Educating Muslim Women
Educate a man, you educate a person. Educate a woman and you educate a family. Educate a family and you educate the ummah.
Last year on Eid al Adha I visited my Pakistani cousin. He has three children from a Yemeni mother; two boys and a girl. I like the girl very much; she is intelligent and hard working so together that makes a charming combination. It was on Eid that I found out that my niece was being made to study Urdu as a second language by her parents while her brothers were studying French and Spanish. She wanted to study Spanish because she is already fluent in Urdu. My cousin’s excuse is that she is a girl and doesn’t need to study European languages. The boys, future patriarchs of the family, need as many languages as they can master to better interact with the world. My cousin’s family has now moved to Saudi Arabia and I hear that the girl is being home-schooled while the boys go to an American school. She is being home-schooled for A Levels in a Muslim country by her mother who has never been to college and cannot speak English.
The graph below clearly shows the relationship between male and female illiteracy rates in Arab countries. There is not a single Arab country where the female illiteracy rate is lower than the male illiteracy rate. Qatar is an exceptional country because female and male illiteracy rates are equal.
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According to the Adult Literacy Rates and Illiterate Population by Country and by Gender report (of September 2006) by UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), Egypt’s adult literacy rate for males is 83% whereas that of females is 59.4%. The male adult literacy rate for Morocco is 65.7% and that of females is only 39.6%. Pakistan, another Muslim country’s literacy rate is 63% for males and a mirror image of 36% for females. Compare these percentages with that of Israel where male literacy rate is 98.5% and that of females is 95.9%! According to an unpublished report on senior schools by a lecturer at University of Reading, more and more Pakistani parents are keeping their children from seeking higher education or their children themselves are simply not interested in education. The result is that half of Pakistani households in the UK have incomes that are 50% below the national average income (Source) and nearly all Pakistanis aged 60 and over are living on Income Support (Source).
Where are we heading with these figures? Last year, a friend sent me a forwarded email with a plainly written essay on why Muslim youth must be educated urgently. The essay basically compared today’s most influential Jews with Muslims. Results were dismal in terms of how many Muslims were famous compared to what Jews have done for societal advancement and scholarly achievements. The essay referred to famous Jews like, Jonas Salk, Henry Kissinger, Wilhelm Steinitz, Arthur Miller, Stephen Sondheim, Boris Pasternak, Harry Houdini, Steven Spielberg, and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster among the 100 most influential Jews. Of course, one may argue that Muslims are equally intelligent and have been influential, look up history. But, let’s face the stabbing truth – most great and influential Muslim scholars are dead. Gone are the Muslims who fashioned the Islamic Golden Age. I personally find it very sad, more so because in Michael Hart’s book “The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in Historyâ€?, the number one position is held by Prophet Muhammed (pbuh). Time’s TIME 100: The People Who Shape Our World, has only 10 ‘Muslim sounding’ names out of 100 and one of them is that of Wafa Sultan! This means that less than 10% of the 100 most influential people in the world are Muslims. Today we urgently need people like Ibn Sina, Al Khawarzimi, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Al Haytham, Ibn Arabi, and Ibn Rushd because today the number of original research papers published by scientists in Muslim countries is 0.1% of the number published by scientists in Europe and the USA. (Source)
And we need ‘banaat’ (girls) along with the ‘ibns’ (boys/sons) because when you educate a man, you educate a person. Educate a woman and you educate a family. Educate a family and you educate a village. Educate a village, and you educate a country.
A study done with Bangladeshi women showed that “girls’ career preferences in Bangladesh were the most limited in the survey: rural girls opted for ‘doctor’ or ‘teacher’ almost without exception and 88 per cent of the urban girls said they wanted to be doctors. The lack of range in career preferences would appear to be linked to the lack of role models for the girls: only a tiny percentage of their mothers were working outside the home.â€? (Source). Girls in developing countries don’t have appropriate role models and their parents make traditional career choices for them – doctor or teacher. We need Muslim female nurses, scientists, astronomers, composers, painters, writers, business entrepreneurs, and statisticians amongst other myriad professions. Fewer girls than boys are enrolled in high school science curricula because of a bias in the existing education system and family attitudes that encourage girls to study the arts and humanities. (Source) Another study shows that 75% of Muslim women in India are illiterate (Source).
According to a hadith Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) said, “utlub al ‘ilm waslaw fi al-Sinâ€? (Seek knowledge, even unto China). The hadith instructs both men and women to seek knowledge. 750 verses of the Quran urge believers (men and women) to study nature, to reflect, and to make the best use of reason in their search for the ultimate truth (Source). Educating women achieves equality between the genders since it is the duty of both genders to seek education/knowledge and helps to eradicate disease and poverty in the developing world. In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to power, no institution of higher education in Britain was open to women. But before the beginning of the next century women had even entered institutions like Oxford and Cambridge. Many new universities were founded during Victoria’s reign and the result was that the sun never set on the British Empire.
What I am proposing here is to empower Muslim women. I’m not a Western feminist. I’m not proposing that Muslim women bare themselves and burn their hijabs. I’m proposing that we change statistics. Change statistics which show that half the women in the Arab world are illiterate and in all but four Arab countries less than 80 per cent of girls go to secondary school.
