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The issue of women in Islam today is one characterized by struggle among competing voices. Broadly speaking, the competition is between, on the one hand, the claims of those for whom Islam generally represents a movement of social and religious reform, and that the role of women and gender equity was always central to the reform. On the other hand are those for whom Islam is in fundamental opposition to notions of reform that would entail a role for women marked by equal status and opportunity. The former claims would seem to be more fi rmly based in the scholar- ship of the ages, both Islamic and Western, and promise greater levels of social and religious discourse between Islam and non-Islam, while the latter could be said to be a reaction to cataclysmic historical events that have fractured Islam and spawned an exclusivist perspective that idealizes its separation from all things non-Islamic, an Islamic guise referred to variously as Islamism or radical Islam.

In the midst of this contemporary wider struggle between the forces claiming Islam as their inspiration, the role and place of women is a de fi ning issue with views that cover the spectrum from claims around equality through to those around relega- tion and suppression. The book will gather together a collection of updated research with a primary focus on the issue of Muslim women, either historically or contem- poraneously. The impetus for the book came from an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded research program involving Professors Terry Lovat and Hilary Carey from the University of Newcastle, Australia, with collaboration from Professor Geoffrey Samuel and Dr. Santi Rozario of Cardiff University, UK, and supported by Dr. Belinda Green. The research in the book encompasses far more than was the subject of the ARC project, research that comes from many parts of the world, representing Muslim and non-Muslim researchers, with national identities and focus issues related to Muslim intense countries including Bangladesh, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Tanzania, Tunisia and Turkey, as well as France, the UK, Canada, South Africa and Australia. The research also covers an array of Muslim views, both Sunni and Shi’a but also minority perspectives such as Ismaili. In each case, the research is underpinned by the latest socio-theological insights and/or empirical fi ndings, as appropriate, and the persistent method is one of re fl ection into understanding and, where suitable, recommended action.

Foreword

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EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/17/2021 4:06 AM via AMERICAN UNIV OF KUWAIT AN: 523061 ; Terence Lovat.; Women in Islam : Reflections on Historical and Contemporary Research Account: s3931335

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1 The ‘Women’s Movement’ in Modern Islam: Reflections on the Revival of Islam’s Oldest Issue ............................... 1 Terence Lovat

2 Reconciling Traditional Islamic Methods with Liberal Feminism: Reflections from Tunisia by Mohamed Talbi ..................... 11 Kelly al-Dakkak

3 Young Muslim Women and the Islamic Family: Refl ections on Confl icting Ideals in British Bangladeshi Life ................................ 25 Santi Rozario and Geoffrey Samuel

4 Women and Human Development in the Muslim World: Reflections on Islamic and UNDP’s Approaches .................... 43 Muhammad Ahsan

5 Being Muslim in the Neoliberal West: Reflections on an Ethnographic Study of Muslim Women in Australia ................ 61 Belinda Green

6 Youth Identity Formation in the Presence of the ‘Other’: Reflections on Being Young and Muslim in an Interfaith Setting ........................................................................... 75 Mehmet Ozalp and Kulsoom Siddiqui

7 Social Inclusion in the Context of Foreign-Policy Debates: Reflections on Jihad, Human Rights and Gender Equality in Islam ..................................................................................... 89 Halim Rane

8 The Contribution of Muslim Women in the Flourishing of Modern Society: Reflections on Refugee Transition from East to West .................................................................................... 107 Ibtihal Samarayi

Contents

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9 Islamic Legal Maxims for Attainment of Maqasid-al-Shari‘ah in Criminal Law: Reflections on the Implications for Muslim Women in the Tension Between Shari’ah and Western Law .................................................................................... 117 Luqman Zakariyah

10 The Way Forward for Muslim Women: Reflections on Australia’s Social Inclusion Agenda ................................................. 135 Mohamad Abdalla

11 Muslim Women in Higher Education: Reflections on Literacy and Modernization in Israel .............................................. 149 Zehavit Gross

12 Hagar/Hajar, Muslim Women and Islam: Reflections on the Historical and Theological Ramifications of the Story of Ishmael’s Mother ........................................................... 165 Robert Crotty

13 Muslim Women Academics in Higher Education: Reflections from South Africa ................................................................ 185 Doria Daniels and Nazreen Dasoo

14 Muslim Women, Peer Relationships and Educational Trajectories: Reflections on Muslim Stereotypes in a British Setting .................................................................................. 197 Jody Mellor

15 Voices from Shia Imami Ismaili Nizari Muslim Women: Reflections from Canada on Past and Present Gendered Roles in Islam......................................................................... 213 Adil Mamodaly and Alim Fakirani

Author Index.................................................................................................... 237

Subject Index....... ............................................................................................ 243

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Dr. Mohamad Abdalla is an Associate Professor at Grif fi th University, Australia, and the Founding Director of the Grif fi th Islamic Research Unit (GIRU), and Director of the Queensland node of the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies Australia (NCEIS). He is a public intellectual and a respected leader in the Australian Muslim community. Dr. Abdalla was the Chairperson of the Queensland Muslim Community Reference Group (MCRG) and the Vice-president and spokes- person for the Australian National Imams Council (ANIC). Dr. Abdalla has published widely in the fi eld of Islamic studies.

Dr. Muhammad Ahsan is an independent academic research and training consul- tant in UK. In the fi elds of Contemporary Muslim World, his research has gained international recognition. In addition to authoring various books, Dr. Ahsan has produced a large number of reports and research papers published in various refereed international journals. His thoughts have signi fi cantly in fl uenced in fi xing priorities and directions for the Muslim World and re-forming the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.

Kelly al-Dakkak is a D.Phil. candidate in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford, UK. She is specialised in Islamic thought and movements in the Middle East and North Africa and is currently completing a dissertation on Tunisian intellectual Mohamed Talbi. She is a former Fulbright Fellow in the United Arab Emirates, where she pursued research on Islamic identity for which she was awarded a Fulbright Islamic Civilization Grant.

Dr. Robert Crotty is Emeritus Professor of Religion and Education at the University of South Australia. He has written widely on Religion Studies and has had a long- standing interest in Islam and its relationships with Judaism and Christianity. He is presently involved in research on the possibility of restoring convivencia among the Abrahamic religions.

Author Biograph ies

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x Author Biographies

Dr. Doria Daniels is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. She has been the primary investigator of an Indigenous knowledge research project that explored gender in community history and has published on how South African Muslim women are remembered and portrayed in their communities’ histories.

Dr. Nazreen Dasoo is Senior Lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She has been teaching Islamic Studies Methodology to postgraduate students since 1998. In 2001, she was asked to serve on a Standards Generating Body for Islamic Studies in South Africa. Her main role comprised setting the unit standards for how the subject should be taught at both schools and universities. As part of her community engagement projects, she conducts in-service training for teachers at Madrasahs in Johannesburg.

Alim Fakirani is an educator who completed his B.A. at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. in the Faculty of Religious Studies. This led him to pursue a double-Masters with Distinction at the Institute of Ismaili Studies and the Institute of Education, London. While in London, Alim became deeply fascinated with the intersection of religious identity with the plural and secular landscapes of our societies. Speci fi cally, he is interested in the ways in which women of faith experience their religious identity in their daily lives.

Dr. Belinda Green is a post-doctoral researcher attached to the University of Wollongong, Australia. She has been an active researcher in the fi eld of Islamic Studies, with special attention to Muslim women in diaspora situations.

Dr. Zehavit Gross is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Bar Ilan. She has worked extensively with mixed religious groups, including especially Jewish and Muslim groups, in her teaching and research.

Dr. Terence Lovat is Emeritus Professor at The University of Newcastle, Australia. He has been chief investigator of a number of Australian Government funded projects concerned with aspects of Islam and has written extensively in the area. In 2004, he was presented with an award by the Sydney-based Muslim association, Af fi nity Intercultural Dialogue, for academic work that promoted understanding of Islam.

Adil Mamodaly is a secondary religious education teacher within the Ismaili Muslim community in Montreal, Canada. He has studied at the Institute of Ismaili Studies and the Institute of Education in London, England, where he completed a Master in Teaching and a Master of Arts in Education (Muslim Societies and Civilizations). He has written extensively on various subjects within the fi eld of Islamic studies and has always had a passion for understanding the experience of Ismaili Muslim women.

Dr. Jody Mellor is a research assistant at the University of Bristol, UK, working on a project exploring class in higher education. Before this, she was based at the Islam-UK Centre at Cardiff University, UK, researching the early history of Muslim migration to South Wales, UK. Jody’s ESRC funded PhD research, completed in

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2007, focused upon British Muslim and non-Muslim women’s experiences of class whilst at university.

Mehmet Ozalp is an Islamic theologian, academic and community activist. He is the founder and Executive Director of Islamic Sciences and Research Academy associated with Charles Sturt University, Australia. He serves as the Muslim Chaplain at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University. He is a proli fi c speaker on Islam and Muslims in Australia and the author of three books: ‘101 Questions You Asked About Islam’, ‘Islam in the Modern World’ and ‘Islam between Tradition and Modernity: An Australian Perspective’.

Dr. Halim Rane is the Deputy Director of the Grif fi th Islamic Research Unit and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at Grif fi th University, Australia. Dr. Rane is the author of numerous articles and books concerning Islamic and Muslim issues including Islam and Contemporary Civilisation: Evolving Ideas, Transforming Relations (Melbourne University Press, 2010); Islam and the Australian News Media (Melbourne University Press, 2010); and Reconstructing Jihad amid Competing International Norms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Dr. Santi Rozario is a former Reader at Cardiff University, UK, now at The University of Tasmania. She has engaged in extensive funded and unfunded research in a variety of projects associated with Islam and Muslim women in cross cultural contexts.

Dr. Ibtihal Samarayi is an Australian Muslim who was born in Iraq, Visual Arts Lecturer and Coordinator, and Research Academic at The University of Newcastle. She has experienced refugee status in the West and has studied Islam in both its origins and contemporary problems through the lens of fi ne art, with especial attention to the artwork of Muslim children caught up in detention. Ibtihal’s new book, Refugee to Resident, is a memoir about her journey as a refugee in moving from Iraq to Australia.

Dr. Geoffrey Samuel is a Professor at Cardiff University, Wales, UK, where he directs the Body, Health and Religion (BAHAR) Research Group. His academic career has been in social anthropology and religious studies, and his books include Mind, Body and Culture (1990), Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (1993), Tantric Revisionings (2005) and The Origins of Yoga and Tantra (2008). He is currently working on material on Tibetan yogic health practices and Tibetan medicine, and on a research project on young Bangladeshis, Islam, marriage and the family.

Kulsoom Siddiqi is associated as a researcher with the Islamic Sciences and Research Academy, Charles Sturt University, Australia.

Dr. Luqman Zakariyah is Teaching Fellow of the Study of Islam and Muslims at Al-Maktoum College of Higher Education and honorary Teaching Fellow of the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. Dr. Zakariyah has published in many international journals including Arab Law Quarterly, Brill. He has been appointed as visiting scholar at Ripon College, Oxford, UK.

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1T. Lovat (ed.), Women in Islam: Refl ections on Historical and Contemporary Research, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4219-2_1, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

Abstract While early Islam’s development was far from unequivocal in the way women were treated, evidence nonetheless of radical reform around the issue is indisputable. The original Constitution guaranteed the right to inheritance, including of property, as well as to initiate divorce and testify in court. Women and men were equally bound by the law and punishable for misdemeanors against it, and were equally liable for the ultimate reward of entering Paradise. There is considerable evidence as well that women were active participants and leaders in the earliest communities, with two of Muhammad’s own wives being prominent in advocacy and juridical advisory roles, both within and shortly after the lifetime of the Prophet himself. The chapter will attempt to set the scene for the volume by exploring these themes. It will make use of prominent Muslim scholarship around the issue of women in Islam, including work by Mohamed Talbi, Leila Ahmed, Amina Wadud and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, work that in various ways illustrates that the current struggle to recover the voice of women is crucial to no less than a recovery of Islam itself.

Introduction

While early Islam’s development was far from unequivocal in the way women were treated, evidence nonetheless of radical reform around the issue is indisputable. The original ‘Constitution’ has the appearance of guaranteeing the right to inheritance, including of property, as well as to initiate divorce and testify in court. Women and men were equally bound by the law and punishable for misdemeanours against it, and were equally liable for the ultimate reward of entering Paradise. There is considerable evidence as well of women being conceived of as active participants

T. Lovat (*) Faculty of Education and Arts, The University of Newcastle , P.O. Box 442 , New Lambton , NSW 2305 , Australia e-mail: [email protected]

Chapter 1 The ‘Women’s Movement’ in Modern Islam: Re fl ections on the Revival of Islam’s Oldest Issue

Terence Lovat

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and leaders in the earliest communities, with two of Muhammad’s own wives characterized as prominent in advocacy and juridical advisory roles, and other women taking on inspirational leadership roles beyond the norm in companion religions. The chapter will attempt to set the scene for the volume by exploring these themes. It will begin with a brief appraisal of the historical evidence and the store that can properly be attributed to it in light of recent scholarship surrounding the source texts of Islam. It will then move to appraise a sample of the wealth of prominent Muslim scholarship directed at the issue of women in Islam, work that in various ways illustrates that the current struggle to recover the voice of women is crucial to no less than a recovery of essential features of Islam, at least partly lost in our own time.

The Earliest Evidence

Phyllis Trible and Letty Russell ( 2006 ) proffer that “… understanding problems and opportunities of the past and present among Jews, Christians and Muslims, as well as envisioning a different future, resides more in studying the women Hagar and Sarah than in stressing the putative unity located in Abraham.” (p. 1) Indeed, the stories surrounding these two women, representing respectively the claims of Islam and those of Judaeo-Christianity, stand increasingly at the centre of the contemporary dispute, disenfranchisement and growing friction that characterizes the relationship between Islam and its sibling ‘Western religions’. Hagar, Abraham’s Arabic wife and mother of his fi rst-born child, Ishmael, is matriarch of the Arabic peoples and, in that sense, of Islam itself. She it is who obeys the will of Allah, even in dif fi culty and apparent rejection by her husband and his Israelite wife, in taking Ishmael back to his own people where he can learn the Arabic ways in order to ful fi l his own destiny to be the father of the Arabic people and patron of Islam, represented in de fi nitive fashion when, together with his father, he builds the Ka’aba to mark the Covenant with Allah. Sarah, meanwhile, is Abraham’s Israelite wife who initially seems complicit in encouraging him to take a second wife in order to ensure an heir but then quickly turns against Hagar (and Ishmael) when she is herself with child, Isaac, who, according to the Israelite story, is ordained as the true heir because of his pure Israelite heritage.

The importance of these stories, centred on the two foundational women of the Abrahamic tradition, cannot be overstated when one considers that, for these people, the identity of an individual resided in the maternal line. St. Paul seemed to under- stand this when, in the Letter to the Galatians, he chose to contrast Hagar and Sarah as matriarchs of the Old and New Covenants, rather than making reference to the patriarchal heritage. Ironically, in conferring the status of matriarch of the original Covenant on Hagar, he can be interpreted as endorsing, albeit well before the event and no doubt unintentionally, the later Muslim claim that it was through Abraham’s Arabic wife that Allah’s promise was ful fi lled. In one of countless points of intrigue in the matriced lines of interpretation and cross-interpretation that characterize the

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31 The ‘Women’s Movement’ in Modern Islam…

various source texts of the Abrahamic religions, Paul can actually be read as having endorsed the claims of the Ishmaelites (the early Muslims) that their patriarch was the heir to the Covenant, in precedence to Isaac. Of course, Paul’s intention was far from this, his chief interest being in discrediting the claims of the so-called ‘Judaizers’, those who believed that Judaic adherence must necessarily precede being Christian. He was also striving to draw out the link between Isaac, the progenitor of the New Covenant, and Jesus (the new Isaac), as the de fi nitive heir of the New Covenant. Nonetheless, in doing so, Paul makes the very point that later Muslims would make, namely that Hagar is the matriarch of the Old Covenant and that Ishmael, therefore, is the heir of the Old Covenant and, in that sense, heir to the promise made to Abraham.

In a day and age that sees a large proportion of Islam, both mainstream and radical, identifying itself as ‘children of Ishma’il’ ( Adang 1996 ; Ibn Hazm 1997 ; Hoyland 2001 ), sometimes as an angry protest, and the name Ishma’il also associated with radical Islamism by protesting non-Muslims (cf. Prophetic Roundtable, www.propheticroundtable.org ), the dispute is clearly of huge moment and requires a renewed and vigorous conversation around the issue. In similar fashion, the asso- ciation of the name of Hagar with early and more recent Muslim claims around both their own proper heritage and protestations that these claims have been persistently misheard and rejected by the (Judaeo-Christian) West, makes the issue of recovering the crucial matriarchal heritage of huge import to contemporary events. For not only did many early Muslims refer to themselves as ‘Hagarians’ but, moreover, Hagar’s importance to de fi ning the nature of being Muslim, in terms of submission to Allah’s will and withstanding the onslaught of Judaeo-Christian hostility in ful fi lling that will, are coming to hold increased importance in contemporary Islam:

Hagar (Hajar) does not see herself as a victim of Abraham and Sarah, or of a patriarchal, class and race conscious culture. She is a victor who, with the help of God and her own initiative, is able to transform a wilderness into the cradle of a new world dedicated to the ful fi lment of God’s purpose on earth … In doing so (i.e. Muhammad leaving his own city and establishing Islam), he followed in the footsteps of his foremother Hagar who, generations earlier, had chosen to dwell in the desert to which God had directed her, making a home and community out of an unknown land and people. She demonstrated by her faith and actions that for a believer all of God’s earth is a sancti fi ed place and that loyalty to God supersedes attachment to terrestrial bonds, be they of place or persons. (Hassan 2006 , p. 155)

Asserting the relevance of Hagar to the issue of women in Islam today is not to proffer a naive or uncritical pertinence of source texts to a contemporary issue. Nor is it to deny the importance of ongoing scholarship around the nature, history and formation of the Islamic scriptures (Warraq 1998 ; Armstrong 2001 ; Ohlig and Puin 2009 ) . It is merely to highlight the importance of the original inspirational material available to the earliest Muslim communities as well as to take note of the use to which this material is being put in contemporary Islamic re fl ection. This re fl ection seems to suggest that the role of women in Islam is arguably its oldest issue, in that claims made about Hagar’s role in submission to Allah and the subsequent effecting of the Covenant that sits at the heart of Islam’s central claims about itself, captures nothing less than the core of Islamic self-identity. In a sense, Hagar is the fi rst

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Muslim. In a way that cannot be said of any of its companion religions, Islam rests on the faith of a woman. This realization seems to sit at the heart of much contem- porary Islamic scholarship, both that which deals speci fi cally with the issue of women and that which deals with more generalized issues of reform. For those who see reform as a de fi ning notion of all for which Islam originally stood, the issue of women is central (Haddad and Esposito 1998 ) . There can be no recovery of Islam without its settlement.

Mohamed Talbi

Mohamed Talbi is a prominent Muslim historian who specializes in Qur’anic inter- pretation. Against the rise of radical Islamism in recent times, his passion and commitment has been in utilizing his knowledge of the Qur’an and other inspira- tional sources of Islam to show how unfounded and skewed are the claims of radical Islamism as representing a return to Islam’s origins. Talbi’s work ( 1995, 2006 ) is an interesting place to begin the recovery of the voice of women in Islam. It is especially relevant to this issue because it relies heavily on the notion of ihtiram mutabadal (mutual respect) as being central to the ethics of social relations in the earliest communities of Islam. One might suggest that it is on the interpretation of ihtiram mutabadal that much of the debate within Islam about the role of women rests.

Talbi is in no doubt that Islam was and is a religion of reform when properly understood. This proper understanding centres on Muhammad’s belief that, in Islam, he was constructing the community ( Ummah Wahida ) that God had fore- shadowed in the Promise to Abraham, renewed to Moses and represented in the followers of Jesus. Islam was therefore a reform of all previous attempts to construct a community that lived by God’s ordinance, rather than human ordinance, including being a reform of Judaism and Christianity. As such, its charter was to be found in the prophetic tradition and, within that tradition, it was clear that the essential reform envisaged of the Ummah was around the respect, care and tolerance that should be extended to all people, with special mention being made of women and children, among others. For Talbi, far from the radical Islamist construction of Islam as an intolerant force bent on conformism and the relegation of women to second-class status, Islam is in fact the religion of pluralism and acceptance of and respect for human difference of all kinds, including gender difference.

Nettler ( 1999 ) , in commenting on Talbi’s contribution, says:

The Qur’an, as basis and foundation of the whole structure, is Talbi’s ultimate source. He sees in his theory of pluralism a ‘modern’ idea from the depths of revelation. Despite his obvious debt to modern thought, Talbi’s point of departure is from within the sacred text and its early historical context. His approach to that text and history presupposes there is a humanistic message of the Golden Rule and an empirical validity in historical sources such as the Constitution of Medina which support that message. (p. 106)

Nettler’s reference to the Constitution of Medina is about the kind of community that Islam fi rst established around the belief that it was the model community that

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51 The ‘Women’s Movement’ in Modern Islam…

God had envisioned. By any standards, this community, together with most Islamic civilizations of the early Middle Ages, was remarkable for its overarching ethic of tolerance. Additionally, many features that one would associate with the Western state and democracy, rather than with the stereotype of Islam presented by radical Islamism were to be found in the communities built around the Constitution of Medina. Among these features were those concerned with social welfare systems, education and healthcare schemes, and included innovations in law ( Shari’ah ) and new conventions designed to protect the rights and promote the status of women. Almost a thousand years before the so-called Enlightenment in the West began the move towards these features, they were part and parcel of early Islamic civilization (Lewis 1987 ) . In this respect, Islam can claim to be one of the world’s great social experiments where human rights of all sorts were enshrined in law. Talbi’s ( 1995 ) view on the role of women in this context is clear from the Qura’nic evidence:

We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know (be friendly towards) each other … (p. 61)

In a word, women and men are different but nonetheless equal, two halves of a single pair, each incomplete without the other.

Leila Ahmed

Leila Ahmed ( 1992, 2006 ) offers an informed and balanced view of the issue of women in Islam, and indeed of the origins of Islam itself. Unlike Talbi, she acknowl- edges that there are two different and equally cogent interpretations of the nature of early Islam, both of them inspired by the character of Muhammad who, she implies, was a product of his time as well as being a reformer. For this reason, there are some apparent inconsistencies in the testimony provided by the sources. Regarding the issue of women, she maintains that the two interpretations turn on, fi rst, one that seems clearly to endorse the notion that the moral and spiritual equality of all human beings is an ethical imperative for the Ummah. On the other hand, there are more than hints to be found in the inspirational writings of a hierarchy that relegates women to an inferior status to that enjoyed by men.

In conceding the possibility of this dual interpretation, Ahmed might be seen to be playing into the hands of the radical Islamist view on the place of women. On the contrary, the importance of her work is in illustrating that, while it is plausible that the hierarchical interpretation can be held, it is nonetheless based on a misunder- standing of the essence of the Islamic reform. According to her, the dominance of the hierarchical view throughout much of Islamic history owes more to the forces that gained control in the early centuries of Islam than to their understanding of the reform that Islam implied. As suggested, even the character, Muhammad, can be seen in part to be bound by his heritage and so perceived reference on his part to gender inequality comes hardly as a surprise. In contrast, granted the social context and heritage, the real surprise and innovation is in the rigorous and exhortatory

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discourse around the moral and spiritual equality of all people, including between women and men. Ahmed regards the interrelationships between Islam and the West, emanating essentially from the colonial era of the nineteenth century, as crucial to the recovery of this essential voice of Islam. Among other things, it is forcing Islam to re-assess the role of women and so, in her view, to re-discover that it was in fact Islam, not the West, that fi rst proposed the equality of women and enshrined in its own laws a level of rights, including to inherit and own property, that would only come to the West a thousand years later.

Amina Wadud

Amina Wadud builds on the above themes with at least as much recourse to the Qur’an as her foundational source as is characteristic of Talbi. Wadud ( 1999, 2006a, b ) asserts that the issue of women is the central social issue to be found in the Qur’an and that the entire testimony is aimed at reversing the beliefs of the surround- ing tribes that women were somehow less than human. She infers that Judaism and Christianity did not always help in this regard because their stories of the origins of the world prioritized the creation of man and left woman as an apparent after- thought. In contrast, she points out that the Qur’anic expression of creation, while similarly constructed, carefully presents man and woman as a single pair, with a picture of perfect equality in the Garden of Eden and equivocal sharing of guilt when the forbidden fruit is taken. Most crucial to Islam is that man cannot be cre- ated in God’s image, as Judaism and Christianity would have it, because Allah is beyond being personalized, least of all gendered, in the way to be found in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. For Wadud, this de-gendering of God and the assertion of equality and equivalent rights for women is central to the reform that Islam represents.

Along with Ahmed, Wadud acknowledges that Islam’s development was far from unequivocal in the way women were treated but she continues to point to the radical reforms characteristic of the original Constitution to mount the strongest possible case for the issue being central to the Islamic reform. In spite of the context of the times, Islam brought radical changes to the issue. The Qur’an guaranteed the right to inheritance, including of property (perhaps the most radical reform), as well as the rights to initiate divorce and to testify in court. It protected women’s rights against coercion, including against sexual violence even in marriage. Women and men were to be equally bound by the laws of their land and religion, including being equally liable for any punishment owing to misdemeanour, as well as equally liable for the ultimate reward of entering Paradise. The testimony is clear that women were extremely active as participants and leaders in the earliest communities. A’ishah, allegedly Muhammad’s favourite wife, played a role as juridical advisor (interpreter of Shari’ah ) in the days following her husband’s death. Like Ahmed, Wadud believes that the current struggle to recover the voice of women is crucial to no less than a recovery of Islam itself.

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71 The ‘Women’s Movement’ in Modern Islam…

Popular Women Voices

Ahmed and Wadud are just two of a growing chorus of voices being raised by Muslim women about the role of women in Islam. Others include: Fatima Mernissi ( 1975, 2006 ) , the Moroccan sociologist and author of Beyond the Veil ; Majida Rizvi, the fi rst female Judge of the High Court of Pakistan and later Chairperson of the National Commission on the Status of Women, most famous for her leading the successful opposition to the Hadood Ordinance in Pakistan that all but stripped women of their Shari’ah rights; Shirin Ebadi ( 2006 ) , Iranian former jurist deposed to secretarial work after the Iranian Revolution and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, most famous for her support of women’s rights in Iran and Islam generally; and, Ayaan Hirsi Ali ( 2006, 2007 ) , Somalian writer of the Caged Virgin and In fi del , former Muslim and converted atheist who challenges the very founda- tions of Islam with especially sharp criticism of the malevolent effects of political Islam on women in Muslim societies. While the others mentioned remain devout Muslims, Hirsi Ali has abandoned the religion over its alleged failure to protect the rights of women and others. Her impact on the quest to recover the voice of women in Islam is nonetheless profound through her political and literary in fl uence.

In recent important work that captures the potential of women from across the Abrahamic traditions to collaborate on study of women in Islam, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane I. Smith and Kathleen M. Moore ( 2011 ) focus on the changing experi- ences of women and Muslim views about same in Western diaspora communities. It offers a reappraisal of historical material from within Islam, of traditional Western constructs of Muslim women and how Islam is changing in response to such reap- praisals and critiques. The book focuses especially on the Muslim experience in America, examining Muslim American analyses of gender, Muslim attempts to form a new ‘American’ Islam and the legal issues surrounding equal rights for Muslim females. It also looks at the ways in which American Muslim women have tried to create new paradigms of Islamic womanhood and are reinterpreting the traditions outside of the traditional patriarchal structures that would otherwise subjugate them. This research, together with other work noted above, represents a surge among female Muslim scholars to re-create the contemporary circumstances for Muslim women. Of equal signi fi cance is the fact that, among the intense scholarship being directed at reappraising the origins of Islamic source material (cf. Ramadan 2007 ; Ohlig and Puin 2009 ) , female Muslim scholars (e.g. Mattson 2008 ) are increasingly playing a part.

Conclusion

In summary, this lead chapter captures something of the current debate about the role of women in Islam, its sources in the tradition and some of its chief contemporary advocates, reformers and critics. The issue of women’s rights in Islam is predictably the most controversial of the many features of modern revisionist scholarship in and

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