28 April 2012

Female British Muslims are at last finding their voice

Anyone who has worked in British Muslim communities will tell you the very notion of women's rights is still considered a taboo subject. Like many women who have spent years challenging gender-based discrimination, I know how much resistance there is to equality.

Recently, there has been talk about an explosion of grassroots feminist organisations – and there is also a new generation of confident, articulate Muslim women who are at the forefront of fighting inequality, which has become part and parcel of everyday life for many British Muslim women.

[A COMMENT] Muslim men who live in the West wear Western clothes, hoodies, trainers, jeans and the whole caboodle, whilst they prefer - and sometimes even go as far as to threaten - their women (sometimes girls as young as 8 or 10) to wear a hijab .... It's about time Muslim women see their religion and cultural norms as well as the general Islamic male attitudes towards women for what they are - deeply regressive, misogynistic and discriminatory. [Guardian Cif] Read more