Islamic Feminism in Kuwait

The Politics and Paradoxes

A. González

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349454570, 9781137304735
• eBook ISBN: 9781137304742
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Nahostpolitik

Drawing on interviews and fieldwork in Kuwait and throughout the Arabian Peninsula, this book explores what cultural elites in the Arab Gulf region have to say about women's political and cultural rights and how their faith is or is not related to their politics.

C H A P T E R 1

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Western Feminism Has Not Taken Root in Muslim Hearts and Minds

We don’t separate. You know this is maybe the Liberals or the West[’s] problem. They think that religion [is] just to worship in a masjid, or a church or a synagogue, or whatever it is, and then you go back to life, and do whatever you want. Which is . . . what makes societies weak. But it’s our belief. My belief. So I wanted the rights for women. I wanted these rights to be taken from my religion.

—Kuwaiti Islamist women’s rights activist¹

One observation that may surprise many readers is that not all Arab Muslim women are jealous of Western freedoms. With depictions of physical abuse, acid throwing, and forced child marriages, these extreme cases portrayed by the media may seem like the norm for Arab Muslim women. But particularly in the oil-rich State of Kuwait, those cases of abuse are far from the norm. And among educated elites, particularly politically Islamist women, there is a disavowal of the belief that they are oppressed by their religion.

According to Islamic history, women of the Arabian Peninsula before Islam were subjected to many kinds of abuses, treated mostly as property, and had few, if any, rights.² What Islam purportedly brought to women in terms of rights and duties were codified standards regarding inheritance and standing within the Muslim community. Where women were routinely the victims of infanticides, Islam prohibited such practices.³ Where women had few avenues for obtaining independent wealth save through the death of a spouse, or the will of a generous father upon his deathbed, Islam codified rights of women to alimony in the event of a divorce, set the amount of a daughter’s inheritance,⁴ and set provisions for exceptional cases such as participation in a polygynous marriage. Although these Islamic provisions may not seem generous by today’s standards, Islamic feminists are quick to highlight the fact that these codifications gave women many rights at the time that other groups did not, including Christians and Jews. Principally, Islam emphasized the political and social rights and responsibilities of women as integral to their participation as equal partners in the ummah.

There is no shortage of Islamically legitimate examples of women who were economically independent of men and thus were able to have a greater voice in their communities, including the Prophet Mohammed’s first wife and his first convert to Islam, Khadeeja.⁵ According to Islamic tradition, when Mohammed met Khadeeja, she was actually his employer. Later after their marriage, she became an important source of income for the budding leader to begin his small community of believers. Mohammed himself encouraged economic independence of women and demonstrated this by establishing that among Muslim believers women would gain some portion of their father’s inheritance.⁶

And yet there are many discrepancies between the legacy of honor and value of women in the Islamic religion and the way that women’s rights have been codified by individual majority Muslim societies. There are many Muslim women who lift legitimate grievances of systematic injustice and inequality of women in their societies. However, many women inside traditional, conservative Muslim societies such as Kuwait have rejected outside help. The reality is that after millions of US dollars in aid and years of violent conflict, Western feminism has simply not taken root in Middle Eastern Muslim hearts and minds.⁷ There are many reasons for this that are explored here. What my research of elites in Kuwait’s contemporary women’s suffrage movement uncovers is that of a new path for women’s rights. An indigenous feminism not solely based in opposition to a Western feminism, but one that fills a niche that Western, individualistic, and secular-based feminism could not reach in traditional, majority Muslim societies.

Feminist scholars have scratched their heads for decades wondering why most women around the world still choose to remain in traditional, patriarchally structured models for the home and society. At the same time, religious and conservative women have expressed dissatisfaction at the public activism of self-proclaimed feminist activists. Bra- and veil-burning demonstrations emblematized the sacrilegious undertones of a Western-based women’s rights agenda that offended instead of liberated some.⁸ To reconcile the long standstill that women from traditional Islamic societies have had when confronting secular and Liberal models of feminism, I build on previous social theory to construct a theory of agency grounded in legitimate authority. By deferring to religious, community, and political authorities in their campaigns for more women’s rights, individual actors in Islamic contexts who have the support of these authorities are valued, accepted, recognized—legitimated. With the approval of a legitimate authority, the individual is emboldened to push over new horizons with a sense of community behind him or her. Throughout the chapters, we will look at how an Islamic feminism based on a sociological theory of legitimate authority differs from more individualized notions of social activism and religiosity in Western contexts.

A NEW SEARCH FOR ISLAMIC FEMINISM

This study is also an updated search of Islamic feminism that began with a “third-world” consciousness of the 1970s. Since the success of the Iranian revolution in 1979 and a rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the 1980s, academic interests promoted efforts to highlight marginalized women’s stories.⁹ Gender studies specialists can agree to disagree on what to call the current wave of feminism. But an updated study of gender and Islam in a majority Muslim context is particularly important and relevant to contemporary gender studies because the global context for both Islam and feminism has shifted dramatically in the last few decades. Though there has been a history of political Liberalism and individual rights that accompanied the feminist movements of the 1960s, historian Margot Badran recognizes the new interactive space for traditional women created by Islamic feminists.

The appearance of the new Islamic feminist paradigm did not spell the disappearance of secular feminisms. The “two feminisms” continue to exist side by side, and are increasingly mutually interactive. Secular feminists have a long historical memory of women’s gender struggles and a repertoire of organizational practices and skills highly honed over time.¹⁰

Whereas secular feminists in Muslim societies have a history as pioneers, they may also have marginalized the upwardly mobile middle-class masses of women from rural, tribal, or more religiously conservative backgrounds. The fact that Islamic women’s rights activists have become bolder in the last few years, particularly in times of social revolutions, has attracted more attention to their cause. Islamic feminists have responded to global, political, economic, and social shifts and inspire scholars, policy makers, and women’s rights activists to rethink previously held assumptions about the empowering agency of religion. As we read the experiences of Kuwaiti elites witnessing the dawn of women in Kuwaiti politics, it becomes clear that legitimating religious, community, and political authorities hold particular power for women in highly religious and traditional majority Muslim contexts.

ISLAMIC FEMINIST DISTINCTIONS

A critical stance toward Western feminism has spurred an indigenous, Islamic feminist approach to women’s rights that holds its own distinctive characteristics. First, Islamic feminists seek to establish an agenda that is part of a comprehensive Islamic worldview. It is more than a spin-off of Western feminism. Second, Islamic feminists seek an agenda that is legitimated in their societies by a religious source—whether by sacred text or tradition—that could be by a religious scholar, ulama (as in Iran and Afghanistan), or by personal study of the scriptures (the Qur’an) and tradition of the Prophet Mohammed (the Sunna). Third, Islamic feminists seek cultural compatibility, that is, a framework for social activism that complements a patriarchal cultural and historical legacy. For much of the Arabian Peninsula, this includes deference to a legacy of tribalism present since before the founding of Islam as a religious and cultural force.¹¹ Many Muslim women have sharpened their arguments by not resisting their patriarchal cultures, but in fact embracing them.¹² This is not necessarily particular to Islamic women’s activism. A similar approach was documented in studies of evangelical women in the United States¹³ and of evangelical women in Colombia who reshaped their communities by their pious example.¹⁴

ISLAMIC FEMINISM, A MEANS TO AN END

One of the most important findings in this exploration of the relationship of Islam, at the macro-sociological and micro-sociological levels as well as the evolving role for women’s political rights in Kuwait, is that regardless of gender and political affiliation, Islamic feminists view women’s political participation as a means to larger social reform issues, particularly reform of Personal Status Laws, and not an end in itself. In particular, some issues addressed by personal status legislation in Kuwait (and also in several other Arab countries) include: rights of citizenship, options in the event of divorce, and rights of inheritance and property ownership. Currently, Kuwaiti women are not able to pass on their citizenship to their children if they marry a non-Kuwaiti. Not being a citizen would exclude their children from receiving government subsidized education, healthcare, and other benefits. Matters of child custody, ability to find housing, and even the ability to enter into marriage or to break their marriage contract in divorce, are all procedures that, under the current interpretation of Islamic law in Kuwait, must be mediated by a male guardian or in some way present complications for women with requirements not demanded of men. In addition, male guardianship requirements for marriage or travel further complicate already emotionally difficult situations for many Kuwaiti women.¹⁵ Regarding rights of inheritance and property ownership, while receiving one half of the amount of inheritance as a male heir was revolutionary and progressive during the Prophet Mohammed’s time, in contemporary times it brings to light gender-based discrepancies that may have outgrown their original usage. To address such women’s rights concerns, secular and Islamist Kuwaiti women have taken different paths to political activism. For example, although only a handful of women (mostly secular) ran as candidates in the first 2006 elections, many Islamist women chose to vote for male candidates whose agenda they agreed with. They believed that their political rights were meant to improve more important social rights such as maternity leave and flexible working hours. By incorporating more women into the politics of legislating women’s rights, practical issues that many Kuwaiti, Arab, and Muslim women face provide politicians, voters, and outsiders opportunities to observe and analyze which interpretations of Islamic law, and indeed which sources of authority, will prevail when it comes to negotiating new boundaries or new “horizons” for women’s rights in Islamic societies. In the short term, it appears that Islamic approaches to politics may serve feminists as a means to their long-term goals of appealing for more social rights for women.

IN OPPOSITION TO WESTERN FEMINISM

Some Western audiences have asked whether I sensed certain jealousy from the women I interviewed for my project; whether they were jealous of the freedoms I enjoyed—to travel wherever I wanted (unaccompanied), to wear whatever clothing I wanted to, to choose whom I wanted to marry or not get married at all. And my answer may surprise some. Not only were most of the women I interviewed not jealous of my respective freedoms, but they also seemed largely content with their own availability of choices and the cultural constraints that shaped them. Clearly, many of these cultural elites are actively engaged in a struggle to give Kuwaiti women more rights and choices—the choice to work outside the home and still balance family obligations; the freedom to recover emotionally, physically, and financially from abusive relationships; the right to retain custody of their children in the event of a divorce; the right to have their voices heard at all levels of government (including voting and running for parliament); increased access to healthcare and education; and many more. Still, I sensed an awareness among Kuwaiti activists of such issues as global problems that are present in all societies—not necessarily unique to their own culturally Muslim society. There was also an awareness of the fact that the solutions to these problems take time to resolve. As one Qatari interviewee put it:

[There is] the difference between the real religion and the practices. You must differentiate. Talk about the practices. Don’t focus on Islam. In the West, everything is focused on Islam. “Islam is bad!” “Islam is violent!” But this is not the case, you’ve seen it.

As for the women, like in all the Arab countries, there are injustices for women, it’s just you know, “growing up” societies . . . So again, there are problems to be solved—slowly, slowly.¹⁶

Instead of resentment over Western freedoms, I found an overwhelming acceptance of a cultural orientation that was more appropriate to their liking than the radically individualistic, somewhat chaotic vacuum of choices they viewed as the “Western” option. There is a real sense of ownership that comes through from the men and women who see themselves as individual agents of change for a generation caught up between the rapid economic growth and demographic shifts of a rural bedouin and tribal culture to a more globalized and cosmopolitan society. The most central difference I discovered between Islamic feminism and the more Western, Liberal, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• 1   Western Feminism Has Not Taken Root in Muslim Hearts and Minds
• 2   Islamists Are Winning Elections
• 3   Veiled Women Are Leading
• 4   Men Are Enabling Islamic Feminism
• 5   Arab Youth Are Both Modern and Traditional
• Conclusion: Legitimate Authorities in Balance
• Appendix 1: Islamic Social Attitudes Survey (ISAS) Methodology
• Appendix 2: Summary of Interview Responses to Select Interview Questions
• Notes
• Glossary
• Selected Bibliography
• Index