Debating Sharia: The 1917 Muslim Women’s Congress in Russia

In 1917, a year of revolutionary change in the Russian Empire, Muslim women organized a congress in order to propose and debate resolutions that they hoped would be incorporated into Russia’s new constitution. Transcripts from the April Congress in Kazan provide evidence that participants sharply disagreed over whether polygyny should be permitted, limited, or abrogated, and they used these debates to articulate their own understandings of rights. While women religious scholars pursued efforts to reread the Qur’an in order to emphasize justice, other educated Muslim women favored historicizing the Qur’an to argue that equality and justice for women in the twentieth century would differ from justice in the time of the Prophet.