5/11/07

The migratory project of women coming
from Muslim countries

Isabella Paoletti*
(Social Research and Intervention Centre, NGO, Perugia, Italy)

The research project involves researchers in SSF Italy and SSF-Spain and the Maroccan Women Group in Rome. The project aims to explore the migratory projects of women coming from Muslim Countries living in Italy and Spain.
The relevance of this topic was highlighted during a talk with the president of the Maroccan Women Group in Rome. Souad Sbai highlighted as many migrant women see Italy as a place where they can finally see acknowledged their rights, but this is often an illusion. They get caught up in family bounds that keep exercising a total control over their lives. If in their own country, with their husband abroad, they had often the householder role and they work, coming in Italy they find themselves segregated at home, they don’t know the Italian language and they are totally isolated. At times, as in the case of Maroccan women, they find worst condition than in their homeland:
“I notice a great difference between the Islamic community in Italy and the population living in Marocco. I immediately realised the extremism of Islam in Italy, in particular the extremism of Italians converted to Islam. Looking at the difference between Muslim people living in Marocco and those living in Italy, it seems to go back of decades. Not even that. It seems to go back directly to the medieval age. There are a few veiled women, women with no rights, women assaulted within their home in Marocco, a lot less than in Italy” (Sbai, 2007,199)
Souad Sbai denounce the hypocrisy of multicultural ideology that allows, through a misinterpreted “respect of other cultures”, to maintain oppressive conditions, in open violation in respect to the Italian Constitution and the Human Rights charter. It is evident that the support to women’s rights coming from Muslim countries is bound to the struggle at a global level between liberal and progressive Islam on one side and fundamentalist and violent Islam on the other; a fight that is essentially internal in the Islamic world, before being a struggle between Western and Eastern world. Souad Sbai point out as a useful research aim, in order to understand and document those conflicts, the history of the Islamic committee in Italy.
We think hat is really important and urgent to understand and document those phenomena in order to contribute to stop regressive processes that, once spread, it would be a lot more difficult to control. In particular the research project has the aim to find forms of support towards women coming from Muslim countries in other to see their rights recognised. This aim is seen also as a form of resistance to Islamic terrorism and to the culture that supports it. Souad Sbai says: “In Marocco women are encouraged to become religious leaders (murshidat), above all in order to keep believers out of the most fundamentalist doctrine. Fifty women were ordered as religious leaders. Here in Italy on the contrary we are not reasoning along these lines. We continue to want not to see the radicalism problem, to want not to face it. We have feminist that justify infibulation, judges who legitimise polygamy. With extremists you cannot make concessions: if they obtain one, they want more, until they impose their law, the Islamic law. (Sbai, 2007, 200)


Bibliography
(hold in the Updates archive. everybodies who needs that, Pl contact Editor).

* President of SSF-Italy

3 comments:

Judith said...

Amazing piece of research. I hope you get the word out to the Italian media. Congratulations, Judith

Anonymous said...

Great! We need some same projects which we can do between SSF ers to prepare some reports even small projects. How can we do that?

Unknown said...

mohammad reza iravani from iran

sociology2007.blogfa.com