A dramatic development shocked most delegates and observers on the last day of the 47th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York, March 2003.
This issue of the Dossiers focuses on two main areas: the role of culture in the making of religious identities; and progressive interpretations within Islam. The issue of culture viz religion and identity is crucial to us; one of the aims of WLUML is to facilitate debate towards disentangling cultural identity from religious and political identities.
An appeal, due to begin in northern Nigeria for Amina Lawal, a Muslim woman convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning, has been postponed because the judges failed to turn up.
One year after the Gujarat genocide, a petition was delivered to the British Charity Commission, because the organisations which financed the massacres and the continuing communal violence are still enjoying charity status in Britain.
The anthology bears witness to the anti-war attitudes and activities of women from the Yugoslav geographical space. It is a record of their emotional conflicts and pain, yet, at the same time, a testimonial of their strength and vitality. It treasures every individual story and every emotion. In this respect is follows Simone Weil’s dictum from the year 1943: “In momentous historical events, personal emotions have a significance which has never received proper attention.”
The paper thus outlines the social and political conditions that have
led not only to the development of secular feminist perspectives in Iran, but to
the emergence of woman-centred Islamists and their strategies which aim, thus
far with considerable success, to fundamentally challenge conventional gender
visions often presented as "Islamic." This analysis of the gender debates in
Iran, and by extension elsewhere in the Muslim world, reiterates that Islam,
particularly as a political ideology, is far from static and unchanging; it is a
dynamic and evolving ideological force that
