Gender Issues in the Middle East

Greetings to you at the beginning of May. The seminary is nearing the completion of its spring term. Four graduate students are working frantically to finish their dissertations in time to be recognized at graduation the end of this month. I will share that celebration with you. In addition to concluding my class in the "History of Christianity until 1800", I have been researching the themes for next year's classes. A book which caught my eye, reissued this year is pictured here, and sold at the American University in Cairo book store, (also available from Amazon.com) presents essays on how the gifts and contributions of women can be identified and included in addressing issues and problems for our common humanity in this region. One which particularly caught my eye was: "Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Accord: Feminist Approaches to International Politics" by Simoni Sharoni, a Jewish feminist working in Washington, D.C.

Since the peace process has been restarted between Israel and Palestine, I thought I would share a few thoughts with you and encourage you to read the article, others in this book, and from other literature to be better informed than what we get on the news. Beginning with a review of the Olso Peace Accords of 1993, Ms. Sharoni shows how the contributions of women's groups of Palestinians and Israelis working together have been largely ignored and dismissed. She calls for three ways to redress this:

....Include in the delegations to current talks an equal number of women.

....Listen to perspectives other than the masculine-militaristic approach - ones which include the insights and experiences of women from both sides with their understandings of peace and security.

....Review the basic assumptions about the processes, practices and prevailing power relations which have operated up until now.

Central to this discussion and a major part of the emergeance of what is termed the "feminist movement of the 20th Century"is the assumption that women can and should be freed to develop their own identities and insights which arise out of their particular origins and contexts. This also relates to the ways that women review and challenge the resources from the past and how these have been interpreted by mostly male scholars and out of a male-oriented power base.

Other examples of this are to be found in another book we will be using, (at the right) which supplies information about the stories and struggles of Islamic women within their culture. The new approach regarding the study of Holy Scriptures is the same developed and used by western feminists in the past century:

...to look again at texts, and to review and critique it in the light of its environment and cultures of that time,

- and -

...to bring the experiences of the women who study these texts to bear, and to affirm new insights and "truths" which connect and combine what God's Spirit has done in the past with what it is doing today among God's people, valuing what arises out of their own realities. This is a particularly difficult and risky task within present Islamic cultures, as you might imagine.

To say all this another way: to accept women as also created in the image of God, means to affirm and value who they are and what they can contribute for themselves and for us all. Another author puts it this way:

>Women need to be made visible again in all their realities, often

hidden and forgotten

>Women need to analyze these realities in the light of what is

wrong and describe what should be

>Women need to work with men in the transformation of existing

realities.

Lots still to learn and to share. I welcome your comments. You can use the blog or my e-mail - rogerrab39@yahoo.com.

Peace and justice to all, Roger Rogahn