Soul Food:

Stereotypes tend to portray Muslim women as being oppressed. They are seen as having little political power and scarce access to education, forced into marriage then confined to the home to cook, clean and raise their families.

The symbol of this perceived oppression in many Western minds is no doubt what we have come to know as the hijab, the headscarf and sometimes head-to-toe covering some Muslim women wear. But many groups are actively working to change this stereotype of oppression, as well as many other stereotypes associated with Islam.

While in a rural area outside Amman, Jordan, I sat in a circle with six other Americans on upholstered office chairs with wheels, exchanging the smiles of strangers while served tea. The morning was already hot outside the freshly painted white room with a speckled-tan linoleum floor.

Many of the 19 women we were there to meet were covered head to toe, most of them in layers of black apart, at times, from a white or colored headscarf. One wore a veil that covered her face except for her eyes.

We — five women and two men — were there to learn about a network of women’s advocacy groups they were a part of, created by a project called WEDGE, Woman Effective Democratic Groups Empowered, funded by CARE International and the Jordanian Hashemite Fund for Human Development.

WEDGE’s central purpose according to Huda Hakki, a director in the program, is to make sure that a woman knows her rights and asks for them.

Had Huntington Beach resident Maria Khani been there she would have been nodding her head in approval. Khani spent a recent Monday evening talking to a group of students at Cal State Fullerton about the role and rights of Muslim women.

Her presentation, “Muslim Women in the 21st Century,” was part of an event called Through Her Eyes, sponsored by the Muslim Student Association and presented by Muslim Women Voice, an organization founded by Khani with three goals in mind.

Through the group, she hopes “to show the community that we are so proud of our history [and] to bring the past to the present.” Most importantly, she hopes to show the important roles women have had and continue to have in society.

In addition to Khani’s presentation, women from Muslim Women Voice provided exhibits about their native or ancestral countries, including examples of traditional handcrafts and homemade samples of food such as chicken shawrma, tabouli, hummus, Arabic pita with olive oil and thyme, borek, Moroccan basteela, a cinnamon inflected chicken pie, fava bean foul, Egyptian koushari made from brown lentils, pasta and rice, and Arabic coffee.

Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Morocco, Egypt and Bosnia — the only country whose language is not Arabic — were represented. Many of the women dressed in elaborately hand-embroidered traditional costumes.

The exhibits reflected the subtitle of Khani’s address, “Believing in the past; living in the present; looking for the future.” Like Yamam Al-mouradi, a member of the Muslim Student Association, who introduced Khani, they encouraged participants to see commonality but to eschew stereotypes.

“Don’t associate the actions of people and of countries with the religion Islam,” Al-mouradi told the audience before giving the floor to Khani. It was a message I had heard before in Jordan, from Amal Sabbagh, secretary general of the Jordanian National Commission for Women.

Sabbagh called the notion of Muslim women as oppressed “a myth in the Western mind.” She characterized Muslim women as “standard-bearers of tradition” and urged us to differentiate between “patriarchal structures” and Islam.

That is a discrepancy that has been apparent in our own country, where women did not gain the right to vote until 1920.

A 2005 Gallup poll seems to bear out Sabbagh’s opinion. The 8,000 women from eight predominantly Muslim countries who were interviewed face-to-face did equate legal gender equality with the West but none seemed to want to adopt Western ways, citing moral decay, promiscuity and pornography that is degrading to women.

They highly valued their nations’ and their own personal “attachment to moral and spiritual values.”

Islam, said both Al-mouradi and Khani, gave women the right to vote 1,400 years ago. And while their comparing that to the United States giving women the right to vote only 88 years ago may confuse a patriarchal structure with this nation’s Christian influences, the comparison does make a point Al-mouradi and Khani want to drive home.

Even Muslim women can be confused or ignorant of the rights Islam grants to them. Women must read Islam’s scriptures, the Koran and the Sayings of the Prophet; they must, as Hakki said in Jordan, know their rights and ask for them.

Islam, said Al-mouradi, not only encourages education for both men and women, it demands it. She offered a folk saying — “seek knowledge even if you have to go to China” — that reflects that demand.

The Koran, Khani said, says God created men and women from the same soul. They therefore have equal but different roles.

She noted that chapter four of the Koran, Al-Nisaa, is named for women. And she enumerated the essential roles of Eve; Hagar; the wife of Pharaoh; the wife of Moses; the Queen of Sheba; Mary, the mother of Jesus — all recounted in the Koran.

The very Arabic word for nation, ummah, comes from the word for mother, umm, which also means apex. Mother, Khani said, “is not half of society; she is raising society.”

But in the West, even to some young Muslim women trying to find their way in the 21st century, this idea smacks of male domination.

As does the wearing of what has become commonly — if inaccurately — known as the hijab.

The word used in the Koran, says Khani, is not “hijab” but “kheemar.” And there is a difference. “Hijab,” Khani said, means “wall,” something that you cannot see beyond. Look up “kheemar” in an Arabic dictionary, Khani said, and you will find it describes “something light that covers the head.”

“I always say I am so grateful to God that he did not impose on me hijab but he did impose on me kheemar,” Khani told me after her presentation.

I will tell you more about women’s equal but different role in Islam in my next column.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].