women there not only join the congregation in the
mosque but also visit the cemetery. Interestingly,
land for the first mosque to be established at the
Cape was donated by a woman, Saartijie van de
Kaap in 1794, at the end of the period of Dutch
occupation.
Women have started a campaign to be admitted
in all mosques. With the support of male champi-
ons of women’s rights, they have also started the
family ≠ìd congregation in several major centers,
much to the chagrin of those who believe that they
are violating a sacred tradition.
The exclusively male theological councils’ deci-
sions are now being questioned by women, espe-
cially in the realm of family law, for example, issues
of divorce and custody, which they believe to reveal
a male bias. Challenges have been made to other
aspects of Islamic law that are perceived as dis-
criminatory as well. One crucial area has been in
the realm of inheritance, traditionally weighed in
favor of men. Muslim activists are demanding that
inheritance should be shared equally between men
and women and that divorced women should be
provided with maintenance even after the end of
≠idda, the three-month waiting period for Muslim
widows, after which they are allowed to remarry.
Women also demanded and succeeded in obtaining
the right to have input in the drafting of the Muslim
Marriage Bill. An interesting related development
is the recent employment of women counselors by
theological councils to advise families experiencing
marital problems.
Conclusion
A distinctive ethnic and cultural minority, South
Africa’s Muslim women bring the strengths of their
past struggles as Muslims, as Asian and African
immigrants, and as women to the challenges of
nation building in the new South Africa.
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New York 1975 (reprint of the 1936 ed.).Suleman E. DangorTurkeyAt the start of the twenty-first century, Turkey’s
state institutions are increasingly unable to keep
up with the complex changing structure, needs, and
demands of a heterogeneous Turkish society.
Despite strong centrifugal tendencies along ethnic,
religious, and national lines among the population,
Turkish nationalism or its more recent version, the
so-called Turkish-Islamic synthesis, is still pro-
moted as a unifying force (Bozarslan 1996). In its
practical functioning the state has been forced to
take some steps in the field of religious, ethnic, and
women’s rights. Yet attempts by the state and mili-
tary establishment to control opposition movements
such as political Islam and Kurdish nationalist pol-
itics, both movements with a large female con-
stituency, continue to be sources of serious crises
and violence (Çaha 2000, Cizre 1999). In partic-
ular, ethnic minority women in Turkey are con-
fronted with multi-layered forms of oppression and
violence.
At the root of Turkey’s problems lies the process
of nation building. Republican Turkey is a typical
example of a state forging a nation from above. The
founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 and its
official ideology, Kemalism, which prescribed ethno-
nationalism, etatism, and secularism as main pillars
of the political system, represented an important
break with the Ottoman multi-ethnicity. As part of
the broader project of nation building, the status of
women was made into the barometer of Turkish
modernization. Turkish nationalism, however, con-
tained contradictory elements from the very begin-
ning. On the one hand, Turkish citizenship was
defined as an all-embracing concept encompassing
all citizens, regardless of ethnic origin or gender,
granting them equal rights and obligations. On the
other hand, every citizen in republican Turkey, which
according to Andrews (1989) counts at least 47