness campaign in district Jhelum, an impoverished region of Punjab, Pakistan. The project included 5,000 illustrated booklets in simple Urdu on domestic violence awareness from Islamic, legal and social perspectives, 20 street theater performances, as illiteracy is an issue in the region, and three advocacy and awareness sessions on domestic violence with community leaders across many sectors.

WISE is also working in Afghanistan with an NGO based in Kabul and Jalalabad to educate and mobilize Imams, or religious leaders. Imams attend training sessions pointing out that numerous harmful traditional practices against women result from patriarchal (mis)interpretations of religious texts. The sessions also utilized the Afghan constitution, other national and international legal treaties and the WISE Compact, which encapsulates the mission of WISE and defends gender equality through the objectives of Islamic law. Working with the project team, the Imams developed a series of booklets about women’s rights and 25,000 copies in Dari were distributed. The Imams spoke about women’s rights during Friday sermons, which were monitored by university students hired for the project. In their monitoring reports of 240 people who attended the Imams’ sermons, 97 percent of interviewees said they felt Islamic human rights for men and women are equal and the same. Through widespread media attention for the project, almost 9.5 million people have been exposed to the Imams’ sermons on women’s rights in Islam. The project is currently establishing formal women’s sections in 10 mosques in Kabul—to be coordinated by 20 women mosque leaders who will also receive the same training as the Imams.

The Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality (WISE) is a program of the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA). ASMA aims to elevate the discourse on Islam and foster environments in which Muslims thrive through interfaith collaboration, youth and women’s empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange. The mission of WISE is to build a cohesive, global movement of Muslim women that will reclaim women’s rights in Islam, enabling them to make dignified choices and fully participate in creating just and flourishing societies. Visit the WISE Muslim Women's Web Portal to learn more about WISE and its activities: www.wisemuslimwomen.org.