In this interview with Yoginder Sikand, she talks about the origins and prospects of Islamic feminism as an emancipatory project for Muslim women and as a new, contextually relevant way of understanding Islam.
Q: Several Muslim women's groups today struggle for gender equality and justice using Islamic arguments. Most of them are led by women from elitist or middle class backgrounds and seem to lack a strong popular base. How do you account for this?
A: I think the majority of the women who are publishing about 'Islamic feminism' are definitely from the elite or the middle class. But then feminism has always had to do with the middle class. Islamic feminism is, in a sense, the unwanted child of 'political Islam'. It was 'political Islam' that actually politicized the issue of gender and Muslim women's rights. 'Back to the shariah' slogan meant seeking to return to the classical texts on fiqh and doing away with various laws advantageous to women that had no sanction in the literalist understanding of Islam. Translated into practice, law and public policy, this meant going back to pre-modern interpretations of shariah, with all their restrictive laws about and for women. It was this that led, as a reaction, to the emergence of Islamic feminism, critiquing the Islamists for conflating Islam and the shariah with undistilled patriarchy and for claiming that patriarchal rule was divinely mandated. These Muslim women were confronted with horrific laws that Islamists sought to impose, and so began asking where in all of this was the justice and equality that their own understanding of the Quran led them to believe was central to Islam. These gender activists brought classical fiqh and tafsir texts to public scrutiny and made them a subject of public discussion, articulating alternative, gender-friendly understandings, indeed visions, of Islam. That marked the broadening, in terms of class, of the fledgling Islamic feminist movement.
This discourse is now being relayed to the grassroots by several NGOs working with Muslim women groups using both human rights and Islamic frameworks.
Q: Surely it isn't possible to bracket all Islamists together. There is a large diversity of opinion, including about women, even among Islamists, isn't it? Some of them do at least sound less regressive than others on women's rights.
A: That's true, of course. But, for all Islamists the gender issue is of paramount significance. One of their main claims to legitimacy is their critique of the West, a central plank of which is a moral vision that rests on strengthening the family. They don't say that women have no rights—after all, the language of 'political Islam' is also one of rights. Rather, they claim that Islam gives women all the rights they need, though, what this actually means for women is, for all practical purposes, the same patriarchy.
That said, I would say that the tension between Islamic feminists and patriarchal Islamists is as acute as that between the former and many fellow feminists, who believe that Islamic feminism is an oxymoron and that, in fact, it will only strengthen the Islamists in the long-run with its use of Islamic, instead of secular, human rights, arguments.
I must also add here that just as Islamists are not a monolith, there is also considerable diversity among the Islamic feminists. Many of them would even refuse to be called as such. But one common concern that brings them together is their demand for gender equality and justice, which they claim using various Islamic arguments. Even here, however, there may be differences in the way they conceive equality and justice.
Q: How would you distinguish fiqh from shariah?
A: The shariah denotes what Muslims believe to be the divine path, while fiqh represents the historical tradition of human attempts to discern the mandate of the shariah in different situations. Now, while the former is considered unchangeable, the latter being amenable to change. However, very often both traditionalist Muslim ulema conflate the two, holding them synonymous. Therein lies the major problem that Muslim women continue to be faced with in terms of a whole slew of regressive laws that are wrongly presented as mandated by the shariah.
Recognising this opens up the possibilities of substantial reform for it effectively highlights the separation between the sacred and the legal. This crucial distinction was widely recognized in the past, when no faqih or Muslim jurist of note would ever claim that his fiqh position was absolute and final.
Q: Not all the ulema of the madrasas are misogynist, unlike what is sometimes made out. A few younger Indian madrasa graduates are quite receptive to the sort of arguments of Islamic feminists. Don’t you feel it is crucial to identify and work with such ulema, rather than to brand all ulema as irredeemably sexist or misogynist?
A: I agree with you entirely. But most Muslim societies are characterized by a yawning educational, indeed epistemological, dualism. There is now little or no contact between the ulema of the madrasas and ‘secular’ or ‘modern’ educated Muslims, who also include key Islamic feminists. This dualism marks a major departure from the classical past, where knowledge of the times was an integral component of education in the madrasas where the ulema were trained. Colonialism pushed aside Islamic Studies from the educational ‘mainstream’. So, now, the vast majority of ulema have no idea of contemporary sociology, economics, political science and so on. They are wholly incapable of dealing with the new and myriad challenges of modernity. That, incidentally, is something that makes them so defensive. It is also a class issue. Modernity came to Muslim countries on the back of colonialism, and so it is mainly the poor who now inhabit the madrasas. Their economic location and the overall culture of the madrasas, which cannot be seen apart from this economic issue, further inhibits their receptivity to the ideas being generated by Islamic feminists.
Q: A number of NGOs working with Muslim women rely heavily on Western funding and come to be branded ‘tool in the hands of enemies’.
A: It certainly leaves them open to that oft-hurled charge, but then anyone who works for gender justice, even if she doesn’t depend on foreign money, is quickly branded with the same label! So, what other option do they have? Most Muslim countries lack a civil society and oil-rich Muslim world would not fund Ngo's working for justice and equality for Muslim women. So Muslim women’s group must be clear in their objective and should not become their puppets.
Q: With just a few notable exceptions, the key articulators of Islamic feminist discourse are all non-Arab Muslims. Does that strike you as strange, as Arab world is considered the ‘heartland’ of Islam?
A: Yes, most of the cutting-edge writing on Islamic feminism is happening at the so-called ‘periphery’ of the Muslim world, in Iran, Indonesia, and, of course, among Muslims in the West and in languages such as English, Persian and Bahasa Indonesia. Political conditions in the Arab world are simply not conducive for such discourses to be publicly articulated. Doing this could well cost you your life. You could easily be branded as an apostate and killed.
Q: Recent years have witnessed the mushrooming of girls’ madrasas. Do you think they could help galvanise Islamic feminist tendencies while empowering their graduates to become women religious authorities in their own right?
A: Frankly, I do not think so. At least, this is not happening now. The girls studying there are trained in the same traditional way, not allowed to question things, leave alone criticise received views. They are reared on the patriarchal fiqh tradition, which, is treated as almost as sacrosanct as the Quran itself. How can Islamic feminist stirrings emerge from these madrasas?
Q: Islam has often been critiqued for allegedly denying women their rights. The Islamists’ claim that Islam provides all the rights that women need can possibly be seen as a defensive or apologetic response to that critique.
A: There is undoubtedly an element of apologetics involved here. Islamic feminism is reacting to forces like fundamentalism, traditionalism, Orientalism and even dominant Western feminist trends. So, in a sense, it is an apologetic or reactive discourse, directed against those who claim that Islam does not countenance gender justice and equality.
Zia Mir-Hosseini can be contacted on zm4@soas.ac.uk
