Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
In a 2008 interview, a founding member of the organization told me that “not much
happened with Karamah until 9/11,” and it remained very small with “only two or
three people” in its early years. But after 2001 the organization became more formally
structured, and for the first time it began doing advocacy work around civil rights is-
sues in the United States. While the organization remains “nonpolitical,” meaning that
it does no legislative lobbying or electoral activism, Karamah has presented several
consciousness-raising and educational activities around women's rights in the United
States. This kind of activism focused around gender stands in stark contrast to the work
carried out by CAIR, much of which has not centered on gender.
Based on the vastly different women's participation between them, there appears to
be a de facto gendered division of labor between CAIR and Karamah. By this, I mean
thatpeopleworkingatKaramahbelievethatCAIR(andsimilar,largeMuslimAmerican
advocacy organizations) do not meet the needs of women in the community. Therefore,
organizations focused on gender must help fill that need with a staff that is almost ex-
clusivelywomen.Ilearnedinmyinterviewwithafoundingmemberoftheorganization
that the Board of Directors decided in late 2002 or early 2003 to narrow the organiza-
tion's focus from civil rights generally to women's rights in particular. At that time, the
board felt that “no one is really watching the store about women's rights.” She went on:
[S]o we wanted to go back to that [working exclusively on women's rights].
Especially since Muslim women were having issues with marriage and divorce,
immigration, abuse, et cetera, and no one was really caring about those issues.
So we decided that we are a women's organization that for now will focus on
that, since others are doing the heavy lifting in the other field.
This respondent told me that while the organization doesn't coordinate its activities
directly withCAIRoranyotheradvocacy organization, sheandtheboard“receive their
emails” and the organizations are in contact with one another occasionally. So while
there is not a formal division of labor along gendered lines and no specific coordination
between CAIR and Karamah on gender issues, clearly the lack of attention to women's
issuesfromCAIRinformedKaramah'sdecisiontoworkinthatniche.Basedonthedata
on women's participation at CAIR and at Karamah, there are quite sharp differences in
the involvement of women between these two organizations.
Perhaps not surprisingly, documents from Karamah indicate that domestic violence is
a primary issue for the organization, and they engage in sustained campaigns designed
to impact private as well as public spaces to confront this issue. Karamah maintained a
webpage specific to the resources it provides on domestic violence (Karamah 2004a).
Together with the Asian and Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence, in 2004
Karamah held a “National Summit of American Muslim Women Leaders” (Karamah
