Sisters in Islam
Zainah was involved with Sisters in Islam for two decades as its leader. She was responsible for building the NGO from a small organisation to a global one and is invited to give talks all over the world.
In 1987, a clutch of women lawyers and a journalist friend including Zainah jointly founded a fledgling movement to look into the problems Muslim women had with the courts. In 1990, the movement formally became known as SIS. Its focus was to challenge laws and policy made in the name of Islam that discriminate against women. Eventually, SIS areas of work expanded to emcompass larger issues of democracy, human rights and constitutionalism.
Said Zainah in an interview with The Star:
| “ | It’s as if in Islam, women don’t have any rights at all. One woman asked, if the house were on fire, would she then have to seek her husband’s permission to flee! Women cannot even use their common sense to save their (own) lives. This cannot be Islam. God is just. Islam is just. | ” |
Aghast at what was being taught in the ceramahs, the founding sisters turned to the Quran to find out for themselves what the verses say, as opposed to various interpretations. What they discovered was a revelation. On polygamy, the Quran says: “If you cannot treat them the same, then marry just the one.”
| “ | That was a moment of epiphany. It was that kind of questioning that made us want to read the Quran with a new lens. It was a liberating process understanding that the Quran speaks to women and is lifting and empowering. | ” |
Read more about this topic: Zainah Anwar
Famous quotes containing the words sisters and/or islam:
“The miller quickly drew the dam,
An’ there he found a drown’d woman.
You cou’dna see her yallow hair
For gold and pearle that were so rare.”
—Unknown. The Twa Sisters (l. 32–35)
“Awareness of the stars and their light pervades the Koran, which reflects the brightness of the heavenly bodies in many verses. The blossoming of mathematics and astronomy was a natural consequence of this awareness. Understanding the cosmos and the movements of the stars means understanding the marvels created by Allah. There would be no persecuted Galileo in Islam, because Islam, unlike Christianity, did not force people to believe in a “fixed” heaven.”
—Fatima Mernissi, Moroccan sociologist. Islam and Democracy, ch. 9, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. (Trans. 1992)