Margot Badran. Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an. Editor: Jane Dammen McAuliffe. Volume 2, Brill Academic Publishers, 2003.
Feminism in Muslim countries and communities has from the start been formulated within religious parameters. The earliest paradigm, feminism with Islam, is a rights-centered feminism. Its beginnings are found in the late 19th century when some Muslim women in different parts of “the East,” drawing upon their newly acquired literacy and expanding social exposure, brought their qurʾanic consciousness to bear as they grappled with issues related to their changing everyday lives in the face of encounters with modernity. Reflecting upon their own experience, and in the context of Islamic reformist movements calling for renewed ijtihad (individual investigation of the sacred texts) and of national liberation struggles against colonial rule, some Muslim women began to evolve what can be recognized as a “feminist consciousness” before the term itself existed. They pointed out that the Qurʾan accorded them rights that were being withheld from them in practice, often in the name of Islam, and drew attention to constraints imposed upon them in the name of religion, thereby beginning to articulate a “feminism” backed by religious argumentation.
Women in Egypt in the 1890’s, for example, cited the Qurʾan to demonstrate that veiling the face was not a qurʾanic requirement as they had been made to believe. Women also argued against other practices and constraints imposed upon them, employing the holy book as their liberation text. One of the first Muslims to make a public demand for women’s religiously-granted rights, such as access to mosque worship, education, and new work opportunities was Malak Ḥifni Naṣif, known also as Baḥithat al-Badiya, who presented her claims at a nationalist conference in Cairo in 1911 and who had two years earlier published her feminist views in her book al-Nisaʾiyyat. She articulated and acted upon a “feminism” before the term existed in Egypt; before long, however, others cited her as a feminist fore-bear. In Beirut in the 1920’s the Lebanese Naẓira Zayn al-Din of Lebanon, a woman learned in religion, invoking the qurʾanic spirit of freedom, justice, and equality, including equality between women and men, argued against such injustices as the face veil and polygamy in her book Sufūr wa-ḥijab published in 1928. Although the term “feminism” had recently come into circulation, Naẓira Zayn al-Din did not frame her call for the recuperation of women’s qurʾanically granted rights in the language of feminism. Nevertheless, some of her Muslim contemporaries referred to her work as feminist.
Among the first Muslim women explicitly to link feminism and the Qurʾan were members of the Egyptian Feminist Union who demanded full and equal rights for women in the public sphere and a reduction of inequalities in the private or family sphere. They adopted a gradualist position in calling for controls on men’s practice of divorce and polygamy, citing qurʾanic verses (ayat) in support of their case. Egyptian feminist Iḥsanaal-Qūsi referenced the Qurʾan in arguing for an end to the legalized institution of bayt al-ṭaʿa or the forced restitution of an estranged wife to the conjugal home.
Historically, the first Muslim women to declare publicly their feminism did so in the context of western colonial occupation. Secure in their Islamic identity and firm about a feminism of their own making, they refused to be silenced by detractors who misrepresented their feminism, attempting to delegitimize it as a western anti-Islamic foreign imposition. Muslim feminists stressed the Islamic notion of maṣlaḥa (well-being or prosperity) of the umma (community of Muslims) insisting that the exercise of women’s rights would strengthen both the Muslim community and the nation as a whole, in its struggle to win and secure independence from foreign rule.
For most of the twentieth century, in different parts of the Muslim world, the paradigm of feminism with Islam that incorporated intersecting Islamic, nationalist, and humanitarian (later human rights), and democratic discourses remained paramount.
Qurʾanic Hermeneutics and Gender Equality
Toward the end of the twentieth century, especially in the 1990’s, it became evident that there was a major paradigm shift underway. This was a shift towards a feminism grounded exclusively in religious discourse with the Qurʾan as its central reference, or what is increasingly called Islamic feminism. The new Islamic feminism constitutes a move away from the earlier women’s rights-based focus toward a wider focus on gender equality and social justice as basic and intersecting principles enshrined in the Qurʾan. Those who shaped the feminism with Islam discourse claimed an explicit feminist identity, while most of those who articulate Islamic feminism are reluctant to wear a feminist label.
The new Islamic feminism emerged in the context of Islamic religious resurgence (including the growth of a global umma of vast proportions), of the spread of Islamism or political Islam, and at a moment when Muslim women had gained access to higher education on an unprecedented scale. Key formulators of the new Islamic feminist discourse are women who utilize their advanced training in the religious sciences and other disciplines to reinterpret the Qurʾan. In making the Qurʾan the center of their attention, women are recuperating their right as Muslims to reflectively examine (tadabbur) sacred scripture, thus disputing the exclusive authority men have arrogated to themselves to define Islam. The female exegetes (mufassirat) draw upon their own experience as women as they pose fresh questions. They proceed within an interpretive framework which maintains that the fundamental ideas of the Qurʾan cannot be contradicted by any of its parts. They perform skilled deconstructions of qurʾanic verses and enact fresh readings respectful of the spirit of the holy book while mindful of the letter of the text.
This new gender-sensitive, or what can be called feminist, hermeneutics renders compelling confirmation of gender equality in the Qurʾan that was typically obscured as male interpreters constructed a corpus of commentary (tafsir) promoting a classical doctrine of male superiority that reflected the mindset of the prevailing patriarchal cultures. Feminist hermeneutics distinguishes between the universal or timeless basic principles and the particular and contingent, which are understood as ephemeral. In the case of the latter, they have judged that certain practices were allowed in a limited and controlled fashion as a way of curtailing behaviors prevalent in the society into which the revelation came, while encouraging believers on a path to fuller justice and equality in their human interactions. Feminist hermeneutics has taken three approaches: 1) revisiting verses (ayat) of the Qurʾan to correct false narratives in common circulation, such as the accounts of creation (q.v.) and of events in the primordial garden that have shored up claims of male superiority; 2) citing verses that unequivocally enunciate the equality of women and men; and 3) deconstructing verses attentive to male and female difference that have been commonly interpreted in ways that justify male domination.
Exegetes such as Amina Wadud-Muhsin in her major work of exegesis Qurʾan and woman, and Riffat Hassan, in various articles and public lectures, have corrected the widely-circulated but erroneous narratives (traditionally repeated by the religiously trained and the wider populace alike) purporting to be qurʾanic. One such narrative insists that the woman was created out of the man (from a crooked rib of Adam) and thus woman was a secondary or derivative creature. Another concerns the events in the garden of Eden claiming that Eve tempted Adam, thus making woman responsible for the downfall of man and enforcing the stereotype of the female as seductress. Wadud-Muhsin and Hassan point to verses of the Qurʾan declaring that women and men were created at the same moment as two mates (each mate is referred to by the masculine noun zawj) out of a single self or soul (nafs). For example, Q 4:1 states: “Oh mankind [humankind]! Reverence your guardian-lord, who created you from a single person, created, of like nature, his mate, and from the two scattered [like seeds] countless men and women.” In the Qurʾan both Adam and Eve fell into temptation in the garden (q.v.), both were expelled, both repented and both were equally forgiven.
The new interpreters stress that the Qurʾan makes clear the fundamental equality of women and men. Human beings, whatever their sex, are distinguished one above the other only in piety (q.v.; taqwa). “Oh mankind [humankind]! We have created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female… verily the most honored of you in the sight of God (is he [or she] who is) the most righteous of you [who possesses the most taqwa]” (Q 49:13). Aziza al-Hibri and other female exegetes point to the qurʾanic principle of tawḥid as affirming the oneness of God as the supreme being and the equality of all human beings as his creatures. All Muslims are enjoined to fulfill the trusteeship or moral agency (khilafa) that is entrusted to them as human beings.
While fundamentally equal, humans have been created biologically different for the perpetuation of the species. Only in particular contexts and circumstances will males and females assume different contingent roles and functions. Woman alone can give birth (q.v.) and nurse, and thus in this particular circumstance a husband is enjoined by the Qurʾan to provide material support (see FAMILY ) as indicated in Q 4:34, “Men are in charge of (or the managers of, qawwamūn ʿala) women because God has given the one more than the other (bima faḍḍala llahu baʿḍahum ʿala baʿḍin), and because they support them from their means.” Wadud-Muhsin, Hassan, and al-Hibri demonstrate that qawwamūn conveys the notion of “providing for” and that the term is used prescriptively to signify that men ought to provide for women in the context of child-bearing and rearing but does not mean that women cannot necessarily provide for themselves in that circumstance. The term qawwamūn does not signify that all men are unconditionally in charge of (or have authority over) all women all the time, as traditional male interpreters have claimed, nor does the term faḍḍala indicate male superiority over women, as is also commonly claimed. Such female exegetes thus show how common male interpretations have turned the specific and contingent into universals. In confronting the masculinist argument that men have authority over women, feminist Qurʾan commentary both deconstructs particular verses, such as those cited above, and draws attention to other verses that affirm mutuality of responsibilities: for example, Q 9:71, which says that “The believers, male and female, are protectors of one another” (i.e. they have mutual awliyaʾ).
The rigorous scrutiny and contextualization of qurʾanic terms and phrases pursued by female commentators exposes the patriarchal inflections given to many qurʾanic passages in classical interpretations produced by men and demonstrates how such patriarchal interpretations contradict the basic qurʾanic message of gender equality. The project of Qurʾan-based Islamic feminism, while still in its foundational stage, continues to be meticulously elaborated and is fast gaining wider ground.