Discrimination in the Name of Religious Freedom: The Rights of Women and Non-Muslims after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan

Government policy since independence has by and large disregarded Sudan’s multi-religious character through continuous Islamisation and Arabisation processes that have fuelled the civil war. International considerations regarding religious pluralism and the accommodation of different religious communities were at the forefront in the peace negotiations. The study outlines Islamic actors’ perception of non-Muslims’ rights after the comprehensive peace agreement (2005), including the rights of apostates. Also, the study elaborates how non-Muslims themselves perceive their rights within the frame of Islam. In their eagerness to include marginalised religious groups, Sudanese and international peacebuilders ignored gender issues during the negotiations. In the name of religious freedom, the CPA and the national interim constitution have left the civil rights of women to the country’s religious communities – Islamic, Christian, and traditional African beliefs. Muslim and non-Muslim leaders alike perceive this as an intrinsic religious right. Civil rights such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, maintenance and financial custody of children, and alimony are perhaps the most tangible and important in the daily lives of “ordinary” Sudanese women. Yet, the CPA and the national interim constitution have not defined how the religious and tribal family laws that regulate women’s civil rights are being and should be formed and applied in today’s Sudan. Sudanese woman are granted different civil rights depending on which religious or tribal community they belong to. This study outlines the main discriminatory features in what has become a complicated patchwork of plural legalities for Sudanese women since the peace agreement. Religiously defined laws in and by themselves are not necessarily discriminatory against women, but this plural legal system does not guarantee all Sudanese women equal civil rights as enforced in today’s Sudan. The study shows that there are ongoing debates within the religious communities towards maintaining or changing the discriminatory features of religious and tribal family laws. Despite the fact that most Sudanese elite women deem their current “rights status” as discriminatory, they do not demand a secular law on women’s civil rights. They promote “changing from within” by reinterpreting and transforming the religious and tribal laws in a more gender equal direction

Satellitization of Arab Media : Perceptions of Changes in Gender Relations

Artikeln handlar om hur studenter i östra Amman i Jordanien upplever relationen mellan global television och sociala förändringar i genus relationer. Studien bygger på en enkät besvarat av 946 muslimska studenter, fokusgrupp diskussioner och individuella intervjuer med 44 muslimska studenter i 2009, 2010 och 2013. Materialet analyseras i ljus av kultivationsteori, moralpanik- och receptionsteori. Studien visar att många studenter menar att TV-tittande gör att många ser "verkligheten" genom televisionsprogrammen de ser på. En annan konklusion av studien är att många studenter tolkar televisionsprogrammen så att de kan ge dem möjlighet att klarar av sina egna liv. En tredje konklusion är att många studenter upplever moralisk panik och ser det globaliserade televisionsutbudet som ett attack på kulturella värden. Andra studenter igen tycker att det de uppfattar som det liberala budskapet i det globaliserade utbudet är positivt för den sociala utvecklingen i Jordanien. Många studenter upplever att det turkiska och amerikanska utbudet har en påverkan på genusrelationer i deras lokala samhälle. Denna påverkan uppfattas av många som "positivt" och av andra som "negativt".This article explores how students living in East Amman in Jordan perceive a link between global television entertainment and social changes, particularly changes in gender relations. The study relies on a questionnaire distributed among university students in Amman in 2009 and 2010 with 946 Muslim respondents, and focus group discussions and individual interviews with 44 Muslim students living in East Amman in 2013. The theoretical framework for the discussion is cultivation theory, moral panic, and audience reception. The main conclusion from this study is that many students believe that watching television makes viewers see ‘reality’ in view of TV programs. Another conclusion is that students seem to tailor their use of television according to their own needs. A third conclusion is that many students experience moral panic and see global television as an attack on cultural values. Other students, however, welcome global television’s transmission of what they consider new liberal ideas. The students’ experience is that television entertainment products such as Turkish and American films and series, have an actual impact on social changes linked to gender relations in the East Amman society. The impact of global TV on local society is envisioned as being either “good” or “bad”

Vigselrättens symbolvärde

Religionsfriheten är viktig att värna om, men också den svenska lagen om individens rättigheter. Frågan är vilka konsekvenser det får när staten ger vigselrätt till religiösa samfund som utfärdar parallella äktenskapskontrakt

Expressing Religiosity in a secular society : the relativisation of Faith in Muslim Communities in Sweden

This article discusses religion in public space and the case study is the Muslim minorities in Sweden. The discussion deals with secularization trends within the Muslim communities in Swedish society in view of the notion of counter-secularization as a fixed and unchanged form of religious expressions in contemporary public life. What happens in the Muslim communities as Muslims of various cultural backgrounds and religious orientations meet and interact in a new secular context? The article argues that similarly as the 19th and 20th century Christian reform movements opened up for a relativisation of faith and thus to a certain extent initiated a secularization process, a relativisation of faith is at present an on-going process in Muslim communities in Sweden. Of the three definitions on secularization, promoted by Jose Casanova, secularization as ‘differentiation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms’, ‘marginalisation of religion to a privatised sphere’, and ‘the decline of religious belief and practices’, the Muslim practice in Sweden indicate an adherence to these two notions of the relation between “church and state”. As for the last definition of secularization; ‘the decline of religious belief and practices’, which has to do with private religious practices, many Muslims would regard themselves as religious without claiming a public role for religion, similarly as many Christians in Sweden. Furthermore, many of the traits considered to be “religious”, might as well be attempts on protecting a particular cultural context rather than being signs on increased religion as such

Er Muslimske Kvinner Undertrykt?

Denna boken diskuterar de "problematiska" genusfrågorna i den muslimska gruppen i Norge och Sverige

Multiculturalism and Pluralism in Secular Society : Individual or Collective Rights?

This paper discusses multiculturalism in view of collectivistic cultural structures in immigrant communities. Women in religious minority communities are ruled according to collectivistic structures as it comes to marriage, divorce, and children custody. Some Muslims leaders demand a plural legal, where minority communities can live according to their collectivistic nomos. In contrast some Muslim women organisation tend to reject this claim regarding it as opposed to equal individual right for every citizen