Gender Politics within Islam Today

0:00 today's lecture is on debate within modern islam concerning the roles of women we've already looked at the life of muhammad and his involvement with women's starting with his first wife khadija and his most famous wife aisha we've looked at women's passages relating to women in the quran we've looked at later muslim texts the sunnah the hadith various forms of commentary and interpretation called tafsir and then the compilation of these into a body of law known as the sharia and formulated and kind of defined in a final way in the 12th century so today we're going to be jumping from

0:47 the 12th century to the 20th and 21st centuries a big jump to know more about women in islam there are many universities that offer a full course in women in islam here at csun naira tohidi the chair of the gender and women's studies department offers a course this semester actually in women in islam but we'll do our our survey of the issues in this course and today we'll be looking at the 20th and 21st centuries the debate surrounding women's roles this debate is paralleled within christianity a very vocal debate over uh whether women should be allowed to be priests to have full equality in the church and in the home or not

1:33 and the similar debate within judaism so even though the three main branches of judaism allow women to be rabbis we still have orthodox jews who say that women are very different and have different roles including not having a full status of rabbi open to them although we do have so far one woman ordained to be sort of a female rabbi with a different title but all the same responsibilities so even the orthodox within judaism are making progress on this issue from the point of view of the progressive women but let's look at women's debate the debate concerning women within islam

2:20 it's probably obvious to everyone today that there is one group within one end of the spectrum within islam that is advocating separate roles and restricted roles for women we hear a lot about that definitely that would include the taliban in afghanistan and conservative muslims in various parts of the world here are some things that we hear in the news we hear about women being uh beaten if they don't agree to an arranged marriage a flogging incident in swat in 2009 where women in pakistan

3:08 held large rallies protesting the flogging of a girl we hear a lot about female circumcision within various muslim cultures so we have a tendency to um to say all muslim women and then fill in the blank are oppressed um face um restrictions culturally such as female genital mutilation known as fgm or all women have to wear the veil and those are misconceptions those anything that begins with all muslim women is likely to be a misconception muslim women's rights vary from country

3:54 to country turkey is probably the most progressive country in which women have most of all the same rights of any european country there are more conservative countries such as somalia definitely currently iran afghanistan and pakistan where you do have limited rights for women within the political sphere within the home but you also will notice that even within any one country conditions vary greatly from the countryside in the rural areas to the city so what we're dealing with when we look at women in islam is two factors one is the cultural

4:41 norms for women which existed prior to the life of muhammad and persist today so ideas that the man should should have complete control and dominance over the woman that the man owns the children that that women's sexuality has to be very largely circumscribed controlled in order to protect the honor of the family these aren't really ideas within islam there are ideas within middle eastern countries and now that islam has spread within other countries that have picked up cultural ideas and spread them as being part of islam when in fact if you look in the koran you don't find any

5:28 backing for these things you do find within sharia law quite a few restrictions on women but as we discussed in a previous lecture sharia law was codified in the 12th century in the 1100s uh four years 400 years after the life of muhammad and during that 400 years there was a lot of debate on the role of women shortly after the death of muhammad his wife aisha had a very powerful role within islam interpreting her husband's statements and his leadership and passing it on to the people around her and so for the next 200 years his statements and ideas were written down

6:14 collectively known as the sunnah his actions and practices and the haditha his sayings and then these were were culled and sorted into which were probably true and which were legend and then for 200 years after that there were schools of pr of legal decisions on how all of the quran and the sunnah and the hadith and the interpretations already written should be compiled into a law that could be a useful law for a muslim country in which the legal system was there was no separation of church and state there was in fact a combined rule so how do we have laws

6:59 that reflect our religion so that's what this the sharia was and that's what it was said as in the 12th century and with a decision you know we're not going to argue about this anymore we're just going to accept this from now on now they weren't thinking of the next uh thousand years up to uh the 21st century so uh the main point about women in islam is that the stereotypes are exactly that they're stereotypes and we have to look at each country we have to look at each century we have to look at each writing and each group of women within the 20th century and the 21st centuries and find out what different women within islam have thought about interpretation of the quran about

7:46 how to understand sharia law in the 21st century so at this point i'd like to point out that there are a number of muslim women's organizations and many of them are progressive and i'll just mention a few that have websites that are available one is the muslim women's league and it's at mwlusa.org and it presents definitely a strong stand in favor of gender equality and it has documents and papers and events that help muslim women to understand that within the koran there is equality for women that there

8:32 should be in muslim societies another is the international union of muslim women and i don't know their website address at this this point that i got it it was still under construction but you could reach them at uimw at live islamd there's another website called live islam and another website i'll just mention is called islam4today.com and it also speaks to women's rights within islam has websites by muslim women that it has links to and discusses issues such as the hijab which is the veil the covering

9:18 and another widespread misconception about polygamy oh in islam a man can have four husbands well as we discussed in a previous lecture the conditions under which the koran allows for husbands have a lot to do with conditions in the seventh century and orphans and women whose are widows and who need need an economic basis and a place within society and under those conditions muhammad said yes you can have up to four wives when you're dealing trying to provide for an orphan or someone but actually it's very important to note that muhammad was limiting

10:03 marriage to four in that century he wasn't going from a situation where you could where marriage was a one-to-one relationship and expanding it to four he was trying to to control the widespread practice of multiple wives and trying to say and i shouldn't say he was trying to do that god in god's revelation through the quran was giving muhammad the directive that for wives were possible in a condition of need but in most cultures in the u in the world today that that same urgent need to provide for a woman doesn't exist because in many parts of the world today a woman

10:50 can get a job a woman can provide for herself even if she's widowed or is an orphan or just growing up and needing a way to survive she can probably take care of herself not not true in all cultures and in all places definitely so these are important organizations to know about another important way to work on the stereotypes is is to notice the different countries and to notice uh that that when we hear about things like honor killings and female genital mutilation that these have a lot to do with ancient cultures and

11:36 rural areas enforcing ideas that are not within the koran so let's look now at the issue of the veil within islam because that's a widespread idea that women have to wear the veil or definitely in iran that women have to wear a full covering head to toe of burqa so we've noted in a previous lecture that within the koran there are only a couple of statements about modesty and covering and the one that we noticed the other day on modesty speaks both to men and to women to lower their gaze and guard their modesty

12:22 it says for women that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except within the family um here's here's another passage that is uh sometimes cited as a a passage where requiring women to wear the veil but all interpreters note that this particular passage is a message from god to muhammad in regard to his own wives and daughters so the passage is in surah 33 59 and 60 and it says o prophet tell thy wives and daughters and the believing women that they should cast their outer garments over their persons when abroad that is most convenient that they should

13:08 be known as such this is muhammad's family and not molested and allah is oft forgiving often most merciful so um so what occurred in the 7th century in regard to veils was that veiling was only available to upper class women your average woman who was in the marketplace in the fields working and laboring wasn't going to be wearing a veil it was a status symbol and this was true within many cultures uh within many religions in the world of mecca and medina

13:55 and the whole middle eastern world the mediterranean that it was a status thing to be able to have a veil and a beautiful veil and to guard your modesty and that wasn't available to everybody so when when muhammad later in his life when he adopted the practice of wearing the veil as instructed through the messages that he got from god it was to protect his family and to protect his honor to have his family observe the high status practice of wearing veils and um to be protected from the general public kind of like in the 21st century dealing with paparazzi so this was a way

14:42 of respect gaining respect and status but later actually very shortly within islam other women adopted it it was the thing to do like wearing having the right handbag by the right maker by the right manufacturer and other people adopted it so it became a widespread practice then within the 20th century we have another political factor coming into the choice to wear the veil so um especially in north africa when france controlled algeria um france viewed the veil as a cultural

15:30 behavior and a sign of of muslim religion that they wanted to have women give up and they wanted women to not wear the veil in order to show that they were a french country algeria was a french country and that they should adopt french and western practices so we have the colonial idea that the veil should not be worn and when you have a political system from the west saying don't wear the veil then suddenly wearing the veil becomes no longer the woman's own choice it becomes a symbol of her family's allegiance politically and of her nationalism

16:16 and it's not just her own choice am i going to be a really observant muslim woman or am i going to not be so dramatically in line with historical customs and practice so here's a quote from a man named franz fanon who wrote a book analyzing the whole algerian and french war and the use of the veil within that context and he says to the colonial offensive against the veil the colonized opposes the cult of the veil so they they establish the cult of the veil or the extreme value of veiling

17:02 in in opposition to the the colonial power saying you have to not wear the veil so then the the oppressed culture and family says you have to wear the veils so uh as feminists have commented the woman's body then becomes the site of a battleground over politics whether she wears or doesn't wear the veil is not so much her choice as her family's political statement so this is where women do can in some cultures lose the choice their own personal choice over how observant they want to be we have this debate still happening today within france and within places like turkey

17:48 turkey for a while has had a ban on head scarves because they don't want to to have everyone required to wear headscarves so they say no one can wear headscarves once again the battlefield being the women's body and the woman's clothing so um here's a headline from 2008 move to lift a ban on headscarves games in turkey then we have actually by the year 2011 the ban on headscarves voted out in turkey so in turkey now it is possible to choose to wear the the hijab the the head scarf and

18:35 shoulder and busts protective ornament or scarf or not to wear it what women in turkey progressive women are nervous about is the pendulum continuing to swing to the point where wearing the hijab would be required so this is a political debate and it's being waged on the issue of the clothing of women uh similar debates are happening in egypt and in france so uh last year in 2011 in april the french government had earlier passed a law saying that if a woman was shopping and wearing a

19:21 veil she could be fined in other words it's such a political statement to wear a veil that france isn't allowing women to wear veils in public so this article says france is the first country in europe to publicly ban the muslim face veil and this is the actual complete veiling with just the eyes anyone can have a lighter scarf over their head but here's another article saying that there's a quiet end to turkey's ban on headscarves and and even in colleges there's an end to that ban so this is an issue that continues to be debated

20:06 within the world but within the quran it's for muslims who want to be modest and observant both men and women to to dress modestly so the man can't have a bare-chested dramatically sexy look neither can the woman have a profile that's suggestive or low-cut or whatever and then for the other thing to remember that in the quran it's primarily muhammad's wives and daughters that are having this veil as a protection from the public and as a status symbol for

20:53 respect for the prophet and his family that has been adopted widespread later has been custom and then in the 20th century and 21st century has become a political issue and certainly in iran today when the taliban wants to assert its power it says women will be covered head to toe if you have a bit of ankle showing you can be arrested or kidnapped and put in jail if and you you have to be veiled to the extent of only your eyes showing so this is a debate but we can't say anything like all women uh have to wear the veil or or um are oppressed because it varies from

21:39 country to country and um it's not within the koran and islam per se it's within the culture so those are points to notice um let's go on and look at women a little bit just a few names from women in muslim history from the 12th century to the 21st because even though there are people today especially in countries like iran who don't want women to have education and to have equal status within the political and and uh public sphere there have been female muslim scholars and female leaders throughout the previous uh 1000 years of history and

22:26 certainly since the 12th century 11th century and certainly in the first few centuries during during muhammad's lifetime and in the first few centuries after his lifetime um so uh there are there are lists of female scholars that are known in history they're known as muslimas hadith scholars and i'll just name a few of them fatima al-fudaliah juma bint ahmad dun al-waz abda bint khalid im safwan and perhaps the most famous name aisha bint mohammed ibn abdil hadi

23:13 so we'll talk a little bit about her she's an 11th century student of the law and scholar and let me find my notes about her um let's see at any rate she's a poet um she argued cases within the law i believe she's living in egypt and anyway she's an amazing instance and she's

23:58 almost a thousand years ago so she gave legal opinions she did important writings and she's not widely known today there are also female shakes and throughout history you can find here and there different female shakes which you can find by researching on google or going to some of your online sources when we get to the 20th century we start to have some very important names and one of them is aisha abdul rahman her dates are 1913 to 1998. she was egypt's leading female islamic

24:46 writer and scholar she was an a human rights and women's rights advocate but she was completely an observant muslim woman and she was a scholar of islamic philosophy she wrote 40 books on the history and structure of islamic scripture on literary criticism and some of them she also wrote a dozen novels and short stories anthologies of short stories and many research papers and even a daily newspaper column so she was a columnist and a scholar and a writer and in the early

25:31 in in the early part of the 20th century in egypt there was a feminist movement that reached its political peak in 1919 when there was a revolution against the british military presence in egypt and against ottoman influence so it's important to know that just as there's a second wave within um united states feminist movements there's a second wave in egypt today and the first wave was the early part of the 20th century and she was part of it let's see another the next important name we need to know is leila ahmad who was born in 1940 and this is her most famous book

26:17 women and gender in us islam so she's a scholar and a historian and she looks at the rise of women within islam and discourses about the veil and various kinds of social change um and just an excellent scholar which will dispel all stereotypes about women in islam because there are scholars like her that are working on these issues here's another book about social change within islam and this is more current her book i believe is probably around 20 years old it's 1992

27:08 published by yale university here's another book called islam gender and social change and it's a collection of essays edited by ivan haddad and john esposito so there's definitely social change happening today and these are different articles analyzing different conditions in different countries and political factors and modernism and east-west relations and different countries such as the philippines indonesia conditions in various countries are all addressed the most important names that we need to

27:55 know today for this course are besides lila ahmed very important let's look at three names asma barlis amina wadud and irshad manji so let's just take them as examples of progressive feminist women within islam so first let's look at asma barles she's the author of this book believing women in islam and its subtitle is unreading patriarchal interpretations of the quran so she goes through very carefully

28:43 a study of the koran and to look at different texts that have to do with women and issues relating to women's rights and she looks at the different balance of of influence of other is muslim texts such as the haditha the um sunnah and the commentary known as tafsir so she's she notices all of these um influential forces within decision-making um uh influences within islam so she begins

29:30 one chapter with the statement how do how do people within islam make decisions about how they should live and she points out that there are these in fact i'll just read her quote she says we want to understand how muslims produce religious meaning so she says in order to understand this how they get meaning how they interpret the various cultural and quranic and other textual influences for their own lives their own decisions so she says in order to discover how a particular muslim person decides how to live their life we need to know something about the various

30:16 primary texts so she has a chart showing the quran in the middle the sunnah the hadith the tafsir and sharia law as four other factors surrounding the quran and one of her main points in this book is that the koran is not as heavily weighted in a lot of situations as modern women would like it to be what takes greater weight often is the commentary on the ter on the quran or the sunnah the practices of muhammad in the 7th century his actual dealings with people as recorded in little anecdotes so she says

31:02 it would be better for women if we just really looked at the koran than if we than if we relied so heavily on the patriarchal interpretations of the quran so asma barlas a very influential voice among muslim women today another interesting voice is amina wadud and here is one of her books quran and woman re-reading the sacred text from a woman's perspective amina wadud is actually an african-american whose father was a pastor who converted to islam in her college years she's a scholar of the quran and she's very well known today

31:50 one of the things that she's most well known for is her decision in 2005 to hold a worship service for both men and women and with herself as the leader of the worship service so this was pretty radical because it hadn't been done that we know of prior to that so women were allowed to lead worship services with women and men were allowed to lead and still are allowed to lead worship services for a mixed group of men and women although traditionally the men would sit in the front and the women in the back or behind a wall or perhaps even in a separate room in 2005 however

32:35 she announced and and her supporters working with her announced that she was going to lead a mixed congregational prayer in new york city which was actually held in a christian church and when this announcement was made there were she got a lot of backlash she got threats to her life and some of the mosques where she would have held it refused to host the prayer service so it ended up being in the cathedral church of saint john in new york city but she went ahead and held the prayer service and in the days after it she got a lot of negative feedback from

33:21 various muslim institutions for example the sunni muslim institution in egypt issued a condemnation and she was accused of trying to corrupt the community so that was a famous act and um since 2005 there haven't been a lot of people following her but that was a courageous step um and uh she continues to be an important voice speaking for women's rights and studying the koran and and doing modern interpretation of the rights and roles of women based primarily on the koran and less on the cultural influences such as the sharia so actually it's a debate within one of

34:07 the debates within women in islam in the 21st century is can we modify the sharia which in the 12th century closed off 200 years of debate by saying okay we're all going to agree on this and we're not going to debate it anymore well if they could have imagined that there would be a very different world and culture a thousand years later that might want to have wanted to modify it maybe they wouldn't have cut it off quite so emphatically but there are women today who are and men who are arguing that sharia law in some asp some details is not appropriate for the 21st century so now i'll just list the names of some prominent men who are

34:53 scholars on this subject of reform within islam so um some of the most well-known scholars are farid esak who wrote a book of interpretation called the quran he talks about how it was first uh revealed to muhammad um how it was written down how the different sections each revealed in a different time a different month or over a period of 20 years were gathered together how it's been understood and interpreted since then so he's an important scholar who's

35:39 working on these issues along with the women here's another scholar fuzz lure rahman and his one of his books is called major themes of the quran and so one of his points in this book is we need to look at the important major themes and honor them and honor the overall direction that the quran was going when it was revealed in the 7th century and not try to pick out little verses that we want to enforce today that are actually more cultural and time-bound we should look at the untime-bound larger themes here's another commentator syed hussein nasser the heart of islam enduring values for

36:27 humanity and here's another well-known commentator abdullah saeed interpreting the quran toward a contemporary approach so each of these men has a different um particular take on how to how to look at the quran and how to reinterpret uh the sharia for today but i would say as a whole that they they agree that there is a need for more um understanding of how it can be applied to muslims lives today and less just taking for granted

37:12 that customs and laws in the 7th century such as cut off the hand of a thief or stone someone for adultery that these no longer really should be enforced in the way that they were understood in the 7th century and i will just comment that this is also true for christians and for jews so we all have these ancient texts that say things like if your son disobeys you um you you can you can kill your son and you that you should stone someone who commits adultery or in fact that's another lecture but these these ancient traditions ancient scriptures and how to apply them

37:59 today are debated within all three religions okay let's look at a couple of other important women within islam here's another book by amina wadud called inside the gender jihad women's reform in islam so she's actually using the term jihad to describe the gender politics between women and men in islam today jihad actually means struggle it can be a spiritual struggle so a person struggle on how to really live out service to god and respect for god within the world struggle with your own self

38:46 to do the right thing it's popularly known as in the year in in the um the 911 2001 event the word jihad was used to describe a struggle between radical islam trying to impact or conquer or hurt uh the western world particularly the us and and new york city and the world trade center but that that form of jihad as a as a military struggle is only one of the meanings and it's not the primary meaning within the koran so she describes gender politics as a jihad inside islam today

39:34 amina wadud here's another book to just point out the difference between what one group says and what the debate within the entire muslim community and this book is called who speaks for islam what a billion muslims really think and this is written by john esposito and dahlia moga head so this even the title just points out that muslims are a quarter almost a quarter of i think about a quarter of the world's population today and that anyone who says what they really think is over generalizing but the question is who speaks for islam

40:21 are we going to listen to what the taliban says and say oh well islam is so weird or so conservative or so radical well we wouldn't do that for christianity would we we wouldn't say that what the southern baptist denomination that does not currently allow women to be priests we wouldn't say that that represents all of christianity or we wouldn't say the pope represents all of christianity there are many groups of christians that have women pastors and full women's equality within them so who speaks for islam is is a question and i'll just mention a couple of other books this one is called opening the gates a century of

41:06 arab feminist writing so like the book by by guerda lerner called the women's consciousness how it how feminist consciousness developed over the centuries over actually um more than a thousand years this book points out that there's been a whole century of feminist women within arab cultures arab and primarily muslim cultures discussing women's rights and how to get better equality for women within the muslim world here's another one called the price of honor muslim women lift the veil of silence on

41:52 the islamic world by jan goodwin so it's how muslim women have been affected by the modern rise of fundamentalism and how women are fighting against that rise of fundamentalism another important name to know about is nawal el-sadhui and she's a important leader in egypt right now and she's been a leader for most of her 85 years in egypt she's a doctor so one of the books she wrote is memories memoirs of a woman doctor her most famous book is woman at point zero this is a fictionalized version of an account of the life of a woman

42:40 who nawal el-sadhui interviewed when she was interviewing women in prisons and helping women as a doctor earlier this book was written i believe about 20 years ago um yes it was written in 1975 so that's really um almost 40 years ago her most famous book the woman in this story is in a prison and she's not afraid to die and she has been told that her death sentence can be lifted if she will just agree to it and say thank you but she is proudly saying no

43:25 i've been mistreated my whole life and i prefer to go ahead and and die rather than then take any uh crumb tossed to me by an unjust legal system so that's a it's a based on a true story and it's uh nawa el-sadawi's most famous um depiction of the plight of women in egypt in particular this is a woman who starts out as a poor child discriminated against in her family she's forced into an unfair marriage with an older man she then escapes from that becomes a prostitute and has a series of other events before she kills one of her abusers and then ends up in prison

44:12 and is interviewed by dr sadawi here's another book by nawal called the hidden face of eve women in the arab world and here's a book about her by fedwa malte douglas called men women and god gods whichever way you want to think about it nawal el sadhui and arab feminist politics so there's so much happening for women in the muslim world today there's different countries gender conflicts issues and there's a lot to know about i will now raise a few other names because there are some other important

44:58 women to know about one is rifat hassan she's an author professor and leading spokeswoman for muslim feminist today she taught at the university i believe the univ at the university of louisville in kentucky for many years i believe she might be retired now she was a scholar of a poet i believe a pakistani poet and then she was asked to speak to give a women's point of view about 30 years ago at a conference and she thought why would i why would i want to talk about the woman's point of view i just i'm interested in literature and in polit political and philosophical issues

45:45 but i'm not going to just speak for all women or look at women's issues but she took the opportunity she took the the challenge to do that and she started looking at the koran and looking at all the women's issues and she decided that that she should become a spokesperson for women in islam because practices within parts of the muslim world today were so far from what's actually outlined in the quran so she became an important spokeswoman another interesting person to know about is ishad manji she's a canadian feminist and journalist she's author of a book called the

46:31 trouble with islam today she's now working at new york university she keeps a blog she's a mother she identifies as a lesbian and one of the most interesting things about her is that uh she has made available on her website a newer translation of the quran called in the quran can't actually be translated it's just the meaning that can be translated so that's a distinction that muslims make that any translation of the quran is actually identified as the meaning of the holy quran that has been translated because the words themselves are too holy

47:17 and can't completely be translated but she has on her website a quran which in passages where it says man and and really means mankind the language is changed to reflect men and women and uh in various other ways just by simple translation details the quran is much more receptive and inclusive of women so um you can access that by going to her website and her website is earshodmanji.com so irsajd

48:03 m-a-n-j-i dot-com and you can download a copy of this reformist interpretation of the koran so she's an interesting voice it's important to know that there are lesbians within women within islam so good to know about her other names that uh give us another perspective on women in islam sharina body the nobel peace prize winner in 2003 the iranian lawyer who has courageously stood up to her government and defended human rights under extremely difficult conditions

48:49 she now has a memoir out so to read her memoir would would help to dispel any stereotypes about how oppressed women are within islam because um she was allowed to get an education and prior to the revolution in iran in 1978 she had much more equality and freedom and she has continued to fight for it since then another interesting name is benazir bhutto who twice served as prime minister in pakistan and was assassinated in 2007 in december while running for office again so another major leader within pakistan

49:35 another important person to know about is ayan hirsi ali she's somali by birth she experienced female genital mutilation as a child she was allowed to go to school in england and i believe she was no actually i'm sorry that might be a different person but she was about to be forced into an unfair marriage when she to a person she hadn't met a cousin an older man and she managed to escape and she fled to the netherlands there she started supporting herself working as a translator in different

50:21 courtrooms and then she became interested in the legal practice and in law and ran for office and became a member of the lower house in the netherlands she became an activist against fgm female genital mutilation and against other oppressive practices in some islamic cultures she actually is now an ex-muslim she identifies as an atheist and she has a lot of issues with the religion in which she was raised the fundamentalist kind of of islamic faith in her fight against these oppressive

51:09 practices that she experienced in somalia she was making a film called submission and the filmmaker was theo van gogh uh i think a grand nephew of vincent van gogh she he was killed by right wing muslims who did not like him making a film that they felt was a defamation of the muslim faith so she at one point had to flee for her life to the united states so she's no longer living in the netherlands but she's continuing to write about her life and her journey one of her most recent books is titled infidel

51:55 so she's an interesting spokesperson for a woman who has left the muslim faith kind of parallel perhaps to someone like mary daley who is an ex-catholic so important to know about those people i'll mention a couple of other names marjan satrapi she grew up in iran she was about maybe eight or ten years old at the time of the revolution the taliban takeover in 1978 and she has written graphic novels describing her own life journey growing up in tehran iran those novels were subsequently made into a film with a similar graphic

52:44 it's not a it's not a person it's simply cartoons in a graphic film persepolis that came out in 2007 so by watching that film you can get more of an idea about um her experience as a woman within islam another name to mention here at csun especially is esha momenti she was a grad student here who was making a documentary about women working to improve conditions for women in iran today she had grown up partly in iran and partly here and she went back to her country to in about i believe 2009 to make a to film parts of this

53:29 documentary and the whole point of the documentary was going to be the progress that women have made as of the year 2009 2010 and the courageous struggle of women in iran to achieve full equality and achieve their rights even within a system governed by the taliban but when she was there filming she didn't realize that simply doing any kind of filming would be threatening to the government so she was arrested and she was imprisoned she was in prison for a little over a year and she was finally released in 2010 and there was a big movement here on the csun campus to support her and to try to

54:18 write letters and get her release so she's an interesting person to know about and along with her i'll just mention that there are many books on muslim women in america and what immigrants have the adjustments that they've made and the contributions that they've made to the american culture today so this is called muslim women in america the challenge of islamic identity today and it's edited by ivan haddad jane smith and kathleen moore um and um especially since the year 2001 of course it's been very difficult to be a muslim woman in the u.s or a muslim man but particularly to have clothing that

55:03 visibly identifies you as a muslim woman in fact we have a case recently earlier this year in 2012 of a woman in san diego who was shot and killed and a little note was threat there was a threatening note a few days ahead of time and a threatening note left on her body saying you're a terrorist go back to your own country so um why did they think she was a terrorist because she wore a veil so it takes a lot of courage in the u.s today and in many cultures to publicly identify as a muslim and women are doing that so those are some of the names and some of the issues

55:48 uh that will give you um i hope a new perspective or just a sense of the incredible diversity and the in the the courageous struggle for human rights within the world of islam and within the world of gender politics today thank you