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An Historical Overview of Conferences on Islamic Feminism: Circulations and New Challenges

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An Historical Overview of Conferences on Islamic Feminism: Circulations and New Challenges Margot Badran* An historical Overview of Conferences on Islamic Feminism: Circulations and New Challenges Conferences bringing people together in face-to-face encounters form an inte- gral part of the history of Islamic feminism and are intimately involved in the shaping and transmitting of Islamic feminist discourse and activist work. At the same time, conferences help consolidate transnational Islamic feminist networks and cement relationships. They also provide valuable records of the work and serve as markers of the trajectory of Islamic feminism1 The conference on “Islamic feminisms: boundaries and politics” that Stephanie Latte Abdullah organized at the Institute de Recherches et d’Études sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman in Aix-en-Provence in December 2009 occurred at a time when Islamic feminism is moving with increased acceleration from a primary focus on * Senior Fellow, The Reza and Georgeanna Khatib Visiting Chair in Comparative Religion at St. Joseph’s College, Brooklyn. 1 On global feminist networking in general see Valentine Moghadam, Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). REMMM 128, 33-39 34 / Margot Badran theorization to the stage of social movement organizing. It is also a moment: (1) when expanding numbers of women affiliated with Islamist political parties and movements are gravitating toward the egalitarian model of religion that Islamic feminism explicates, and (2) when moves toward egalitarian Islam are discernable inside highly conservative Muslim majority societies such as Saudi Arabia. These trends may be seen as the new sociological layer in the quest for the implementa- tion of an egalitarian model of Islam as we get insights into from papers presented in the conference. The terms in the conference title –Islamic feminisms, boundaries, politics capture key– concerns of this moment in the history of Islamic feminism. The pluralizing of Islamic feminism can be read either as announcing or suggesting the need to consider the notion of multiple Islamic feminisms. I continue to prefer to retain the singular to keep the focus on Islamic feminism’s core message, and sine qua non, of full human equality inclusive of gender equality and social justice. As I see it, if this basic meaning is not taken as a given then we are not speaking of Islamic feminism but of something else2. Now that there is an accelerated move in the trajectory of Islamic feminism from theory building to social movement building clearly there will be, and are, different local movements, responding to the diversity of local imperatives, but the driving core principles and core ideas remain the same. I think retaining the singular reminds us of this and helps preserve the integrity of Islamic feminism. I think we have to be wary of the possibility of fragmentation and circu- lation of multiple meanings that can cunningly undercut or dilute the basic tenets of Islamic feminism which pluralizing the term might unwittingly promote. I do agree however that we need to guard against the possibility of suggesting Islamic feminism is static and monolithic. I also understand that we need a vocabulary to talk about the multiplicity within Islamic feminism short of simply adding an “s”. (I do pluralize Muslim women’s secular feminisms which emerged from the start as diverse, nationally-grounded social movements.) The question of boundaries is vexing. There exist both conceptual and social boundaries. I have just made the case for respecting Islamic feminism’s concep- tual boundaries, which should not be seen as tantamount to shutting out theoreti- cal refinements and dynamic thought, and indeed I understand boundaries to be porous. Concerning social boundaries and Islamic feminism, as just observed, we are at a moment when more women, from Islamist groupings and in arch conserva- tive societies, are coming into Islamic feminist space, in terms of being inspired by the ideals of an egalitarian Islam. Yet, while there is not a necessary connection between Islamic feminism and religious identity, there is now a noticeable slide toward associating Islamic feminism with being Muslim and a recent tendency among progressive Muslim women for gate-keeping in some movement-building 2 I expressed this view, which I continue to maintain, in 2007. See Margot Badran, “Islamischer Feminismus - Drei öffentliche Foren in Europa,” [English original, Islamic Feminism: Three Forums in Europe] www.StimmenMuslimische.de July 13, 2007 (date of initial posting on this web journal). An historical Overview of Conferences on Islamic Feminism… News Challenges / 35 circles. The less bounded Islamic feminism is in terms of who is in and who is out as pivoted around identity the more vitality it will have and the greater chance for its vision to be translated into practice at local levels and to become a broad social reality. Now is the time for serious political work. In this social movement stage what is needed is not more theology but more politics. Patriarchal states – whether secular or Islamic – as well as patriarchal Islamist movements are not moved by the vigor of religious argumentation alone but by their own political interests. It is not that what Islamic feminism stands for has not worked for many women in their every- day lives, for it has. The great success that Islamic and secular feminists scored with the revision of the Moroccan Mudawwana or family law came about through astute politics involving women, civil society at large, and the state. The theology was in place. I would now like to place the Aix-en-Provence conference in the context of an abbreviated history of conferences illuminating Islamic feminism, focusing on a few ground-breaking meetings in which I have participated over the past two decades that mark some of the milestones in the trajectory of Islamic feminism. It was at the 1990 Roundtable on Identity Politics and Women that Iranian- American sociologist Valentine Moghadam organized at the United Nations World Institute for Development Economics (WIDER) in Helsinki that there were the first inklings that the phenomenon that would be soon identified as Islamic feminism was in the making, that is to say, that moves to articulate principles of gender equal- ity and social justice in Qur’anic language were underway. We as a group of secu- lar feminist scholars and human rights activists of different religions and national backgrounds had assembled to discuss the still relatively new and disturbing appearance of religious fundamentalisms and their dire effects on women. Nayereh Tohidi, an Iranian scholar, and I coming directly from Egypt where I was doing research, shared the news that from inside the Islamic Republic of Iran and from within the context of the Islamic political and cultural resurgence in Egypt, efforts were underway to develop an Islamic liberation theology counteracting the repres- sive treatment of women. This conference occurred one year before African- American Amina Wadud published her ground-breaking book Qur’an and Woman and two years before Shahla Sherkat founded what immediately became the highly influential journal Zanan in Iran. These publishing events are considered foun- dational moments in Islamic feminism. We left Helsinki pondering new, brighter directions women might be heading toward in the maelstrom of religious funda- mentalisms’ dark shadows. To combat the ill effects of spreading Islamic fundamentalism, or Islamism, Women Living under Muslim Laws (WMUML) was created by secular feminists from diverse locations in the early 1980s who answered back to the introduction of a regressive family law in Algeria. WLUML, which included Muslim women and those of other religious affiliations, maintained a central concern with reforming family laws and other laws inimical to women, and became the first significant REMMM 128, 33-39 36 / Margot Badran transnational network of its kind. WMUML held a conference in Bangladesh in 1992 where we strategized the project of collecting family laws based in fiqh, along with civil and customary laws, in some twenty Muslim majority countries. We wished to demonstrate the diversity of family laws in Muslim societies and thus the multiple readings of Islamic jurisprudence and to underline that so-called “shar ‘iah laws” as fiqh-backed law are man-made and not divine and thus immu- table as commonly claimed. I remember well the energy and insights that streamed into our collective work over the years transcending national and religious bound- aries. The results of a decade of painstaking collection resulted in the manual Knowing our Rights: Women, Family, Laws, and Customs in the Muslim World published in 2003 and republished in 2006. As widely known, WLUML became the largest network of Muslim women, together with non-Muslims and is still going strong today. The Conference on Religion, Culture, and Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World that met in Washington in 1994 organized by Iranian activist Mahnaz Afkhami, director of Sisterhood is Global Institute (SIGI) constituted another milestone3. It was convened to discuss women’s issues framed by the slogan “human rights are women’s rights” in preparation for the UN World Conference on Women to be held the following year in Beijing. This conference, unlike the previ- ous two mentioned, was open to the wider public which gathered in huge numbers. For the first time in my experience secular Muslim women and religiously identi- fied Muslim women (I prefer this to the term “religious women” as it presumes that secular women are not religious which many secular women resent) as well as non- Muslim women assembled in the same public venue. My reaction to this was that simply coming together in the same room and having formal and informal contact was an effective way to build understanding and to resist attempts by conservatives to split the world of women, the old “divide and rule” technique. The conference was also an answer to those who wished to perpetuate the notion of an East/West split and use the western label to discredit progressive moves.
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