On Islamic Feminist Texts and Women Activism

Abstract

In the early nineteen nineties, when Arab and Muslim women in the diaspora began to speak of the linguistic construct “Islam” and “feminism,” the two terms were not yet closely connected. The discourse was rather about Islamic feminism as a trend or as a different form of gender awareness and renewal in Islamic thought (Badran, 2009). With the start of the twenty first century, a large group of Muslim women scholars and activists working on feminist issues, researchers on Islam, theologians, and social scientists from Senegal, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, Malaysia, France, and the United States met for a conference in Barcelona (October 26-30, 2005) under the title “Junta Islamic Catalonia”. The Iranian Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Pakistani Refaat Hassan, Afro-American Amina Wadud, Pakistani Asma Barlas, and many other voices were heard officially discussing “Islamic feminism”, knowing that the phrase itself was used earlier in the journal Zenan, in post-revolutionary Iran. Their feminist criticism focused on Muslim women’s right to re-interpret religious texts, study the origin of Islam and the Qur’an, and share their knowledge and experiences with the religious establishment. Their methodologies encompassed feminist critique, historical and literary criticism, psycho-analytical theories, social and anthropological sciences, and aimed to put an end to the long history of malecentered interpretation of the foundational texts of Islam (i.e the Qur’an and Hadith).