Musawah: scholarship and activism

Musawah as a global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family was initiated in 2007 by the pioneering Malaysian women’s group, Sisters in Islam, and launched in Kuala Lumpur in February 2009.

We commissioned a number of concept papers by reformist thinkers, such as Khaled Abou El Fadl, Muhammad Khalid Masud and Amina Wadud, as a way of opening new horizons for thinking, to show how the wealth of resources within Islamic tradition, and in the Qur'anic verses on justice, compassion and equality, can support the promotion of human rights and a process of reform toward more egalitarian family relations. These papers were published as the book Wanted: Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family;²⁰ we made them available in En­glish, French and Arabic and used them as the basis for a wider discussion with a larger group of Muslim scholars and human rights and women’s rights activists. This discussion, including two further workshops in Cairo and London, followed by constant electronic communica­tion among the members of the committee, led to the Musawah Framework for Action.²¹

Drawing on the latest Muslim reformist thought and feminist scholarship in Islam, in Framework for Action we ground our claim to equality and arguments for reform simultane­ously in Islamic and human rights frameworks. Taking a critical feminist perspective, but most importantly working within the tradition of Islamic legal thought, we invoke two of its main distinctions.

The second distinction, referred to earlier, is that between the two main categories of legal rulings (ahkdm): 'ibdddt (ritual/spiritual acts) and mu'dmaldt (social/contractual acts). Rulings in the first category, 'ibdddt, regulate relations between God and the believer, where jurists contend there is limited scope for rationalization, explanation and change, since they pertain to the spiritual realm and divine mysteries. This is not the case with mu admaladt, which reg­ulate relations among humans and remain open to rational considerations and social forces, and to which most rulings concerning women and gender relations belong.

These distinctions give us the language, the conceptual tools, to argue for gender equality from within Muslim legal tradition. Our main objective is to re-insert women’s concerns and voices, which were silenced by the time that the fiqh schools emerged, into the processes of the production of religious knowledge and law making. In this sense what we are doing is part of the larger struggle for the democratization of production of knowledge in Islam, and for the authority to interpret its sacred texts. Two questions are at the centre of our work: If justice and equality are values central to Islam, as we believe they are, why have women been treated as inferior to men in Muslim legal tradition and in Muslim societies? And if equality has become inherent to conceptions ofjustice in modern times, as many Muslims now rec­ognize, how can it be reflected in Muslim laws?

In 2010, Musawah initiated a multi-faceted project to rethink two central concepts that we argue lie at the basis of the unequal construction of gender rights in Muslim family laws.

The project has two interconnected elements. The first is the production of new femi­nist knowledge that critically engages with these concepts and redefines them in line with contemporary notions of justice. The second element of the project involves documenting the life stories of Muslim women and men in different countries with the aim of revealing how they experience, understand and contest these two legal concepts in their lived realities.

For the first element, we invited scholars from different disciplines to write background papers that expound and interrogate the construction of qiwama and wilaya, their associated religious and legal doctrines, and their place and working in contemporary laws and practices. Then, in the course of several intensive workshops we discussed these background papers and shared their insights with our advocates and those involved in the life stories element.

This, of course, took us to Qur'an 4:34, which constitutes the main textual evidence in support of men’s authority over women, and is often the only verse that ordinary Muslims know in relation to gender relations and family law. It reads:

Men are qawwdmun (protectors/maintainers) in relation to women, according to what God has favoured some over others and according to what they spend from their wealth. Righteous women are qanitdt (obedient) guarding the unseen according to what God has guarded. Those [women] whose nushdz (rebellion) you fear, admonish them, and abandon them in bed, and adribuhunna (strike them).

This verse has been the focus of intense contestation and debate among Muslims for over a century. There is now a substantial body of literature that attempts to contest and reconstruct the meanings and connotations of the four Arabic terms above (italicized). Kecia Ali, from whom I have taken the translation of the verse, leaves the emphasized words untranslated, pointing out that any translation of each of these key terms amounts to an interpretation.²³ I have inserted translations that approximate the consensus of classical Muslim jurists and are reflected in a set of rulings (ahkdm) that they devised to define marriage and marital relations. These rulings rest on a single postulate: that God placed women under male authority. For these jurists, men’s superiority and authority over women was a given, legally inviolable; it was in accordance with a conception ofjustice that accepted slavery and patriarchy, as long as slaves and women were treated fairly. They naturally understood the verse in this light; they used the four key terms in the verse to define relations between spouses, and notions of justice and equity.

This is what in our project we refer to as the qiwama postulate — using ‘postulate’ in the sense defined by Japanese legal scholar Masaji Chiba: ‘A value system that simply exists in its own right’.²⁴ It operates in all areas of Muslim law relating to gender rights, but its impact is most evident in the laws that classical jurists devised for the regulation of marriage and divorce. As outlined earlier, they defined marriage as a contract that automatically places a wife under her husband’s qiwama (authority) and presumes an exchange: the wife’s obedience and submission (tamkin) in return for maintenance (nafaqah) by the husband.

Yet the term qawwamun, from which the jurists derived the concept of qiwama, only ap­pears once in the Qur'an in reference to marital relations.²⁵ The closely related term wilaya does occur in the Qur'an, but never in a sense that specifically endorses men’s guardianship over women, which is the interpretation of the term that is enshrined in classical fiqh.²⁶ Many other verses speak of the essential equality of men and women in the eyes of God and the world.

One of the main objectives of the project is to bring the insights from feminist theory and gender studies into conversation with Islamic legal tradition, and to ask new questions: Why and how did verse 4:34, and not other relevant Qur'anic verses, become the foundation for the legal construction of marriage? What does male guardianship, as translated in the con­cepts qiwama and wilaya, entail in practice?

How can we rethink and reconstruct them in line with contemporary notions ofjustice and maruf of our time? What do equality and justice entail in family and society? Do they entail identical rights and duties for spouses?

These questions are central to the ongoing struggle for equality and justice in Muslim families, and our project seeks to clarify them and suggest some answers. The first product of our research is a collected volume: Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition.²⁷ Its main thesis is that the concepts of qiwama and wilaya have mistakenly been un­derstood as a divine sanction for men’s authority over women, with the result that they have become the building blocks of patriarchy within Muslim legal tradition.

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