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From Islamic Feminism to a Muslim Holistic Feminism

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From Islamic Feminism to a Muslim Holistic Feminism From Islamic Feminism to a Muslim Holistic Feminism Margot Badran* Abstract This article looks at the trajectory from secular feminism to Islamic feminism to Muslim holistic feminism, examining the changing meanings of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’ and the ways they intersect in the different modes of feminism. It contrasts the open, inclusive nature that typifies the secular feminisms Muslim and non-Muslims created in the twentieth century in contexts of anti-colonial struggle and early nation-state building with the communalism of the new Muslim holistic feminism now emerging in global space at a time when religious identity is fore-fronted and there is an international preoccupation with Muslim women’s rights. The article argues that the communalisation of women’s rights activism or the privileging of Muslim women’s rights occurring at the global level and being exported to local terrain can be divisive and threatening national unity. 1 Introduction broad-based local political work is needed to A generation after the emergence on the global move from a patriarchal to an egalitarian model scene of Islamic feminism, we are now witness to of the family. the appearance of a ‘Muslim holistic feminism’. Like the pioneering secular feminism/s that Today, in an era of religious revival, communal Muslims and non-Muslims created together early identity is fore-fronted. Social movement in the last century in their national spaces, the organising is being exported by Muslim women new Muslim holistic feminism draws upon from global to national spaces in contrast to multiple discourses, including Islamic discourse. earlier practice in Muslim majority societies But, unlike these secular feminisms, Muslim when feminist movements were locally grounded holistic feminism is communally based (of, for, and organised within a national context. Nation- and by Muslims) and globally anchored. based feminist movements, such as the pioneering Egyptian feminist movement, The final major feminist challenge that activists accessed the world of international feminism and face today in Muslim majority countries is did so on its own terms. These national feminist achieving equality in the family. Long after movements were organised and directed by significant equality was realised in the public women as citizens of different religions. domain (although this is unfinished business), Organising activism along communal lines and gender inequality in the family remains exporting social movement activism from the widespread, sustained by fiqh-backed, state- global arena to national space is new to our time. enacted laws. Islamic feminist discourse has made two potentially useful theoretical advances: This article reviews the historically changing (1) breaking down the notion that the sphere of constructions of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’, the family constitutes a separate domain positing at a time when they are politically over-loaded instead a continuum of private/family and and central items in the linguistic arsenal. I public/society; and (2) dismantling the notion observe the feminist trajectory from secular that Islam ordains a patriarchal construction of feminism to Islamic feminism to the emerging the family. This lays important groundwork for Muslim holistic feminism, pointing to the arguing against gender inequality shored up by simultaneity of the different feminisms. I speak Muslim family laws. However, intensive and of the communalisation of women’s rights IDS Bulletin Volume 42 Number 1 January 2011 © 2011 The Author. IDS Bulletin © 2011 Institute of Development Studies Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA 78 activism and reflect on the implications of this at structures of thinking and the laws that express the local level. The underlying argument here is them. To these tasks, we bring the various tools that the communalisation of women’s rights – or we possess, including our different vantage the privileging of Muslim women’s rights and its points and varied experiences. export from the global to local terrain, is a potentially divisive force that threatens national Egyptian feminist, Saiza Nabarawi (a close cohesion and can constitute another element in partner of the pioneering feminist leader, Huda the marginalisation of non-Muslim citizens. Sha’rawi), confessed to me more than four decades ago that the greatest disappointment of 2 Positionings and multiple identities the founding feminists was their inability to make Like many women today, my positionings and significant headway in reforming the Muslim identities are multiple and complex. It is as a life- Personal Status Code and their unhappiness over long feminist, scholar-activist and historian of the injustices such failure perpetuates. I place feminisms that I come to the subject of this myself alongside others in the long struggle to article. As a young scholar in the 1960s, I began complete the quest for gender equality, and research on the rise and evolution of feminism in especially the unfinished business of equality in Egypt and the Middle East. From the 1990s, when the family and gender justice more broadly. Islamic feminism was ascendant, I broadened my scope to include the global Muslim world in which 3 The secular and the religious it circulated. My feminism first bloomed four The equality struggle has been fought on terrain decades ago as a form of consciousness, thinking, variously claimed, constituted and staked out over activism simultaneously in the USA and in Egypt time and space by ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’. while living, studying and moving between the The extent to which many have been imprisoned two countries. I am a citizen of the USA by birth by terms taken to be far more narrow and static and of Egypt by choice, allowed to me by the than the dynamic realities suggest, is striking. It patriarchal structuring of naturalisation.1 I do not is also striking to observe how ‘the religious’ is publically position myself within a religious equated with ‘the indigenous’ or ‘the authentic’ framework and am not interested in having and ‘the secular’ with ‘the alien’, a notion with a legitimacy conferred or withheld by my religious history stretching back to colonial days. ‘Secular’, identity. Irrespective of my religious affiliation which is often simplistically seen as religion’s and nationality through marriage to a Muslim other, needs to be unpacked and historicised. In citizen, I am subject to Egypt’s Muslim Personal Egypt, the term for secularism/secularisation was Status Code. For more than four decades, I have coined in Arabic in the late nineteenth century as been a ‘woman living under Muslim Law’ in almaniyya. It denoted a separation of state and Egypt. When it was being formed in the mid- religious authority and the process by which the 1980s, I became part of the global network: modern state in formation assumed legal and Women Living under Muslim Law (WLUML). As institutional responsibility for matters previously one subject to the Muslim Personal Code in under the purview of the religious authorities Egypt, I have an immediate stake in how it is (Badran 1999, 2009). The state during re/constructed, and as I see it, a responsibility to secularisation took it upon itself to protect become directly engaged in building a locally religion, not just Islam, but all religions. The based movement. state instituted a system of secular education leaving to Al Azhar, the ancient seat of religious My analysis and interpretation of feminism, learning, the teaching of the Islamic sciences. Islam and culture, come from my research and Law was secularised, with the exception of my participation in debate, which are informed personal status or family law (this article uses the by the world of lived realities. My activism is two terms interchangeably) that was left under inspired by real-life challenges that I, along with the aegis of the religious authorities. The state other women in the places where I live and work, enacted separate religiously backed personal experience as we defend our rights – the right to status codes for Muslims and Christians. speak, to be heard, to be equal and to be However, in the process of the codification of the included as guaranteed to us as citizens by our Muslim Personal Status Code by the state in the national constitutions. Our activism is directed early twentieth century, foreign elements were towards achieving specific goals and changing absorbed (Sonbol 1996). IDS Bulletin Volume 42 Number 1 January 2011 79 There have been different constructions of the secular state, branded ‘the secular’ as Western secular in Muslim majority countries ranging and un-Islamic or anti-Islamic and, accordingly, from the singular example of the total the secular state as illegitimate. In the 1970s and evacuation of the religious from the state and 1980s the terms ‘secularism with religion’ and public sphere in Turkey (although the secular ‘secularism without religion’ began to circulate state retained administration of religious indicating two ways of understanding secularism. properties including mosques), to the Egyptian However, the later meaning gained ground with model that is described above and that was the continuing spread of political Islam (Badran followed in the Arab countries of the east 2009) and the secular and the religious came to Mediterranean and Iraq (the Arab east). In the be seen as stark and oppositional categories.3 Maghreb, with its experience of French colonial rule, different from the French mandate system Scholarship and ongoing historical investigation in Syria and Lebanon and to the less directly is now showing ways the secular and the religious interventionist British colonial practices, there have mutually constructed each other (Asad was a sharper distinction and polarisation 2003; Hurd 2008). The persistent perception of between the secular and the religious than in the ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ as distinct, that is Arab east.
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