Ghobadzadeh Naser
University of Sydney, Australia.
Commonw Comp Polit. 2010;48(3):301-19. doi: 10.1080/14662043.2010.489747.
Canadian Muslim women, as opposed to their Australian counterparts, have attained prominent social status not only in terms of their contribution to electoral politics but also in other political spheres. With its focus on the Sharia debate, this paper investigates one potential explanation for this difference. Challenging Okin's feminist perspective, which claims that multiculturalism is an undesirable policy for emancipation, it is argued that multiculturalism facilitates agency of female members of Muslim communities. A comparative examination of the Sharia debate between the two secular countries of Canada and Australia demonstrates that the former's more robust multicultural polity in terms of responding to requests to adopt the Sharia have not only culminated in Muslim women's empowerment but have enhanced their political representation. In contrast, Australian Muslim women have neither had the opportunity to articulate their position with regard to Sharia nor to contribute to an important issue that could have empowered them.
与澳大利亚的穆斯林女性不同，加拿大的穆斯林女性不仅在对选举政治的贡献方面，而且在其他政治领域都获得了显著的社会地位。本文聚焦于伊斯兰教法辩论，探讨造成这种差异的一个潜在原因。本文挑战了奥金的女权主义观点，即多元文化主义是不利于解放的政策，认为多元文化主义有助于穆斯林社区女性发挥能动性。对加拿大和澳大利亚这两个世俗国家之间的伊斯兰教法辩论进行的比较研究表明，加拿大在回应采用伊斯兰教法的要求方面具有更强有力的多元文化政策，这不仅使穆斯林女性获得了赋权，还增强了她们的政治代表性。相比之下，澳大利亚的穆斯林女性既没有机会表达她们对伊斯兰教法的立场，也没有机会参与一个本可赋予她们权力的重要议题。
