The primary concern of the present article , it must be stated at the outset, lies centred

around the issue of Islamic feminism and its potential ramifications. The issue is predictably

a complex one and involves a multi-layered approach, for the question the article intends to

deal with has been at the heart of many social, political, and religious upheavals. This

adequately explains the choice of two Muslim women writers from two different cultures

who strove hard to change the way Muslim women in their respective societies perceived and

understood themselves. Muslim women writers have always had a very difficult relationship

with Islam, and, consequently, their attitude to it has been understandably complex. Attempts

made by women in orthodox societies to write have been stoutly resisted, or, to take a

charitable view, frowned upon. This resistance to women’s writing has its origin in many

causes, of which the desire on the part of patriarchy to shape cultural reality in its own terms

and to its own advantage is primary one. The ruling orders have always been aggressively

hostile to alternate views of reality as posing a likely threat to existing power structures.

Writing, of all cultural practices, is endowed with the utmost potential to create and present

subversive perceptions of reality. The established power structures are exaggeratedly

apprehensive of writing practices, owing to which they find themselves devising different

measures and tools of interception and censorship. That writing, as a practice, has never been

freely available to all members of the society is closely related to the assumed subversive

potential of this much-vaunted cultural practice. The fact that women have been

systematically barred from accessing this subversive practice has been the grist of much of

feminist theories. A sizeable body of feminist discourse has also been devoted to theorising

the forms in which the writing practice has been kept inaccessible to women. Religions and

religious institutions, in tandem with other established governing orders, have been in the

forefront of keeping cultural practices out of women’s reach. In this context that feminism
comes in handy as a powerful political and intellectual tool. As Azza M. Karam states in her

book Women, Islamisms and the State, feminism is:

…an individual or collective awareness that women have been and continue to be

oppressed in diverse ways and for diverse reasons, and attempts towards liberation

from this oppression involving a more equitable society with improved relations

between women and men. (5)

All forms of feminism have tried to engage with the question of women’s freedom

within a variety of discursive practices. Women, who chose to write, find themselves up

against a host of inimical forces, which, apart from psychological inhibitions that beset

women writers, go into the making of the complex phenomenon called women’s writing.

Non-Western societies have been resistant to the ideas and thoughts that have their roots in

European philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysics. More often these societies tend to

view the practice of writing as alien to their respective social spaces, and it is always with a

great measure of trepidation that have entertained this mode of representation. The sense of

unease felt by these conventional social orders have feared the subversive potentiality of

writing. Apprehensive of this essentially subversive practice falling into the hands of the

unrepresented, marginalised, and subaltern communities, the orthodox ruling orders have

kept the radical practice of writing and self-expression away This dissertation brings into

sharp focus two Muslim women writers, one Indian and the other Egyptian, and attempts to

map their socio-cultural bearings in very hostile societies. It also discusses the various ways

of look ing at a set of complex relations emerging from the constant conflict between

established religions and individuals born into them. Any discussion of the two women

writers chosen for the study must start with an exposition of theoretical framework involving

the point of confluence and conflict between Islam and the basic discursive orientations of

feminism. Both the writers seem to share a very intricate relationship with Islam and
feminism. If one could infer anything from their respective works, the two writers have an

ambivalent attitude to both Islam and religion. The discussion about these two writers

acquires a more complex dimension because both come from relatively more secular

societies, which, in turn, may be argued to have rendered any possible theorisation of their

writings formidable. Interestingly, both Ismat Chughtai and Nawal El-Saadawi, for a long

time were involved in political activism that has had tangential relation with their writing.

Margot Badran talks about how Islamic feminism has taken on different dimensions over the

years:

Historically, Muslim women have generated two major feminist paradigms, which

they have referred to as “secular feminism” and “Islamic feminism.” It is important

to immediately observe, however, that these two feminisms have never been hermetic

entities. Muslims’ secular feminisms first arose on the soil of various emergent

nation-states in Africa and Asia from the late nineteenth century through the first half

of the twentieth, during processes of modernization, nationalist anti-colonial struggle,

dynastic decline, and independent state building. Islamic feminism emerged in the

global umma (Muslim community) simultaneously in the East and West, in the late

twentieth century during the late postcolonial moment. Islamic feminism appeared, as

well, at the time of an accelerating Islamist movement, or movement of political Islam

- and, in the case of Iran or, later, Sudan, following the installation of an Islamic

regime - as well as during widespread Islamic religious cultural revival in many

Muslim-majority secular states and minority societies. From the beginning, secular

feminism has been action-oriented, engaging in social and political militancy. Indeed,

it emerged as a social movement. (11)

from them.