Introduction

Gender equality is a modern ideal that did not enter Islam’s juristic landscape until the 20th century, along with the expansion of feminist and human rights discourses. Since then it has been the subject of an impassioned debate — a debate that is entangled in the history of the polemics between Islam and the West, and the anti-colonial and nationalist discourses of the first part of the 20 th century.

With the rise of political Islam in the second half of the century, and the Islamist slogan of ‘Return to Shariah’, the debate became part of a larger intellectual and political struggle among the Muslims between two understandings of their religion and two ways of approaching its sacred texts. One is an absolutist, dogmatic and patriarchal Islam that makes little concession to contemporary realities, such as the changed status of women in society. The other is a democratic, pluralist and rights-based Islam that is making room for these realities and values, including gender equality. In the new century, the politics of the ‘war on terror’ and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq — both of them partly justified as promoting women’s rights — added a new layer of complexity to the political and rhetorical dimensions of the debate.

In this chapter I outline the conceptions of gender evident in Islamic legal tradition, summarizing how classical Muslim jurists, in the dominant interpretations of the Shariah, conceived of gender difference and gender relations. I show how 20th-century developments — notably the rise of Muslim nation-states and changed relations between Islamic law, state and practice — challenged these traditionalist conceptions of gender, and led to the debate between two competing contemporary trends, which I have termed neotraditionalist and reformist. I then introduce the work of recent reformist and feminist voices and scholarship in Islam, and the political and hermeneutical challenges they face in their attempts to bring about an egalitarian construction of gender.

Finally, I give the example of the work of Musawah, a movement of scholars and activists for justice and equality in the Muslim family.¹

Two themes run through the chapter and link its different sections.

First, ideas about gender, equality and justice have always been socially constructed; they were shaped and evolved in interaction with ideological, political, socio-economic forces,

and people’s experiences and expectations. The same goes for interpretations of Islam’s sacred texts and the legal rulings that the jurists derived from them. There is a dynamic tension between spiritual-ethical egalitarianism as an essential part of Islam’s message and the patriarchal context in which this message was unfolded and translated into law. This tension has enabled both proponents and opponents of gender equality to claim textual legitimacy for their respective readings and gender ideologies.²

Second, the contemporary quest for gender equality in Islamic law is part of a larger struggle for social justice, which is enmeshed in an intricate dialectic between religion, politics and practice. The democratization of the production of religious knowledge is an essential part of this struggle.

<< | >>

↑

Source: Abou El Fadl Khaled, Ahmad Ahmad Atif, Hassan Said Fares (Eds.). Routledge Handbook of Islamic Law. Routledge,2019. — 466 p.. 2019

More legal literature on Laws.Studio

Introduction

More on the topic Introduction: