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The following are excerpts from an interview with the Bahraini researcher Dhiyaa Musawi, which was broadcast by Al-Arabiya TV on September 21, 2005
Dhiyaa Musawi: First of all, of course I don't think that Islam is against women. Second, I think part of the crisis in the Arab world is that no Arab country is ruled by a woman. I believe women can even be rulers, not only judges. This is my ideological belief, which I can support with jurisprudence. Some scholars, like Sheik Shams Al-Din and Fadhlallah called for that. We believe that women...
Interviewer: You mean women should be rulers?
Dhiyaa Musawi: Yes. The problem is that we still live in a male-dominated society.
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The Western world thinks about reaching Mars in 2015, while we are still debating the question of women driving, like some of our brothers in Saudi Arabia are doing.
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Interviewer: You are not trying to make points with the West?
Dhiyaa Musawi: Absolutely not. I wish for a future and for coexistence between people. I believe in the verse "Call (people) to the way of the Lord with wisdom and goodly exhortation," and not in calling (people) to the way of the Lord with goodly explosives belts, or bombing them in the most gracious way.?
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We must strengthen the common ground in the mentality of the believing youth, instead of allowing Muslims to develop an outlook based on explosive historical stories, so they will explode in New York, London, or any other place.
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Interviewer: You often call for opening up to the West. You emphasize this.
Dhiyaa Musawi: I do not advocate opening up to the West. I call for understanding the West rather than dissolving in it. There is a difference.
Interviewer: If I called for opening up to the West, nobody would accept it, so you are trying to...
Dhiyaa Musawi: I am not trying to dress it up with pretty words. The West exists. I object to the constant hunt for the Western "demon". The West is not all black. The West has anthropology, and human sciences. Many of our sheiks, when they are sick, they go to hospitals in Britain, America, France, and so on. We can adopt the Japanese mentality. Despite the catastrophes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese benefited from the Western organizational ingenuity, from the institutions in the society, from the rule of law and so on. They adopted all these, and began to produce... This is the difference between us and them. When we hate someone, we see only as a demon. We see him as a jinn. At the same time, as you can see, everything you read, the media, the press – it all comes from the West. Yet I do not advocate Westernizing Muslim society.
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