This is an edited version of Professor Aslam Fataar’s speech which he delivered as guest speaker at Claremont Main Road Mosque last Friday.
We have been witnessing the devastation associated with the recent spate of gender-based violence and femicide.
The dictionary informs us that femicide is “the intentional killing of a woman by a man because she is female”. Femicide is a gender-based hate crime.
This seems to be an apt description for what we have been witnessing during the last couple of days.
On Saturday, August 24, 2019, UCT student, Uyinene Mrwetyana, was killed while collecting a parcel at the Claremont post office.
Similarly, on Friday, August 30, Leigh Ann Jegels, the boxing champion from East London, was killed by her policeman ex-boyfriend, against whom she had an interdict.
Also on Friday evening August 30, UWC student, Jesse Hess, and her grandfather’s bodies were found in their flat in Parow.
Other recent victims were 14-year-old Janika Mallo, Lynette Volschenk, and Meghan Cremer.
They died because of a great gender-violent calamity that impacts how women have to live, survive and die.
May their innocent blood, martyred in the cause of gender justice, jolt us out of our complacency.
We’ve been listening to the anguished voices of women on public radio, in social media and we’ve heard them at the various pickets, marches and protests.
Our collective breath is taken away by their fear, anxiety and despair. The demand for protection and safety and courageous leadership is now the clarion call of all women.
We must respond to this call, properly, redemptively and transformatively. It cannot be business as usual.
We must now place the conferring of women’s dignity at the centre of our restorative behaviour.
We have to create the conditions for women to live lives of personal bodily freedom, free from violence or its threat.
Protecting women and providing safety must be accompanied by creating conditions for gender parity and equity in our homes, mosques, educational institutions, work participation, and leadership structures.
The first response by government to the current gender-based violence was defensive and callous.
The government twitter handle tweeted out that, “Violence and
abuse against women have no place in our society. Govt (government) is calling on women to speak out and not allow themselves to become victims by keeping quiet. Women who speak out are able to act, effect change and help others”.
The tweet has since disappeared.
How sickening it is to put the onus on the victim. Such a response says as much about the government’s indecision in coming to the defence of women as it does about its inability to target the type of social reform that will protect women and create the conditions for them to live in safety, free from the threat of femicide.
This is a moment of confoundment. We struggle to understand what’s going on and our own role in it. We are exasperated by societal and governance failure.
Us men must interrogate our role and complicity in patriarchal dominance that creates and nurtures the male monsters who perpetrate gender-based violence.
In this sense all men are complicit, and Muslim men, as a specific instance of a broader patriarchal trend, have to now confront our ignorance, complacency and complicity. Ignorance is in fact guilt by omission. Ignorance does not absolve our roles in perpetuating a gender-violent society.
Men must explicitly take a position that gender-based violence will not happen in their name, and take active steps to act on such a position.
The onus is on society, men and women, to hear the cries of women for freedom. The onus is on us to confront what the Qur’an describes in a parable, as that of people who kindle a fire: but as soon as it has illumined all around them, God takes away their light and leaves them in utter darkness, wherein they cannot see.
Deaf, dumb, blind - and they cannot turn back.
It is apparent that a patriarchal misogynistic culture is mired in the darkness of its own doing, its own denials, complacency and complicities.
The Qur’an offers us the metaphor of active, present-minded heart listening - sam’a - as a way of confronting our tone deafness.
Listening with one’s heart and with a conscious mind gives us some chance to disrupt our intuitions and understandings. Perhaps, such listening would enable us to better intuit, understand and act.
Listening with present-mindedness would allow us to discern the deep historical dimensions of genera
lised patriarchal violence in and across the body politic and the ways it is being held up by state and societal violence.
Listening properly would help us understand how gender-based violence affects gender relations and the vulnerable positions of women in society.
Active heart listening, listening with compassion, would per chance make us responsive to Allah’s exhortation.
And how could you refuse to exert yourself (fight) in the cause of God and of the utterly helpless men and women and children?
Most importantly, the spectre of femicide requires us to listen to the utterly helpless women and children as the Qur’an puts it, to listen with the inner depth of our heart, the location where we are able to intuit justice, the justice available to the heart of the human being.
Active listening, however, is the necessary, but not sufficient, condition for pursuing gender justice.
Pursuing the gender jihad means that we, as a community of believing men and women, together, should place the struggle for the dignity of women at the principled and strategic heart of everything we do.
Anything less would mean that we would continue to remain complacent and complicit in the perpetuation of gender-based inequity in our society, a situation which would be contrary to the Qur’anic requirement of conferring dignity on all God’s children.
* Aslam Fataar is professor in sociology of education at Stellenbosch University.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.