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.

Charity of the Heart

“I believe that with great wealth comes great responsibility.”

So said Bill Gates on June 15 as he announced plans to phase himself out of Microsoft by 2008 to focus full-time on philanthropy and tackle the vast challenges of child mortality and disease control throughout the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, founded in 2000 and with assets valued at $30 billion, has already made its mark financing projects to eradicate deadly diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhea and AIDS in Asia and Africa.

From Bangladesh to Botswana, the Gateses have funded programs driven by cutting-edge science to develop, test, and manufacture drugs and vaccines for diseases that kill millions of children every year.

One good thing begets another. In this case, did it ever!

Investment guru Warren Buffett, the second-richest man on the planet and a close friend of Numero Uno Bill Gates, pledged $30 billion dollars to the Gates Foundation, overnight doubling its assets to $60 billion dollars.

That’s the kind of cash that can transform the world. Yet the history of philanthropy is littered with huge endowments gone horribly awry. Why should this be different?

Two words: Bill and Melinda.

The couple has turned traditional philanthropy on its head by marrying charity to accountability, management, rigor, research and result. The traits that allowed Gates to build Microsoft into what it is today are also qualities that animate the foundation: curiosity, attention to details, business savvy and a desire to confront the most intractable problems head-on.

But reducing social inequities and improving lives around the world are not the same as solving engineering and mathematical problems, however complex.

Still, applying scientific rigor on unwieldy issues of global health and universal education can only lead to more insights, as various projects that the Foundation has undertaken in the direst regions of Africa show. And more insights often mean a greater chance of success in these thorny human issues, even if the initial approaches fail.

Gates modeled his philanthropic philosophy after a mathematician. In the year 1900, the great German mathematician David Hilbert outlined 23 major mathematical problems that he believed would dictate research in the field in the twentieth century. (About half of these problems are still unsolved.) Taking a cue from Hilbert, Gates challenged scientists, physicians and health-care professionals in 2003 from around the world to draw up a list of grand challenges in global health.

After intense research and debate, investigators produced a list of 14 “global challenges” in seven categories: improve childhood vaccines (3), create new vaccines (3), control insects that transmit agents of disease (2), improve nutrition to promote health (1), improve drug treatment of infectious diseases (1), cure latent and chronic infections (2), and measure disease and health status accurately and economically in developing countries (2).

It is this laser-sharp focus on priorities that persuaded Warren Buffett to entrust his wealth to Bill and Melinda Gates, instead of creating his own foundation.

There are many high-profile personalities who by example are ushering in a golden and dynamic era of philanthropy. The actress Angeline Jolie, for example, donates one-third of her income to charitable causes in the poorest nations of the earth. As a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. Refugee Agency, she has traveled to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Rwanda, and Ethiopia to stir the world’s conscience about the plight of the hungry, the vulnerable and the homeless.

But what about the rest of us, neither famous nor millionaires? Is there anything we can do to touch lives less fortunate than ours?

I will take Bangladesh as an example, my birthplace. There are millions of Bangladeshis, including many of us living abroad, who are doing precisely that: sponsoring a child, pooling resources to build schools and hospitals, donating books to libraries, buying textbooks for orphans, creating scholarships for poor but meritorious students. The means of charity are endless, tangible and intangible. What counts is that we make the extra effort to do the best we can, to lift a burden here and bring a smile there, to forgive a debt, to give hope to a beaten spirit, to …

Fill in the blanks and just do it. No charity is too small and no giving from the heart leads to poverty.

The tragedy is that millions of us are also materialists and narcissists who have no margin in our lives for others, who remain adamantly blind to the inequity around us. This, in spite of Zakat being a pillar of our faith! It is never too late to change.

In a visit to Bangladesh last December, Bill Gates described his meeting with seamstresses and other women entrepreneurs in a village on the outskirts of Dhaka as “a religious experience.” He was particularly impressed by how micro-credit, pioneered by economist Dr. Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen (Village-based) Bank, and promoted by Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) and similar organizations around the world, is transforming the lives of women. This first-hand observation undoubtedly played a pivotal role in his recent decision to make micro-credit a salient feature of his foundation.

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts of the new era of philanthropy we are now witnessing will be to curb all types of extremism. When people are freed from the ancient curses of ill-health, poverty, ignorance and debt, and their children survive to lead productive lives, the world will become a better place for all.

Currently, Bangladesh seems to be in the grips of a particularly venal form of religious extremism in which a minority of zealots are persecuting Ahmadiyyas. To these zealots we say: It is up to God, and God alone, to decide who is a Muslim and who is not. You commit the gravest of sins if you attempt to usurp the right that is uniquely God’s. Back off. Use your energy to do good to your fellow humans. Do it out of the charity of your heart, even if you cannot do it in the name of God.