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Journal of Women's History, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2001, pp.

47-52 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2001.0022

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2001 THEORETICAL ISSUES: MARGOT BADRAN 47
Understanding Islam, Islamism, and Islamic Feminism

Margot Badran

B ronwyn Winter’s ambitious piece which covers wide ground reminds

us of the challenges involved in debating and analyzing the complexi-
ties of gender, Islam, Islamism, fundamentalism, and feminism. I would
like to take Winter’s article as an invitation to enter into debate on issues,
of evident concern to the author, that beg clarification and elaboration.
First, there is a certain slippage between Islam and Islamism, appearing
in her work as essentialized or frozen categories. The author, moreover,
operates from the premise that all monotheistic religions, including Is-
lam, are bad for women. For her, not only is political Islam or Islamism
bad for women but so is the religion. Are we then meant to line up saying
“yes” or “no”? Where do we go from there? This is not an optimal ap-
proach for getting beyond the “Fundamental Misunderstandings” of her
title. I would like to come in from another direction.
First, although many scholars other than Winter confuse Islam and
Islamism, and indeed there sometimes are blurred borders between the
two, it is important to avoid a simple collapse between Islam the religion
and political Islam or Islamism. As the widely influential Turkish “public
theologian” Yasar Nuri Ozturk, who speaks the language of religion to large
audiences and who is anathema to the Islamists, puts it: “The Quran wants
us to be Muslims not Islamists.”1 Should we use the term “fundamental-
ism” or “Islamism” when referring to political Islam? Scholars have long
debated the question, and Winter raises some of the problems in this unre-
solved issue. Many of us use the term “Islamism” to refer to political Islam,
yet understand that a more generic term assists in debate about compara-
tive political mobilizations of religion. My problem is with Winter’s narrow
definition of “Islamism.” She defines “fundamentalism” and “by extension
‘Islamism’” as the “extreme right mobilization of religion to political ends.”2
As Winter points out, fundamentalism has been generalized from this origi-
nal meaning relating to early-twentieth-century Christian movements in
the United States “to describe any religion-based political movement that
prescribes rigid adherence to restrictive interpretations of religious founda-
tional texts.”3 She explains that she uses the term “Islamism” because her
discussion “centers on the extreme right mobilization of Islam.”4 It is highly
problematic to reduce Islamism to extreme right-wing political Islam. I
think we need to work with a broader definition of Islamism to capture
the wide net of its projects and reach, and its permutations. And, indeed,
within Muslim societies, from my observations in various parts of the
Middle East and Africa, Islamism is understood and confronted broadly.

© 2001 JOURNAL OF W OMEN’S HISTORY, VOL. 13 NO. 1 (SPRING)

48 JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY SPRING

It seems more useful to characterize Islamism, in its mainstream for-

mulation, as a broad project of the political mobilization of Islam. Within
political Islam, some advocate the establishment of an Islamic state (and
for some this is the distinguishing feature of political Islam), while others
promote the notion of an Islamic society or community within a secular
state. Still others, and this is more a phenomenon of late Islamism (1990s),
behave politically to achieve the personal freedom to express their reli-
gious identity in public as they see fit. We may also note that there is some-
thing which its protagonists call “progressive Islamism” in South Africa
(a movement of political Islam that emerged out of apartheid and Islamic
reformist struggles), which promotes progressive readings of the Quran
and their applications in everyday life. Thus I would argue that a wider
definition of Islamism allows us to capture more in our analytical lens,
and see the more liberal and progressive manifestations or radical (in a
positive sense) potential of present political Islamic movements. This
definition in no way should inhibit our ability to analyze the extreme right-
wing manifestations of political Islam that Winter talks about, but rather
help us see ways in which Islamism is being challenged and eroded from
within and thus bears some seeds of its own destruction.
Before expanding on projects of rereading Islam/isms, I wish to ad-
dress discursive approaches to the question of woman and Islam/isms.
Winter identifies three predominant discourses: orientalist, multicultur-
alist, and pluralist. The first two discourses are produced and elaborated
in the West, although this is not to suggest that Muslims in the West do
not participate in the multiculturalist discourse. When Winter speaks about
the “racialized minorities” in the West and how “nonracialized minori-
ties” in the West through misplaced patronizing “support” or postcolonial
guilt sometimes tolerate what they would otherwise not accept, I heartily
agree and deplore it as she does. Her discussion highlights the Western-
centricity of this multiculturalist discourse as the people she speaks of as
racialized minorities would not be depicted as such in the East or South.
And liberals and progressives in those locations would not tolerate the
intolerable. The pluralist discourse however has more global origins and,
indeed, Muslims in the West and beyond the West have played significant
roles in its articulation. Finally, I take issue with Winter’s characterization
of the multiculturalist and pluralist discourses as apologetic, as if to insist
that more positive articulations of women and Islam are ipso facto defen-
sive, although there certainly is an offensive apologetic strain. But the work
of South African progressive Islamist Farid Esack (and others I discuss be-
low) does not fit this description. His project constitutes a probing investi-
gation of religious sources in the spirit of ijtihad (an independent reading
of the Quran and other religious texts) not to apologize but to transform.5
2001 THEORETICAL ISSUES: MARGOT BADRAN 49

Moving beyond Winter’s typology of frameworks, I would like to

suggest considering feminist discourse in ways other than within orien-
talist, multiculturalist, or pluralist positions. In Muslim states and societ-
ies, feminist discourse historically has been located within or articulated
through (secular) nationalist, Islamic modernist, and more recently dem-
ocratic and human rights discourses. These discourses also intersect, al-
though one among them may be paramount at any given time. The newest
framework is that of Islamic feminism which some Muslims have elabo-
rated and identified as such. Others who articulate what can be seen as an
Islamic feminist discourse do not characterize it as such.
Islamic feminism appears to be a difficult subject for Winter and there-
fore difficult to discuss with her, especially within the framework she sets
up. She asserts that there are two basic feminist approaches to religion.
She then claims that the “main ideological difference can be put quite sim-
ply: there are those, such as [Riffat] Hassan [who engages in gender-pro-
gressive readings of the Quran], who do not see religion in itself as a
political tool of social control (in particular of women), and those, like
myself, who do.”6 But how does that help us clarify our thinking about
feminist approaches to Islam and shed more light on the relationship be-
tween Islam and Islamism? I think it is useful and enlightening to look at
exactly what women like Hassan and others (scattered about the globe)
are up to in their interrogations of Islam and consider the implications of
their arguments for Islam/isms and feminisms.
What about Islamic feminism and Islamist movements? What typi-
cally goes under the rubric Islamism and Islamist movements (with the
already noted exception of South African progressive Islamists), I agree
with Winter, is oppressive and doubly oppressive for women. And, yes,
women have been co-opted into these movements and “woman” is made
the central and indispensable symbol of Islam/ism (as women were co-
opted into nationalist movements during independence struggles and
made central symbols of the nation, only to be shunted aside after inde-
pendence was won). While initially there may be some benefits for wom-
en to become part of Islamist movements (e.g., new public roles, and new
experiences that bring satisfaction and prestige and help hone new skills),
these movements are patriarchal and ultimately oppressive to women (as
patriarchal nationalist movements in their own ways have likewise been).
However, such feminist movements as the Egyptian feminist movement
which formed in the 1920s emerged from internal encounters with patri-
archal nationalist movements. Through her fieldwork among Islamists in
Turkey, sociologist and feminist Nilufer Gole discovered a nascent femi-
nism being articulated by some women inside the Islamist movement.7
Sociologist Barbara Pusch also found that Turkish women were taking
50 JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY SPRING

feminist lessons from within Islamist women’s nongovernmental organi-

zations.8 The oppressiveness of Islamism is leading these women not to
abandon Islam but to question issues of gender within Islam and possibly
abandon Islamism. This is not always easy to do, especially in the case of
attachments to extremist groupings as the story of the martyred Turkish
Islamic feminist Konca Kuru indicates.9 However, within the less extrem-
ist Islamist mainstream, some women are finding room to maneuver. To
continue with the Turkish example, Sibel Eraslan, who led in forming the
Women’s Committee of the (now defunct) Islamist Party, Al-Refah, be-
came a feminist without the label as she became increasingly disillusioned
with masculinist Islamist politics but not with Islam, which to the con-
trary she saw as liberatory. For the time being, she elaborates her own Is-
lamic feminism from the margins of Al-Refah’s successor party, Fazilah.10
Gole suggests that “We can speak of a post-Islamist stage in which Islamism
is losing its political and revolutionary fervor but steadily infiltrating so-
cial and cultural life.”11 This, indeed, is the location of the emergent Islam-
ic feminism whose proponents are determined to influence the contours
of this contested terrain.
Muslims who are Islamically oriented, those who come out of Islam-
ist backgrounds, and some secular (this term is becoming increasingly
contested) Muslim women are contributing to the production of Islamic
feminism. In their studies, Iranian scholars Afsaneh Najmabadeh and Ziba
Mir-Hosseini have presented the Islamic feminist rereadings of the Quran
underway in the Islamic Republic of Iran since the early 1990s in which
the non–gender egalitarian and misogynist constructions of Islam are be-
ing dismantled through interpretative methodologies that include classi-
cal Islamic and modern (secular) social science approaches. In a country
where the Quran virtually functions as the constitution, this refiguring of
Islam has direct implications for the practice of citizenship.12 Moroccan
feminist sociologist Fatima Mernissi exposed the spuriousness of many
hadiths (sayings and deeds attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad)
widely used to uphold misogynist constructions of Islam. African Ameri-
can Islamic theologian Amina Wadud, who chose to become a Muslim
(and therefore did not see Islam as oppressive to her as a woman but quite
the opposite) has devoted her scholarly life to rereading the Quran.13
Wadud is one of the contributors to a just-published book called Windows
of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America, which looks “at
women’s issues from within the Islamic perspective [which] must include,
and indeed unite, issues of theory and practice.”14 They employ the Is-
lamic methodology of ijtihad to realize the full potential of Islam, which
they see as guaranteeing social justice, including gender justice and equal-
ity. In Egypt, Suad Salih, a dean and professor of comparative jurispru-
2001 THEORETICAL ISSUES: MARGOT BADRAN 51

dence at Al-Azhar University (the ancient Islamic university) has submit-

ted a demand that women be appointed as muftis (officials who dispense
authoritative interpretations of Islam), arguing that there is nothing in the
religious texts preventing a woman from holding this position.15
The Muslims who are producing a discourse of Islamic feminism (with
or without the label), and many others, see in Islam something quite dif-
ferent from, on the one hand, the patriarchal Islamists and patriarchal re-
ligious scholars who want to impose their narrow version of religion upon
people and, on the other hand, those like Winter who write off in a single
stroke all religion as injurious to one’s health. I have endeavored to re-
spond to Winter’s article by pointing to other ways of thinking about femi-
nist discourses relating to Islam and Islamism. I agree with her that under
the name of multiculturalism or any other rubric we should not accept the
unacceptable—in this case gender injustices, legitimizing them on the
grounds of cultural relativism (it is O.K. for them). Nor should we tolerate
the intolerable from within Muslim states and societies, for fear of offend-
ing ideas and actions housed in religious discourse, when they constitute
a perverse reading of religion. And we also need to keep our eyes trained
on the worst excesses of political Islam. But if we start with the premise
that religion per se is bad for women then we have to get rid of it lock,
stock, and barrel and there is nothing to discuss—or for which to hope.
Religion and the cultures in which it is imbricated are not going to go
away. Nor are they monolithic and static. Within Muslim societies, both
Muslims and non-Muslims—for whom the stakes are high—participate
in debates about Islam and feminism and about women and Islamist move-
ments as matters of immediate interest. Public debates and a proliferating
literature reflect this engaged concern. We need to be attentive to these
debates going on at diverse sites around the globe.

NOTES
1
Yasar Nuri Ozturk, interview by author, Istanbul, 10 August 2000. Among
his numerous works is Yasar Nuri Ozturk, Reconstruction of Religious Life in Islam
(Returning to the Koran), trans. Ali Hayrani Oz (Istanbul: Yeni Boyut, 1999).
2
Bronwyn Winter, “Fundamental Misunderstandings: Issues in Feminist
Approaches to Islamism,” 9, in this issue.
3
Ibid., 12.
4
Ibid., 13.
5
For example, see Farid Esack, Qur’an, Liberation, and Pluralism: An Islamic
Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity against Oppression (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997).
52 JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY SPRING

6
Winter, “Fundamental Misunderstandings,” 14.
7
Nilufer Gole, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1996).
8
Barbara Pusch, “Stepping into the Public Sphere: The Rise of Islamist
Women’s Organizations in Turkey,” in Civil Society in the Grip of Nationalism, ed.
Gunter Seufert (Istanbul:Orient-Institute, 2000).
9
Whitney Mason, “A Veiled Threat: Who’s Afraid of Konca Kurish?”
(Hanover, N.H.: Institute of Current World Affairs, January 2000), 1–19.
10
Sibel Eraslan, interview by author, Istanbul, 10 November 1999.
11
Nilufer Gole, “Snapshots of Islamic Modernities,” Daedalus, 129, no. 1
(2000): 91–117.
12
Afsaneh Najmabadeh, “Feminism in an Islamic Republic, ‘Years of Hard-
ship, Years of Growth,’” in Islam, Gender, and Social Change, ed. Yvonne Yazbek
Haddad and John Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 59–84;
and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, “Stretching the Limits: A Feminist Reading of the Shari‘a
in Post-Khomeini Iran,” in Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives, ed.
Mai Yamani (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 285–319.
13
Amina Wadud, Quran and Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
14
Gisela Webb, “Introduction: ‘May Muslim Women Speak for Themselves,
Please?’” in Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America,
ed. Gisela Webb (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000), xi–xix, quota-
tion on xi.
15
Ibid.