Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 3 | Islam & Feminism: ARE THE BARRIERS COMING DOWN? (low bandwidth)

But women scholars are now demanding recognition of widely ignored rights for women that are clearly laid out in the Qur’an. It states, for example, that women’s money is their own, not their husbands’, and that women should not be forced to marry someone they do not want. Riffat Hassan, one of the first Muslim women to call herself a “feminist theologian,” also has pointed out that the Qur’an’s Creation story relates that Eve was not made from Adam’s rib, but created independently at the same time as Adam. It also does not portray Eve as the temptress responsible for Adam’s first sin. (See also “Additional Commentary,” in sidebar “Qur’anic Verses.”)

Other female Muslim scholars are offering alternative interpretations of key Qur’anic verses that male scholars have long cited to justify male superiority, bar women from public office and deny them any authority over men. A seminal book in this area is Qur’an and Woman: Rereading Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective by Amina Wadud, professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. First published in 1992 and reprinted in 1999 by Oxford University Press, the book has been translated into multiple languages.

“My objective...was to make a ‘reading’ of the Qur’an that would be meaningful to women living in the modern era,” writes Wadud, an African-American convert to Islam. “I explicitly challenge the arrogance of those men who require a level of human dignity and respect for themselves while denying that level to another human, for whatever reason—including simply because she is a woman. In particular, I reject the false justification of such arrogance through narrow interpretations or misinterpretations of the Qur’anic text, namely interpretations which ignore the basic social principles of justice, equality and common humanity.”

Equally provocative is Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (Yale University Press, 1992). Ahmed, professor of women’s studies in religion at Harvard University’s Divinity School, argues that Islam’s “ethical vision” is “stubbornly egalitarian” but that has not been evident in the “technical, legalistic establishment version of Islam.” Because Muslim women have continued to hear this “egalitarian voice of Islam,” Ahmed wrote, they “often declare (generally to the astonishment of non-Muslims) that Islam is nonsexist.” Just like Judaism and Christianity, Ahmed adds, Islam’s moral message is open to a variety of interpretations, “including feminist interpretations.”

Islamic feminism, whether or not it uses the “feminist” label, generally has several characteristics. It is based on the Qur’an. It rejects the idea that Muslim women have to abandon Islam to secure their rights. It asserts that there are other models for emancipated, modern women besides the Western one. It sees the traditional, extended family as the essential foundation of society. And it places just as much, if not more, emphasis on an individual’s duties to the community as it does on recognizing an individual’s rights. And while Islamic feminism accepts that men and women have different roles within the family because of biological differences, it firmly holds that these differences do not make women morally, spiritually or intellectually inferior to men, or preclude them from participating equally with men in the public arena.

Among the Muslim world’s 1.2 billion adherents, this emerging vision of gender equality is only beginning to have an impact on legal and political structures. “We’re only at the beginning of imagining what Islam would look like without that patriarchal filter,” explained Mohja Kahf, a contributor to Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America (Syracuse University Press, 2000; Gisela Webb, ed.), a collection of female voices redefining women’s rights from an Islamic perspective.

Although Millett’s vision of a Western-style, secular global women’s movement never emerged, her prediction that Iran’s revolution might “herald the rise of women throughout Islam” was on target. In many Islamic countries, Muslim women’s movements are among the most dynamic and creative social groups pressing for change. “The Islamic world is teeming with feminists,” says Riffat Hassan. “They may not call themselves feminists, but they want a choice in who they marry, and they want education.”

Some of these women’s groups operate from a secular outlook. Others, such as Malaysia’s Sisters in Islam, advocate a faith-based feminism. The faith-based groups often elicit skepticism from mainstream American feminism because it has long operated from a strongly secular outlook and has been influenced by the view that all religions are inherently patriarchal, and therefore irredeemably anti-women. But precisely because Muslim women see Islam as an all-encompassing faith that affects everything from family relationships to public policy, they believe it is important to base their activism in their faith. Moreover, they see Islam as a powerful weapon for reform because it is the primary legitimizer for social customs and laws in Islamic societies. Once women can show that a practice is unIslamic or not condoned in the Qur’an, they have presented the most potent argument for ending that practice.

While many Muslim women view this approach as a key strategy for change, American feminists sometimes adopt other, ill-advised strategies with damaging results.

Take a recent case in Nigeria. Last May, Ayesha Imam, an activist with BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights, issued a global Internet alert pleading for a halt to a letter-writing campaign protesting last year’s stoning-to-death sentence imposed on Amina Lawal by an Islamic shari’a court. Imam said the campaign had hurt BAOBAB’s efforts to appeal the sentence because local religious authorities in Nigeria were incensed by “negative stereotypes” of Islam in some letters and regarded the campaign as hostile interference by non-Muslim outsiders. To show their defiance of this foreign meddling, the authorities hastily carried out a flogging sentence on another woman without waiting for her appeal to be heard, Imam noted.

“Women’s rights defenders should assess potential backlash effects before devising strategies,” Imam’s alert warned. “There is an unbecoming arrogance in assuming that international human rights organizations or others always know better than those directly involved.”

Other Muslim women expressed dismay over the confrontational tactics used by some Western feminists to impose a strongly secularized feminist agenda on conservative Islamic societies. These efforts “backfire on people like us because we are trying to influence the men. And they say, ‘You are part of these extremists,’” says Sima Wali, an Afghan-born women’s rights activist in Washington, D.C. “You’re talking about women concerned about the basics: clean water, health care, education and security. You cannot impose practices that are very farfetched at this moment in Afghan history, such as a 50 percent quota for women in the Afghan government...This is not the time and place.”

But equally unhelpful, says Wali, is accepting injustices done to Muslim women as an unavoidable part of their culture, which “buys into the male political agenda of keeping women subservient.”

Perhaps most exasperating for Muslim women, however, is Western feminists’ preoccupation with the Islamic head covering, often generically referred to as the veil. Focusing on the veil reinforces the myth that Muslim women are repressed individuals waiting to be “rescued,” they say. (Though anyone with female Muslim friends who wear a veil know that is no barrier to self-confidence, intelligence or assertiveness.) Focusing on this particular aspect of dress distracts time and energy from more pressing issues, such as the right to participate fully in public life, and is sometimes seen as a cover for promoting hostility towards Islam itself.

Muslim women have a recipe for American feminists who want to help advance women’s rights in Islamic societies and these are its ingredients: Forget labels (like feminist) and clothing (like the veil). Realize there are many versions of Islam. Recognize the validity of faith-based feminism. Accept that its content will differ from that of Western feminism. Listen to what Muslim women say they want. Despite some early missteps, the Feminist Majority Foundation’s “Campaign to Help Afghan Women and Girls,” which was launched in 1997 when much of the world was ignoring the Taliban’s misogynist policies, drew praise from several Muslim women. “They have learned from their mistakes,” says Wali. “They’re there for the long haul and are promoting the empowerment of Afghan women. They help us get funding and support to create change from inside. They’re listening now.”

Muslim women also have a role to play in furthering rapprochement. They need to reach out to American feminists who want to better understand their Islamic perspective and they need to more forcefully and creatively demonstrate to non-Muslims that Islam and women’s rights are not in conflict.

For both sides, the challenge is to keep their eyes less on their pride and more on their prize, which is the goal of feminism everywhere: justice for all women.

“Dialogue is always the best place to start and if I define justice from my Qur’anic view and someone else defines it from their background, there’s not going to be that much difference,” says Uzma Mazhar. “I think everyone will be surprised at how much we want the same things.”

Caryle Murphy covers religion for The Washington Post and is the author of the recently published Passion for Islam (Scribner, 2002), which explains the contemporary revival of Islam in the Middle East. She was the Post’s correspondent in Southern Africa from 1977-1982 and its Cairo bureau chief from 1989-1994, responsible for covering the Arab world. In 1991, she won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting for her coverage of Iraqi-occupied Kuwait and the subsequent Persian Gulf War.