Stop the Genocide Against Rohingya Muslims

In the 21^st Century, we are witnessing a repeat of the horrific ‘Trail of Tears’ of 19^th Century America, only worse. In the 1830s, Native Americans were forcibly removed from their traditional lands in Southeastern United States and forced to march to reservations in Oklahoma, a journey of 1,000 miles. About 5,000 of the relocated 17,000 Cherokees perished along the way.

In Mayanmar now, history is repeating itself but with a genocidal twist. Rohingya Muslims, considered the world’s most persecuted minority, have lived for 150 years in Myanmar’s far western Rakhine state. Denied citizenship by the military junta since 1982, they have been stateless and without the most basic human rights, thus prey to indiscriminate rape, torture and killing by Buddhist militants and civilians alike.

In recent days, however, eyewitness accounts of mass rape, killing and ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims has horrified the world. Families, including newborns, have been slaughtered and burned alive. United Nations officials report that tens of thousands of Rohingya women, children and men are streaming into neighboring Bangladesh after trudging through treacherous ravines and jungles, many falling along the way. Babies are dying in the cradles of their mothers.

Bangladesh, a poor country, is reeling under the burden of providing relief to the 100,000 who have fled Mayanmar in the last 2 weeks alone. This is in addition to the already half-a-million Rohingyas in the Cox’s Bazar district and adjoining villages living in squalid, unhygienic camps. (Growing up in Bangladesh, I visited Cox's Bazar and its adjoining villages in my youth for picnics and idyllic strolls along its unbroken shoreline but now it resonates only with the suffering of Rohingya Muslims.)

For perspective, I called a journalist friend reporting from border posts along the
200-mile Bangladesh-Mayanmar border.

Mamun Abdullah manages a 24-hour News Channel called Independent TV. “Rohingya insurgents were forced to take up arms against the violence on their people,” said Mamun. “On August 25 they attacked some Mayanmar police posts. The government responded with disproportionate military force. That’s when the mass exodus began.”

The critical need of the refugees, said Mamun, is food, pure drinking water, sanitation and shelter. “That’s not available. About 50 Rohingyas with multiple bullet and burn injuries are being treated in Chittagong medical college hospital a hundred miles away. It’s like a drop in the ocean. Several have already died.”

Mamun is skeptical about the possibility of Rohingya Muslims returning to Myanmar. “Repatriation is a pipedream. Sheikh Hasina (Bangladesh’s prime minister), has praised Bangladeshis along the border for giving shelter to fleeing Rohingyas but has also said Bangladesh cannot meet the demands of the swelling refugees. It’s true, we just don’t have the facilities or the land.”

“So what’s the way out?”

“There must be international pressure to force Myanmar to stop the genocide. We have not heard anything from United States government. Only the Turkish and Indonesian governments have pledged some help so far.”

It is in the American character to serve the suffering. While it is beyond our power to control the fury of nature, as we saw with Hurricane Harvey and now with Irma, we can unite as decent human beings to do something about the deadly violence being waged against the Rohingya Muslims, and, for that matter, violence anywhere against a minority by a majority, irrespective of race and religion.

Despite the bigotry and divisiveness promoted by president Trump and his cohorts, Americans of all persuasions should contact their elected officials and lawmakers to demand that Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace-prize winner and the de facto leader of Myanmar, stop the torture and the killing of Rohingya Muslims. She has not said a word so far, a stance that has been denounced by many governments but unfortunately, not ours. Her silence has only emboldened Myanmar’s militants and security forces in the state-sanctioned genocide of Rohingya Muslims.

We should also call upon our government to demand that the Myanmar government give Rohingya Muslims citizenship in a country where they have lived for centuries, and to accord them the same dignity, safety and security that the Buddhist majority enjoy. A concerted effort must also be made to provide humanitarian aid to the refugees streaming into Bangladesh and to sponsor a resolution in the UN Security Council to immediately stop the genocide of Rohingya Muslims.

Some media links:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/09/opinion/kristof-nobel-prize-aung-san-suu-kyi-shame.html

https://www.ushmm.org/confront-genocide/about/initiatives/bearing-witness-trips/burma

https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/durbin-mccain-resolution-condemns-violence-against-burmese-rohingya-calls-on-aung-san-suu-kyi-to-act

http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2017/08/27/pope_francis_appeal_for_end_to_violence_against_rohingya/1333091

http://www.fortifyrights.org/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/07/massacre-at-tula-toli-rohingya-villagers-recall-horror-of-myanmar-army-attack

https://www.nytimes.com/video/international-home/100000005404848/endless-stream-of-rohingya-flee-military-offensive.html

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39204086

https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/09/08/burma-rohingya-describe-military-atrocities

https://www.iol.co.za/news/opinion/an-open-letter-from-desmond-tutu-to-aung-san-su-kyi-11123972

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/opinion/kristof-myanmars-appalling-apartheid.html

https://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/so-many-pharmacies-too-few-doctors/

Longing for Peace and Justice in 2015

If a single sentence is to summarize the year 2014, it will probably be “I can’t breathe.”

Those were the fateful words a 43-year-old black man named Eric Garner managed to utter before dying when police officer Daniel Pantaleo applied a chokehold on him in Staten Island, NY, on July 17. Just three weeks later, on August 9, 2014, an unarmed 18-year-old black man named Michael Brown was shot dead by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri.

Neither officer was indicted.

The protests and civil unrests that followed put America on edge as the distrust between police and people, particularly African-Americans, grew intense. Almost inevitably, a criminal named Ismaaiyl Brinsley, a black man, shot dead two police officers in Brooklyn, NY, on December 20, before killing himself.

Can there be a silver lining to these horrific events? Perhaps this: Brinsley tried to invoke the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner as motivation for killing two policemen. Both the Brown and the Garner families denounced and rejected his reasoning.

Racism lurks beneath the façade of normalcy in America. We have progressed beyond Jim Crow but the progress has been uneven and slow. Blacks have legitimate reasons to fear the police for reasons both historical and structural. It is a tragedy that progress in race relations in America occurs only after blacks die, mainly because it forces us to question existing laws and attempt to make them less cruel and more human.

Year 2014 has been a difficult year. Murderous organizations like ISIS went on a killing spree, beheading journalists and civilians who challenged their barbarity. In Peshawar, Pakistan, the Taliban killed over 130 children in a single horrific attack in a school.

Yet the fanatics are steadily losing ground as Muslims overwhelmingly reject them and coalition forces retake territories.

Every nation in the Middle East unfortunately lived down to their unexceptional state. None showed any imagination or daring to break out of the cycle of distrust and violence.

On December 9, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 6000-page report on the CIA's "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques." CIA’s depravity against 9/11 detainees shocked America. Yet there was something else too: In how many countries could such a report see the light of day? America’s willingness to question itself is one of its strengths, although its capacity to learn lessons from its failures gets at best a c-.

It was not all dystopia, of course.

The Nobel committee honored Malala Yousafzay of Pakistan and Kailash Satyarthi of India with the Nobel peace Prize “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.” The Taliban had shot Malala in the head in 2012 when she was 15 but that only strengthened her determination to secure universal access to education, particularly for girls. Satyarthi, 60, had been waging a tireless war against the exploitation of children for decades. The “Save the Childhood Movement” he launched in 1980 has saved over 80,000 children from exploitation, bonded labor and trafficking.

Openings are always better than closings. President Obama’s decision to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba was welcomed by most Americans. “These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked,” declared the President. “It’s time for a new approach.” (Are leaders in the Middle East and elsewhere listening?) Pope Francis played a critical role in bringing the two sides together. This humble man has shown that religion can be a catalyst for diplomacy when applied with the right touch of humility and foresight. Transcending the naysayers was the euphoria that gripped ordinary Cubans. “For the Cuban people, I think this is like a shot of oxygen,” exulted a 32-year-old IT specialist in Havana. “It’s a wish-come-true, because with this we have overcome our differences.”

Cynicism is supposedly the hallmark of the modern man but even the most hardened heart has to acknowledge that peace is a universal human longing.

In education, the Common Core Curriculum (CCC) is going through its trial by fire. More parents than teachers seem to be against it, only because CCC is forcing children to analyze what’s going on under the hood – critical thinking - and that has shaken parents off their complacency. For the first time in years, parents were forced to confront the possibility that their children were perhaps not as smart as they imagined them to be. Yet what they need to consider is that CCC can actually make their kids smarter, if only they give the curriculum a chance.

In community colleges, the tension between learning and relevance continues to frustrate students and teachers alike. Students are convinced that education is important but they are not convinced that what they learn at community colleges will help them in their lives. “As soon as I am done with this algebra course, I will flush it completely out of my brain, so I can make room for what will really help me,” said a despairing student. Replace ‘algebra’ with any other subject and this is a refrain one hears frequently in the corridors of community colleges across America.

But teachers are stepping up to the challenge. They are making relevance and connection with real-world problems a priority in the student-centric learning environment they are striving to create, recognizing that the main purpose of education is not to train students for jobs but to kindle their passion for knowledge and for their capacity to think independently.

Also laudable is the effort by organizations like California Open Educational Resource Council (OERC) to reduce textbook costs by making peer-reviewed quality textbooks available to students for free.

What is perhaps missing from our perspective is an awareness of the countless acts of kindness and generosity that ordinary people perform every day to propel us forward. It is the anonymous goodness of mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, teachers, nurses, volunteers and others that animate our humanity. It is their sacrifices, and not the antics of the headline grabbers, that keep the world humming. The source of the extraordinary, we often forget, is ordinary lives. No one captured this more eloquently than George Eliot in Middlemarch:

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The world may appear more unsettled and dangerous than ever but when we believe in the generosity and selflessness of those “who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in uninvited tombs,” our faith in humanity is restored. We sense that a new beginning is ours for the taking, that the fanatics and the extremists will be defeated by the humble and the resolute, that cruelty and stupidity will surrender to kindness and reason.

We long for peace and justice and hope that 2015 will be a year when we will be graced by both. Perhaps 2015 will be our personal Year of Innisfree (W.B. Yeats – The Lake Isle of Innisfree)

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

Defeating Bigotry

A 17-year-old Pakistani, along with a 60-year-old Indian activist named Kailash Satyarthi, has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Malala Yousafzai was honored for her death-defying stand against the regressive and fanatical Taliban and for demanding her rights to modern education and a life of freedom from fear. Her story has given hope to millions of girls like her, not just in Pakistan but around the world. As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said of her: “The terrorists showed what frightens them most: a girl with a book.”

Malali’s Nobel should gladden the hearts of most Muslims, particularly in the wake of the fierce debate on Islam and Muslims viewers witnessed on Bill Maher’s "Last Word" TV show on HBO on October 6. Prominent Islamophobes Maher and Sam Harris attacked Islam, essentially declaring that Islam and its adherents were the root of all evil in our times. “Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas,” asserted Mr. Harris. An unbelieving Ben Affleck could only exclaim, “Jesus, it’s an ugly thing to say!”

Thank God for Ben Affleck, the protagonist and director of Argo, the 2012 political thriller about the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis. Affleck provided the most spark in the debate with his logic and clarity and for challenging bigotry. He called the views of Maher and Harris on Islam and Muslims “gross” and “racist.” As Harris nonchalantly continued his attack on Islam, Affleck challenged Harris: “Are you the person who understands the officially-codified document of Islam?” Mr. Harris replied, “I am actually well-educated in Islam.”

Well, let’s see. In an interview with Pat Morrison of Los Angeles Times on September 24, Harris was asked what he thought about the “the latest, distressing religion-related headlines … by Islamic State, posing as believers.”

Harris replied, “They're not posing as believers; they are true believers. They truly believe in the letter of the scripture. Everything we see ISIS doing is spelled out in the Koran and the Hadith. The problem is not how to correct the lies of religious extremists; we have to figure out how to divorce Islam from its actual doctrines. Cutting off people's heads is there in the Koran. If it said, "Cut off their legs," we would see ISIS cutting off legs. This is paint-by-number Islam.”

The “well-educated in Islam” neurosurgeon and in-your-face atheist has concluded that the solution to the world’s problems lies in “divorcing Islam from its actual doctrines.” In other words, a good Muslim is, according to Harris, an atheist Muslim, whatever that means.

Forget the breathtaking arrogance of that statement for a moment. But for Harris to claim that he understands Islam, while ignoring the fact that ISIS victims are mostly Muslims, that Muslim nations have joined America in the fight against the terrorists, and that ordinary Muslims and scholars have condemned these killers, is prejudice of the worst sort.

Incidentally, the reason for the interview with LA Times was the publication of Harris’s book, “Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.” The title is certainly intriguing, until the reader realizes that Harris found his special brand of spirituality through the drug Ecstasy.

Why, this expert on Islam wants to know, would anyone seek morality and spirituality based on a religion when she or he can so easily get it with just a few tablets of Ecstasy a day? Hence his anger at the government: “The idea that something like Ecstasy is illegal is a travesty.”

Sam Harris probably considers himself the Samuel Taylor Coleridge of our times, a ‘poet’ who discovered his very own Xanadu through a newer edition of opium.

The religious scholar Reza Aslan, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, has had his share of dealing with ignoramuses and bigots on TV. His interviews with FOX News, CNN and Bill Maher, all of which went viral on the Web, have been revealing. His take on Harris is incisive: “With Harris, we are confronted with a completely different issue, which is the idea that anyone can simply become a recognized expert in religion simply by spouting these overly simplistic criticisms of it. Sam Harris, to me, gives atheism a bad name because he comes from a tradition of atheism that is really disconnected from the titans of intellectual, philosophical atheism who gave birth to the modern world. These were experts in religion who, from a position of expertise, criticized religion. Sam Harris is a neuroscientist; he knows as much about religion as I do about neuroscience. The difference is that I don’t go around writing books about neuroscience.”

Equally apt is Reza's conclusion about Maher: “Bill Maher’s usual critique of religion in general has morphed into a real crusade against one religion in particular, Islam, which he has on repeated occasion said is worse than the other religions and not like other religions; other religions are bad, but Islam is far, far worse. And I would say that the other thing that’s a little bit different is that the criticism of Islam has really crossed the line into what can only be described as frank bigotry.”

Coming back to Malala’s Nobel: If Islam is the source of violence, one has to wonder how the Mahers and the Harrises of the world reacted when they heard that a Muslim was recognized with the highest peace award in the world for standing up to the Taliban and blazing a new trail for oppressed adolescent girls everywhere. They probably denounced the award, or rationalized it away by saying the Nobel peace prize was, after all, a political award, or that there were probably a few good Muslims (you can count them on your fingers!) among the 1.6 billion of them, and she just happened to be one who succeeded in divorcing her faith “from its actual doctrines.”

For those of us rejoicing at Malala’s Nobel Peace Prize, which must surely include most of the world’s population, we need to remember that Malala did not happen in a vacuum. Before her, there was a young woman named Mukhtar Mai, also of Pakistan, who was brutally gang-raped by Muslim men in 2002. In the face of death threats, she testified against her attackers, won in the courts and used her settlement money to start schools for girls in remote Pakistani villages. The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, also a guest with Ben Affleck on Bill Maher's HBO show, has been a tireless champion of Mukhtar Mai and did much to bring her inspiring story to the rest of the world.

In towns and villages across the world, there are brave souls, most of them girls, who break free of the cruel practices of patriarchal societies and point the way to a life of freedom and dignity. They are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, and yes, Muslims, who often have to make the ultimate sacrifice to open the door for others. A few celebrities like Angelina Jolie take up their causes and succeed in shining the spotlight on the plight of the oppressed and the vulnerable. We wouldn’t know it by listening to the Mahers and the Harrises of the world, people who only know how to deal with the currency of bigotry. Far better it would be to join ranks with those who are making a difference in the lives of others and support them in whatever way we can.

No matter how you look at it, it is clear that in terms of benefiting humanity, one Malala is worth more than a million pairs of Bill Maher and Sam Harris.

The Dickensian Decade

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way …”

Can we use the stirring words of Charles Dickens to describe the first decade of the twenty-first century, the “Oughty-Noughties” (2000-2009 or the 00s) as it has come to be called?

Answer: A qualified “Yes.”

The decade began with the bursting of the dot-com bubble in March of 2000. Eight months later, George W. Bush claimed the presidency of the United States after the “hanging chad” farce in Florida and a strange and unprecedented 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

On September 11, 2001, homicidal maniacs claiming Islam as guidance hijacked commercial airliners and crashed into what they perceived as American symbols of power, the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Close to 2,300 Americans and an estimated 500 foreign nationals from 91 nations perished in the attacks.

In response, the U.S. went after the Taliban in Afghanistan with almost universal support. The Taliban were swiftly routed but victory proved elusive as a quagmire set in, reminiscent of Vietnam. Eight years later, the war continues as a corrupt Karzai regime hangs on to power.

Support for American policy quickly dried up as President Bush used the pretext of weapons of mass destruction and a manufactured Al-Qaida connection to attack Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in March of 2003. The invasion, boasting technological “shock and awe,” seemed at first to be as easy as winning a video game but the occupation proved catastrophic. America’s moral authority came undone in waterboard torture pits and in the horror dungeons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

As of now, the Iraq war has alone caused almost 100,000 civilian deaths, euphemistically called “collateral damage.” Sectarian violence is a daily occurrence and the Iraqi government remains weak and dysfunctional. The toll the two wars have taken on the families of American soldiers killed and injured is incalculable.

In technology, the Internet gold rush that collapsed in 2000 regained some of its luster, as social networking became all the rage. MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004) and Twitter (2007) became household names. Web 2.0, the read/write Web, turned everyone (well, almost everyone) into a blogger and a “pundit.” How far the democratization of ideas and opinions go and what influence it has in speaking truth to power, however, remain to be seen. Apple revolutionized the music industry with its iPod products and leading universities of the world made many of their courses in various disciplines available online. Cloud computing went mainstream and software and hardware breakthroughs blurred the distinction between smartphones and PCs.

Amazon’s success with the Kindle, introduced in November of 2007, raised an intriguing question: Will eBooks replace physical books, and if so, when? “When” is difficult to say but it is clear that, where the technology is available, sale of eBooks is rising dramatically against the sale of ink-on-paper books. As Amazon Chief Jeff Bezos noted, however, the Gutenberg model has had a 500-year run, making the physical book probably the most successful technology ever.

Among many achievements in science, scientists mapped the human genome sequence and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider first sputtered and then came to life as two beams of protons collided head on at a combined energy of seven trillion electron volts, setting the stage for answering fundamental questions about our universe in the new decade.

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected the first African American president of the United States. Americans were drawn to his platform of change and hope. The world breathed a sigh of relief and the nation’s stature in the world went up almost overnight. But a global economic meltdown, brought on by Wall Street charlatans, Ponzy schemers, unscrupulous bankers and hedge-fund hucksters, threatened to undermine his presidency from day one.

Massive stimulus money pumped into the economy seems mostly to have rescued the industry titans and their acolytes, however. Financial future of the average American appears bleak at this point, with job losses and home foreclosures not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The crisis has spread worldwide and it will clearly be a while before the Great Recession is actually over.

Still, the election of Barack Obama to the highest office of the land was like light breaking forth after an unending night of darkness. Sadly, the president has committed more troops to Afghanistan, although withdrawal from Iraq is expected to take place during the middle of 2010. The new year will test the young president’s mettle, his ability to deliver on the message of hope and change that carried him to victory.

Perhaps the most significant global issue of the decade was climate change and our response to it. Most of us, with the exception of rabid right-wingers and congenital contrarians, recognize the existential threat that global warming poses to the earth. Yet consensus on how to mitigate this threat has fallen prey to nationalism. For the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases – China, the United States, India, Russia, Japan – national economy trumps the survival of the planet.

Still, the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December of 2009 raised the expectations of common and indigenous people around the world to soaring heights, a reflection, perhaps, of the hope they invested in Barack Obama.

But while it roared in like a lion, the Summit went out like a lamb. There were no lasting binding agreements. A limited deal was reached in which both developed and developing nations agreed to “list national actions and commitments” on cutting carbon emissions. Wealthy nations also offered billions in aid to help countries like Bangladesh and the island nation of Kiribati, threatened with the worst effects of climate change. Significantly, leaders also gave their assent to a 2 degree Celsius cap on global warming.

The real success of the Climate Summit is in the impetus it has given to green technology and clean energy. Entrepreneurs are racing to produce energy-efficient devices and systems, ranging from innovative fuel-cells and green building materials such as ultra-insulated windows and glass to roof-top gardening, clean-coal technology and high-efficiency solar and wind systems.

It is also not without irony, and some measure of justice, that Al Gore, who lost the muddled 2000 presidential election to George Bush, won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to raising global awareness of man-made climate change.

So there you have it, a decade dominated by terror, bad governance, war, unregulated greed and financial terrorism, but also a decade in which sanity replaced insanity toward the end, in which Muslims overwhelmingly rejected Al-Qaida’s message of nihilism and asserted their message of moderation (the Nidal Hasans and the Abdulmutallabs reflected systemic failures), in which awareness of the earth’s fragility entered our consciousness and spurred us to action, and in which we recognized, as never before, that our prosperity and well-being depended on the status and education of women throughout the world.

We may have begun this decade in the winter of despair but perhaps it is not too far fetched to suggest that a spring of hope beckons as we end it.

Happy New Decade!

Gender Equality, Dr. Muhammad Yunus and the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize

Gender equality in the heterogeneous Muslim world is a work in progress. The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize gave a boost to this work when it was awarded to Bangladeshi economist Dr. Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded in 1976.

Mainstream media have been abuzz with inspiring stories of millions of poor Bangladeshi women lifting themselves out of poverty by borrowing little sums of money from Grameen (a Bengali word meaning ‘village-based’) Bank and starting their own businesses, a model now emulated in over 100 countries. (97% of Grameen clients are women.)

What has received little attention is the contribution Dr. Yunus has made in helping disenfranchised women challenging a patriarchal society that often practices misogyny against them in the name of Islam.

Whereas the husband’s (or the father’s) word was the de facto law before, particularly in villages where illiteracy is high and sacred text is manipulated to suit the male viewpoint, economic freedom gave women entrepreneurs the courage to question religious chauvinism and resist attempts to undermine their dignity.

Speaking to a reporter a few years ago, Dr. Yunus explained the psychological barriers to his bank this way: “The first hostile person to our program is the husband. We challenge his authority. In the family, he is a macho tyrant. He starts to see that she is not as stupid as he thought. He says, ‘Now she cannot nag me about money, because she understands how hard it is to make.’ The tension eases and they become a team.”

A team can function only when there is mutual respect. A husband accustomed to obedience from his wife begins to respect her opinion on religious matters, too, since she has shown her worth by financially supporting the family.

This has been the noteworthy byproduct of the microcredit revolution that Muhammad Yunus launched three decades ago. Unwittingly, he forced a predominantly conservative Muslim society to confront its ingrained habits and customs, inspiring countless women to question dogma and realizing their God-given rights.

Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer-activist and the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, evoked the gender issue in her Nobel Lecture: “The discriminatory plight of women in Islamic states, whether in the spheres of civil law or in the realm of social, political and cultural justice, has its roots in the patriarchal and male-dominated culture prevailing in these societies, not in Islam. This culture does not tolerate freedom and democracy, just as it does not believe in the equal rights of men and women, and the liberation of women from male domination (fathers, husbands, brothers …), because it would threaten the historical and traditional position of the rulers and guardians of that culture … The patriarchal culture and the discrimination against women, particularly in the Islamic countries, cannot continue for ever.”

It certainly cannot, and the work of Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the “banker to the poor” who proved that poverty was not destiny, that, in fact, destiny was what one made of it, vindicates Ebadi’s hope and assertion.

In the post-9/11 world, Muslim women in affluent western countries are engaged in the battle of ideas to shape their faith and reclaim it from traditionalists and extremists.

In March of last year, for instance, Dr. Amina Wadud, professor of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Quran and Women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, delivered a sermon and led a public, mixed-gender Friday congregational prayer in New York City.

This symbolic but seminal act received widespread support, and criticism, from Muslims around the world, stirring vigorous debate and soul-searching.

Asra Nomani, a journalist and author of Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, is on a mission to reclaim the rightful role of woman in Islam defined by the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad but denied by centuries of cultural accretions.

“We joke that we want to take the “slam” out of Islam – that’s our American generation’s way of understanding it,” she says. “But it’s really that simple: we’re just so tired of going to our mosques and feeling unworthy or worthless or less than faithful. It says in the Quran, “There is no compulsion in religion,” and yet the fanatics in all religions want to make it compulsory that you follow their path of faith.”

Theological debates and reclaiming interpretive rights to sacred text by educated Muslim women activists constitute one path toward gender equality. The other is by empowering poor women engaged in daily existential battles to achieve financial freedom so that they too can challenge the myth of patriarchy in traditional societies and experience the egalitarianism that permeates Islam.

Only when the two paths converge – intellectual and existential, selective and grassroots - will true gender equality flourish in the heterogeneous Muslim world. Only then can we expect the sequence of events such as the following becoming a reality.

A seamstress in a village in Chittagong, Bangladesh, delivers garments to a demanding but honest merchant, and makes a tidy profit. The ripple from this transaction reaches Kandahar, Afghanistan, where a twenty-something teacher briskly walks along an earthen road to her one-room school, smiling to herself as she anticipates the fresh, eager faces of girls and boys waiting to learn arithmetic from her. A local cleric approaching from the opposite direction alights from his bicycle and respectfully acknowledges her.

The ripple from this gesture spreads to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where a middle-aged housewife patiently maneuvers her car heavy traffic and heads for the English-medium school in the center of town to pick up her two children. She has an appointment to see the principal about introducing more challenging curricula in the school and mentally rehearses her presentation.

The ripple from the rehearsal propagates to Katsina, Nigeria, where a judge raises her gavel to bring order to her courtroom in a complex inheritance case as she prepares to dispense justice tempered by mercy.