Muslima Theology

Front matter

Ednan Aslan / Marcia Hermansen / Elif Medeni (eds.)

Muslima Theology

The Voices of Muslim Women Theologians

Part 1 —muslim Women As Theologians: Historical And Contemporary Perspectives

35 Early Community Politics and the Marginalization of Women in Islamic Intellectual History Ednan Aslan

45 Muslim Women as Religious Scholars: A Historical Survey Zainab Alwani

59 Feminist Readings of the Quran: Social, Political, and Religious Implications Ndeye Adüjar

81 Muslim Feminist Theology in the United States Aysha Hidayatullah

Part 2—theological Anthropology And Muslim Women

Women and Man’s “Fall”: A Qur’anic Theological Perspective Riffat Hassan

The Position of Woman in the Creation: A Qur’anic Perspective Hatice Arpagus

Misogynistic Reports in the Hadith Literature Hidayet Sefkatli Tuksal

Gender Justice and Gender Jihad—Possibilities and Limits of Qur’anic Interpretation for Women’s Liberation Muna Tatari

Part 3—muslim Women And Islamic Religious Law

Gendering Ritual: A Muslima’s Reading of the Laws of Purity and Ritual Preclusion Celene Ayat Lizzio

Ibn Taymiyya's Feminism?

Imprisonment and the Divorce Fatwas Carolyn Baugh

Sexing the Prayer: The Politics of Ritual and Feminist Activism in Indonesia Etin Anwar

Violence Against Women in Qur’an 4:34: A Sacred Ordinance?

Rabha Al-Zeera

Part 4—muslima Constructive Theology

From Sexual Difference to Religious Difference: Toward a Muslima Theology of Religious Pluralism Jerusha Tanner Lamptey

Resisting the Veil of Universalism:

Muslim Womanist Philosophy as a Lens for Authentic Representations of African American Muslim Women

In Search of al-Insan: Sufism, Islamic Law, and Gender Sa‘diyya Shaikh

Bibliography

Series editor’s foreword

We are pleased to present the third volume of “Wiener Islamstudien”—works in the field of Islamic Studies from the University of Vienna. This series aims to make intellectual contributions to Islamic discourse while providing material that is academically rigorous and accessible to the general public.

The current volume on Muslima Theology highlights an important emergent phenomenon in contemporary debates about the situation of Muslim women. This is the growing role played by female Muslim theologians and academics working in the field of religious studies who are critically reflecting on their position within Islam through making interpretive contributions that challenge the prevalent patriarchal readings of religious tradition.

Numerous books have been published about ‘Women in Islam’ and it remains a popular topic in popular debates. A naive perception is that the position of women has already been defined within the Islamic religion for all eternity and one only needs to open the classical books in order to obtain the answers to today’s questions on gender issues. This overlooks the fact that Islam as it exists today, in all its variety and richness, developed historically. After all, today’s Muslims are not the first generation to be faced with the task of dealing with new social and religious situations and the need to find reasonable ways to resolve the concomitant challenges and crises.

Series editor’s foreword

Previous generations of Muslims found their own answers to such questions in various cultural and geographical regions of this world. It is therefore not possible to speak of a single Islam, rather we encounter a multitude of cultural and historical expressions of the religion in the most diverse cultural environments. In its dynamic history throughout the past centuries, Islam has been able to continually adapt and incorporate diverse theological traditions of interpretation and practice.

The work of female Muslim theologians in this volume indicates that Muslim women are increasingly drawing on the dynamic origins of the religion and deriving from them a theology fit for the needs of our time. While rooted in authentic Islamic sources and interpretive methodologies, the contributions from Muslima theologians featured in this collection clearly demonstrate their creative and future-oriented approach.

This volume, initially intended as a project within the Department for Islamic Religious Education at the University of Vienna, would not have come about without the valuable contribution of my colleague Prof. Dr. Marcia Hermansen. In addition to her valuable introduction to the topic, she also took charge of the entire editing and transliteration requirements of the volume. The success of this work is due to her indefatigable commitment.

We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of an international team of graduate student assitants including Elif Medeni, Danny Gibboney, and Jason Renken. Dr. Barbara von Schlegell also provided valuable assistance during the editing process.

Ednan Aslan Vienna, May 2013

Introduction

The New Voices of Muslim Women Theologians

While it is clear that, historically and doctrinally, there is no barrier to females commenting on and interpreting Islamic sacred texts, af ter the first generation of Muslims, women primarily functioned as transmitters rather than as interpreters of the tradition.! It is only with modernity and the rise of mass literacy that Muslim women, beyond the circle of a few elite scholarly families, began to have access to the education and tools needed to engage in writing interpretive theology. Of course, this could also be said to a greater or lesser extent of all major religious traditions. While much of this new Muslim theology undertaken by female interpreters is explicitly feminist or womanist, the participation of many women in Islamist or socially conservative pietistic movements has also opened up the field of religious discussion and activism to those Muslim women who seek to reaffirm many traditional Islamic tenets while also speaking in a female voice that addresses issues of special relevance to women.

The very concept of Islamic theology requires historical contextualization. Unlike Christianity, and more similarly to Judaism, law, rather than theology, became the privileged intellectual discipline in classical Islamic religious thought. The budding rationalistic theologies of

1 This is not to say that transmission is always devoid of individual input and perspectives. There were exceptions throughout history of Muslim women becoming legal experts, issuing fatwas and making legal decisions as well as, in very limited cases, speaking or writing critically about male interpreters. See, for example, Ruth Roded, Women in Islamic Biographical Collections: From Ibn Sa’d to Who’s Who (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994).

ninth century Baghdad such as Mu ‘tazilism eventually fell into eclipse in the Sunni world. While the Sunni ‘Asharite and Maturidite schools of thought continued to exist, their articulation was generally limited to commentary on existing texts rather than full-scale reinterpretation of revealed sources in order to make them speak to the particular concerns of a changed context. In the Shi‘a world and in some areas of traditional Sufism, elements of philosophical or mystical theologizing continued. However, their main concerns were neither gender nor the challenges of contemporary social and political issues.

Terms for theology in classical Arabic are “‘ilm al-kalam” and “‘agida”. Tlm means science or discipline while kalam literally means speech or discussion, and the scholastic “question and answer” format of early treatises on issues that impacted the Muslim community initially reflected political and subsequently more theoretical debates about issues such as “who is a Muslim?” or “free will vs. determinism”. A crucial debate that emerged early and continues until the present concerns the scope of applying rational or metaphorical interpretation to the revealed sources, in contrast to restricting readings of their terms and injunctions to the literal meanings, in which only texts could be used to comment on other sacred texts.

‘Aqida, the second term related to theology in the Islamic tradition, is derived from a root that conveys *binding, commitment, and contract" and suggests the binding nature of religious conviction. While Islam is not creedal in the same way as Christianity, some early Muslim figures drew up lists of basic tenets of faith.

The documents to which the terms ‘aqida or 'aqa'id are applied vary in length, and the longer ones cannot be sharply divided from the comprehensive theoogical treatises (e.g. al-‘Agida al-Nizamiyya by Juwayni). The terms, however, may usefully be taken to signify compositions where the chief interest is in he formulation of doctrine or dogma, and not in intellectual discussion or argument about it ... Creeds are often built round either the shahada (as al- Ghazali's) or the tradition, which elaborates a qur'anic formula, that faith is faith in God, His angels, His books, His prophets, etc. (as Birgew1’s). Sometimes hey are included in legal treatises, as introductory statements of what it is obigatory for a Muslim to believe.?

2 W.Montgomery Watt, “‘Akida,” Encyclopaedia of Islam I, 2nd ed., eds. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W.P. Heinrichs (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2011), 332.

Current lively and critical discussions about the interpretation of religion and the role of Islam in all areas of life have provoked a renewal in speculative theology among Muslims which addresses all areas of ethical, interpretive, and constructive engagement with religious teachings. When contemporary Muslim women engage in scriptural interpretation and theology they are breaking new ground in a number of areas, not only as females, but also as interpreters of the religious tradition in the context of significant contemporary challenges. Their sources cannot be limited to pre-modern theologies of ‘ilm al-kalam and “aqida, which tended to be scholastic in argumentation and to address matters that are no longer compelling or relevant to most Muslims. Therefore, the writings of the new cohort of Muslim women theologians draw on a range of initiatives that support their project, including the following.

ISLAMIC LIBERALISM

Islamic modernist or liberal thought emerged in the late nineteenth century, due to rapid social and historical change accompanied an increased acquaintance with Western post-Enlightenment methodologies for reading scripture that applied historical criticism and the analysis of literary tropes and genres?

Both secularized and explicitly religious writers and activists had an influence on reformist currents in Muslim societies. For example, Qasim Amin’s Liberation of Women was thought to have been influenced by the Egyptian modernist Shaykh al-Azhar, Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905).4 Modernists such as Abduh aimed to liberate society from the effects of medieval interpretations and to ultimately transform family life and the understanding of the husband-wife relationship with its extreme gap between the sexes.

Other male Muslim liberals such as ‘Ali Shari'ati (d. 1977) and Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988) presented Islam in ways that addressed the limitations placed on women by taking historical critical approaches to traditional interpretations. In particular, Rahman’s approach of his-

3 Charles Kurzman, Modernist Islam, 1840-1940: A Sourcebook (New York: Oxford, 1998) and Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (New York: Oxford, 2002). 4 Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

torically contextualizing specific verses of the Qur’an that seem to inscribe female deficiency, in order to offer a more egalitarian reading? influenced the present cohort of Muslim female theologians. His hermeneutic featuring a holistic approach to the message of the Quran is acknowledged as a formative influence by pioneering advocates of Qur'anic gender justice such as new readings undertaken by Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas.‘

Charles Kurzman noted the *social location" of Muslim liberals, observing that they emerged independently and rarely read one another's work. This assertion is challenged by the case of current Muslim women theologians who often draw on international networks of activists and scholars who increasingly cooperate with one another. In fact, activists for women's advancement join with scholars by putting forward the issues that they face in local contexts, thereby encouraging feminist theologians to work on material that may address and ameliorate such concrete issues. Some of these concerns may be legal such as recognizing the need for women’s rights to be framed in marriage contracts. Others are addressed by advancing new interpretations of Qur'an 4:34, the *beating" verse, while further initiatives comprise female-empowering exegeses of sacred texts or the recovery of positive gender meanings embedded in traditional writings.

Several contributions to this collection evidence such interactions, and explicitly comment on the leading role of female Muslim scholars living in the West in laying out some of the formative approaches to Qur’anic interpretation. The most often cited works in this vein are the theological papers of Pakistani-American feminist, Riffat Hassan, a contributor to the present collection, as well as the Qur'anic studies of Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas. Notably all three have advanced degrees from the West and have held academic positions at American universities.

5 Fazlur Rahman, “The Status of Women in Islam’: A Modernist Interpretation,” in Separate Worlds: Studies of Purdah in South Asia, eds. Hannah Papanek and Gail Minault, 285-310 (Columbia, SC: South Asia Books, 1982). His hermeneutic is further elaborated in Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 20, and Major Themes of the Qur'an (Chicago: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1980).

6 Amina Wadud, Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

FEMALE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ACTIVISM AND THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT

During the earlier decades of the twentieth century Muslim women played new and important public roles in independence struggles and nationalist movements in many parts of the Muslim world. For example, the (1892-1920) women’s press’ and early female social movements that emerged in Egypt combined charitable endeavors with a desire to educate the masses and mobilize them toward independence.’ Najmabadi presents parallel developments in Iran, emphasizing the participation of women in nation-building through their role in the family and the importance of education.’ This was also the period during which a Syrian woman, Nazira Zain ad-Din, wrote her re-interpretation of the Qur’anic verses that specifically concern women." In South Asia, Bengali writer, Rokeya Sakhaat Hussain, published her “Sultana’s Dream”, a work of feminist science fiction, in which women take over the public sphere, in 1905."

We therefore find evidence for a new involvement of Muslim women as activists and scholars in various women’s movements that emerged in Muslim societies early in the twentieth century, as well as in the documents that were generated within these groups. Ultimately Muslim women, like their Western feminist counterparts, sought to achieve or enhance women’s rights through theoretical reconstruction, as well as undertaking practical initiatives.

In the West and, in fact, globally, the scope and theory of feminism has developed from “first wave” or early feminist concerns such as demanding female suffrage and basic rights, to a “second wave” theoretical critique of patriarchy as embedded, not only in social institutions, but also in the very ordering and construction of categories of knowledge. Women of color further criticized the overwhelmingly white and privileged nature of previous feminist agendas resulting

7 Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven: Yale, 1997).

8 Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

9 Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran, in Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, 91-125 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

10 Bouthaina Shaaban, *The Muted Voices of Women Interpreters" in Mahnaz Afkhami, ed., Faith and Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim Middle East, 61—77 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995).

11 Rokeya Sakhaat Hussain, Sultana’s Dream and Selections from The Secluded Ones (New York: Feminist Press, 1988).

in “cultural” or “third wave” feminism that recognized the distinctive concerns of non-Western, non-privileged females. Theoretical and theological writings by women of color hence generate their own “womanist” or, in the case of Latinas, mujerista approaches, to religion and culture. As part of this third feminist wave, the category of Islamic (as opposed to primarily secular) “Arab” or other feminisms emerged in the 1980s among Muslim women who embraced their religion and did not want to be seen as imposing and adopting Western norms. Islamic feminists seek to combine Islamic understandings with liberatory readings of classical Islamic sources, religious or historical. Some of the contributors to the present volume have suggested the coinage “Muslima” feminism to apply to this form of theologizing, inspring the title of the volume.

A continued strategy to ameliorate women’s status in Muslim societies involves activism against social injustice through addressing woman-unfriendly readings of religious tradition. Like feminism in the West, Islamic feminism may be said to evolve through waves, beginning with a first impulse toward activism for basic rights such as education and the vote. Early Arab feminists such as the Egyptian, Hoda Sharawi, emerged from seclusion and demanded basic rights while participating in national liberation movements. Female social activism could be exemplified by Egyptian feminist author, Nawal al- Saadawi, who preferred to critique Arab culture rather than directly engaging Islamic religious authorities and discourse. Thus the earlier feminist movements in the Muslim world were primarily oriented toward secular projects and discourse.

Later, the second wave of theoretical feminism would begin to engage Islamic religious texts more directly. This may be due to the realization that religion constituted a major element in the social construction of gender roles in Muslim societies. Greater interest in religious interpretation parallels the Islamic resurgence in most of the Muslim world that marked the later decades of the twentieth century.

Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist strongly influenced by Western critical theory, moved from predominantly social critique in her earlier works such as Beyond the Veil to considering constructions of women, power and political leadership in the deployment of religious sources. An example is her essay questioning the provenance of the hadith report, “The nation led by a woman will not prosper"?

Her rationale for such an enterprise was that changing mass opinion on such issues would ultimately require engaging the religious sources and their interpretation directly, and that this would require mastery of methodologies of the traditional Islamic sciences, for example, evaluating the reliability of the narrators of a hadith.

Leila Ahmed’s work, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, represents an important resource for contextualizing the roles of Muslim women in the early and pre-modern periods as well as for understanding their struggle for rights in contemporary Islamic societies. At the same time, this history becomes a resource for contextualizing and contesting misogynistic interpretations and practices embedded in religious interpretation and practices.

The emergence of third wave, womanist, global, or “cultural” feminisms in the 1980s and 1990s represented an area of theorizing that challenged then-prevalent assumptions. Both secular and Islamic feminists became more self-critical regarding the dominance of Western white middle class women’s aspirations that had constituted a normative agenda assumed for all women, thereby enabling or perpetuating colonial or imperial projects. This development was especially signif icant for Muslim women who constituted the “Other” of traditional feminism, and enabled diverse Muslim female voices to emerge as activists and participants who could resist such hegemony.

This also helps explain why the label “feminist” is not universally welcomed or espoused by Muslim activists or Muslima theologians due to a history that was often associated with marginalizing, ignoring, or subverting the goals of Muslim women situated in their own cultural and religious contexts.

At the same time a whole range of trends characterized as “Islamic feminism(s)"? emerged as part of a broader spectrum of movements and thought that shared an interest in the dignity and flourishing of Muslim women. As Sa'diyya Shaikh argues, “Retaining the term ‘feminis? enables Muslim women to situate their praxis in a global polit- 12 Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975). Her chapter on the hadith is reprinted in “A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam,” in Liberal Islam, ed. Charles Kurzman, 112-126 (New York: Oxford, 1998).

13 The primary scholarly authority on the emergence of Islamic feminisms is Margot Badran: “Feminism” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World II, ed. John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 19-23, “Islamic Feminsim: What's in a Name?” in al-Ahram Weekly #569, Jan. 17-23, 2002 http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/569/cu1.htm accessed January 6, 2012, and Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences. (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009).

ical landscape, thereby creating greater possibilities for alliances, exchanges, and mutually enriching interaction among different groups of women?

SCRIPTURAL FEMINIST METHODOLOGIES IN OTHER RELIGIONS

Not all contemporary female Muslim theologians overtly espouse feminism, yet the work of Christian and Jewish biblical feminists!’ has no doubt been influential, particularly among pioneering Muslim feminists based in the West such as Riffat Hassan, Azizah al-Hibri, and Asma Barlas. Strategies for recovering the role of women in religious traditions, as in history, value researching *Herstory?—the recovery of important female figures, their activism, and, when available, their literary production.!é This recovered past is also a more accurate one, according to feminist Buddhist scholar Rita Gross." Sa'diyya Shaikh further comments on how such new readings aim to redress *the androcentric silence and trivializing of women in much of the inherited historical canon? Such a project is especially important in the present because, ^A politics of recovering feminist histories thus is invaluable to those living religious communities that want to create new, bountiful, future visions for their own humanity within their traditions.” The approach of many among the first cohort of Muslim women to reexamine the sources was both theological and—at least implicitly— feminist. Such a tendency could be termed “Qur’anic” or “scriptural” in the same way that some Christian feminists are designated as *biblical” in orientation. Furthermore, the pioneers of Qur’anic feminism overwhelmingly followed the Muslim modernist or liberal strategy of concentrating on the Qur'an and viewing the reliability of the hadith corpus with suspicion. A number of these female Muslim theologians, 14 Sadiyya Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender, and Sexuality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 23. 15 The term “biblical”feminism is used here to refer to the approach of Christian women who pursue a woman friendly reading of the Bible and do no reject the tradition wholesale. 16 A pioneering article in this area is Azizah al-Hibri, “A Study of Islamic Herstory: Or How Did We Ever Get into this Mess?” in Women’s Studies International Forum 5, no. 1 (1982): 212-215.

17 Rita Gross, Buddhism after Patriarchy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 20. 18 Sa'diyya Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy, 25, 26.

in particular Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas, cite the work of Muslim liberal thinker, Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988), as an inspiration due to his initiating a hermeneutic of reading the Qur’an holistically in order to determine the spirit behind the literal force of certain injunctions. Early examples of such Muslim scriptural feminist writing include Rif fat Hassan’s substantial work on clearing the accretions of biblical and non-canonical elements from the figure of Eve. According to Hassan’s reading, interpretations that inscribe female deficiency and blame Eve for a Fall of humanity cannot be derived on the basis of the creation narrative as presented in the Qur’an.”

The methodologies of Muslim scriptural feminists may explicitly draw on feminist hermeneutical approaches that are willing to interrogate the dominant traditional articulations of the “true” meaning of texts. This lays the foundation for a *hermeneutic of suspicion? that can confront the hierarchical and patriarchal biases brought to bear in formulating earlier interpretations. This hermeneutic can be brought to bear on the gendered nature of language itself including the gender of particular vocabulary items and the use of pronouns, and can apply to more explicit and direct embedding of gender disparities within canonical formulations.

Continuing the strategy of re-reading and re-translating existing legal and theological interpretations and resources from a womar's perspective, Amina Wadud's groundbreaking study of the Qur'an? explores not only gendered language but also the various female characters in the sacred text. These include the figures of Sarah and Mary as depicted in the Qur'an, and even the role of the female houris in the Qur’anic portrayal of the afterlife.

Increasingly, Muslim women theologians engage both the hadith and the later tradition, including both Islamic legal theory and rulings," and the philosophical and Sufi heritage, in some cases reading against the grain and questioning embedded patriarchal assumptions. Exemplary in this regard would be the work of Sa‘diyya Shaikh on 19 Riffat Hassan, “The Issue of Woman-Man Equality in the Islamic Tradition,” in Women’s and Men's Liberation: Testimonies of Spirit, eds. Leonard Grob, Riffat Hassan, and Haim Gordo (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 65-82.

20 Amina Wadud, Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 21 Kecia Ali's book, Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur'an, Hadith and Jurisprudence (Oxford:

Oneworld, 2006), explicitly positions itself as engaging the resources of fiqh and juristic deliberations rather than adopting a *Qur'an only"feminist stance, p. xx.

hadith depicting women in Islamic eschatological imagination,” and her recent studies of reading Sufi thought, in particular the work of Ibn ‘Arabi, as opening up new understandings of gender dynamics within Islamic thought.? Indonesian-American feminist theologian, Etin Anwar, who has also authored a chapter in the current collection, has contributed a monograph, Gender and Self in Islam,” in which she draws on both Islamic scriptures and the philosophical tradition to explore the construction of gender in Muslim sources as based on the hierarchical principles structuring understandings of human reproduction, especially the role of women in conception. Through confronting such embedded inequality, Anwar attempts to redress the alienation of the self as part of recovering the Muslim woman’s sense of individuality, agency, and autonomy.

Muslim feminist legal scholar, Kecia Ali, noted that many of the initial efforts by Muslim scriptural feminists concentrated on Qur’anic texts and did not explicitly engage the intricacies of the legal tradition (fiqh). This present collection features several articles by Muslim women theologians that directly engage the legal tradition, demonstrating the growth of work in this area and the broadening of scriptural methods beyond the initial “Qur’an only” focus.

PIETISTIC MOVEMENTS: ISLAMIST OR ISLAMIC FEMINISMS?

With the rise of grassroots Islamist movements and the moderation and feminization of membership, the role of such women in gender activism needs to be taken into account. Increasingly, Islamist women or simply *pious" Muslim identified females are significant actors and in some cases writers and theorists of gender issues. Notable in this regard are figures such as Zaynab al-Ghazali (d. 2005) and Bint al- Shati (d. 1998) in earlier cohorts. Zaynab al-Ghazali’s Association of

22 For example, Sa'diyya Shaikh's study of the depiction of women in hadiths on the Last Days, *Knowledge, Women and Gender in the Hadith: A Feminist Interpretation,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 15 no. 1 (2004): 99-108.

23 Includingthe paper reprinted in the current collection and her Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender, and Sexuality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

24 Etin Anwar, Gender and Self in Islam (London: Routledge, 2006).

25 Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam, xx.

Muslim Women (1920s) that emerged parallel to the Muslim Brotherhood, but also the women’s movement promoting liberal ideas, emphasized the religious dimension in women’s education. In some ways, al-Ghazali helped to provide the impetus for men and women Muslim activists who emerged in the 1980s. Such individuals sought to return liberated, educated women, especially university students, from miniskirts and mores imported from the ‘West’ to a an embrace of personal piety and search for Islamic authenticity. Manifestations of this trend included adopting globalized Islamic dress (hijab) and seeking “traditional” Islamic knowledge.”

Currently we may cite Egyptian political scientist, Heba Raouf Ezzat, as one representative of Islamic intellectual feminism.” In Pakistan and now Canada, the al-Huda movement inspired by Niqab-wearing Islamic scholar, Farhat Hashmi,? runs courses enabling Muslim women to acquire fundamental knowledge of Qur'anic and hadith studies. Established in 1994, the al-Huda course is franchised across Pakistan and operated locally by females who have been her students. Scholarly views and public opinion debate whether Hashmi is an empowering innovator for female Muslims or a regressive force. In 2004 Hashmi relocated to Toronto, Canada, where since 2005 she has operated the al-Huda Institute to train diaspora South Asian women in her educational method and interpretations.

Saba Mahmood conducted seminal research on the pious women of Egyptian women's mosque movement who reclaimed public religious spaces as part of pursuing Islamic knowledge and embracing a personally religious lifestyle.” Mahmood made the critical argument that such women, by mastering the discourse of classical Islamic texts and argumentation and adopting a habitus of modest and compliant behavior, express their agency and autonomy— both “feminist” objectives, within an Islamic framework. An additional example of a grassroots movement based on Muslim females as *pious subjects" would be the Qubaysiyyat in Syria, which is an initiative exclusive to wom- 26 Leila Ahmed's A Quiet Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011) exploresthis global return to Islam on the part of Muslim women with specific interest in “reveiling.”

27 Some of Raouf's writings in English may be found at http;/www.heba-ezzat.com/category/english/ (ac cessed November 26, 2011). A parallel Arabic site is also available.

28 Studied by Sadaf Ahmed in Transforming Faith: The Story of al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism among Urban Pakistani Women (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009).

29 Saba Mahmood. *Feminist Theory, Agency, and the Liberatory Subject: Some Reflections on the Islamic Revival in Egypt,” Temenos 42, no. 1 (2006): 31-71.

en that is highly conservative in maintaining Islamic norms, while providing an independent space for female leadership and interpretation within classical strictures.” Likewise women in traditional Sufi orders?! or in post-tariqa? pious movements such as the Turkish Nur and Gulen communities,” have been studied for their access to leadership and their participation, which they exercise despite being part of socially conservative and male dominated groups.

MUSLIM WOMEN AS THEOLOGIANS

Most, but not all, current theological interventions on the part of Muslim women are informed by an awareness of gender studies and the broader context of studies of women in religion. Conservative discourses about women in religion, or women in Islam specifically, often present an essential concept of the “muslimwoman”,** who may be the abstract and idealized “woman” of religious ideology and pious fantasy. This depiction stands in contrast to speaking about “women”, the experiences and agency of actual Muslim females in particular contexts.

Noted scholar of women and religion, Susan Sered, suggests that there are four positions that members of the general public, and to a degree, scholars, are taking today in their discourses and understandings of women and religion. The first position could be termed “patriarchal and proud of it? Here there are no apologies for gender discrimination; patriarchy is the way it is, part of the divine order, and that is good. Secondly, there is the position that the founders of religions or the prophets such as Jesus or Muhammad were the