Modernism & Islamic Feminism

By Assem ALMOUSSAOUI (Student in Gender Studies MA program)  

  

   It often hits my mind the idea of a possible co-existence between modernism and religion. Feminism, as a modernist movement, seeks to rebel against sexist, rotten and traditional patriarchal society. Take the Arab world, for instance, where religion is in most cases the ascendant. Westerners and modernist easterners alike attack Islam for oppressing muslim women in various aspects of life. Polygyny, veiling and inheritance, to name a few, are considered as legalized forms of persecution perpetrated against muslim women under the disguise of religious sanctity. Nevertheless, we find some women who unabashedly adhere to the feminist movement and struggle for equality within the religious Islamic framework. The problem which arises here is that of congruency between Islam and feminism, as modernism in its core is based on rejecting metaphysical beliefs which cannot be scientifically proven and on embracing a new lifestyle which should cope with new demands of the industrialization phase. Thus, should Islam and feminism be looked at as antithetical?

   The incompatibility looms large once gender roles are brought to the fore. Gender roles in Islam are mandated to be complementary as a ship with two different captains is doomed to sink. In that complementarity relationship, man is seen as the one who is more liable to lead and be the bread-winner of the family while the woman is branded with being sensitive, physically weak and emotional. Thus, equality between men and women, which feminists regurgitate all day-long, is absent in the Islamic teachings. By no stretch of the imagination would feminists capitulate to such principle as it is seen patriarchal and does not take into account the modern economic changes which require women to be workers, leaders and nation builders, and not imprisoned into constricted jobs. What man can do woman also can do. That’s the motto of feminism above all. Negating, or even just limiting, her agency is a negation of her existence. Here, Islamic feminism comes to be caught in a double-bind situation. Should women’s struggle to bettering women’s lives under the umbrella of Islam be necessarily painted as feminist? Or should these women activists throw away that umbrella and claim themselves as modernist feminists but under the torrential rain of scolding from religious scholars and leaders? Is there a way out from such existential dilemma?

   The challenge for muslim women either to be modernist or remain traditionalist is a false and displaced debate. The frame within which the debate is tackled reflects the westerner’s imperialist hegemony. As in the 1840s India, the British imperialism enacted the abolishing of the sati practice describing it as savage and inhuman. Apologists for the British colonization of India boasted of the civilizing mission the colonizer burdened itself with and which was embodied in the fact of annulling the sati. Spivack, however, contends that abolishing was imposed on religious Indian women who wanted to observe their Hinduism and who considered self-immolation to be martyrdom and a duty not a suicide or death penalty. The colonizer meddled in religious affairs and imposed its perspective about that religious practice without getting down to earth so as to try to fathom the cultural sensibilities of Hindus. It is an act of silencing the subalterns. By the same token, Islamic feminists are victims of the West meddling into the affairs of the East. By imposing the western model of women’s emancipation, that is feminism, ‘Islamic feminists’ allowed the west to trample over our own belief system and to silence the majority. A majority who believes in absolute divine-justice as far as gender roles are concerned.

   To conclude, it is true that muslim women are afflicted by the misunderstanding of certain religious texts and the overlapping of traditions and customs with the religion, but such injustices can, indeed, be corrected under the umbrella of Islam. An umbrella which can be opened only on complementarity between men and women and not on rivalry. Seen from such outlook, adding Islamic to feminism is a subtle confession that Islam is oppressive to women. It is time to celebrate our own capacity to solve our problems  and unfetter ourselves from the complex of inferiority to the west.