Mobilizing Muslim Women: Multiple Voices, the Sharia, and the State

This article reflects on the challenges faced by Muslim women in Africa in the context of the globalization of women's rights and the politicization of Islam. I argue that the gender hierarchies affecting Muslim women's identity politics are embedded in the broader historical processes of struggles against colonial regimes, on the one hand, and the different projects of national state building, on the other hand. Central to these processes is a male interpretation of Islam that has defined the way women are incorporated into "nationhood" and become "citizens" in the independent state. I also argue that Islam has been a major site for both the justification of women's oppression by state and nonstate actors and a source for identification and empowerment for women in Africa. In the independent states, women's identity politics have been shaped by the institutionalization of gender inequalities in various legislations and by the enforcement of Sharia pressured by the gains of political Islam. Following Craig Calhoun, I view identity politics as collective struggles by people for recognition, legitimacy, and access to power.¹

Though I consider the "malestream" interpretation of Islam a powerful source of the oppression of Muslim women, I still do not view them as passive victims of this oppression.² My study draws on the substantial body of literature by local activists and scholars to historicize the current political and economic context of the struggle of Muslim women across the continent. I use the term Muslim women in this study to refer only to the cultural location of women who may or may not identify with the Islamic faith. I also draw the line between Islamic activists who claim the emergence of Sharia-based states and other groups that inscribe their struggles within the framework of a progressive Islam but do not share the ideology and goals of political Islam. This picture is even more complicated by the location of women at all these levels of cultural framing and political activism in Africa. I use the term political Islam, instead of Islamism or fundamentalism, to describe this contemporary appropriation of Islam by individuals and groups who claim a "return" to the "pure" sources of sunna (the words and deeds of Prophet Muhammad) and the Koran for political ends. In Africa Islamic movements have embodied an Islamic state in Sudan, formed Sharia-based states in northern Nigeria, and turned violent in Egypt and Algeria during the past two decades. The literature has generally viewed political Islam as a response to the perceived Western cultural hegemony and imperialist intervention in the Muslim world and a reaction to the disastrous consequences of prescribed global economic reforms enforced by nondemocratic regimes.³

In what follows I introduce the ways in which some studies have viewed the impact of Islam and colonization on Muslim women in Africa. Next, through case studies from North Africa, Nigeria, and Sudan, I examine how women's groups position themselves in relation to both the state and political Islam. My focus is the case of family law in North Africa and the implementation of Sharia-based regimes in northern Nigeria and Sudan. Finally, I look at the way current scholarship has explored the politics of the veil and its different meanings for Islamic activists in North Africa and Sudan.

The Othering of Islam and Muslim Women in Africa

The orientalist tradition set the frame for understanding Muslim women through a lens that viewed Islam as backward and inherently oppressive. The leading work of Edward Said shows the cultural mechanisms through which the colonial enterprise created an essentialized "Orient" and made it different to maintain Western domination and provide it with a moral ground: in the case of the Middle East and North Africa, to liberate women.⁴ Said argues that the "homo islamicus" is actually a product and tool of orientalism, seen as a discourse of power, domination, and control. With French intervention in North Africa, started with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1797, the borders of the fictional Orient shifted to North Africa and, more precisely, argues Marnia Lazreg, to Algeria...