Hidden Problems Involving Gender Inequality:

Hidden Problems Involving Gender Inequality: The Double-Plight of Muslim Women in Europe

The oppression and inequalities that women who live in Muslim countries face in their daily lives has gained increasing media attention in recent years, as Muslim culture in general has come under greater scrutiny. Certainly, the greater global recognition of the extent and severity of the inequalities and injustices women face in these countries is an important step in addressing the issue, but unfortunately this increased attention also helps to obscure another issues. Muslim women living in European countries are trapped not only by the restrictions of their Muslim society, but also by the cultural demands of the larger society of which they are -- and aren't -- a part. Essentially, women from traditional Muslim families are left without either familial or cultural supports, and so are entirely isolated.

This is clearly seen by an examination of the many Muslim women in France from both immigrant families and those that have lived in traditional Muslim communities for generations. Young women from these families are not only subjected to many draconian and abhorrent punishments for perceived transgressions, but they are also decried as "different" and un-French by the people that would be their social peers.

That is, these girls are severely punished at home for anything that appears to be a rejection of their Muslim heritage and/or an adoption of French culture, and they are ostracized from the larger society and their peers due to their obvious Muslim identity and customs. In this way, the isolation of Muslim women occurs from all of those surrounding them.

This isolation even became a conscious and purposeful part of the Muslim culture that developed in France and other parts of Europe. Largely as a backlash against anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments in the country and region, increased fundamentalism and factionalism -- two concepts that almost always occur simultaneously -- began to spread in European and particularly in France. So called "basement imams" in the nineteen-nineties "developed a very mach political discourse on confining the individual."

This confinement isolates women especially, not allowing them to take part in either their own Muslim culture or in the surrounding culture; their heritage in effect not only limits but absolutely eradicates their potentiality in wider society.

There were certain Muslim scholars and political theorists who suggested that gender rights should not be decided by religious tradition -- and indeed not religious tradition (or stated tradition) alone -- but rather must be subject to the times and cultures in which a community lived.

This view is often drowned out in the far more vociferous voices of fundamentalism, however. A stricter interpretation of Muslim tradition and law might actually, as many scholars have asserted, support much greater rights for women and even drastically different methods for determining the extent of those rights than those that are practiced by fundamentalists. But regardless of what the texts, prophets, and traditions of Islam truly say about the rights of women, the fact remains that they are completely subjugated by fundamentalist interpretations of the Muslim religion, and isolated from society because of it.

The isolation that women, and especially young women, experience in this situation is exemplified in contemporary fiction (or semi-fiction) as well; Faiza Guene's novel Kiffe Tomorrow centers around a teenage girl, Doria, who struggles to understand what life is like for other Parisians as she and her mother live at the bottom of the Muslim community, having been abandoned by Doria's father. Her familial situation matches Doria's cultural and gender difficulties; like her father, the world essentially turns its back on her, abandoning her and forcing her to fend for herself. The fact that Doria lives only twenty minute from the Eiffel Tower yet has never actually seen this globally recognizable landmark is a large symbolic example of her isolation from French society, while at the same time she is relegated to a near non-entity in the Muslim community.