Finding ‘a solution to closed doors’
During a lighthearted moment rife with serious undertones, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Divinity School gently corrected her interpreter during a presentation at Andover Hall. In a discussion last Wednesday titled “Women’s Rights in a Man’s World,” featuring Kholoud Al-Faqih, the first female judge to hold a seat on a Shariah court in the Middle East, her translator said in delivering her remarks in English that she had been chosen the most influential woman in the Islamic World in 2009. Al-Faqih quickly intervened in Arabic. Her translator then corrected his statement, saying she had been chosen the most influential “person.” The change drew loud applause from the crowd. Al-Faqih described her path to the Shariah courts in Ramallah on the West Bank and her ongoing struggle to make the equal participation of women in the region a reality — the need to “find solutions,” she said, to “closed doors.” (Shariah, the...