Fairly critical analysis of Islamic fiqh, thought it would be interesting to share. Excerpts pasted below
By Yoginder Sikand
Margot Badran is a historian and a specialist of gender studies focused on the Middle East and Islamic world. She did her MA from Harvard University and DPhil from Oxford University. She acquired a diploma in Arabic and Islam from Al Azhar University, Cairo.
A Senior Fellow at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, Badran is currently a visiting fellow at ISIM (Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World) in Leiden, The Netherlands. Her books include Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt, and Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing. She has also penned numerous articles on feminism and Islam. Her works have been translated into Arabic, French, Italian, Dutch, German, and many other languages.
Badran has lectured on feminism and Islam in the US, Europe, Middle East, and Africa. She writes for numerous newspapers in the Middle East, for International Herald Tribune, and contributes regularly to Al Ahram Weekly. Here she speaks on issues related to Islamic feminism. Excerpts follow:
YS: How do you perceive the term ‘Islamic feminism’? How is it different from ‘Muslim feminism’?
MB: ‘Islamic feminism’ is a discourse about women and gender grounded in religious texts; the principal being the Quran and everyday behaviour and practices related to this discourse. I do not use the term ‘Muslim feminism’ nor it is in a wide circulation. A Muslim may be a feminist, who uses a feminist discourse, which includes several discursive strands, such as nationalism (Arab, Egyptian, Turkish, etc), Islam, human rights, democracy etc, in ways specifically meaningful to her. It is her own discourse, fashioned according to her own needs and cultural formation. Islamic discourse is part of this feminist discourse, which has plural strands, whereas Islamic feminism is grounded in Islamic discourse, as it is paramount or exclusive discourse.
Muslim women may use their own general (or many-stranded) feminist discourse as well as Islamic feminist discourse. Let us take a historical example. Egyptian feminists who were Muslims, alongside Christian Egyptians, used nationalist arguments to fight for expanded educational rights under British colonialism and in the early post-colonial moment. Simultaneously, Muslim Egyptian feminists also marshaled Islamic arguments to strengthen their case, demonstrating that Islam enjoined the pursuit of knowledge upon all believers. But when it came to the feminist campaign to reform the Muslim Personal Status Code, this was an exclusively Muslim campaign led by Muslim feminists who employed purely Islamic arguments to push the case for a more progressive shariah-based law.
YS: How did you get interested in writing and researching about Islamic feminism?
MB: I became interested in Islamic feminism–as a new discourse–at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. It was a time when I began to observe a major paradigm shift in feminist discourse among some Muslims. I discovered this in Egypt in the course of doing oral histories, seeking to discover how professional and activist women defined feminism. In my previous scholarly research, I had focused on feminism in Egypt from the end of the 19th Century into the middle of the 20th Century.
Later, I wanted to discover how contemporary women defined and understood feminism. So, that was when I saw the genesis of an Islamic feminism. I presented the results of this discovery at a Roundtable on Identity Politics and Women at the UN University World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki, and I subsequently published them in a paper called ‘Gender Activism: Feminists and Islamists in Egypt’. Later, while I was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago in the Center for Near Eastern Studies, where I taught a course on ‘Feminisms and Islamisms’, I wrote Towards Islamic Feminisms, in which I observed the further rise of this new discourse and analysed its trajectory alongside the continuing spread of Islamist movements and their gender agenda.
While I was struck initially (at the turn of the '90s) by the “distinctiveness” of the emergent “Islamic feminist discourse”–the rigour and outspokenness, I also began to see roots of this “new” discourse in the earlier “secular feminism” (another term for a broadly inclusive feminism) discourse of Muslim women in Egypt and other parts of the Arab-East Mediterranean. But let me add, this was the historian’s eye at work, for the architects of this new discourse of Islamic feminism were not connecting to this kind of past. It was by noticing certain similarities (expressed over time) in the “secular” and “religious” or “Islamic” feminist discourses (and I kept observing Egypt closely) that I could see the fine meshing of the “religious” and the “secular”, and how these were not two distinct and sharply different categories.
YS: How does one counter the oft-heard argument that Islamic feminism is a Western import and represents a misreading and distortion of faith as salafe saleh, the early Muslims, had understood it?
MB: Islamic feminism, as a discourse grounded in the Quran and other religious texts, is not “Western”, nor it is “Eastern”. It is a universal discourse. There are many ayats in the Quran, firmly indicating that Islam is a universal religion, knowing no geographical or cultural boundaries. This is exquisitely imparted in Surat Al Nur.
“God is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His Light is as if there was a niche and within it a lamp…lit from a blessed tree, an olive, neither of the East nor the West.” (24:35)
The specific forms that Islamic feminist activism takes are locally grounded. They come from within. For example, we have run the long campaign for many years, led by some women in Egypt, using the discourse of Islamic feminism to argue that there was nothing in the religion of Islam barring women from becoming judges. This finally ended in victory this January when three women were finally appointed as judges.
In South Africa, Muslim women have been campaigning for greater access to participate in congregational prayer alongside men (that is to occupy adjacent rather than behind or an altogether separate space) and to give talks at Friday prayer prior to the khutba, and have met with successes. I can give you the example of the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town, where women’s discourse at Friday congregational prayer is now a commonplace.
Yoginder Sikand is editor of web-based magazine Qalandar, www.islaminterfaith.org.