Resources

30/1/2003

Dossier 14-15: Women's Rights Activist Assassinated in Algeria

February 17, 1995

Human Rights Watch's Women's Rights Project and Middle East division today deplored the assassination by suspected Islamist militants of Algerian women's rights activist Nabila Djahnine. Ms. Djahnine, a thirty-year-old architect who led an organization called the Cry of Women, was killed on February 15 in Tizi Ouzou, the capital city of the Kabyle region. According to a February 16 El-Watan report, she was gunned down by two men in a car as she walked to work.

30/1/2003

Dossier 14-15: The Campaign for Women’s Emancipation in an Ismaili Shia (Daudi Bohra) Sect of Indian Muslims: 1929-1945

Introduction

At the beginning of the women’s emancipation struggle among the Muslims of the Indian sub-continent access to education and the campaign against Purdah were the main points. The late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries were characterized by considerable debate on these issues in the Muslim community, throughout India. The reform effort by men on behalf of women was sparked by the considerable progress made by other communities in India and was inspired by changes taking place in Muslim countries of the Middle East.

30/1/2003

Dossier 14-15: Statement of Rights from an Independent Women’s Court

We, the women participating in the Arab Court of Women, held in Beirut, June 28-30, 1995, as testifiers and audience to those testimonies; we, who had the opportunity to take part in this great event, jointly assume the responsibility of what we heard of words of truth which broke the ring of silence that had long stifled our voices and sufferings of women.

30/1/2003

Dossier 14-15: The Original Sin and Internationalism

Once upon a time there was a people called North which was white and rich, and a people named South which was non-white and poor. The people North exploited, attacked and killed the people South according to their needs.

30/1/2003

Dossier 14-15: Birth, Nationalism and War

In late eighties, with the consolidation of nationalism as the state ideology in Serbia, the propaganda directed against women grew stronger. It is well known that in periods of acute crisis, economic repression or marked repression, women are called to turn back to "home and family"; they are referred to as "the angels of the home earth", as ideal mothers, as faithful wives… Such propaganda, among other things, aims at postponing or preventing social tensions, outburst of social discontent caused by mass lay-offs of working men and women.

30/1/2003

Dossier 14-15: Multi-Fundamentalism in Mauritius

The attacks by Muslim fundamentalists against Mr. Namassiwayam Ramalingum and against L'Indépendant, the newspaper he is editor of, were accurately described and rightly denounced in Index 3/1995. But Mr. Ramalingum has not provided a clear enough picture of what was going on in general in Mauritius. This is a pity, because knowing about the context helps towards a more thorough condemnation of all the attacks on free speech in Mauritius.

Mauritius has seen vast changes over the past fifteen years.

30/1/2003

Dossier 14-15: Islam and Women's Rights: A Case Study

Given the rising tide of Islamisation in Muslim countries and its call for wider recognition of Shari'a as the primary legal basis of Muslim nations, concerns about Shari'a's conflict with human rights standards must be addressed.

30/1/2003

Dossier 17: Stretching The Limits: A Feminist Reading of the Shari’a in Post-Khomeini Iran

Women’s issues are now an integral part of modern Islamic discourses, as evidenced in the plethora of ‘Women in Islam’ titles in religious publishing projects all over the Muslim world.[1] In practice, this has entailed re-readings of the old texts in search of solutions - or more precisely, Islamic alternatives - for a very modern problem, which has to do with the changed status of women and the need to accommodate their aspirations for equality and to define and control their increasing participation in t

30/1/2003

Dossier 14-15: Gender, Civil Society and Citizenship in Algeria

Women in Algeria must negotiate their access to the public sphere in a society torn between the residual patriarchal reflexes of the modern state and Islamist revivalism.

30/1/2003

Dossier 17: Statement by the Afghan Women’s Network

Who we are

We are a group of Afghan women and their supporters who live in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In a country where over 90% of the women and girls are illiterate, we are a group of women who were encouraged by their families to become educated. Many of us have university degrees. Many of us previously worked in Afghanistan as lawyers, engineers, professors and doctors. Now we are working with NGOs (non governmental organizations), UN agencies and schools. Some of us are widows. Many of us are the sole support of our families.