Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 3 | Maysam J. Al-Farugi (low bandwidth)

A few years back, Cairo’s renowned Islamic university of Al Azhar decreed that a new Egyptian law giving women the same right as men to divorce was in line with the Qur’an.

“Oh, so now it dawns on you?” Maysam J. al-Faruqi recalls thinking. “After all these years?”

As far as she was concerned, Azhar’s mostly male religious scholars should have done “a bit more soul-searching” a long time ago as to why women’s right to divorce—guaranteed in the Qur’an—was not enshrined in Egyptian law. For al-Faruqi, it was another example of how “Islamic jurisprudence has been colored by male jurists. And this has to be rectified.”

Al-Faruqi is among the new wave of Muslim female scholars who are reading the Qur’an and Islamic law with an eye on greater gender equality. Their work is part of a movement that she views as unstoppable. “Muslim women are coming to grasp that the problems they experienced in the past were cultural,” al-Faruqi said during a break from correcting final exams at Georgetown University, where she teaches Islamic studies. “They are more and more aware of their rights in Islam. And that awareness is irreversible.”

A slender woman of Palestinian descent, al-Faruqi was born and educated in Lebanon, where she got degrees in economics and anthropology. At Temple University she specialized in economic theory in classical Islamic law for her doctorate. But spurred by questions from Muslim women about their rights, al-Faruqi lately has focused on how those rights are expressed—or not—in Islamic law.

She does not call herself a feminist “because the word carries too much baggage...It implies accepting definitions of self, relations with society, and identity that come from the West...That’s definitely not my view. I start from Islam itself.”

Al-Faruqi said she understands the Western perspective that men and women should be equal in all things in every way, but does not think that it “takes into account the reality of things.” By contrast, she said, “Islam is more practical.” For example, its emphasis on the extended family as the foundation of society provides Muslim women with “a network, so I’m not prone to loneliness, or despair and even economic bankruptcy,” said al-Faruqi. And the Qur’anic command that men are financially responsible for the family comes from the fact that women inescapably are responsible for bearing and nursing children, she explained. “It’s a matter of equalizing the responsibilities.”

But this differentiation of family roles does not mean that men and women differ in intelligence, talents or the right to play a role in public life, al-Faruqi added. Nor does it mean that women cannot work or provide for the family if they want.

Muslim women should be active in reevaluating prevailing interpretations of the Qur’an and Islamic legal rulings, al-Faruqi said, because this is an essential task for ending practices that hold women back. “If you say this is against Islamic law then you have immediate cooperation. It’s an absolutely great tool in terms of reform,” she said. But this reinterpretive effort is not a “feminist” movement, she has written, “because its basis is Islam and not gender: the injunctions of the Qur’an still take precedence over anything and everything even if, to the Western feminist, they do not provide blind equality.”

Al-Faruqi says that Muslim women “have already taken a great gift from Western women, namely, their gaining of their rights,” which she calls a “propeller” for Muslim women’s struggle. On the other hand, she believes that Western women have problems “because the feminist movement has focused on the individual, which has made it hard for women to find that equilibrium which would provide them with all their fundamental rights but also a fulfilling relationship with their family and with society.” Muslim women, she adds, “can help their Western sisters find that middle road.”

The two sides have more in common than stereotypes suggest, al-Faruqi says.

“I haven’t met a Western woman who says I don’t care about my children, or my family or my society,” she notes. “And I have not met a Muslim woman who does not want to fight for her rights.”