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chapter 8 Feminism and Conversion Comparing British, Dutch, and South African Life Stories Margot Badran Asignal foundational text of Islamic feminism was written by a woman convert to Islam. The text is Qur`an and Woman. It was first published in 1992 and was republished in 1999. The author is Amina Wadud, an African American and a professor of Islamic theology who calls herself a scholaractivist .1 Feminism and conversion to Islam, however, have remained virtually unlinked as subjects of analysis in both the scholarly and popular literature . Indeed, they have constituted rigidly separate categories of inquiry, almost as if they were antithetical. The spread of conversions to Islam, especially in countries of the West, is a phenomenon of the late twentieth century continuing its rapid growth into the present century, with women constituting the largest numbers of these new Muslims. A concurrent phenomenon is the global rise of Islamic feminism ,adiscourse,groundedintheQur`an,thatarticulatesfullgenderequality and social justice across the public and private spheres, and activisms based upon this. Among Muslims it is the cutting-edge feminism, pushing inquiry and activism into new zones. Conversion to Islam and Islamic feminism address intersecting religious, societal, and cultural needs, and both raise hard questions. If the present numbers of women converts are large—and exceed the numbers of male converts worldwide—the numbers of Islamic feminists are small, but they are vocal and growing. The acceleration of Muslim conversions and the rise of Islamic feminism both occurred in the wake of the surfacing of political Islam and subsequent broader Islamic cultural revival. Conversions to Islam and Islamic feminism have also spread during a moment when the “new racism,” or “cultural racism,” and more specifically Islamophobia , are on the rise in the West. The gender projects of Islamic feminism and political Islam are diametrically opposed. The implementation of the Qur`anic message of gender equalityandsocialjusticethatIslamicfeminismsupportsischallengedbypolitical Islam, which promotes a patriarchal gender system upholding the hegemony of men over women that is anchored in male dominance in the family and f e m i ni s m a nd c o n v e r s i o n 193 extends into society. While large-scale conversion to Islam predominates in the West, political Islam originates in the old Muslim-majority societies of Africa and Asia, although its outreach is now global. The current “cultural racism” and Islamophobia have predominantly, but not exclusively, surfaced in the West. Islamic feminism arose and continues to spread simultaneously in both the West and in old established Muslim societies. Iran, for example, is an important pioneering site of the production of Islamic feminist discourse. Islamic feminism, with its calls for the implementation of gender equality and social justice, is anathema to the projects of patriarchal political Islam and of cultural racism/Islamophobia, wherever they may exist. I come to the subject of conversion and feminism as a historian and gender studies scholar with a longtime focus on feminisms among Muslims and others in the Middle East, and a more recent concern with the production of Islamic feminism(s) globally. My contribution is based on oral histories and open-ended interviews with Muslim women converts, methods I used in my research on the rise of Muslim women’s feminism in the Middle East more than three decades ago. Many of us pioneering in the new field of women’s history in the late 1960s and the 1970s (in my case, the history of Egyptian women’s feminism) sought oral accounts from women on their own lives, as women and their experience were largely missing in the written record and thus “hidden from history.” Today, Muslim women converts and their accountsarenothidden ;tothecontrary,theyarehighlyvisible(vanNieuwkerk, this volume). What is still largely hidden are converts’ feminist stories. In this chapter I examine Muslim women converts’ approaches to Islamic feminism fully aware that I am moving in uncharted waters. This exploratory look at Muslim women converts’ engagements with feminism connects Muslim conversion literature with the literature on Islamic feminism. I undertake a comparative study moving beyond the usual practice of examining conversion within national or regional frameworks and the tendency to focus on conversion mainly in the West.2 The subject of feminism and conversion is part of the story of the politics of new Muslim communities in the West, of new Muslim sociologies in the West, indeed of new Wests. It is enmeshed with identity politics and citizens’ rights. It connects with the story of migration and concomitant cultural transfer and...

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