In a tiny shanty in Sultan Shahi in Hyderabad's old city, a group of 10 and 15-year-old girls is drawing. One drawing makes artist and and Deccani-Urdu poet Jameela Nishat stop in her tracks.
"Isn't something missing?" she asks the 14-year-old, about the bird drawn without wings. The teenager promptly draws a cage over the bird. In the next day's class, Jameela asks them to answer "Main kaun hoon". "Nothing" was the only, and seemingly, most natural response. Jameela says she made her beginning on that note. With young girls who believed they were 'nothing'.
Across India, from Hyderabad to Pune, Lucknow to Kolkata, educated Muslim women like Jameela — artists, activists, teachers and doctors — are conducting awareness drives among poor women in Muslim slums in cities fashioning change in the subtlest of ways. Heels firmly dug in, they have their task cut out, fighting both illiteracy and political agendas to keep women illiterate. They teach hygiene, physiology, reproductive cycles on the one hand, constitutional rights on the other. They talk identity and training, doing what it takes to help impoverished Muslim women think for themselves.
"Hunar, hisab, himmat is the development agenda," says Pune-based Razia Abdur Rahim Patel who works with Muslim women across Maharashtra, having started in the early 1990s in a single slum cluster in Pune.
Now with a team of 20, Patel says skill-training, understanding basic money transactions and creating self-esteem among slum dwellers is focus. "Political leadership failed us. There's a huge gap between leaders' agenda and people's agenda. We are creating social leadership at the community level," says the 48-year-old on phone.
http://newageislam.com/muslim-women-fight-for-rights/islam,-women-and-feminism/d/2546
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2:42 AM
Moderate Islamist here
