British Muslim women launch 'jihad against violence'
LONDON // A "jihad against violence" has been declared by an organisation of Muslim women in Britain in a campaign against extremists and the ill-treatment of women.
The organisation Inspire, formed in the UK in 2009, also wants to reclaim the term "jihad" from extremists.
Sarah Khan, a community development specialist and co-founder of Inspire - an organisation mainly comprising young professional women - said that too many now associate jihad with violence.
"People think 'jihad against violence' is a contradictory statement but our jihad is for peace," she said, at the campaign launch last week.
"Islam has become synonymous with all things violent and the repression of women. We thought we couldn't sit back and stay silent while our religion is being used to carry out acts of violence."
Basing its arguments on the Koran, the women will be producing scholarly works and other materials for distribution among Britain's two million-plus Muslims to attempt to counter conservative ideas over the treatment of women.
Launched after a two-day conference in London this week, the campaign also plans to pressure community leaders to confront more what it says are the "taboo" subjects of violence and subjugation of women.
Mrs Khan, a mother of two, said out that an opinion poll last year showed that almost 70 per cent of Britons associated Islam with the repression of women.
"Islam, instead of being recognised as the faith for peace, has now become synonymous with violence, and all things negative, including the oppression of women," she said in an ABC radio interview.
"We just felt as women, we can no longer sit in silence and to watch our faith being used to justify crimes, particularly by those who are carrying out these crimes in the name of good faith.
Mrs Khan said that dispassionate, scholarly literature on the role of women was unobtainable in most Muslim bookshops.
"There tends to be the dominance of conservative interpretations around the role of women," she said, "and what we wanted to highlight was that there are alternative interpretations which are much more in line with the contextualised times that we're living in today."
She cited a speech at the London conference by Dr Khaled Abou el Fadl, a leading authority on Islamic law and a prominent scholar in the field of human rights, who explained how Islam represents a way of life designed to empower women, not to make them subservient to men.
"What we want with the Jihad Against Violence campaign is to place an emphasis and a responsibility on Muslim leaders within our community to say that anyone who's justifying any type of violence - whether it's female genital mutilation, honour killing or honour crimes - is unacceptable," said Mrs Khan.
Aftab A Malik, from the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Culture at the University of Birmingham, said that the campaign represented part of "a generational shift that has occurred in the last decade" among British Muslims.
"The Muslim community has shifted from being isolated to being self-reflective and ready to take on challenges," he said.
