Unveiling Islamic Issues
When students gathered on January 12th to discuss women in Islamic societies, guest lecturer Guity Nashat cited passages from texts like the Quran that have shaped gender roles in Muslim-majority nations for centuries.
Many of these moral injunctions—traditions like head coverings—have ignited debate over women’s rights in the region for decades. But there is a cultural history behind these practices and understanding it is crucial for making future policy decisions in the region, Nashat argued.
“We might think, ‘These poor wretches, they’re life was horrible,’ but how did they perceive it?” asked Nashat, a research fellow at Hoover Institution and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern history at UIC. “How was it that women came to be gradually put in this confined role?”
These questions marked the debut of Harris School’s newest student organization, the Islam and Public Policy Discussion Group, which was created to bring context to policy issues in the Muslim world.
Its founders, second-year MPP students Nada Abuissa and Sohair Omar, believe that understanding the social, political, and institutional foundations of Islam is essential to the security and peace of the global community. They hope the new discussion group will help, if indirectly, to encourage future holistic policies and a consideration of all perspectives while tackling complex problems in troubled regions of the Muslim world.
“Most of our colleagues will be policymakers,” Abuissa explains. “In addition to having the analytical tools that Harris provides, we thought that we should try to understand the political and social situations in those countries.”
Together, the two students envisioned a discussion group that learns from experts in the field, shares ideas for development, and provides a new perspective on progress in Islamic-majority nations.
Nashat, who also serves as an advisor to the World Bank on gender economic research, has been writing books about Islam and women since the early 1980s. Her recent Harris School lecture retraced the history of gender roles in Western Asia—from their pre-Islamic, agricultural origins to their inception as moral laws—and presented a cost-benefit analysis of the incentives that have encouraged them for centuries.
“I try to view the role of women through the lens of economics,” she explained during her presentation. “Very gradually, as they became less economically productive, women got pushed slowly into the household. There were rewards for them there, which is why they accepted it.”
The student group plans to take the same approach in future events, focusing on educational, financial, and legal institutions in some of these countries. At its next meeting (February 18) the discussion will focus on higher education in the Arab region, analyzing strengths and weaknesses of a few educational institutions.
“We’re just trying to dig deeper,” Omar says. “We want to get people thinking differently about it. We want to empower them to make better policies.”
- Steven Yaccino
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