Nazlin has once more made history and her hard work has been noted and unknown to her, been profiled as a case study on an entire chapter by the university of pennsylvania, usa, in the ‘pennsylvannia studies …
Nazlin has once more made history and her hard work has been noted and unknown to her, been profiled as a case study on an entire chapter by the university of pennsylvania, usa, in the ‘pennsylvannia studies in human rights series’ published by university of pennsylvannia press, in the volume titled ‘gender and culture at the limit of rights’ edited by doroty l. Hogdekinson professor and chair of the department of anthropology at rutgers university usa in chapter nine titled ‘muslim women, rights discourse and the media in kenya’ authored by professor ousseina d. Alidou. The volume is described in the words of the editor professor dorothy l. Hodgeson as follows,
“The volume is an inter-disciplinary collection, authored by well known distinguished scholars and examines the potential and limitation of women’s rights as human rights framework as a strategy for seeking gender justice drawing detailed case studies from the USA, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.
Contributors to the volume explore specific social histories, political struggles, cultural assumptions and gender ideologies in which rights based protocols that have produced certain rights or reframed long-standing debates and perceptions in the language of rights. The essays address gender specific ways in which rights based protocols have been analyzed, deployed and legislated in the past and present and their implications. Contributors speak to central issues on current scholarly and policy debates about gender, culture and human rights from comparative disciplinary, historical and geographical persepectives. This bold agenda is made even more challenging by the focus on gender, particulary on those many interventions that have depicted women as victims and vulnerable to male power. The book provides a timely , well balanced and valuable resource that has been previously missing from the array of text books that could be used in university courses and those interested in human rights sciences consistently focusing on how rights , gender and culture, interact, come into conflict and discursively construct each other while very successfully moving the debate forward, by exploring how rights based interventions presume or transform gender relations.”
IN A NUTSHELL ON NAZLIN, IN THIS UNIVFERSITY OF PENSYLVANIA SERIES ON HUMAN RIGHTS VOLUME TITLED ‘GENDER AND CULTURE AT THE LIMIT OF RIGHTS’ EDITED BY DOROTY L. HOGDEKINSON PROFESSOR AND CHAIR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT RUTGERS UNIVERSITY USA IN THE ENTIRE CHAPTER NINE TITLED ‘MUSLIM WOMEN, RIGHTS DISCOURSE AND THE MEDIA IN KENYA’ AUTHORED BY PROFESSOR OUSSEINA D. ALIDOU, STATES THAT, QUOTE,
“Born in 1967, Nazlin is a woman of modest educational accomplishments. She only completed high school because of her family’s decision to marry her off at an early age. Inspite of this background, she is clearly a brilliant person who has continued to read widely in both the western and Islamic traditions. In the process, she has acquired a degree of consciousness and skills that are rare for Muslim women of her level of formal education. With a sophisticated mastery of both Kiswahili and English, she came to see herself as a translator and mediator, with the ability to read critically the implications of both secular laws and Muslim doctrines. As a result Nazlin was able to delineate the areas of the proposed sexual offenses Bill that were technically problematic. The excerpt of her live radio talk show on the Bill in 2006, Radio Rahma, Mombasa, Kenya, demonstrates her sharp awareness of questions of legal definition, evidentiary procedure and the consequences of Law on public resources.
At the time of this radio talk show in 2006 Nazlin was already a very prominent activist in the Orange democratic movement (ODM), a political party that had emerged in the heat of an acrimonious political contestation over the constitutional referendum in 2005. Partly because of leaders Like Nazlin, the ODM accomplished its objective when the majority of Kenyans voted NO in the referendum. The results of the referendum, in turn, gave Nazlin and the other ODM leaders a new political clout in the Nation. In the aftermath of the referendum, Nazlin declared her intrest to run for the presidency of Kenya then scheduled in 2007. Though she probably knew her chances were slim, she saw the elections as window of opportunity to inscribe the voice of the minority, Kenyan Muslims, even as she articulated politico-economic agendas that were both National and transethnic.
Nazlin has brought to the public domain what has been traditionally considered to be in the private domain. It shows Nazlin’s commitment and dedication as an Islamic activist of limited education, to acquire skills in critical literacy to read and deconstruct not only religious texts but secular materials like legal documents of scientific literature on diseases that have a bearing on their lives. Nazlin has also galvanized media technology towards challenging the hegemony of the non-Muslim majority.
Nazlin shows how secular learning and social skills have been mobilized by Muslim women for religious ends on behalf of Muslim women in particular and the Kenyan Muslim community in large, in the political context of the nation in transition. This Islamist Muslim woman’s voice challenges prevailing deeply entrenched orthodoxies that have defined relations not only between men and women in the Muslim communities and between Muslim women and non- Muslims including their non-Muslim ‘sisters’, the dominant non-Muslim majority misrepresented and misunderstood Muslim women’s reality…that when references are made about Kenyan women, the nuanced experience of minority Muslim women are not taken into account, or perceived as “non-indigenous. For Nazlin, reclaiming their citizenship in a Nation-state that discriminates against them as a religious minority becomes a critical mission. Secondly she feels it is urgent to confront their own community about patriarchal interpretation of Islam and its (misconceived) link to Muslim women’s oppression.
Her activism is shaped by an Islamic framework rather than secular reasoning, which they reject as a constituent of western secularism. Nazlin has galvanized the media and enabled Muslim women to reclaim their citizenship within their own communities and the nation at large.
This dynamic is precisely what makes Nazlin both a Muslim leader and a Kenyan leader. In this process of re-claiming Islam and redefining citizenship, Nazlin is not only galvanizing Muslim women to not only ‘multi-culturalize’’ the human rights regime in their country, but also putting to rest the long held view of Muslim women as passive onlookers. Nazlin has left no doubt that Muslim women are bold agents of change within their own communities and well beyond.” End of quote.
IN A NUTSHELL, ON NAZLIN AND NAZLIN’S FOUNDED MAMOTH ORGANIZATION THE NATIONAL MUSLIM COUNCIL OF KENYA (NMCK –NUR) WHICH IS DETAILED FURTHER HEREIN, THE UNIVFERSITY OF PENSYLVANIA STUDIES ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE PROFESSORS STATES THAT, QUOTE,
“(In the past) institutionally, virtually all Muslim organizational structures in Kenya such as SUPKEM had been entirely male dominated and male centered. The founding of the NMCK, pioneered and chaired by Nazlin Omar Rajput – a Muslim organization with an overwhelming women’s grassroot membership, marked a clear departure from this patriarchal tradition. NMCK sent a clear signal of the determination of Muslim women activists to transform this gendered structures of Kenyan Muslim organizational leadership. The primary mission of the NMCK is to fill the gap of Muslim women’s under- representation created by male-dominated organizations. More important, its goal is to provide an effective mechanism for addressing major societal issues affecting Muslim women and children, including HIV/AIDS, gender disparities, the role of religion in addressing women’s rights, and social justice in their own communities and at large.
NMCK is also active in providing a Muslim women’s perspective on governance. As Nazlin Omar Rajput points out,
“The situation of Muslim women is made all the more invisible due to the lack of accessible information on their status, their priority needs and the factors that contribute to their marginalization. Without reliable gender sensitive information, awareness raising on persistent gender inequalities is undermined and the development for the effective “action for change” programme constrained. Also while a number of Muslim women groups exist, they are geographically scattered, not well organized and are not linked through formal networking arrangements. Instead the interests of Muslim women tend to be represented by male dominated and gender blind organizations acting as umbrella bodies for Muslims, which have no interest nor programmes targeted specifically for Muslim women nor any representation of women throughout the Nation.”
Clearly then, Kenyan Muslim women are beginning to refuse to be part of the patriarchal vision of the unconditional unity of Muslim polity. To them, Muslim unity must arise not only from confronting the non-Muslim ‘other’ on questions of distributive justice, but also from the promotion of a more just relation across gender within the Muslim Ummah itself.” End of Quote.
NAZLIN IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA HUMAN RIGHTS SERIES’ PUBLISHED IN 2011
Nazlin has once more made history and her hard work has been noted and unknown to her, been profiled as a case study on an entire chapter by the university of pennsylvania, usa, in the ‘pennsylvannia studies …
Nazlin has once more made history and her hard work has been noted and unknown to her, been profiled as a case study on an entire chapter by the university of pennsylvania, usa, in the ‘pennsylvannia studies in human rights series’ published by university of pennsylvannia press, in the volume titled ‘gender and culture at the limit of rights’ edited by doroty l. Hogdekinson professor and chair of the department of anthropology at rutgers university usa in chapter nine titled ‘muslim women, rights discourse and the media in kenya’ authored by professor ousseina d. Alidou. The volume is described in the words of the editor professor dorothy l. Hodgeson as follows,
“The volume is an inter-disciplinary collection, authored by well known distinguished scholars and examines the potential and limitation of women’s rights as human rights framework as a strategy for seeking gender justice drawing detailed case studies from the USA, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.
Contributors to the volume explore specific social histories, political struggles, cultural assumptions and gender ideologies in which rights based protocols that have produced certain rights or reframed long-standing debates and perceptions in the language of rights. The essays address gender specific ways in which rights based protocols have been analyzed, deployed and legislated in the past and present and their implications. Contributors speak to central issues on current scholarly and policy debates about gender, culture and human rights from comparative disciplinary, historical and geographical persepectives. This bold agenda is made even more challenging by the focus on gender, particulary on those many interventions that have depicted women as victims and vulnerable to male power. The book provides a timely , well balanced and valuable resource that has been previously missing from the array of text books that could be used in university courses and those interested in human rights sciences consistently focusing on how rights , gender and culture, interact, come into conflict and discursively construct each other while very successfully moving the debate forward, by exploring how rights based interventions presume or transform gender relations.”
IN A NUTSHELL ON NAZLIN, IN THIS UNIVFERSITY OF PENSYLVANIA SERIES ON HUMAN RIGHTS VOLUME TITLED ‘GENDER AND CULTURE AT THE LIMIT OF RIGHTS’ EDITED BY DOROTY L. HOGDEKINSON PROFESSOR AND CHAIR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT RUTGERS UNIVERSITY USA IN THE ENTIRE CHAPTER NINE TITLED ‘MUSLIM WOMEN, RIGHTS DISCOURSE AND THE MEDIA IN KENYA’ AUTHORED BY PROFESSOR OUSSEINA D. ALIDOU, STATES THAT, QUOTE,
“Born in 1967, Nazlin is a woman of modest educational accomplishments. She only completed high school because of her family’s decision to marry her off at an early age. Inspite of this background, she is clearly a brilliant person who has continued to read widely in both the western and Islamic traditions. In the process, she has acquired a degree of consciousness and skills that are rare for Muslim women of her level of formal education. With a sophisticated mastery of both Kiswahili and English, she came to see herself as a translator and mediator, with the ability to read critically the implications of both secular laws and Muslim doctrines. As a result Nazlin was able to delineate the areas of the proposed sexual offenses Bill that were technically problematic. The excerpt of her live radio talk show on the Bill in 2006, Radio Rahma, Mombasa, Kenya, demonstrates her sharp awareness of questions of legal definition, evidentiary procedure and the consequences of Law on public resources.
At the time of this radio talk show in 2006 Nazlin was already a very prominent activist in the Orange democratic movement (ODM), a political party that had emerged in the heat of an acrimonious political contestation over the constitutional referendum in 2005. Partly because of leaders Like Nazlin, the ODM accomplished its objective when the majority of Kenyans voted NO in the referendum. The results of the referendum, in turn, gave Nazlin and the other ODM leaders a new political clout in the Nation. In the aftermath of the referendum, Nazlin declared her intrest to run for the presidency of Kenya then scheduled in 2007. Though she probably knew her chances were slim, she saw the elections as window of opportunity to inscribe the voice of the minority, Kenyan Muslims, even as she articulated politico-economic agendas that were both National and transethnic.
Nazlin has brought to the public domain what has been traditionally considered to be in the private domain. It shows Nazlin’s commitment and dedication as an Islamic activist of limited education, to acquire skills in critical literacy to read and deconstruct not only religious texts but secular materials like legal documents of scientific literature on diseases that have a bearing on their lives. Nazlin has also galvanized media technology towards challenging the hegemony of the non-Muslim majority.
Nazlin shows how secular learning and social skills have been mobilized by Muslim women for religious ends on behalf of Muslim women in particular and the Kenyan Muslim community in large, in the political context of the nation in transition. This Islamist Muslim woman’s voice challenges prevailing deeply entrenched orthodoxies that have defined relations not only between men and women in the Muslim communities and between Muslim women and non- Muslims including their non-Muslim ‘sisters’, the dominant non-Muslim majority misrepresented and misunderstood Muslim women’s reality…that when references are made about Kenyan women, the nuanced experience of minority Muslim women are not taken into account, or perceived as “non-indigenous. For Nazlin, reclaiming their citizenship in a Nation-state that discriminates against them as a religious minority becomes a critical mission. Secondly she feels it is urgent to confront their own community about patriarchal interpretation of Islam and its (misconceived) link to Muslim women’s oppression.
Her activism is shaped by an Islamic framework rather than secular reasoning, which they reject as a constituent of western secularism. Nazlin has galvanized the media and enabled Muslim women to reclaim their citizenship within their own communities and the nation at large.
This dynamic is precisely what makes Nazlin both a Muslim leader and a Kenyan leader. In this process of re-claiming Islam and redefining citizenship, Nazlin is not only galvanizing Muslim women to not only ‘multi-culturalize’’ the human rights regime in their country, but also putting to rest the long held view of Muslim women as passive onlookers. Nazlin has left no doubt that Muslim women are bold agents of change within their own communities and well beyond.” End of quote.
IN A NUTSHELL, ON NAZLIN AND NAZLIN’S FOUNDED MAMOTH ORGANIZATION THE NATIONAL MUSLIM COUNCIL OF KENYA (NMCK –NUR) WHICH IS DETAILED FURTHER HEREIN, THE UNIVFERSITY OF PENSYLVANIA STUDIES ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE PROFESSORS STATES THAT, QUOTE,
“(In the past) institutionally, virtually all Muslim organizational structures in Kenya such as SUPKEM had been entirely male dominated and male centered. The founding of the NMCK, pioneered and chaired by Nazlin Omar Rajput – a Muslim organization with an overwhelming women’s grassroot membership, marked a clear departure from this patriarchal tradition. NMCK sent a clear signal of the determination of Muslim women activists to transform this gendered structures of Kenyan Muslim organizational leadership. The primary mission of the NMCK is to fill the gap of Muslim women’s under- representation created by male-dominated organizations. More important, its goal is to provide an effective mechanism for addressing major societal issues affecting Muslim women and children, including HIV/AIDS, gender disparities, the role of religion in addressing women’s rights, and social justice in their own communities and at large.
NMCK is also active in providing a Muslim women’s perspective on governance. As Nazlin Omar Rajput points out,
“The situation of Muslim women is made all the more invisible due to the lack of accessible information on their status, their priority needs and the factors that contribute to their marginalization. Without reliable gender sensitive information, awareness raising on persistent gender inequalities is undermined and the development for the effective “action for change” programme constrained. Also while a number of Muslim women groups exist, they are geographically scattered, not well organized and are not linked through formal networking arrangements. Instead the interests of Muslim women tend to be represented by male dominated and gender blind organizations acting as umbrella bodies for Muslims, which have no interest nor programmes targeted specifically for Muslim women nor any representation of women throughout the Nation.”
Clearly then, Kenyan Muslim women are beginning to refuse to be part of the patriarchal vision of the unconditional unity of Muslim polity. To them, Muslim unity must arise not only from confronting the non-Muslim ‘other’ on questions of distributive justice, but also from the promotion of a more just relation across gender within the Muslim Ummah itself.” End of Quote.