Human Rights and Spirit
By boona cheema
“Own country? Of what feather is that bird? And tell me, good people, where does one find it? The place that one is born in, that soil which has nurtured us. If that is not our country, can an abode of a few days hope to be it? And then, who knows, we would be pushed out of there and told to find a new home, a new country. I am at the end of my life. One last flutter and therell be no more quarreling about countries. And then, all this uprooting and resettling doesn’t even amuse anymore.” Ismat Chugati, Roots
In the last 50 years, some 100 new nations have emerged, each creating their own refugees. Mass migrations have occurred across borders. Hunger, death, rape, murder, theft, loss of family and home have become the visible horrors of this mass migration. Especially for women, this has become an almost impossible situation. Usually as non-actors of civil strife, without self-defense, their human rights have been violated by governments, and at the hands of private armies, and by fathers, sons, and brothers of their villages and towns.
As a person whose spirit connection to the world comes out of a faith-based tradition, the spirit and human rights connection for me is deeply rooted in the faith of my birth and my early exposure to the great writings in the Sikh holy book, The Guru Granth Sahib. It is important for me to share some of the tenets of this great religion and its unusual stand on the role of women and their rights in the early 16th century.
Rejecting the idea of female inequality, Guru Nanak wrote, “Man is nourished in the womb and born from a woman. - Friendship is made with a woman and civilization originates from a woman.” Guru Nanak also forbade the practice of widow immolation and encouraged widows to remarry, otherwise unheard of in those days. He was also gravely concerned with the practice of female infanticide. And the holy book forbids any Sikh to associate with anyone who has killed a girl child. In Sikh culture, women are regarded as equal and are not prevented from fulfilling their potential through education, religion, or profession.
On human rights, the other tenet is, “The sign of a good man is that he always seeks the welfare of others.” This welfare of others is further translated into action throughout the cornerstones of the religion, the concept of seva. The early Sikh theologian Bhai Gurdas writes in the holy book, “Service of one’s fellow is a sign of divine worship.
“Women’s steps to spirituality, even in Sikhism, comes from the same patriarchal groups and institutions that give them their place in society, politics, arts, and the workplace, and this spirituality is developed alongside the subjugation and the invalidation. Yet in times of war, this spirituality seems to become independent, and the spirit of women begins to be at the center of renewal. What is of deep concern here is that, politically, women only play a peripheral role. But spiritually, they bring life back after destruction, playing a central role in the community.
In the oration of the holy scriptures they found life affirmation, they made us younger girls listen to the writings and then they would give us their feminist version of the scriptures, knowing well enough that if and when the killings stopped, they would again be relegated to second place in society, religion, and culture. But for now in the freedom of torture, they were the spirit of hope and future, and they would lead the new nation to a different covenant on women.
Growing up in a family that was uprooted during the partition in India, and at a time when each woman feared for her personal safety, women were attacked, abducted, and forced to convert. During this time, it seems that women depended on their faith, they feminized the Sikh holy scriptures upon which the women in my family seemed to pin all hope. Spiritual women believed that in their religion women were regarded as equal, and somehow they would escape the horrors of the partition. While this did not come true, their spirit stood strong and the message to fight and change India remained in their consciousness. The Constitution of the newly formed India shows this to be true.
I grew up around stories of the great strength of these women and their spirit which added to the new country. Often I have also been witness to the loss of hope and spirit that comes with violations of human rights inflicted by not only strangers, not just men in uniform, but neighbors and friends turned enemy overnight. This betrayal deeply wounded the spirit of women, and yet it is this very same woman spirit that healed the wounds and rebuilt the community.
During the Vietnam war, I participated with Vietnamese nuns in the early years of Thich Nhat Hanh’s anti-war movement in
In the United States, I have lived and worked with street homeless women for the last 28 years. The undeclared war in our streets is extremely brutal to women, especially homeless women who suffer from similar human rights violations as do women in areas of conflict. Rape and beatings go hand in hand with urban homelessness. Women living in the streets of America often live lives similar to the refugees from a war or other conflict, much of their experience goes unreported, and these human rights violations seem to have no place in the discussion on human rights in this country. But it is their spirit that, while dealing with survival issues, they are also in the forefront of the homeless civil rights movement. I have met some women of great spirit who have overcome and repeated violations of their bodies, mind, and spirit, and have rebuilt their lives and helped politicize this issue in their communities.
In 1947, I was two years old. For the next five years, every member of our family was uprooted and then had to resettle. It was during the stories of that time and the readings of the holy book as a community rededicating itself to the core values and principles of our faith that I formed my earliest ideas about spirit and its connection to the universe. And in my youthful universe, I knew that great harm had been done to women. It was in the women circles that stories were shared about aunts and nieces and sisters and grandmothers, the losses of land and jewels and home, and then more in a whisper, the rapes and murders and kidnappings. I remember how much I wanted to change the world and make it without violence against women, and there my spirit moved to action and service.
It pains me much that in the 50th year of the signing of the human rights declaration the situation is not much better. What surprises me most is the silence of the great faiths and religions of the world on the issues of displaced and homeless women, the violations of their basic human rights, and the continued spiritual invalidation of women by the patriarchs of the church, synagogue, and temple.
As women are beginning to discover specific ways in which their experience and views have not been taken into consideration, they have begun to review the traditions to try and recover what is life-giving to them. By finding neglected elements in our respected traditions, much like the women in my family did, we can re-interpret and re-establish claims for just and equitable treatment of women.
At the eve of the obvious rewriting of the human rights covenant from a feminist perspective, a recovery of religious wisdom must happen, making them hospitable to women. We are living in a time of global transition. The women’s movement is also becoming globalized. The sisters in Africa know the conditions the sisters in India are living under. Religion provides a vision for humanity, but also needs to provide a constructive force to recreate equality and harmony.
There are many women who have difficulty in tuning into these thoughts and spiritual problems, because the daily struggle for life and survival against death, in all its varied forms, demands all the energy they can get. Among them, and even right in their vanguard, are women like Domatilla de Chungara from the tin mines of Bolivia. She organized a hunger strike in the midst of starvation. Or Rigoberta Menchu, or the women of the Playa de Mayo, the Filipino nuns and their fight against prostitution.
“For centuries, we women have been possessed by spirit that used to cripple us. The evil spirit of female weakness caused us to be bowed down and bent double. And so I see before me the mother in Soweto, bent double with grief over her child shot down. She had brought it into the world hoping for a better time. But then at once she straightened up and began to praise god. The spirit that used to cripple us is standing up straight, and we are beginning to think and act. The picture I see before me now: mothers in the Pacific, after nuclear tests have given birth to jellyfish babies and are screaming from the root tops. You spoilers of the ocean, our beaches, our children. Test your weapons over Washington
A global framework with a spiritual perspective needs to be emphasized in addressing the issue of women’s human rights. There needs to be a women’s agenda in the spirit and human rights conversation.
boona cheema is the executive director of Building Opportunities for Self – Sufficiency (BOSS). First published at the BOSS Website: http://www.self-sufficiency.org Reprinted with permission.