Those at particular risk of abuse are the members
of the A™madiyya community. A™madìs, members
of a religious group founded in the nineteenth cen-
tury, consider themselves to be Muslim, but ortho-
dox Muslims regard them as heretical. In 1974, a
constitutional amendment introduced by then
Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto declared
A™madìs a non-Muslim minority. Subsequent legis-
lation passed in 1984 made it a criminal offence for
A™madìs to call themselves Muslim, and profess,
practice, and propagate their faith as Muslims.
The blasphemy laws are a major tool used to
harass, intimidate, and detain members of the
minority community or members of the majority
religion who in some way interpret, teach, or de-
bate their religion in a non-orthodox manner. The
blasphemy laws continue to be used by the present
government to arbitrarily detain members of the
minorities. Charges are also filed under those sec-
tions of the penal code specifically directed against
A™madìs and entail trial by the special anti-terror-
ism courts. Women are unable to acknowledge
their religion or speak out against the discrimina-
tion they experience for practicing their faith. They
are also prevented from criticizing practices within
their own community that harm women, for fear of
betraying the community, which already faces
external threat and persecution.
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Ratna KapurSub-Saharan AfricaThe record of freedom of expression of women in
Sub-Saharan Islamic cultures has been mixed and
historically conditioned – that is, if we take free-
dom of expression broadly to include the space of
free articulation of ideas, feelings, opinions, and
identities in verbal, non-verbal, and symbolic forms.
Freedom of expression presumes unfettered
access to the tools and means for the exercise of
sub-saharan africa 181that freedom. Foremost among these are intellec-
tual, linguistic, and literary skills imparted in spe-
cific educational settings. In the majority of Muslim
societies in Sub-Saharan Africa, classical Arabic
and higher realms of Islamic learning were almost
the exclusive preserve of men. As a result, the space
to articulate a particularly woman centered reading
of Islam and women’s place within it has been
undermined by patriarchal control of Islamic learn-
ing and knowledge.
Since the beginning of the democratization pro-
cess in the early 1990s, however, many of these
societies have experienced the emergence of political
Islam with movements such as Izala in Nigeria and
Niger. This development has created new conditions
in which Muslim women have begun to develop
their own initiatives to study classical Arabic and to
understand and use Islam from their own perspec-
tives – ranging from orthodox to liberal and secu-
lar positions (Gamatié-Bayard 1992, Alidou 2000).
In instances where Muslims constitute the pre-
ponderant majority in the nation, as in Niger, Mali,
and Senegal, this Muslim women’s activism rooted
in new readings and uses of Islam has inspired
minority Christian women to engage in similar
efforts to interrogate afresh the place of women in
Christianity itself and in the wider Muslim polity
(Marut 2002, Ganda and Galadima 1992, 3).
Where Muslim women’s readings of Islam in pre-
dominantly Muslim nations have departed from
received patriarchal interpretations, the women
have often been victims of violence and aggression
and subject to accusations of selling out to Western
interests. In nations where Muslims are not in the
majority, in contrast, as in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi,
and South Africa, similar developments among
Muslim women have led to their being associated
not only with Western interests, but also with the
interests of the non-Muslim “other,” namely Chris-
tians, in the nation-state. For example in Kenya, the
(gender) Equality Bill was opposed by most Muslim
men, and some conservative Muslim women’s asso-
ciations supported this particular protest on the
ground that the proposed bill was a Western-
Christian inspired legal document (Mazrui 1999).
Gender disparity within education, however, is
evident not only within the world of Islam, but also
in the more recent domain of secular education.
Religious, colonial, and postcolonial conditions,
including forces of globalization, have combined to
the disadvantage of women in modern schools,
especially at the higher levels. As a result, Muslim
women’s acquisition of ex-colonial languages and
educational qualifications that have become requi-
site in critical areas of public expression such as the