Beyond the Text: Between Islam and Feminism

My contribution to this roundtable addresses the space between Islam and feminism and ventures to imagine what might be “beyond” the text to illustrate how, at this interstice, the Qurʾan may remain central to Muslim meaning making yet open to evolving understandings of justice. Caught under the weight of Margot Badran’s now well-rehearsed approach to Muslim women’s equality work under the label “Islamic feminism,” Asma Barlas finds her work so “inextricably linked” that in responding to her critics she finds herself also responding on behalf of Islamic feminism. For the feminists among her critics, Barlas argues, Islamic feminism is “a straw woman on which they cut their academic teeth but without taking it seriously” (112).

Theorizing against the easy convergence of Islam and feminism as Islamic feminism, I have argued instead for a tentative engagement that neither inflates nor conflates the distance between the two intellectual paradigms but maintains a productive tension that lends itself to translucence rather than transparence between feminism and its Muslim others.¹ In maintaining this critical space, I argue, we may avoid Islamic feminism as either a catchall solution or problem in Muslim women’s equality work.

A close study of Kecia Ali and Aysha Hidayatullah’s work shows that among scholars that have ventured a convergence between the two paradigms, Hidayatullah has perhaps been the most circumspect. Furthermore, Ali has “taken Islam for granted” in the sense where doing so indicates that she has not theorized her equality work as Islamic feminism.² Both scholars have allowed the two intellectual paradigms to articulate with each other but do not make claims to Islamic feminism. Therefore, it is surprising that Barlas comments as she does on their use of Islamic feminism as a “straw woman,” more so because Barlas has in the past been among the strongest critics of the tendency to name Muslim women’s equality work “Islamic feminism.” Yet here, Barlas employs Islamic feminism as simply the combination of Islam and feminist principles. The distinction between Hidayatullah and Ali’s respective works and claims to Islamic feminism is important, because theirs are unlike the project of Islamic feminism of the type that Badran has fashioned for Muslim women’s equality work, which risks either conflation or inflation of the space between the two intellectual paradigms. To illustrate, in the conflation of the two, Barlas here finds herself immediately under the yoke of Islamic feminism and compelled to its defense. In inflating the space between the two paradigms, Barlas has also produced an unfortunate and unproductive polarity that separates “observant Muslims” from feminists (114).

Therefore, more than a charge against the straw woman of Islamic feminism here is the question of the “sacrality” of the Qurʾan and its “sanctified relationship to God” (114). Confronted with Hidayatullah’s concern for what it means to be confronted by the possible incommensurability of our desire for equality with the historical but divine text, Barlas finds that “treating the Qurʾan as a discourse is a rather obvious attempt to secularize (desacralize) it” (116).³ Yet Hidayatullah’s argument for the Qurʾan as discourse speaks to the ways in which the Qurʾan may also remain continuously relevant to the reader and not as a definitive closed text that “says” things with unassailable authority in the way that Barlas argues the Qurʾan is antipatriarchal. Hidayatullah offers instead a “divine text that allows us to imagine justice.”⁴ In feminist philosophy, the “imaginary configurations” of a text instruct us on its “metaphoric networks” and the “grammar” of discourses that permit the text its forms of representivity.⁵ Accordingly, Hidayatullah’s analysis tells us much about the representation of women in the text concluding from which she makes two important suggestions for how we might enter a space “beyond” the text.⁶ Her preference is for a discursive approach applied both to the text and to ideas of sexual difference. The former relies on Abu Zayd’s work and her approach to sexual difference requires new ways of theorizing ideas of equality, namely “the specificities of situational...