Self-Determination and Women’s Rights in Muslim Societies

Introduction: Gender Equality, Change, and the Quest for Social Justice for Women in Muslim Societies

xiii The struggle for gender equality is neither new nor confined to Muslim societies . Non-Muslim women have endured long histories of very particularized oppression justified by both religious and secular male-driven laws (for example, Mir-Hosseini and HamziĆ 2010). Nonetheless, for a complex set of social, political, and economic reasons, Muslim states have among the weakest human rights records, including those pertaining to gender equality (Baderin 2007; Moustafa 2011). While Islam is neither the cause of nor the solution to Muslim women’s gender inequality (Chase 2007), religion has been increasingly recognized as a key element of human identity (Moustafa 2011; Gates and Steane 2009) rather than a completely separate and private sphere of ideology or faith. Religion cannot be ignored, sidestepped, or minimized in the quest for change. Furthermore , in virtually all Muslim societies and Muslim states, family structures and personal status codes crucial to attaining gender equality are influenced by Islamic codes to some degree (Baderin 2007). Thus, any attempt to change Introduction g e n D e r e q u a l i t y, c h a n g e , a n D t h e q u e S t f o r S o c i a l J u S t i c e f o r W o m e n i n m u S l i m S o c i e t i e S c h i t r a r a g h ava n a n D J a m e S P. l e v i n e i n t r o D u c t i o n xiv women’s rights in these key areas must engage with Muslim cultural contexts and Islamic discourse (Modizardeh 2006). Finally, because Islamic discourse has always historically privileged social justice and has been traditionally used as a call for action (Waardenberg 1985), such discourses can help provide a familiar and trusted platform from which to orient improvement in women’s rights. The twelve essays in this volume present the struggles to end oppression against women from multidisciplinary perspectives in Muslim contexts spanning the globe. While there are excellent books that cover comparative approaches to Muslim law from a jurisprudence standpoint or from the view of a single culture (for example, Welchman 2007; Esposito and DeLong-Bas 2004), this is the first volume to consider the topic from diverse methodologies in a wide range of countries. We present studies that move beyond narrow conceptions of Muslim societies within the Arab world to include Muslim majority and minority countries in Asia and North Africa, such as India, Thailand, the Maldives, and Uganda. Scholars are drawn from both the humanities and the social sciences — from anthropology, law, political science, history, and psychology. The use of ethnographic methodology drawn from these disciplines in several essays is especially noteworthy. Ethnographic method—which relies on original field data and interviews — has been slow to enter the discourse on Islam and women’s rights, in part because of methodological differences across disciplines, and in part because of difficulty of access to grass-roots women’s voices. By using original field data on issues pertaining to marriage, divorce, property rights, and women’s sexuality, authors in this volume explore how the debates around rights discourse, local cultures, and varying interpretations of Islamic legal traditions are lived and challenged every day. Ethnographic data brings readers closer to the lived world of women in Muslim societies and allows readers to understand the changes women desire, how change happens, what obstacles confront women, and how they challenge them. This focus on local realities can illuminate surprising disjunctions between politico-legal reforms on the one hand and daily life on the other hand: diverse opinions at the local level help explain why politico-legal reforms can have limited effect, how supposedly feminist legislation can backfire (especially when the voices of women are not included in drafting the reforms), and how popular Western assumptions about the slow pace of change in Muslim societies are faulty. i n t r o D u c t i o n xv This collection is also unique in that it brings larger theoretical frameworks of change crucial to development in all types of societies to bear on specific Muslim contexts. This is an especially important contribution to the literature on this topic...