LEWISTON — When women’s rights activist Zainah Anwar talked about growing up Muslim in Malaysia, how she had chores and housework to do when her brother never did, 17-year old Bisharo Odowa could relate.
Odowa wasn’t so sure such unequal treatment was Islamic-based — the Lewiston High School junior saw it as more cultural than religious — but she had a word for it either way.
Unfair.
Lewiston students, it turned out, could relate to a lot of Anwar’s experiences.
Anwar, a leading advocate in the Muslim women’s rights movement, is visiting Maine this week as part of the sixth annual Justice For Women Lecture presented by the University of Maine School of Law. She was scheduled to spend Monday afternoon at the Tree Street Youth Center and Monday evening at Bates College in Lewiston.
She spent Monday morning at Lewiston High School, talking first with 11 teenage Muslim girls who are part of the school’s 21st Century Leaders Program and then with a wider group of more than 100 students.
Anwar, a former journalist, is the director of Musawah, an international movement for equality for women in Islam. She is also a founding member of Sisters in Islam, an international group that brings people together to produce feminist scholarship in Islam, to train activists and to challenge government’s use of religion to circumvent human rights.
Anwar has been named by Newsweek and The Daily Beast as one of the 150 women “who shake the world.” She is being filmed for a documentary.
She talked Monday morning of the discrimination she’s seen or experienced from men who conscript Islam for their own gain and twist a few verses in the Quran to justify their abusive treatment of women.
“For us (in Sisters of Islam), it was really a most revealing, liberating experience to actually open the Quran as adults and to find incredible verses in the Quran that talk about equality, that talk about justice, that talk about men and women as garments to each other — you know, that close — men and women as protector and friends of each other,” she said.
She also spoke about fighting to change that attitude through education, advocacy, demonstrations and court actions. And she spoke of the threats and intimidation that came along with those efforts.
“When you’ve been privileged for a thousand years, why would you want to give up those privileges? So really, in the end, it’s up to us as women to push for change,” she said, adding, “Change does not happen on a silver platter. We have to be the change we want to see.”
Some students saw parallels to their own lives: Lewiston girls who have been told they shouldn’t play sports or wear pants because they’re Muslim, who have brothers who get out of household chores because they’re boys, who have been told women shouldn’t work outside the home.
But what irritated them as much: people who used that discrimination by some as a reason to hate or fear all of Islam.
“People think Islam is a bad religion. It’s not,” said 17-year-old Zahara Abdi. “They’re ruining our image, basically.”
She and Odowa said they’ve been taught that the Quran requires kindness and equal treatment of women.
“It uplifts instead of bringing them down,” Odowa said.
Sisters in Islam founder Zainah Anwar speaks to the 21st Century Leaders at Lewiston High School on Monday while a documentary film crew follows.
Lewiston High School junior Bisharo Odowa, left, asks Sisters in Islam founder Zainah Anwar a question Monday. Abshiro Abdi, center, and Hodan Musse, far right, are classmates of Odowa.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
