WUNRN
February 7, 2010
Born
in Iran and now based in London, Ziba Mir Hosseini, an anthropologist by training,
is one of the most well-known scholars of Islamic Feminism. She is the author
of numerous books on the subject, including Marriage on Trial: A Study of
Family Law in Iran and Morrocco and Islam and Gender, the Religious Debate
in Contemporary Islam.
She
is presently associated with the Centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Law at
the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
In this interview with Yoginder Sikand she talks about the origins and
prospects of Islamic feminism as an emancipatory project for Muslim women and
as a new, contextually-relevant way of understanding Islam.
Q: In recent years, a number of Muslim women’s groups have emerged across the
world, struggling for gender equality and justice using Islamic arguments. Most
of them are led by women who come from elitist or, at least middle class,
backgrounds. Many of them seem to lack a strong popular base. How do you
account for this?
A: I think the majority of the women who are writing and publishing about what
is popularly called ‘Islamic feminism’ are definitely from the elite or the
middle class. But then, globally speaking, feminism has always had to do with
the middle class, at least in terms of its key articulators and leaders. I
believe that Islamic feminism is, in a sense, the unwanted child of ‘political
Islam’. It was ‘political Islam’ that actually politicized the whole issue of
gender and Muslim women’s rights. The slogan ‘back to the shariah’ so
forcefully pressed by advocates of ‘political Islam’ in practice meant seeking
to return to the classical texts on fiqh or Muslim jurisprudence and doing away
with various laws advantageous to women that had no sanction in the Islamists’
literalist understanding of Islam. Translated into practice, law and public
policy, this meant going back to pre-modern interpretations of shariah, with
all their restrictive laws about and for women. It was this that led, as a
reaction, to the emergence of Islamic feminism, critiquing the Islamists for
conflating Islam and the shariah with undistilled patriarchy and for claiming
that patriarchal rule was divinely mandated. These Muslim women were confronted
with horrific laws that Islamists sought to impose in the name of Islam, and so
began asking where in all of this was the justice and equality that their own
understanding of the Quran led them to believe was central to Islam. These
gender activists, using Islamic arguments to critique and challenge the
Islamists, brought classical fiqh and tafsir texts to public scrutiny and made
them a subject of public debate and discussion, articulating alternative,
gender-friendly understandings, indeed visions, of Islam. That marked the
broadening, in terms of class, of the fledgling Islamic feminist movement.
But, that said, I am not sure how far the Islamist feminist discourse has been
able to effectively reach out to and influence the so-called ‘grassroots’. One
heartening development, however, is the emergence of a number of NGOs working
with Muslim women who are using this discourse and relaying it further, using
Islamic and human rights frameworks to stress the need for gender equality and
justice in Muslim communities.
Q: Surely it isn’t possible to bracket all Islamists together. There is a large
diversity of opinion, including about women, even among Islamists, isn’t it?
Some of them do at least sound less regressive than others on women’s rights.
A: That’s true, of course. But, for all Islamists the gender issue is of
paramount significance. One of their main claims to legitimacy, which they all
seem to share, is their critique of the West, a central plank of which is a
moral vision that rests on strengthening the family. They don’t say that women
have no rights—after all, the language of ‘political Islam’ is also one of
rights. Rather, they claim that Islam gives women all the rights they need,
though, what this actually means for women is, for all practical purposes, the
same patriarchy.
That said, I would say that the tension between Islamic feminists and
patriarchal Islamists is as acute as that between the former and many fellow
feminists, who believe that Islamic feminism is an oxymoron and that , in fact,
it will only strengthen the Islamists in the long-run with its use of Islamic,
instead of secular, human rights, arguments.
I must also add here that just as Islamists are not a monolith, there is also
considerable diversity among those who could be referred to as Islamic
feminists. Many of them would even refuse to be called feminists or even
Islamic feminists for that matter. But one common concern that brings them
together is their demand for gender equality and justice, which they claim
using various Islamic arguments. Even here, however, there may be differences
in the way they conceive equality and justice.
Q; You mentioned fiqh and you also spoke about the shariah. How would you
distinguish the two?
A: The shariah denotes what Muslims believe to be the divine path, while fiqh
represents the historical tradition of human attempts to discern the mandate of
the shariah in different situations. Now, while the two are very distinct, the
former is considered to be divine and, hence, unchangeable, the latter being
historically created or determined, and hence not sacrosanct and, therefore,
amenable to change.
However,
very often both traditionalist Muslim scholars or ulema as well as Islamist
ideologues conflate the two, taking fiqh, a human product, to represent or to
appear as synonymous with the shariah. Therein lies the major problem that
Muslim women continue to be faced with in terms of a whole slew of regressive
laws that, deriving from the fiqh tradition, are wrongly presented as mandated
by the shariah.
Personally, I think it makes more sense, when discussing the issue of legal
reforms, to speak about the ‘Muslim legal tradition’ rather than the shariah,
which remains a nebulous, furiously contested terrain. This tradition, one must
recognize, is a human and historical creation and is immensely diverse. That is
why there have been, and still are, so many fiqh schools which often proffer
conflicting opinions on a vast range of issues, including those relating to
women. Recognising this opens up the possibilities of substantial reform for it
effectively highlights the separation between the sacred and the legal. This
crucial distinction was widely recognized in the past, when no faqih or Muslim
jurist of note would ever claim that his fiqh position was absolute and final.
He would offer his own views, of course, but at the end would invariably add
the phrase ‘And God knows best’, indicating that he recognized that he might
well be wrong. Today, however, this practice is rare and so you have people
who, completely lacking this humility, would insist that their own opinion is
absolute truth, the sole or the correct shariah opinion on any matter.
In this regard I think it is crucial to always foreground the fact that what we
understand of Islam—or any religion for that matter—is always just that—simply
one understanding out of many, which is heavily influenced by our own personal
and social location.
Q: A number of NGOs working with Muslim women, including some prominent ones
that are engaged in articulating what could be called an Islamic feminist
discourse, rely heavily on Western funding. Doesn’t this further open them to
the accusation of being ‘tools’ in the hands of what are branded as ‘enemies of
Islam’?
A: It certainly leaves them open to that oft-hurled charge, but then anyone who
works for gender justice, even if she doesn’t depend on foreign money, is
quickly branded with the same label! So, what other option do they have? The
fact of the matter is that many Muslim women live in undemocratic contexts that
lack strong civil society institutions that can support the sort of work they
are engaged in. This forces many NGOs working with Muslim women to fall back on
Western funding agencies. After all, the oil-rich Saudi Wahhabis are certainly
not going to fund NGOs working for justice and equality for Muslim women, even
if these are articulated in an Islamic paradigm. But that said, those women’s
groups who, for lack of any other alternative, are forced to depend on Western
funds, must be clear that they don’t become their puppets.
Q: Islam has often been critiqued for allegedly denying women their rights. The
Islamists’ claim that Islam provides all the rights that women need can
possibly be seen as a defensive or apologetic response to that critique. Do you
think Islamic feminists are also engaged in the same sort of apologetic defense
vis-à-vis critics of Islam?
A: There is undoubtedly an element of apologetics involved here, and Islamic
feminism is certainly reacting to critiques and circulating discourses about
Islam. It is crucial to examine the forces which the emerging Islamic feminism
is facing and reacting to. These include ‘political Islam’ or what is loosely
called ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ that advocates a return to the patriarchal
texts and advocates what it calls an ‘Islamic state’; ‘Islamic traditionalism’,
which is not necessarily political, in the conventional sense of the term, but
sees the fiqh tradition as almost sacrosanct and divine; ‘secular
fundamentalism’ that regards religion as, by definition, unjust and rules out
the very possibility of any progressive or feminist interpretation of religion;
and, of course, Western, including Orientalist, critiques of Islam. What is
common to all these different sets of discourses to which Islamic feminism is
reacting is a very essentialised, non-historical understanding of Islam, one
that refuses to recognize the diverse, alternative understandings of Islam that
have always existed. Islamic feminism is also reacting to dominant Western
feminist trends, according to which to be a feminist you have to be secular and
must work within a secular framework, an understanding that is something
heavily influenced by white, middle-class Western women’s experiences and
cannot be said to be universal at all.
Islamic feminism is thus reacting to these discourses all at the same time. So,
in a sense, it is an apologetic or reactive discourse, directed against those
who claim that Islam does not countenance gender justice and equality.
Q: For some Islamic feminists, their use of Islamic arguments for gender
equality may indeed be a serious expression of closely-held religious
convictions. However, one gets the feeling, although this is just speculation,
that for some others employing Islamic arguments for gender justice might
simply be an instrumental use of alternate understandings of Islam in order to
counter Islamists and traditionalists on their own turf or simply because
operating in a Muslim context necessarily demands the use of Islamic arguments
in order to gain a hearing. Do you agree?
A: It is impossible to generalize, of course, but I think there is an element
of both—of sincere faith as well as, in some cases, a tactical use of Islamic
arguments to reach the same conclusions and make the same demands as secular
feminists would in a non-Muslim context. Public space in Muslim communities is heavily
defined or influenced by Islam, and so many women’s groups believe that without
using Islamic counter-arguments to press the claim for equality they would
hardly get any hearing at all. Since political discourse in Muslim countries is
so heavily influenced by appeals to Islam, especially with the global rise of
‘Islamism’, whether or not gender activists in Muslim contexts are believers
they have been forced to engage with Islam. Since a whole range of regressive
laws, as far as women are concerned, are sought to be imposed in the name of
Islam, these activists, irrespective of their own personal religious beliefs,
have been compelled to seek to articulate alternative Islamic interpretations
to counter them.
Q: With just a few notable exceptions, the key articulators of Islamic feminist
discourse are all non-Arab Muslims. Does that strike you as strange, given the
marked tendency among many Arabs (and many non-Arab Muslims as well) to see the
Arab world as the ‘heartland’ of Islam?
A: Yes, most of the cutting-edge writing and publishing on Islamic feminism is
happening at the so-called ‘periphery’ of the Muslim world, outside the Arab
belt—in countries like Iran, Indonesia, and, of course, among Muslims in the
West. Interestingly, much of this publishing work is happening not in Arabic,
but in languages such as English, Persian and Bahasa Indonesia. I think
political conditions in the Arab world are simply not conducive for such
discourses to be publicly articulated. Doing this could well cost you your life.
You could easily be branded as an apostate and killed.
Q: Recent years have witnessed the mushrooming of girls’ madrasas or Islamic
seminaries in various parts of the world. Do you think these institutions could
help galvanise and popularize Islamic feminist tendencies while empowering
their graduates to become women religious authorities in their own right?
A: Frankly, I do not think so. At least, this is not happening now, though I
don’t know how the future will unfold. The girls studying in most such madrasas
are trained in the same traditional way. They are not allowed to question
things, leave alone criticise received views. They are not encouraged to ask
any questions—if they do they are made to feel as if they are questioning Islam
itself. They are reared on the patriarchal fiqh tradition, which, although a
human product, is treated as almost as sacrosanct as the Quran itself. In such
a situation, how can one hope for Islamic feminist stirrings to emerge from
these madrasas?
Q: Not all the ulema of the madrasas are horribly misogynist, unlike what is
sometimes made out. I know a few younger Indian madrasa graduates who are quite
receptive to the sort of arguments that Islamic feminists are making. Don’t you
feel it is crucial to identify and work with such ulema, rather than to brand
all ulema as irredeemably sexist or misogynist?
A: I agree with you entirely, but the problem is that most Muslim societies are
characterized by a yawning educational, indeed epistemological, dualism so that
there is now little or no contact between the ulema of the madrasas and
‘secular’ or ‘modern’ educated Muslims, who also include key Islamic feminists.
This dualism marks a major departure from the classical past, where knowledge
of the times was an integral component of education in the madrasas where the
ulema were trained. Colonialism pushed aside Islamic Studies from the
educational ‘mainstream’, a process that continued in the post-colonial period
in Muslim countries. So, now, the ulema—or at least the vast majority of
them—have no idea of contemporary sociology, economics, political science and
so on. They are wholly incapable of dealing with the new and myriad challenges
of modernity. That, incidentally, is something that makes them so defensive. It
is also a class issue. Modernity came to Muslim countries on the back of
colonialism, and so it is mainly the poor who now inhabit the madrasas. Their
economic location and the overall culture of the madrasas, which cannot be seen
apart from this economic issue, further inhibits their receptivity to the ideas
being generated by Islamic feminists.
Q: You have worked extensively on Islamic feminist articulations in
Shia-dominated Iran. Do you think that the Shia version of Islam, because it
allows for continuous ijtihad or independent interpretation of the sources of
Islamic tradition, might be more progressive, as far as women’s issues are
concerned, than the Sunni version?
A: Frankly, despite ijtihad I do not think that with regard to women’s rights
the Shia ulema are any different from their Sunni counterparts. Of course, the
possibility of ijtihad in the Shia tradition is a good thing, but we need to go
beyond theory and see how the religious tradition plays itself out in the real
world, in its interaction with the state, the wider society and the
international context. What is really key here is the presence or absence of
political will for reform. So, for instance, in Sunni Morocco, because the King
was heavily in favour of women’s rights, and because the palace, the parliament
and women’s groups were able to come together on this issue, the country now
has a reformed personal law wherein women and men have almost the same rights.
Now, despite the presence of ijtihad in the Shia tradition, the Iranian ulema
have, by and large, displayed no such enthusiasm for legal reform for promoting
women’s rights in Iran.
Q: The focus of many key Islamic feminist NGOs is the reform of personal laws
in Muslim contexts that militate against women’s equality. Do you see this as a
somewhat narrow focus? After all, personal law is not the only problem that
many Muslim women face? For many of them, grueling poverty, for instance, might
be an even more pressing concern.
A: I think the issue of gender relations within the family—which is what
personal laws are all about—actually relates to the core of power in society at
a broader level. Since the family is the basic unit of society, only if there
is justice and democracy within the family can you possibly have justice and
democracy in the wider society. In other words, the key to democratizing the
whole society is to democratize its basic unit, the family, and for this legal
reform is crucial.
Q: By exploring and articulating gender-friendly fiqh prescriptions, do you
feel that, somehow, many Islamic feminist scholars are unwittingly further
legitimizing and strengthening the fiqh tradition that, on the whole, is
solidly patriarchal? Why not circumvent the fiqh tradition altogether and
articulate an Islamic feminist understanding based simply on what could be
called core Quranic values, such as justice, kindness, mercy and equality?
Wouldn’t that make the whole effort much simpler?
A: Fiqh as a legal tradition with centuries’-old roots in Muslim societies
cannot simply be wished away even if you wanted to! Ignoring fiqh won’t make it
disappear! But Islamic feminist scholars and activists are not just
articulating alternate fiqh prescriptions to counter blatantly patriarchal
ones. Many of them are engaging with several paradigms at the same
time—progressive fiqh and tafsir or Quranic interpretation, human rights
arguments, international instruments, laws and treaties, and, above all, the
lived realities of Muslim women. This is something that the book I am presently
working on seeks to grapple with—exploring questions of Islamic feminist
constructions of family law or, even, feminist family law, looking at the
writings of new reform-minded Muslim scholar-activists with a focus on issues
related to gender. In a sense it is a modest attempt to go beyond the two major
blind spots that we have for so long been faced with—the blindness of Islamic
Studies as an academic discipline to gender issues, and the blindness, indeed,
aversion of the secular feminist ‘mainstream’ towards religion, its language,
categories and frameworks.
Q: Are Islamic feminists simply arguing for the same ends as secular feminists
but by using Islamic arguments? In other words, is it a case of the ends being
the same but only the means being different? Or is it that Islamic feminists
(or, some of them, at any rate) might be offering something in their vision of
gender and womanhood that the secular feminist project lacks?
A: For me feminism is both a consciousness that women suffer discrimination at
home, at work and in society and in life because of their gender, as well as
action to do something about this. So it is a striving for justice and equality
for women in a just world; it is a frame of mind and a way of life, a kind of
path that can be followed by everyone – regardless of gender, sex, race, faith
and other differences among us. But justice and equality are contested and
relative concepts, in the sense that they mean different things to different
people in different contexts. There is also an epistemological side to
feminism, it is also a knowledge project; in the sense that it tell us how we
know what we know. Feminist scholarship in Islam as in any other religious
tradition has a lot to offer to both the understanding of religion and the
search for justice. But feminism, as an ideology, as a movement, as well as a
knowledge project, in order to grow and not to become dogmatic, needs to have a
critique from within. In the 1970s and 1980s, Black and ‘Third World’ feminists
provided that critique; for instance, Audre Lorde’s criticism of mainstream
feminist literature of the 1960s for its focus on the experiences of white,
middle-class women and their values; Chandra Mohanty, with her seminal article
“Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse”, offered a
potent critique of the complicity of feminism and colonialism. Such criticism
helped feminism to grow theoretically and become more inclusive.
In my view, what Islamic feminists have to offer now is to help ‘mainstream’
feminism to look at its own troubled relation with religion and to re-examine
some its dogmas – now that religion has come out into public space, and that
the whole thesis that modernization will bring the decline or privatization of
religion is now seriously questioned. Feminists need to reconsider why, in the
course of the 20th century, was it necessary for them to be secular? And what
does being ‘secular’ and what does being ‘religious’ mean in today’s context?
Q. What could secular feminists learn from Islamic feminists? Do you personally
agree with the overall secular feminist critique of the notion of the
complimentarity of the sex roles that underlies general Muslim understandings?
Might there not be some merit in this notion, which Western and
Western-influenced secular Muslim feminists in general do not (or refuse to)
acknowledge because of their particular way of conceiving gender equality as
sameness?
A. I would certainly insist that we all can learn from each other. As for the
notion of ‘complementarity of sex roles’, I passionately disagree with the way
it has been conceived and articulated by dominant Muslim discourses. It is
simply a new and ‘modern’ way of justifying inequality and discrimination, but
expressed in a language that can fool women and Muslims. If one probes deeply
in the literature and engages with those who argue for complementarity – as I
have done in my work – one finds that in fact they accept the premises of
classical fiqh and its conceptions of gender – for instance, men’s right to
polygamy and unilateral divorce – but they either try to modify its harsh edges
or provide new justifications for it. I must say that I have become allergic to
the terms ‘equity’ and ‘complementarity’, because they have come to mean
inequality and discrimination. The fact is that both polygamy and men’s right
to talaq are basically unjust in our context and in our time; and they are at
the very root of suffering for the vast majority of Muslim women. There is no
way that one can rationalize and justify them in the name of Islam and shariah
– these rights were not given to men by the Qur’an, but by classical jurists;
the way the jurists originally formulated these rights did provide women with a
measure of protection in a culture and society in which patriarchy and slavery
were part of the fabric of life. In other words, they are juristic
constructions that no longer reflect contemporary notions of justice.
But, then, there can be a good side to ‘complementarity’, in the sense that
feminist theory has now come to appreciate that the kind of equality that
basically entails a purely legal or formal reversibility of roles does not
bring women real equality. Women do not start from the same starting point in
life as men, and they are not on a level playing field, so we need a new
concept of equality that takes into account difference. The fact is that
neither are all women exposed to discrimination nor do they experience it in
the same way; race, class, education, ethnicity, being part of the ‘third’ or
‘first’ world – all these factors matter. Men are as oppressed as women in many
situations, and are sometimes are dominated by them. There has been a shift in
feminist theory from formal models of equality to what is now called
substantive equality – there is now a big debate going on, and Muslims need to
take part in this debate. We need to rethink old dogmas, both religious and
feminist, and this is where we can learn from each other.
Ziba Mir-Hosseini E-Mail:
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