The Ethics Center and the Hadassah Brandeis Institute held a conference addressing the possibilities of a reconciliation of modern law and traditional customs with regard to gender equality worldwide on Tuesday, April 15. Over 100 academics, activists and interested students participated in the conference, which took place in the Hassenfeld Conference Center, according to Lisa Fishbayn, director of the Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law at the HBI.

The event opened Monday evening with a lecture by Nobel Laureates Shirin Ebadi and Jody Williams.

The event's conclusion Tuesday morning included a keynote speech titled "Is Pluralism an Ideal or a Compromise" by Martha Minow, a professor at Harvard Law school followed by a series of panels.

The event was part of a larger research project under HBI titled "Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law," which was launched last February with a grant from Dan Fischel Sylvia Neil, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law who initiated the project and her husband Dan Fischel.

Neal said that the conference provided a platform for woman activists to share strategies for advocating gender equality by listening to experiences and drawing lessons from diverse cultures

Because of its Jewish background and its commitment to social justice, Brandeis is the "perfect home" for the project, Neal said.

"I also felt it was very important that since we have so many issues dealing with the intersection of gender and religion and the law in Judaism, that when we are talking with other [faiths] who also have these issues . We are in parity with each other," she said.

The final panel featured two researchers and activists, Fatou Camara, assistant professor of law at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, and Likhapha Mbatha, a researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, who offered comparative perspectives on the question "What Is Effective Law Reform?"

Senegal's failure to recognize the widespread indigenous beliefs in animism in the country have caused women to suffer under Islamic laws, Camara said.

She stated that official statistics declaring Senegal over 90 percent Muslim were misleading, because animism coexists with Islam, Christianity and Judaism in Senegal. "The [Senegalese] go to the mosque and right after they will give offerings to their ancestors," she said.

She posited that unofficially the statistic should read 99.9 percent animist. She explained that according to animist belief, all that exists has life in it so that traditionally, believers would, for example, make offerings to a large tree home to sacred spirits.

Those statistics are troublesome, she explained because "Islam is openly used to justify legal and social discrimination against women" through, for example, unequal inheritance laws.

This development is upsetting, she explained, because the indigenous beliefs follow a matriarchal system, under which women are in the position of power.

For this reason, she said, a project underway to establish a "temple for initiated women" is necessary to preserve the country's indigenous culture. Initiated women are spiritual leaders who have undergone a test to attain exclusive traditional knowledge and pass it on to later generations, she said. Many traditional laws exist in hidden forms, such as encoded writings, that only the initiated can recognize, she said.

Without the special temple that could serve as a refuge for initiated women today, "No one is going to pay attention to the indigenous faith," she warned. The history of the indigenous beliefs also shows that feminism was not just a Western idea, she said. "Gender equity is an indigenous African concept," she stated

In her presentation, Mbatha spoke about the possibilities for compatibility between customary law and international human rights conventions in South Africa, where international covenants signed by the country challenged the widespread practice of polygamous marriages.

The government set up a commission to oversee implementation of international laws, she said. After receiving much input from many national organizations, the commission decided to recognize customary laws regarding polygamy, with some restrictions, she reported.

"I strongly felt that polygamy had to be recognized," she said. The government had to weigh "the extent to which [it] was obliged to focus on the interests of the international community" and what it owed the "people it could touch and see," she said. She noted that polygamy is already becoming less popular because of financial burdens associated with it.

She added that customary law also included safeguards to protect women and children within the institution of polygamy. "Following international law would have bastardized and deprived women of their [property] rights," she said.

"The South African government saw that legal abolishment would not discourage polygamy," she said, but because the government restricted polygamy as much it could, "to an extent South Africa has obliged," Mbatha concluded.