The Report
How do women experience male authority and guardianship? How do these experiences play out in a girl’s childhood, when she is getting married, in her role as wife or mother, or if the couple divorces? What does it mean for a woman to obey or submit to male authority on a daily basis or over the course of months or years? What happens if the husband or father fails to protect and provide for his wife and/or children—how do they survive?
Women’s Stories, Women’s Lives: Male Authority in Muslim Contexts outlines the findings and selected stories from the Global Life Stories Project, which documented the life stories of 55 Muslim women in nine countries (Bangladesh, Canada, Egypt, the Gambia, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria and the United Kingdom) over a period of three years (January 2011 through December 2013). The Project was undertaken by teams from the nine countries, the Musawah Knowledge Building Working Group, individual Musawah Advocates from different countries and an Indonesian Pilot Project team.
The Life Stories Project is one component of Musawah’s Knowledge Building Initiative on Qiwamah and Wilayah, two concepts that are commonly understood to mandate men’s authority over women and that lie at the heart of contemporary Muslim family laws. Qiwamah includes a husband’s authority over his wife and his responsibility to provide for and protect her. The related concept wilayah relates to male family members’ right and duty to exercise guardianship over female family members and fathers’ privileged guardianship over children. We designed the Knowledge Building Initiative, which comprises theoretical research alongside this life stories documentation, to produce new feminist knowledge about the idea and realities of qiwamah and wilayah that Musawah Advocates can use to promote egalitarian family laws and gender norms.
In this report, we include the following:
1. An introductory section outlining the objectives of the project, the process through which the documentation of life stories took place, the methodological approach and the framework for analysing the stories.
2. Insights and stories from each of the nine countries that participated in the Project, including socioeconomic information, key experiences women had with male authority and guardianship, and short and long excerpts from the life stories themselves.
3. An in-depth overview of the main findings from the stories, taking a transnational approach to understand how male authority and guardianship can manifest in women’s lived experiences.
The annexes include a table with profiles of the resource persons , a glossary of terms used in the report and examples of some of the visual tools arising from the stories that were developed by some of the country teams during the Project.
