Name and Goals
Women’s Voice for Peace-أصواتهن للسلام is a personal initiative launched in 2019 under the auspices of King Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz Center for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID). The Initiative aims to achieve the following:
- Breaking the stereotypes practiced against women in Arab societies, especially in the Middle East, wrongly in the name of religion.
- Presenting the sound true interpretations of religious texts (Islam and Christianity) that address gender issues in a simplified Arabic language.
- Presenting stories of real men and women who managed to break the social stereotypes and made real change within the challenges they face in society.
- Keeping up-to-date content that addresses women’s problematic issues like FGM, child marriage, rape, sexual harassment, etc.
The word peace in the initiative’s name addresses the more comprehensive meaning of the word. It focuses on the inner peace that starts within the “family”, which is the heart of the society and thus disseminates peaceful coexistence among gender relations. In Islam and other previous religions “male-female,” relations are created on the basis of mercy, love, and peace. It is only the customs and traditions that distorted these meanings and thus created a sort of gender-based violence against women in the first place. In all religions, men and women stand on equal footing, and thus we should bring this to focus in our societies.
Audience
Since technology has become an indispensable part of our today’s world, the initiative was mainly launched through social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Sound cloud, and Twitter).
The content is presented in an interesting simple language and method with very distinguished graphic designs with a view to attracting social media users from young people, university students, academics, researchers in social sciences, and others.
Vision
As KAIICIID fellows, we have to work on achieving peaceful coexistence within a context of religious diversity. The center fully funds the initiative based on the budget request submitted.
The idea is to cooperate with civil society organizations, women institutions, and any entity that serves this goal of gender equality and ending violence and discrimination against women and men in the name of religion. The initiative mainly focuses on social media work (articles, interviews, videos, field visits, etc).