On May 28th,
2016, a Huffington Post article with a bombastic title “Muhammad was a feminist”
appeared in my newsfeed. The article became quite popular among the people of
my country, and it was shared with me by one of them. Reading it, and absorbing it made
me realize the “Aha! moment” which my passionate Muslim folks must have had,
when they first read that piece. It looked like, everything they had wanted to
say about the status of women in Islam and the overly negative light in which their views are usually
expressed on popular media forums, just got a voice, in the form of a sensible,
nicely written article; which could be aimed at the bigots, the right-wingers and
the new wave of Trumpists.
The article,
however, was not about something new. It was just a flavor of the larger, stronger
and more popular movement of “Islamic feminism”, which I came across during a
talk at my college. In case you don’t know its premise, it sees “Islam as a
theology which is inherently feministic which have only been interpreted in distorted ways
by Muslim politicians, religious leaders and institutions. The
current state of women in Muslim countries hence, is solely the result of culture and
politics and not the tenets of faith”
The aim of Islamic feminism is plain
and simple. Standing for women's rights in the Muslim world. I know this because I
had long associated myself with this movement, partly because it was appealing to me as a young woman, but mostly because it seemed to work. It did make
people talk about feminism and paved the roads for discussions which seldom used to happen before in Muslim countries. However, there was a fundamental flaw in my
approach and the larger approach of Islamic feminism. A flaw so great and obvious, that I regret not seeing it earlier.
The rhetoric of
Islamic feminism was trying to legitimize feminism by the use of religion, as
if feminism needed the validation of a theology or ideology to stand and get
its voice heard in the Muslim countries. A closer observation of the origins of
Islamic feminism would reveal that it began to gain pace during the increasing friction
between Muslim countries and the Western world in the 21st century,
which had been described by Huntington as the “Clash of the Civilizations”. When
feminism emerged as a powerful global movement, and gradually casted its steps
into the Muslim world, it faced such a backlash, and still does, in ways that
are gruesome to describe, with women ending up jailed and expelled, their writings
getting banned and social media pages and forums getting filtered out. In the amidst
of all this, a movement seeming to “soften down” the stance of feminists, and
attracting much less backlash arose, which now has solidified into “Islamic feminism”,
whose lines of thinking has also become part of mainstream liberal feminism in
West. Its evidence is the article I mentioned above and many others
like that which continue to see the daylight on blogging platforms like these.
The problem with
Islamic feminism is not necessarily the flaw in its premise, but its practical
implication as well, that is women‘s rights are pretty much at the discretion of wisdom of Islam. Where Islam supports the rights of women, it might work.
Where it does not, what about that? What are we supposed to do in that
situation? What if after playing all the mental and lingual gymnastics, we
still could not find a single verse which could save us? I am raising all these
questions because this has happened before and still continues to happen.
Islamic feminists will enthusiastically give speeches about the inherent feministic
nature of Islam, and will bring abolishment of burying females in 6th
century Arabia; they will talk about the status of respect for the mothers and
sisters in Islam as if other women do not deserve one, they will talk about the use of
polygamy to shelter women without questioning why those women need the shelter
of marriage in the very first place, they will talk about the role of Muslim
women in wars during the expansion of Islam but won’t bring their status as a
material possession in the events after hijrat from Makkah to Medina, which is celebrated as a great example of brotherhood and fraternity which was achieved by exchanging food, clothes, utilities and women. They will talk about the non-religious basis
of hijab, but emphasize modesty of clothing as if that’s an idea not rooted in
misogyny and control of a woman’s body. And lastly, which happens to be my favorite
one, is when they talk about “respect” of women in Islam. The same respect
which lead many Muslim men to compare women’s bodies to gold or candy. I
mean, you are free to compare women with diamonds in the hope that you are
showcasing respect for them, but how I see it is that it’s a gross example of
objectification which fuels the culture of ownership, ‘protection’ and honor. And
we are talking about pretty basic things here. When it comes to homosexuals, transsexuals
and expression of genders, where feminism has played an unprecedented role, Islamic
feminism miserably fails, like it fails in addressing concerns about pre-marital
sexual relationships, the verse about beating wife on dissent, the Sharia laws
which no sensible woman can take seriously and “the second sex” status of women
in Quran.
Voicing these
concerns in conversations with Islamic feminists, as I have done many times,
will often get you this response every time, which according to me is a cheap
tactic to deflect criticism,“Oh, but what about Christianity?
Hinduism? Buddhism?Why don't you look at them?” as if some oppression rat race is going on to see which
religion oppresses women the most. This is a major downside of basing the
arguments for human rights on religion, which has mostly been fruitless in this
regard. It’s for the same reason that democracy has not thrived much in the Muslim
world, because many well-intentioned Muslims are still stuck on the debate of whether
democracy is Islamic or not.
The appeal of
Islamic feminism, especially among the liberal Western feminists, arises from
the fact that the movement’s most loud and forefront voices are Muslim women
speaking for themselves, rather than someone dictating them about liberation and freedom. But it is also not a far-fetched truth that a lot of bullshit passes down as
“feministic” and without much questioning or scrutiny just because the person
saying it has brown skin. Using the placard of culture or religion, and
thinking that it somehow immunes you from criticism or ending the debate with “But that's part of my culture” rather than beginning with it, is a grotesque example of moral
relativism, which in my eyes is a feministic sin. Saying a practice is fine as long as it let's you celebrate "diversity" and multi-culturism does not make you a liberal; it makes you an intellectually dishonest person who needs history lessons.
If a Muslim woman
is okay with the Sharia laws or glorification of hijab and modesty culture, it
does not really mean anything. I don’t get why these women are used as propaganda tools to basically say “Oh look she is fine with this so that means
this must be feministic or nothing is particularly wrong with this practice”. I
mean there are women who support Trump, and there are women who support Al-Sisi
in Egypt. Interestingly, those same women are often used by MRAs and
right-wingers in West to discredit feminism. The point is that for the most
part, women have been used to upheld and justify their own oppression. There is
no shortage of deluded women, and just because a woman is “okay” with a
practice or a norm should not prevent it from criticism. This is why the
popular MRA argument “So many women in West are okay with disliking feminism,
that means it’s wrong” resembles so closely to the argument of Muslim men “So many
Muslim women are okay with the hijab and modesty, that means nothing is wrong” which
I am tired of hearing.
All and all, seeing Muslim community as a monolith and taking the narrative of dominant, Sunni Muslims and allowing it to shape your perception is a marked example of anti-liberalism. The Islamic feminists' voices are loud, because they form the mainstream Muslim societies, while women who raise conflicting voices are silenced or labeled as 'bigots' thanks to toxicity of political correctness. If you seriously think feminism needs the approval of a religion to validate itself, or you grossly cherry pick and choose the parts of scripture and try to forcibly white-wash and suger coat it, or if you see hijab as a tool of empowerment but fail to explain the slut-shaming, harrasement and rape which women face on the streets because their clothes were not modest enough, then I have nothing to say except gape at your hypocricy. You cannot fight patriarchy unless you fight religion which continues to be the justification of many misogynistic practices. If in 2017, you are writing articles about how 7th century women in Arabia had more rights, you are basically naive about the decades long struggles of women in West who have fought along the civil rights movement, liberal principles and democracy of the 20th century to stand against the Church and question every fringe of culture, religion and politics.
