A Gender Jihad For Islam's Future
by Asra Q. Nomani
Barcelona
Several months ago, when a group of Spanish Muslims approached
city officials here about sponsoring a conference on Islamic feminism, one
responded, "Isn't that an oxymoron?" That's what many people believe.
To conservative Muslims, the phrase is an insult to Islam. But to many moderate Muslims -- and I
count myself among them -- an Islamic feminist movement fits with the
religion's early teachings and offers one of our best hopes for countering
extremism. Indeed, those of us who have joined the movement since it emerged in
the 1990s have come to understand that Islam needs to go back to its
progressive 7th-century roots if it is to move forward into the 21st
century.
How difficult that is -- and how important -- became clear to me
when I joined the first International Congress on Islamic Feminism, which was
held in this Spanish city just over a week ago. When the floor was opened for
questions during one session, a young Muslim man made the comment I've heard so
often: "In Islam, there is no place for feminism. . . ." Sitting on
the dais, where I had just chronicled our successful struggle to integrate some
U.S. mosques, I took it in stride. I've become accustomed to belittling comments,
even death threats. But what happened next stunned me.
From the middle of the audience of some 250 women and men, Amina Wadud, a Muslim scholar of Islamic
studies who calls herself "a pro-faith feminist," stood up. "You
are out of order," she said to the man. "What you are doing is
exactly the kind of thing that we are here to be able to stop." The
audience broke into cheers. Another Muslim man tried to protest. I interrupted
him. "We're changing history today," I said. "We're not going to
shut up."
What stunned me was not only the confidence with which we spoke
but the willingness of the group to back us -- 12 Muslim women scholars and
activists who had been invited to attend the conference by a small but
ambitious group of largely Spanish Muslim converts, the moderate Catalan
Islamic Board.
The force of our collective effort convinced me that we have the
strength to challenge the men's club that defines most of the Muslim world. It
was an affirmation of the commitment that had brought me and the 11 other
participants here from as far away as Malaysia, Mali, Nigeria, France, Canada,
the United Kingdom, the United States and refugee camps in the disputed
territory of Western Sahara to share stories from the trenches in the
"gender jihad." We Muslim feminists view it as a struggle that taps
Islamic theology, thinking and history to reclaim
rights granted to women by Islam at its birth but erased by manmade rules and
tribal traditions masquerading as divine law.
In the communities where we live, we have begun challenging
customs that deny women rights from the mosque to the bedroom: gender
segregation, mandatory veiling, forced early marriages, clitorectomies, polygamy, death for sex outside of
marriage, domestic violence and strict domestic roles. We have many Muslim men
on our side: The chief organizer of the conference was a man, Abdennur Prado, who hustled nonstop
behind the scenes. And we are taking a lead from Christian and Jewish women who
are generations ahead of us today in their efforts to challenge traditions that
block them from the workplace, the political arena and the pulpit.
To many, we are the bad girls of Islam. But we are not anti-sharia
(Islamic law) or anti-Islam. We use the fundamentals of Islamic thinking – the
Qur'an, the Sunnah, or
traditions and sayings of the prophet Muhammad, and ijtihad, or
independent reasoning -- to challenge the ways in which Islam has been
distorted by sharia rulings issued mostly by ultraconservative men.
We are wrestling with laws created in the name of Islam by men,
specifically eight men. The Muslim world of the 21st century is
largely defined by eight madhhabs, or
Islamic schools of jurisprudence, with narrow rulings on everything from
criminal law to family law: the Shafi, Hanafi, Maliki and Hanbali schools in the majority Sunni
sect; the Jafari and Zaydi schools, for the minority Shiite
sect; and the Ibadi and Thahiri schools among other Muslims. But
the first centuries of Islam's 1,400-year history were quite different --
characterized by scores of schools of jurisprudence, many progressive and
women-friendly. It is not Islam that requires women to wear a headscarf, but
rather the scholars in the contemporary schools.
To many of the women I spoke with, their struggle to move Islam
forward by reaching back to its past represents nothing short of a revolution.
"This is a global struggle," says Valentine Moghadam, a native of Iran and the chief
of the gender equality and development section of UNESCO in Paris. She sees the
movement as an important response to "frustration with Islamic
fundamentalism." And there is no doubt in my mind, either: The kind of
ideology that willingly subjugates women can also foster hatred.
From the dais, activists dressed in everything from Parisian
fashion to traditional African batik offered powerful stories of regional
reform. From Malaysia, Zainah Anwar,
executive director of the Sisters in Islam (dubbed "Satan in Islam"
by conservatives), laid out a strategy for reforming Islamic family law in her
country, by, for example, educating women about their right to refuse forced
marriages. And like others, she is looking beyond her country's borders for
support. The group's newsletter is being funded by the successful multinational
cosmetics company the Body Shop. And the group is calling Moroccan legal
experts to Malaysia next February to educate local leaders about the
progressive family reforms that Morocco passed last year. This month, Anwar and
other Sisters in Islam leaders will go to England to swap strategies with 10
Muslim women's groups.
In some local areas, groups like Anwar's have begun to see
success. Peeking over her laptop and occasionally adjusting the flowing white
headscarf she chooses to wear, Djingarey Maiga, the chief of a Mali-based group
called Women and Human Rights, explained how she started a rural radio program
in her country to promote women's rights. And BAOBAB, a Nigerian group founded
in 1996, made headlines in 2003 when it helped win a victory for Amina Lawal, the mother sentenced to be
stoned to death for having a baby outside of marriage. Mufuliat Fijabi, a senior program officer at
BAOBAB, told us how a conservative sharia judge broke with tradition not
long ago to oppose marital rape after going through training provided by his
organization. One Nigerian imam, after hearing BAOBAB's message
encouraging ijtihad
surprised BAOBAB organizers by following up and encouraging Muslims to consider
alternative schools of thought.
The challenge isn't just in poor villages in Nigeria or Mali. It's
in the wealthy and supposedly well-educated West. In 2003, I set off a debate
over the rights of Muslim women when I wrote in The Post's Outlook section
about walking through the front door of my hometown mosque in Morgantown,
W.Va., and praying in the main hall, thus defying an order that women enter
through a back door and pray in a secluded balcony. Since then, I've been
harassed in mosques from New York City to Seattle for refusing to accept
separate quarters. After almost two years of public campaigning with other
women, the country's major Muslim organizations, including the Islamic Society
of North America, issued a 28-page report in July titled, "Women Friendly
Mosques and Community Centers: Working Together to Reclaim Our Heritage,"
recommending reform, including an affirmative action program to get women on
mosque boards.
Our movement also caused a stir earlier this year when Wadud led a congregation of about 125
women and men in a New York prayer service. As the chief organizer, I wondered
what the impact of her action would be as I unfurled the massive roll of carpet
I'd purchased from the ABC home furnishing store to serve as our prayer rug.
Many clerics around the world attacked us at fiery Friday sermons for
undermining our religion, and Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi claimed that our prayer
"creates millions of bin Ladens" by challenging male
authority. We're up against a formidable machinery of opposition, but we're
convinced that now is the moment to coordinate the legal and policy reforms
that Islamic feminism is promoting. Initially, I thought it was time for a new madhhab. But
Islamic scholars have persuaded me that that would be too limiting. We need to
focus instead on broad societal initiatives.
We see our struggle as part of a wider peace jihad. It was
a national Islamic leader who oversees the Catalan Islamic Board, Mansur Escudero, who issued the first fatwa
against Osama bin Laden, months before U.S. Muslim organizations issued their
own. The organizers of the conference say they don't accept support from Saudi
Arabia, which has funded much of the spread of ultraconservative Islamic
orthodoxy in the world.
At the Barcelona conference, I proposed a plan called "The
Islamic Dream" -- an effort to connect our disparate efforts and develop a
new approach for Islam in the 21st century. I would like to see us organize a
summit of Islam's progressive thinkers to establish the terms of reform and
define a 20-year plan to transform our world. That is where we are headed.
During Wadud's
presentation on one of the last days of the conference, a Spanish American
woman stood up and asked: "Would you lead us in prayer today?" Wadud assented. A group of about 30
Muslims gathered in a hotel conference room to pray behind her, men and women
standing shoulder to shoulder -- grounds for banishment in mosques around the
world. A Pakistani Canadian activist, Raheel Raza, ran to join the line, not far
from a Pakistani American scholar, Asma Barlas, dubbed one of "the mothers
of Islamic feminism." Together, we opened our hands as Wadud prayed, "We ask for Your protection." Our prayer
complete, we declared with one voice, "Ameen." "Please accept."
Author's e-mail: asranomani@theislamicdream.com
Asra Nomani, a
former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, is the author of the book
"Standing Alone in Mecca" (Harper San Francisco).
Posted November 23, 2005. The above article was printed in the November 6, 2005 edition of the Washington Post. It is posted here with the permission of the author.