Islam, however, dealt with the issue decisively, but ignorance and enduring male arrogance have always connived to deny women what Islam has given them. This was further compounded by the incorporation of the Muslim world into the contemporary world, shaped as it had been by Western liberalism which is rooted in a rebellion against a Christian God. With both Christianity and Islam marginalized in our contemporary world, the job of intervention and the restoration of equity in this gender relationship have now been taken over by the United Nation and chains of NGO’s. The idea of women empowerment is a concept created by the UN, championed by UNIFEM and supported by the various NGO’s. Is Empowerment of women the answer to the problem? Can the UN, supported by the host of, admittedly good intentioned agencies, redress the imbalance and restore equity in gender relations? Does Islam offer a better hope and if it does, will our contemporary Muslims allow it? These are some of the questions that this paper seeks to address.
But first some caution. Foremost, the relation between men and women, which this paper is obliged to touch, is too often clouded by emotion. This may have to do with the nature of the relationship between men and women which is essentially emotive. For it is difficult to explain rationally why we love the people we love or why we marry the spouses we marry. Emotions, we hardly need to say, cloud vision, obstruct rationality and make it difficult to fathom issues. Second, Muslims scholars have remained decades (some would say centuries) behind the very societies they are supposed to guide.
Many of them appear to be oblivious of the age in which they live and seem unwilling to exert themselves as their predecessors had done in developing rulings (fatawi) which takes into account the dynamics of society and address their immediate context. This not only stultifies the Sharia, especially in the eyes of the uninformed, but, it also holds the Muslim community hostage to the imbecility and ineptitude of those who are supposed to lead it. Many followers are consequently left to wallow in increasing confusion as to the position of the Shari’a on many issues, especially the issue of women. Third, the prevailing intellectual decadence of the Muslim community has over several decades forged a timid mind which had been keen on conformity and weary of creativity. Thus the average Muslim mind has lost its analytical capacity and has become mechanical in its thinking, content with whatever is passed to it as knowledge.
The mind has been particularly intimidated into conformity by a clergy who have masked their incompetence by curtailing the kind of questions that can be raised and by raising the qualification of the jurist who could answer these questions to such humanly unattainable heights, that we are left to helplessly and endlessly wait for some imaginary mujtahid to emerge from only God knows where. Thus the average Muslim mind fears to raise questions and finds it easier to evade rather than face issues, leaving many topical questions unanswered. Far from deterring us, these problems ought to, in fact, motivate us the more, they are raised here mainly to help explain some of the questions to be raised and put in context some of the liberties the author may wish to take. But it seems necessary to first appreciate the features and contours of our contemporary world, the terrain within which we shall be applying whatever ideas we may come up with.
Our contemporary world is nothing but the extension and perfection of a culture which took its roots from the European Renaissance which itself started in 15th century Europe. This is a culture which rebelled against God as symbolized by the Christian Churches and sought to create a civilization which is man-centered and where the pursuit of pleasure becomes the overriding objective in life. The Renaissance Movement thought that man’s craving for pleasure and material progress has been blocked or at least delayed by the idea of a god and sought, therefore, to wean off man from God and release him from all inhibitions so that man can, for once, be free to explore his full potentials uninhibited. This new man, also called the ‘renaissance man’ or the ‘universal man’, limitless in his capabilities to acquire knowledge and in his capabilities for development, was deemed to be the center, nay the master of the universe. The vision of the new man was to be found in the motto of the renaissance, captured in the famous remark of one of its chief prophets, Leon Battista Alberti (d. 1472) that "a man can do all things if he will". This was to form the foundations of Renaissance humanism and the modern world it gave birth to.
By the 19th century, renaissance had acquired sufficient momentum and its new man, enough audacity to declare God dead. Soon books were being written about the history of God and Karl Marx was reported to have said that God never created man, but it was the man who created God, in other words, God was nothing but a figment of man’s imagination. By the middle of this century, however, some of the promises of the Renaissance were still to be realized. The elusive search for happiness has only produced sadness and misery as evidenced by the dramatic rise in suicide cases, mental illnesses, and violent crimes. The El Dorado promised by communism remained a mirage until the whole edifice collapsed like the proverbial house of cards. The glitter of science and technology had by the second half of this century began to fade in the face of the destruction it had wrought not only on the physical environment but also on man’s social environment. Social and economic inequality, weakening of the family unit and the crisis of values, were to unleash series of unprecedented consequences that continue to suffocate the life of the modern man. In the words of a prominent Western scholar, "the modern era had put its enthusiastic hopes in the mastery of nature and society. For more than two centuries man believed that the continued perfecting of rationality would have as a result the unceasing growth of his power and, consequently, an increase in well-being and happiness, freedom and equality among people. Now, not only has he experienced the limits of his power, but he has discovered that the rational and technological civilization creates new problems and that it endangers the balance between man and nature, individual and society. The deception", he added, "is all the more painful because the progressivist had exalted people’s desires and confidence."
Such was the tragic end of modernism. In the eloquent words of Erich Fromm, "in the nineteen century, the problem was that God is dead, in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead."Our contemporary world is a postmodern world in which the variety of the problems created by modernism are being addressed. Admittedly many of these problems have not been sufficiently diagnosed or sufficiently comprehended. Even in the physical environment, which lends itself to the easy inquiry, when we thought we have learned enough about the global warming and ozone layer, the problems of EL-NINO is surfacing out of the blue. The emergence of a new brand of tuberculosis that defies all known remedies, may well be the tip of an iceberg. The Social environment which is certainly more complex is even more difficult to fathom. The crisis of values triggered by renaissance and championed by modernism, the confusion of roles and the consequent identity crisis and the rising domestic violence and the breakdown of the family, are only aspects of a complex situation in a constant state of flux. Though Europe and the rest of the Western world provided the main theatre for this drama, the Muslims world in particular and the non-western world in general, have increasingly been drawn and incorporated in to this contemporary world, initially through imperialism, subsequently through education and recently, but, perhaps more effectively, through satellite communication. The relationship between men and women, which is the concern of this paper, has been dramatically changed and shaped by the social crisis which has become the trade-mark of our contemporary world. This is what makes it necessary to first appreciate the features and contours of this contemporary world before delving into this issue.
The plight of women in the middle ages, when Europe was in the full grips of Christianity, is fairly explicable, for the Bible seem to have placed the entire blame for the descent of man at the door of the woman. In the popular literature of the middle ages, the woman was likened to the Satan who worked day and night for the destruction of the man. The Church in Europe remained stuck with its misogyny up through the 18th century when it presided over the famous debate in France on whether a woman had a soul or not. What appeared inexplicable was the continuation of these prejudices well after the Renaissance and the weakening of the grip of the Church and the liberalization of thoughts and ideas. It was even more surprising that a whole century after the French revolution of 1789, with its promise for people’s rights and democracy, women in the West remain suppressed. Writing in 1866, George Eliot observed, "A woman can hardly ever choose ... she is dependent on what happens to her. She must take meaner things because only meaner things are within her reach." One can feel the sense of frustration in this remark. What is news, however, is not the remark , but the fact that George Eliot is a pseudonym of an English woman novelist Mary Ann Evans (1819-80), who apparently dared not use her proper feminine name in a society so dominated by men that works like hers could only be taken seriously if they were to come from men. She had six years earlier written that "the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history", in her book, ‘The Mill on the Floss’, where she "portrayed rural Victorian society, particularly its intellectual hypocrisy".
This situation seemed to have continued unabated well into the second half of this century and seem to have given impetus to what is commonly referred to as feminism. The lives and works of three prominent Western feminists summarise the situation. Virginia Woolf, (1882-1941) a British novelist, philosopher, and critic took the themes of the tensions for combining marriage and career in her book The Voyage Out and pursued the issue of economic independence for women in her book The Years 1928. That she tragically ended her life through suicide by drowning herself may not be unconnected with the tensions of her times. Gloria Steinem, (1943- ) an American journalist and liberal feminist emerged as a leading figure in American new women’s movement in the late 1960’s, co-founded the women’s action alliance in 1970 and also co-founded the Ms. Magazine. She was one of those who gave feminism a concrete shape, betraying the cumulative oppression and frustration of women behind the thin veneer, or as we may prefer in Nigeria, behind the smokescreen of freedom and equality. Her perception of feminism is captured in her oft-quoted statement "We are becoming the men we wanted to marry" and another attributed to her, "a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle". Yet another woman in this class is Juliet Mitchell, a British psychoanalyst, and writer. She took feminism further first in her article titled The Longest Revolution, in 1966 and later her books titled, Women’s Estate (1971) and Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974). She seemed to have been the first to combine socialism and feminism and to use Marxist theory to explain some of the reasons behind women oppression in the West. Juliet Mitchell has had a tremendous influence on feminist thinking and one could see her hands in a lot of the women struggles against oppression in the West.
The influences of these and other feminists writers can easily be detected in the current debate on gender equity. We must not make the mistake that many pious Muslims make of dismissing feminism. One does not have to like feminism to appreciate the situational problems that brought it about. Dismissing it, as many Muslims are apt to do, is ignoring the circumstances, which is neither fair nor the panacea. If nothing else, in feminism we have a lesson to learn and that is: if we are not prepared to allow equity, then we should be prepared to live in anarchy. And one should quickly add, single-parent family, which had been a phenomenon restricted to non-Muslim communities is slowly creeping into the Muslim community. This is only one form of anarchy. Lesbianism is another. And one could go on.
In the Muslim world the literature on this subject, especially authored by women, may not be as rich, but that is not to say the oppression was any less. Here in pre-Jihad Hausaland, presently the Northern States of Nigeria, reading the works of Shehu Usman Dan Fodio, particularly his Nurul-al-Bab one can see a lot parallel with the misogyny of the Victorian days in Europe, in spite of the equitable and humane provisions made by the Sharia. The presence of the Sharia, undoubtedly, made the difference. Even as the provisions of the Sharia did not stop the oppression, they made Shehu Usman’s case easier, for all he needed do was to enlighten the society and draw attention to these provisions. Of course, even then it was far from easy, not only because of the opposition he faced from nor other than scholars themselves but also because no sooner had the tempo of the jihad began to wane and ignorance started to creep, the situation reverted, gradually, back to the pre-Jihad periods. Today the situation of Muslim women, in terms of rights and equity is very much close to the pre-Sokoto Jihad period. It may at first sound like an exaggeration until we visit the Area Courts in the North and perhaps the customary courts in the South. Or better still until we allow the women to tell their tales.
Many Muslim women will today find the offer of the UN and the host of NGO’s quite attractive, not so much because Islam has not given her something better, but rather because they are either not sufficiently aware of the men, better still, Muslim scholars, are not quite ready to concede to them what Islam has given them. But coming from the West, such offers of emancipation are, rather naturally, rooted in the rebellion of the renaissance, imbued with a consuming hedonism and embellished in a rhetoric that is designed, like a bait, to capture a prey. The social context of the offer itself presents some problems for Muslims, for our contemporary modern world, has made the search for pleasure a major, some would say, the major, objective in life, has predicated gender relationship on sheer lust. Modeling, fashion, and advertising agencies are up and about exciting our base desires and making lust a major consideration in our decisions in life including the important institution of marriage. The institution of marriage itself has lost its sacredness in the West, it is, in fact, fast losing its meaning, so such offers tend not only to ignore Muslim sensibility, invert Muslim scale of priority but may actually find no place to accommodate religion, having completely dispensed with it a long time ago.
It is worth recalling that the globalization of gender equity started quite recently, with the United Nation declaring 1975 as the International Women’s Year. Sequel to this the decade 1976-1985, was declared the Decade for Women, during which international agencies, as well as some governments, focused attention on what came to be popularly referred to as ‘women issues’. This decade was crowned by the Nairobi conference on women in 1985 in which forward-looking strategies for women to be implemented by the year 2000, were adopted. Then came the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 which seemed to focus on the independence and autonomy of women even within a family context. Indeed several conferences, conventions, and activities of a host of international agencies took place during the 1985-1994 period to prepare the grounds and minds for the famous Beijing Conference in 1995. It was in Beijing more than anywhere the issue of empowerment was focused and made such an indispensable condition for world progress and development. These two decades, during which the UN championed the globalization of the women issues, happened to be the two decades during which the UN became increasingly a tool in the hands of a few Western nations who were using it to achieve their selfish political goals. The role of the UN in the Palestinian Crisis, its role in the Gulf War and its performance, or lack of it, in Bosnia, left many in no doubt that someone was using the UN to subvert Islam and Muslim body politic. This left many Muslims unsure about the role of the UN in respect of the women issues.
The word ‘empowerment’, seems to be of very recent etymology, it became widely used and popularised by the ‘Draft Platform of Action’ of the Beijing conference of 1995. Though the etymology appears recent, the morphology of the word betrays a deep root in the psyche of a civilization which had been born out of conflict and remains ridden with conflict. For empowerment suggests the giving of power to someone who has been deprived of it, someone who will remain vulnerable without that power, someone whose hope for justice and fairness seem to hinge on the possession of that power. This power, which is held to be the solution to all the problems, has to be wrested from some despot, presumably, in this case, man. This power also holds a promise for a panacea. All these features underscore the origin of this word in the Western conflict embedded psyche. This conflict which began with renaissance and continues to date appears to be one thread which runs through Western social and intellectual development. First, it was a conflict between man and God, then between the state and Church, then science and nature, then the Proletariat and the bourgeoisie, then women and man and young and old.
There is, therefore, the fear that empowerment conceived in this context may only aggravate this perceived conflict rather than solve it. In the same way that the empowerment of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie led to the crumbling of the communist edifice leaving hardly any pieces to pick. The difference is that while we can happily do without communism, one is not sure if the same can be said of the institution of the family. Empowerment, at least in the way it has been conceived in Beijing, may only aggravate the war of the sexes which had been triggered earlier. Empowerment, if and when it succeeds, maybe the cost of complementarity of the sexes which again is essential for the health and function of the human family. One is not sure from where empowerment will drive its power of implementation. So far it looks like it will be the UN and its Member states, which undoubtedly have immense coercive powers, but can coercive power alone impose a code of behavior between such intimate partners as husband and wives, brothers and daughters, ect.? Granted the UN and its member's states will be wise enough to appreciate the folly, will they then appeal to the minds and hearts of their citizens? But does the UN and its member states and even the NGO’s have a real place in people’s heart? To put it bluntly, does UN and others in the business of empowerment believe that people will abandon what their religions stipulate in favor of some resolution from Beijing? The UN has immense power, they can send troops anywhere in the world and these troops can wreck all manners of havoc, but unfortunately for the UN or any of its members state, it has no heavens or hell to reward or punish people after death.
But first some caution. Foremost, the relation between men and women, which this paper is obliged to touch, is too often clouded by emotion. This may have to do with the nature of the relationship between men and women which is essentially emotive. For it is difficult to explain rationally why we love the people we love or why we marry the spouses we marry. Emotions, we hardly need to say, cloud vision, obstruct rationality and make it difficult to fathom issues. Second, Muslims scholars have remained decades (some would say centuries) behind the very societies they are supposed to guide.
Many of them appear to be oblivious of the age in which they live and seem unwilling to exert themselves as their predecessors had done in developing rulings (fatawi) which takes into account the dynamics of society and address their immediate context. This not only stultifies the Sharia, especially in the eyes of the uninformed, but, it also holds the Muslim community hostage to the imbecility and ineptitude of those who are supposed to lead it. Many followers are consequently left to wallow in increasing confusion as to the position of the Shari’a on many issues, especially the issue of women. Third, the prevailing intellectual decadence of the Muslim community has over several decades forged a timid mind which had been keen on conformity and weary of creativity. Thus the average Muslim mind has lost its analytical capacity and has become mechanical in its thinking, content with whatever is passed to it as knowledge.
The mind has been particularly intimidated into conformity by a clergy who have masked their incompetence by curtailing the kind of questions that can be raised and by raising the qualification of the jurist who could answer these questions to such humanly unattainable heights, that we are left to helplessly and endlessly wait for some imaginary mujtahid to emerge from only God knows where. Thus the average Muslim mind fears to raise questions and finds it easier to evade rather than face issues, leaving many topical questions unanswered. Far from deterring us, these problems ought to, in fact, motivate us the more, they are raised here mainly to help explain some of the questions to be raised and put in context some of the liberties the author may wish to take. But it seems necessary to first appreciate the features and contours of our contemporary world, the terrain within which we shall be applying whatever ideas we may come up with.
Our Contemporary World
By the 19th century, renaissance had acquired sufficient momentum and its new man, enough audacity to declare God dead. Soon books were being written about the history of God and Karl Marx was reported to have said that God never created man, but it was the man who created God, in other words, God was nothing but a figment of man’s imagination. By the middle of this century, however, some of the promises of the Renaissance were still to be realized. The elusive search for happiness has only produced sadness and misery as evidenced by the dramatic rise in suicide cases, mental illnesses, and violent crimes. The El Dorado promised by communism remained a mirage until the whole edifice collapsed like the proverbial house of cards. The glitter of science and technology had by the second half of this century began to fade in the face of the destruction it had wrought not only on the physical environment but also on man’s social environment. Social and economic inequality, weakening of the family unit and the crisis of values, were to unleash series of unprecedented consequences that continue to suffocate the life of the modern man. In the words of a prominent Western scholar, "the modern era had put its enthusiastic hopes in the mastery of nature and society. For more than two centuries man believed that the continued perfecting of rationality would have as a result the unceasing growth of his power and, consequently, an increase in well-being and happiness, freedom and equality among people. Now, not only has he experienced the limits of his power, but he has discovered that the rational and technological civilization creates new problems and that it endangers the balance between man and nature, individual and society. The deception", he added, "is all the more painful because the progressivist had exalted people’s desires and confidence."
Such was the tragic end of modernism. In the eloquent words of Erich Fromm, "in the nineteen century, the problem was that God is dead, in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead."Our contemporary world is a postmodern world in which the variety of the problems created by modernism are being addressed. Admittedly many of these problems have not been sufficiently diagnosed or sufficiently comprehended. Even in the physical environment, which lends itself to the easy inquiry, when we thought we have learned enough about the global warming and ozone layer, the problems of EL-NINO is surfacing out of the blue. The emergence of a new brand of tuberculosis that defies all known remedies, may well be the tip of an iceberg. The Social environment which is certainly more complex is even more difficult to fathom. The crisis of values triggered by renaissance and championed by modernism, the confusion of roles and the consequent identity crisis and the rising domestic violence and the breakdown of the family, are only aspects of a complex situation in a constant state of flux. Though Europe and the rest of the Western world provided the main theatre for this drama, the Muslims world in particular and the non-western world in general, have increasingly been drawn and incorporated in to this contemporary world, initially through imperialism, subsequently through education and recently, but, perhaps more effectively, through satellite communication. The relationship between men and women, which is the concern of this paper, has been dramatically changed and shaped by the social crisis which has become the trade-mark of our contemporary world. This is what makes it necessary to first appreciate the features and contours of this contemporary world before delving into this issue.
The Problem
The plight of women in the middle ages, when Europe was in the full grips of Christianity, is fairly explicable, for the Bible seem to have placed the entire blame for the descent of man at the door of the woman. In the popular literature of the middle ages, the woman was likened to the Satan who worked day and night for the destruction of the man. The Church in Europe remained stuck with its misogyny up through the 18th century when it presided over the famous debate in France on whether a woman had a soul or not. What appeared inexplicable was the continuation of these prejudices well after the Renaissance and the weakening of the grip of the Church and the liberalization of thoughts and ideas. It was even more surprising that a whole century after the French revolution of 1789, with its promise for people’s rights and democracy, women in the West remain suppressed. Writing in 1866, George Eliot observed, "A woman can hardly ever choose ... she is dependent on what happens to her. She must take meaner things because only meaner things are within her reach." One can feel the sense of frustration in this remark. What is news, however, is not the remark , but the fact that George Eliot is a pseudonym of an English woman novelist Mary Ann Evans (1819-80), who apparently dared not use her proper feminine name in a society so dominated by men that works like hers could only be taken seriously if they were to come from men. She had six years earlier written that "the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history", in her book, ‘The Mill on the Floss’, where she "portrayed rural Victorian society, particularly its intellectual hypocrisy".
This situation seemed to have continued unabated well into the second half of this century and seem to have given impetus to what is commonly referred to as feminism. The lives and works of three prominent Western feminists summarise the situation. Virginia Woolf, (1882-1941) a British novelist, philosopher, and critic took the themes of the tensions for combining marriage and career in her book The Voyage Out and pursued the issue of economic independence for women in her book The Years 1928. That she tragically ended her life through suicide by drowning herself may not be unconnected with the tensions of her times. Gloria Steinem, (1943- ) an American journalist and liberal feminist emerged as a leading figure in American new women’s movement in the late 1960’s, co-founded the women’s action alliance in 1970 and also co-founded the Ms. Magazine. She was one of those who gave feminism a concrete shape, betraying the cumulative oppression and frustration of women behind the thin veneer, or as we may prefer in Nigeria, behind the smokescreen of freedom and equality. Her perception of feminism is captured in her oft-quoted statement "We are becoming the men we wanted to marry" and another attributed to her, "a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle". Yet another woman in this class is Juliet Mitchell, a British psychoanalyst, and writer. She took feminism further first in her article titled The Longest Revolution, in 1966 and later her books titled, Women’s Estate (1971) and Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974). She seemed to have been the first to combine socialism and feminism and to use Marxist theory to explain some of the reasons behind women oppression in the West. Juliet Mitchell has had a tremendous influence on feminist thinking and one could see her hands in a lot of the women struggles against oppression in the West.
The influences of these and other feminists writers can easily be detected in the current debate on gender equity. We must not make the mistake that many pious Muslims make of dismissing feminism. One does not have to like feminism to appreciate the situational problems that brought it about. Dismissing it, as many Muslims are apt to do, is ignoring the circumstances, which is neither fair nor the panacea. If nothing else, in feminism we have a lesson to learn and that is: if we are not prepared to allow equity, then we should be prepared to live in anarchy. And one should quickly add, single-parent family, which had been a phenomenon restricted to non-Muslim communities is slowly creeping into the Muslim community. This is only one form of anarchy. Lesbianism is another. And one could go on.
In the Muslim world the literature on this subject, especially authored by women, may not be as rich, but that is not to say the oppression was any less. Here in pre-Jihad Hausaland, presently the Northern States of Nigeria, reading the works of Shehu Usman Dan Fodio, particularly his Nurul-al-Bab one can see a lot parallel with the misogyny of the Victorian days in Europe, in spite of the equitable and humane provisions made by the Sharia. The presence of the Sharia, undoubtedly, made the difference. Even as the provisions of the Sharia did not stop the oppression, they made Shehu Usman’s case easier, for all he needed do was to enlighten the society and draw attention to these provisions. Of course, even then it was far from easy, not only because of the opposition he faced from nor other than scholars themselves but also because no sooner had the tempo of the jihad began to wane and ignorance started to creep, the situation reverted, gradually, back to the pre-Jihad periods. Today the situation of Muslim women, in terms of rights and equity is very much close to the pre-Sokoto Jihad period. It may at first sound like an exaggeration until we visit the Area Courts in the North and perhaps the customary courts in the South. Or better still until we allow the women to tell their tales.
Many Muslim women will today find the offer of the UN and the host of NGO’s quite attractive, not so much because Islam has not given her something better, but rather because they are either not sufficiently aware of the men, better still, Muslim scholars, are not quite ready to concede to them what Islam has given them. But coming from the West, such offers of emancipation are, rather naturally, rooted in the rebellion of the renaissance, imbued with a consuming hedonism and embellished in a rhetoric that is designed, like a bait, to capture a prey. The social context of the offer itself presents some problems for Muslims, for our contemporary modern world, has made the search for pleasure a major, some would say, the major, objective in life, has predicated gender relationship on sheer lust. Modeling, fashion, and advertising agencies are up and about exciting our base desires and making lust a major consideration in our decisions in life including the important institution of marriage. The institution of marriage itself has lost its sacredness in the West, it is, in fact, fast losing its meaning, so such offers tend not only to ignore Muslim sensibility, invert Muslim scale of priority but may actually find no place to accommodate religion, having completely dispensed with it a long time ago.
It is worth recalling that the globalization of gender equity started quite recently, with the United Nation declaring 1975 as the International Women’s Year. Sequel to this the decade 1976-1985, was declared the Decade for Women, during which international agencies, as well as some governments, focused attention on what came to be popularly referred to as ‘women issues’. This decade was crowned by the Nairobi conference on women in 1985 in which forward-looking strategies for women to be implemented by the year 2000, were adopted. Then came the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 which seemed to focus on the independence and autonomy of women even within a family context. Indeed several conferences, conventions, and activities of a host of international agencies took place during the 1985-1994 period to prepare the grounds and minds for the famous Beijing Conference in 1995. It was in Beijing more than anywhere the issue of empowerment was focused and made such an indispensable condition for world progress and development. These two decades, during which the UN championed the globalization of the women issues, happened to be the two decades during which the UN became increasingly a tool in the hands of a few Western nations who were using it to achieve their selfish political goals. The role of the UN in the Palestinian Crisis, its role in the Gulf War and its performance, or lack of it, in Bosnia, left many in no doubt that someone was using the UN to subvert Islam and Muslim body politic. This left many Muslims unsure about the role of the UN in respect of the women issues.
Is Empowerment the Solution?
There is, therefore, the fear that empowerment conceived in this context may only aggravate this perceived conflict rather than solve it. In the same way that the empowerment of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie led to the crumbling of the communist edifice leaving hardly any pieces to pick. The difference is that while we can happily do without communism, one is not sure if the same can be said of the institution of the family. Empowerment, at least in the way it has been conceived in Beijing, may only aggravate the war of the sexes which had been triggered earlier. Empowerment, if and when it succeeds, maybe the cost of complementarity of the sexes which again is essential for the health and function of the human family. One is not sure from where empowerment will drive its power of implementation. So far it looks like it will be the UN and its Member states, which undoubtedly have immense coercive powers, but can coercive power alone impose a code of behavior between such intimate partners as husband and wives, brothers and daughters, ect.? Granted the UN and its member's states will be wise enough to appreciate the folly, will they then appeal to the minds and hearts of their citizens? But does the UN and its member states and even the NGO’s have a real place in people’s heart? To put it bluntly, does UN and others in the business of empowerment believe that people will abandon what their religions stipulate in favor of some resolution from Beijing? The UN has immense power, they can send troops anywhere in the world and these troops can wreck all manners of havoc, but unfortunately for the UN or any of its members state, it has no heavens or hell to reward or punish people after death.
source: islamicstudies.islammessage.com
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