Citizenship, Faith, and Feminism: Jewish and Muslim Women Reclaim Their Rights

Conclusion

n Conclusion Women of faith in Kuwait, Israel, and the United States enrich our understanding of the connections between citizenship, religion, and feminism . They make use of the narrative of civic citizenship combined with what they take to be a more authentic, if alternative, reading of their faith tradition. They seek to recapture G-d’s intention from which they believe the dominant interpretive insights and judgments to have strayed. Women in these settings are connected critics of their regimes and their religions. In countries where they enjoy full rights of citizenship, both Muslim and Jewish feminists seek to align their religious equality with their political equality. Both groups have evolved, through struggle, strategies that are political and theological. Religious feminists in Israel, the United States, and Kuwait, though di√erently situated, have all made progress toward equality within their religions by enlisting civil law and constitutional promises to challenge male religious authority. Feminists of faith, whether Jewish or Muslim, American, Kuwaiti, or Israeli, have more in common than they perhaps realize. Both emphasize that G-d is just and that men and women share in divine justice and mercy. Both emphasize that there is an irreducible element of human subjectivity in the act of interpretation required to understand these precepts. Education , principles of public discourse, and deliberation are the best antidotes to the fallibility of the individual exegete. Both understand that the right of exegesis belongs to all humans but that it has been monopolized by men, which has produced distortions of G-d’s will through the ages. Both groups understand the necessity of disentangling religious principles from cultural accretions that have distorted divine intent. Both Muslim and Jewish feminists see their project as one of recovery, involving the reinterpretation of sacred texts according to their best principles, rather than as refracted through male perspectives and interests. Both groups engage in this process in full submission to G-d. In Israel and Kuwait entrenched religious authorities are the most powerful opponents of equal rights for women. In deferring to these religious 202 n Citizenship, Faith, & Feminism authorities, the secular governments of Israel and Kuwait risk sacrificing the guaranteed rights of their female citizens in the name of greater regime stability that they believe religious authorities can deliver or withhold. In Kuwait religious critics of the established authority are no friends of feminists. They are primarily the Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood, both of which have more in common with Islamists than feminists in terms of their agenda and goals. They promise, if they manage to become politically powerful in Kuwait, to upend the hard-earned reforms that feminists have achieved. Nonetheless, Kuwaiti women have made impressive political gains. They have been appointed to ministerial positions by two successive friendly amirs, and most recently, they have garnered grass-roots electoral support and had four women elected to the National Assembly. The election results signal a cultural shift reflected in public opinion in favor of women’s political participation, but as in Israel, a determined opposition, backed by entrenched religious parties, still threatens these gains. Because Israel’s voters are supportive of women’s citizenship and civil rights, democracy poses no real threat of reversing women’s gains. But Kuwait’s fragile and tension-ridden sectarian democracy may actually prove the undoing of Kuwaiti women’s gains. For the time being, Kuwaiti women still depend on the backing of the amir. Yet political challenges to this amir are increasing, and his popularity, though still widespread, may be ebbing. If he is replaced, there is no reliable predictor of the future of women’s rights in Kuwait. In Israel, where women achieved formal equal citizenship long ago, political culture reflects the popular habituation to women’s public equality . Still, the religious parties threaten a di√erent, but significant source of opposition. Real gains have been made by Israeli feminists, but a backlash by the religious authorities is a perpetual threat because of the dual legal system, which grants religious authorities a stranglehold over family law. While Israel’s numerous internal critics of the religious authorities represent a more pluralistic, secular, liberal and democratic worldview, and are certainly friendlier to women’s rights than the religious authorities, they are not necessarily embraced by Orthodox feminists who pursue reform within the Orthodox fold. In the United States, where Jews and Muslims live as minorities in an overwhelmingly liberal Protestant culture, women are minorities within minorities. American law and...