The 2024 IGW session will be a non-traditional position paper session that aims to engender a conversation about the current state of women and gender studies in Muslim contexts past and present. We invited participants to engage with three broad themes: the study and practice of Muslim and Islamic feminisms, decolonial approaches as they intersect with Islam and gender, and the role of "tradition" and athority in the study of Islam and gender. Four scholars offer short position papers on the divine feminine between decoloniality and tradition, Muslim #MeToo, ordinary women as producers of Islamic knowledge and doctrine, and the reproduction of religious practice in Islamic law. The short presentations will be followed by a facilitated discussion with those in attendance at the session on wider repercussions of these papers and the direction(s) our field is moving in.
My position paper argues for the Islamic authority of ordinary Muslim women who are lost in the blur of a gendered everyday life in the home, dwelling at a remove from activities of the mosques and madrasas. I join feminist scholars of Islamic Studies in critiquing “ulama-ology” (cf. Dana Sajdi, 2013) i.e., the patriarchal politics of knowledge that privilege ‘ulama-led discourses written and uttered by men. I argue in my presentation for the role that diverse religious interpretations by ordinary Muslim women – i.e., women unlinked to Islamic institutions of mosques and madrasas, infantilized and silenced by men as ‘nāqiṣ al-‘aql’ (of deficient intellect) – play in shaping the meanings of texts and traditions in Islam. This demographic of Muslim women live an ordinary life performing gendered care and service work, and they make up the majority of Muslim women in the larger MESA region. I synthesize findings from my ethnographic research on women in Pakistan where ordinary Muslim women agentially create and transmit Islamic knowledge, particularly related to taboo aspects of sexuality and hygiene, situating these findings in the larger interpretive quest of locating feminist voices in the field of Islamic Studies.
What is the relationship between religious authority and power? In contemporary Muslim theology, women’s growing prominence as religious leaders appears to be related to an increased conceptual awareness around rahma, Divine Mercy, rahim, the womb, and al-Rahman, the God of Mercy. I trace this connection in the writings of prominent Muslim theologians and scholars and ask how and when it is leveraged to support new modes of Muslim religious authority and praxis. I argue that the feminist move towards the tradition represents a Muslim engagement with the global feminism debate and allows for gender-fluid and non-hierarchical readings of the Qur’an.
When it comes to the issue of patriarchal legal praxis in fiqh, Muslim feminist theory and praxis have remained in a relative stalemate. There are Muslim feminists who argue that Islamic law can be reformed and those who argue that fiqh is completely irredeemable. In this position paper, I draw on the work of autonomous Marxist-feminist scholar Silvia Federici to reconceptualize ritual obligations as a form of reproduction. Federici's conception of reproduction challenges classical Marxist thought on reproduction. Rather, Federici's work is an invitation to understand how knowledge, information, ideologies, and the materiality of daily life are forms of reproduction. Through Federici, I argue that thinking about ritual obligations as the reproduction of religious life requires Muslim feminists to think about what aspects of religious life they want to reproduce. As a result, they're better poised to do the work of dismantling patriarchal legal praxis in fiqh.
Islamic Liberation Theology recognizes that margins shift. The #MeToo Movement has been the locus of one such margin: the sexually abused. Focusing on iterations of #MeToo amongst Muslim societies, this paper finds that while both Islamic Liberation Theology and Muslim #MeToo are committed to the Islamic tradition, neither substantively engage Islamic Law, representative of a larger pattern within Islamic feminism. Additionally, analysis of the neoliberal discourse underlying the #MeToo Movement and how it has informed #Muslim MeToo responses is missing. This paper seeks to begin a conversation on these limitations, namely, the sidestepping of Islamic Law and inattentiveness to decolonial concerns. Instead of dismissing Islamic Law as irrational or irredeemably patriarchal, I argue that engaging its indigenous interpretive methodology (ʾuṣūl al-fiqh) addresses the decolonial concerns of external co-option and epistemic delinking, while providing an avenue for the Islamic Liberation Theology component of praxis inspired reinterpretation.