How the World Is Neglecting Muslim Female Heroines!

3 years ago

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French magazine Jeune Afrique reported on several Muslim women who "changed the world", but many of them are sometimes "unrecognized".

In a book, journalist Elise Saint Julian spoke about thirty pictures of inspiring Muslim women.

The biography and battles led by Tunisian gynecologist Tawhida Bencheikh and her Somali colleague Hawa Abdi are at least as impressive as that of Congolese Denis Mukwege in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

However, they were not awarded the Nobel Prize , and their stories were not mentioned much, according to the magazine.

 

Honorable Models

Somali environmental activist Fatima Jibril started her battle against deforestation nearly twenty years ago with Greta Thunberg.

But she has never found the same attention as her counterpart Greta, a young Swedish and international activist.

The reasons, according to the magazine, are perhaps because they were (very) ahead of their time, or because they are women, or maybe because they are not westerners, or because they are Muslim ...

Whatever the reason is, they are now highlighted in Muslim Women Around the World: Getting to Know Inspiring Women, a book that traces the extraordinary and often unacknowledged biographies of thirty women, twelve of whom are African.

If women in history have been largely absent, the silence around Muslim women is deafening, notes journalist Elise St. Julian, who specializes in women's rights and Islam, and who herself was a convert.

The writer says : “There are now many books about inspiring women, but when it comes to Muslim women, they are often limited to (Pakistani activist) Malala (Yousafzi), or in Arabic literature where the talk is limited to characters who lived in the time of the Prophet".

"I wanted young people to be able to identify with more contemporary personalities," she says.

It is not their faith or ritual practice that determines the characters assembled in this book but "the way they changed the world."

The journalist, who is tired of hearing news about Muslim women in the media or in publishing houses. Women are always seen from the same angle: veiling, submission, or the contradiction between tradition and modernity.

Missing Fighters

In this book, we discover the extraordinary fate of Fatima Fihri, founder of the University of Al-Kayrawaniyyin in Fez in the ninth century, considered by UNESCO to be the oldest in the world, and the Moroccan mountaineer Bouchra Bibanou, who completed the Seven Summits Challenge (the highest on each continent) in 2018.

But there are also more tragic stories of Moroccan citizen Soraya Chaoui, the first female pilot in the Arab world, whose killing was not clear at the age of nineteen, one day before Independence Day.

Also the murder of Lalla Fatima N'Soumer, the tribal resistance against the French occupation in Algeria, who died at the age of 33 in her cell.

"When I was younger, I wanted to have a book like this so I could set an example to agree with," Tunisian comedian Samia Orosman says in the book's introduction.

In the same context, she adds, "It is difficult to identify the personalities who appear in the media when you are young and from minority backgrounds."

These images are short excerpts: we touch upon the immense musical heritage of the Egyptian Umm Kulthum and the lengthy message of the Senegalese feminist Mariama Ba.

Jeune Afrique wonders about the danger of leaving readers curious. On the contrary, it says, they may want to go further.

It also wonders if they will read the book - and it answers again: Who knows?

Like the tales of Etithal Mahmoud (the magazine did not mention her full name), who fled the Darfur war from an early age.

She remembers this poet in her poem "To My Mother", for which she won the 2015 World Championships in Free Poetry and Poetry in Washington.

She remembers her situation in Darfur. "My mother and I can no longer walk home on the street alone," she says. In the same context, she adds, "there are no more streets to walk on where we used to live."

 

Persecuted Minorities

Photographer L.K. Imani, the hardworking landscape architect in the aforementioned book, gave each of these women extraordinary features, vision, and colors.

The writer describes these women, saying: “They are all doers and activists, and they have their own energy and personality.”

Through her usual routine, through her account on Instagram, the writer followed the stories of the epics of some women, who were often minorities.

From the Senegalese fighter during the French colonial era, to Aissa Maiga at the César concerts for French cinema for the year 2020, and a series of young women who proudly wore the veil like her.

No doubt she was particularly inspired by the image of Ilhan Omar, the first African-born veiled woman (in Mogadishu) who was elected to the US Congress in 2018.

The rising icon in the "Young Democrats" lists won her candidacy, through the voting mechanism on an amendment to the internal system that banned for 181 years the wearing of the veil in the House of Representatives. She later swore to the Qur'an instead of the Bible.

If this book is intended primarily for young readers, those who read in depth will undoubtedly fill in some gaps and open their eyes to the main battles.

These mother battles may start with the Uighur and Rohingya minorities, who are persecuted in China and Bangladesh, according to Jeune Afrique.

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