[Bok]

Mood Swings: Who's afraid of Islamic feminism?
By Margot Badran (with Bok's emphasis)
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It seems quite a few people. They include non-Muslims who fear Islam and Muslims who fear feminism. And, what is feared is usually slammed. So we find strange bedfellows joining in decrying Islamic feminism.

Often fear and condescension, and worse, hatred, go hand in hand, to say nothing of ignorance. Some think Islam is so benighted that feminism is beyond its reach. Islam -- as religion and culture -- is resolutely patriarchal, anti-equality, justice, and that is that. This view comes in handy if you want to denigrate or hate Islam since after at least two waves of heavy-duty feminism in the US and other parts of the West we have (finally) learned that gender oppression is bad and those who do it are bad -- or bad if they are blatant. It was much easier to hit the Taliban because they did gender oppression openly and in spades. Would there have been a war without the chadoor? If it is dandy to strike gender oppressors it is not nice to bulldoze feminists. No, Islamic feminism is not useful -- even if the imagination does stretch that far, the thought is to be resisted.

All religions have their patriarchalists (we are not talking goddess cults) and here who would like to exceptionalise Islam? No one. So these patriarchalists of the Muslim variety, like their co-patriarchalists of other religions, are shy about coming forward and admitting straight out that they like patriarchy. When you ask them to stand up and be counted they won't; they won't take credit where credit is due. Instead, they repeat the mantra. Islam grants rights to women. Agreed. So what about the practice? At that point there is a swift switch to tarring feminism with the colonial brush. We cannot get to the subject of gender oppression and the handing over of gender rights and gender justice on the spot because we are deflected by the decrying of colonialism (their plots to undermine our culture and authenticity -- authentic patriarchy?). Then we have to be told that feminism is a Western word -- and when we hear this from those who love to speak English and are not bothered that the entire language they mouth is Western, it starts to sound weird. We waste time. So, why can we use some English words and not others, or is feminism a swear word? Are we into linguistic cleansing?

In my movements in liberal and so-called progressive circles, and mais oui, well-educated, I have observed that it is men who are usually more vexed about Islamic feminism, revealing that the issue is gendered. Ah, the gendering of gender. Such men do not want to say they like patriarchy but do like to say they dislike feminism. Read my lips and read my silence. If you suggest that Islamic feminism is a way to jump-start the activation of the women's rights they boast Islam affirms, and that that might just well be a way of behaving religiously, this sends the conversation skittering back to colonialism. So out goes Islamic feminism with the colonial bath-water.

Now that the neon lights of terrorism are before us, fundamentalism (only theirs, of course) is on the front burner, and Islamophobia is carte du jour, what do we do? We collapse terrorism and Islam. Then to prevent over-heating we decouple the engine and the caboos. For awhile. We say Islam is nice. But not that nice. Then back to Islamophobia. Here again exceptionalism is a must, for this is just about the last publicly allowed phobia. Over the past 370 days or so there have been roundtables, panels, workshops, conferences, you name it, on Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, the more blurred the better. (Now don't get me wrong, I am not blind to the good work being done out there.) Why do they hate us? Yes, we discuss that. But why do we hate them? We don't ask because we know.

Now if you have spent your life doing Islam and feminism (yes, hard labour) and more recently observing the increasingly fast ascent of the Islamic feminist star you see that (Islamic) feminism isn't just a pain to patriarchalists but it is a burr in the craw of Islamophobes. Since Islamic feminism is about gender equality and social justice it may make Islam look too good. And them too much like us. Good grief! Then it would not be p.c. to dump on Islam. Worse still, if they are too much like us then we might have to treat them like us. It all becomes too onerous. As for our die-hard patriarchalists of Muslim stripe, Islamic feminism might cause their roof to collapse. It might even put an end once and for all to colonialism. Then what?

Alas, the bedfellows who love to hate Islamic feminism have no love lost for each other. And, the Islamic feminists are not too sanguine about it either. You can't stick with the brothers, and you can't stick with the others. So what to do? Maybe while the bedfellows are obsessed with terror and territory Islamic feminists can score a victory. Then everyone would have to like each other. They would have to live with equality and justice. So how could we have a war on terror? Beats me.

* The writer is senior fellow at the Centre for Muslim- Christian Understanding, Georgetown, and presently a visiting professor at the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World.
http://weekly.ahram....002/609/li1.htm

[Mowlana Vector]

Islamist Women Play A Key Role
By: Shakira Hussein*
The Australian (15 March 2007)

Media analyses of Islamism and gender have tended to focus almost exclusively on males as perpetrators and females as victims. This accurately captures the subordinate status of women according to much Islamist ideology, but it misses certain nuances. With the notable exception of the Taliban, most Islamist movements have highly active women's wings, without which they could not have achieved popular acceptance. Islamist movements owe a great deal of their appeal to the success of their welfare programs, which fill the gaps left by the failure of governments to provide adequate services in health, education and social services. In gender-segregated communities, effective welfare provision would be impossible without the contribution of the women's wings, which have access to other women and to private homes.

The women's wings of some Muslim movements play a progressive role. As part of a wide-ranging gender empowerment program, the young women's wing of the Indonesian Nahadlatul Ulama produced counter-readings to traditional texts that had provided religious sanction to wife-beating. However, the women's wings of other organisations have actively endorsed highly patriarchal policies that have had disastrous effects for women.

The women's wing of the Pakistani religious party Jamaat-i-Islami plays an important symbolic role in the defence of the Hudood ordinances under which thousands of Pakistani women, many of them rape victims or targets of malicious neighbourhood vendettas, have been jailed for adultery. The JI women (fully veiled, as the party press office is careful to point out) regularly take to the streets to proclaim that the ordinances, far from oppressing Pakistani women, offer them protection from the evils of Western-style sexual decadence. They claim that the Pakistani women who have long campaigned for the repeal of the ordinances are an unrepresentative elite and that JI represents the voice of the masses.

In the course of their prison welfare and legal aid work, the Jamaat-i-Islami women activists have seen first-hand the traumatic effects the ordinances have had on the lives of many Pakistani women. They readily volunteer stories of innocent women who have been arrested as a result of false accusations by jealous ex-husbands. And yet they maintain that problems arise only from the implementation of the law, not the law itself. They loudly opposed as un-Islamic recent reforms to the ordinances that retain the prohibition on adultery but alter procedures and laws of evidence in ways that are supposed to reduce the chances of wrongful prosecution and conviction.

Paradoxically, participation in Islamist politics enables women to transgress social norms that Islamism itself supposedly upholds. The JI women leaders say that a woman's proper place is in the home, but in many regards their own lifestyles resemble those of Western middle-class professional women. Like their male colleagues, they are generally well-educated and intelligent, and their party activism provides them with a full-time outlet for their energy and skills.

After the 2002 elections, some of them entered parliament under gender quotas. They were careful to specify that this was only for the sake of shoring up party numbers, with one female parliamentarian explaining that, in general, women were meant "to create human beings, not governments". But after meeting them, it is clear that they love their work.

A similar paradox is to be found in the life of Zaynab al-Ghazali, an Egyptian who was the most famous female Islamist until her death in 2005. Al-Ghazali was highly independent by any standards. She swore an oath of loyalty to the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, but refused his request to merge her organisation with his. Despite not being a formal member of the brotherhood, she became an important figure in the movement. Sayyid Qutb's book Milestones, which he wrote in prison and which became one of the most noteworthy Islamist texts, was first circulated by her. Her first marriage broke down and she told her second husband that she would end their marriage if it ever came into conflict with her duty to jihad. She withstood arrest and torture for her opposition to the Nasser regime. Yet in her advice to other women, she sermonised that married women should remain in the home and obey their husbands.

For many Islamist women, the struggle to build what they regard as a truly Islamic society provides a reason for entering public life. While some maintain that such a society will retain a place for women in the public realm, others imply that women will then return full-time to the home. It is hard to imagine that these restless, energetic women will be happy there.

*Shakira Hussein is a Canberra writer
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[Mowlana Vector]

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Speaker: Rachel Woodlock

Marking the birth of modern feminism in the Muslim world, Huda Sha'rawi founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union, publicly removed her face-veil in Cairo in 1923. Seventy years later, Amina Wadud gave a historic pre-khutba talk in Cape Town before an audience of both men and women who had assembled for Friday prayers.

In this lecture, Rachel Woodlock will explore Muslim feminism in the twentieth century, looking at Western-inspired secular feminism, Islamist feminism and the gender-jihad of progressive Muslims. Rachel has a Masters of Islamic Studies and is currently researching Muslim settlement in Australia.


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[Mowlana Vector]

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Dr. Abdulaziz Sachedina: Woman Half-the-Man? Crisis of Male Epistemology in Islamic Jurisprudence

Islamic sacred law, the Shari`a, has been regarded by Muslims as a perfect, divinely ordained religious-ethical-legal system. The Shari`a relates Muslims to God's purposes by providing comprehensive directives in the two spheres of human activity: those actions that relate humanity to God, and those that relate humans to fellow humans. The former actions are categorized as `ibadat (literally, "acts of honoring God", technically, God-human relationships) and the latter are known as mu`amalat (literally, "transactions", technically, interhuman relationships). Whereas the God-human relations have remained more or less immutable in the Shari`a, the area of interhuman relationships has demanded rethinking and reinterpretation of the normative sources like the Qur'an and the Sunna (Tradition) to deduce new directives under changed social conditions. There are, however, epistemological problems connected with the way normative sources are retrieved and interpreted by Muslim jurists which have hampered the necessary progress towards one particular area in the interhuman relationships, namely, the personal status of Muslim women. The juridical deliberations in the exclusively male-oriented traditional centers of Islamic learning, the madrasa, have disregarded female voices in the emerging discourse connected with women's issues and human rights. The redefinition of the status of a Muslim woman in modern society is one of the major issues that confronts Muslim jurists' claims to be authority on legal-ethical sources of Islam. But such a redefinition, as I argue in the paper, is dependent upon Muslim women's participation in the legal- ethical deliberations concerning matters whose situational aspects can be determined only by women themselves. Without their participation in legal-ethical deliberations, women's rights will always depend on a "representational discourse" conducted by male jurists who, in spite of their good intentions, treats the subject as "absent" and hence, lacking the necessary qualification to determine her rights in a patriarchal society. 
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[Mowlana Vector]

Azizah al Hibri: Islam, Law and Custom - Redefining Muslim Women's Rights (PDF)