Daisy Khan, an activist for Muslim women’s rights, has a list – 10 practices related to women that are often carried out in the name of Islam. They include domestic violence, honor killings, child marriage, female genital mutilation and more. Her Muslim Women’s Shura Council of 40 members meets online with the aim of building the religious case that these practices are actually the result of misinterpretations of the Koran.

“Ten Deadly Sins, I call them,” Khan, who is executive director of the New York-based American Society for Muslim Advancement, told an audience at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) on Feb. 20. “Let’s get rid of them. Can we do this over 10 years? Honestly, I know we can, but we can’t do it by ourselves. We have to have the men by our side and we have to bring the men along.”

Khan and four other panelists in the event, “Engaging Men in Women’s Rights and Empowerment,” outlined the case and strategies for involving men as part of a discussion of the Lessons Learned Working Group convened by USIP’s Gender and Peacebuilding Center of Innovation. The group looks at lessons learned from programs designed to support women in Iraq and Afghanistan. The panel discussion was the second focusing on engaging men.

One of the lessons identified is that “virtually everybody has to do a better job of reaching out to men in these conflict countries to support women’s rights,” said Ambassador Steven Steiner of USIP, a former senior adviser in the State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues. “We’re trying to learn what are the best practices for doing this and how can it be done.”

The rationale is simply practical – in most cases, men still hold the cards.

“They have the leadership, they have the power, they have the authority,” said Suzan Aref, the founder and director of the Women Empowerment Organization in Iraq and an adviser to the San Francisco-based nonprofit Global Fund for Women. Even in cases when women are involved in decision-making bodies such as parliaments or religious organizations in Muslim countries, their role is more likely to be more limited than that of men, she said. “It’s very important to engage men in our work.”

Successful strategies can include educating imams about human rights principles and interpretations of Islam. Dialogue between women and Muslim religious leaders has improved in some cases, indicating that it is possible to open lines of communication by showing respect and appealing to their interests in preventing practices such as honor killings, Aref said.

Paradoxically, the midst of conflict often can be the perfect time to accomplish change quickly, said Mariam Atash Nawabi, an attorney and vice president of the PlanetPix Media and Entertainment Group. She cited Afghanistan, where she has worked extensively on legal and women’s issues, as a case in point. She was on the U.N.’s Legal Affairs Working Group and helped analyze Afghan constitutions historically and those of other countries for wording that could help elevate the status of women in Afghanistan’s constitution after they emerged from subjugation and abuse under the Taliban. It was that kind of research that helped persuade the men in authority.

“In the end, it was actually the men who ended up supporting that language,” Nawabi said. “If they had not, it wouldn’t have passed at the constitutional loya jirga. It was really the women of Afghanistan who got the support of men to put that language” into the text.

Hamid Khan, a senior program officer with USIP’s Rule of Law Center of Innovation, said it’s important to seize the power of religious narratives to help change the understanding of Islam’s provisions among both religious scholars and the public.

“It can be a great equalizer,” he said. He gives the example of the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, considered a religious duty of Muslims at least once in a lifetime. The practice has origins in the Muslim belief that the Patriarch Abraham's wife, Hagar, and their son, Ishmael, were desperate for water in the valley of Mecca and miraculously uncovered the source of a well.

“One of the most central practices in the Islamic faith, the Hajj, centers around a woman’s act,” USIP’s Khan said.

Engaging men in the cause of women’s empowerment will mean shedding stereotypes of men as predisposed to violence and coming up with alternatives to the “false choice” often presented to men in conflict zones – either defend their cause by violence or do nothing, said Joseph Vess, a senior program officer at Promundo, a nonprofit group based in Brazil that promotes “caring, nonviolent, and equitable masculinities and gender relations.” Men’s roles or potential roles in preventing and resolving conflict can be reinforced with an emphasis on what they’re doing right and expanding on that, Vess said.

Daisy Khan tells the story of a fellow campaigner in the Philippines who persuaded an imam to give a sermon, or khutbah, explaining that domestic violence couldn’t be justified in the name of Islam, contrary to frequent popular belief. A positive response from the congregation prompted the imam to offer to conduct more sermons on other topics and to encourage other imams to do the same.

In Afghanistan, a woman who runs a school heard about the Philippines success, and began a project with a government ministry to train imams on Islamic principles related to inheritance, domestic violence, child marriage and social mobility, Khan said. One of the imams who was trained in the program went to conduct a marriage and found the bride was a 12-year-old girl who was weeping because she didn’t want to marry the 28-year-old man selected for her.

The imam proceeded to tell the congregation that consent is a primary requirement of Islam. The girl’s family even tried to bribe the imam, Khan said.

“So he left and the next day – it was Friday – he gave a very passionate khutbah, and he talked about the harm that is being done to our girls, the psychological harm, the physical harm,” Khan said.

An old man sitting in the audience approached the imam afterwards, “all shaken up,” Khan said in relaying the story at USIP. The village elder demanded to know why the imam hadn’t told them this before because the man had already sold off three daughters as brides in the traditional way. “The imam said, `It is too late for you, but it is not too late for the people in this room,’” Khan said. “These imams have become great allies for us.”

How supportive do you see men when it comes to empowering women? Tell us your thoughts by submitting a comment below.

Viola Gienger is a senior writer at USIP.