Political struggles of women in Muslim societies

The previous discussion demonstrates the belief shared by Muslim women scholars and reform-minded Muslims that women’s lived experiences in the Muslim societies are the result of the interpretation of Islamic texts, turned by rulers into legal doctrine.

This understanding forms the basic character of Muslim women’s political struggles. The limited opportunity women enjoy to participate in formal politics has prompted them to find alternative ways. Muslim women and some male Muslims seek to promote justice and equality in society within an Islamic framework. They believe that Islam guarantees equality between men and women (Mir-Hosseini 1996; Badran 2002; Ahmed 1999; Wadud 1999; Othman 2006; Anwar 2001; Muzzafar 2006).⁹ In doing this, Muslim women and men go directly to the Islamic texts in their effort to find the egalitarian messages of Islam (Badran 2002, 4).¹⁰ However, since it is the ruler of the state who defines and interprets Islam to be used both as an ideology of the state and as a religion of the people, women activists promote the need for the society to understand what constitutes sharia or Islamic law and that Islamic law is a product of the laws created by rulers to regulate the lives of Muslim societies.

Thus, Muslim women and Muslim reformers attempt to dismantle the product of these interpretations by calling for a rereading of the Islamic scriptures. They believe that gender inequality in Muslim societies derives from ‘inner contradictions between ideals of the sharia and the social norms of Muslim cultures’ (Mir-Hosseini 2003, 21). Thus, if there is discrimination and oppression towards women, it is not the result of sharia, but derives from patriarchal interpretations of sharia, which can, and must, be challenged or overruled (Mir-Hosseini 2006, 632). As believers in Islam, Muslim women are committed to find liberation, truth and justice from within their own faith. As one activist from Malaysia, Zainah Anwar (2001, 227), puts it, Muslim women like her are convinced that Islam allows and grants women the right to:

Reclaim their religion, to redefine it, to participate in and contribute to an understanding of Islam, how it is codified and implemented – in ways that take into consideration the realities and experience of women’s lives today.

This path of struggle by women in the Muslim world to address inequality and injustices is described as ‘Islamic feminism’. ‘Islamic feminism’ can be defined as a feminist discourse and practice articulated within an ‘Islamic paradigm’ (Badran 2002, 1). Islamic feminism believes that the struggle for equality within Islam should be based on rereading and reinterpreting the Qur’an and Hadith in order to produce feminist interpretations of sharia. It seeks justice, equality and women’s rights directly from the Qur’an, from the totality of their existence (Badran 2002, 1). Muslim feminists seek to find justice and equality by focusing on Fiqh knowledge. As Mernissi (1991, viii) argues:

Muslim women can walk into the modern world with pride, for full participation in the political and social affairs without the drive of imported western values, but from within the true part of the Muslim tradition.

Islamic feminists have also acknowledged the fact that the Islamic law being implemented in Muslim societies tends to be misogynist, gender-biased and discriminatory against women because, according to Afshar (2008, 422), the interpretation has been dominated by conservative male Ulama.¹¹ The result is that hundreds of verses are narrowly interpreted to confine the role of women in the family and in Islam.¹² But in the late nineteenth century, women began to question the reading and interpretation of the Qur’an and, in particular, matters strongly related to women’s interests and gender relations (Afshar 2008, 423). Those of this view believe that a reinterpretation of Islamic texts will reduce restrictions on women and create more equal gender relations in Muslim societies.¹³ Yet, it is not easy for women and modernists alike to reread and reinterpret the Qur’an and Hadith, as attempts made by women are immediately seen as a threat to both formal and informal social authority, which is mostly comprised of men (Afshar 2008, 423). Muslim women believe that Islam teaches the moral and spiritual equality of men and women as expressed in Qur’anic verses.

Islamic feminism gained wider public attention in the 1990s following growing interest in the West in the lived experiences of women and Islam (Mojab 2001, 124). In Egypt, alternative voices among Muslim women in Egypt emerged at that time, articulating female subjectivity within what is called ‘a native vernacular, Islamic discourse’, apart from the dominant feminist voice affiliated with Western and secular tendencies (Ahmed 1992, 174). Looking more broadly in the Middle East, Badran (2005, 8) argued that Islamic feminism has appeared at a moment of late post-colonialism and a time of deep disaffection over the inability of the Middle East nation-states to deliver democracy and foster broad economic prosperity.

Islamic feminism has sparked debate among both Muslim scholars and Western feminists, for whom even the term ‘Islamic feminism’ is an oxymoron (Cooke 2000; Abu-Lughod 2002; Moghadam 2002).

Cooke (2000, 93–94) offers another view of Islamic feminism. She argues that women who choose to work within the framework of Islamic feminism prefer to work ‘within the system’, since they can engage in public debates and directly challenge those who claim to speak on behalf of women. Thus, Cooke tries to understand the binary of Islamic feminism by looking at it as women’s double commitment: on one hand commitments to their faith, and, on the other, a commitment to women’s rights in both the public and domestic sphere. As a result, she perceives Islamic feminism as a new and complex self-positioning that demonstrates women’s multiple ‘belongings’. Cooke (2000, 95) thus defines Islamic feminists as:

Whenever Muslim women offer a critique of some aspects of Islamic history or hermeneutics and they do so with and/or on behalf of all Muslim women and their rights to enjoy with men full participation in a just community, I called them Islamic Feminists. This label is not rigid, rather it describes an attitude and intention to seek justice and citizenship for Muslim women.

By being Islamic feminists, Muslim women feel that they continue to belong to their religious community while also pursuing activism on behalf of, and with, other women. Similarly, in order for women to reclaim their rights and justice in Islam and under its laws, Muslim women must be actively engaged with the project of interpretation of texts and laws (Othman 2006, 339).

This section has demonstrated that the path taken by Muslim women activists in dealing with injustices and discrimination is typically framed within Islamic values, and the political struggle of many Muslim women activists can therefore be defined as an ‘Islamic feminism’. The next section turns to consider in more detail the form of the struggles taken by Muslim women to promote gender equality and women’s rights in Muslim societies.