This issue of Agenda was inspired by our late colleague Elaine Salo who before she died saw a critical need for African feminisms to understand, theorise and speak about the injustice, abuses and human rights violations perpetrated against women in the troubled confluence of religion, gender and women's bodily/physical insecurity in many war contexts currently in the world. Particularly, she placed the emphasis on the vulnerability of gender non-conforming people as a result of hegemonic religious belief and practices. Elaine, one of the guest editors of this issue, was with us to discuss the abstracts that were submitted. We considered how the meanings of women's security in intersection with religion, indigenous knowledge and tradition were interpreted by writers in the context of the broader gendered meanings of domestic security of women as well, not just in war. Consequently the issue explores and surfaces different meanings of women's human in/security in the context of religion, how women are casualties of patriarchal interpretations of religion, as well as the holders of power to create conditions of greater security.
Elaine died before the issue was completed. We have missed her Black feminist critique, her situating of the issues in ways that were far sighted and grounded in critical postcolonial feminist terms, and her wry humour. We hope that this issue would have met her expectations and we have dedicated it to her.
The issue ‘Women, religion and security’ takes further the question of the role of religion to either liberate or oppress women and the gravitas that is given by women to spiritual and religious freedom addressed in earlier issues of Agenda. These issues established both the importance of religious doctrine, belief and practice in serving women; women often constitute a majority among religious adherents. Yet, in a population where more than 90% of the population profess religious belonging, women's participation and leadership is not accorded equal status with men. Both sacred texts and practices are accepted as androcentric. These remain issues, imbricated in the questions that writers raise.
Fatima Seedat, guest editor of the issue, highlights the need for feminist theorisation of gendered human security to understand the securitisation of religious women's lives. In the introduction to the issue she writes: “Marriage, sexuality, and the dynamics of the family unit are the strong focus of women’s security concerns in their religious lives. The domesticity of the location of these concerns does not however limit the security concerns to the domestic arena, their ramifications extend into broader social spaces and produce a picture of women’s lives under multiple dimensions of threat.”
The issue breaks new ground with contributions that focus on how women's insecurity is produced in interpretations of militant jihad female identity and the contemporary textual discourses of Islamic law that serve to legitimise the taking of concubines during war. Writers also address the piety that is required of women in the syncretic practices of African Independent and Initiated Churches, even as they experience subordination and economic insecurity, as wives in polygyny and as women.
Quite a few writers have raised the tensions between the freedom of religion as a constitutional right and how this freedom is mediated, exercised and curtailed. The right to spiritual freedom when it involves the right to same sex marriage by a religious practitioner, as in the case of De Lange vs the Bishop of the Methodist Church, demonstrates how few churches have decided to support sexual minorities' needs and choices, and to be open and life supporting, rather than denying life giving care to vulnerable communities. The marginalisation of sexual minorities by religions needs to be critiqued more strongly as it is sharply in conflict with a human rights culture. It is thus with regret that we note that an article in this issue by an initiative that addresses the persecution of LGBTI groups by fundamentalist religion was withdrawn because of the possible consequences of publicity for the consciousness raising work that is being done through workshops that critique religious texts.
Women's endeavours to interpret sacred texts for themselves is not new, however such interpretations have been largely marginalised. From their work we can follow a questioning of misogyny in religious practice and interpretation and taken for granted assumptions that give weight to men's unmediated authority to abuse women, both in war and during the normal course of their lives. The gender-sensitive re-reading of texts provides the basis for religious, social and feminist activism to prevent violence against women and sexual minorities, and to provide families with support by sensitised religious leaders across religious beliefs and structures.
The importance of women as a cultural resource to communities that follow indigenous religious belief and practices in a pluralist society are subjects which writers also address in the issue. The research studies open up the roles performed by women in maintaining domestic security of the family and food security. Women's spiritual and religious roles are easily discounted and undervalued as a result of the hegemony of Christian missionaries and the secular laws of the post-apartheid democratic state which have been criticised for privileging patriarchal authority, ignoring women's performance of customary practices in laws governing traditional authoritiy. Matrifocul centres of traditional power nonetheless exist as important in the process of the socialisation of traditional knowledge, as well as the continuation of the patrilinear family.
The secular law has a role in mediating unjust customs that sanction women's inequality, ignorance and that take away women's right to dignity. In this issue, the example of recent activism by women in India who have called into question the justice of religious practices and discourses that perpetuate the myth of ‘uncleaness’ during menstruation is discussed.
The terms and conditions which women are required to accept to fulfill their religion's requirement or demands of piety are demonstrated in the articles in the issue as often being extreme and disempowering. As Rosemary Chikafa-Chipiro notes, feminist activism needs to call attention to the abuses that are perpetrated against women in the guise of ‘religious truth’, as the law is slow to intervene in religious matters.
Agenda is indebted to Elaine Salo and Fatima Seedat, the guest editors of the issue, “for taking us a little further than we were before in understanding the securitisation of women’s religious lives and the impacts of religion on women’s security”.
We hope that the issue opens up the contemporary relationships between the gendered meanings of in/security and precarity and religion/ culture for further analysis and engagement by feminists and gender activists.