Gender Jihad: modern feminist critiques of Islamic patriarchal narratives. One of the most crucial issues facing Muslims today is gender, which encompasses all other issues related to modernity such as democracy or human rights. Within this framework, the Islam feminist train arose, and it has increasingly become the focus of academic interest in recent years. 1 As the authors of the 1998 Sisterhood Is Global Institute manual stated, the most important feature of contemporary Muslim women’s fight is their refusal of the assumption that they cannot be both equal with men and good Muslims at the same time, stating instead that only when a woman has achieved equality as an individual she can become an authentic Muslim. 2 The goal of this essay is, indeed, the same as the feminist one: to challenge the idea of male privilege that Muslims have traditionally read in the Qur’an and, at the same time, to recover its teachings of equality. 3 As Riffat Hassan 1 Margot Badran, Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2009), p. 1 2 Miriam Cooke, “Multiple Critique: Islamic Feminist Rhetorical Strategies”, Nepantla: Views from South, 1(2000), p. 91 3 Asma Barlas, “Women’s readings of the Qur’ān”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Qur’ān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 258 1
Transcript
Gender Jihad: modern feminist critiques of Islamic patriarchal
narratives.
One of the most crucial issues facing Muslims today is
gender, which encompasses all other issues related to modernity
such as democracy or human rights. Within this framework, the
Islam feminist train arose, and it has increasingly become the
focus of academic interest in recent years.1 As the authors of
the 1998 Sisterhood Is Global Institute manual stated, the most
important feature of contemporary Muslim women’s fight is their
refusal of the assumption that they cannot be both equal with men
and good Muslims at the same time, stating instead that only when
a woman has achieved equality as an individual she can become an
authentic Muslim.2 The goal of this essay is, indeed, the same as
the feminist one: to challenge the idea of male privilege that
Muslims have traditionally read in the Qur’an and, at the same
time, to recover its teachings of equality.3 As Riffat Hassan1 Margot Badran, Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences (Oxford: OneworldPublications, 2009), p. 12 Miriam Cooke, “Multiple Critique: Islamic Feminist Rhetorical Strategies”,Nepantla: Views from South, 1(2000), p. 913 Asma Barlas, “Women’s readings of the Qur’ān”, in The Cambridge Companion to theQur’ān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),p. 258
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stated, the more we see the justice and equality in God’s
teachings in the Qur’an regarding women, the more angry feminists
become in acknowledging the injustice and oppression to which
Muslim women are subjected in the misogynistic reality.4 In order
to question those patriarchal assumptions, then, I will argue for
a double critique: from a theological point of view on one side,
and then from a methodological one on the other. Firstly,
however, I will express some preliminary points that I consider
vital in order to place the feminist struggle into the broader
context.
Islamic feminists work within the system that is trying to
marginalise them5, and this bears a great danger: as in the case
of subalterns, you cannot completely delete the old narrative and
create a new one, not without taking the chance of negating once
again women a voice. As Shuruq Naguib argued, ‘The main
problematic lies in the uncompromising construction of a set of
binary oppositions whereby the interpretation of the Qur’an is
4 Riffat Hassan, “Equal Before Allah? Woman-man equality in the Islamictradition”, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, 2(1987), accessed 9 March 2015,http://www.wluml.org/node/2535 Badran, op. cit., p. 56
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either modern/feminist/egalitarian on the one hand, or
traditional/male/misogynistic on the other.’6 Not only binary
oppositions are always problematic: in this particular case, in
which the term Islamic feminism7 itself stands for a double
commitment of being both woman and faithful8, they can lead to
over simplistic oppositions. The work of Muslim feminists is
aimed at refusing those boundaries created by others for them, a
struggle to find an identity as both Muslims and modern women,
but since they work from within, they are bounded by the risk of
deleting old narratives and therefore appealing more to the
Western gaze than actually helping the Muslim condition. The
understanding of the Qur’an depends on who reads it, how, and in
what context. Even if traditionally it has been interpreted by
men, just as silencing women worked against a true understanding
of what it really means to be Muslim, silencing the old (mostly
6 Shuruq Naguib, “Horizons and Limitations of Muslim Feminist Hermeneutics:Reflections on the Menstruation Verse” in New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion:Contestations and Transcendence Incarnate, ed. Pamela Sue Anderson (Amsterdam:Springer Books, 2011), p. 47 This term has been regarded by some as an ‘oxymoron’, but according toMargot Badran the term eradicates old binaries, arguing that assumptions ofclashes between “secular feminism” and “religious feminism” only revealignorance or worse, political attempts to prevent solidarity among women. Fora more detailed discussion on this matter, see Badran, op. cit., pp 242-2508 Cooke, “Multiple Critique: Islamic Feminist Rhetorical Strategies”, p. 93
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male) tradition takes the chance of committing the same mistake.
Moreover: we always need to remember that feminism is a modern,
secular concept, and we must be conscious of the problems that
arise in applying such concept to a religious tradition such as
Islam.
Most of all, however, an important distinction must be made
between Shari’a law and Islamic Jurisprudence, which is necessary
in order to develop a structural and theologically strong
critique of patriarchal assumptions.9 The fiqh legacy, in fact, is
a dynamic human interpretation that seeks to translate the
Shari’a vision of a moral path for human fulfilment into legal
norms10; it is not an end in itself, and it is not static, and in
order to construct a feminist critique, we need to question the
assumptions of fiqh as problematic from a gender point of view.
Ibn Arabi11, in particular, challenges the notion of men as
9 Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s reform in Islam (Oxford: OneworldPublications, 2006), pp 48-5310 Sa’diyya Shaikh, “Islamic Law, Sufism and Gender: Rethinking the Terms ofthe Debate”, in Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, ed. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani and Jana Rumminger (Oxford: Oneworld Publications,2014), p. 12411 Within this framework, Ibn Arabi develops a theory of legal testimony thatchallenges the idea that male testimony is inherently superior. Through theuse of context he states that women’s experience was limited primarily to the
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primary agents, underpinning his argument with a logic that ‘law
is to be receptive to and informed by changes in contexts,
experiences and knowledge.’12 His approach to fiqh opens up the
possibility of pursuing a dynamic way to formulate the law
today.13 But not only we can rewrite the law through fiqh:
according to Amina Wadud we must rewrite the law, which she sees
as contingent of the time in which it was written just as the
fiqh of our time has meaning as fiqh al-waqi’ah.14 At the time of
Revelation, gender was not a category of thought, but today it is
imperative that we rethink sexism as it goes against Qur’anic
egalitarian principles. It is with this in mind that modernists
assume the right to ijtihad while also propagating legal reform,
which they perceive as separation of the true Shari’a from its
medieval juristic formulation, fiqh.15
private realm, hence the different weight for the testimony of each gender.For a more detailed account, see: Shaikh, op. cit., pp 122-12512 Shaikh, op. cit., p. 12413 Ibid14 Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, p. 20515 Barbara Stowasser, “Gender Issues and Contemporary Quran Interpretation”,in Islam, Gender, and Social Change, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 34
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At the base of the unequal construction of gender in the
Muslim legal tradition is the idea of male authority over women,
justified using Qur’anic verse 4:34 from which jurists derived
the concept of qiwamah.16 Disparities between the sexes stem from
the assumption that God endowed men and women with different
qualities to perform different tasks; God has given men more than
women, hence the responsibility that they have towards women at
home which translates with an equal responsibility for religious
and political leadership of the community.17 Moreover, and still
working towards patriarchal narratives, Muslims have always
believed that female sexuality is potent and can lead to chaos in
the male, which in turn led to the belief that, in order to
preserve order in society, it is necessary to control women.18
These increasingly misogynistic interpretations of the Qur’an,
were also accentuated by certain dynasties (like the ‘Abbāsid19),
16 Ziba Mir-Hosseini, “Muslim Legal Tradition and the Challenge of GenderEquality”, in Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, ed. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani and Jana Rumminger (Oxford: Oneworld Publications,2014), p. 1417 Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, “Islam and Gender: Dilemmas in the Changing ArabWorld”, in Islam, Gender, and Social Change, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L.Esposito (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 1418 Ibid., p. 1719 Under the ‘Abbāsid rule female slavery and subordination to men throughlimitless harems were institutionalised. For more information on this matter,see: Barlas, “Women’s readings of the Qur’ān”, pp 256-258
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and as a result the idea of women as active participants in the
making of culture was replaced with a memory in which they had no
right to equality, and were largely excluded from public life and
the process of knowledge.20
Starting in some cases from a new reading of Sura 4:34
itself, feminists have developed critiques of patriarchal
readings and interpretations of the Qur’an, a rewriting not only
aimed at producing new legal interpretations but also at
awakening women in order to make them claim their rights and
transform society.21 Particularly interesting in this sense is
the reading provided by Sufists, that refer to every human being,
regardless their gender, as capable of pursuing the same and
ultimate goals, an assumption that poses a challenge to every
type of patriarchy.22 Sufi psychology, with its notion of the
relationship between nafs, qalb and ruh, provides us with an
inherent critique of selfishness and at the same time with the
tools to challenge notions of male superiority.23
20 Barlas, “Women’s readings of the Qur’ān”, p. 25721 Cooke, “Multiple Critique: Islamic Feminist Rhetorical Strategies”, p. 10622 Shaikh, op. cit., pp 114-11523 Ibid., pp 115-117
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As for the theological critique, it argues that the negative
attitudes towards women are rooted in theology.24 The Qur’an
identifies the origins of men and women from a single nafs (self),
to be ‘each other’s protectors, supporters, and comforters’25,
within a relationship that is based on equality and mutuality.26
References used by the Muslim tradition to argue for male
superiority are made to non-Qur’anic traditions that depicts the
woman as created from the man’s rib27, which entered Muslims’
mind through the tradition of hadith28. In the Qur’an there is also
no suggestion that Adam’s wife seduced him away from obedience to
God, no implication that women or sexuality are accursed, and
particularly both Adam and Hawwa are identified as equally
responsible for the Fall29. Those unambiguous rulings, however,
are in practice completely ignored by Sunni Muslim law, an
24 Hassan, “Equal Before Allah? Woman-man equality in the Islamic tradition”25 Yazbeck Haddad, op. cit., p. 1226 Ibid.27 Ibid., p. 1428 Hassan, “Equal Before Allah? Woman-man equality in the Islamic tradition”.It has also been argued that the hadith literature itself reflects medievalethos rather than the real Qur’anic spirit. For further reference, see: AsgharAli Engineer, The Qur’an, Women and Modern Society (United Kingdom: New Dawn PressGroup, 2005), pp 195-20329 Leila Badawi, “Islam”, in Women in Religion, ed. John Holm and John Bowker(London: Pinter Publishers Ltd., 1994), p. 87
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example of customary law prevailing over Qur’anic legislation.30
Sura 4:34, in particular, is seen as especially important by
scholars such as Ziba Mir-Hosseini when dealing with the issue of
gender equality, arguing that the juristic construct of qiwamah
developed in the context of marriage provided the justification
for other legal inequalities, with the lack of authority within
the family context that translated into a lack of authority
outside of it.31 This patriarchal reading of the verse, however,
comes with many implications. God, who speaks through the Qur’an,
is characterised by justice, and can never be guilty of
oppression or wrongdoing.32 As a consequence, the Qur’an, as
God’s word, cannot become a source of human injustice, and the
oppression to which Muslim women have been subjected to cannot be
regarded as God-given.33 Also, the Qur’an, even if it directs
Muslims towards justice, does not give a definition of justice
but only a direction to it, which is always time and context
30 Ibid., pp 96-9731 Mir-Hosseini, op. cit., p. 1732 Hassan, “Equal Before Allah? Woman-man equality in the Islamic tradition”33 Riffat Hassan, “Challenging the Stereotypes of Fundamentalism: An IslamicFeminist Perspective”, The Muslin World, 91(2001), p. 63
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bound34, and this leaves space for critical readings and
interpretation.
One of these interpretations has been provided by Muhammad
Abduh, an Egyptian theologian and jurist who claims that Islam is
compatible with modernity. His new reading of the Qur’an is
guided by a separation of ibadat (laws on religious duties) from
muamalat (laws on social transactions).35 While the first are
immutable, and therefore not open to changes in interpretation,
the second require interpretation and adaptation from each
generation of Muslims in light of the needs of their age.36 His
itjihad was not put forth to benefit women per se, but to benefit
the Islamic society at large through a re-Islamisation of the
family37, challenging Islamism and their practice of translating
sacred texts directly into contemporary thought and action38. 34 Mir-Hosseini, op. cit., p. 3735 Stowasser, op. cit., p. 3436 Ibid.37 Ibid., pp 35-3738 Islamist often associate gender equality with the West, which in theiropinion will bring societal and cultural destruction. The main problem is thatan emancipated Muslim woman is often seen by many Muslims not as a symbol ofmodernisation but as one of westernisation, violating the barrier betweenpublic and private space. Today, however, largely because of anti-women lawspromulgated in some regions of the Muslim world under the cover of“Islamisation”, women with some degree of education are starting to realisethat religion is being used for oppression rather than liberation. For further
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Writing from a similar perspective, Tahir al-Haddad makes a
distinction between norms and prescriptions that are essential to
Islam as a religion (thus eternal) and those which are contingent
(time and context bound).39 In Islam the greatest goal is to
reach equality among all God’s creatures40, but this was
impossible to achieve at the time of Revelation, leading Islam to
be tolerant of patriarchy even if the Qur’an clearly states a
principle of equality.41 He argues that both verses 4:34 and
2:228 (which constitute the primary textual support for male
authority) must be put into the context of marriage and divorce
of the time, arguing that the aim was not to repress women but
instead to restrain the privileges that men had over them for
protection.42 By putting Sura 4:34 into context and reconnecting
it to verse 30:21, he breaks the idea of authority and interpret
the verses in an egalitarian way, since the love and mercy that
references see Hassan, “Equal Before Allah? Woman-man equality in the Islamictradition” and Hassan, “Challenging the Stereotypes of Fundamentalism: anIslamic Feminist Perspective”.39 Mir-Hosseini, op. cit., p. 2040 Badran, op. cit., p. 24741 Mir-Hosseini, op. cit., pp 20-2142 Ibid., p. 21
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the second verse underlines cannot be developed in an imposed
relationship.43
Still analysing the binary distinction between eternally
valid reasons and situation-specific laws, Fazlur Rahman argued
that:
The Qur’an was the divine response, through the Prophet’s
mind, to the moral-social situation of the Prophet’s Arabia.
To apply this divine truth to all later ages, including our
own, requires scripturalist interpretation in the form of a
double movement, from the present situation to Qur’anic
times, and then back to the present.44
Particularly interesting in his position is the balance that he
advocates for a thorough analysis: not just accepting patriarchal
interpretations of the time, neither rewriting new
interpretations from scratch, but finding an equilibrium between
43 Ibid., pp 22-2344 Stowasser, op. cit., p. 38
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the two.45 According to him, Sura 4:34 is a clear example of a
Qur’anic law specifically revealed for the patriarchal Arab
society of the Prophet’s time46, and this leaves space for new
interpretation based on the recognition of crucial distinction
between Qur’an and Sunna, essential and accidental.47
Apart from a theological critique based on different
interpretations of Qur’anic texts, however, Muslim feminists have
also argued for a methodological one, using mainly itjihad and
tafsir48 to propose new methodologies of analysis of the text.
The main critique advanced by Muslim feminists lies in the
traditional use of linear-atomistic approaches of analysing a
line at the time without putting it into the wider, coherent
context, which according to them projects patriarchal and
45 This position is also shared, for example, by El Fadl, who argues that wecannot completely put aside considerations of the classical tradition in orderto rely only on contextual and contemporary interpretation. For furtherreference on this matter, see: Omaima Abou-Bakr, “The Interpretative Legacy ofQiwamah as an Exegetical Construct”, in Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in MuslimLegal Tradition, ed. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani and Jana Rumminger(Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2014)46 Stowasser, op. cit., p. 3947 Mir-Hosseini, op. cit., p. 2548 Badran, op. cit., p. 247
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misogynistic meanings49. The established order, as argued
throughout this paper, within the Arabian Peninsula at the time
of the Revelation was patriarchal. This led some to argue that
Islam is essentially a variation of patriarchal ideology, while
others are convinced that Islam is above worldly ideology,
including patriarchy, and that even if Islam as it is practiced
today is utterly patriarchal, true Islam is not.50 In Quran and
Woman51, Amina Wadud, a Muslim feminist that applied this
methodological critique to the Qur’an, argued for a
differentiation between two textual levels: the historically and
culturally contextualised “prior text” and the wider “megatext”
of universal relevance, in which gender distinctions are
superseded by the Qur’an’s emphasis on gender equality.52 She
identifies three different categories of Qur’anic interpretation:
traditional, reactive and holistic. The traditional one does not
consider, according to her, the Qur’an’s unity, the main fault of
which is that all traditional interpretations were written by49 Barlas, “Women’s readings of the Qur’ān”, p. 26250 Amina Wadud-Muhsin, Qur’an and Woman (Selangor: Penerbit Fajar Bakti Sdn,1992), pp 80-8151 In her later work Inside the Gender Jihad, Wadud describes her old method asapologetic and insufficient, stating that a possibility of ‘refuting thetext’, talking back to it and even say no to it, exists. 52 Stowasser, op. cit., p. 39
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men, excluding women and women’s experiences or interpreting them
through the male vision.53 While arguing that even the reactive
method used by many feminists (and other ideologically motivated
individuals) is incongruous with the Qur’an, she advances the
holistic method which considers not only the context of a
Qur’anic Revelation, grammar and semantic, but also the overall
Qur’anic overview54, approaching both words’ basic meaning and
relational one.55
Drawing from the idea of the importance of words in the
Qur’anic interpretation, other critics analysed the role of
language in creating gendered meanings, which undermines Qur’an’s
teachings.56 Every reading reflects not only the text but also
the reader’s own perspectives, background and biases, and the
imposition of a particular cultural perspective contradicts the
essentiality and the universal purpose of the Qur’an. In
particular, legal scholars within the Islamic tradition selected
specific terms from the Qur’an and used them to develop the
53 Ibid., p. 4054 Ibid.55 Wadud, Qur’an and Woman, p. 1056 Barlas, “Women’s readings of the Qur’ān”, p. 265. In particular, Barlasbreaks with the feminist tradition that reads the Qur’an as dual-gendered infavour of an interpretation of God that is beyond sex/gender.
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foundations for gender hierarchy, adding additional layers of
gender inequality to the already patriarchal elements of the
revealed texts.57 Working, consciously or not, within the train
of perpetuating misogynistic narratives, Muslims defend the
Qur’an universalism by viewing its teachings ahistorically58,
because they believe that historicising its context means also
historicising its contents, and therefore undermining its sacred
and universal character. Modern and contemporary traditionalist
Muslim thinkers, in particular, have started to rely less on
chronology (especially with regards to specific Qur’anic
Revelations) because they fear that such reflections might
suggest that certain Revelations were determined by historical
necessity, a possible reaction against some liberal voices that
propose new interpretations and most of all problematize the
cultural formation of such verses.59 One of these new voices, Abu
Zayd, argues that even if the Qur’an is a holy text, it is
57 Shaikh, op cit., p. 11058 Asma Barlas, indeed, identifies as one of the main conceptual confusions inreadings of Islam the non-present distinction between the Qur’an as revelation(Divine Discourse) and the Qur’an as text (that is, fixed in writing by humansand interpreted by them in time/space). For further reference, see: AsmaBarlas, “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (UnitedStates: University of Texas Press, 2002), pp 10-18 59 Stowasser, op. cit., p. 31
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historically and culturally determined: even if God’s words exist
in a sphere that is beyond human knowledge, his words have been
interpreted, and sociohistorical analysis is needed for its
understanding, not to mention that a modern linguistic
methodology should be applied for the interpretation.60
The problem is not with the text but with the context, and
the ways in which the text has been exploited to sustain
patriarchal structures. We need to recognise and question the
interests of those who manipulate and establish certain
interpretations of the text in order to perpetuate a misogynistic
and patriarchal narrative, not only to support male dominance but
also to maintain authoritarian approaches to religion.61
Undoubtedly many interpreters were sincere in their desire to
actually interpret God’s words62, but others might have exploited
certain verses in order to impose androcentric narratives,
formulating a patriarchal Islamic Law which holds utilitarian
60 Mir-Hosseini, op. cit., p. 3261 Ibid., p. 3862 Shaikh, op. cit., p. 110
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perspectives on women that are treated as objects instead of
subjects.63
These patriarchal interpretations of the Islamic Law,
moreover, favour the Western rhetoric in claiming the oppression
of women in order to broaden their support in the fight of Islam.
The new prominence, or I shall say centrality, which the issue of
women came to occupy in the Western colonial narrative of Islam
by the late nineteenth century, appears to have been the result
of strands of thought all developing within the Western world64.
Furthermore, all the evidences about the “backwardness” of Islam
as inspired by their attitude toward women were gathered by
missionaries and other figures65, once again putting themselves
on the other side of the barrier instead of immersing themselves
into it. This colonial account of Islamic oppression of women,
however, was based on misperceptions and, even worse, political
agendas.66 The custom of wearing the hijab, then, becomes for the
West the proof of the inferiority (and otherness) of Islam and63 Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, p. 9664 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1992), p 15065 Ibid., p. 15166 Ibid., p. 166
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their justification for undermining Muslim religion and
society67, and for the East the emblem of generalisations. The
oversimplification of the concept of veiling is embodied in the
Western view that Islam is innately and immutably oppressive
towards women,68 whereas the true meaning of the veil for each
and every woman can only be heard from the woman who wears it,
and not from our outside perspective69. As Miriam Cooke correctly
underlines, ‘even when women make their own decisions concerning
the veil, their decision may be used by others to serve other
goals.’70 Indeed the veil, in the post-colonial period, was seen
by Muslim women not as a symbol of the inferiority of their
culture, but as a symbol of resistance to Western colonialism and
domination71, a way of reinvesting new meanings into an old
symbol,72 and in some cases a way of emancipations and indeed
female empowerment. It is in here that lies the difference
67 Ibid., p. 23768 Ibid., pp 151-15269 In her book Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil (London: International Instituteof Islamic Thought, 2007) Katharine Bullock proposes an alternative viewcreated from the perspectives of Muslim women, instead of the “mainstream” onethat has been primarily formulated by either Westerners or Muslims who do notwear the veil.70 Miriam Cooke, Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature (New York:Routledge, 2001), p. 13371 Ahmed, op. cit., p. 16472 Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, p. 177
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between the Western and the Muslim feminist critique on the
account of gender equality. Muslim women work from within the
system in which they live in, in which they are immersed in,
instead of judging it from what they perceive of it from the
outside to feed a broader political agenda in need of
legitimisation.
As showed throughout the paper, current discriminatory laws
regarding marriage and gender relations are neither divine nor
immutable, but they represent juristic interpretations based on
principles that are no longer valid or acceptable.73 In a time in
which the umma is increasingly fragmented, Islamic feminism can
be seen as a way to recuperate the idea of the umma itself74, a
way to go beyond binary distinctions between the West and the
East, the secular and the religious. This legal reform, however,
can only be effective where there actually is a real basis for
social change, because otherwise its success will be restrained
to certain social groups and it will be limited and transitory,
73 Mir-Hosseini, op. cit., p. 3574 Badran, op. cit., p. 323
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remaining at the margins.75 In an environment such as the one in
which we find ourselves now, it must be recognised and accepted
that the Islam that some Western feminists reject as misogynist
and extremist is the religion of a very small minority, and
especially it is not the Islam to which Islamic feminists pay
allegiance. The Islam they invoke is the internationally
significant political player, but also the individual faith
system that eschews violence as it seeks to manage both internal
and external conflict.76 It is only from within this global,
political, and religious system that the “stubbornly egalitarian”
voice of Islam77 can not only be resumed, but also accepted.
75 Mir-Hosseini, op. cit., p. 2876 Badran, op. cit., p. 32377 Barlas, “Believing Women” in Islam, p. 2
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