Chapter Six – Reclaiming Shari’a: Women’s Activism In Somaliland – from Part II – Struggles of a Broken Nation, 1991–2021 in Shari‘a, Inshallah: Finding God in Somali Legal Politics
For centuries men have dominated Somali families, states, and the law, serving as the aqils, the sultans, and the leaders of the colonial and state governments, militant groups, clans, elders’ councils, and religious orders described in the previous chapters. Taking up and using the same religious and legal tools as those men, women activists struggling for rights have sowed a different understanding of shari‘a that they hope, inshallah, Somalis will follow. Certainly, some women have been involved in co-opting law and religion to reinforce patriarchy or militancy – as informants, foot soldiers, or security agents.
Author
Mark Fathi Massoud
Type
Chapter
Information
Shari‘a, Inshallah: Finding God in Somali Legal Politics
, pp. 255 – 288
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108965989.008
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021
BOOK CHAPTER
CHAPTER SIX – Reclaiming Shari’a: Women’s Activism In Somaliland
from Part II – Struggles of a Broken Nation, 1991–2021
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2021
By Mark Fathi Massoud
Mark Fathi Massoud is a Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Law’s Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan. He has held Carnegie, Guggenheim, and Mellon Foundation Fellowships.
In this chapter
Aid Workers Stay “On the Safe Side”
DISCURSIVE RESOURCES: WHY ACTIVISTS USE SHARI‘A
ORGANIZING STRATEGIES: HOW ACTIVISTS USE SHARI‘A
Increasing Women’s Participation in Politics
Stopping Female Genital Mutilation
INTRODUCTION
For centuries men have dominated Somali families, states, and the law, serving as the aqils, the sultans, and the leaders of the colonial and state governments, militant groups, clans, elders’ councils, and religious orders described in the previous chapters. Taking up and using the same religious and legal tools as those men, women activists struggling for rights have sowed a different understanding of shari‘a that they hope, inshallah, Somalis will follow. Certainly, some women have been involved in co-opting law and religion to reinforce patriarchy or militancy – as informants, foot soldiers, or security agents. But other women have been fighting male domination too. Their efforts combine sincerity, strategy, and symbolism and, like other state and non-state actors in this book, they have turned shari‘a into a form of legal politics.
In 2019, I met with Asha, a university lecturer in her forties who volunteers with civic groups, in a hotel lobby in Hargeisa. Asha had memorized the Qur’an at a young age and, during her adulthood, she taught herself Islamic philosophy and memorized volumes of the Hadith (detailed records of the Prophet Muhammad’s statements, actions, and tacit approvals). In other countries, Asha would have held the title of sheikha (female sheikh), but local norms prevented women like her from becoming publicly visible religious leaders like men with similarly extensive knowledge of Islam. As we sipped our tea, Asha expressed disappointment over misogynistic interpretations of shari‘a that restricted women’s roles. She recounted how some politicians in Somaliland have used a statement attributed to the Prophet Muhammad – “A people [or nation] assigning a woman to handle their affairs will not prosper” – to argue that shari‘a prohibits women from serving as political leaders. But Asha interpreted this Hadith differently. The Prophet was not speaking about all women, Asha told me, but instead about the narrow context of one monarch, the Queen of Kisra, who had ordered the execution of Muslims. Asha added that one of the Prophet Muhammad’s last actions before he died was entrusting the distribution of the Qur’an and the message of Islam to a woman, Aisha, his wife. Such interpretations of religious texts suggested to Asha that it is acceptable for Muslim women to enter politics and lead nations.
Women in Somaliland have joined a long struggle in Islamic discourse over the meaning of shari‘a. Islam’s decentralization has demanded that people study the sources of shari‘a, including the Qur’an and the Hadith. Debates abound over which interpretations are valid. By showing that a given theological text may be interpreted in less patriarchal ways, Somali women shatter myths that men own shari‘a and its analysis. But they face the inflexibility of political and religious leaders and everyday Somalis who see women as spectators, not participants, in the interpretation of shari‘a.
Some Somali women are generating feminist and religious knowledge, which is not uncommon in Islamic history and other Muslim-majority societies. Islamic history, for instance, counts women sheikhs as among the most important and well-regarded transmitters and preservers of the Hadith, from Islam’s earliest days, when women delivered their own lectures and issued their own ijazat (Arabic: diplomas) to students. But because women’s perspectives have become marginalized, their knowledge is no longer authenticated. Somali feminist activists must position their work so that they do not antagonize either Somalis who see feminist work as anti-religious or Western feminists and aid workers who see religious work as anti-feminist. According to some activists I met, Western feminists seem to fight patriarchy and religion, but Somali feminists fight only patriarchy.
Activists in Somali society must carefully navigate a historical memory in which feminism is closely associated with authoritarian power and thought to be against Islam. Their repertoire of activism is built on piety but also on a strategy of survival given their knowledge of the political context in which they operate. They are creating space for feminist discourse to filter into Islam and Islamic discourse to find its way into feminism. Women activists have also found themselves caught between two disparate groups: the contemporary (foreign) funders they need for financial support and the male sheikhs they need for scholarly support. Understanding how these women move – strategically, symbolically, and piously – in that fraught terrain is crucial for illuminating how feminist activists in Muslim-majority states organize.
What are the implications of this argument that women activists in Somaliland have promoted an Islamic feminism that casts aside Western discourses of human rights? It means that women activists are not only turning to Islam out of piety to build notions of equality and dignity. They also do it out of strategy. This does not mean they do not believe. On the contrary, many of them are putting their beliefs to work, reclaiming shari‘a because they recognize the inability of political leaders and international aid groups to come up with the solutions women need. For these women activists, belief and strategy are not mutually exclusive or even inconsistent.
In legally plural contexts, war can disrupt gender hierarchies and create space for women to access state law.[1] In Somaliland, the development of a new state after the civil war also created space for women activists to promote a post-patriarchal version of shari‘a. These activists are sophisticated, educated, urban women who work on a paid or voluntary basis, primarily in Hargeisa. They are knowledgeable and skilled enough to engage with Islamic texts and to promote a shari’a consciousness that reflects women’s concerns. Such activists constitute a minority of women in Somaliland, most of whom live in poor, rural areas where xeer (Somali custom) is the controlling law and who thus do not have full access to discourses of shari’a. Since Somaliland’s reassertion of sovereignty in 1991, women activists have adopted a strategy oriented toward, rather than away from, shari‘a.
Activists’ efforts to recast women’s rights as a core concern of shari‘a counter the interventions of international lawyers, foreign diplomats, and Western feminists who see Islam as regressive or bad for women and who, instead, promote secular human rights law. But Somali women activists’ have a vision of shari‘a redemptive and flexible enough to accommodate women’s needs in society, law, and politics and built on the goal of achieving equality and dignity for women, which they see as the starting point for any promise of limited government and the rule of law. Their strategy involves educating people that shari‘a allows Muslims to take different positions on the same issues, and it resembles the strategies of women’s groups in other Muslim-majority areas. In Malaysia, Sisters in Islam has invoked shari‘a since its founding in 1987, despite facing lawsuits and a fatwa (religious ruling) against the organization. According to Tamir Moustafa, embracing shari‘a was the activists’ acknowledgment of the “limitations of … courts.”[2] In Egypt, sophisticated activists also advanced new readings of shari‘a that challenged patriarchal interpretations of family law. According to Hind Ahmed Zaki, framing women’s activism with shari‘a rather than with international human rights conventions helped expand women’s access to divorce in Egypt.[3]
While the activists I met in Somaliland have not succeeded in displacing patriarchy, they are the deep thorns that pierce patriarchy’s side. They accept the historical reality of men’s political and religious power. But they also understand that men have attained their authority from patriarchal laws of the state, custom, and Islam that those same men have long declared inflexible. Though women activists advocate with government officials, they also know that any laws passed in their favor are unlikely to be implemented or followed on a wide scale, given the state’s weaknesses. And xeer, based on centuries of precedents by men, will also be slow to change. But the malleability of religious principles and shari‘a’s multiplicity of interpretations have drawn activists to advocate for their understanding of God’s will in order to change society from its roots. Activists struggling for the rights of women have thus allocated their labor and discursive resources to promoting an alternative narrative of shari‘a that adequately reflects women’s concerns.
This chapter draws on fieldwork and a subset of 52 of my 142 qualitative interviews in Somaliland during my visits in 2013, 2014, and 2019. These interviews provide a way of seeing into the experiences and efforts of women activists since the 1990s. I met with women lawyers and civic activists, along with sheikhs, government officials, and elders targeted by their activism. My efforts to get to know their stories form a case study of how and why activists use shari‘a to fight patriarchy. Activists often cycle through multiple discourses, or frames, for their contestation – rights-oriented, religion-oriented, or a combination – and women in Somaliland are no exception. Over the years they have brought their concerns to colonial, democratic, socialist, and authoritarian leaderships, shifting tones under each political context. Since Somaliland’s 1991 reassertion of sovereignty, they have, at different times, championed shari‘a for varying, and sometimes overlapping, reasons, primarily (1) to distinguish themselves from the former Siad Barre dictatorship, which executed sheikhs opposed to the regime’s women’s rights legislation; (2) to obtain the support of male sheikhs, especially those whose preaching is widely heard and trusted; (3) to limit the influence of customary law, which makes fewer resources available to women than to men and results in harsher judgments than shari‘a for women seeking rights; and (4) to express a sincere belief in God’s will. Just as with male authorities, shari‘a activism for women’s rights emerges from a combination of piety and strategy. In the process, activists reserve the discourses of international law and principles of human rights largely for their communications with and reports to foreign donors.
Activists fighting for women’s rights in Somaliland see God’s will as both a source of hope and a source of frustration – for men in power often call upon shari‘a to oppose women’s rights, while international feminists and lawyers abandon it to promote secular versions of rights. To make this argument, this chapter proceeds in three parts. The first part explains feminism’s fraught place in Somali political history, and how a turn to international law has provided important material and financial resources to women’s groups but not the discursive legitimacy necessary for challenging patriarchy. The second part describes why women activists see shari‘a as supporting their social and political goals. The third part details how the activists use shari‘a to advocate for educating girls, setting a minimum quota for women in parliament, and ending female genital mutilation, forced marriage, and sexual violence. While shari‘a has long been a tool for male domination of Somali politics, women activists in Somaliland have used that same tool in their struggle against patriarchy.
LEGACIES OF PATRIARCHY
Modern history in the Horn of Africa is marked by attempts and failures to build the rule of law or even a lasting, recognizable state. Across this history, men have been the dominant actors. Colonial administrators, authoritarian leaders, judges from the Islamic Courts Union, the warlords they fought and the militant groups that emerged from their demise all used shari‘a discourse to achieve their goals. International donors armed with aid and foreign militaries armed with weapons have also seen shari‘a as religious law largely incompatible with their goals. Somaliland’s state officials, sheikhs, and elders, too, have promoted their own versions of shari‘a to build stability, peace, and a sovereignty that they hope one day will be recognized internationally. In calling God’s will to their sides, and in largely denying political leadership to women, these men also reinforced patriarchy and made Islam the dominant expression of their patriarchal system.
Somalis I met often mentioned the treatment of women as an important difference between British and Italian colonial rule. While British officials were trading in livestock, Italians were settling, creating an Italian Riviera of sorts on the Horn of Africa’s lush eastern coast. According to Somalis, Italian men “came with their mafias”[4] and “intermingle[d] … and married Somali women.”[5] Because the British did not “intermingle” with Somali women, many Somalis I met felt the British, particularly through the treaties they signed with Somali elders, had “respected the culture” in a way that Italian colonists had not.[6]Echoing others I met in the region who spoke of the legacies of Italian colonialism, one Somali activist said simply: “They came, they married, and they had [mixed-race] babies.”[7] These sentiments gesture to women’s long being seen not as bearers of rights and liberties but as a kind of politicized possession or medium for colonial contestation between Somali men and foreigners.
Although women were involved in the struggle for decolonization in the 1950s, as in other transitional states women’s concerns largely took second place as men focused on building national unity.
Somalia’s first constitution, ratified in 1960, provided that men and women would have equal rights and duties.[8] But, according to those I met, few things changed for women during Somalia’s democratic period (1960–1969). Somalia received more aid per capita than any other African state, but “Nine years of development projects led to … no visible improvement in the standard of living – apart perhaps from the creation of the first generation of millionaires,” which left many Somalis with the impression that state authorities focused on lining their own pockets.[9] Thus, “Where some Western observers saw democracy, many Somalis saw corruption, tribalism, indecision, and stagnation,” which did not improve women’s access to rights.[10]
Siad Barre’s military regime promoted women’s rights in theory but inhibited their development in practice. On the one hand, in the 1970s and 1980s, Somali women faced grave difficulty discussing politics or engaging in any form activism that could be seen as opposing the regime. As an activist I met said of her experience as a young civil servant at the time, “We did not raise things that would raise problems with government. We could not do that.”[11] On the other hand, the regime’s 1975 family law, drawn from its professed socialist ideology, promised women inheritance equal to that of their brothers and then executed ten sheikhs who disagreed with the state’s position on theological grounds – thus doing long-term damage to the cause of women’s rights. The regime’s mass execution of religious leaders in the name of gender equality is not lost on contemporary women’s rights activists in Somaliland. The episode is seared into their memories; activists I met spoke of the difficulty of addressing women’s concerns given a historical and political context in which women’s rights were a feature of authoritarian rule and of interventions to build adherence to foreign – Western or socialist, rather than Islamic – principles.[12]
Following Somaliland’s 1991 declaration of independence from Somalia, women’s groups had to confront the omnipresent memory of the Siad Barre regime. Women I met who were involved in equality activism said Somalis viewed feminist campaigns with suspicion as if the campaigners were “working for what … that [Siad Barre] regime [did],” in other words, advocating for the killing of religious men.[13]These accusations are met with further charges that, by promoting women’s concerns, Somali women act as the accomplices of foreign aid groups imposing their Western agenda. Not wishing to risk being seen as shills for anti-Muslim ideologies, women’s rights activists have instead been using religious discourse, often by encouraging sheikhs to speak publicly in support of the activists’ version of shari‘a. Somaliland’s women activists have been caught between sheikhs whose support they feel they need, state leaders who do not support feminism, and an international aid community whose views of feminism either sideline or eschew Islam entirely to achieve a secular rule of law.
Activists struggling for women’s rights in Somaliland did not always adopt an Islam-first approach. Such an approach evolved organically, over a generation, out of the ashes of civil war. According to a long-time activist I met, women like her first got involved in providing services to war survivors displaced to encampments in the 1980s and 1990s, as the regime collapsed and warlords seeking territorial control rose in the government’s place. Women, largely from educated and middle-class backgrounds in Hargeisa or Mogadishu, formed “self-help groups” in desert encampments to assist wounded persons and “collect money for sick people.”[14] As more wounded and sick arrived, more self-help groups emerged, gradually becoming more organized. What began as community service shifted toward advocacy for women’s rights in education, politics, and society. International NGOs arrived, too, hoping to alleviate poverty exacerbated by massive drought. Somali women I met learned how these groups were “seek[ing] funds” to help with girls’ education and other local needs.[15] With the assistance of these international NGOs, then, the self-help groups conducted their own trainings on how to form organizations; they shared with one another what they learned about “how to [write] a constitution, how to organize meetings,” and how to obtain funding from the international aid groups that came to help.[16]But women faced substantial obstacles in daily life, let alone in efforts to organize and participate. First came the 1991 stoning of a woman in Hargeisa for alleged sexual offenses.[17] Later, in 1993, an armed group arrested and charged five women with prostitution and adultery; an ad hoc religious court condemned them to death sentences by stoning. Although the Somali National Movement, which had been in charge at the time, arrested the religious leaders, many Somalis also demanded their release.[18]In addition to these threats to life and liberty, women were being shut out of politics in the newly independent Somaliland. Somaliland’s reconciliation summits during the 1990s reserved delegate places almost entirely for men who were elders and community and religious leaders. By 1997, when Somaliland formed its own House of Representatives, women were excluded from office. According to activists I met, Somalis at the time felt women had already achieved their rights under Siad Barre’s family law of 1975, which touched off the country’s long, slow collapse. An activist recounted that people told her, “You ladies became liberated [under Siad Barre],” in order to stop her activism.[19] The statement implied to her that women’s rights had already been tried with devastating results, blaming women for the regime’s heinous acts.
Organizing Against Patriarchy
Despite women’s long-term political exclusion, the self-help groups they organized in Somaliland grew into more than thirty NGOs by the late 1990s, many of which had their roots in the refugee camps. These groups formed an umbrella organization that coordinated activities and requested and dispersed aid dollars. Proposing international treaties as guides, Western-based aid organizations increased their efforts to support the self-help groups and NGOs in bringing to light Somali women’s concerns, including their exclusion from politics. These projects were undertaken with similar zeal in Somalia. As one international lawyer told me, “Frankly speaking, the international community [has] their own checklist and their own perception of democracy and priorities … When you work in a post-conflict country, the first thing you want is elections and constitutional development and parliament and … empowering civil society [on] gender issues.”[20]
But leaving Somali women alone was a hallmark that Somalis had used to separate British from Italian colonialism when Italian settlers had taken Somali women as their wives. To many Somalis, Western aid groups seemed hyper-concerned with Somali women and their bodies, livelihoods, and rights. Such perceptions of Western aid groups’ “taking” Somali women, much as Italian colonists had done, affected people’s trust in aid agencies. The aid groups became part of an “unbroken chain” – including early Christian missionaries and colonial administrators – in which outsiders and state authorities seek to change Somali women and, by extension, Somali culture.[21] Women activists, then, slide from being vocal advocates for women to being political objects, pawns, and guarantors of local “culture.”
Echoing the words of other activists I met, one civic activist told me that Europeans “brought this language of human rights [and] impos[ed]” it upon Somali people.[22] The ideal of gender equality is a key feature of this imposition. As one activist told me, “There are many organizations that work on human rights [and] they [all] emphasize … gender.” “But,” this activist continued, “human rights issues are broader than just” gender.[23]Another male activist similarly complained that large donors, including the UNDP, “want women in law, not[in]medicine or[other areas].”[24]Aid workers are seen to be excessively focused on linking gender to the law, just as colonial administrators and the Siad Barre regime were, thus diminishing the work of women’s groups by consigning contemporary women’s rights activists to a larger “anti-Muslim” category.
A local sultan confirmed what activists were telling me: that the distrust of aid groups comes from their work with women and their shunning of shari‘a and local norms. “The only [thing] that we are afraid of is that [foreign aid workers] are intermingling with women,” he said. This unease about potential impropriety is directed at aid organizations and the women activists with whom they have professional relationships. The sultan continued that he felt aid workers’ attention to women’s issues also disempowered community elders and religious leaders, just as Siad Barre had tried to do. Aid workers “put together traditional and religious,” he said, and then they “sideline” them.[25]
Because Western-based NGOs were seen as suspicious at best or anti-Muslim at worst, civic activists I met worried that encouraging women’s rights was synonymous with expressing a distaste for Islam. One activist said that Somalis suspicious of Western aid workers believe that because women’s organizations “work with international [funding], we are not Islamic.”[26] The UNDP’s encouragement of principles associated with international human rights law means, to Somalis, that aid groups are discouraging principles associated with shari‘a. A Somali consultant in Hargeisa gave me the example of how the aid groups with whom he works “want to … downplay [the Qur’an] in the administration of justice” by changing the crime witness requirement that two male witnesses are the same as one male and two female witnesses. In “encouraging gender equality … [UNDP officials] don’t want to see shari‘a … in the courts,” he said.[27]Once Somali NGOs picked up these themes, they were tainted with the same anti-Muslim bias that affected aid workers. As one sheikh told me, international aid groups were simultaneously “sidelining shari‘a [and] encouraging law.”[28] While international law and Western feminism challenged patriarchy, to these Somalis they also seemed to challenge religion.
Aid Workers Stay “On the Safe Side”
When I asked about differences between international law, shari‘a, and xeer, most people responded by discussing the problem of sexual assault. According to many xeer precedents, a rape survivor’s clan or sub-clan – not the survivor herself – is compensated for the injury. The survivor is then forced by precedent to marry her perpetrator because her defilement makes her unfit to marry any other man. A European aid worker explained that “Women’s rights are … not respected” because survivors cannot participate in xeer hearings. “It is not individual justice …This is completely against human rights,” she told me.[29] According to another aid worker, diplomats and aid workers are “not comfortable getting involved in the shari‘a thing … They say it’s not gender sensitive.”[30] For these reasons, donors “cannot appear to be supporting” shari‘a, said an aid worker.[31] Sheikhs also felt that donors from the West promoted anti-Islamic ideas. People who “don’t understand shari‘a” and Muslim intellectuals “trained with a Western mindset [who] take the Western argument easily,” one lawyer and sheikh in his thirties told me, both fall into the same trap of misinterpreting shari‘a as sexist.[32]
According to aid workers, international NGOs generally “do not want to interfere [with shari‘a], to be on the safe side.”[33] But UN agencies like UNICEF and UNDP have also not hidden their interest in understanding shari‘a, instead commissioning studies and programs related to women in Islam. When I asked why, a Somali human rights activist who worked with the United Nations in Mogadishu and Hargeisa told me her colleagues “see Islam as backward and hostile to women.” While some of them want to learn more about shari‘a, “I don’t think their donors would accept to support [UN agencies] to work in a proactive, engaged way to improve Islamic laws. They think this is anathema to the international community,” she concluded.[34] United Nations agencies’ “studies” of women in Islam and their reluctance to engage with shari‘a contribute to the perception, even among activists, of aid groups as anti-Islamic.
Aid workers’ attempts to work with Islam continue to be met with skepticism. In addition to worries about neocolonialism and mistrust of aid workers, Somalis have life-and-death reasons for their reluctance to associate with Western aid groups. According to an aid worker in Nairobi, “If you did engage [with Western aid agencies] you are seen as not a real Muslim, so you are targeted [by militants]. Activists don’t want to be exposed to that risk.”[35] There is a widespread perception in the region that UN agencies do not support shari‘a because of a fear amongst aid workers that Islamic law does not promote women’s rights in the same way that international law does. Likewise, Somali men holding political and social authority tend to portray UN agencies as anti-Muslim specifically because of feminism, because aid workers portray Islam as unsupportive of women’s rights. In this context, women activists find themselves backed into a political and rhetorical corner. Their work with Western aid groups risks branding them as antiMuslim or making them the targets of extremists even though they also try to appeal to shari‘a and work with sheikhs.
What happens to international law in this context, as it sits precariously sidelined in relation to the various versions of shari‘a in Somali discourse? While international law provides Somali women with discourse for obtaining financial support from UN agencies and international NGOs, international law fails to provide women with the discursive potential to challenge the domination of men who feel they have God’s will on their side. International law is meant to limit the actions of states but – to the United Nations, Somalia, and much of the rest of the world – Somalilandisnot a sovereign state. That limits the effectiveness of any argument that the Somaliland government should commit to and abide by international law, since Somaliland is not a UN member-state and is unable to ratify and be held accountable to multilateral treaties like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). While an appeal to international law provides women activists with important material resources for their organizations and activism, it does not provide them with resources appropriate to their political context.
Somali women continue to work with local and international NGOs to implement a shared vision for women’s rights. But, as one staff member of an international NGO told me, “We are … pushing for change, but what does change mean for local people? I really do not know.” Fearing reprisal from her employers, she asked me to turn off the recorder and then she discussed Somalis’ widespread mistrust of the Western NGOs with whom she worked. She ended our conversation with a sigh, “We always find a way to come up with a very nice report.”[36]
DISCURSIVE RESOURCES: WHY ACTIVISTS USE SHARI‘A
A combination of institutional and historical pressures – the influential authority of sheikhs and a legacy of domestic authoritarianism and international intervention by colonial administrators and aid workers with their own plans for feminist progress that limited or did away with Islamic power – channeled women into an Islam-first strategy. More importantly, as scholars of Islam have pointed out, shari‘a provides its own scriptural basis for the rights of women.[37] Rather than feeling oppressed by shari‘a, women have come to embrace it as a source of rights. When activists put shari’a into practice, it proves more malleable than expected by observers who see it merely as a divine law that jurists interpret. In the Horn of Africa, broken down by decades of civil war and state collapse, shari‘a has become a basis of modern constitutional law and a rallying cry for women seeking the values that aid workers associate with liberal democracy: women’s suffrage, women’s participation in government and decision-making (including the ability to stand for office, be appointed as judges, or be seen as capable religious leaders), and the rights to be protected from assault, discrimination, genital mutilation, forced marriage, and child marriage.
Women activists adopt an Islam-first strategy, educating themselves about the major sources of shari‘a and then teaching others about how these sources provide a basis for women’s rights. Activists I met and documents they gave me show that they have adopted a multipronged strategy that includes education and advocacy for public health and criminal justice. They consider female genital mutilation (FGM, also called female genital cutting, or circumcision), sexual assault, forced marriage, and child marriage as predominant issues. Activists also work on encouraging women to run for political office and getting more women to vote for them. Many activists I met affirmed that Islamic faith guides these activities rather than any desire to achieve justiciable rights in courtrooms. When I asked an NGO executive director why she works for women’s rights, she replied directly, “Because I am Muslim. Every step I can take is based on my Islamic religion. It’s part of my motivation. If I am a Muslim woman, and I want to go to my job and have a normal life, it’s [all] based on Islamic religion.”[38] Another said she is “simply trying to [remind] people … that we [women activists] are Muslim.”[39]
Motivated by the sources of shari‘a, women also connect with international groups for financial support. These groups bring additional discourses with them, typically of human rights.[40] In the process, activists in Somaliland have been extricating Islam from their country’s authoritarian past, from aid agencies bearing alternative discourses of justice, and from xeer, which women see as less protective of their interests than the sources of shari‘a. The work of women’s activists shows how, when they put shari‘a into practice, they – like colonial and authoritarian administrations, the ICU, and the sheikhs and elders who tried to build peace in Somaliland before them – engage in its interpretation, challenge its political uses, and redraw its boundaries.
Western policy and scholarship on law and courts, largely based on the analogy of legal cases in the United States, would suggest that marginalized groups should turn to national courts to protect their rights when legislators are unable or unwilling to enforce them. That is, many advocacy groups seek to secure rights through constitutional review of private action or state legislation.[41] One might expect this kind of legal activism to prevail in Somaliland and Somalia, where women’s rights are written into national constitutions. (Somalia’s 1960 constitution, Somaliland’s 2001 constitution, and Somalia’s 2012 constitution all prescribe women’s rights and gender equality.[42]) A lawyer and activist in Somaliland, educated at the University of Mogadishu, told me, “When we have an argument with the [Somaliland] government, they say you [women already] have all your rights in the constitution.”[43] The words “gender” and “women” appear nine times in the constitutions of Somaliland and Somalia. These documents provide gender-related protections in labor, the military, and other areas. On the books, Somali women have access to constitutional protections. With all this constitutional law protecting women’s rights, they nevertheless adopt a shari‘a-first strategy. Why? Three principal reasons follow.
First, Islam is technically the basis of all law, including constitutional law. All three major constitutions proclaim Islam the religion of the state – in Article 1.3 of the 1960 Somalia constitution, Article 2.1 of the 2012 Somalia constitution, and Article 5.1 of the 2001 Somaliland constitution. The Somaliland constitution further prohibits the passage of any law contrary to shari‘a.[44] Understanding shari‘a to be the basis of all state law and less susceptible than it to political swings, women have focused on promoting the sources of shari‘a – the Qur’an and the Hadith – rather than constitutional protections that may come and go.
Second, even if the courts were to adjudicate constitutional issues around Islam, there is no culture of “impact” litigation. Courts and civil society have been slow to regain their footing since the state’s 1991 collapse – including in Somaliland, which began running its own political affairs at that time. According to one Somali staff member with an international NGO in Hargeisa, whom I met in 2013, the idea of impact litigation was still “quite new.” Somaliland’s first law school did not graduate its first students until 2006 (cf. Figure 5.2). While a strategy of constitutional litigation may eventually be attempted as the state and civil society grow stronger, Somaliland, in his words, lacked “experienced legal people who can really challenge the government [by taking] cases … to the constitutional court.”[45]
Third, institutional pressures on successive constitutional courts mean that judges, who are not appointed for life, may likely rule for the government that appointed them in order to protect their positions. Judges are perceived as first and foremost “loyal to the President.”[46]“They would lose their jobs,” one observer said of Somaliland’s Supreme Court judges if they ruled against the political party in power.[47] When I spoke with activists, most told me they would not take cases before the constitutional court because they saw the court as a space for battles between major political parties, for instance over contested elections. Instead, “To change the law,” one lawyer told me, “you go to Parliament.”[48]
The authority of sheikhs, the primacy Somalis grant to shari‘a, the nascent state of the legal profession, and an inability or unwillingness to take high-impact cases before the courts have all pushed women toward Islamic versions of rights. To the women activists I met, gender roles in Islam differ in meaningful ways from gender roles in Somali culture, which led the activists to promote knowledge of Islam so that women would know their rights according to the Qur’an. Activists told me that many “women … are illiterate [and] don’t know which is religion and which is culture. So, they don’t know their rights written in the Qur’an. If a person knows the meaning of the Qur’an, [they] will know a lot of rights of women.”[49]
Because many Somalis view the government and aid agencies with skepticism, women’s rights activists have forged another path toward legal progress: promoting Islam itself. Rather than alienating sheikhs as Siad Barre once did, activists bring religious leaders into the advocacy process, inviting them to forums and workshops to discuss what the sources of shari‘a say about women. Their efforts transform shari‘a from a threat to women’s activism into a resource for it. Not only do women activists express religiosity through their engagement with sheikhs, but they also design and practice their own strategy of using religious texts and symbols to foster social acceptance of their struggle against patriarchy.
Through creativity and reflection, women activists promote an Islamic discourse of rights, disassociated from Siad Barre’s legacy and from the strains of Western intervention. As one woman told me, “you can find support for almost everything” in the Qur’an. While her comments may be read as strategic or even cynical, Islam’s flexibility of interpretation, particularly in relation to xeer’s rigidity of precedents, made many women I met prefer Islam to xeer in family disputes, divorce, or cases of sexual violence. International NGOs, for their part, support the efforts of women’s NGOs, such as initiatives to work with elders to remove precedents from xeer that contradict shari‘a. These groups purposefully strive to separate religion from local culture, a strategy the British colonial administration in Somaliland also employed. As an activist told me, “Sometimes the line between culture and religion becomes so blurred that they tell you it’s Islamic that a woman should [stay in the home to] cook and clean … but it’s not Islamic!”[50]
ORGANIZING STRATEGIES: HOW ACTIVISTS USE SHARI‘A
Women’s rights are sensitive to discuss in Somaliland, let alone to implement. “We always look like the villains … because we try to give women their own voice,” an NGO project manager told me.[51] For this reason, women activists foreground male sheikhs, who are seen as the experts on shari‘a, often because of their education overseas in Islamic institutes and universities. Somalis recognize the intensity of study necessary to earn the title of sheikh, so activists want these scholars to construct a public narrative of shari‘a that is more supportive of women’s concerns. “When it comes to Islam or religion, I think it should be left to people who have received foreign, Islamic educations,” one activist told me.[52] The most prominent Somali sheikhs have deep cultural influence through their own radio or television programs, Facebook pages, YouTube lectures, and Twitter handles. Somalis I met also listen to sheikhs from Egypt and Saudi Arabia but, as one person told me, they “give priority to” sheikhs from Somaliland.[53]
In Somaliland’s context where sheikhs exercise authority, women activists have found that the most plausible way forward is to try to get the sheikhs to change the narrative of women’s rights with the hope of changing society’s views on women’s issues.[54] To meet this goal, women’s groups have organized forums with sheikhs to discuss issues related to women’s and girls’ lives, including education, forced marriage, rape, and female genital mutilation, which affects nearly all Somali women. They have invited sheikhs to lead these sessions, whose audiences consist of other sheikhs. Though women’s rights NGOs organize these workshops and sheikhs facilitate them, the NGOs are not religiously affiliated organizations. The civic activists do not sit at the main table and sometimes do not participate at all, because the sheikhs are seen as the “people who can speak authoritatively on shari‘a and who can work out the tension” between shari‘a, custom, and Somali laws like the penal code.[55] One woman said, “Sheikhs do not lie to us. They are honest [and tell us] what religion says.”[56] Another said simply, “Not many women know the Qur’an properly. We do not know the Qur’an, the meaning, and what shari‘a … says. If a sheikh says ‘this is so and so,’ then we believe him.”[57] When women activists do not see themselves as capable of interpreting the sources of shari‘a publicly, they direct their activism at male religious authorities, hoping to induce them to change their interpretations. For these women, promoting equality and dignity as starting points for the rule of law means dealing first with the rule of men.
Other women activists spoke more resignedly: “We had to invite [sheikhs]. Otherwise we would be in a problem [because] they [would] say we are following Western ideas. The [sheikhs] say all of the rights of women are in the Qur’an…so we are fighting for these rights, for our Islamic rights, [to show] how these [Islamic rights] are being violated [in Somaliland].”[58]Working with and through sheikhs to achieve these Islamic rights seemed to be the only discursive option for these women activists. Another said that women tread carefully when advocating with sheikhs because many sheikhs still see women as unequal to and less than men:
You can see a man … saying ‘She is [just] a woman’ like she is weak. And he is a big sheikh … He knows the rights that Allah says … But there was Khadija [the Prophet Muhammad’s workplace boss and, later, his first wife] and Aisha [the Prophet’s surviving spouse]. [Women] can produce and help. But now, [sheikhs] just say, ‘She is just a woman.’ One day things will change.[59]
Empowering Women and Girls
Civic activists use shari‘a to empower women in education, politics, and sport. Activists I met promoted girls’ education, for instance, by explaining how shari‘a demands that both “boys and girls have the right to education.”[60] With support from international NGOs and donor countries, activists have reminded people of the Islamic teaching that to educate a girl is to educate a family or a nation (Figure 6.1). Activists told me their work aims to “empower women … to have access to justice, to join politics, and to run for elections.”[61] One NGO director said that Somali “culture,” for instance, “refuse[d] to allow girls to play” sports, but such a rule is not in accord with Islam, which “gives rights to human beings.” She reflected on her one-to-one advocacy with sheikhs, saying, “I use religion to say that girls should have a chance to play, separately [from boys.] I talk to religious leaders, Qur’anic teachers, and sheikhs. I ask them questions. When I am starting that sport, I ask them about Islam. They tell me [that] it is okay for young girls to participate [so long as they play] separately from boys.”[62] The approval of sheikhs brought critical community support for an endeavor that could be seen as a foreign import inappropriate for girls. In the long term, activists said, if “you see [women] don’t have property [or] don’t have rights to [be free from] FGM or sexual- and gender-based violence, all this is related to [our] culture,” not to Islam.[63] Again, those struggling for women’s rights consistently relied on shari‘a as a strategy, in the process showing how Somali law and society have distorted the religion they share.
Some women said that learning more about Islam helped them to understand broader issues in politics and daily life, including obligations to others and the environment. Women I met told me that, according to religious tradition, men have important duties and obligations to women. A husband “has to be responsible for his family. If he takes another wife, he should stand in front of the court [to] look into the matter.”[64] Similarly, women I met working in environmental protection groups also turned to Qur’anic text to justify their activities protecting the Somali coastline and forests. “We had verses of the Qur’an in our posters … in Somali. [Religion] encourage[s] people.”[65]
Figure 6.1 “Educate a girl, educate a nation”: Using Islam to promote women’s rights. Photo credit: Michael Walls.
Increasing Women’s Participation in Politics
When I asked one activist why she was trying to advocate for women’s rights, she spoke of the importance of using the Qur’an as a source of authority to get women into government. She said, “We need representation. The people who vote for men are women! [We need] to change their attitudes. They have to know their rights in the Qur’an. This [allowing women to participate fully in parliament] is Islamic! They have seen women ministers, role models, in parliament.”[66] Why do activists want more women to vote and stand for election? “I don’t think [people] understand that having women in high-level positions is better for society as a whole. If we simply let men run everything and follow them like sheep, we’ll have fiascos all the time,” said one activist.[67] Nevertheless, people see these efforts as “Westernized,” which has become a tenet of Somali “culture … difficult to break.”[68]
Activists seek to construct a public narrative of shari‘a that reflects the concerns of women’s NGOs. To do so, they have tried to earn the support of sheikhs willing to say publicly that what the women were fighting for was consistent with shari‘a. But the activists were, at best, receiving mixed messages from the sheikhs. In some cases, women told me, while they felt the sheikhs “have … more knowledge of religion, they try to confuse us.” That is, these sheikhs have said that Islam does not give women the political rights they are seeking, even though activists thought that Islam provides “rights … for women to be in government,” or at least does not prohibit it.[69]
To gain support for their advocacy to improve women’s political participation, or for a quota setting a minimum number of women members of parliament, women’s groups have organized forums for sheikhs. “We invited different sheikhs and asked them, ‘is it possible … to tell the people if it is right for women to [be] ministers [and members of] parliament?’ The sheikhs said, ‘yes, you … women can do these things.’ When they are in one room in a meeting, they can accept it. But they don’t like to tell the public” that Islam does not prevent women from having these rights.[70] Because many men who are not sheikhs have trouble supporting the idea of electing women to parliament, activists told me, they hoped that sheikhs might change the minds of men across society. “It is patriarchy, not Islam,” an activist told me, that says women should not participate in politics.[71] These women separate Islam from patriarchy in a way that many men do not.
I was told that sheikhs were unwilling to speak publicly about issues that women cared about most. In other cases some sheikhs, women felt, were “so rude” by not giving a fuller or complete interpretation of a Qur’anic verse or statement of the Prophet Muhammad.[72] At trainings or debates sponsored by women’s NGOs, for instance, religious leaders “sometimes … take the first part of the [Qur’anic] verse or Hadith that suits them, but they omit the rest.”[73] In one example, Somalis have used an evidentiary rule – that two female witnesses to a crime are equivalent to one male witness – to say all women are worth only “half of a man.”
[But] they leave out the part which says two women [are needed] in case one of them forgets something, the other one will support her because of the overload [women] have. Sometimes women are pregnant or sick … The [religious leaders] leave all that out. They [also] don’t ask why diyya [blood money] is 50 camels for women [who are killed] and 100 for men … [It is] because the man is … responsible for his wife and his unmarried sisters … But they make it like ‘You as a woman are half.’ And they don’t give an explanation.[74]
Women activists have worked to counter sexist interpretations of the sources of shari‘a. But, according to community leaders I met, the sheikhs simply “feel irritated” when they are called upon to support women’s issues or to give the public a richer or more complex view of shari‘a.[75] Thus, activists told me, ordinary people remain “ignorant” and women informally “advise them to study the texts and Hadith” on their own wherever possible, rather than adopting uninformed views.[76]
Stopping Female Genital Mutilation
Civic activists I met said that they have not reached their goal of eliminating the practice of FGM because “Sheikhs are not with us.” They “have different versions of” shari‘a, activists told me. So how do those seeking to stop the practice of FGM engage with sheikhs? “You have to start by talking about the Qur’an and Sunnah,” and only after speaking about religious texts do civic groups turn to “present[ing] the facts regarding [women’s] health.”[77] One civic group I met had conducted “trainings of trainers” that involved facilitating workshops for hundreds of sheikhs, men mostly in their twenties and thirties, on issues related to the lives of women. Business leaders and staff from the ministry of education, the ministry of justice, and similar ministries that confront problems tied to the rights of women also attended. The organizers hoped that those sheikhs, business leaders, and government employees would then educate others about what they have learned. These are not always Somaliland’s wealthiest or most influential leaders, but some of them are already somewhat supportive of women’s rights, as they do voluntarily “come to learn.”[78]
This NGO had met with so many people, particularly sheikhs, to promote awareness of shari‘a that people labeled the NGO hayadii diinta (Somali: roughly, “the religion NGO”). Managers from the NGO also privately “engag[ed] women sheikhs,” whom male sheikhs “would [not] accept as their own.”[79] These women scholars, like Asha, have enough knowledge of Islam to educate others about women’s rights in the Qur’an and Hadith. They are dismissed either as not really scholars or as fronts for Western groups; people “just presume” the women sheikhs are promoting a Western agenda “because the supporters are [international NGOs and UN agencies] using international law.”[80] Activists have been careful to avoid being seen as denigrating Islam and careful to avoid criticizing sheikhs themselves; if anything, they actively promote Islam and work with sheikhs rather than against them. I was told of a Somali woman in the UK who had spoken out against sheikhs online but was quickly and deeply criticized, leading many Somalis to distance themselves from her, and of a woman who faced vocal opposition from sheikhs after she tried to open a madrasa (Arabic: religious school).
Any legislation passed in Somaliland, people told me, must have an Islamic foundation because “Those in parliament … know the sheikhs will become angry” if the legislation has a different foundation, such as international human rights law.[81] But sheikhs, though they all practice Islam, disagree on how to interpret shari‘a. For instance, the practice of FGM has long been common in the Horn of Africa, where some estimates suggest nearly all women have been circumcised. Women activists I met have been trying to stop the practice by getting sheikhs to disavow it publicly as impermissible under Islamic law. Some sheikhs have spoken out to end it. But many of them have been silenced by more powerful or influential sheikhs, leading others to refrain from speaking out, and still others to suggest that the practice is permissible or even required by Islamic law. Some sheikhs have promoted only the “Sunna” form of FGM, which involves removal of the clitoral hood. (The Sunna method is seen as less invasive than infibulation, or pharaonic method, involving removal of the labia and a near-total closure of the vagina, except for a small hole for the urine stream.) Women I met had gone to great effort to draft an anti-FGM policy for the Somaliland government but were disturbed that sheikhs could not agree to ban FGM.
According to one researcher, a legislative ban on FGM would be at best only a partial victory. Even if parliament passed laws against FGM, the practice would not cease unless prominent sheikhs spoke out against it. Political leaders “just say that” FGM is an outrage “to please the international community,” one observer told me. She continued that the government does not have “power to [enforce] any … [antiFGM] laws … [Anti-FGM laws are] just a fantasy to please donors,” particularly when sheikhs have the power to stop it.[82] After many sheikhs claimed that the Sunna type of FGM was permissible under shari‘a, women told me, “We [still] called [the sheikhs] from time to time” to advocate for a change in their views.[83] In these cases, women walk a fine line between entirely avoiding the sheikhs or reluctantly engaging with them.
In 2018, things took a turn for the worse for activists when sheikhs working in Somaliland’s Ministry of Religious Affairs issued a fatwa that ruled additional forms of FGM acceptable. Members of one advocacy group told me they thereafter stopped their anti-FGM activism to avoid prompting the religious leaders who delivered the fatwa to speak out against their group. Instead, they began “low-profile” advocacy, such as one-to-one conversations with sheikhs, to try to change the fatwa “that is not supporting us.”[84] The activists’ “intentional invisibility” is authentic, strategic, and risk-averse, and helps them navigate the cultural landscape and avoid potential backlash.[85]
Ending Child Marriage
Like FGM and women’s political participation, child marriage (sometimes called early marriage) has been a difficult topic for sheikhs to agree upon publicly. Many community and religious leaders in Somaliland promote early marriage as a way to deal with boys and girls having sexual relations prior to marriage. Women activists told me of their failed attempts to bring sheikhs together to discuss a ban on child marriage. In one workshop, “It took three days to get [a sheikh] on board. We had to keep going back to him” to convince him with case studies. These case studies included that of a young girl whose pelvis had been broken by childbirth, and that of another child who “went crazy and drank bleach” to avoid a forced marriage.[86] That is, instead of advocating directly for a fatwa against child marriage, civic activists and NGOs have brought religious leaders together to explain to them the specific problems that often result from a young girl’s marriage. Doing so helps religious leaders learn about the girls’ experiences, potentially building sheikhs’ empathy for these girls: “When we [talk about health-related problems in child marriage], even the sheikhs accept it, because Islam always promotes the person, health, and dignity … The religion doesn’t accept any problem with those things, so we just identify the specific [issues] that come from early marriage.”[87]But empathy did not go far in helping activists achieve their goals. The sheikhs “were livid, not happy at all with this project” of stopping child marriage. A sheikh put in charge of a one-day workshop was given a facilitator’s fee and asked to write a report on Islam and women, but when he realized the organization was against child marriage, he exclaimed, “What? I’m not doing that!” He asked the women activists if they wanted “to stop marriage” entirely. The activists clarified that they wanted to stop the practice of child marriage, not adult marriage. They hoped some sheikhs who agreed with them would “make friends with [other] religious leaders [and then] convince these guys … who carry out the [child marriage] ceremonies” to stop, not least to prevent the dangers to young girls.[88]
At another workshop, however, men in attendance “saw the logo” of a prominent women’s organization and noticed the women sitting on the edges of the room. Realizing that the workshop was actually organized by a women’s rights NGO – and not by the leading sheikh and Islamic studies professor facilitating it – the participants became “really aggressive.” They “stood up and shouted, ‘this is Western ideologies taking over our Muslim identity. This is the last one-hundred percent Muslim country!’” It was “mayhem,” according to attendees of the meeting whom I later met. The sheikhs perceived the workshop to be an attack on marriage in general, claiming that the organizers “openly oppose[d] culture, religion, tradition” by not supporting child marriage.[89]
Preventing Sexual Assault
The issue of sexual violence is particularly vexing, activists told me, because many elders have forced women to marry their assaulters, which activists see as directly contravening shari‘a. Forced marriages lead to perverse incentives, such as prompting a man to rape a woman whom he wishes to marry – or, in one egregious case, incentivizing gang rape as a group of young men sexually assaulted a woman together to make it impossible to prove which one of them should be forced to marry her as his “punishment.”[90] Forcing a woman to marry the perpetrator reduces and “simplifies” the punishment for zinna (the Islamic crime of unlawful sexual conduct) by prioritizing peace between the families or clans involved, despite the obvious injustice of such resolutions for the assault survivor.[91]
As in the battle against FGM, feminist civic groups have tried to get sheikhs and their counterparts – “cultural leaders, the sultans, and aqils” – on their side, so that these leaders would then show how local practices pervert Islamic rules.[92] Civic activists against sexual violence realized that the elders who enforce xeer would not want to behave inconsistently with Islam, and they wanted to stop any distortions of Islam. “They are not using the right [shari‘a],” an activist told me of the multiple interpretations of zinna. The “right” shari‘a, she exclaimed, “says to kill the rapist. But they [sheikhs and sultans] don’t do that. They just talk about [the rape causing a] conflict…between the clans.”[93] While women I met did not advocate publicly for the execution of rapists, they did try to open debate on the diversity of punishments for rape, pointing out how local practices overemphasize what elders see as their communities’ needs at the expense of the needs of the survivors of assault and the rules of Islam.
Feminist activists focused on developing an argument that shari‘a is purposefully misinterpreted to enforce patriarchy and oppress women. Some men, activists told me, “use religion to deter women” from advocacy, even though activists know “the religion [and] the [words and actions] of the Prophet” do not support these actions. Consequently, women want people to learn that men should not “change [shari‘a] just to bring down women … [Men] use traditional [practices] and shari‘a … to help the men. But the way it is written in the Qur’an is different.”[94]Another expressed frustration that men were not following the example of “the Prophet [who] was very good to his wife.” She continued that, in her work, “We … always take what is within the Qur’an and Hadith [that promotes] justice.”[95] For these reasons, activists turn to sheikhs to discuss the scriptural basis for an end to sexual assault, despite the recalcitrance women face from many religious men.
One activist told me that she saw violence against women as a more important issue than equal inheritance rights because “It’s something so clear[ly] written in the Qur’an, and men are violating” it by physically harming women and girls. Both shari‘a and international law do not support violence against women, activists told me, but they found invoking shari‘a to be a more useful strategy, because it helps them to emphasize that their advocacy does not intend to “contradict the sheikhs and shari‘a.”[96]
The primary source of shari‘a is the Qur’an, and Somaliland’s constitution makes Islam the primary source of law. So why would women not speak about scripture openly, instead of leaving that task to male sheikhs? After all, women played an important role in Islam’s earliest history: many of the oral preservers of the Qur’an and most trustworthy and notable muhaditheen (Arabic: scholars of Hadith) were women. While some women do speak openly in forums, “The custodians of law were always men,” I was told.[97] That is, the dominant culture expects religious leaders to be men. In the view of one longtime women’s rights activist and former senior government minister, “This is a patriarchal society. If women need something, men would have to defend them. But they never would. They say, ‘You women stay at home’.”[98]
Shari‘a as Strategy
Activists fighting a long tradition of patriarchy justified through simplistic interpretations of religious discourse are caught between knowing – from their private study or meetings with sheikhs – that shari‘a does not have to be sexist and being unable to convince sheikhs to speak publicly about that. These sheikhs, in turn, fear distancing themselves from Somali culture or even from Islam. After an NGO organized a dialogue with religious leaders, sheikhs “accused us of promoting an alien agenda from the West. Once we realized they are against us, we decided not to engage with them.”[99] The activists realized they were giving power to the sheikhs, which led them to consider alternative options, including trying to find a foreign (nonSomali) Muslim scholar who could support the women’s version of shari‘a. “Our sheikhs … hide [so] we need a sheikh [who will] speak publicly” about how shari‘a protects women.[100] In one case, activists told me they had hoped to hire a Black American Muslim, regardless of whether or not he had a Somali background or spoke Somali. They sought out international scholars – sheikhs – to validate what activists were trying to show about women, rights, and religion. When Somali sheikhs were unable or unwilling to speak out in support of the concerns of women’s NGOs, these NGOs began looking for foreign sheikhs to do it, pinning their hopes on their feminist interpretations of shari‘a. When I asked how people would respond to a Muslim American interpreting shari‘a, activist leaders seemed unconcerned about such a scholar being from a Western country: “But he is Muslim,” I was told. “We need an Islamic scholar from wherever in the world.”[101]
Despite their focus on shari‘a and bringing religious men to speak out in support of women’s rights, activists do not ignore foreign and international law. They see that “traditional systems are patriarchal” and that foreign “law, starting in the West fifty years ago” discusses “equality [and] positive discrimination … giv[ing] them more justice and rights.”[102] One NGO executive director told me her organization, like other civil society groups, brought international treaties into their work.[103] The NGO held workshops discussing CEDAW, even though Somaliland – not fully recognized as a state – cannot ratify it. But just as they strategically sideline state feminism because of the legacy of Siad Barre’s rule, they also sideline CEDAW because of the legacy of foreign intervention. They mention it, but they focus their strategies on promoting shari‘a instead, to which they see state leaders bound for legal, religious, and moral reasons. United Nations agencies and international NGOs happily support the efforts of women’s rights groups, but only if they also discuss international law. As activists told me, foreigners “were never opposed to women doing Islam-oriented work as long as they were also teaching people about … international conventions.”[104]
Activists struggling for women’s rights do not see shari‘a existing in isolation, but co-existing alongside discourses of rights in international and domestic law. Activists I met were pleased that Somaliland’s 2005 inheritance law protected the rights of women, but the state’s process of passing the law, which women told me had anyway been “kick-started by Siad Barre,” was long and “more gradual.”[105] Women activists also wanted Somalis to speak out about men who do not support women fully, including financially, and say that such men are actually acting contrary to shari‘a and forcing women to find work:
Sixty percent of people in Somaliland are women. They are breadwinners. They are working in the market [and] tea shops, selling qat, [doing] small jobs. So why can [people] say that women must stay in the home, when [women] are doing these things? In Islam, you should say ‘I am a man, I am responsible for you.’[106]
This approach – giving space to state law and international law, but primacy to shari‘a – has slowly worked to improve some women’s status. According to activists, Somaliland has seen an “increase in enrollment of education for young girls. We now have women in the police force … and women lawyers … at the forefront of fighting for women’s rights in individual cases.”[107] Many of these women joined after they and their families understood that Islam permitted these things. Others told me that since the 1990s, “There [has been] change. Now [there are] more women lawyers and graduates.”[108] It is not that activists are trying to get Somalis to see Islam’s “capacity for evolution,” as Ignác Goldziher, a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence, once put it,[109] but that they are trying to show that Islam never opposed women’s rights. Instead, they argue that Somali practices evolved away from Islam, which has long advanced women’s rights.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has uncovered how persistently and thoroughly activism for women’s rights in Somaliland invokes, interprets, and relies on shari‘a. Since Somaliland’s 1991 declaration of independence from Somalia, women’s civic groups have made strides toward becoming professional organizations while promoting grassroots order and equality principles. While aid efforts have often been predicated on the notion that shari‘a is bad for women, Somali women activists instead have used it to promote women’s rights. The fact that these activists continue to adopt this strategy – in the face of centuries of patriarchy that also invokes shari‘a – renders shari‘a malleable, even as some activists see shari‘a as resolute in its support of gender equality. The psychological gains of knowing that faith is on their side, not against them, are real. As one woman activist told me, “Patriarchy will not end unless we promote how we are all … Muslim.”[110] Just as state officials, elders, religious leaders, and militants have used religion as their ordering principle throughout Somali history – turning Islam into a tool of patriarchy – civic activists have remade these very symbols of repression into sources of hope, redemption, and salvation. If this project is to succeed over the long term, the social transformation that activists envision will emerge from the new meanings they give to the discourses that male elites have used to hold onto power.
When I asked a Somali activist about the evolution of women’s rights in the region, she looked away, sighed, and said that “Women had more rights under Siad” Barre. She was still longing for equality, even if from a dictator ruling by decree. Siad Barre, in her words, “made women and men equal.”[111] A dictator’s power has enduring consequences, and Siad Barre’s approach contaminated the goal of equality and still tarnishes contemporary efforts to achieve it. His legacy, linked to a spurious form of state feminism that accompanied the execution of religious leaders, guided feminist activists a generation later to reconfigure women’s rights as a core concern of Islam. These feminist activists continue to endure a vicious cycle in which aid organizations are seen as antiMuslim because they support feminist causes, and because aid organizations are seen as anti-Muslim they hurt the feminist causes they support. Feminist activists have thus found themselves in an impossible position because of their relationships to international aid groups and perceptions of feminism itself as a tool of state domination or neocolonial oppression. They must try to navigate a narrow channel between challenging patriarchy and not seeming to challenge religion.
Just as Somalis have turned to shari‘a to resolve disputes with one another, feminist activists have turned to shari‘a to promote women’s rights. Whether or not this strategy will succeed in dismantling patriarchy, women activists continue to devote resources, time, and energy to it, suggesting that they believe change and progress depend on it. For civic activists, shari‘a is not just a rallying cry; it is also a guide for interpreting daily life and, inshallah, for tearing down patriarchy. Given activists’ dedication, I was not surprised when some of them told me they would favor a state governed more closely by shari‘a, or at least their version of it. They worried, however, that in an Islamic state some sheikhs would use shari‘a as an excuse to “oppress women in the name of the Qur’an. But if the sheikhs studied [shari‘a] out of love and tolerance, then I wouldn’t have a problem” with an Islamic state, one activist told me.[112]
Civic activists fighting male domination in Somaliland have been working hard to get Somalis to see shari‘a and its sources differently, from the ground up, while disentangling women’s rights from the West, from Somalia’s own history of authoritarian rule under Siad Barre, and from sheikhs who see Islam narrowly as unsupportive of women’s rights. But when activists launched these projects, they were accused of “openly opposing Islam” and some were told that they were “no longer Muslims,” leading them to seek alliances with male religious leaders who, because of their status, could render feminist knowledge intelligible to local communities.[113] The work of these civic activists uncovers the democratic potential of Islamic activism. “You cannot say that it’s ‘un-Islamic’ to be democratic,” a former NGO director told me when we met in Hargeisa in 2019. She said that any state – Islamic or otherwise – that has a long history of men serving nearly exclusively as the “custodians of law” is likely to harm women.[114]
Summarizing colonial and state law in Somali history, one civic activist I met said simply, “Men use . . . law [first] to suppress [women] and [then] to set themselves above the law,” which has led women to shari‘a.[115] Advocacy for the rights of women means confronting a paradox: building values related to human rights without being seen as promoting a Western agenda and without resurrecting the nation’s struggle with authoritarianism. The approach to Islam among the women activists I met in Somaliland emerged not only out of their ethical formation and religious piety but also out of hope and strategy, as it does for many others who use shari‘a as a form of legal politics. Islam offers scriptural resources for dismantling patriarchy, but the doors to discourses of state-sponsored feminism and Western-style human rights remain largely closed. Shari‘a gives activists a toolkit of discourses in a place where the standard tools are unavailable or mistrusted. But when put into practice in political and social life, particularly in the carefully orchestrated debates between women’s rights advocates and sheikhs, shari‘a and its interpretations may be just as diverse, unstable, and fragmented as the Somali state itself.
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NOTES
[1] Egor Lazarev, “Laws in Conflict: Legacies of War, Gender, and Legal Pluralism in Chechnya,” 71
(4) World Politics (2019): 667–709.
[2] Tamir Moustafa, Constituting Religion: Islam, Liberal Rights, and the Malaysian State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 136.
[3] Hind Ahmed Zaki, “Law, Culture, and Mobilization: Legal Pluralism and Women’s Access to Divorce in Egypt,” 14(1) Muslim World Journal of Human Rights (2017): 1–25.
[4] Interview 35 with Cabdulmajid, senior government official in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[5] Interview 124 with Najib, former senior government minister in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[6] Interview 45 with Aqil Zaki Yasim, aqil and senior government official in Hargeisa, Somaliland (July 2013).
[7] Interview 22 with Shahab, expatriate consultant in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[8] Article 3 of the 1960 Constitution of the Somali Republic provides for this equality: “All citizens, without distinction of race, national origin, birth, language, religion, sex, economic or social status, or opinion, shall have equal rights and duties before the law.”
[9] David D. Laitin, “Revolutionary Change in Somalia,” 62 Middle East Research and Information Project Reports (1977b): 6–18, p. 7.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Follow-up interview 139 with Fawzia, women’s rights activist and former NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[12] Interview 17 with Amburo, former senior government minister and United Nations official in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[13] Interview 55 with Fawzia, women’s rights activist and former NGO executive director, in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[14] Ibid.
[15] Interview 62 with Bilan, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (July 2013).
[16] Interview 55 with Fawzia, women’s rights activist and former NGO executive director, in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[17] Judith Gardner and Judy El-Bushra, eds., Somalia – The Untold Story: The War through the Eyes of Somali Women (London: Pluto Press, 2004), cited in Mark Bradbury, Becoming Somaliland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 181.
[18] Amnesty International, “Report 1994 – Somalia (1 January 1994),” https://bit.ly/2WV524I; see also “Human Rights Brief: Women in Somalia” (Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, 1 April 1994), https://bit.ly/3rC5MK6 (accessed January 1, 2021).
[19] Interview 55 with Fawzia, women’s rights activist and former NGO executive director, in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[20] Interview 134 with Hatim, United Nations official and adviser to the Somali constitution in Mogadishu, Somalia (reached via telephone from Princeton, NJ) (November 2015).
[21] On the unbroken chain of intervention in Africa, from missionaries to colonial administrators and contemporary aid workers, see Makau Mutua, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
[22] Interview 62 with Bilan, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (July 2013).
[23] Interview 119 with Abubakr, NGO finance manager in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[24] Interview 14 with Maxamed, independent researcher and consultant in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[25] Interview 37 with Sultan Mansoor, sultan in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[26] Interview 125 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[27] Interview 14 with Maxamed, independent researcher and consultant in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[28] Interview 52 with Sheikh Zaki, sheikh and former senior judiciary official in Hargeisa, Somaliland (July 2013).
[29] Interview 15 with Evelyn, United Nations official in Garowe, Puntland (conducted by telephone from Hargeisa, Somaliland) (June 2013).
[30] Follow-up interview 94 with Jeff, aid worker and consultant in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[31] Interview 12 with Daniel, expatriate lawyer and NGO program manager in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[32] Interview 32 with Axmed, lawyer and university lecturer in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[33] Interview 62 with Bilan, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (July 2013).
[34] Interview 78 with Majda, lawyer and human rights activist in Mogadishu and Hargeisa (conducted in Nairobi, Kenya) (July 2013).
[35] Interview 65 with Jen, expatriate aid worker in Nairobi, Kenya (conducted by telephone from Hargeisa, Somaliland) (July 2013).
[36] Interview number removed for anonymity.
[37] Asifa Quraishi-Landes, “Secular Is Not Always Better: A Closer Look at Some Women Empowering Features of Islamic Law,” Policy Brief No. 61 (Washington, DC: Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, June 2013); Tamir Moustafa, “Islamic Law, Women’s Rights, and Popular Legal Consciousness in Malaysia,” 38(1) Law & Social Inquiry (2013): 168–188; Asifa Quraishi-Landes, “Who Says Shari‘a Demands the Stoning of Women? A Description of Islamic Law and Constitutionalism,” 1(1) Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Law (2008): 163–178. On the relationship among culture, law, rights, and feminism, see Cyra Akila Choudhury, “Beyond Culture: Human Rights Universalisms Versus Religious and Cultural Relativism in the Activism for Gender Justice,” 30 Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice (2015): 226–267; Mark Fathi Massoud, “Rights in a Failed State: Internally Displaced Women in Sudan and Their Lawyers,” 21 Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice (2006): 2–12.
[38] Interview 47 with Jamila, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (July 2013).
[39] Interview 128 with Omera, NGO project manager in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[40] On aid groups’ legal reform strategies, see Alejandro Bendaña and Tanja Chopra, “Women’s Rights, State-Centric Rule of Law, and Legal Pluralism in Somaliland,” 5(1) Hague Journal on the Rule of Law (2013): 44–73.
[41] On the extent to which constitutional judicial review promotes social activism and protects minority rights in the United States, see Robert A. Dahl, “Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy Maker,” 6 Journal of Public Law (1957): 279–295; Alexander M. Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Gerald N. Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change?, Second Edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
[42] The equality clause of the 2012 Provisional Constitution of the Federal Republic of Somalia indicates that the state “may not discriminate … on the basis of … gender” (Article 11.3). The equality clause of the 2001 Constitution of the Republic of Somaliland indicates that “all citizens … shall enjoy equal rights … and shall not be accorded precedence on grounds of …gender” (Article 8.1).
[43] Interview 33 with Salaam, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[44] “The laws of the nation shall be grounded on and shall not be contrary to Islamic Sharia.” Article 5.2, Constitution of the Republic of Somaliland, 2001.
[45] Interview 34 with Cabdi, former political prisoner and retired NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[46] Interview 33 with Salaam, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[47] Interview 3 with Sam, professor in London, England (June 2013).
[48] Interview 5 with Na’im, lawyer and legal consultant in England (conducted by telephone from London, England) (June 2013).
[49] Interview 125 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[50] Follow-up interview 139 with Fawzia, women’s rights activist and former NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[51] Interview 128 with Omera, NGO project manager in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[52] Interview 125 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[53] Interview 138 with Asha, university lecturer and independent consultant in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[54] See, e.g., Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), discussing how women in Egypt invited men to “salons” to discuss pertinent religious issues.
[55] Follow-up interview 108 with Rashida, lawyer and government consultant in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[56] Interview 128 with Omera, NGO project manager in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[57] Interview 33 with Salaam, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[58] Follow-up interview 139 with Fawzia, women’s rights activist and former NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[59] Interview 125 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[60] Ibid. See also Abdulai Abukari, “Education of Women in Islam: A Critical Islamic Interpretation of the Quran,” 109(1) Religious Education (2014): 4–23.
[61] Interview 28 with Nahda, NGO project manager in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[62] Interview 116 with Nisreen, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[63] Interview 125 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[64] Interview 55 with Fawzia, women’s rights activist and former NGO executive director, in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[65] Interview 122 with Xidig, government minister in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[66] Interview 125 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[67] Interview 128 with Omera, NGO project manager in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[68] Interview 29 with Daahir, NGO project manager in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[69] Interview 130 with Ladan, women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[70] Interview 125 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[71] Follow-up interview 140 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[72] Interview 128 with Omera, NGO project manager in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[73] Interview 62 with Bilan, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (July 2013).
[74] Ibid.
[75] Interview 37 with Sultan Mansoor, sultan in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[76] Interview 62 with Bilan, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (July 2013).
[77] Interview 138 with Asha, university lecturer and independent consultant in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[78] Follow-up interview 140 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[79] Interview 141 with Bourhan, NGO project coordinator in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[80] Follow-up interview 140 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[81] Follow-up interview 139 with Fawzia, women’s rights activist and former NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[82] Interview 133 with Stephanie, researcher and author in London, England (July 2014).
[83] Interview 33 with Salaam, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[84] Interview 141 with Bourhan, NGO project coordinator in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[85] Swethaa Ballakhrishnen, Priya Fielding-Singh, and Devon Magliozzi, “Intentional Invisibility: Professional Women and the Navigation of Workplace Constraints,” 62(1) Sociological Perspectives (2019): 23–41.
[86] Interview 128 with Omera, NGO project manager in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[87] Follow-up interview 140 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[88] Interview 128 with Omera, NGO project manager in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[89] Ibid.
[90] Interview 82 with Mille, expatriate aid worker in Mogadishu, Somalia (conducted in Nairobi, Kenya) (August 2013).
[91] Follow-up interview 98 with Tahir, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[92] Interview 128 with Omera, NGO project manager in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[93] Interview 125 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[94] Ibid.
[95] Follow-up interview 139 with Fawzia, women’s rights activist and former NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[96] Follow-up interview 139 with Fawzia, women’s rights activist and former NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[97] Interview 80 with Gul, aid worker in Nairobi, Kenya (August 2013).
[98] Interview 17 with Amburo, former senior government minister and United Nations official in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[99] Interview 33 with Salaam, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2013).
[100] Interview 125 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[101] Interview 125 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[102] Interview 80 with Gul, aid worker in Nairobi, Kenya (August 2013).
[103] Interview 47 with Jamila, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (July 2013).
[104] Interview 62 with Bilan, NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (July 2013).
[105] Interview 130 with Ladan, women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[106] Interview 125 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[107] Interview 131 with Shamsi, women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[108] Interview 125 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[109] Ignác Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, trans. Andras Hamori and Ruth Hamori (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 52 [originally published as Vorlesungen über den Islam (Heidelberg, 1910)].
[110] Follow-up interview 140 with Sohir, NGO executive director and women’s rights activist in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[111] Interview 77 with Khadra, United Nations official in Nairobi, Kenya (July 2013).
[112] Follow-up interview 139 with Fawzia, women’s rights activist and former NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[113] Interview 128 with Omera, NGO project manager in Hargeisa, Somaliland (June 2014).
[114] Follow-up interview 139 with Fawzia, women’s rights activist and former NGO executive director in Hargeisa, Somaliland (March 2019).
[115] Interview 80 with Gul, aid worker in Nairobi, Kenya (August 2013).
