Islamic Feminism

William Shakespeare, the English bard of Avon, inaugurates a Feminist approach in Love’s labour’s Lost which is comparable with the Holy Quran’s mandate and Hadith. He reminisces Muslim association through deeply-seated words of the Elizabethan era including Ethiop, black, moors, Africans and so on in order to signify in his work the Islamic concern for the Muslim women in terms of respect, love, and revival of rights. Riffat Hassan’s theology of honor killing and progressive Islam could be argued to be in thematic affinity with Gayatri Spivak’s concepts of ethical responsibility of the agents and subalterns. The area of concern in Shakespeare’s encompasses men’s sanction in shunning women, intellectual men vs. slave, black and inferior women, and love, marriage and infatuation with women. This is in line with Quranic principles namely poor Muslim lifestyle vs. the affluent pagan hegemony, Muslim’s faith, migration to from Ommat, reception by the hegemonic pagans, Muslims’ conquests and Islamic enhancement. The area of concern in Shakespeare’s play includes men’s sanction in shunning women, intellectual men versus the black and inferior women, love, marriage, and infatuation with women. This approach is in line with the life style of the poor Muslims as opposed to the affluent pagan hegemony, and includes faith, migration, and toleration for the sake of Muslims’ conquests.

Islamic feminism is one of the movements that developed in reaction to the revival of political Islam in post-Islamic Revolution Iran (1979). The present study attempts to seize the major nodal points around which this discourse has been formed. Using Margot Badran’s theory of the convergence of secular and Islamic feminisms, this study also explains the tenets of Islamic feminism in a country where filling the gap between the secular and the Islamic is rejected. It focuses on the analytical articles published by Zanan and Zanan-e-Emruz magazines as two prominent platforms for Islamic feminists to highlight their answers to the modern concerns of Iranian women. The results indicate that the major discursive nodes include: a) women’s Ijtihad and the re-interpretation of the holy texts with a women-friendly outlook, b) human equality exempt from sexuality, c) demands for a conventional notion of justice, and d) recognition of women’s socio-political capacities vis-à-vis their family identities.  

: The post-colonial conditions provided a good opportunity for Muslim women to shift their strategic position from a unit of analysis for westerners to the agent of active knowledge production. For many, Islamic feminism is considered as an alternative knowledge to bring about an epistemological emancipation from Orientalist ideas. Nevertheless, the present study shows, this is not free of ambiguity and problems. This study focuses on a book entitled Women and Gender in Islam by Leila Ahmed (1992) as one of the most influential sources of Islamic feminism, which is considered as an international academic source and is part of the most frequent textbooks in syllabi in American universities for decades Regarding the issue of the current article, that is, the challenges of thinking on the boundary of Islam and modernity for Muslim women, the supremacy of presuppositions and modern gender ideas have been explored in Islamic feminism. This superiority of discourse is to the extent that by using the critical discourse analysis method and understanding intertextual connections with other first-hand Islamic historical and jurisprudential sources, Ahmad's reading can be much distorted. As such, the paper tries to unveil the necessity of re-considering internal ambivalences and discursive complications of the book, considering its logic in approaching early marriage, polygamy, and veiling through Ahmed's creation of complex binaries such as Jahiliah (ignorance) vs. Islam and the Prophet vis-a-vis his female counterparts.

Ziba Mir-Hosseini employs feminist theory and global human rights principles to promote and implement legal changes to Islamic law to achieve gender equality. She proposes the pursuit of an alternative “sacred spiritual project” as a means to advance gender equality through these legal reforms.To achieve this goal, four underlying assumptions inform her work that are essential for her spiritual project to be successful. (Mir-Hosseini's approach includes: 1) Advocating religion's adaptation to societal changes, prioritizing individual autonomy over religious demands. 2) Applying social constructionism to challenge binary gender concepts and traditional roles. 3) Asserting that Orientalism influenced male scholars' misinterpretation of Islam's sacred texts. 4) Embracing Western individualism to counter Traditionalist or Neo-Traditionalist Islamic teachings while overlooking Western women's sexualization experiences in her pursuit of equality. The possible consequences of her philosophy include that it might aid secularization and syncretic tendencies within the sphere of Muslim women; it might emphasize a personal interpretation of religious texts leading to distrust of male authority; it might intersect with evolving attitudes towards gender roles, family dynamics, and women’s rights within society, which may affect Muslims and their families as a whole. It might contribute to tensions already there among women.