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In the fourth installment of a six-week lecture series on Christianity and Islam, a three-woman panel put together by the United Methodist Student Movement Ministry Team spoke about women in the Muslim culture.
Often perceived by the Western world to have an oppressive attitude toward their women, Muslims often have been subjected to scorn and ridicule because of a misconception that these negative behaviors are rooted in Islamic belief, speaker Brenda Meneses said.
Meneses said that is not true.
Islam actually teaches equality and respect for everyone, including women, but people often confuse cultural behaviors with the actual theology, Meneses said. Christians in the Western world, she said, have difficulty understanding because they have a different attitude about the role of religion in their lives.
Christians - Westerners in general, for that matter - have long separated their religious life from a secular one. They are "compartmentalized," she said.
In contrast, Muslims integrate their religion into every aspect of their lives, affecting how they dress, court one another and conduct politics, she said.
Meneses and the other two women on the panel, Aurora Deiri and Narjis Pierre, acknowledged conditions for women vary from country to country but they stem largely from the culture that existed prior to Islam's spread throughout the world and the nuances of varied interpretations of the theology.
Deiri likened it to the subtleties of the many Christian faiths that exist today.
Except for extreme instances of disparity, which Meneses said is becoming more rare, Islam has pushed women's rights sooner and more significantly than Christianity. "If you ask me if there is any feminism in the Muslim world I say ... it is in the Muslim world," Pierre said.
It is difficult for the Western world to see this, Deiri said, because there is very limited understanding of the Islamic religion.
This ignorance causes people to misinterpret some of the external practices of Muslims that Westerners often cite as oppressive, she said, such as the wearing of head scarves by women.
When asked how Christianity and Islam can be so far apart today when they have so much they share in common ancestry, Deiri replied, "In some instances, ignorance allows you to retain power."
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