International

MUSLIM WOMEN IN EUROPE CLAIM RIGHTS AND KEEP FAITH
By Marlise Simons

** Embracing Islam and Independence **

New York Times
December 29, 2005
Page A3

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/29/international/europe/29women.html

[PHOTO CAPTION: Hanife Karakus, with her daughter, Saliha, is the daughter of Turkish immigrants and is the first woman to lead an Islamic council in France.]

[PHOTO CAPTION: Soria Makti, a museum curator in Paris who is of Algerian descent, said "We all understood that education was our passport to freedom."]

[PHOTO CAPTION: Sen, a magazine named for the Turkish word for 'you', is aimed at immigrant women in Europe.]

[PHOTO CAPTION: Emel, which describes itself as a "Muslim lifestyle magazine," is written for the broad Muslim population in Britain.]

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

Perhaps even more telling, Mrs. Karakus this year became the first woman to lead 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."

Mrs. Karakus, 24, does not call herself a feminist; she simply says she is a French lawyer. But she qualifies as part of a quiet revolution spreading among young European Muslim women, a generation that claims the same rights as its Western counterparts, without renouncing Islamic values.

For many, the key difference is education, an option often denied their poor, immigrant mothers and grandmothers. These young women are studying law, medicine, and anthropology, and now form a majority in many Islamic studies courses, traditionally the world of men. They are getting jobs in social work, business, and media, and are more prone to use their new independence to divorce. Also, French, English, German, or Dutch may be their native languages.

"We are not fully accepted in France, but we are beginning to be everywhere," said Sihem Habchi, 30, who was born in Algeria, grew up in France and works as a multimedia consultant.

Unlike their homebound elders, these emancipated Muslim women use the Internet and spend hours in 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 men, high school teachers say girls are the most motivated students because they have the most to gain.

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

"We all understood that education was our passport to freedom," said Soria Makti, 30, the daughter of an Algerian factory worker, who left her Marseille housing project and is a museum curator in the city.

The emancipation of Muslim women, like that of Western women before them, is often slow and sometimes deeply painful when women feel they must break with their families. But nowhere is this quiet new form of Islamic feminism more evident than in the realm of religion, the centuries-old domain of men.

Young women are increasingly engaging in 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 at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, who is writing her doctoral thesis on Europe's "new Islamic elites." "Instead of having to be passive, women now become teachers," she said. "It used to be taboo for women to recite the Koran." But now, she added, "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." In fact, Ms. Boubekeur said, women found religious texts more effective than secular arguments. Today, Islamic studies courses, often taken on weekends and accessible to secondary school graduates, are expanding in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. In the six institutes for Islamic studies in France, almost 60 percent of this year's nearly 1,000 students are women.

La Grande Mosquée in Paris, a large white and green compound from the 1920's with a finely chiseled minaret and students milling about under arcades, is France's leading religious institution. It has its own theological school, largely financed by Algeria. Abdelkrim Bekri, the director, said that the school started a program in 2002, unavailable elsewhere, to train young women as spiritual counselors for hospitals and prisons, much like the ministry of Christian chaplains. Twenty women had graduated, and others were in training, he said. "There is a great need here," he said.

Although women are not allowed to perform the most prestigious ritual of leading the mosque in Friday Prayer, Ms. Boubekeur said women were pushing to have a voice and participate in religious debates. "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 the need to end the social segregation of men and women. "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 women. "The motivation of the girls is very remarkable," he said.

Mrs. Karakus, who heads the Muslim Council in Limoges, has not studied theology, but her tasks, long the work of men, touch on religion as well. She has negotiated with local authorities to obtain plots for Muslim burials at the local cemetery, and has reserved sites for the slaughter of sheep for Eid-el-Kebir, a major Muslim holiday. She also helps to organize courses for imams who arrive with little knowledge of French or French traditions.

As educated Muslim women assert themselves, they appear to be forging a strand of Euro-Islam, a hybrid that attempts to reconcile the principles laid out in the Koran with life in a secular, democratic Europe.

"I tell women, 'We can honor the Koran from our perspective and apply it to our experience today,' " said Dounia Bouzar, an anthropologist who is both Algerian and French. "We must recover the religious texts and 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 them to become radical. Tokia Saifi, a former deputy minister for development who remains one of the few women of Arab descent to reach a high post in the French government, said she worried that many young people studied religion because it was socially acceptable, not because it was an informed choice. "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 harassed or punished for being too Western. Latifa Ahmed, 25, arrived in the Netherlands from Morocco when she was 8. As she grew up near Amsterdam, her family turned against her because she preferred to be with her Dutch classmates.

"They were bad, they were infidels, I was told," she said. "My parents and my brothers started hitting me." Ms. Ahmed, who lived at home until she was 23, 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, when she returned from a concert with a Dutch friend, her father yelled, " 'Let's take a knife and we'll finish with her,' " she said. "He didn't kill me, but he put a curse on me. It was very frightening."

She ran away, and although she lives in another city, she said she was still afraid of her brothers, who had 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 are uneven. Many are still pressed into arranged marriages, while others are finding independence. Change is hard to measure in France, where the law forbids the census to collect data by ethnic origin or religion. But in the Netherlands one telling signal is the rise in divorce among immigrants. According to Dutch government statistics, divorces among Moroccan families have increased by 46 percent since 2000, and among Turkish families by 42 percent in that period, with a majority believed to be instigated by wives.

Women are also often at the forefront of liberal tendencies among Muslims, publishing critiques, and studies about the obstacles and abuses women face. In Germany, Seyran Ates, a Turkish-born German lawyer, and Necla Kelek, a Turkish-born sociologist, have recently published books that have been read widely on the oppression of Muslim girls by their own families. Ms. Kelek's book "The Foreign Bride," a best-seller, denounces the plight of often illiterate girls, brought from the Turkish countryside "as modern slaves" for their husbands and in-laws in Germany.

Other women are fighting for change through the law. Mimount Bousakla, whose family is from Morocco, is a member of Parliament in Belgium. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, is one in the Netherlands. They were reared as Muslims, and have pressed for policies to aid women, including raising the legal age for marriage to protect young "imported" brides and imposing tougher sentences on men who kill women to save the honor of their families. In France, a movement called "Neither Whores nor Doormats," begun in 2003, helps many Muslim women who have been abused get services from lawyers, doctors or psychologists.

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, Turkey, and the Middle East. And as Europe rethinks its faltering integration policies, the place of Muslim women is a new target of scrutiny. Critics, including immigrants themselves, argue that in the name of respecting other cultures, Europeans have allowed the oppression of Muslim women in their midst. Increasingly, women are saying that integration policies have been too male-oriented and must focus more on women.

Senay Ozdemir, a Turkish-born Dutch citizen and the editor of Sen, a new glossy magazine aimed at immigrant women, is among those voices. 'Sen' means 'you' in Turkish. "Obviously women are a key to integration," Ms. Ozdemir said. "If the woman cannot or will not integrate in a new country, it affects the whole family. She will isolate her children."