Uganda signed the Maputo Protocol--a key women's rights treaty in Africa--in 2003. Since then the landmark treaty has run into religious arguments against Western influence and abortion. Fifth in a series on African women and the rule of law.

Truth is often said to be the first casualty in wartime. But if the real truth is told, it is women who are the first casualties. In conflict zones, the United Nations children's agency UNICEF recently observed, sexual violence usually spreads like an epidemic. Whether it is civil war, pogroms, or other armed conflicts, all too often women's bodies become part of the battlefield. The victims of large-scale sexual atrocities range from baby girls to old women.

President of the United Republic of Tanzania H.E. Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete signed UNIFEM’s Say NO to Violence against Women campaign on Saturday 24 May 2008 in Dar es Salaam. At a colourful ceremony at Mnazi Mmoja Grounds, the president led more than 2,000 people from government ministries and institutions, universities, schools, women’s organizations, unions, the UN, and development partners to add their names to the campaign.

The United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, managed by UNIFEM on behalf of the UN system, issued its 2008 global annual call for proposals to support national and local initiatives working to end violence against women in the developing world and countries in transition on 28 April 2008.

Spain has signed on to UNIFEM’s Say NO to Violence against Women campaign (www.SayNOtoViolence.org). Today, during a ceremony in Madrid, Bibiana Aído, Minister of Equality, added her name on behalf of the Spanish Government in the presence of UNIFEM Executive Director Inés Alberdi. UNIFEM Goodwill Ambassador Nicole Kidman, who is the spokesperson of the campaign, joined the ceremony live via satellite link from Nashville.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/378/48557woman.jpgIn addition to the psychological trauma of sexual violence, Miriam Madziwa argues that the violence is likely to have an adverse effect on women's participation in politics into the future.
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There is haunting weariness in Precious Zhove's eyes as she recounts events leading to her fleeing her home in Mberengwa in Zimbabwe's southern region. Clutching at her 18-month-old baby, she relives the horror of the day war veterans, ZANU PF supporters, and soldiers descended on her homestead looking for her husband Joab Gumbo, who contested to be a councilor under a Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) ticket.

"I was trying to tell them I did not know where my husband was since it was in the afternoon. They grabbed my baby, this one here and tied a sack around her waist then one of them started swinging her while holding her by the legs.”

"They said she was an MDC baby so they were going to take her away from me. They said that way me and my husband would have another baby, a Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) baby this time, because they don't like MDC people, and they are sell-outs."

While she pauses to catch her breath, she sighs, "Oh not again," and shifts the baby on her lap. The baby has no nappy, so her skirt has become wet. She explains the baby has no nappies or warm clothing. "I didn't have time to pack anything. The moment my husband returned home we left."

Zhove’s story is just one of many I have listened to in recent weeks as more and more families in rural Matabeleland and Midlands flee from harassment, intimidation, and beatings characterising the post March 29 period in Zimbabwe.

Media show images of injuries caused by the brutal attacks. The footage and reports are frightening. Burnt buttocks, breasts severed, limbs broken, and backs festering with wounds from plastic burns. Stories of pregnant women having their stomachs cut open or men young enough to be their grandsons raping elderly women.

Yet, away from the cameras, audio recorders, and notebooks there is emotional and psychological trauma that victims endure in stoic silence. Zhove is lucky to be out of physical harm's way. However, she is in continuous emotional turmoil. Her conscience gnaws at her heart over the fate of her two school-going children left behind in Mberengwa.

"I don't know what they are eating. I don't know whether they are going to school. I'm not even sure if they are still alive. I pray all the time that they are safe and that I will see them again soon.”

“I wonder sometimes whether I should have stayed with my children. If the war vets came back and killed me, at least my children would know my fate. Right now they don't even know I am here."

Broken bones heal with time if the victims are fortunate enough to access medical treatment. The verbal abuse and the psychological impact of the beatings, sexual abuse, and public humiliation will haunt these women forever. It reminds me of the ditty: "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can hurt forever." The violence inflicts deep emotional wounds among victims, their relatives, and friends.

An added repercussion is the effect that the violence is likely to have on women's participation in politics. The post-election violence reinforces long held beliefs that "politics is a dirty and dangerous pursuit that only men can dabble in.” The violence gives politics a bad name and pushes women further onto the fringes of active politics.

The majority of women targeted are political activists who openly admit they are in politics to try to ensure a better future for their children. Women polling agents and candidates who contested in local council elections are key targets. Winning female councilors in rural areas are being hounded out of their homes and therefore, being denied the chance to work and help develop their communities.

Added to these politically active victims are hundreds of women who are killed, raped, harassed, humiliated and abused simply because they are mothers, wives, sisters and aunts of prominent MDC activists.

An elderly granny who had fled her home in Kezi tells of the shame she endured during a rally when “youthful war veterans” taunted her using abusive and vulgar language because her son is an MDC activist.

She confided that how unhappy she was to be living with her daughter in-law indefinitely. "I want to be home and not get in my daughter in-law's way. But I am too afraid to go back."

Mostly women carry the heavy responsibility of explaining the horrifying events to scared, confused and traumatised children. They also try to ensure life goes on as usual for the children amid all the upheaval and uncertainty.

Mothers have to answer questions of "Baba varipi? Ubaba ungaphi? (Where is daddy?)" from children whose fathers have fled their homes in the dead of night. These women have the daunting task of trying to make senseless reprisals make sense to their children.

Women are the people who have to make sure that even after houses and granaries are razed to the ground, children are clothed and fed. Moreover, these same women live with the unspoken scorn of close relatives for “allowing” themselves to be raped by war veterans.

Yet in communities where war veterans have set up the infamous “bases” everyone knows that women have no option but to “agree” to rape in desperate attempts to protect their families.

The true extent of humiliation that violated women are enduring became clear when a man from the Midlands narrated the extent of sexual abuse in his wife's presence.

"Every woman who is still young is being raped by these brutes who threaten to destroy homesteads if women do not give in to their demands. We men, know it's happening even though women don't talk about it. We know they are desperate to spare their husbands and families victimisation. We are going to be raising children that are not ours, but AIDS is the real threat in the community now."

While the man spoke, his wife was shaking her head silently, tears streaming down her cheeks. The effect of all these experiences is to traumatise Zimbabwean women into silence, and out of the political arena.

Ultimately, to quote writer Chenjerai Hove in Shebeen Tales, there is the long term danger that if the violence, harassment and abuse continues unabated, "women will remain of politics and not in politics." And that will do liitle to make sure their needs are cared for in the future.

*Miriam Madziwa is a freelance journalist based in Zimbabwe. This article is part of the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service that provides fresh views on everyday news.

*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

We, the Zimbabwean women and women worldwide, urgently call for stopping of violence in Zimbabwe and protection of women and girls, in this post election catastrophe. This is an emergency as the country gears up for a presidential run-off on the 27th of June 2008.The violence persists and is real. No election observers are yet in the country, despite our calls, appeals, cries to Southern Africa Development Community, (SADC), African Union (AU) and the United Nations. Zimbabwe is a full signatory to CEDAW.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/378/48552rights.jpg Although often overlooked amidst the shocking images and stories emanating from the xenophobic attacks of the last two weeks, there is a gendered face of xenophobia, says Romi Fuller. Foreign women face the double jeopardy of belonging to and being at the intersection of two groups so vulnerable to exploitation, abuse and violence. This something the country must consider as it moves towards healing and responding to the needs of the injured and displaced.
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In the wave of xenophobic violence that swept across South Africa in the past weeks, more than 50 people have died, hundreds are injured, and thousands displaced. While media reports described the brutality of the attacks on foreign nationals – which have included people being beaten, stabbed, torched and dispossessed of their belongings and homes – there has been little consideration to the double jeopardy of being both foreign and female that renders women especially vulnerable in this deepening crisis.

While the perpetrators of the xenophobic violence in South Africa have not differentiated based on gender or age in their attacks on foreigners, there is a gender perspective to xenophobia getting lost in the midst of the horror.

Foreign women in the townships have been disproportionately affected by the recent xenophobia, not only because the violence has played out on the site of their bodies (through beatings and rape), but also because the violence has been directed towards their homes (through burning and looting).

At the same time, within South Africa’s undisputedly patriarchal society, women have also been thrust into the conflict as a real and potential source of violence between South African and foreign men. Again and again, we hear South African men accusing foreign nationals of “stealing our women.”

There have been reports of rape in the midst of the general perpetration of xenophobic violence. Systematic rape is often used as a weapon of war in “ethnic cleansing.” Although South Africa is not at war, it current situation could be considered a “conflict situation” and in a conflict situation, the sexual violation of women can erode the fabric of a community in a way that few weapons can.

Rape in conflict situations serves to dominate and tame not only the women survivors who are its immediate victims, but also all the men that are socially connected to them by delivering the message that they are not strong enough to protect their women. From this point of view, rape in war or conflict is a means of committing genocide, by destroying a particular group or nation’s identity.

In a country where sexual violence is pervasive in everyday life, it is difficult to distinguish rapes motivated by xenophobic attitudes from those perpetrated because the general atmosphere of violence and lawlessness has allowed for it. Rape can be a political tool of xenophobia; or an act of opportunistic criminal violence against a woman because of her gender, under the guise of xenophobia.

Unfortunately, though reported numbers of rape were not alarmingly high in the recent attacks, it is likely that many xenophobia-related rapes are unreported because foreign women are fearful of the police. Firstly, as foreigners in an environment where the police have a reputation for complicity in corruption, intimidation and abuse of foreigners they are mistrustful of law enforcement. Secondly, as women in a society where the victims of sexual violence are often treated with scepticism and suffer secondary victimisation, there is a general reluctance to disclose.

South African women marrying or dating foreigners may also be vulnerable to attack and sexual violence, based on xenophobia. Sexual violence is well documented in South Africa as a means to control and punish women. Men may rape South African women as a means of controlling them or curbing their agency in choosing foreign men, and as a punishment for their waywardness.

The affect in women is not just physical assault. Many foreign women have been responsible for protecting their young children from the violence, which has entailed displacement to temporary shelters or places of safety where there is insufficient access to food, blankets and sanitation.

“Woman’ (and the associated categories of wife, mother and daughter) is a social position that comes with a range of expectations and investments. Women are the traditional carers of their families, with the responsibility to feed, clothe and provide shelter for their families.

As such, xenophobia targets women and children because they are central to making settlement happen - while a host population may see migrant men as transitory, women and children denote a more permanent move and the laying down of roots.

Migrants are increasingly targeted as the scapegoats for all manner of domestic problems facing societies today, particularly unemployment, crime, and limited access to services. People perceive immigrant women – whom following gender roles tend to be responsible for their families’ well being –as taking jobs and “using and abusing” already stretched public services, such as hospitals and schools.

In reality, many migrant and refugee women in South Africa have limited employment opportunities and are often at the bottom of the labour market. Many of these women hold jobs in the informal economy or unregulated sectors. As such, their access to state services such as health, education and justice is also limited, especially if they are undocumented migrants or illegal immigrants.

Many foreign women are in South Africa after having fled conflict-zones, sexual and domestic violence, and political and/or economic repression in their home countries. The insecurity and violence they now face in South Africa compounds their trauma.

Interestingly, in her book Engendering Wartime Conflict: Women and War Trauma, Ingrid Palmary points out that women, and others, often do not see violations against women as part of political conflict, but instead tend to view them as personal or domestic violations. This means the very real possibility that leaders and service providers leave women out of reconciliation and justice mechanisms.

Although often overlooked amidst the shocking images and stories emanating from the xenophobic attacks of the last two weeks, that there is a gendered face of xenophobia is unmistakable. Foreign women face the double jeopardy of belonging to and being at the intersection of two groups so vulnerable to exploitation, abuse and violence. This something the country must consider as it moves towards healing and responding to the needs of the injured and displaced.

* Romi Fuller is the Project Manager of the Violence and Transition Project at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. This article is part of the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service that provides fresh views on everyday news.

*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Gay rights activists have condemned Gambian President Yahya Jammeh`s threat to behead homosexuals. Last week he told a political rally that gay people had 24 hours to leave the country. He promised "stricter laws than Iran" on homosexuality and said he would "cut off the head" of any gay person found in The Gambia.

Reverend Jide Macaulay of House of Rainbow, who is gay, fears for his life following death threats he received after Nigeria’s PM News published his picture alongside an article titled ‘Homosexual Act Not Against Bible’. Written by Samuel Ateba, the story which appeared on PM News’s front page on 12 May followed an exclusive interview that Macaulay had with Mo Abudu’s on A Moment with Mo talk show discussing homosexuality.

Pregnant women and single mothers are languishing in a secret detention center in Tindouf, a southwestern province in Algeria, charges Brahim El Selem. "It is made out of mud bricks . . . You can't see the jail because it is a hole between two hills. "El Selem says the women's detention center--which he says he visited three or four times--confines almost 30 women, some with toddlers. The structure's zinc roof provides minimal protection from the Saharan desert heat, he adds.

On Sep. 7 last year, as she walked to her home, parliamentary candidate Flora Igoki Terah was attacked and tortured by a gang of five men. Terah's case is one of several case studies highlighted in Amnesty International's 2008 report on the state of the world's human rights, released on May 28.

The fact that no single woman MP was elected in the crucial House Committees in the 10th Parliament speaks volumes to an institution that is supposed to pass laws which are amenable to every Kenyan. This is not withstanding that the 10th Parliament will go down in history has having the highest number of women in Parliament and the highest number of Cabinet Ministers.

Mother of two Nyasha, desperate to put food on the table for her family back home in Zimbabwe, turned to prostitution in neighbouring Mozambique after being told that it was a surefire way of earning US dollars."The money is little, but if I save it properly I will be able to send groceries that will sustain my family for some days," the 23-year-old told AFP in the central Mozambican town of Chimoio.

Participants in the 2008 CODESRIA Gender symposium will be invited to consider the mixed landscape of gender and citizenship that has been forged out of contemporary globalisation with a view to reflecting on ways of overcoming the new barriers that have emerged alongside the old obstacles that have persisted in the search for a better engendered citizenship. The Symposium will be held in Cairo, Egypt, from 08 – 10 October, 2008.

This international working conference will probe and address global acquiescence to impunity, gender violence and exclusion that continues to obstruct peacebuilding and deny human security. Dates: September 24 - 26, 2008.

Jegede Ademola Oluborode looks at the Protocol on the Rights of Women in relation to medical or scientific experiments and argues that ethical and scientific standards are lowered when it comes to African women and informed consent may not be enough to protect vulnerable African women.

This article is a reflection on the provision of article 4(2)(h) of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa( Protocol on the Rights of Women) which seeks to prohibit all medical and scientific experiments on women without their informed consent. The article argues that the prohibition of all medical or scientific experiments on women without their informed consent, without more, falls short of other ethical requirements for safety in scientific and medical experimentation. This in itself is an expression of the regrettable gap which over the years has existed in major international human rights instruments, to which most African States are signatory. To this end therefore, the article suggests that along with the requirement of consent, there is a need to legally prescribe appropriate human rights standard on the performance of medical and scientific experiments. The article concludes that a re-draft of article 4 (2)(h) of the Protocol on the Rights of Women is imperative to ensure maximum legal protection for women, who by virtue of their role in the society are most vulnerable to medical and scientific exploitation.

INJUSTICES IN MEDICAL OR SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS AND WOMEN [1]

Examples of where women have been victims to medical and scientific exploitation under the pretext of research are not new. Grave atrocities were committed in the process of medical experiments carried out during the Second World War on non-consenting women and children prisoners of Nazi concentration camps [2]. During the same period in history, African women from the German South West Africa, now Namibia, were part of sterilization programmes instituted by Germany without their consent [3]. In more recent times, evidence from Nigeria implicated Pfizer International Incorporated (PII) of fraud and criminal breach of trust of its controversial drug test, popularly known as Trovan Clinical Trials, which it carried out on Nigerian citizens in Kano in 1996, which had fatal results [4].

The burden of disease, generally, including malaria, sickle cell anaemia, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, weighs heavily on Africa, where these illnesses are most prevalent. In more ways than one, the impact of these diseases has been disproportionately borne by women. While medical and scientific trials and research involving women, holds great prospects for the solution of these problems, researches and pharmaceutical companies who engage in trials can not always be trusted to function with due consideration for ethical requirements, when such requirements are not well specified and projected in the African human rights system.

It is noteworthy that due to low level of literacy in Africa, very few women who are research participants are sufficiently educated to really understand the details of studies and trials in which they are engaged [5]. The poverty and powerlessness of women often lead to their participation in clinical and scientific researches merely for inexpensive inducements, and largely due to less understanding of study risks, or for the pregnant women, under the mistaken belief that such studies will result in care for their unborn children. There are for instance, controversies which have surrounded microbicide trials carried out on women in South Africa which revealed that women in the study developed higher risk of HIV infection [6]. In 2007, the US-based reproductive health research organisation, CONRAD, also announced the premature end of trials of a cellulose sulphate-based microbicide in Nigeria, Benin and Uganda after the data safety and monitoring committee found a higher number of infections in the active group compared to the placebo group [7].

The New England Journal of Medicine carried a comment on 15 on-going clinical trials testing cheaper drug regimens to prevent maternal-foetal transmission of HIV in Africa. Some 16,000 pregnant, HIV-positive women were enrolled in the placebo-controlled trials. The problem with these trials was that it began after Zidovudine (AZT) had been found to prevent such transmission by 50% or more, and is recommended to all HIV-positive pregnant women in western countries. In other words, it was reported that, thousands of women in the trials were getting sugar pills to test the efficacy of the new regimens whereas if they had been enrolled in trials in Europe, they would have received a standard course of AZT [8]. This further underscores the point that the truth in Africa, is that very few women do enjoy the benefits of the research in which they participate.

The survival of women therefore raises the question as to whether international human rights have done enough to protect women in terms of medical and scientific experimentation and if not, whether there is the need for the African human right system to review existing legal framework with the view of addressing such gap.

INTERNATIONAL AND REGIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS INSTRUMENTS ON MEDICAL/ SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS

When international human rights instruments have discussed access to health services, it has been silent on medical and scientific experimentation. This was the case with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which only guarantees in its Article 25(1) the right of everyone to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care. Similarly, subsequent notable instrument such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in Article 12(2)(d) only urges the States to take steps to achieve full realization of the right to health by creating conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness [9]. Article 5 (d)(iv) of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination is no different when it provides for the right to public health, medical care, social security and social services [10].

Although, the need to take urgent steps to address the inequality as it affects women on a number of issues led to the adoption of the Convention on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), [11] the Convention fails to sufficiently address the issues of human rights around medical and scientific experiments in its copious provisions in Article 11(f), 12(1) and 14(2) (b) regarding improvement of access of women to health care services. This is also lacking in the 1999 General Comment of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, which interpreted the right to health under Article 12 of CEDAW as the right of women to be fully informed, by properly trained personnel, of their options in agreeing to treatment or research, including likely benefits and potential adverse effects of proposed procedures and available alternatives [12].

Article 4(2)(h) of the Protocol on the Rights of Women provides that States parties shall take appropriate and effective measures to prohibit all medical or scientific experiments on women without their informed consent. This appears progressive for Africa, considering that, with the exception to South African Constitution which has similar provision; hardly does any other African constitution have a similar provision with such safeguard [13].The Protocol is however merely re-stating article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which provides that ‘no one shall be subject without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation [14]. The inherent weakness in the foregoing efforts is that the requirement of consent, without more excludes certain elements of ethics which are fundamental in medical and scientific experiments and in so doing, deprives them of being legally determinable.

ELEMENTS AS IMPORTANT AS ‘INFORMED CONSENT’ IN MEDICAL AND SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS

The medical misdeeds at the Second World War led to the Nuremberg code in 1947, a set of principles devised to protect human subjects from unethical experimentation [15]. The Nuremberg code was a part of the judgment delivered in the so-called Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg following World War II. The principles of the code were based upon the criteria for ethical research that were elucidated by the two expert medical witnesses at the trial if human experimentation was to be justified. These are: informed consent; Results must be for the good of society; and the experiment must be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons [16].

While further reinforcing the principles at Nuremberg, the Declarations of Helsinki (1964 and 1975, with further revisions in 1983, 1989, 1996 and 2000) emphasised that in research involving human beings, the potential benefits must outweigh hazards. The Belmont Report of 1979 projected three ethical principles as relating to research on human subjects namely; respect for persons; beneficence and Justice. The principle of respect to persons connotes that individuals should be treated as autonomous agents. The principle of benevolence indicates that harm must not be occasioned; maximum benefits must be ensured while Justice signifies that there should be fair distribution of burdens and benefits of research [17].

RECENT EFFORTS AT CODIFYING RESEARCH ETHICS

The Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights (the Declaration) which regulates cell research appears to have provided for other requirements apart from informed consent. Article 5 of the Declaration recommends that attention be given to best interest the persons involved in the research, compliance with national and international research standards or guidelines, health benefit, minimal risk and minimal burden, compatibility with the protection of the individual's human rights [18]. Apart from failing to define what the national and international research standards and guidelines are, the Declaration, suffers the same setback with other declarations, which is that generally, they are not binding in international law.

In 1997, Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine was adopted by the Council of Europe (The Convention). The Convention provided extensively for ethics regarding medicine and scientific experiments. Article 16 of the Convention extensively provides for protection of a person undergoing experimentation and accommodates the ethics on Justice, Benevolence and freedom of harm which the Nuremberg Code, Helsinki Declaration Belmont Report have projected. Article 23 of the Convention allows parties to pursue judicial protection to prevent or to put a stop to an unlawful infringement of the rights and principles in the Convention at short notice [19].

Africa may not however benefit from the Convention considering that the only parties to the Convention were members of the Council of Europe. Without regional legal human rights coverage of the subject, it is unlikely that the Convention as it is presently will be of any use on African concerns on the matter of experimentation and exploitation. The need for such coverage is imperative in a globalised world where Africa remains a fertile ground for research and stands the greatest risk to be impacted by medical exploitation. That is more so considering that it is unlikely that free choice and benefits can be enjoyed by women in relation to medical and scientific experiments where standards are absent.

THE WAY FORWARD

From Universal Declaration of Human Rights through CEDAW to the Protocol on Women Rights, international human rights instruments to which most African nations are signatory are inadequate as a standard of regulating scientific and medical experiments. Most importantly, article 4(2)(h) of the Protocol on Women Rights lacks the essential components on ethics required for scientific and medical experimentation. The Protocol on Women Rights, just as the Convention on Human Rights & Biomedicine should accommodate requirements which the Nuremberg Codes, Helsinki Declaration and Belmont Report have projected in terms of respect for persons; beneficence and fairness. Achieving this will be a leap forwards as it will take the principles beyond the realms of mere ethics to the realms of active rights. It is therefore suggested that article 4(2)(h) of the Protocol on Women Rights in addition with the principle of informed consent should include the principles of beneficence and fairness. This is imperative in this age of globalisation where Africa remains a fertile ground for research and its women the most vulnerable.

*Jegede Ademola Oluborode is a legal practitioner and a human rights activist in Nigeria.

*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

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As homophobic hate crimes escalate in the country, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community is concerned about certain information purported in relation to the gay community. It is the government’s responsibility to ensure that information disseminated is balanced so that people understand its stance.

Poverty and tradition help fuel a potent business in human trafficking in East Africa, where a girl can sell for $20. Most kidnapped children are not as lucky as Saffi, who returned after her mother bought TV ads. Many disappear without much notice.

Egypt has appointed its first female official to certify marriages and divorces. The move has been met by public debate and opposition from some Muslim clerics who say women shouldn't serve in the role. Seventh in a series on women and Islam.