Islam, Women and Violence

Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC

http://FTH.sagepub.com
Vol. 17(3): 292-328
DOI: 10.1177/0966735009102361
Islam, Women and Violence*

Anna King
anna.king@winchester.ac.uk
Abstract
Islam is a religion of vast dimensions which has inspired great civilizations
and today offers many men and women comfort and ethical guidance. In
this paper I suggest that the tension between the Qur’an accepted as the
perfect timeless word of God and the encultured dynamic Islam of nearly
a quarter of the world’s population results in contending perspectives
of women’s role and rights. The Qur’an gives men and women spiritual
parity, but there are verses in the Qur’an that some feminists find diffi-
cult to reconcile with the modern rights of women. Most Islamic feminists
make a clear distinction between cultural practices (what actually happens
to embodied women) and the pure word of God.1 There are profound
differences in the status of women within and between predominantly
Muslim countries. In some countries it is illegal for women to drive a car,
or to move freely outside the home, in others women have become heads
of state. The decision to wear the veil, often a sign of empowerment in
Europe, is in parts of the Islamic world obligatory. Voices representing
an exclusivist, literalist understanding of Islam have entered the main-
stream of Muslim lives due in part to the fact that Wahhabism imposes
a narrow, sectarian view of Islam, and the Saudi government with its
massive oil wealth propagates this puritanical form of Islam across the
world. Some traditionalist maulanas and maulvis are concerned above
all with women’s modesty and enforce customs that refine, purify and
protect their chastity. They, like some Islamic feminists, position Islamic
rights and roles for women with regard to the exoticized and eroticized
‘other’ – in this case Western civilization, Western imperialism and the
rise of Western feminism. ‘The West’ becomes for traditional interpreters
a kind of contemporary jahilya. There are also many progressive Muslim
scholars who seek to articulate a historically accurate, non-idealized, now
* This paper is dedicated to women who having experienced violent rape and
psychological abuse, still found the courage to seek redress for abuse and assault
through the criminal justice systems in Pakistan and the UK.
1. Few Islamic feminists engage with the Qur’an critically; their aim is to decon-
struct the patriarchal interpretations that have dominated historically and to get back to
the freedoms of the early period.
King Islam, Women and Violence 293
challenged, now challenging, view of Islam with an uncompromising

emphasis on social justice, equality and pluralism (Safi 2008: 215).
This paper argues that the ongoing, postcolonial battle against Western
‘imperialism’ demands epistemological humility. Nevertheless, women
are fighting for basic human rights and freedoms in parts of the Islamic
world where the State, religious authorities (the ulema) and the patriarchal
family assume the right of legal and moral surveillance. In considering the
nature of violence to Muslim women in Pakistan and the UK, I hope to
show that accusations of orientalism should not deter us from recognizing
the courage of women activists who themselves risk imprisonment and of
the struggle of women victims of rape and domestic violence to overcome
feelings of shame and dishonour. I argue that both the private and public
spheres need to be made safe for all Muslim women, and not just a profes-
sional elite. This can only be achieved by a fuller recognition of women’s
rights encapsulated in law and all aspects of public life.
Keywords: Islam, Muslim women, violence, feminism, patriarchy, Islamic

dress, Prophet Muhammad, Qur’an and hadith
After 9/11 Islam became globally, and almost overnight, a field of

study of immense significance to both politicians and the public. Since
then Islamicists have been challenged to reach out and talk to all kinds
of people—often about terrorism and jihad. At the same time the expe-
riences of Muslim women have come to influence, even at times to
dominate, moral debate about Islam. Since Muslims constitute nearly
a quarter of the world’s people, and Muslim women are a vast and
varied group belonging to hugely complex and diverse cultures, it is
only too easy for scholars to retreat into defensive essentialisms. The
very idea of Islam as a meta-culture obscures the reality that, as Al-
Azmeh notes, there are as many ‘Islams’ as the conditions that sustain
them—as many ‘Islamic cultures’ as different geographical, social con-
ditions, size of wealth and educational levels can produce (Moghissi
2000: 17; Al-Azmeh 1993: 6-8). However, the vast and growing litera-
ture on ‘women in Islam’ is evidence not only of the wide spectrum of
interpretations, but also of more painful scrutiny of the place of vio-
lence in religion and particularly of violence towards women.2
Islamic and Muslim feminism can be regarded as a form of jihad
against social injustice. Today women have emerged as a political force
in Islamic countries of the Middle East and elsewhere; the woman’s
movement has become one of the most potent social movements of
2. In 2006 the subject of a symposium at a United Nations’ Conference on the

Status of Women was ‘Are Islamic societies more prone than others to violence against
women?’ The event was reportedly partly a blunt critique of the failures of Islamic soci-
eties in the treatment of women, and partly a celebration of the dramatic progress that
many Muslim women have made.
294 Feminist Theology
modern times campaigning for justice, democracy and equity. One of

the most important means whereby this common fight is articulated is
through the worldwide web.
When I was asked to write a paper on this topic I hesitated. Having
thrown off the chains of colonial imperialism, women of the Arab/
Islamic world are increasingly resistant to Western cultural imperial-
ism, even in the form of feminism. Moreover, the roles and religious
rights of women in Islam are highly contested and unsettled issues.3 A
very deliberate focus on the exclusion and limitation of women in Islam
risked sustaining and reinforcing the stereotypes of women as silenced
victims. I was concerned too about the wisdom of stressing human
rights’ violations of Islamic regimes at a time when many Muslim
leaders argue that the major responsibility for violence against Muslim
women lies with the politics and neo-imperialism of the West. And as
Hughes (2008: 2) notes, knowledge of Islam has never been about the
simple collection of facts; the interpretive lens used to study Islam has
always been caught up with larger forces (e.g., Orientalism, 9/11, the
fight against terrorism, the creation of a liberal Islam).
There is also the difficulty of achieving balance. There are within
the global ummah progressivists and modernists whose objective is
to nurture a socially just and equitable Islamic worldview. There are
also traditionalists who are socially highly conservative and who
view women’s movements as Western contaminations aimed at the
destruction of Islam from within. The modern revitalization of Islam
owes much of its success to two Muslim organizations which stress the
importance of women maintaining Islamic values: The Muslim Broth-
erhood, founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, and the Islamic
Society organized in Pakistan by Mawlana Abu al-A’la al-Mawdudi in
1941. Mawdudi (see McDonough 2002: 176; see also note 37) in particu-
lar focuses on women’s weakness and the need for male authority and
supervision, and he influenced many others who, in the name of pro-
tection, honour and sacred motherhood honour the status of Muslim
women.4 A defensive Occidentalism leads many maulvis and maulanas
to lament the evils brought about in Europe and America by the deseg-
regation of the sexes, and the shamelessness and immodesty of con-
3. Cush argues elsewhere that it is important to avoid premature evaluation, an

approach she describes as ‘epistemological humility’ (Cush 1999: 386; Cush 2005: 92).
But she also notes that as feminist and other liberationist thinkers have pointed out,
complete objectivity is a myth and that it is immoral to collude with injustice.
4. Doi writes that in Western culture ‘woman is considered no more than a play-
thing, and her shamelessness and immodesty is appreciated as an art’. ‘Western talk of
women’s liberation or emancipation is actually a disguised form of exploitation of her
body, deprivation of her honour, and degradation of her soul!’ (1989: 10).
temporary Western culture.5 They therefore position Islamic rights and

roles for women in opposition to the exoticized and eroticized ‘other’—
in this case Western civilization, Western imperialism and the rise of
Western feminism. Feminism and gay rights movements are regarded
as threatening the family and indirectly leading to the individualism of
the West. Professor Abdur Rahman I. Doi, Director, Center for Islamic
Legal Studies, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaira, Nigeria offers a tradi-
tional Islamic viewpoint:
Heart-breaking transference of love and affection, neglected wives,
forsaken children, mistresses and street girls are common features of
Western life. Western women are the most unhappy creatures on earth
and their position in society has created innumerable social, psychological
and moral problems that they are desperately trying to solve or at least to
alleviate, but all in vain. It is against this background that we must view
the noble and natural Islamic conception of woman’s equality to man in
her free will, nature, spiritual responsibility and ability to raise herself
to high planes of virtues, consciousness of Allah (taqwa) and honour, as
stressed in many verses of the Holy Qur’an, as well as many hadith of the
Prophet (1989: 185).
In researching this paper I began to consider whether Western academ-

ics in the name of postmodernity, multiculturalism and cultural sen-
sitivity have become tolerant of the intolerable. When fundamentalist
movements become powerful it is women (particularly poor women)
and minority groups who suffer most. The treatment of women by fun-
damentalist regimes in Afghanistan, Sudan, Algeria, Pakistan and Iran
is known to be repressive, yet there is little outrage in the academic
literature of the West (Moghissi 2000: 7). Women who speak out against
a literal interpretation of the Qur’an, challenge Islamic conservatism
or commend a separation of religion and state frequently face anger,
hate and death threats. Among these women are Irshad Manji, a Can-
ada-based Muslim author, feminist, activist and lesbian, who protests
against the ideological occupation of Muslim minds by mullahs, imams
and civic leaders, and Taslima Nasrin, a Bangladeshi writer, who has
battled against religious persecution, fundamentalism, genocide and
communalism. While Manji offers a practical vision of how the United
5. Thus Maulana Mufti Ahmed E. Bemat (1987) quotes hadiths like the following:
Hazrat Abdullah ibn Mas’ood reports from the Holy Prophet (pbuh!) that he said: ‘A
woman is a hidden thing. When she stirs out of her house, Satan begins to stare at her’
(Tirmizi: 1987: 60). Hazrat Jabir reported that the Holy Prophet (pbuh!) said that ‘[A]
woman comes in the form and guise of Satan and goes in this disguise’ (1987: 60). Hazrat
Osayd (Abph.!) reports that once, while walking, men and women intermingled on the
way, the Holy Prophet (pbuh.!) asked women to be in the rear and walk on one side of
the path’ (1987: 72).
States and its allies could help Muslims undertake a reformation that
empowers Muslim women, Nasrin argues flatly that it is not possible
to be a feminist and a Muslim, ‘religion is made for men, for their own
pleasure’ (Nasrin 2002: 5).
There are many other women who have been targeted by a minor-
ity of Muslim extremists; among these a small number have achieved
global recognition. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former Dutch
politician, strongly criticized Islamic attitudes towards women and
the widespread practice of female genital mutilation in Muslim North
Africa. She rose to international attention in 2004 as the writer of a con-
troversial film on violence against Muslim women, Submission, after
her collaborator, filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a radical
Islamist. Amina Wadud, an African-American convert to Islam and
Professor of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University,
infuriated traditional Muslims by leading a mixed congregation of men
and women at Friday prayers in New York. Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani
village woman was brutally gang-raped in 2002. In an unprecedented
act of courage, she took her attackers to court and later campaigned
against women’s abuse in the highly male dominated conservative
society of rural Pakistan. Shirin Ebadi, a lawyer and human rights
activist became Iran’s first Nobel Peace Prize winner. Her outspoken
campaigns for democracy and greater rights for Iranian women and
children have often brought her into conflict with conservative clerics.
Dr Wafa Sultan appeared on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic television network,
opposite a Muslim cleric, Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouly on February 21, 2006.
MEMRI estimated that the video has been viewed at least one million
times, and clips from the interview spread through the internet like
wild fire:
The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions,
or a clash of civilisations… It is a clash between civilisation and back-
wardness, between the civilised and the primitive, between barbarity and
rationality. It is a clash between human rights on the one hand and the
violation of these rights on the other, between those who treat women
like beasts and those who treat them like human beings (http://www.
memritv.org/clip/en/1050.htm).
Death threats against all these women are commonplace. Irshad Manji
has had to install bullet-proof windows in her home. Three death war-
rants (fatwas) have been issued against Taslima Nasrin who was then
forced into exile. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, like Shirin Ebadi, travels everywhere
with bodyguards. On 8 April 2007, the New York Times reported that
Mukhtar Mai lives in fear for her life from the Pakistan government
and local feudal lords. Dr Wafa Sultan’s family lives with constant
threats.
Muslim Women: Oppressed or Empowered?

Carl Ernst writes:
it still amazes me that intelligent people can believe that all Muslims are
violent or that all Muslim women are oppressed, when they would never
dream of uttering slurs stereotyping much smaller groups such as Jews or
blacks. The strength of these negative images of Muslims is remarkable,
even though they are not based on personal experience or actual study,
but they receive daily reinforcement from the news media and popular
culture (Ernst 2003: xvii).6
Fetzer and Soper observe that from the standpoint of many Western
feminists, Islamic culture does oppress women (Fetzer and Soper 2008:
168-69). Such feminists claim that passages from the Qur’an teach the
inferiority of women, that Islamic laws of inheritance, marriage and
divorce favour males over females, that practices in some Muslim
countries oppress women, and that patriarchal pressures and assump-
tions force Muslim women in Western countries into traditional gender
roles. French feminist, Elizabeth Altschull, for example, believes that all
religions have their oppressive aspects towards women, but that ‘none
[but Islam] has gone so far, is as systematic, or is as explicit about the
inferior status of women, [a status] willed and created by God’ (in Fetzer
and Soper 2008: 168-69; Altschull 1995: 200).7 On the other hand many
Muslim women are emphatic that the Qur’an not only preaches the
spiritual equality of men and women, it offers women more rights than
other religions, or is at the very least no more inherently patriarchal.
The reality is far more complex than this kind of polarized debate
suggests—perceptions of women’s rights in Islam are continually
changing and being challenged. Many women in countries like Iran and
Pakistan are trying to show the world that it is possible to be Muslim
and to believe in the equality of rights between men and women. Ordi-
nary Muslim women do not often practise the kind of Islam promoted
by Islamist movements, mosques, schools and Qur’anic courses, while
6. Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood, an English revert (2008: 1-4) takes it for granted
that many Muslims (men and women) regard the treatment of the Muslim women
of Afghanistan by the Taliban regime as a grotesque caricature of Islam, view female
genital mutilation as an inconceivable horror and find forced marriages an anathema.
She accepts that a woman forbidden from driving a car in Riyadh will cheerfully take
the wheel when abroad, confident that her country’s bizarre law has nothing to do with
Islam.
7. Issues of gender equality in Islam as they apply to education have developed in
European countries into long-running debates over the curriculum, faith schools, single
sex schools, sex education and the teaching of religion.
the growing numbers of ‘liberal’ British and American women who

revert (convert) to Islam often say that they do so precisely because it
gives women rights and has less tolerance of the commercialization of
sex and the sexual objectification of women.
The Politics of the Veil: ‘I cover my head not my brain’ (Hayrunisa Gil)
Janice Turner, a British journalist wrote in The Times recently that:
the head is the site of our brains, our faces, our individuality. To cover it in
public implies sublimation, a need to be hidden, disregarded, subordinate
to male authority under the guise of religious observance. The degree to
which women are covered in any Muslim country is a reliable index of
their oppression (2008: 4).8
The West, Turner states, longs for an affirmative answer to the ques-
tion, ‘Can an Islamic nation be truly democratic?’ She argues that true
democracy can only come when women are fully involved in the politi-
cal process. In this section I explore the social construction of the hijab
as a useful lens through which to explore the interweaving of politics,
religion and gender in the twenty-first century.9 In many countries of
the world women who wear the hijab, the niqab or the burkha go about
their daily life unremarked and unremarkable. Elsewhere the wearing
of Islamic dress has become an ethical and political touchstone, and
a symbol of political Islam.10 Metcalf writes that control of women’s
behaviour and restrictions on women’s dress have become centrally
important public symbols of an Islamic society (Metcalf 2007: 143).11
However, many young Muslim women in the West and elsewhere are
choosing to re-veil, claiming that the hijab is no longer a sign of oppres-
sion at the hands of men, but a symbol of cultural identity. Fadwa El
Guindi (1999: 184) observes that ‘the voluntary wearing of the hijab since
the mid-seventies is about liberation from imposed, imported identi-
ties, consumerist behaviours, and resisting…Western dominance’.
8. El Saadawi argues that Arab and Muslim women know that their authentic
identity is based on unveiling their minds and not on veiling their faces. The veiling of
women is the other side of the coin of nakedness or displaying the body. Both consider
women as sex objects (eg. 1997: 170).
9. Turner asks, ‘Who has control over their bodies? The imams, the State or the
woman?’
10. The hijab is a scarf that covers the hair and neck. The niqab involves covering
the body entirely—wearing gloves and a veil over the face leaving just the area round
the eyes open. The burka is the most concealing form of veil. It covers not only the entire
body but the face, leaving only a mesh screen for women to see through.
11. Whalley (1993) described the choices of dress styles available to urban, educated
women as they seek to manage a public image of themselves as both modern and
moral.
Not all Muslim women agree. Islamic female dress may also be
seen as a sign of creeping Islamism and a potential threat to respect for
democracy, egalitarian values and historically won freedoms. In July
2008, a Muslim woman member of the French government attacked
the head-to-toe Islamic dress as a prison. Fadel Amara, the Minister
for Urban Affairs, and a longstanding women’s rights campaigner, is
reported as saying, ‘The burka is a prison, a straitjacket. It is not religious.
It is the insignia of a totalitarian political project for sexual inequality’
(Bremner 2008: 36). This followed a decision by the French Council of
State to refuse nationality to a Moroccan woman who wears the niqab.
This was only the latest episode in France’s struggle to balance the
laïcité principle with the religious practices of Europe’s largest Muslim
community. Meanwhile the headscarf war in Turkey is ‘so grave and
bitterly entrenched that it has brought angry millions onto the street’.
The Times comments that ‘The headscarf has become the most potent
symbol of a battle for the soul of a country that will determine its place
in Europe and the Islamic world’ (The Times 18 July, 2008, p. 2). Eighty-
five years after Ataturk banned fezzes as well as veils, headscarves
are back, worn perhaps by 60% of women. Hayrunisa Gul, the wife of
President Abdullah Gul, wears a headscarf which, to Turkey’s secular
establishment, symbolizes the threat to Ataturk’s strict secularism and
raises fears of a radical Islamic agenda (cf. Fletcher and Erdem 2007:
41).12 And as Moghissi points out, the debate over hijab in the West
concerning its role in ‘empowering’ Muslim women by providing them
with a protected space, ignores the fact that under some Islamist rule in
12. Critics are anxious that Islamic dress may imperceptibly become a matter of
expectation rather than choice; that this expectation could lead to segregation of the
sexes and finally that such segregation could be enforced by a legislature and bureau-
cracy packed with AKP supporters. The Times comments: ‘For at stake here is nothing
less than respect for democracy, for people of religion and for people who cherish the
right to live lives absent of faith’ (The Times, 18 July, p. 2). The Times also reports that
hardline laicists like Dr Aysel Eksi, a psychiatrist at Istanbul’s International Hospital, see
Mrs Gul’s headscarf as the starting flag to Islamic revolution. She counts on her fingers
the countries that have fallen to fundamentalism in her lifetime: Algeria, Morocco, Indo-
nesia, Tunisia, Pakistan, Iran. ‘We are worried by this Government’, she says, ‘The Presi-
dent comes from a very religious background. These people don’t see women as equal
human beings. This is why they fight for the headscarf. They just want to hide women
from the eyes of man. It will be followed by segregation. This means male doctors never
examining female patients and vice versa’.
‘The real change is that Islam—in the shape of women in headscarves is altering the
political climate, not by force, but by sheer numbers. Thirty years ago, the only head-
scarves in Istanbul were worn by domestic servants or visiting villagers. But in recent
years, an aspirational but devout middle class has risen, spreading into cities. As its
political voice, the AKP, has gained power, so they have gained confidence’ (Turner
2008: 6).
the Middle East and North Africa, women who are persecuted, jailed
and whipped for their non-compliance with hijab, find the dress code
anything but empowering. In Pakistan recently a government minister
and women’s activist was shot dead by an Islamic extremist for refus-
ing to wear the veil (see n. 44).
The Construction of Muslim Women: Western Responses post-Said

The strong link between power and knowledge in the discourse of rep-
resentation owes much to Edward Said’s ideological Orientalism. Said
interpreted the constructed oppression of Muslim women as central to
the Orientalization of the East, arguing that the study of the Orient was
not simply about the innocent production of knowledge but a way of
thinking about and ultimately constructing Self and Other. It is in this
hyper-anxious, post-Said climate that the contemporary academic study
of Islam and Muslims attempts to defy charges of racism. Both supporters
of Edward Said and his critics acknowledge the profound, transforma-
tive influence that his book Orientalism has had. It has had a radical effect
on the contemporary academic study of Islam and Muslims, a discipline
which is now strongly influenced by anti-Orientalism, postmodern rela-
tivism and identity politics. Safi, a progressive Muslim scholar, notes
(2008: 213-17) that he, like most scholars of Islam today, was trained to
avoid grand generalizations, to emphasize the historical, cultural and
intellectual diversity of the Islamic experience, and to go beyond apolo-
getics, particularly in dealing with difficult issues such as gender con-
struction. For the purposes of this paper, however, I argue that Said’s
work can lead to the denial of anyone’s right or ability to represent others
and to an apologetic justification of oppressive gender practices (cf.
Moghissi 2000: 37). I shall show that non-engagement with Islamic fun-
damentalisms sanitizes their consequences for women, leaving feminists
in the Islamic/Arab world isolated in their battles for human rights.
Scholarly books do not reach millions of people, the Daily Mail, the
Sun and television news do. Post 9/11 viewers are familiar with images
of ‘Muslim’ women caught up in wars, in violence and what is loosely
called the war against terror.13 Women are depicted on the whole as
defenceless, innocent victims of violence.
13. Muslim women have also been caught up in the violence provoked by the rise
of right wing nationalist sentiment in India. One of the most harrowing stories of 2002
was of Muslim women in Gujarat raped by Hindus in revenge for the burning of a
train carriage. Muslim women were subjected to ‘unimaginable inhuman and barbaric’
sexual violence during communal riots in the west Indian state of Gujarat. Narendra
Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister was accused of condoning the slaughter of Muslims by
Hindu mobs.
Furious bewilderment accompanied reportage earlier this year that

Al-Qaeda had used Down’s syndrome women as suicide bombers.14
Since January 2008 however, there have been 24 attacks involving women
suicide bombers in Iraq, and women have become ‘the perfect weapon’
in a country where males cannot search women for cultural reasons and
where it is easy to hide a vest packed with explosives under women’s
traditional Islamic robes (Haynes 2008: 32).15
Just as politicians and reporters struggle not to equate terrorism with

all Islam, so they struggle not to present a distorted picture of Islam
as a particular religion, predisposed to oppress and maltreat women.
Journalists have become increasingly careful in their domestic treat-
ment of the religion, soliciting reactions from local communities and
avoiding anti-Muslim backlash. However, global media coverage tends
to be stark. In February 2008, international attention was captured by
the story of Yara, a 37 year-old American businesswoman and married
mother of three who was thrown into jail by Saudi Arabia’s religious
police (‘mutaween’) for sitting with a male colleague in Starbucks coffee
shop in Riyadh. (In Saudi Arabia public contact between unrelated men
and women is strictly prohibited). Yara claimed that she had been strip
searched, threatened and forced to sign false confessions (Verma 2008a:
40). A later report in The Times noted that the religious police contested
this story and accused Yara of breaking the law, wearing make-up, not
covering her hair and of moving around suspiciously. Verma (2008b:
39) observes that the media story had started fierce debate within Saudi
society where reformers and human rights groups are putting pres-
sure on the Government. Yara and her family had been caught up in
an ideological crossfire between conservatives and reformers. There
14. In Iraq one of the most shocking news stories of the year was headlined ‘Down’s
syndrome bombers kill 70. Al-Qa’eda detonates handicapped women by remote control’.
Martin Fletcher (2008: 1) reported from Baghdad that Baghdad’s fragile peace was shat-
tered when explosives strapped to two women with Down’s syndrome were detonated
by remote control in crowded pet markets. The first woman blew herself up—or was
blown up—in the bird section of the popular al-Ghazl pet market in central Baghdad
soon after 10am, killing at least 46 people, injuring scores more and leaving the ground
covered in body parts, blood and the scorched carcases of birds. Although the use of
women in warfare violates religious taboos, they have obvious appeal for terrorists
because they can conceal explosives beneath their black robes—abayas—and usually
escape the rigorous body searches to which men are subjected.
15. Haynes also notes that the military believes that al-Qa’eda employs a variety
of highly questionable tactics to get women to become suicide bombers. Some women
are ‘easy prey’ because their husband or children have been killed or detained by U.S.
forces. Others are married by a member of Al-Qaeda and are then dishonoured and
forced to end their lives. There are also reports that women are told that their husband
or child will be killed unless they agree to become suicide bombers.
were hundreds of media stories about this one incident, but few sought
to examine the Saudi Government’s discriminatory policies towards
women, or to explain the stringent moral code of conduct to which
women are subject.
European colonial constructions of the ‘Muslim woman’ (the harem,
the veil, polygamy) have been fiercely critiqued. Yet many schol-
ars argue that such male, inferiorizing views are perpetuated in the
Western media’s coverage of female oppression: shariah punishments,
forced marriages, punishments for adultery, spouse abuse and murder,
honour killings, polygamy, cousin marriage, rape, dowry violence and
trafficking.16 Critics claim that in the public debates of contemporary
commentators like Martin Amis, Mark Steyn, Christopher Hutchins
and Hugo Young a kind of Orientalism lingers with the plight of
Muslim women as its chief justification. Amis’s angry response to 9/11
distinguishes between Islam and Islamism, Islamophobia and Islamis-
mophobia. He claims that ‘All religions are violent; and all ideologies
are violent’. ‘Millennial Islamism is an ideology superimposed upon a
religion—illusion upon illusion. It is not merely violent in tendency.
Violence is all that is there’ (2006: part 3, 5). Amis remarks that the
connection between manifest failure and the suppression of women
is ‘unignorable’. He asks rhetorically what would happen if we spent
some of the next 300 billion dollars…on the raising of consciousness in
the Islamic world. ‘The effect would be inherently explosive, because
the dominion of the male is Koranic—the unfalsifiable word of God, as
dictated to the Prophet’:
Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior
to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good
women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has
guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish
them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them. Then if they obey you,
take no further action against them. Surely God is high, supreme (4.34).17
Even the liberal media in the UK tend to assume that the Qur’an itself
and sharia place women in a subordinate position. Headlines render
exotic the cultural practices of hijab, burqua, purdah, representing them
16. There were also angry debates in the tabloid press about the UK benefit system’s
recognition of polygamy.
17. Amis blasts the unleashing of Islamism, the reversal of Muslim culture and
rationalism and the rationalist naïveté of Western liberals. However, the fierce attacks
on Amis by, among others, the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton who likened some
of his statements on Muslims to ‘the ramblings of a British National Party thug’, and
Yasmin-Alibhai Brown who commented that the writer was ‘with the beasts’ in his views
about Islam, refute easy charges that all media coverage is inherently racist or Islamo-
phobic. It divides along broad political lines and engages widely different readerships.
as characteristic of all Islamic culture, and identifying Islam with its

most radical forms (cf. Brown 2004: 230). Shariah has become synony-
mous for many Europeans with violent assaults on the body.18 This
perception on the part of ordinary citizens of the UK was evident in
the furious reactions to Rowan Williams’ speech (‘Civil and Religious
Law in England’).19 Under the front-page headline ‘What a burkha’,
the Sun claimed Williams had ‘handed Al-Qaeda a victory’. The Times
commented that any talk of sharia in the West ‘conjures up images of
thieves having their hands cut off, murderers being decapitated and
adulterous women being stoned to death’.20
Much of this debate turned on the role of Muslim women. Per-
ceived threats to the basic rights of women fuelled the opposition
to the Archbishop. Michael Nazir Ali, the Pakistan-born Bishop of
Rochester was widely reported as saying that every school of sharia
law would be in conflict with British law ‘on matters like monogamy,
provisions for divorce, the rights of women, the custody of children,
the laws of inheritance and of evidence. Not to mention the relation of
18. Shariah law is built on the Qur’an and the Sunna and hadith of the Prophet. It is
implemented fully only in some Muslim states—Saudi Arabia and Iran—while in others
there is a dual system of secular and religious courts, in which the latter deal mainly
with marriage and inheritance and custody of children.
19. This lecture was delivered to an audience of more than one thousand lawyers
including the lord chief justice At the heart of Rowan Williams’ speech was a call for
more attention to be paid to religious sensitivities of all kinds in the British legal system.
The multicultural sensitivities recommended by the Archbishop and others suggest that
the values and beliefs of religious communities should be considered within the polity
of democracies. In other words equality before the law and the respect for human rights
may ride roughshod over the rights of faith communities. In particular, the Archbishop
was drawn to the subject of ‘religious conscience’ by the recent debate over whether
Catholic adoption agencies should have to accommodate same-sex couples. He raised
the issue of sharia to prevent the further isolation of the Muslim community and stated
in a BBC interview that the adoption of sharia in the UK was ‘unavoidable’. He appeared
to be calling for elements of shariah to be adopted by Britain. In a Radio 4 interview he
commented that Muslims should not have to choose between ‘the stark alternatives of
cultural loyalty or state loyalty’.
It is noteworthy that the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the
most senior judge in England, gave a speech to a large audience at an east London
mosque, arguing that there was no reason why principles of sharia law, or any other
religious code, should not be the basis for mediation or any other forms of alternative
dispute resolution. ‘It must be recognised that any sanctions for failure to comply with
the agreed terms of the mediation would be drawn from the laws of England and Wales’
(Marin 2008: 20).
20. A dozen or so sharia councils, sometimes called courts, are operating in British
towns and cities. They deal with civil disputes, almost all matrimonial, but can do so
only within the law. They have no separate jurisdiction (Ahmed and Gibb 2008: 4).
freedom of belief and of expression to provisions for blasphemy and

apostasy’.
‘Islamic Feminists’, ‘Muslim Feminists’, ‘Secular Feminists’ and ‘Islamists’

Movements for women’s emancipation have long existed in Islamic
societies and contradict arguments that feminism, as a political and
intellectual project advocating equal gender rights and women’s access
to public life, is a Western product (cf. Moghissi 1999: 125-48). The Wiki-
pedia entry on Islamic feminism says that ‘There are subtle yet sub-
stantial differences to be noted between the terms “Islamic feminist”,
“Muslim feminist” and those regarded as “Islamists” ’. My analysis
follows almost the same classification but adds a fourth category.
Many of the first wave of contemporary Muslim feminists regarded
feminism as a universal movement against patriarchy, demanding
control over their own bodies and the right to sexual expression. The
Egyptian writer, Nawal el Saadawi, has had a major influence on the
women’s movement globally. Saadawi at a young age, underwent the
process of female genital mutilation. As an adult she has written about
and criticized this practice. She attacks the universal patriarchal class
system built on the sacrifices, the deprivation, the sweat and blood of
women, and argues that we cannot speak about global injustice without
speaking about inequality between countries, inequalities between
classes in each country, and inequalities between the sexes. All these
different levels of inequality are linked together in the patriarchal capi-
talist system that governs the world today. El Saadawi’s journey takes
her from the practice of medicine to collective action and the struggle
for women’s freedom (1997: 56).21 El Saadawi fought a long war for
women’s social and intellectual freedom, and came to see that the
oppression of women must be put into the broader context of history
and global politics (she views Western feminism as often too ‘personal’,
ahistorical and apolitical).22 She says of the aims of the Arab Women’s
Solidarity Association which she founded:
One of our slogans…is ‘unveil the mind’. We speak and write in Arabic.
We join all struggles for liberation for ourselves and our countries. We
study our history, and try to redefine Islam in intellectual terms. We
question the dominating Islamic tradition defined by men… The authen-
21. El Saadawi even relates female genital mutilation to the politics of George
Bush.
22. El Saadawi argues that Arab and Muslim women know that their authentic
identity is based on unveiling their minds and not on veiling their faces. The veiling of
women is the other side of the coin of nakedness or displaying the body. Both consider
women as sex objects.
tic identity of the Arab woman is not a straitjacket or dress, or veil, it is an

active, living changing process which demands rereading of our history,
and a reshaping of ourselves and our societies in the light of present chal-
lenges and future goals (El Saadawi 1997: 97).23
In the late twentieth century a distinctively Islamic feminism developed,

the work principally of diasporic feminist academics and researchers of
Muslim background living and working in the West (cf. Moghissi 1999:
126). Islamic feminists attempt to contribute towards the construction
of a new civil society worldwide, based on a culture of human rights
and Qur’anic values such as democracy, social justice, freedom of con-
science and gender equality. They argue that the condition of women in
all pre-Islamic societies was improved by the arrival of Islam, and that
in the period immediately following the death of the Prophet, women
were active participants at all levels of community affairs. Muslims then
moved away from the Qur’an’s ethical codes for female autonomy to
advocate instead women’s subservience, silence and seclusion. Ahmed
contends that Islam originally emancipated women but that as it devel-
oped it assimilated the dominant norms of the patriarchal family and
female subjugation typical of Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrian-
ism. It gradually absorbed the customs and values of the societies it
conquered, assimilating the practices of veiling, of purdah and of harems
into the corpus of Islamic life and thought (1992: 4).24 Thus the violence
that Islamic feminists observe in Islamic societies towards women is the
result of the loss of rights provided by the Qur’an. They challenge and
reject the views of Muslim ideologues who use Islam legally to justify
a practice or norm. They attack so-called ‘Islamic’ cultural and tribal
traditions that oppress women, traditions that blur Qur’anic injunc-
23. ‘Faith in God as a symbol of justice and freedom can add fuel to revolutionary
fervour against all types of exploitation. Islam in our region can be a spiritual force in
the struggle against foreign penetration. But this must not blind us to the fact that “God”
in the eyes of the oppressed is different from “God” in the eyes of the oppressors. Under
the name of “God” as a symbol of absolute power our oppressors try to justify dictator-
ship’ (1997: 99).
24. Islamic feminists make a clear distinction between cultural practices (what
actually happens to embodied women) and the pure word of God. They contrast the
respect given to women by the Prophet and Islam with the period of jahilya. Barbara
Stowasser also argues that mediaeval Islamic exegesis which viewed women’s innate
nature as weak but also dangerous to the established moral order, largely excluded the
Qur’anic theme of female spiritual freedom and moral responsibility (Stowasser 1994:
31).
However, as Geaves (2005: 217-40) indicates, there can be no absolute agreement as
to what counts as culture and what as religion in Islam; those cultural practices which
feminists regard as most disempowering to women are regarded as religious by others
and vice-versa.
tions and patriarchal notions, justifying domestic violence, forced mar-

riages and honour killings. Some go further, locating their feminism
in Islam and seeking new meaning within the sacred texts, reasserting
the supremacy of God’s revelation over secular values and defining
themselves against Western culture.
Thirdly, there are feminists who distance themselves from Islamic
associations or expose the patriarchal bias of Islamic texts (Mir-Hos-
seini 1999: 5). These feminists explore the possibilities and the limits of
Islamic feminism, and refute the attempt to push Islam onto feminists
in Islamic societies as the only ‘culturally suitable’ or workable project
(Moghissi 1999: 10). Moghissi offers a radical critique of the new presen-
tation of the Muslim woman as a wholly dignified, spiritually empow-
ered being… ‘Non-Westoxicated, she enjoys a balanced dose of public
activity and moral restraint, an enviable security from the violence
afflicting women in the developed West’ (2000: 7). She draws attention
to the extravagant affirmations of the Muslim women’s ‘agency’, gender
awareness, empowerment and security within a protected space. ‘In
an heroic effort to rescue “Islam” from its bad reputation in the treat-
ment of women, discussions blurred distinctions between “Islam” as a
faith, “Islam” as the ideology of a movement in opposition, and Islam
as a ruling system, that is, Islamic fundamentalism.’ Moghissi notes
also that some scholars have even yielded to the Islamists’ intellectual
seductions, ‘transforming the robust defence…political and cultural
power’ (1999: vii).
Moghissi argues that for centuries women’s sexuality and moral
conduct have preoccupied Muslim men; men’s needs and scripts have
circumscribed women’s lives and the extent of their participation in
public affairs. Islam approves of sexual pleasure, yet sexuality in Islam
is the site not only of love, desire, sexual fulfilment and procreation,
but also of shame, confinement and anxiety. Women are regarded as
susceptible to corruption and this makes legitimate in many areas of
the Islamic world their surveillance by family, community and state.
Islamists take upon themselves the guardianship of the moral purity of
women in their societies.
Finally, there are Islamist women who often hold the view that Islam
promotes a patriarchal structure of family and society, but one which
isn’t inherently oppressive to women. Islamists are often advocates of
political Islam, the notion that the Qur’an and hadith mandate an Islamic
government. Some Islamists advocate women’s rights in the public
sphere but do not challenge gender inequality in the personal, private
sphere. Islamist ‘fundamentalist’ women also struggle for the rights
given to them by Islam and have often been able to mobilize in greater
numbers than Muslim liberals. Many find an identity, a space and even a
freedom within the right (see Khan 1992: viii), and become allies or sup-
porters of revivalist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and
Jama’at-i Islami. Thus Zaynab al-Ghazali, an Egyptian activist, founded
the Muslim Women’s Association in order to organize women’s activi-
ties according to Islamic norms and for Islamic purposes.
Maryam Jameelah, essayist and journalist, born Margaret Marcus,
is an Orthodox Jewish woman who converted to Islam in the early
1960s. Jameelah argues that the feminist movement is revolutionizing
the whole structure of society and changing the entire basis of human
relationships. She claims that the uni-sexual society proposed by the
feminists—that is, a society which makes no cultural or social distinc-
tion between the sexes, a society without marriage, home and family,
where modesty, chastity and motherhood are scorned, does not repre-
sent ‘progress’ or ‘liberation’ but degradation at its worst. ‘The result is
pure and unadulterated anarchy, confusion and chaos’ (2005: 8).
Jameelah states that from the Islamic point of view, the question
of the equality of men and women is meaningless. It is like discuss-
ing the equality of a rose and a jasmine. Each has its own perfume,
colour, shape and beauty. Men and women are not the same. Each has
particular features and characteristics. Women are not equal to men.
But neither are men equal to women. Islam envisages their roles in
society not as competing but as complementary. The Muslim man pos-
sesses certain privileges such as social authority and mobility against
which he has to perform many heavy duties. The Muslim woman too
has certain privileges. First, she is free from all economic responsibil-
ity. Second, she does not have to find a husband for herself. She does
not have to display her charms and make the thousand and one plans
through which she hopes to attract a future mate. Third she is spared
direct military and political responsibility:
In return for these privileges which the woman receives, she has also certain
responsibilities of which the most important is to provide a home for her
family and to bring up her children properly. In the home the woman rules
as queen and a Muslim man is in a sense the guest of his wife at home. The
home and the larger family structure in which she lives are for the Muslim
woman her world. To be cut off from it would be like being cut off from the
world or like dying. She finds the meaning of her existence in this extended
family structure which is constructed so as to give her the maximum pos-
sibility of realizing her basic needs and fulfilling herself.
The Shariah therefore envisages the role of men and women according to
their nature, which is complimentary. It gives the man the privilege of
social and political authority and movement for which he has to pay by
bearing heavy responsibilities, by protecting his family from all the forces
and pressures of society, economic and otherwise. Although a master in
the world at large and the head of his own family, the man acts in his home
as one who recognize the rule of his wife, in this domain and respects it.
Through mutual understanding and the realization of the responsibili-
ties that God has placed on each other’s shoulders, the Muslim man and
woman are able to fulfil their personalities and create a firm family unit
which is the basic structure of Muslim society (Jameelah 2005:6).
The Prophet Muhammad: The Pure Exemplar and Model

The English revert to Islam and Qur’an translator, Mohammad Marma-
duke Pickthall25 asserted that, ‘The historical truth is that the Prophet of
Islam is the greatest feminist the world has ever known’,26 The Prophet
Muhammad is believed to bring to humanity the final message of
freedom and equality, substituting a spiritual community for group-
ings based upon kinship, race, nation or gender. The Sahabiyat (Women
Companions) of the Prophet were honoured during Muhammad’s
own lifetime and their achievements and influence acknowledged
(see Ghandafar 2001). Khadija, Muhammad’s wife, is described as a
Mother, dearer to Muslims than their own mother. Muhammad’s wives
are called ‘the mothers of the faithful’ (Surah 33:6) and were subject to
some special restrictions; after his death, for example, they were not
allowed to remarry (Surah 33.53). At the end of his life the Prophet
was married to nine wives, and he once said that ‘To be married is
my sunna’ (Schimmel 1985: 50). Schimmel (1985: 49) comments that,
‘Someone brought up in the Christian tradition with its ascetic ideal
of the celibate Jesus and its stress on monogamy will of course have
difficulty acknowledging that a true prophet could have been married,
nay, even polygamous’. Muslims, however, believe that the Prophet
set an example for his community in his treatment of his wives. Nasr
states: ‘The Prophet’s marriages symbolise not his lustfulness, but his
patriarchal nature and his function, not as a saint who withdraws from
the world, but as one who sanctifies the very life of the world by living
in it and accepting it with the aim of integrating it into a higher order of
reality’ (Nasr 1966: 76). Tradition ascribes to Muhammad great venera-
tion for women and the saying, ‘Paradise lies beneath the feet of the
mothers’. The prophet’s love for his wives and daughters, especially
Fatima, is well known.27 One of his most famous sayings is: ‘God has
25. Pickthall also lamented the contemporary sorrowful plight of Muslim women.
26. More than any other historical figure, it was Muhammad who aroused fear,
aversion and hatred in the medieval Christian world. When Dante in his Divine Comedy
sees him condemned to eternal pain in the deepest abyss of Hell, he expresses the
feelings of innumerable Christians of his era who could not understand how after the
rise of Christianity another religion could appear in the West (Schimmel 1985: 4).
27. See T. Winter, and J. Williams, Understanding Islam and the Muslims (Louisville,
KY: Fons Vitae), pp. 59-62.
made dear to me from your world women and fragrance, and the joy of
my eyes is in prayer’ (Schimmel 1985: 51).
The Qur’an and the Hadith: The Foundations of Islam

Islamic feminists attempt to provide new Islamic discourses that chal-
lenge the male domination of interpretation of the Qur’an. They note,
for example, that the Qur’an devotes a whole surah to women. It
repeatedly refers to the pious and faithful men and women, and states
that Muslim women have the same religious duties as men and will
receive equal recompense for their actions. While the creation of Eve
is not described in detail, the Qur’an does make it clear that a “mate”
was created with Adam, from the same nature and soul. Moreover the
Qur’an reveals that Eve was not the sole cause of the Fall. Allah refers
to both Adam and Eve as tempted by and succumbing to Satan’s wiles
(2.34-36). The Qur’an provides examples of strong women like Mary,
the virgin mother of Jesus, Khadijah, the first wife of Muhammad and
Fatima his beloved daughter.
Surah al Nur 24.3-20 declares:
Glory be to Him (God), for what he has done for us females: for he has
bestowed upon us, believing women of unblemished reputation, protec-
tion of our honour and dignity from falsehood, calumny and detraction.
The Qur’an stresses the sanctity of life (hurmat al hayat). The life of every
single individual regardless of gender, age, nationality or religion is
worthy of respect.28
Surah al An’am 6.151 says:
Do not take any human beings life, (the life) which God has declared to
be sacred—otherwise than in (the pursuit of) justice: this He has enjoined
upon you so that you might use your reason.
The Qur’an requires that women be respected and protected under all
circumstances, and makes clear that the basis of a marital relationship
is love and affection.
Surah al Rum 30.21:
And among His wonders is this: He creates for you mates out of your own
kind, so that you might incline towards them, and He engenders love and
tenderness between you: in this, behold, there are messages indeed for
people who think.
28. Qur’an 16.58-59 states: ‘When one of them gets a baby girl, his face becomes
darkened with overwhelming grief. Ashamed, he hides from the people, because of the
bad news given to him. He even ponders: should he keep the baby grudgingly, or bury
her in the dust. Miserable indeed is their judgment’.
Surah al Baqarah 2.187 says:

…They are a garment for you
and you are as a garment for them.
The Qur’an rejects completely the idea that celibacy is the higher spiri-
tual vocation. It celebrates sexuality, albeit only within heterosexual
marriage, and accepts women’s capacity for, and right to, sexual plea-
sure. Mernissi (1985) points out that Islam has always understood that
women’s sexuality was active, while Western Christianity socialized
women into accepting sexual passivity.29
While the Qur’an has a prophetic thrust towards justice and com-
passion, its particular injunctions reflect its historical context. A whole
host of contradictory teachings and hadiths presuppose male authori-
ty.30 The Qur’an makes men the ‘managers’ of the affairs of women.
Monogamy remains a moral code for women only. Men are allowed to
marry up to four wives (contract polygamous marriages) provided that
the wives are treated with equal justice, and also unilaterally to divorce
them. They are also able to own slaves and concubines. Qur’anic
teachings differentiate between men and women in matters relating
to marriage with non-Muslims, matters of discipline, legal testimony
and inheritance. The testimony of women is half that of men (Qur’an
2.282). On the question of inheritance the male is given a portion equal
to that of two females (Qur’an 4.11). Dress codes for women are more
onerous although the interpretation of the veil is controversial. Some
scholars argue that the commandment with respect to the hijab applies
only to the Mothers of the Believers (Qur’an 33.53), whereas ch. 33, v.
55 which applies to all women in general prescribes only a veil to cover
the bosom and modesty in dress. Surah Ahzab (33.33) also says:
O you who believe, enter not the dwellings of the Prophet for a meal
without waiting for the proper time…and when you ask of them (his
wives) anything, ask of them from behind a curtain. That is purer for
your hearts and their hearts…it is not for you to cause annoyance to the
messenger of Allah, nor may you ever marry his wives after him. That in
Allah’s sight would be an enormity.
This verse appears to instruct Muslim men as to their proper conduct

with the wives of the Prophet. It continues, however, to be read by
29. F. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Muslim Society (London: Saqi
Books, 1985), pp. 91-138. She comments that Islam has a healthy honesty and acceptance
of human sexuality which is evident in a wealth of detail in Islamic jurisprudence.
30. According to El Saadawi (1997: 80) the Qur’an reflects a society characterized
by a patriarchal system built on private property with a class structure composed of a
majority of slaves and a small elite who owned sheep, cattle and horses and who, as
traders, travelled far and wide over the commercial routes of the Arab peninsula.
some Muslims as a divine rule requiring men and women to occupy

different spheres, and as granting all public space to men alone. Debate
also surrounds verse 34 of Surah an-Nisa which suggests that husbands
have the right to discipline (chastise lightly) their wives.
When we move to shariah injunctions we find that the penalties
against women are heavy, while the hadith are ambiguous in that some
affirm female equality, whereas others regard women as weak and
foolish. A hadith often quoted is that women cannot and should not
say no to their husband when he approaches them sexually—except
when they are menstruating. Modernists like Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan
advocated a selective method in the use of hadith,31 while contempo-
rary feminists like Fatima Mernissi, the Moroccan feminist writer and
sociologist, deal with misogynous hadiths by challenging their chain
of transmission (Mernissi 1991: 34-36, 43-46, 58-61).32 In late February
2008 Western media broke the news (later denied) that Turkey’s highest
religious authority was preparing to publish a groundbreaking guide
to Islam for the modern world which would make it much more diffi-
cult to justify extreme, misogynistic and violent interpretations of Islam
(Erdem 2008: 40; Piggott 2008: 1-5). Reports claimed that a team of theo-
logians at Ankara University were carrying out a fundamental review
of the hadith in terms of morality, justice and women’s rights. Professor
Mehmet Gormez, vice-president of religious affairs and senior Hadith
lecturer commented, ‘The project takes its inspiration from the interpre-
tations of the modernist vein of Islam. This gets obscured by modern
clichés, but reinterpretation is actually part of the basic fabric of Islam’.
The Case of Pakistan: The Struggle for Women’s Rights

Women in Pakistan face spiralling rates of gender-based violence, a legal
framework that is deeply biased against women, and a law enforcement
system that retraumatizes female victims instead of facilitating justice
(Samya Burney, author of the report Crime or Custom? Violence Against
Women in Pakistan and researcher for the women’s rights division of
Human Rights Watch).
31. It should be binding in religious matters, but not for details of social behaviour
or political and other worldly affairs.
32. The second source of Islamic law, the Sunna, has given rise to intense debates
over religious authority. Some Muslims have rejected the authority of Sunna entirely,
arguing for a return to the Qur’an alone. Most Muslims believe that to dispense with
Sunna is to undermine the very foundation of Islamic law, yet even here the challenge
of deciding what is authoritative Sunna remains. There is for example a discrepancy
between the Qur’an and the Sunna over the exact penalty for adultery. The Qur’an pre-
scribes flogging, the hadith literature records that Muhammad ordered adulterers to be
stoned (Brown 2004: 221).
The case of Pakistan, is particularly relevant for the UK because of its

colonial past and because the great majority of British Muslims come
from the Asian subcontinent. In Pakistan female sexuality and gender
issues have become linked not only to communal honour, but to chang-
ing concepts of national identity and political struggle. They are also
linked to questions about Islam as a culture, as a religion and as a
political force. In the wider political arena, Islam appears as a recur-
ring theme (Mumtaz and Shaheed 1987: 1).33 Nighat Said Khan (1992:
i-x) emphasizes that the recent history of Pakistan is a history of unre-
solved debates on the ideology of Pakistan and on the definition of a
Muslim, and arbitrary attempts to resolve these issues have often led
to violence, intolerance and to social disintegration. The move toward
the Islamization of Pakistan focused its attention primarily on the place
and role of women in Islam.
In the fifty years preceding independence progressive Muslim
groups justified women’s education, emancipation and rights from
within an Islamic framework. From 1947 Islam was often the medium
used by those wanting to curb or deny women their rights, and Mumtaz
and Shaheed note that those who raised the Islamic banner consistently
opposed equality between the sexes and firmly advocated an inferior
position for women (1987: 1). The Islamicization process started by Zia-
ul-Haq in 1979 resulted in the State passing Islamic laws that formal-
ize women’s secondary position within society. Such laws include the
Hudood Ordinance, the Law of Evidence and the Law of Qisas and
Diyat.34 In the wider political arena, Islam appears as a recurring theme
33. See Mumtaz and Shaheed for a detailed account of the impact of British rule in
India, and the concomitant rise of movements of national liberation and female reform
movements. The nationalist struggle provided the environment in which Muslim
women broke through traditional rules and restrictions, cast off their veils, left their
homes, confronted the police, and entered politics (1987: 47). The culmination of the
seven-year old movement for Pakistan was the massive cross-migration of populations.
The struggle for rights was an uphill struggle, bringing women into conflict with the
maulvis. It was also carried on by a very tiny proportion of women—the urban, educated
middle and upper classes.
34. Mumtaz and Shaheed (1987: 8) state that, ‘Jinnah’s vision of a non-theocratic
Pakistan and Liaqat’s aspirations for building a liberal democratic political system were
not viewed by the political elite as antagonistic or contrary to Islam. Democracy, right
of speech, freedom of conscience, emancipation of women, human dignity and toler-
ance were regarded as Qur’anic principles…’ Fatima Jinnah herself campaigned to be
President of Pakistan in 1965 when she was in her seventies. However, the ulama had a
different view of the nature of an Islamic state. Although they had opposed the creation
of a separate Pakistan, they contended that the Islamic State should involve the recog-
nition of the absolute sovereignty of God; the supremacy of the laws contained in the
Qur’an and Sunnah which could only be applied and interpreted by themselves and the
banning of preaching and propagation of any ideology not in consonance with Islam.
(Mumtaz and Shaheed 1987: 1). Nighat Said Khan (1992) emphasizes
that the recent history of Pakistan is a history of unresolved debates on
the ideology of Pakistan and on the definition of a Muslim, and arbi-
trary attempts to resolve these issues have often led to violence, intoler-
ance and to social disintegration.35
Attempts at modernizing and liberalizing Pakistan by Ayub Khan
and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto36 came to an end when General Zia al-Haq
came to power in 1977, imposing Martial Law. He was supported by
the United States and the military, and by the Jamaat-e-Islami. A year
later he initiated a process of Islamization which included discrimina-
tory legislation against women. Zia based his legitimacy on his claim
that he had a mandate for the ‘Islamization’ of Pakistan’s legal system,
‘Nizam-I Islam. In the words of Khan, the State then moved to take
over the lives of women, to control their bodies, their space, to decide
what they should wear, how they should conduct themselves, and the
jobs they could take, the sports they could play, and took it upon itself
to define and regulate women’s morality (1992: vi). Women’s presence
and dress now became the subject of a campaign for Islamic morality.37
Zia suspended all fundamental rights guaranteed in the Constitution,
including that stipulating gender equality. The 1979 Offence of Zina
Maulana Mawdudi, the most vocal opponent of Jinnah who migrated to Pakistan in
August 1947, became the head of the Islamist political party, Jamaat-e-Islami. Mawdudi
(see McDonough 2002: 176-77) denounced European women and contributed signifi-
cantly to the ambivalently charged image of the ‘West’. He found three pernicious doc-
trines that subverted what he presented as the very order of nature: the equality of
women, the economic independence of women, and the free intermingling of the sexes.
His idealization of domestic space and of women as queens of that space, at once ideal-
ized women and made them subject to male control. His revivalist ideas have been a
significant factor in the political life of the subcontinent since the 1950s. From then on
the educated elite were put on the defensive when labelled un-Islamic by the purists.
Women who demanded greater rights for women were often accused of being un-
Islamic and Westernized.
35. Khan’s book, Voices Within (1992), highlights not only the diversity but the
depth and passion and the richness of the voices of Pakistani women as they reflect on
themselves and their relation to religion.
36. In particular, the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance of 1961 and the Constitution
of 1973.
37. See Mumtaz and Shaheed (1987: 77-81). In 1980 all women Government employ-
ees were ordered to wear Islamic dress (the chador), and there was an attempt to ban the
sari as unIslamic. In 1982, all girls in educational institutions were required to wear the
dupatta and all staff the chador. The code of conduct and dress for Pakistani women was
modelled on Saudi Arabia and Iran. These kinds of requirements created an atmosphere
in which all males became the judge of a woman’s modesty and status in society. In
1982, the government launched a campaign against obscenity and pornography, and
female visibility was equated with obscenity.
(Enforcement of Hudood) Ordinance and the Law of Evidence specifi-

cally affected women. The Ordinance encompasses the crimes of zina,
which can be understood as both adultery and fornication, and zina-
bil-jabr which can be translated as rape. For the first time in Pakistan’s
history fornication (non-marital sex) became illegal. The punishment
for illicit sex, be it adultery or rape, depends on both the evidence on
which the conviction rests and the marital status of the offender. To
determine whether the case before the court is fornication or rape the
court requires either the confession of the rapist or the presence of four
morally ‘trustworthy’ Muslim men. The law excludes the testimony
of women altogether. In 1981, a session judge sentenced a man and
woman to a hundred lashes each and stoning to death. This galvanized
women into forming a pressure group, the Women’s Action Forum,
which worked within the framework of Islam in order to communicate
its message and to expose the difference between progressive and con-
servative Islam.38 It spearheaded the struggle against Islamization and
for human rights.39 40
In 1988, Benazir Bhutto became the first female Prime Minister of
Pakistan and the first woman to head a Muslim country. Although she
voiced concerns over social issues of women, health and discrimination
and promised to repeal the Hudood laws she was unable to implement
these policies. In 1997, Nawar Sharif was elected Prime Minister and
his government formally enacted the Qisas and Diyat ordinance which
invokes shariah-based changes in Pakistan’s criminal law. Qisas, appli-
cable for murder or injury, is based on the notion of retaliation: it involves
inflicting the same punishment on the defendant as she or he inflicted
on the victim, in some cases using the same methods (for example, a
38. Mumtaz and Shaheed (1987: 123-42) point out that, unlike the earlier genera-
tion who concerned themselves mainly with social welfare, the women who formed the
WAF were concerned with rights. They protested against the government’s campaign
to Islamize society on a social plane, focusing on veiling and secluding women, and also
on the segregation of the sexes (for example in universities and higher education) and
the exclusion of women from spectator sports as unIslamic.
39. According to a 1998 report by Amnesty International more than one-third of all
Pakistani women were being held due to having been accused or found guilty of zina.
Uzma Saeed who campaigns for the repeal of the Hudood laws estimates that 60% of
the women in Pakistani jails are there as a result of Hudood laws (http://news.bbc.
co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4271504.stm, p. 1 of 5, accessed 16.06.2008).
40. In an interview Dr Israr Ahmed, a member of the advisory Council of Islamic
Ideology and of the Majlis-e-Shoora (Federal Council) advocated that all working
women should be retired and that women should not leave their own homes, except in
emergencies. He also believed that a true Islamic state meant the total segregation of the
two sexes and the seclusion of women in their homes. Men should only be treated by
male doctors and women by female doctors (Mumtaz and Shaheed (1987: 83-86).
murderer should be killed with the same type of weapon as she or he

used to commit the murder). Diya, or the payment of blood money,
requires financial or material compensation for the crime in cases where
the family of the victim does not demand qisas. In July 2006, General
Pervez Musharraf asked his government to begin work on amendments
to the 1979 Hudood Ordinances and in late 2006 the Pakistani Parlia-
ment passed the Women’s Protection Bill, repealing some of the Ordi-
nances. This invoked protests from Islamist leaders and organizations.
Today, after the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf, the power
of the feudal lords and the clerics remains strong with a sizeable section
of the population supporting strongly patriarchal interpretations of
Islam. The killing of Benazir Bhutto was an act of extreme violence. As
an Oxford educated articulate woman who espoused liberal values she
was a target for conservatives. She herself states in her autobiography
that: ‘It was men’s interpretation of our religion that restricted women’s
opportunities, not our religion itself’.41 42
I now turn to consider the fact that Islamicization has not given
women greater security. Although violence against women is rarely
acknowledged and punished as a crime, numerous reports show
that women in Pakistan face extraordinarily high levels of violence
and abuse at the hands of men, family members and members of the
state. Monitoring by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International,
women’s organizations and NGOs show that Pakistani law fails to
protect women from violence. The Human Rights Watch Report Crime
or Custom? Violence Against Women in Pakistan, a 100-page report on the
state of women’s rights, documented a ‘virtual epidemic’ of crimes of
41. Benazir Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto: Daughter of the East (London: Simon & Schuster,
2007), pp. 34-35. Bhutto’s record in the area of women’s issues remains disputed with
many women activists suggesting that Bhutto made general statements against discrim-
inatory laws but did little to implement them.
42. A Pakistani minister and woman’s activist was subsequently shot dead by an
Islamic extremist for refusing to wear the veil (Bhat and Hussain 2007: 2). Zilla Huma
Usman, the minister for social welfare in Punjab province and an ally of President
Pervez Musharraf was killed as she was about to deliver a speech to dozens of party
activists, by a ‘fanatic’, who believed that she was dressed inappropriately and that
women should not be involved in politics. The gunman, Mohammad Sarwar, was over-
powered by the minister’s driver and arrested by police. A stonemason in his mid-40s,
he is not thought to belong to any radical group but is known for his fanaticism. He was
previously held in 2002 in connection with the killing and mutilation of four prostitutes,
but was never convicted due to lack of evidence. Mr Sarwar appeared relaxed and calm
when he told a television channel that he had carried out God’s order to kill women who
sinned. ‘I have no regrets. I just obeyed Allah’s commandment’, he said. Adding that
Islam did not allow women to hold positions of leadership. ‘I will kill all those women
who do not follow the right path, if I am freed again’, he said.
violence against women.43 Multiple forms of violence and aggression

include sexual assault, rape, gang rape, abduction, domestic abuse such
as spousal murder, burning, disfiguring of the face with acid, bodily
injury and torture, beatings, ritual honour-killings, custodial abuse and
trafficking. Women who are unprotected from violence often resort
to suicide and attempted suicide. Women who seek divorce are often
themselves victims of honour killings. The privatization of crimes by
the qisas and diyat laws have had particularly damaging consequences
in terms of intrafamily violence, the majority of which involve domestic
abuse or spousal murder. Honour killings are often dealt with leniently
if they are believed to accord with the injunctions of the Qur’an and
Sunnah. Although some Muslim scholars contend that Islam permits
women to obtain divorces in cases of domestic violence, divorce may be
unavailable to women as a practical or legal matter. The issue of marital
rape is disputed in Islam with rights groups lobbying to have marital
rape made an offence, and conservative Islamic scholars arguing that
a husband cannot be guilty of raping his wife, he has a right to sexual
relations with his spouse.
Human Rights Watch found that bias against female victims of rape
and domestic violence pervades all aspects of the Pakistani criminal
justice system. It reports ‘rape, sexual assault, beatings, and abusive
strip searches’ of women prisoners by male guards.44 Amnesty Inter-
national states that, ‘Women continue to be subjected to arbitrary
detention and torture, including rape, which police and other security
personnel commit with virtual impunity.’ Women who report rape
or sexual harassment encounter a series of obstacles, and open them-
selves up to the possibility of being prosecuted for illicit sex if they
fail to prove ‘rape’ under the Hudood Ordinance. Domestic violence is
still regarded as condoned by social customs and considered a private
family matter.
Human Rights Watch states that women’s low status and a long
established pattern of active suppression of women’s rights by suc-
cessive governments have contributed to the escalation in violence.
A 1987 Ministry of Women’s Development and a later study by the
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in 1996 suggested that domes-
tic violence takes place in approximately 80% of all households in the
43. The Human Rights Watch Report Crime or Custom? Violence Against Women in
Pakistan has a detailed discussion of domestic law, rape, domestic violence, gender bias
in the criminal justice system, the role of the police, harassment and abuse of victims,
etc.
44. In interviews police, prosecutors, judges and doctors denied that sexual and
domestic violence were critical problems for women and asserted that the occurrence of
such crimes was precluded by Pakistani social and religious norms.
country. According to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in 2002,

over 90% of married women reported being kicked, slapped, beaten, or
sexually abused when husbands were dissatisfied by their cooking or
cleaning, or when the woman had failed to bear a child or had given
birth to a girl instead of a boy. Saleem Khan (2008a) reports that a case
study of brutal incidents of violence reveals that in most cases petty
issues spark fights that end in someone being brutally tortured.
The economic factor is a major reason in cases of domestic violence, which
is followed by chauvinism. A brutal incident of domestic violence was
reported in January in which Muhammad Ramzan, a resident of Melsi, cut
his wife Fayyaz Mai’s tongue for complaining to her parents about him. In
another incident reported in April, Zahid killed his wife Zakia in Murree,
cut her lips and hung her corpse on a tree in a forest. The reason was a
petty domestic quarrel. The most recent incident took place on June 27
near Millat Park in which Ashiq threw acid on his wife Bushra, a mother
of four children, over a domestic quarrel. In another incident of violence
against women reported on May 27, Amir Bhatti, a resident of Sandha,
threw acid on a woman, Samar Nauman and her friend Naghma Bibi.
Bhatti had wanted to Marry Samar 10 years ago, but she had refused.
Amnesty International in its latest (2008) report speaks of the suspen-

sion of fundamental constitutional rights, arbitrary arrests and deten-
tions, torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearance, abuses
by armed groups, hostage-taking and killings. Some 310 people were
reportedly sentenced to death, mostly for murder. At least 135 people
were executed, including at least one child offender. Members of Islamist
groups carried out execution-style killings of dozens of people deemed
to have contravened Islamic law or to have co-operated with the gov-
ernment, in some cases after hearings before Islamic councils (shura).
This climate of violence affects women profoundly. In 2007, members
of pro-Taleban and other Islamist groups took hostages, unlawfully
killed civilians and committed acts of violence against women and
girls. Girls and women were increasingly targeted for abuses in the
areas along the border with Afghanistan. In Bann, North West Fron-
tier Province, a note attached to one woman’s body said that she had
been killed to punish her for immoral activities. Amnesty International
also reports that custodial violence against women, including rape,
continued, and that the state failed to prevent and prosecute violence
in the home and community, including mutilation, rape and ‘honour’
killings. The NGO Aurat Foundation said that in the first ten months of
2007 in Sindh alone, 183 women and 104 men were murdered for sup-
posedly harming family ‘honour’. Despite a ban on jirgas by the Sindh
High Court in 2004, official support continued. The higher judiciary
on several occasions ordered the prosecution for swara, the handing
over of a girl or woman for marriage to opponents to settle a dispute.
The practice was made punishable with up to ten years’ imprisonment

by a 2005 law, but continues to be widespread. It should be noted that
violence against women is paralleled in the violence towards gay and
transsexual Muslims who may be put to death if they actively engage
in homosexual practices.45
The UK: Questions for the Future

In the aftermath of 9/11 and the July 2005 London bombings, the
UK’s political and religious leaders, partly to maintain civic peace,
encouraged the assumption that there is a liberal or progressive Islam
deriving from the Qur’an which is compatible with modernity, liberal
values, and gender equality. This true, ‘authentic’ Islam of peace and
equality is juxtaposed with the Islam of Al Qa’eda, Saddam Hussein,
the Taleban, suicide bombers and fundamentalists. The UK Govern-
ment presents Islam as a religion whose message has been ‘distorted’
by extremists. Abroad concern over rising Islamic militancy along the
border with Afghanistan has just caused the UK to double its aid to
Pakistan. Much of this money is earmarked for education and tar-
geted at girls in order to help the Pakistani Government counter the
influence of the radical madrassas. At home the Government is actively
supporting initiatives designed to give Muslim women a voice, partly
as an attempt to counter the radicalization of some British Muslim
young men.46 The Government has already set up a Muslim Women’s
Forum, and is funding citizenship classes in madrassas. On 18 July
Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, announced that a board
of Islamic scholars and theologians is to be set up with Government
funds to offer advice to Muslims on issues such as wearing a veil, and
the role of women in public life.47 While Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra, an
45. Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and
Nigeria apply the death penalty for homosexuality, according to the International
Lesbian and Gay Association (Kennedy 2007: 36). A story current in 2007 concerned
Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) papers released under the Freedom of Infor-
mation Act (Kennedy 2007: 36) which apparently show that the UK regularly challenges
Iran about its gay hangings, stonings and executions of adulterers and perceived moral
criminals.
46. David Cameron’s gift of a life peerage to Baroness Sayeeda Warsi was also con-
sidered a highly political act. Baroness Warsi wearing jeans and an electric-pink tank
top in a parliamentary canteen, is reported by The Times on Saturday 2 February, 2008,
as saying that she had worn a face veil and she liked it. ‘It was really an empowering
moment, I know that sounds crazy…it made me feel very safe, very secure, in control’.
47. Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, announced that £100,000 will help the
University of Cambridge to create an independent board of academic and theological
experts. There will also be citizenship classes for young Muslims in mosque schools.
imam with the Muslim Council of Britain, claimed that the creation of
the Board has been driven by Muslims rather than the Government,
Taji Mustafa, a spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, commented
(Ford 2008: 27):
Whether it is the proposed state citizenship indoctrination for children in
madrassas, or the new imams’ board, the British Government’s interfer-
ence in the Muslim community and matters of Islam is unprecedented in
comparison with any other religion or community.
In the UK, particularly London, Muslims come from global back-

grounds, but are pre-eminently South Asian. They arrived most fre-
quently from parts of Pakistan and North India rooted in traditional
rural culture, and were then concentrated into particular communities
in cities. The first generation of Muslim families brought with them
a culturally strong notion of izzat, and in many households today
young women are still required to behave in a way that preserves
the family honour.48 Parents who wish only the best for their children
may continue practices that deny their daughters (and sons) their
human rights. Girls are increasingly encouraged to stay on at school,
go to university and have careers. Nevertheless traditional notions
of izzat may mean that there is a preference for marrying girls young
and to men known to the family or community. A new study by Dr
Nazia Khanum, focused on Luton, claims that the true figure of forced
marriages per year could be up to 4,000. Khanum says that there is
a wall of silence around forced marriages: ‘Forced marriage should
be recognised as a form of bullying and domestic abuse and tackled
in accordance with the normal professional standards and guidance
for such cases’ (in Taylor 2008: 16). Over two hundred women are
repatriated to the UK each year after they have been taken abroad
against their will to marry, while the Government’s Forced Marriage
Unit gets 5,000 calls for advice. Most victims are women, although
a minority (15%) are boys. At its most extreme, the victims end up
dead, like one teenager from Cheshire who claimed that she had been
The idea is to show young people that there is no conflict about being Muslim and being
British. The Government is providing money to train imams for the schemes.
48. When Muslim men from the subcontinent first emigrated to the West they often
interpreted the rise in feminine consciousness and the move towards more liberal laws
regarding homosexuality, abortion and divorce as leading to the breakdown of the
family and to denial of a divine harmony and order. The new civil partnership acts, rise
in sexually transmitted diseases and the birth of children outside marriage proclaim to
many Muslims a lack of respect for community and family cohesion. A YouGov poll in
2005 found that British Muslim men are far more likely than women to say that Western
society is decadent and immoral. The Times, Friday, 9 February, 2007).
abused by her mother and father for not marrying the man of their
choice. Her decomposed body was washed up on a riverbank in the
North of England in February 2004 (Bouquet 2008: 43).49
Muslim men in the UK still find it easier to have extramarital liai-
sons, to punish their wives for misbehaviour and to set limits to their
freedom. There are women who are too ashamed to seek legal redress
and who suffer at the hands of abusive husbands.50 Where rape law is
based on consent the trauma for Asian Muslim women is huge since
shame to the family or community often forces silence. Women require
enormous courage and support to testify publicly about the details of
spousal or non-spousal rape and violence.51
Gina Khan who was born 39 years ago in Birmingham to Pakistani
parents, ran away from a marriage arranged when she was sixteen.
In an interview with Mary Ann Sieghart (2007b: 4) she claims that
‘Muslim society…is based on male domination and the oppression
of women. The mosques are run entirely by men, the Sharia councils
are run by men, the “voice” of the Muslim community is always
male. And it is women who suffer as a result’. Khan is enraged by
forced or arranged marriages for teenage girls, polygamy and the
veil. She speaks out against male-dominated mosques, informal
polygamy, and teenage marriages to unknown husbands abroad,
arguing that the mullahs implicitly condone both forced marriages
and polygamy. Khan says, ‘Muslim women aren’t supposed to make
waves. I didn’t even hear my own screams for 34 years. I have now
stepped back and decided to understand and challenge my religion’
(Sieghart 2007b: 6).52
49. The very great majority of reported forced marriages involve Muslims, however
Sameem Ali explains, ‘It is not just a Muslim problem. We hear more about them because
the taboo is beginning to be broken and more girls are speaking out. In ten years’ time
other communities, from China, the Middle East, the Balkans and Africa, will have to
face up to the same reality’.
50. ‘Convicting Rapists’, p. 5. This Consultation Paper warns that, ‘Rape is an
appalling crime that devastates the lives of victims and their families and inspires fear
in our communities’. It points out that cases of rape are extremely difficult to prose-
cute and despite activity by the government in recent years the conviction rate remains
exceedingly low and currently stands at fewer than 6%.
51. A recent court case in Southampton concerned the plight of a young woman
from Pakistan married into a British Muslim family. She was essentially alone in the
UK and unable to speak English. She was physically and psychologically abused by her
husband and her father-in-law, virtually imprisoned and raped violently in front of her
small child. She managed to escape and her case finally produced a conviction.
52. Mosques are often perceived to fail women and it has been argued that in many
cases imams are ill-equipped to help women in society, and that the role of imams needs
to be redefined.
Sameem Ali lives in Moss Side, Manchester, and is now a happily

married mother of two grown-up sons and a local councillor. In Belong-
ing, Sameem tells how she was abused violently by her family, taken
to Pakistan at the age of thirteen and forced to marry a man in his late
twenties who raped her repeatedly. She was pregnant by the time she
was fourteen, but at the age of seventeen she escaped her family and,
a few months later, a kidnap attempt by armed men to bring her back.
Now thirty eight years old she says: ‘I want to inspire women to have
a voice, whatever they are going through. It was many years before I
found my voice’ (2008: 42).
In March 2007 Banaz Mahmod, 20, was murdered by her uncle and
father, Muslim Kurds originally from Iraq, because she had brought
shame on the family by falling in love with Rhamat Suleiman, an Iranian
Kurd. Her body was found in a suitcase and dumped more than 150
miles from her London home. The bootlace that was used to garrotte
her was still tied around her neck. Victor Temple, QC, for the pros-
ecution, said: ‘The Kurdish community in South London is small, self-
contained and tight-knit. Great weight is placed upon the family and its
collective honour… In some sections of the community the family name

and reputation subjugates all else… In the eyes of the family, the father

and the uncle she had shamed the family and had to pay the price’
(Bird 2007: 27).
In 2007 the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act came into force,
giving teachers, social workers, women’s rights groups, local councils
and other third parties the power to go to court to prevent or pre-empt
forced marriages. And Muslim women in the UK are campaigning
against violent customs that persist into a diasporic context. There are
now female-led international campaigns against honour killings and
forced marriages. There are refuges where abused women can go.
Conclusion
In this paper I have tried to represent the ongoing, highly politicized
debates about the role of women within Islam. I have suggested that
in post-colonial Pakistan and elsewhere Islam as a cultural reality has
been exploited to justify the subordination of women, and that the
rise of Islamic fundamentalism has in general accentuated the preoc-
cupation with women’s sexuality and moral conduct and translated
it into legal practices and bureaucratic rules. However, Muslim femi-
nists argue that Islam is no more and often less oppressive to women
than most world religions, and that religions like ideologies are used
to justify and maintain control in a particular social structure, whether
that of capitalism, feudalism or patriarchy. Many feminists suggest that
women will have to invoke the principles of ijma (consensus) and ijtihad
(reason) to further their struggle.
Many activists in Islamic countries face tremendous struggles if
they speak out against Islamist attitudes to women because they can
be attacked as legitimating a Western agenda. Practising Muslims do
not want to suggest that Islam perpetuates violence towards women
and even abused women do not want to portray Islam in a way which
demonizes all Muslim men. However, feminists like Moghissi and
Manji who live in the USA and Canada now argue that a scholarly
stress on postmodern relativism, and cultural difference ignores the
remarkable struggle of women throughout the Middle East and else-
where for democratization of their culture and society, and may lend
support to Islamic fundamentalist movements. Hughes, too, (2008)
argues that many professional Islamicists do not enter the realm of
critical discourse for fear of being marginalized as partisans of Orien-
talism. The argument of this paper is that we must listen to the voices of
Muslim women, and challenge not only the typical Orientalist, but the
fundamentalist identification of people in Islamic societies as Muslim
conformists.
The role and status of women are determined, enhanced or impeded
by the social, political and economic development of a people’s history,
the dynamic way in which politics, national identity, gender relations
and religion are enmeshed, and the diverse cultural factors that impact
on Islamic values and attitudes to women within the variety of nations
that belong to the Muslim world. In Pakistan, as in many countries in
the Middle East and North Africa, women’s rights have been curtailed.
Moghissi states (1999: 2) that women everywhere lose much more
than men as a result of the social conservatism that is everywhere the
marker of fundamentalist movements. ‘From Afghanistan to Algeria
to Sudan, Pakistan and Iran—indeed, everywhere in the Islamic soci-
eties—women are systematically brutalised and caught in a deadly
crossfire between the secular and fundamentalist forces.’ In this paper
I have argued that in the global political arena Islam is providing the
vehicle for the political thought and theories of progressive and conser-
vative forces alike. I have acknowledged the damage done to Muslims
by orientalist rhetoric, but have also demonstrated that the scholarly
construction of an ‘authentic’ Islam that coincides with ‘Western’
liberal values can be problematic. I conclude in particular that it fails
to acknowledge the courage of women in Islamic cultures who, in their
fight against oppression, have posed the most urgent challenge to re-
Islamification policies and who offer new visions of what the broader
ethical and moral principles of Islam should mean for women in the
pluralist global community.
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Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications

Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC

Islam, Women and Violence*

challenged, now challenging, view of Islam with an uncompromising

Keywords: Islam, Muslim women, violence, feminism, patriarchy, Islamic

After 9/11 Islam became globally, and almost overnight, a field of

2. In 2006 the subject of a symposium at a United Nations’ Conference on the

modern times campaigning for justice, democracy and equity. One of

3. Cush argues elsewhere that it is important to avoid premature evaluation, an

temporary Western culture.5 They therefore position Islamic rights and

In researching this paper I began to consider whether Western academ-

Muslim Women: Oppressed or Empowered?

the growing numbers of ‘liberal’ British and American women who

The Construction of Muslim Women: Western Responses post-Said

Furious bewilderment accompanied reportage earlier this year that

Just as politicians and reporters struggle not to equate terrorism with

as characteristic of all Islamic culture, and identifying Islam with its

freedom of belief and of expression to provisions for blasphemy and

‘Islamic Feminists’, ‘Muslim Feminists’, ‘Secular Feminists’ and ‘Islamists’

tic identity of the Arab woman is not a straitjacket or dress, or veil, it is an

In the late twentieth century a distinctively Islamic feminism developed,

tions and patriarchal notions, justifying domestic violence, forced mar-

The Prophet Muhammad: The Pure Exemplar and Model

The Qur’an and the Hadith: The Foundations of Islam

Surah al Baqarah 2.187 says:

This verse appears to instruct Muslim men as to their proper conduct

some Muslims as a divine rule requiring men and women to occupy

The Case of Pakistan: The Struggle for Women’s Rights

The case of Pakistan, is particularly relevant for the UK because of its

(Enforcement of Hudood) Ordinance and the Law of Evidence specifi-

murderer should be killed with the same type of weapon as she or he

violence against women.43 Multiple forms of violence and aggression

country. According to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in 2002,

Amnesty International in its latest (2008) report speaks of the suspen-

The practice was made punishable with up to ten years’ imprisonment

The UK: Questions for the Future

In the UK, particularly London, Muslims come from global back-

Sameem Ali lives in Moss Side, Manchester, and is now a happily

Timesonline, February 20, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/

Gledhill, Ruth, and Philip Webster

The Pakistani Spectator: A Candid Blog. 17 July.

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