104 Muslim women strike out

After The Koran, the life of Mohammed and the Hadith I went on to some Muslim philosophers, historians and the like. It was interesting stuff, but it couldn’t hold my interest till I got to the Islamic Feminists. Now that was something to get excited about. I’ve reached adulthood during the second feminist wave in the seventies. The feminism of the white, secular, educated middle classes some people called it and I think it was true. Although it didn’t feel that way when I was living it. This feministic wave petered out after some offending laws were changed and the ‘military industrial complex’ got hold of it, to express it brutally. Feminism became a dirty word once again. However it caught on in unlikely places and in different guises: with women of colour and with religiously inclined women. Ever since Modernism struck the Islamic World there have been women speaking out on misogyny in Islamic society. Among them were Nawal Al Saadawi from Egypt and Fatima Mernissi from Morocco. In the eighties with the hardening attitudes towards Islam and the heightening confusion and identity crisis within the male dominated Islamic World Muslim women also became stirred up. They wanted change but they wanted it on their own terms. They knew as no other that Islam has little to do with modern western thought. That said: they abandoned any notion that western feminism could help them. They felt they needed to go back to the essence of Islam to be able to make the leap forward. In academe they were initially supported by similar movements among Jewish and Christian women. But soon enough they were out on their own as Amina Wadud calls it fighting ‘Inside the Gender Jihad’.