Defying dominion: religious fundamentalism becomes a tool of a threatened patriarchy.

IN SEPTEMBER, COURAGEOUS WOMEN from across Afghanistan gathered in Kandahar, once the spiritual and political center of the Taliban movement, to talk about the future. The women were both Muslims and victims of an Islamic tyranny, but the subject on the table in Kandahar was not religion but law.

"The conference was not about religion and religious dress codes," said Masuda Sultan, program director of Women for Afghan Women and an organizer of the meeting. "It was about the current constitutional process and efforts to secure women's human rights in the forthcoming national constitution."

By the end of the conference, the participants had written a crisp Afghan Women's Bill of Rights that included demands for universal female education and health care, the criminalization of sexual violence, freedom of speech and political activity, equal rights in property, labor, marriage and divorce, and "full inclusion of women in the judiciary system."

Afghan women know better than most what it means to be marginalized and repressed, not only under the crude absolutism of the Taliban, but also by rulers before and after them. Women know that they will continue to be vulnerable until there are laws and a judicial system that do not downplay their rights or fail to guarantee them space in public life.

Burqa or no burqa, they have scant standing in the prevailing warlord culture.

The more that women who cherish their faiths get to know each other across boundaries, the more they argue that whether they live under the influence of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity or almost any other creed or sect, it is often not religion alone, even in the hands of firebrand fundamentalists, that is the root problem. Women's places are more often circumscribed by a combination of powerful cultural influences harnessed to faith by men in authority, and then translated into laws, closing a circle of repression.

The apartheid of purdah, honor killings, female genital mutilation, the buying or selling of brides, forced marriages, clan polygamy and other practices that harm women often seem to come with the territory, their origins lost in the murk of history, or mythology. Cloaked in religion, any number of destructive customary practices acquire a false patina of sanctity and become instruments of control. But not always, and it is the hope of separating culture from religion--and the understanding that it can be done--that many women around the world bank on.

Career women in Indonesia or Malaysia never think twice about mundane activities like driving to work or joining a political campaign. To them, restrictions on fellow Muslim women in the Middle East are a product of Arab culture, not Islam. An urban American Christian, Catholic or Protestant, may feel totally alien in the southern Bible Belt, where preachers still rank submissive, stay-at-home womanhood high and the church parking lot on Sunday is as full as the mall's on Friday night. Compare that with New York, where a recent poll found that only one person in four went to religious services with any regularity. Even in New York, the Hasidic Jewish woman, with a shaved head beneath her wig and hat, segregated from men at worship, lives a world away from her more liberal Jewish sisters, with their secular mainstream lifestyles.

"The problem isn't the faith, but the faithful," Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, likes to say when considering the fundamentalist phenomenon. The UN has seen some bizarre alliances form on social issues, with the Vatican, conservative Islamic governments and sometimes the United States under the Bush administration joined to block trends such as advances in women's reproductive rights.

"Masses of people of faith need to take back their religion and excommunicate the extremists," says Sunita Mehta, a founder of Women for Afghan Women, which sponsored the Kandahar meeting. "What we need are masses of Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Catholics, taking to the streets and denouncing every murder, every violation of human rights and dignity, every bombing justified through their religion."

In arguing for their rights, women have development experts oil their side. There is near unanimity now that when women are marginalized by those who would remake society, in a fundamentalist image, that nation is doomed to underdevelopment and poverty for all its citizens. Women are a major factor in economic and intellectual growth. To bar them from public life or limit their contributions is, in terms of national life, suicidal.

When the United Nations Development Program produced its groundbreaking report in 2002 on human development in the Arab world, the low status of women was listed as one of three "deficits" hampering national life in Arab countries. The other two were a "freedom deficit"--the Arab-speaking region in the Middle East and Africa has the lowest level of political, civil and press freedom in the world--and the "knowledge deficit" that has stunted intellectual life and technological growth. Should it surprise us that in some of these nations women can't vote or drive a car?

Across faiths and around the world women are taking significant steps to move beyond the symbols that men have made of them and to dig deep into the first principles of their religions to reassert and enshrine in contemporary law the measures of fair treatment and equality that they believe have been stolen from them over the ages. They are, in a sense, creating a fundamentalism of their own to counter and expose as frauds the "fundamentalisms" concocted by militants in search of raw power over societies and nations.

Riffat Hassan, a Pakistan-born professor of religious studies and humanities at the University of Louisville, has distilled from Quranic texts the conclusion that "the three assumptions on which the superstructure of the idea of man's superiority to woman has been erected, not only in the Islamic but also the Jewish and Christian traditions, are unwarranted." Writing an essay on Muslim women's rights in the book Women for Afghan Women: Shattering the Myths and Claiming the Future (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002), Hassan said: "Briefly put, the three assumptions are, first, that God's primary creation is man, not woman, since woman is believed to have been created from man's rib and is, therefore, derivative; second, that woman was the primary agent of 'Man's Fall,' and hence all 'daughters of Eve' are to be regarded with hatred, suspicion and contempt; and third, that woman was created not only from man but for man, which makes her existence merely instrumental."

None of these assumptions are found in the Quran, Hassan wrote. Moreover there is evidence that Muslims borrowed some of these ideas from Biblical myth.

To Noeleen Heyzer, a Singaporean who is executive director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women, known as unifem, myths persist as cloaks for male domination even when religion is not revolved. Similar behavior is displayed by militant movements and secular guerrilla armies, and this does not augur well for the future of women in many regions where civil conflict, not religious fundamentalism, is the bigger threat.

In Congo, two wars and an assassination ago, rebel soldiers taking Kinshasa inexplicably whacked the legs of women wearing jeans. What is it about a power high that translates into terrorizing women?

"Women are seen as the vehicle for the containment of culture," Heyzer said in an interview. "If you look at who defines this, increasingly it's a narrower mad narrower group of very rigid men." These men have turned women into symbols of their ideologies or faiths and measures of their success at shaping societies, she said. When she talks with women living in these situations, they invariably have a much more flexible view of culture and a better understanding of how to manage daily life by drawing on a wider range of ideas.

That may be a key to explaining why fundamentalisms may be on the rise. As influences cross borders more easily, and well publicized international conferences on women and their place in society have begun to draw a wide range of participants down to the grassroots level, women are developing their own ideas about the ordering of life. Those who would control them dig in harder. "That has become a major struggle," Heyzer said.

This is a point also made by Sunita Mehta of Women fur Afghan Women, who is also active in The Sister Fund, which helps women seeking change within faiths they hold deeply. "Religious extremism is a phenomenon which occurs when women and minorities acquire rights to the extent that patriarchy begins to be threatened," she wrote in an e-mail to me. "With modernity, there is often some measure of liberalism and increased freedom for women, and this threatens men. Religion is one of many tools used to bring the pendulum back towards conservatism and traditional values. Men then respond favorably in the message of religious extremists."

The nature of contemporary warfare--religious, ethnic, linguistic or purely political--worsens the situation of women, says Heyzer of UNIFEM. "War is no longer in the battlefields but in the villages, in the home, in our communities and increasingly on women's bodies," she said. "Women's bodies have been used as a battleground, and violence against women is used as a weapon of war. It is not just to destroy women. It is basically to humiliate the men [on the other side] and, more important, to make it difficult to regenerate the next generation. That's why you have all the systematic rape and rape across ethnic lines."

Militants of all kinds frequently separate boys and men from their mothers, sisters and other female relatives, said Heyzer, who was recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo trying to involve women in peace negotiations. "If you look at how men are being mobilized to be killers or to run certain kind of wars, you have to cut them off from a proper interaction with some of the closest people in their lives--these are the women. And so you isolate the woman and you image her and you basically create a certain way of being fur her, so she is no longer able to engage in real relationships. You lake her out of public spaces."

This is exactly what the madrassas, the Islamic religious schools that spawned the Taliban, do.

Islamic societies get a lot of attention from the media and the public because men's apparent contempt for women's minds and bodies [or the fear of them] tends to be most stark and the symbols of oppression very visible. The world sees the burqa, the denial of the vote in Kuwait, the rejection of a female judge Americans wanted to appoint in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf.

Muslim women worry about this image. Mahnaz Afkhami, the Iranian-born president of the Women's Learning Partnership in suburban Washington, DC, which assists women from developing nations, said in an interview that hundreds of millions of Muslims in vastly different societies get "piled into one homogeneous hole that is supposed to be Muslim." This hampers cross-religious understanding and building common cause.

"Religion is not the only thing," she said. "My religion is very important. I am a Muslim. But I also have a grandchild. I also have a job. I also have to worry about my pension fund. I also have to worry about my writing. My life has many facets. People look at Muslim societies and think that's all there is: that people are sitting there thinking" constantly about their religion."

Afkhami ventures the suggestion that the burqa, however cruelly limiting it is, may be less of a priority in Afghanistan that many think. "The only women in the world who are making that their top priority are women who live in the West, either Afghan or non-Afghan," she said.

Riffat Hassan wrote in her essay on Muslim women's rights that "it is not surprising that Western feminists can be guilty of an incomplete understanding of the reality of Muslim women." A strong sense in the West that secularism is the answer compounds the problem. "The aversion to religion, especially Islam, that pervades the US women's movement undercuts their genuine effort to empower Muslim women," Hassan said.

Sunita Mehta is adamant on this point. "We refuse to allow the movement for women's rights to exclude women of faith," she said of those who squirm at the show of religious conviction.

Just as Muslim women go back to the Quran in search of truth, a growing number of Buddhists are driven to study the fundamentals of their faith, arguably the most egalitarian of world religions. Women in the Theravada school that dominates Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia and Laos have been pressing for decades to revive long-lost orders of nuns, only to hit a stone wall of male monks who would deny them this goal on a theological technicality.

"If the Buddha had been informed that a group of his monks were refusing ordination to women, how would he have responded to their actions?" asked Jan Chozen Bays, a leading American Zen Buddhist teacher based in Oregon, in a letter to Buddhdharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly The magazine had earlier published an account of the unorthodox ordination of a Thai nun in Sri Lanka against the wishes of Buddhist leaders in both countries. "Please, modern monks," Bays wrote, "follow the example of the Buddha Shakyamuni and his disciple Ananda: step forward and plead for the ordination of women."

"This is not a matter of innovation or reform, but of restoring what has been lost," she said.

Hema Goonatilake, a Sri Lankan scholar of Buddhism, also returns to first principles in countering the argument Buddhist monks make that nuns, known as bhikhunis, cannot be ordained since their orders disappeared centuries ago. She told a conference in the Indian city of Jaipur two years ago that leading monks, or bhikhus, could find several ways around this impasse if they wanted to.

"The Buddha on his death bed told Ananda that if the sangha [the monk body] so desires, it may abolish lesser and minor rules," she said, citing one way out. "The rule that bhikhunis should get ordination from bhikhunis first and then from bhikhus could fall into this category of minor rules." Like the first women seeking to become Christian priests or pastors against strong hierarchical opposition, Buddhist women simply go outside the hierarchy and find a dissident to ordain them.

In India, Hindu nationalists have had a singular and seemingly contradictory, effect on the women's movement, says Urvashi Butalia of the organization Kali for Women in New Delhi. Butalia prepared a briefing paper for the World Bank in 1999 that noted that Hindu nationalism, or fundamentalism, had actually drawn women into it, even in leadership roles. In so doing, however, this "forced women to give up one of their most cherished articles of faith: that there exists a commonality of experience among women that makes for a solidarity that cuts across caste, class, religion, ethnicity." In this environment, Indian Muslim women, who often bear the brunt of pogroms by Hindu mobs, can expect little or no sympathy or support for better legal rights from their Hindu sisters.

Women in Hindu India rank among the lowest in the world in social status, measured in literacy,, health standards and economic power. Most live in a Hindu culture that gives prominence to men, from boyhood to adulthood. The mythological Sita, the long-suffering wife of Rama in the Ramayana legend, is held up as an example of sterling womanhood.

Thousands of Indian women die each year in what are known as "dowry deaths"--murdered by in-laws when a husband or his family decides the bride they chose did not bring enough material goods into her new home or is otherwise not living up to expectations. Women are widely relegated to the background of a Hindu family, said Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women's Health Coalition in New York, who has been working with South Asian women for more than two decades. Sexual abuse by male relatives and in-laws is prevalent, she said in an interview. This could lead to catastrophic health problems as HIV/AJDS begins to shift from brothels to Indian families through heterosexual sex.

In all these cases and others, says Mahnaz Afkhami, who was minister for women's affairs during the reign of Mohammed Riza Pahlevi, the last Shah of Iran (when opposition to his rule meant putting on a head scarf, not taking one off) two issues stand out. One is the need for women to be free to assert themselves in ways they choose. "Agency is important," she said. "Look at this and look at that and make up your mind: how to have your faith and have your rights." Second, control over laws must be wrested from fundamentalists, Afkhami said, echoing the plea coining from Afghanistan.

"A simplistic reading of the text in any religion would render it unable to be a resource in today's life," she said. "Unless you have some sort of separation of church and state, in any religion, you're going to have a huge difficulty implementing democracy."

"The extremists try to say that separation of church and state or secularism means atheism, which is totally false," she said. "The United States is one of the most religious countries in the world, but they took the Ten Commandments out of that courthouse in Alabama."

BARBARA CROSSETTE is a columnist for UN Wire--an independent news agency focusing on the UN and international affairs.