Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (48 page)

people figuratively and literally.

I went on from my street protest activities to become the Project Director of the Laurel, Mississippi branch of the 1964 Freedom Summer Project.
5
It was at this time that I learned a liberating black Christian theology and about community organizing in the face of virulent and violent white racism. The black women of Laurel, and in many other towns, villages, and hamlets in the state were the backbone of the Mississippi struggle. If it had not been for them, we would never have galvanized those thousands and thousands of people who fought for the right to vote and to be active participants in the civil and political life of that state and this nation. What we did in Mississippi reverberated across the South and the entire country, gradually knocking down

the barriers to black people’s civic and political participation at the local, state, and national levels.

I am amazed when I reflect on the reality of what we did in Mississippi and how it has changed so much about the racial landscape in the South, particularly, and in the U.S.A. overall. In 1964, if you were black, you could be killed for attempting to register to vote in Mississippi and some other Southern states. And, of course, running for any public office as a black person was completely forbidden. Presently the U.S. Congressional delegation from the state of Mississippi has the largest number of African-Americans of any state and the Mississippi State Legislature is at least one-third African-American. This has happened in a thirty-year period. It was the Fannie Lou Hammers,
6
the Annie Devines,
7
the Victoria Grays,
8
the Eunita Blackwells,
9
the Eberta Spinks, the Carrie Claytons, the Susie Ruffins,
10
and so many other women and men, girls and boys in Mississippi who made this happen. We Mississippi female freedom fighters stood on the shoulders of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells Barnett, and the thousands upon thousands of African-American women known and unknown who struck their blow for freedom as they lived the destiny that was theirs. These were women of agency and power. They were strong and they did what they had to do, when they had to do it. These are my foremothers. They are my legacy; they are an important part of my heritage.

I personally became engaged in a vigorous fight for my self, for my identity as a black person who had grown up in a racist society at an early age. I was greatly aided in my struggle for self and agency by the black women in my home (my mother, my grandmother, my aunts),
11
my church (particularly the women leaders of the church), my school (wonderful women teachers who took me under their wings and nurtured my intellect and my spirit), and in my community (women community leaders who encouraged my talents and my leadership abilities). I am fortunate as an African-American woman to have been surrounded by powerful women role models who had survived incredible hardships to make a way out of no way.

I was further aided in my struggle against racial dehumanization by the African-American interpretation of Christianity, which not only imputed agency to African-Americans, male and female, but also a chosenness and a challenge to rise up from the degradation and humiliations imposed by our enemies to become a model community of faith and righteousness.
12
I was blessed to be nurtured in such a religious environment.

I came into Islam with this history, with this legacy. Therefore, it is morally, psychically, emotionally and intellectually impossible for me to accept the notion that I am a second-class human
13
because I was born in a female form. I can no more accept this idea than I could accept in the 1960s that I was a second-class citizen because I was born in a black body. My feminism has been greatly informed by my experiences gleaned in the fight for equality here in racist America.

I am further strengthened in my beliefs about the equality of women by the fact that I was graced by God to meet a Sufi mystic, Sheikh Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen,
14
who by his teachings, his example, and his very being introduced me to Islam, an Islam of justice, truth, beauty, and grace. The Islam that my Sheikh taught and exemplified is a gender, racial, and religiously egalitarian Islam. It is an Islam that teaches that all human beings are created from a divine ray of God, are all God’s children and are completely equal in God’s sight. It is an Islam that overtly acknowledges the feminine qualities of God, those qualities of wisdom, compassion, nurturance, and sustenance. It is an Islam that teaches that the human being has been endowed with seven levels of consciousness or wisdom through which he or she can know God personally. The way to know God personally, intimately, taught Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, is through a rigorous self-purification process whereby all ideas and feelings of separation (sexual, racial, and religious), and the ego sense are purged. To be a Muslim, taught Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, is to be in a state of purity. If one reaches this “state” of Islam, this state of purity, then one can communicate directly with God, taught Bawa. Then one is truly a
Mu’min
(a pure believer). It is then and only then that one can truly understand the Qur’an, one’s duty to God and one’s fellow beings, human, animal, and plant, taught Bawa. This was the Islam that captured my heart.

In my studies of Islam, I see Bawa’s teachings and that of many others in the Sufi and philosophical streams in Islam as the true essence of Islam, which emerges after one strips away the cultural, racial, and ideological accretions and dross. It is then and only then, says Bawa, that the human being steps into the true radiance and beauty of God Consciousness, which recognizes no differences in the human family. In this state, all are seen as potential manifestations of God, made in the image of God, which in the physical takes two forms, male and female. It is only this physical form that has differences and these are for reproductive purposes. The soul, the
qalb
(heart), and the levels of consciousness are not differentiated according to race or gender but are potentially the same. To see differences and to make distinctions based on differences in color, class, or gender is the greatest ignorance, taught Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.

However, what I have found in Islam, as practiced, is very, very different from Bawa’s teachings. Distinctions based on race, skin color, class, gender, and religion occur all the time in societies and communities that call themselves Muslim. From my Bawa Muhaiyaddeen inspired vantage, it seems that one of the primordial essences of the religion of Islam is justice.
15
The Islam that I embrace in my heart is one of peace and justice. There can be no peace where there is unrelenting injustice. The injustice to which Muslim women have been subjected cannot be said to be the will of a God of justice. When the oppression of women occurs in an Islamic society in the name of Islam, it is the result of many things, religious, cultural, and economic. Certainly one of these is men’s incorrect interpretations of the Qur’an and
hadith
owing to the societal and

cultural influences that shaped the early jurists’ and theologians’ worldview and subsequent interpretation of these texts.
16
It is not because Islam requires it any more than any of the other religions require it. These early anti-women interpretations have been compounded by later misogynist accretions to Islam’s canon and the mistaken belief that what the earlier doctors of law and theology decided are immutable, unchangeable.
17
This has locked us as Muslims into a legal and theological prison that has fostered and justified violence and repression against women and religious minorities which are done in the name of God and religion.

It is true that the Qur’an and the
Sunnah
of the Prophet have provided textual sources for the development of Islamic law. However, these texts were interpreted and applied in socio-historical contexts by human beings. Using reason and influenced by diverse geographic locations and customs, early jurists developed a body of law that reflected the differences of juristic reasoning and social customs of a patriarchal society.
18
Islamic law is a human product derived from a very human process over several centuries. These laws and the process by which they were derived can and should be questioned, challenged, and changed if and when societal harm occurs because of their implementation.

The idea that changes in law are required when there is harm caused by the law is not a new idea in Islam. Najim al Din Al-Towfi (d.1316) wrote,

If a text implies any damage to the general interest [
maslaha
], it is the latter [general interest] which should prevail. – But some say that it is against the text. On the contrary, it reinforces the text, which was revealed in order to safeguard human welfare.
19

Men defined and continue to define what is in the best interest of Muslim societies legally. Many of the male authorities did not then and do not now include the best interests of over half of their population, women and girls, in their legal formulations. Laws, for example, that continue to countenance universal and unrestricted divorce privileges for men while placing severe restrictions on women’s ability to obtain a divorce; those that permit unregulated polygamy; those that place restrictions on women’s rights to travel, their right to decide if they will go to school or go to work outside the home if married; and those that give reduced sentences to male relatives who commit honor killings and the like are not taking women’s interest seriously and are oblivious to the harms that such restrictions can and do cause women. These laws continue to buttress and sustain male privilege, patriarchal privilege, and to enforce women’s subjugation and oppression.

Islam as practiced does have a gender ideology, which is not necessarily reflective of the Qur’an, which, as both Leila Ahmed
20
and Farid Esack
21
have written, shows ambivalence about women’s equality. There is, however, a significant number of verses enjoining equitable treatment for women. So much so that if the male lawmakers had been so inclined, they could have developed a

gender-equitable interpretation of the Qur’an. The negative position of women in Islamic societies has been deeply affected by the writings, interpretations, and attitudes of the ‘
ulama
of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries.
22
Their attitudes regarding breadwinning in the family, Islamic family law, biological differences between the sexes, differences in the socialization of the sexes, and the whole issue of men’s honor being located between the thighs of a woman have been used to marginalize women in both the public and domestic spheres. Polygamy, men’s easy access to divorce, and the wife’s expected obedience to her husband in all matters including sexual access and when to have or not have children, have marginalized women in the private sphere. Putting men in charge of household expenditures, which is said to be the normative arrangement, is largely responsible for the socioeconomic inequality between the genders.

By and large, Muslim religious authorities and legal scholars are of the view that the man is obliged to provide food, shelter, and clothing for his wife and children. In return the woman has obligations toward her husband including obeying his sexual demands. According to male interpretations of Islam that have become the orthodox view, men because of their economic role are given the authority to manage the affairs of women and even to punish women if they do not obey.
23
It should be admitted that men’s absolute control over women seriously erodes those rights given to women in Islam that Muslims are so quick to brag about – the right to own and hold property, to work outside the home and to have control over their income, etc. If a man controls your movements and demands that you stay inside the house, it is pretty difficult for you to earn an income or to manage your properties.

This whole idea that women have to be protected, looked after, and controlled must be re-examined. Also the prevalent notion that the morality of society can be upheld only through restrictions and policing of women must be challenged. Why the double standard on morality and chastity in Islamic societies and communities? The Qur’an commands chastity and sexual purity for both men and women. Certainly, we all want strong families with children who are cared for and protected by their mothers and their fathers. But if the creation and maintenance of such families become the rationale and justification for denying women human rights, then alternatives to keeping families strong and intact must be found. Resilient and together families can no longer rest on women and their behavior alone; men must assume their role as parents beyond the breadwinning function. We must challenge the idea that woman’s destiny is biologically determined. The idea that women’s biological differences produce an intellectual difference and an emotional difference that suits her for motherhood and homemaking exclusively must be challenged and eradicated.
24

In 2002, I went to hear a noted African-American imam speak at a major university as a guest of a Muslim student group. I purchased three of his tapes that were being sold at that gathering. One of them was titled “The Nature of the Woman.” I became very sad listening to the contents of that tape, which posits

that women are created from a bent rib
25
and as such have certain negative characteristics, which are an inherent part of her nature. The upshot of his discourse was that women were created to have a highly emotional nature, since this suits them for their role as bearers and caretakers of children. Implicit in his statements was the idea that this was woman’s primary role. Here is an African- American man who seemingly has forgotten his own history and the legacy of his foremothers. He has forgotten, for example, that Harriet Tubman single- handedly escaped slavery in 1849 when she was twenty-nine years old, only to return nineteen times to lead three hundred other enslaved Africans to freedom. It is said that Tubman carried a gun in her waistband and if one of her passengers became terrified on the perilous journey and wanted to turn back, Tubman would threaten to kill him or her on the spot and forced them onward, onward to freedom. Tubman had a U.S. $40,000 bounty on her head and that was a lot of money in the 1850s. Traveling by night, hiding by day, scaling the mountains, fording the rivers, threading the forests, lying concealed as the pursuers passed them, Tubman led her passengers, guided by the North Star, to freedom. To this day, none knows the paths she took. But some say it must have been God who led her and I agree. Now can you tell me that this woman was too emotional to be a leader? She was not only a leader; she was a general. Tubman was the first woman soldier in the U.S. Army. She served as a scout and a guide during the Civil War. Shamefully, Tubman was a war veteran who had to sue the

U.S. government to get her pension. I am going on at some length about my foremother Tubman as an antidote to this imam’s tape that says that because woman is created from a rib she is emotional, and that her nature suits her exclusively for motherhood and wifely duties. Clearly women are created to be mothers, since it is only women who can give birth to children. Unfortunately, what is a wonderful attribute given by God to women has been turned into the justification for women’s suppression, repression, and oppression.

We progressive and feminist Muslims must publicly acknowledge the oppression of Muslim women and the denial of their human rights in Islamic societies.
26
And we must also acknowledge that there has been a feminist struggle against this oppression within the Middle East since the beginning of the twentieth century. It really existed before then and it can be attested to in the first written evidence of feminist thought in the poetry of Arab women published as early as 1860. The first explicit organizational identification of Muslim feminism occurred in the founding of the Egyptian Feminist Union and the public unveiling by two upper class women in Egypt in 1923.
27
This act represented a symbolic and pragmatic announcement of the rejection of a whole way of life built on hiding and silencing women. These early feminists argued that Islam guaranteed women rights that they had been deprived of because of “custom and traditions” imposed in the name of religion.

Yet feminism in Islam has been attacked as the cultural arm of imperialism or neo-imperialism out to destabilize local society and to destroy indigenous

cultural identity. It has also been attacked as being anti-Islamic – undermining the religious foundation of the family and society – and for being elitist and therefore irrelevant to the majority.
28

But the feminist movement, named and unnamed, has persevered. Contrary to the charges against it, Margot Badran in her studies of Egyptian feminism and Eliz Sanasarian in hers on Iranian feminism have found that the feminist movements in these two countries are grounded in Islam and nationalism.
29

Badran and Miriam Cooke in their
Opening the Gates
divide feminism in the Arab world into three distinct periods:

1. There was what they call the invisible feminism period from the early 1860s to the early 1920s, which one finds evidence of in books produced by middle and upper class women.
   

2. The second phase they document as being from the 1920s to the end of the
   

   1960s. This period saw the rise of women’s public organized movements. Between the 1920s and the 1950s these movements existed in Egypt. In the 1930s and 1940s feminist movements were found in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria. This same type of activity began in the Sudan in the 1950s.
   

3. The third phase, says Badran and Cooke, began after the 1970s and saw a resurgence of feminist expression in countries such as Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon.
   

   Feminist discourse among Muslim women in the Arab world has addressed universal issues including:
   

the unfettered right to education and work outside the home;

women’s rights in marriage, divorce, and custody of children cases after divorce;

women’s right to the vote, to stand for election, and to participate in all

spheres of their society;

the right to travel freely and an end to gender segregation.

There is a long and wonderful history of Arab Muslim and Christian feminists as well as Muslim feminists in other parts of the Islamic world, including most notably those in Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey, who are striving for their full human rights. I am sure that many if not most Muslims in the world are unaware of this history.
30
It is an important part of recent Islamic history that needs to be taught to Muslims the world over. I urge all Muslim women and progressive men to teach this history of Islamic feminism to Muslims everywhere. I hope that we feminist and progressive Muslims here in America will teach this history to all the women and men converts coming into Islam as well as the immigrants (male and female) who have come to America to live. Just as African-Americans have had to wrest our true history from the lies and obfuscations of white racist American history, we feminist and progressive Muslims must learn and teach the history of Muslim women’s struggle for justice

against ignorance, tradition, and superstition to all Muslims, especially the young. We will face formidable opposition in our efforts. Most likely we will be driven from our mosques and community centers when we try to teach this history. We will be shunned and ostracized. But we must persevere in spite of the forces that will be arrayed against us.

This will not be a new phenomenon, for Muslim feminists have suffered all manner of abuse in their struggle to achieve women’s human rights within Muslim societies. It is the same kind of suffering and abuse experienced by women worldwide as well as racial and religious minorities, slaves, peasants, and workers who have fought for their human rights.

What is so remarkable about feminist Muslim women’s struggles is that their struggle has been waged in largely agrarian societies with high illiteracy rates among men and even more so among women. They are struggling in societies where the hold of religious belief is still great and where religion is an important regulator of everyday life and source of identity. This fact is critical in societies where people are taught that the oppression of women is mandated by their religion. Muslim feminists have had to contend with these deeply held misconceptions about women, which are lodged in their tradition. They have also had to contend with the legacy of the colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as well as the American-enforced “New World Order” of today.

Just as in the past, Muslim feminists and their supporters run the risk of being discredited as anti-Islamic, anti-nationalistic, or both. They also run the risk of assassination attempts and legal efforts to charge them with apostasy or to have their marriages annulled because they are apostate. Of course this is true for progressive male reformers too. Progressive Muslim scholars such as Farid Esack and Ebrahim Moosa of South Africa have suffered immensely, including assaults on their lives, as a result of their progressive views. Even today a Muslim feminist like Nawal al-Saadawi needs bodyguards when she’s at home in Egypt. When Toujan Faisal of Jordan was elected to the lower house of the Jordanian Parliament, she too had to have armed guards to protect her. She was called an apostate; Islamists attempted to have her marriage annulled on the grounds that she was an apostate. They failed in their efforts.

We Muslims, feminists, and progressives here in the U.S.A. have the opportunity to practice an Islam that is egalitarian in its precepts and its practices. We must fight to re-interpret the texts in keeping with the socio- historical context of our times. When women are going on space missions and walking on the moon, flying F-16s, performing heart transplants, and so on and so on, can we continue talking and preaching about woman being created from a rib and that this has determined that she is too emotional and mentally fragile to work outside the home or to pursue a meaningful career? The facts on the ground dispute these contentions, resolutely. We must let these myths go. We must bring the best of Islam into the twenty-first century and stop dragging

those anti-woman perspectives and interpretations of medieval men into our masjids, our classrooms, our homes, and our hearts.

We have the opportunity to bring about a change. Are we up to the challenge?

endnotes

1. Rachel Blau DuPlessis,
   Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth
   -
   Century Women Writers
   (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 26.
   

2. I have lived and traveled in the Middle East on four different occasions. The longest period was from June 1996 to December 1997, when I was based in Jordan on Fulbright and NMERTA Fellowships. During that time, as well as during my earlier visits in 1994, in 1995, and again in 2002, I traveled to other states in the region, including Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Each time I met and discussed the status of women in Arab Islamic societies with men and women concerned about this issue.
   

3. I converted to Islam in 1972 in Philadelphia and have been actively involved in an Islamic community since that time.
   

4. I must point out my particular disappointment with the level of discrimination against women in many (not all) African-American Muslim communities. Given this community’s long history of struggle against discrimination based on race and skin color and its generally progressive politics because of its marginalized position in society, I had certainly hoped for a more liberal gender interpretation of Islam than I have found to be the case. The lure of patriarchal domination (long denied to African-American men over “their” women as a consequence of chattel slavery, where there was only “one man,” the white man who dominated black men and women equally) seems to have overridden racial solidarity concerns. Of course many African-American women scholars and cultural workers have documented black women’s resistance to the sexism and misogyny practiced in black culture. On this topic, see Toni Cade Bambara (ed.),
   The Black Woman
   (New York: Penguin, 1970); Katie Geneva Cannon,
   Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community
   (New York: Continuum, 1995); Angela Y. Davis,
   Women, Race & Class
   (New York: Vintage, 1981); bell hooks,
   Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism
   (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Audre Lorde,
   Sister Outsider
   (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984); Deborah Gray White,
   Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves 1894–1994
   (New York:
   

   W.W. Norton, 1999); Beverly Guy-Sheftall (ed.)
   Words of Fire: An Anthology of African- American Feminist Thought
   (New York: New Press, 1995), Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, (eds),
   All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave
   (New York: Feminist Press, 1982); Aishah Shahidah Simmons, “Creating A Sacred Space of Our Own,” in
   Just Sex: Students Rewrite the Rules on Sex, Violence, Activism, and Equality
   , ed. Jodi Gold and Susan Villari (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Aishah Shahidah Simmons,
   NO!
   , motion picture, AfroLez Productions, forthcoming; and Kimberly Springer (ed.),
   Still Lifting, Still Climbing: African-American Women’s Contempor- ary Activism
   (New York: New York University Press, 1999); among many others.
   

5. The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project was the brainchild of Robert “Bob” Moses and several local Mississippi activists with whom he worked in the early 1960s. The Project was sponsored by COFO (the Council of Federated Organizations), which included CORE (Congress for Racial Equality), NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Council), and SNCC. The Freedom Summer Project brought over one thousand, mostly white, college-age students to Mississippi to help black activists launch a massive statewide voter registration campaign, to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and to generally challenge the racial apartheid system that existed in the state. For a good description of the project, see Doug McAdam,
   Freedom Summer
   (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
   

6. Mrs Hammer was a local leader from Ruleville, Mississippi who became nationally known as a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party when she challenged the all white Democratic “Regulars” at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City on national television. For more information on this remarkable sharecropper turned political leader, see Kay Mills,
   This Little Light of Mine – The Life of Fannie Lou Hammer
   (New York: Plume, 1993).
   

7. Mrs Annie Devine was an outspoken leader of the Freedom Movement from Canton, Mississippi.
   

8. Victoria Gray was a leader of the MFDP from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
   

9. Eunita Blackwell was an SNCC activist from Mayersville, Mississippi who became the first black woman mayor of her town.
   

10. Mrs Carrie Clayton, Mrs Susie Ruffin and Mrs Eberta Spinks were the first leaders of the Laurel, Mississippi movement. They embraced me and the other COFO volunteers when we first arrived in Laurel, taking us into their homes, providing food and shelter, placing their own lives and that of their families in jeopardy by doing so.
    

11. Mrs Juanita Cranford Watson, my mother; Mrs Rhoda Bell Temple Douglas, my grandmother; and Mrs Jessie Hudson and Mrs Ollie B. Temple Smith, my aunts, had a profound influence upon the development of my self-concept as a female person and as a human being.
    

12. For an excellent explanation of this concept of “chosenness and challenge” in African- American Christian theology, see Gayraud S. Wilmore,
    Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African-Americans,
    3rd edn (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), especially 253–82.
    

13. Many Muslims who discriminate against women would argue that they do not posit that women are “second-class humans.” Rather, they contend that God ordained different roles for men and women. It just so happens that these “roles” give men authority over women solely on the basis of gender. The fact remains, however, that women are placed in subordinate positions to men no matter the reason given. For a recent excellent analysis of this problem in traditional Islamic discourse see, Abdulaziz Sachedina, “Woman, Half-the- Man? The Crisis of Male Epistemology in Islamic Jurisprudence,” in
    Intellectual Traditions in Islam
    , ed. Farhad Daftary (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 160–78.
    

14. Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyadeen came to the U.S.A. from Sri Lanka for the first time on October 11, 1971. “What we know of him prior to then we have gathered from scattered details, which begin in 1884 when he was first known in Sri Lanka. He was recognized [then] as an illuminated master while he still lived in the jungle,” writes Sharon Marcus in her “Introduction” to Bawa’s book
    The Triple Flame: The Inner Secrets of Sufism
    (Philadelphia: Fellowship Press, 2001). He was an Islamic Sufi who dedicated much of his long life to instructing people on the true meaning of Islam and the path of Sufism. Because of his saintliness, his unwavering love for all who came before him, and his depth of understanding of the Qur’an and
    hadith
    as well as the Hindu and Christian scriptures, he drew thousands of seekers of wisdom to his sessions over the sixteen years that he lived and taught in the United States. Information on the
    Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship
    , which is the repository of Bawa’s teachings can be found at the Fellowship’s website at
    www.bmf.org or by calling +1-215-879-8631 or 8604. It is located at 5820 Overbrook Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19131, U.S.A.
    

15. It is not only the Sufis who maintain that Islam’s central imperative is one of justice. The eminent legal scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl, in his important work
    Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women
    (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001), writes “[T]he Quran often speaks of the law of God as basically constituted of the imperative of justice. Typically it states that God commands people to establish justice, or it dictates that the Prophet or Muslims implement God’s law by enforcing justice” (27). Continuing, El Fadl states, “[T]he Quran dictates the imperative of justice as both an individual and collective responsibility . . . [T]he obligation of justice must be discharged by the individual and by society at large” (28).
    

16. One of the salient points that feminist religious scholars, as well as others, have shown is the fact that all religious experience is structured by the socio-historically conditioned worldview of the believer. The noted Iranian Islamic scholar AbdolKarim Soroush speaks about the human basis of all religious knowledge also. In
    Reason, Freedom and Democracy in Islam
    , trans. Mahmoud and Ahmad Sadri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Soroush states, “Religious knowledge is a variety of human knowledge subject to change, exchange, contraction and expansion. [It is] human, fallible, evolving and most importantly is constantly in the process of exchange with other forms of knowledge” (15–16).
    

17. As I have written prviously, “The fact that the early Muslim legal scholars, thirteen centuries ago, saw as their lawmaking task the development of a human (the only kind that they could reach as they were not prophets) understanding (
    fiqh
    ) of God’s Commands has often been lost on the faithful . . . The fact that Islamic law is the culmination of hundreds of years of human intellectual activity is crucial for women and other progressive Muslims who are striving to change aspects of the law which are out of step with modernist notions of human rights and women rights.” Gwendolyn Simmons, “The Islamic Law of Personal Status and Its Contemporary Impact on Women in Jordan,” dissertation, Temple University, 2002, 233.
    

18. Joseph Schacht, in “Law and Justice”, “Islamic Society and Civilization” (in P.M. Holt, Anne K.S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis eds.
    The Cambridge History of Islam
    , vol. 2 (Cambridge: CUP, 1970), 539) gives numerous examples of how the early jurists subverted the egalitarian impetus in the Qur’an as it related to women and to male–female relationships (543). He also describes how the law as formulated suppressed the ethically gender neutral voice in the Qur’an and supplanted it with laws reflective of the formulators’ misogynist bias (545). An example of this process, says Schacht, is the case of divorce in Islamic law. As I have written, “Divorce in Islamic law is one of the most harmful to women institutions created by the jurists. Traditionally, it has given men almost total control over the divorce process, permitting them to discard no longer wanted wives easily. Whereas women had to go through a lengthy legal process in order to free herself from an onerous marriage.” Simmons, “
    The Islamic Law of Personal Status and Its Contemporary Impact on Women in Jordan
    ,” 234.
    

19. Muhammad Sa‘id Al-Ashmawi, “Shari‘a: The Codification of Islamic Law,” in
    Liberal Islam
    

    – A Sourcebook
    , ed. Charles Kurzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 56.
    

20. Leila Ahmed,
    Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate
    , (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 64.
    

21. Farid Esack, printed text of talk given at Temple University’s Religion Department Conference on “What Men Owe Women,” Sugar Loaf Conference Center, Philadelphia, June 1998.
    

22. As Sachedina in “Woman, Half-the-man?” writes, “[I]n one area the Qur’an left the status of women to become the
    mawdu
    ’ (her social substantive social context) for laws that permitted, though mitigated, an inequality of status between men and women, reducing a woman to ‘half the man.’ Her distinctive contribution to determining her own social context was thoroughly excluded by eliminating her as the interpreter of her own objects and situations. Patriarchal structures of Arab culture, in the form of loosely camouflaged Traditions ascribed to the Prophet, left her intellectually crippled, while the male jurists prepared text of the laws for her insidious domination by the male members of society.” (169).
    

23. Qur’an 4:34 is the verse of the Qur’an most often quoted to justify the idea that men are in control of women and even have the right to physically chastise them if they are disobedient. Contemporary Muslim feminists have interpreted Qur’an 4:34 differently than the orthodox interpretations of the verse. See specifically, Amina Wadud’s interpretation and explanation of this verse found in her ground-breaking work,
    Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, 2nd edn
    (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
    

24. Feminist scholars across disciplines have maintained that there is a gender hierarchy in patriarchal societies that places women in subordinate positions. As Catherine McKinnon in
    Feminism Unmodified
    has written, “the social relations between the sexes [in patriarchal societies] is organized so that men may dominate and women must submit.”
    Feminism Unmodified – Discourses on Life and Law
    (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 3.
    

25. While many Muslims believe as do their Jewish and Christian counterparts that woman was created from “Adam’s rib,” as described in Genesis 2:18–24, there is no Qur’anic basis for such a belief. The Islamic theologian and scholar Riffat Hassan has written exhaustively on this subject. She notes that in the thirty or so passages in the Qur’an on the creation of humanity, there is no mention of a male human being created first and a female human being created second. Rather, as she states, “An analysis of the Qur’anic descriptions of human creation shows how the Qur’an evenhandedly uses both feminine and masculine terms and imagery to describe the creation of humanity from a single source.” Continuing, Hassan notes the “woman created from Adam’s rib” idea comes into Islamic theology through
    hadith
    sources. As we find these “rib” traditions ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad in both
    Sahih al-Bukhari
    and
    Sahih Muslim
    , the two most authoritative collections of
    hadith
    , Muslims believe these descriptions of woman’s creation to be true. See Riffat Hassan,
    Women’s Rights and Islam: From the I.C.P.D
    .
    to Beijing
    (self-published, n.d.). These
    hadith
    accounts of woman’s creation and the fact that they do not accord with the Qur’anic account of human creation are a problem for feminists and progressive Muslims who are working for gender egalitarian Muslim societies. Hassan and others address this problem by pointing out that these
    hadith
    are weak with regard to their lists of transmitters. Whenever there is a conflict between the Qur’an and
    hadith
    accounts on any matter, Hassan and other scholars are of the view that any
    hadith
    that opposes the Qur’an cannot be accepted as authentic.