A consistent stream of thoughtful writing from Muslim women and men in Indonesia and Malaysia is emerging, concerning the growing erosion of women’s rights and human rights in the region.

Lubna Hussein’s courageous defiance of Sudanese morality laws is encouraging Muslim feminists to evaluate contemporary Islam’s relationship with women, with Indonesia and Malaysian voices being those most often heard in English.

Indirectly, Lubna Hussein’s activism also challenges the millions of educated, ‘liberated’ Muslim women and men who keep quiet on the subject of Muhammad’s view of women and the distortion of gender rights now defended as “truths” of Islam. What now, ladies and gentlemen?

via Flickr’s eDanialIn my own conversations with Muslim women, our dialogue almost always focuses on “what was” in the early days of Muhammad and not “what is” today for the majority of Muslim women. These women passionately defend the original precepts of Islam, if not its modern-day interpretation in the mouths and flogging arms of “dirty, rotten scoundrels”, to use a comparatively neutral metaphor.

Many Catholic women live in the same intellectual space, believing that Jesus Christ really didn’t advocate a patriarchy of men instructing women in the rules of ethical, good behavior. (See this week’s decades long coverup of sex scandals by Irish priests and a few nuns in Ireland.)

As Meidyatama Suryodiningrat reminds us in Gender jihad, the burqa-bikini and religious conservatism, published in a blog at Malaysia Star, Muhammad was raised without a father, with a high regard for the intelligence and capabilities of females. Her narrative is richly smart and thought-provoking; I urge you to read it.

In yesterday’s Jakarta Post, Meidyatama Suryodiningrat takes a similar temperature check, but with some different insights as well.

The core premise of both articles is:

Except for the bedroom and maternity room, the keepers of heaven are marginalized in Islam’s discourse.

It began with misogynistic Arab clans, then the mosque. Finally women were edged out of politics and leadership altogether. Hajar was the first victim of post-Muhammad Islamic history, which turned an egalitarian faith into a patriarchal monolith.

Umm Waraqa, Sayyidah Nafisah: prominent female imams and scholars of their time, but mere footnotes in Islamic history.

The shaping of Islam’s paradigms (sharia) was bereft of female inquiry as men and Arab tradition defined Islam for women. Modern Muslim feminists and female clerics, the likes of Fatima Mernissi or Amina Wadud, continue to be perceived as curios or immoderate.

Today sharia abounds, beyond the borders of the Middle East, from Sudan to parts of Indonesia, yet still adopts the same cultural defects of its point of origin. Religion as a truncheon of political conservatism. Islam hijacked as the raison d’*tre of terrorism.

The end result: a mix of backwardness and incomprehensibility that blights the religion of peace and places women in legal peril.

Like Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein, fined in August for wearing pants in public, or Aisha Duhulow, the girl damned by a Somali sharia court a year ago and stoned to death on charges of adultery.

In Indonesia things are not as bad. Yet.

No further comment from me is required. Lubna Hussein, Anne of Carversville and the whole world is watching what happens next. Anne

Lubna Hussein’s photo via sudanwatch.blogspot.com 8/1/09