Source: allAfrica.com
There are over 750 million Muslim women in the world and the question that often crops up is who speaks for them? Who leads them? This October about 200 Muslim women leaders from about 40 countries attended the 'Muslim Women Leaders at the Frontline of Change' in Istanbul, Turkey, a conference organized by the Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality (WISE).

In attendance at the third WIS E gathering were women human rights activists, members of parliament, judges and scholars. Also gracing the event were female religious leaders from other faith groups keen on inter-religious dialogue in an increasingly intolerant world. A number of men, mainly Muslim, were also at the gathering including supportive husbands and imams from Afghanistan and USA, one of them being Imam Faisal who is the partner of the main engine behind WISE, Daisy Khan.

In Muslim women's organizing, WIS E is relatively youthful as an initiative. In many respects WIS E is a post 9-11 initiative germinating from the undue attention the status of women across the Muslim world received prior to the military incursions in Afghanistan and Iraq. This, however, is but one aspect of WISE.Essentially, WIS E is the Muslim women's response to global and political development geared at improving the status of Muslim women through activism and movement building.

It is an example of how Muslim women are actively changing their predicament and taking charge of their destinies.Another emerging transnational movement among Muslim women intellectuals, activists and social justice advocates is Musawah, a campaign for equality in Muslim personal law. Perhaps Musawah is one of the first initiatives to be started and or located outside the Arabian Peninsula or the West.

In West Africa, Muslim women organize themselves in national federations as well as through a regional federation. East Africa does not have an overly centralized form of representation for Muslim women and there are a number of organizations, like Sahiba Sisters Foundation and Womankind Kenya that work on development.

Perhaps because of its history, South Africa has some dynamic forms of Muslim organizations addressing an array of social and advocacy issues including HI V/AIDS.While not visible to many social movements in Africa, Muslim women have tried to forge solidarity among themselves and with others with varying amounts of success.

There are initiatives like the Sisterhood is Global Institute founded by immigrants and refugees from Iran and Afghanistan; Karamah, a rights based initiative mainly by lawyers and human rights advocates in the US; the International Committee for Women and Child which was an attempt by the International Council of Da'wah and Relief to engage women post the Fourth World Conference on Women; and Women Living under Muslim Laws, a solidarity network established in the 1980s which deals with the impact of the implementation of Islamic laws on women.

While there are national Muslim women's organizations or councils in many countries with a sizeable Muslim population, the key difference between these and the organizations being featured is the level of agency women assume in initiating them. At the national level most organizations catering for Muslim women are appendages or wings of mainstream religious bodies.

They were not created with the intention to radically address the needs or position of women. Rather, they were structured very much in line with the structure of mainstream political parties with social functions, not advocacy concerns.New initiatives Muslim women have launched are aimed at recasting the role and status of women in Muslim societies especially after the passage of the Convention on the Elimination of all types of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Fourth World Conference on Women.

Thus many Muslim women's groups and organizations, like other organizations in the larger women's movement, assumed a right based approach to their identity and work. Locally and internationally this saw the emergence of independent women's groups or organizations not affiliated to national councils or transnational Muslim bodies.

At the international level, however, women from the Arab world and South East Asia are overly represented in Muslim women's movements, making them come across as the ultimate representation of Islam and Muslims. Yet there are millions of Muslims in Africa; in some countries they number more than the entire populations in individual Arab countries. At the WIS E meeting, Africa was represented by Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Libya, Senegal, The Gambia, Sudan, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and South Africa.

East Africa, particularly Tanzania, has one of the oldest Arab and Asian migrant populations in the continent. Yet it is rare for women, let alone Muslim women, from across these communities to meet, socialise and strategise as they would when in international spaces. This poses a challenge to women's movement building, which ideally should begin from the ground and at a national level before it progresses as a regional or global movement.

Muslim women in Africa often have to contend with the perception that they are new converts to Islam and thus not authentic enough when compared to non-Africans. Such perceptions are prevalent among Muslims and non-Muslims alike even though Islam spread to other parts of Africa around the same time it spread to North Africa or the Indian subcontinent.

Such a perception has probably prejudiced donors as well as Islamic foundations from giving to independent Muslim women's groups in African countries the way they do in the west or in South East Asia.Assistance directed at Muslim women in the present reality has mainly assumed the face of military incursions.

Participants at the WIS E Conference noted how military actions in most Muslim majority countries were justified in the name of liberating oppressed Muslim women, but more often than not invading forces and countries have actively compromised the rights of women and relegated women to subsidiary status even in nations that previously pursued progressive agendas for women such as Iraq and most recently in Libya.

Iraq was once recognized as having one of the most progressive Family Codes in the region and many Muslim majority countries tried to emulate its provisions. Libya too adopted a revolutionary ideology to bring women into public life and Gadaffi's female bodyguards communicated strongly the vision for women folk in a Revolutionary state.

Yet both countries, immediately upon the fall of the old regimes, took steps that effectively compromised the rights of women. Under regimes backed by western nations constitutional framework which privilege sectarian interests were introduced. In a fragile political truce, women become the bartering chip with which communities bargain their cultural autonomy and regimes gain some acceptability.