Muslim Feminist Birthdays

I come to Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's piece at a critical juncture in the development of U.S. Muslim feminist theology. The 1990s and early 2000s saw the flourishing of Muslim feminist theology in the pathbreaking works of such pioneering scholars as Amina Wadud and Riffat Hassan, as well as in the vital responses of subsequent scholars including Asma Barlas and Kecia Ali. I have previously argued that these scholars' works constitute a new cohesive field of feminist scholarship of the Qur'an.¹ The birth of this field of theological inquiry has revolutionized how a growing number of Muslims are reading the Qur'an, and a new generation of scholars has begun to take stock of these advances and apply Muslim feminist methodologies to new veins of Islamic scholarship.

However, the latter half of the 2000s, I would argue, has marked a period of standstill in the initial strands of Muslim feminist reinterpretation of the Qur'an. The first generation of Muslim feminist theologians, as a rule, has regarded the whole Qur'an as the divine word of God, unaltered by any human intervention. Regarding the text as purely divine speech, Muslim feminist theologians have based their work on the premise that sexist meanings derived from the Qur'an result only from flawed or patriarchal human interpretations and do not result from the language of the Qur'anic text itself. Indeed, to claim otherwise is to invite accusations that one has denigrated the text and denied its wholly divine status. Scholars associated with such a position are discredited for stepping outside of the fold of Islam, and their work is swiftly dismissed, as it is no longer considered legitimately Islamic.

Limited in their relation to the text in this singular manner, Muslim feminist theologians have come to an impasse in being able to address certain verses of the Qur'an, which, on the level of the literal text, cannot be fully rescued by feminist exegesis, no matter what interpretive techniques they apply. In these instances, Muslim feminist theologians are left with their hands tied, as they are unable to criticize the literal construction of the Qur'anic text. Thus they have reached the end of one road on their journey and must now pave a new one to continue their work. The challenge before them is to develop new ways of understanding their relationship to the Qur'an that account for the sexist elements of the literal text while also maintaining the sanctity and authority of their holy book as Muslims.

Much though certainly not all of the responsibility for taking on this challenge will weigh on the shoulders of an upcoming generation of scholars. Now is a time for taking risks and asking daring questions that have been unimaginable thus far. In this moment of change, Muslim feminists must anticipate a generational shift as new scholars carry out the legacy of the pathbreakers to whom they owe a tremendous debt for creating the foundation upon which a new generation will now build. This transition will come with its inevitable growing pains, and in bearing these, Muslim feminist theologians may benefit from a number of lucid insights and warnings in Elisabeth's reflections on feminist birthdays.

It may be said that the emergence of the field of Muslim feminist theology made possible the birth of an impossible Muslim feminist subject. In making this claim, I am not reiterating the old, cliché dichotomization of Islam and feminism that assumes the two are mutually and inherently irreconcilable. I am, however, referring to the tremendous and conflicting pressures placed on Muslim feminist scholars in their struggles simply to exist. As they have never had the luxury of developing their ideas free of the discursive operations of colonial and neocolonial powers, Muslim feminists have always had to contend with the vicious and maddening cycle of opposition that has compulsively repeated itself since the earliest days of Western colonialism in the Muslim world, stunting the development of their work. The cycle plays out something like this: (1) (neo)colonial powers use Western feminism as a device to "civilize" (today, read: democratize) "backward" and...