WOMEN’S STUDIES DEPARTMENTS IGNORE THE PLIGHT OF WOMEN IN ISLAM
By Sara Dogan

FrontPage magazine.com, CA
?GUID=1279967E-7032-49C9-882C-18DE14FFC38B
Oct 8 2007

One of the central aims of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which will
feature events on more than 100 college campuses from October 22-26,
is to highlight the brutal oppression of women by Islamic radicals
and by the regimes they control such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Despite their vigilance in behalf of women’s rights in America and
other Western nations, Women’s Studies Departments across the nation
have been strangely passive in the face of the barbaric treatment of
women in Islamic regimes. Numerous hours are spent in the classroom,
dissecting the reasons for the ‘wage gap’ in America, violence against
women and the ‘privileges’ accorded Caucasian males. But courses on
the plight of women in Islamic regimes are strangely absent. Where
there are a few courses that touch on Islamic women in Women’s Studies
programs, the focus is often cultural and literary, while the abuses
go unmentioned.

This failure to confront the abuse of women who live in Islamic
countries stands in stark contrast to the mission statements of
many Women’s Studies departments, which describe their focus as
the inequality that women suffer in patriarchal societies. Thus the
official mission statement of the Penn State Women’s Studies Department
declares that "As a field of study, Women’s Studies analyzes the
unequal distribution of power and resources by gender."

Why then does the Penn State department not offer a course analyzing
the extreme inequalities that characterize the status of women in
the Islamic world?

Another mission statement from the Women’s Studies Department at the
University of Rhode Island is even more explicit:

The discipline of Women’s Studies has a vision of a world free from
sexism. By necessity, freedom from sexism must include a commitment
to freedom from nationalism; class, ethnic, racial, and heterosexual
bias; economic exploitation; religious persecution; ageism; and
ableism. Women’s Studies seeks to identify, understand, and challenge
ideologies and institutions that knowingly or unknowingly oppress and
exploit some for the advantage of others, or deny fundamental human
rights. Thus, Women’s Studies envisions a world in which all persons
can develop their fullest potential.

Despite this vision, the Women’s Studies Department at the University
of Rhode Island offers no course whose subject is women in Islam.

Instead, it refers to students to a course in the history department
on "Women in Muslim Societies," which covers "gender relations in
the modern Middle East through novels, poetry, and oral histories,
as well as through historical and anthropological studies." But even
though this course has been listed since 2005, no such course exists
because there are no professors available to teach it.

To rectify this gap in knowledge and concern, students at several
schools participating in Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week plan to hold
sit-ins or silent protests at the offices of their university’s Women’s
Studies Department or Women’s Center with the goal of encouraging
them to provide course offerings on the abuse of women in Islam.

In preparation for these demonstrations, the David Horowitz Freedom
Center researched Women’s Studies course descriptions at eight of
the schools where students plan to petition their Women’s Studies
programs to correct this absence: Pennsylvania State University,
Temple University, George Washington University, the University of
Rhode Island, the University of Pittsburgh, Emory University, the
University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Course Offerings on Women in Islam

At Pennsylvania State University, we did not find a single Women’s
Studies course description that makes specific mention of women in
Islamic regimes, though Judiasm and Christianity are both mentioned
in course descriptions.

At Temple University, only one course specifically mentions Islam and
it is exclusively within the context of the medieval world. "Getting
Medieval: Gender, Sex, Power" describes how students will study "how
the papacy and medieval monarchies regulated gender and sexuality among
Christians and also between Christians, Jews, Muslims and so-called
‘pagans’ from c 500 CE to 1500 CE and in so doing creating a powerful
political notion of a territorial ‘inside’ called Europe."

George Washington University is one of the campuses we found to
actually provide a course specifically on the topic of "Women in
Islam."

According to the description:

This course will investigate the ways in which Islam has articulated
gender identity and relationships between men and women, and
conversely, how women have constructed, refashioned, and articulated
Islam and their place within. We will look at some of these issues as
they are reflected in "classical" Islamic texts, and as they emerge
in different aspects of the social, economic, political, and ritual
lives of women and men in various Islamic societies.

This is a strangely value-neutral description of the subject when
taken in the context of other Women’s Studies courses which speak
frankly of gender inequalities and oppression in such relatively
liberated societies as the United States.

Another course at George Washington on "Global Religious Feminisms"
also examines the "Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam," but also does not hint at the abuse of women in Islamic
regimes.

At the University of Pittsburgh, the only course that deals with
the subject of Women in Islam is on "Women and Literature" which is
described as:

Keeping the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in mind, we will study a
number of theoretical, historical, and fictional texts that illustrate
the ways in which gendered norms and their subversions structure
military conflicts and are, in turn, structured by them. We will begin
with the Armenian genocide in Turkey, then move on to the Jewish
Holocaust in Europe, to the conflicts in Vietnam and the "killing
fields" of Cambodia, and conclude with the current conflicts in Iraq
and Afghanistan. Throughout the course students will be asked to stay
tuned into current news and the continuing legacy of these events.

While this course does touch on the lives of women in Islamic nations,
the violence perpetrated against these women or their economic and
sexual subjugation are clearly not its focus.

Emory University’s Women’s Studies department offers a course on
"Women and Judaism." It also offers a course on "Women and Religion"
though Islam is not mentioned in the course description.

Intriguingly, the department offers a course on "Violence and
Memory in Contemporary Africa." The course description asks "How
is it that people can perpetrate evil against family, friends and
neighbors?….How can governments and individuals stand aside and do
nothing when genocide is occurring in other places in the world?"

These same questions can be asked just as legitimately of Islamic
countries, but Emory does not appear to have a comparative women’s
studies course focusing on Islam.

At the University of California-Berkeley, a course on the topic of
Women in Islam is offered, but it again appears to consider the
treatment of women in Islamic countries as a topic for cultural
consideration, not the focus of analytic studies of the unequal
distribution of resources and power, let alone discrimination and
oppression. "Women in the Muslim and Arab Worlds" is described as
examining "differences and similarities in women’s lives in the
Muslim/Arab world, including diasporas in Europe and North America.

Analysis of issues of gender in relation to ‘race’, ethnicity, nation,
religion and culture." No mention is made of the subjugation of women
in the Muslim world.

In a study of eight prominent universities, the University of
Pennsylvania was the only school which offers a course specifically
concerned about the equal and oppressive treatment of women in
Islamic nations. That course, "Women Social Movements in Afghanistan
and Pakistan," focuses on the struggle of women in these nations to
claim equal rights with men while still maintaining their identity
as Muslims.

The course description reads:

One aspect of the position of women in Afghanistan and Pakistan is all
too clear from the images and reports we see more and more frequently:
veiled (or cocooned in a burka), victim of an honor killing, an
acid attack or a gang rape; subject to Islamic laws that devalue
them. But women in these two Muslim countries have sought to break
the barriers of their rigidly patriarchal societies while refusing
to surrender their identity as Muslims. Understanding how they have
fared could hold the key to how women in South Asia and other parts
of the Muslim world negotiate their autonomy and reclaim their right
to participate as equal citizens on their own terms. At the same time,
no women’s movement anywhere can develop in isolation.

Therefore, this course will explore lines of conflict and co-operation
between women and other groups in society, such as the rural peasantry,
the urban poor, migrant labour, students and peace activists.

It is stunning that among the Women’s Studies departments of these
eight prominent universities which openly declare that their missions
are to analyze "unequal distribution of power and resources by gender"
and to envision "a world free from sexism" there is only a single
course on Women and Islam which speaks to these issues. This is why
we have made this a focus of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.