Feminism in Islam

Secular and Religious Convergences

Margot Badran

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780744476
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamische Theologie

While many in the West regard feminism and Islam as a contradiction in terms, many Muslims in the East have perceived Western feminist forces in their midst as an assault upon their culture. In this career-spanning collection of influential essays, Margot Badran presents the feminisms that Muslim women have created, and examines Islamic and secular feminist ideologies side by side. Borne out of over two decades of work, this important volume combines essays from a variety of sources, ranging from those which originated as conference papers to those published in the popular press. Also including original material written specifically for this book, Feminism and Islam provides a unique and wide-ranging contribution to the field of Islam and gender studies.

Part I

Egypt – Late Nineteenth to End of the Twentieth Centuries: First Century of Feminism

1

COMPETING AGENDA: FEMINISTS, ISLAM, AND THE STATE IN NINETEENTH- AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY EGYPT

In Egypt the “woman question” has been a contested domain involving feminists, Islamists, and the state. This chapter explores their competing discourses and agendas in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt and how they have shifted over time.¹ Divergent discourses arose in the context of modern state and class formation, and economic and political confrontation with the West. These multiple discourses have been sustained in strikingly different political and economic cultures as state and society continually negotiate changing realities.

From the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the state in Egypt tried to draw women into the economic and technological transformations under way. As a consequence it began to wrest women away from the exclusive control of the family, threatening the authority and domination of men over their women. Earlier in the century, after freeing Egypt from direct Ottoman rule, the new ruler, Muhammad ‘Ali, while consolidating his power, had placed the Islamic establishment centered at al-Azhar under the control of the state. The formerly broad purview of the religious establishment was eroded piecemeal in the drive toward secularization of education and law. The only exception to this was the sphere of personal status laws.² For women this created an awkward dichotomy between their role as citizens of the nation-state (watan) and members of the religious community (umma). In a division that was never precise, the state increasingly came to influence their public roles, leaving to religion the regulation of their private or family roles. The structural contradictions and tensions this created have, to this day, not been fully resolved.³

While promoting new social roles for women, the state could not afford unduly to alienate patriarchal interests, and has therefore made various accommodations and alliances. Whatever their competing interests, the state and religious forces have retained patriarchal forms of control over women. It is this patriarchal dimension that feminists have identified and confronted, for which they have been variously attacked, contained, or suppressed by state authorities and Islamists alike. However, in Egypt, there has been sufficient space – albeit more frequently taken than granted – within state and society for women to speak out as feminists and activists. Moreover, the authorities have at times deliberately encouraged women’s initiatives for their own purposes.

The earliest articulation of women’s feminist consciousness, first discernible in occasional published writings – poetry, essays, and tales – by the 1860s and 1870s, preceded colonial occupation and the rise of nationalism.⁴ It was more widely expressed from the 1890s, in the rise of women’s journalism and salon debates. This new awareness (not yet called feminist; in fact, the term “feminism” was not used in Egypt until the early 1920s) was based on an increased sensitivity to the everyday constraints imposed upon women by a patriarchal society. Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike shared this sensitivity, and they projected an understanding, implicit or explicit, that these constraints were not solely religiously based, as they had been made to believe. Furthermore, from the rise of feminism in Egypt to the present, its advocates across the spectrum from left to right have consistently used Islam, as well as nationalism, as legitimizing discourses. In this chapter, feminism is broadly construed to include an understanding that women have suffered forms of subordination or oppression because of their sex, and an advocacy of ways to overcome them to achieve better lives for women, and for men, within the family and society. I am using a definition of feminism broad enough to be all-inclusive without intending to suggest a monolithic feminism. I indicate divergences within this larger framework while keeping the primary focus on the interplay among three major discourses: those of feminists, Islamists, and the state.⁵

Feminist, nationalist, and Islamist positions on the “woman question” have seldom been considered together in the literature.⁶ Here, I pay particular attention to the agendas of women who are feminists across the political spectrum, and of women Islamists. Focusing on what women have to say makes it possible to discern their departures from, and agreements with, their male counterparts, as well as their own internal differences.

The exploration of the competing agendas and discourses on women is organized within the following historical framework: (1) the modern state-building and colonial periods; (2) the period of the liberal experiment; (3) the period of the revolution, Arabism, and socialism; and (4) the era of infitah capitalism and populist Islamist ascendancy.

THE MODERN STATE-BUILDING AND COLONIAL PERIODS: NINETEENTH CENTURY TO 1922

During the nineteenth century, especially in the later decades, new contenders appeared in the shaping and control of discourse in general and, more particularly, discourses on women. With the broadening of opportunities for education and the rise of women’s feminist consciousness, women who had previously been the objects of prescriptive pronouncements began to challenge patriarchal domination.

The expanding modern state promoted new educational and work opportunities for women, especially in health and teaching, but incurred resistance from families. In the early nineteenth century, for example, Egyptians did not initially allow their daughters to attend the new state school for hakimas (Ethopian slaves were recruited as the first students).⁷ In 1836, Muhammad ‘Ali appointed a Council for Public Education to look into creating a state system of education for girls, but it was found impossible to implement. Later, however, during the rule of Isma‘il, one of his wives sponsored the first state school for girls, which opened in 1873, serving the daughters of high officials and white slaves from elite households. Meanwhile, encouraged by the state, Shaikh Ahmad Rifa‘i al-Tahtawi and ‘Ali Pasha Mubarak published books in 1869 and 1875 advocating education for women, using Islamic justifications from the Qur’an and Hadith.⁸ It was not easy, however, to draw women out of the realm controlled by the family.

Feminist discourse first emerged in the writings of women of privilege and education who lived in the secluded world of the urban harem.⁹ Women gained new exposure through expanded education and widening contacts within the female world. They made comparisons between their own lives and those of women and men of other social and national backgrounds. Through their new education women also gained deeper knowledge of their religion. Some urban middle- and upper-class women began to contest the Islamic justification for their seclusion, hijab (then meaning the veiling of both face and body), and related controls over their lives.¹⁰ In 1892, Zainab al-Fawwaz protested in al-Nil magazine, “We have not seen any of the divinely ordered systems of law, or any law from among the corpus of [Islamic] religious law ruling that woman is to be prohibited from involvement in the occupations of men.”¹¹ When Hind Naufal founded the journal al-Fatah (The young woman) in the same year, inaugurating a women’s press in Egypt, women found a new forum for discussing and spreading their nascent feminism.¹²

This emergent feminism was grounded, and legitimized, in the framework of Islamic modernism expounded towards the end of the century by Shaikh Muhammad ‘Abduh, a distinguished teacher and scholar from al-Azhar. ‘Abduh turned a revolutionary corner when he proposed that believers could go straight to the sources of religion, principally the Qur’an and the Hadith, for guidance in the conduct of everyday life.¹³ Through ijtihad (independent inquiry into the sources of religion), ‘Abduh demonstrated that one could be both Muslim and modern, and that many traditional practices violated the principles of Islam. In dealing with gender issues, ‘Abduh confronted the problem of patriarchal excesses committed in the name of Islam. He especially decried male abuse of the institutions of divorce and polygamy.¹⁴

The opening-out encouraged by ijtihad had a number of consequences. While Muslim women’s earliest feminist writing may not have been immediately inspired by Islamic modernism, it was not long before it developed within this framework. The gender-progressive discourse of Muslim secular men, on the other hand, was initially situated within Islamic modernist discourse as articulated by ‘Abduh. However, ‘Abduh’s successors did not expand or perpetuate his Islamic modernist discourse on women, while soon the new secular intellectuals turned to secular nationalist and humanist discourse to argue for women’s rights and advancement.¹⁵

After women had been producing their own feminist writing for some time, Murqus Fahmi, a young Coptic lawyer, published al-Mar’a fi al-sharq (The woman in the East) in 1894, criticizing patriarchal tyranny over women in the home, which he claimed no religion sanctioned. Five years later, a Muslim judge, Qasim Amin, published his famous book, Tahrir al-mar’a (The liberation of woman, 1899), attacking the practice of female seclusion and the hijab – by which he meant face veiling, as the term hijab signified at that stage, rather than the modest covering of the head and body, which he did not oppose. Amin argued that women in Egypt were backward because they had been deprived of the legitimate rights accorded to them by Islam. He insisted that for the nation to advance and become modern, women must regain these rights. This pro-feminist discourse – or, some might say, feminist discourse – generated from within the establishment, by a Muslim lawyer and judge, drew wide criticism, especially from religious conservatives and members of the lower-middle class.¹⁶ While it was perceived as more dangerous than women’s feminist writing, which was less widely visible at the time, in the long run women’s feminism would be more sustained and more threatening.¹⁷

Early in the twentieth century, women’s feminist writing became more visible, and reached a wider mainstream audience, when Malak Hifni Nasif, known by her pen name, Bahithat al-Badiya (Searcher in the desert), began publishing essays in al-Jarida, the paper of the progressive nationalist party, al-Umma. These essays and her speeches were published by the party press in 1910 in a book called al-Nisa’iyyat (which can be translated as either Women’s or Feminist pieces, in the absence of a specific term for “feminist” in Arabic). Women’s feminism was becoming more explicit, and was increasingly expressed within a nationalist idiom, reflecting and fuelling the growing nationalist movement in Egypt.

Another principal producer of feminist ideas at this period was Nabawiyya Musa, who later published her essays in a book entitled al-Mar’a wa al-‘amal (Woman and work, 1920). These two women were both from the middle class: Bahithat al-Badiya was from the upper-middle class, and Nabawiyya Musa from a more modest stratum. They were among the first graduates of the Saniyya Teachers’ School, established in 1889, and both became teachers. In 1907, Musa became the first Egyptian woman to sit for the baccalaureate examination – and the last until after independence: the colonial authorities, with their policy of training men for practical administration, were not prepared to subsidize women’s secondary education. Meanwhile, these two young women carried on consciousness-raising, through their public lectures to strictly female audiences composed mainly of upper-class women, and at special classes for women at the new Egyptian University (which soon were stopped and the money saved used to send three men on study missions abroad).¹⁸

In 1911, Bahithat al-Badiya became a pioneer in feminist activism when she sent demands to the Egyptian National Congress for women’s education and rights to employment and to participate in congregational worship in mosques.¹⁹ While they were claiming women’s rights to public space, feminists such as Bahithat al-Badiya and Huda Sha‘rawi, early in the century, actually opposed the unveiling of the face, which pro-feminist men advocated...