Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (31 page)

There is a significant group of Muslim scholars whose feminist work appears to be permeated with strong spiritual and religious bases. American feminist scholar Elizabeth Fernea also demonstrates this point on the basis of interviewing Muslim women in various parts of the world:

Islamic belief is also the stated basis of most behavior I felt to be feminist

. . . In Egypt, Kuwait, Turkey and the U.S., Islamic women begin with the assumption that the possibility for equality already exists in the Qur’an itself. The problem as they see it is malpractice, or misunderstanding of the sacred text. For these Muslim women, the first goal of a feminist movement is to re-understand and evaluate the sacred text and for women to be involved in the process, which historically has been reserved for men.
42

Some Muslim women scholars have argued that while women indeed have multiple identities which are contingent on specific contextual realities, among many Muslim women there is an overarching sense that a belief in Islam provides a core existential ground for one’s way of understanding the world, one’s self, and the ultimate purpose of human life.
43
This then suggests that for some Muslim feminists Islam is not one among many equally weighted identities but rather a primary source of understanding one’s very being in the world. This does not, however, imply that all Muslim women’s understandings of Islam are the same or that there is a monolithic Islamic identity that stands unaffected by other social, political, and cultural factors. Indeed the manner in which Islam is

understood and experienced in diverse contexts is mediated by numerous factors, including national, ethnic, economic, and cultural forces. However, the essential components of belief and one’s existential relationship to God and the world, the five pillars of Islam, are significantly shared dimensions of how Muslims experience their existence, cosmology, and eschatology.

Islamic scholar Maysam Faruqi points out that while many other dimensions of identity like race or gender are not necessarily subject to one’s own choice, being Muslim in the world is a choice that implies a particular constellations of theological, spiritual, and religious beliefs.
44
In analyzing this paradigmatic assertion one may argue that this Muslim woman sees her religious identity as a primary identity which is then mediated by a number of secondary identities, including gender, nationality, ethnicity, and class.

Whether Muslim women see their religious identities as core to their self- definition or not, I believe that it is accurate to suggest that Muslim feminists are committed to

questioning Islamic epistemology as an expansion of their faith position and not a rejection of it . . . and offer[ing] a critique of some aspect of Islamic history or hermeneutics, and [that] they do so with and or on behalf of all Muslim women and their right to enjoy with men full participation in a just community.
45

SS CC HH OO LL AA RR SS HH II PP AA NN DD AA CC TT II VV II SS MM

There is currently a vibrant presence of Muslim women scholars and activists in various Muslim communities around the world. In reviewing varying types of Muslim women’s gender activism in different parts of the world, feminist scholar Margot Badran has identified different modes of feminist expression among Muslim women. These are, firstly, various types of
feminist writing
from scholarship to fiction; secondly,
everyday activism
, including initiatives in social services, education, and professions; and thirdly, organized
movement activism
, including political and even confrontational movements for women’s emancipation.
46

Particularly within the last few decades, Muslim women are engaging some of the primary sources of the religious legacy, namely the Qur’an and
Sunnah
, not only individually but also as a political initiative. Many of these scholars are deeply committed to their faith and religion and are invested in redressing the male bias of the inherited legacy. Here one finds radical and illuminating understandings of Qur’an, Islamic law, theology, and mysticism from the perspective of women. For example, in contemporary Iran, there is a plethora of emerging women’s discourse on Islamic law and Qur’anic exegesis which contests women’s marginalization in society. This has occurred most explicitly in the popular women’s journal
Zanaan
, where feminist scholars have explicitly

contested and decentered the male clerics from the domain of interpretation and have advocated the reading of the Qur’an as a woman.
47

Similarly, African-American scholar Amina Wadud has authored a book that has gained international popularity:
Qur’an and Women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective
.
48
This was published first in Malaysia and has since been translated into Indonesian, Turkish, and Arabic and used as a formative text in approaching gender justice in Islam. Fatima Mernissi, a Morrocan sociologist, has provided a feminist detective work on retrieving the history of powerful women in Islamic history in her
The Forgotten Queens of Islam
.
49
In another work,
The Veil and the Male Elite
, Mernissi has re-visited authoritative
hadith
regarding the Prophet and the early Companions.
50
Using traditional Islamic
hadith
methodology she illustrates that some of the misogynist traditions are inauthentic and have been fabricated to serve the interests of a particular narrator and respond to historical exigencies. In the book
Women and Gender in Islam
, Egyptian historian Leila Ahmed focuses on the ways in which gender discourses evolved historically within the formative Muslim communities and examines how both patriarchal and egalitarian gender discourses have since developed within some Muslim societies.

On the ground, organizations like
Sisters in Islam
, based in Malaysia, have provided a critique of wife battery from an Islamic perspective and have lobbied for stronger penalties for male offenders. They have also been actively involved in educational and consciousness-raising activities among Malaysian women. In South Africa, the
Muslim Youth Movement
and the
Call of Islam
have promoted women’s leadership, including
inter alia
questions of sermon giving, mosque attendance campaigns, and gender egalitarian reformulation of Muslim personal law. In the United States,
Karamah
(Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights), whose members have varying levels of expertise in both Islamic and American law, has worked to protect Muslim women from sexist applications of Islamic law while simultaneously working to protect the civil rights of Muslim Americans.
51
These are but a few examples of the gender activism and feminist work of different groups of Muslim women.

I maintain that activities emerging from a commitment to the imperative of gender justice in Islam are crucial to the articulation of genuinely engaged and transformative Islamic feminisms. Rejecting colonial feminist representations of Muslim women as the “victimized” and voiceless “other,” Muslim women are contributing to the re-definition of feminist discourse that includes the authentic self-representations of heterogeneous groups of women. This approach is one that embraces the particularity of context and the multiple identities of women. By definition it makes salient the question of religious identity in the experience of Muslim women. It allows for the collusion of feminist discourse with Muslim women’s articulation of their engagement with gender issues. It also creates the space for meaningful dialogue and “horizontal comradeship” between groups of Muslim women and women from other

religio-cultural contexts. Islamic feminism and the broader gender activism of Muslim women are flowering in many parts of the Muslim world. In the last analysis, Islamic feminism is, in my view, one of the most engaged contemporary responses to the core Qur’anic injunction for social justice of our time.

endnotes

*An earlier version of this essay appeared as “Islam, Feminisms and the Politics of Representation,” in
The End of Liberation? Liberation in the End! Feminist Theory, Feminist Theology and Their Political Implications
, ed. Charlotte Methuen and Angela Berlis (Leuven: Peeters, 2002).

1. In South Africa, the resistance of Muslim activists to patriarchy and sexism in their religious communities has been embraced as the “gender jihad.”
   

2. For a discussion on the varying realities of Muslim women from different parts of the world see Azizah Al-Hibri, “Islamic Law,” in
   A Companion to Feminist Philosophy
   , ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Iris M. Young (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 541–9.
   

3. Qur’anic scholar Amina Wadud describes feminism as the “radical notion that women are human beings.” See the preface to the second edition of
   Qur’an and Women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective
   (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
   

4. Clearly neither “the Muslim world” nor “the West” exists as homogeneous or discrete entities. I am simply using them as descriptive categories to the extent that they reflect perceptions of shared identity among respective communities.
   

5. For an incisive analysis of Islam and post-colonial relations of power see Majid Anouar,
   Unveiling Tradition, Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World
   (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
   

6. For a discussion of the politics of gender and identity see Lila Abu-Lughod (ed.),
   Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East
   (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
   

7. Gisela Webb, “Teaching Islam as a World Religion to Undergraduates: Challenges and Opportunities in the Age of Globalization and Multiculturalism,”
   Religion and Education
   , 25:(1–2), 1998, 31.
   

8. Akbar S. Ahmed,
   Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise
   (London: Routledge, 1992).
   

9. Huntington’s argument regarding the inherently conflicting relations between Islamic and Western civilizations was first articulated in his article “The Clash of Civilizations,”
   Foreign Affairs
   , Summer 1993, 22–49. Huntington’s thesis – while no doubt influential – has been severely criticized by a host of anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and others. For one insightful example, see Roy Mottahedeh, “Clash of Civilizations: An Islamicist’s Critique,”
   Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review
   , 2(2), 1996, 1–26.
   

10. Azza M. Karam,
    Women, Islamisms and the State
    (New York: St Martin’s Press; Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1998), 5–6.
    

11. For a discussion of this type of apologia see Barbara Stowasser’s examination of Shaykh Sha’rawi’s work in Barbara Stowasser,
    The Islamic Impulse
    (London: Croom Helm, 1987).
    

12. Margot Badran,
    Feminists, Islam and the Nation
    (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 24.
    

13. Leila Ahmed,
    Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate
    (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 153.
    

14. A detailed account and rich analysis of the relationship between the IAW and Arab feminists is offered by Margot Badran,
    Feminists, Islam and the Nation
    (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
    

15. Ibid., 33. 16. Ibid., 246.

1. For such critiques see the following collections: Cherr´ıe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldu´ a (eds),
   This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
   (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981); Chandra Mohanty (ed.),
   Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism
   (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1991).
   

2. Second-wave Western feminism began in the 1960s and was characterized by the formation of active networks of women’s groups in the U.S.A. and parts of Europe. Its inception is often dated from the publication of Betty Friedan’s
   The Feminine Mystique
   (New York: Norton, 1963) in America. While there was a diversity of perspectives within second-wave feminism, including liberal, radical, and socialist/Marxist approaches, much of this work presumed a universal womanhood without attending to differences of race, culture, First World / Third World locations, etc. See Rosemarie Tong,
   Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction
   (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998) for greater details on the different strands of second-wave feminism.
   

3. There is clearly no singular Third World woman or Third World situation. The terms are used to describe the relationships of structural domination between First and Third World peoples while fully recognizing the diversity of experiences and realities among different groups of Third World people. “Third World women” has also been used interchangeably with the description “women of color.” For a more extensive discussion of defining “Third World feminism,” see Chandra Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in
   Third World Women
   , 1–47.
   

4. See Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, “Challenging Imperial Feminism,”
   Feminist Review
   , 17, 1984, 3–19; Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse,” in
   Third World Women
   , 51–80.
   

5. A classic example of this approach in second-wave feminism is reflected in Betty Friedan’s
   The Feminine Mystique
   , in which the plight of women is described as the boredom and unfulfillment of being mere housewives who were put on a false pedestal and not integrated into the public sphere of work. In
   Feminist theory: From Margin to Center
   (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 2, African-American scholar bell hooks points out that the “generic” woman described by Friedan does not remotely represent women of color or poor and working class women, who often had to work “as maids, as babysitters, as factory workers, as clerks, or as prostitutes and did not belong to the leisure class of housewife.” Similarly, black South African women were often political activists, breadwinners, and heads of households in black townships where men were absent because of the politico- economic apartheid structures of the migrant labor system in South Africa, which caused many black men to leave their household in the search for employment. The effects of migrant labor included disintegrated black families, urban prostitution, and a gender imbalance between rural and urban areas. Black women often became the heads of single- parent families and were left alone to face the rigors of earning an income, raising children, and maintaining a home, often under economically and socially debilitating circumstances.
   

6. Much of the critical and vigilant work among Western feminists addressing issues of representation, difference, and authority emerged in the latter part of the 1980s and 1990s. This includes works such as Elizabeth Spelman,
   Inessential Women, Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought
   (London: Women’s Press, 1990); Nancie Caraway,
   Segregated Sisterhood
   (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); and Anne Russo, “We Cannot Live without Our Lives: White Women, Antiracism and Feminism,” in
   Third World Women
   , ed. Mohanty, 297–313. This type of non-hierarchical scholarship was limited and marginal during the formative period of second-wave Western feminism.
   

7. For a broader discussion of such critiques in relation to other Third World women see Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 51–69.