Women may transform Islam from within — look at Indonesia

Indonesia's Dr. Siti Musdah Mulia is a name to remember. That's because she is showing Muslim women how to break out of bondage using the words of the Koran.

She was raised in a traditional Indonesian Muslim home and an Islamic boarding school. She was barred from contact with men. She was not allowed to laugh out loud. If she socialized with a non-Muslim, she was made to shower afterwards.

Growing up, she traveled to other Muslim countries. She found there were other ways to understand Islam than the rigid orthodoxy of her upbringing. The first Indonesian woman to receive a PhD. in Islamic political thinking, she has become a significant force in Indonesia and elsewhere for Muslim women's rights. She is a researcher and lecturer in Indonesia's Ministry of Religious Affairs. In 2007 she received the International Women of Courage award from then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Mulia is one of several courageous Muslim feminists in non-Arab and Arab countries who are challenging conservative male interpretations of Islam. As Isobel Coleman, a leading American authority on Islamic feminism, and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me: "Half of those men have never read the Koran in their own language."

Mulia is one of several Muslim women in Arab and non-Arab Muslim countries profiled in a significant new book by Dr Coleman, "Paradise Beneath Her Feet — How Women are Transforming the Middle East."

Instead of blatantly waving the banner of democracy, certain to raise charges of being tools of Western cultural imperialism, these women are quietly working within the culture, rather than against it, citing progressive interpretations of Islam itself as justification for women's empowerment, particularly in education and the workplace.

Dr. Coleman applauds the work of a global women's movement, Musawah ("equality" in Arabic) in researching the laws of Islam upon the seventh century arrival of Islam in Arabia. They prohibited the killing of girl babies, upheld the right of women to own property, the right of women to choose their own husbands, to impose conditions on the marriage, to divorce their husbands. They entitled women to an education, to dignity and respect, and the right to think for themselves.

As the largest Muslim country in the world, Mulia's homeland of Indonesia has experienced its surge of Islamic fundamentalism, as has the neighboring Muslim country of Malaysia. But both are non-Arab countries. Both are democracies that have avoided the religious extremism of the Arab world. In many respects, Indonesia today is a showplace of how the nation has prospered by the advancement of women in education and the workplace.