PROJECTS • WOMEN FOR PEACE AGAINST FUNDAMENTALISMS

 

 

Project background

 

The global context:
Post-9/11 Islamophobia and imperialism

Until this year's Arab resistance movements, many believed that the primary problem of the Middle East and North Africa was religious extremism, not repressive authoritarian states managed by the West to maintain secure sites for oil and support for Israel. Since September 11th, the West has singled out Islam as the ground for dangerous, misogynist and anti-democratic movements that must be contained everywhere—in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Outside of the West, an anti-Western response often plays out against minority Christian communities. In Norway, the massacre of Labour Party members was linked to Christian religious extremism fueled by Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments. In Somalia, U.S. imperial interests have intersected with Muslim extremism to create famine conditions where thousands and potentially millions are dying.

Women: Bearing the brunt of conflict
and leaders for change

In both Christian and Muslim traditions, women are at the brunt of the conflict as elites often claim religious legitimacy by promoting policies that control women as the keepers of the religious tradition. We want to consider how female identities have been used to perpetuate the pursuit of war, power, oil and capital by competing patriarchies. Women have been largely and systematically excluded, with a few exceptions, from official policymaking, security and defense matters. However, these have not stopped women from questioning, organizing against, resisting, and offering alternatives to the interlinked dynamics of globalization, militarization and patriarchy—all of which are ultimately undergirded by the same logic of domination. As bearers and nurturers of life, women play a critical role in building a faith-based vision of alternative communities of life.

Faith-based movements, economic globalization, militarization and patriarchy

We want to explore what the role of faith-based movements and communities in the current context of economic globalization, heightened militarization and patriarchal disciplining can be. We want to identify successful interfaith feminist sites of resistance and autonomy, and how are they linked to other feminist struggles around the world.

We want to address an urgent need for progressive Christian and Muslim women to link repressive gender policies with anti-imperial, post-colonial analysis and discuss the relationship of faith-based women's movements to empire, war and fundamentalisms. Campaigns against the war on terror have a more secular following. The secular-religious tensions are particularly visible among women’s movements.

There is a need for secular and religious women to discuss the relationship of faith-based women’s movements to other feminist movements.

Building interfaith movements as interdependence, hope and sites of resistance!

While religious conflicts divide communities, they also can be the sources of new alliances. Muslim-Christian women’s alliances have provided resistance and witness to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, sectarian tensions in Indonesia, insurgency in the Philippines and conflicts in Liberia. As women of faith, we want to build a spirituality of interdependence, honesty and hope that resists the inclination to blame and that can foster strength and vision.

» NEXT: Steering Committee