Where I expected anger and resentment, there was none in sight.  No furious protests, no stormy exits.  A person’s individual vision of God or spirituality can be the easiest subject to offend, so I expected that today’s opening session at the WISE Conference would be the event’s most controversial.  The topic was Qur’anic interpretation. 

Many of today’s panelists insisted that interpretation of the Qur’an is influenced by the historical context of the interpreter, as well as the personality and personal convictions of that interpreter.  If this is so, the absence of significant contribution to Qur’anic interpretation on the part of Muslim women seriously offsets the balance of the collective dialogue.  Meanwhile, if culture has no influence on interpretation, then there is little way to explain why different groups of people adhere to different tafsir so fervently, and without question. 

The conviction that there is a single correct interpretation of Qur’anic texts is felt strongly by many people where I am living in Malaysia, on the more conservative east coast.  That is why I expected significant tension during the discussion today.

But issues of interpretation start at a more basic level, as the primary concern of many women at the conference was education of women on their rights in Islam; education of women around the world on even some of the most fundamental principles of their own religion, which, because of cultural restrictions and variant practices or poverty and lack of access to education, has been kept from them. 

Shahina Akbar, an attorney based in Islamabad, Pakistan, chose her profession when fighting to assert her own rights under Islamic law, as well as Pakistani law, during her divorce.  The majority of Pakistani women sign a legal document when they get married, but very few have actually read it; in many ways it is kept “top secret,” Shahina said.  The document assures women marriage rights as accorded in the Qur’an, but “tradition is such in Pakistan that this legal document is considered un-Islamic.”  Women sign this document with whole sections crossed out, sections that assure them rights in cases of inheritance, divorce, dowry and support. 

“Married women to their death, they do not see this document, what they have signed,” said Shahina.  “It is the customary tradition.”

Shahina has set out to educate women around Pakistan on their rights under Islamic law, knowledge which has been inaccessible to them, as the Qur’an is generally read in Arabic rather than Urdu in Pakistan.  The outcome of her countless visits to homes, schools, vocational centers, banks, clubs and hospitals around Pakistan has been agreement on the part of a large number of families to follow what the original document states, with women claiming their rights through interfamilial negotiation long before the marriage takes place and matchmakers learning to strike proper terms between families.

On the first evening of the WISE Conference women were asked to write about what their greatest concerns, and primary goals, were for the future of Muslim women.  What they wrote was pinned on the walls all around the room, forming a web of dialogue and a framework for the whole conference.  The two words I saw most often on these sheets of paper were “education” and “empowerment.”  Reasserted over and over again this weekend was the following: that Muslims who know the Qur’an know that it is good to women; women who know the Qur’an know that it affords them rights equal to men’s.  At the start of the conference, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, co-founder of the American Society for Muslim Advancement with his wife Daisy Khan, pointed to Mohammad’s mandate on behalf of women: “If you want to be the best of men, the best of Muslims, you have to be best to your women,” he said.  “A society that does not treat its women well is not a society that can call itself Islamic in the highest sense of the word.”

This idea that women are not subsidiary but primary participants in a society of faith recalls for me one of the most poignant invocations still pinned to the wall in the meeting hall now sleeping through this conference’s last night: “Stop being invisible,” it says.  “Participation in every event of the society. 

“You and me are the examples.”