Crediting women

Kristof's comments on empowering women, and Whedon's rant, and the ensuing comments on both reminded me of this:

Back in 1991, I heard Dr. Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank speak at a conference in Silver Springs, Md.

I spent much of that conference hanging out with the folks from the Good Faith Fund, a community development loan fund in Arkansas* that was one of the first groups to try to emulate Yunus' microlending approach in an American setting. We stuck around after the lecture and the future Nobel laureate** seemed happy and eager to talk for a bit.

At that time I'd been reading a lot about Islamic banking, which is based on the Koran's prohibition against charging interest. The Grameen Bank's microlending doesn't follow that model — it charges interest, like a Western bank, but ensures repayment with a peer-group system that's proven far more effective than the use of collateral. So I asked the George Bailey of Bangladesh about this: Had he been criticized for charging interest in a Muslim country?

Dr. Yunus said he was surprised by how rarely this was even noticed. Grameen was often criticized, he said, for lending primarily to women (more than 90 percent of its loans). This criticism, he said, was often framed in religious terms, even though the Koran in no way forbids this. He spoke for a bit about one of the prophet's wives, who was a merchant, a businesswoman, and I realized we were hearing the short version of his religious defense for empowering women — a religious defense that ought to have been unnecessary because the religion, in itself, did not provide the basis for his critics' misogyny.

One could argue that these misogynist Muslims in Bangladesh — like their many CHINO American counterparts — were simply imposing their own pathologies onto their religion, rather than deriving them from it as they claimed. That raises a whole other series of questions, though, about which more later.

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* Arkansas's then-governor, Bill Clinton, had encouraged this development in the hopes that Yunus' successes in Bangladesh could be replicated to empower the poorest people in his state. It's almost hard to remember now, but we used to have a president who approached problems in this way — studying solutions elsewhere and seeing how the best practices might be implemented in new settings.

** I've had the privilege, so far, of meeting three winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.

My conversation with Jody Williams of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines wasn't extensive. I spoke with her on the phone in the mid-'90s, calling to get her fax number to sign up our nonprofit as an endorser of the campaign. She gave me the number, I repeated it back to her, and I believe I said something to the effect that the work she was doing was "really cool." In 1997, the Nobel committee seconded this opinion, recognizing her really cool work with the Nobel Prize.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu had already been awarded the prize when I met him at a banquet celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility. After he spoke, there was a kind of receiving line in which I was able to shake his hand. "It's an honor to meet you," I said. Following that evening's reception, as it happens, I had another opportunity to briefly speak to Bishop Tutu, but due to the circumstances of that encounter, all I said that time was, "I'm so sorry" and "Are you all right?" and "You're sure you're OK? I'm so, so sorry." He was fine.