Secular Feminism and Islamic Feminism: What Differences?

It is very simplistic to assume that feminism is a consistent political, cultural and

philosophical movement. This assumption fizzles out gradually as we research and read more
about feminist criticism and feminist thought. The fact is that feminism is a multidimensional
and multifaceted movement that comprises a myriad of trends and traditions that are often
contradictory, interdisciplinary, and intersectional. In other words, feminism is not a
monolithic movement and feminists do not think alike. The plural form “feminisms” is, thus,
more accurate to use when addressing the course of the development of feminist thought. This
manifold nature of feminist thought makes it difficult to trace; always slippery, contestable
and elusive.
Since Mary Wollstonecraft’s book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and
John Stuart Mill’s essay The Subjection of Women (1869), feminist thought started to
formulate steadily and consciousness towards the plight of women under various repressive
and oppressive cultural and ‘legal’ constraints started to rise. This birth of feminism and its
subsequent struggles both theoretically through the production of an anti-patriarchal discourse
and on the ground through manifestations and protests resulted in a number of movements
such as “the women’s suffrage” movement in the USA and subsequently in various European
countries. The outcome of these feminist struggles was the enactment of a bunch of laws that
guaranteed more political, economic and social rights for women in various Western
countries. This victory was not considered the end in itself, rather it was the beginning of a
more consistent and insistent feminist struggle.
Many Western feminist commentators believe and assert that feminism is a purely
Western product which was later on exported to non-Westerners. However, this claim is
proved groundless by many non-Western Third World feminists. Muslim feminists, for
instance, existed concurrently with Western feminisms and rose up against patriarchy at home
using their own means and tactics. “Those who claim that feminism is Western and White do
not know their history and perpetuate the circulation of myths” 1 as Margot Badran states.
Unlike Western feminisms which are articulated outside religious frameworks, the feminisms
emerged in the Muslim world are deeply concerned with religion and “religion from the very
start has been very integral to the feminisms that Muslim women have constructed […]
whether they have been called ‘secular feminism’ or ‘Islamic feminism’.”2 In fact, Muslim
feminists cannot escape invoking religion because it is an inextricable component of Islamic
societies and part and parcel of people’s daily life. Some Western secular feminists and other
Muslim radical feminists think that it is impossible to reconcile between feminism and Islam
because they are inherently incompatible; the first seeking the liberation of woman and gender
equality while the latter is not compatible with the principles of equality in the liberal sense of
the word. These feminists denigrate Islam and charge the holy book of Islam and the
traditions (hadith) of the prophet Mohammed of privileging men over women and entrenching
patriarchy and its androcentric practices on theological grounds.
In the beginning of her feminist scholarship, Fatima Mernissi was openly siding with
those who believe in the impossibility of reconciliation between religion and feminism. She
said that Islam “professes models of hierarchical relationships and sexual inequality and puts

1
Margot Badran, « Engaging Islamic Feminism, » in Islamic Feminisms: current Perspectives, ed.
Anitta Kynsilehto (Tampere: Juvenes Print, 2008), p. 25.
2
Margot Badran, Feminism in islam: Secular and Religious Convergences (Oxford: Oneworld
Publications, 2009), p. 2.

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a sacred stamp onto female subservience.” 3 In the same vein, the Iranian sociologist and
women studies specialist Haideh Moghissi questions the possibility of this reconciliation and
states:
How could a religion which is based on gender hierarchy be adopted as the
framework for struggle for gender democracy and women’s equality with men?
And if Islam and feminism are compatible, which one has to operate within the
framework of the other?4
Haideh Moghissi’s leftist and radical secular backgrounds make her perceive religion as
inherently hostile to feminism and, therefore, she believes in the impossibility of articulating
feminism within religious frameworks, especially with the rising religious fundamentalism in
various Islamic countries. In an interview conducted in 2000 with the Middle East Quarterly,
the Bengali feminist Taslima Nasreen made a harsh onslaught on Islam and stating:
[I]f any religion keeps women in slavery, if any religion keeps people in
ignorance, then I cannot accept that religion. Religion is a big factor in putting
women into their house-cages. Even though many women have an education, they
are not allowed to work; they have to be submissive to their husbands because
their religion says so. For that reason, I do not accept Islam; so, I criticized it.5
In fact, such views can be referred to as radical secular views because they reject religion
(Islam) altogether and either adopt the Western feminist secular model without further ado or
propose their own alternatives outside religion. Valentine M. Moghadam insists that women’s
rights cannot be guaranteed unless a secular society is established. She states that “Although
religious reform is salutary and necessary, it is important to recognize its limitations.
Women’s rights and human rights are best promoted and protected in an environment of
secular thought and secular institutions.”6 Nevertheless, when it comes to secular feminism
and Islamic feminism in the Muslim world, it is really hard to draw a demarcation line
between the two strands because they confluence and converge in many aspects and thus
“should not be seen as oppositional forces.”7 Both feminisms roared the demands for legal
and legislative reforms and amendments that guarantee more rights for women. Yet, some
minor differences can still be found between the two trends as Margot Badran elucidates in
her book Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences ( 2009)
Margot Badran argues that secular feminists in the Muslim world depended much on
the legacy of Islamic modernist thought to demand for equal education and work between
men and women and for access to congregational worship in the mosque. In contrast, Islamic
feminists depended on their own reading and exegesis of Islamic texts such as the Qur’an and
the Hadith to debunk patriarchy.

3
Quoted in: Asma Barlas, Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the
Qur’an (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. 203.
4
Haideh Moghissi, Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of postmodern Analysis
(London: Zed Books, 1999), p. 126.
5
Middle East Quarterly, Vol. VII, No. 3, September 2000, pp. 67-74. (adapted from:
http://www.meforum.org/73/taslima-nasrin-they-wanted-to-kill-me)
6
Valentine M. Moghadam, “Islamic Feminism and its Discontents: Towards a Resolution of the
Debate” in Signs, Vol. 27, No. 4, (Summer, 2002), p. 1160.
7
Margot Badran, Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences (Oxford: Oneworld
Publications, 2009), p. 6.

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 In an article entitled “Between Secular and Islamic Feminisms: Reflections on the
Middle East and Beyond” published in the Journal of Middle East Women Studies, Margot
Badran draws another distinction between secular feminism and Islamic feminism. The first,
she says “draws on and is constituted by multiple discourses including secular nationalist,
Islamic modernist, humanitarian/human rights, and democratic” while the latter, she
continues, is “expressed in a single or paramount religiously grounded discourse taking the
Qur’an as its central text.”8 In historicizing secular feminism and Islamic feminism in the
Muslim world, Margot Badran sees that secular feminism started to gain ground in the late
nineteenth century in a context in which “religion, state and society were highly enmeshed,”9
while Islamic feminism emerged in the late 20th century when “the notion of secular state and
society had taken hold.”10
Feminists in the Muslim world who accept the label of Islamic feminists, despite being
so fishy to categorize and pigeon-hole, see the matter otherwise and reject such interpretive
reductionism of Islamic texts, especially the Qur’an. Giving that all texts are polysemic and
open to multiple readability, such stances are reductionist because they are only a possible
reading among many. The Algerian thinker Mohammed Argoun uncovers this process of
decontextualizing the Qur’an and affirms that it “has been ripped from its historical,
linguistic, literary, and psychological contexts and then been continually recontextualized in
various cultures and according to the ideological needs of various actors.” 11 The African
American feminist Amina Wadud, who converted to Islam during the second wave feminist
movement in the 1970s, is aware of the decontextualization and distortion of the message of
Islam by biased exegetes. She argues that the opponents of the Qur’anic message and of Islam
altogether make use of the “poor status of women in Muslim societies as justifications for
their reactions.”12 She continues that “these reactions have also failed to draw a distinction
between the interpretation and the text.”13
Islamic feminists claim that Islam came as a revolutionary religion which is flexible,
adaptable and self-renewing. The Moroccan feminist and sociologist Fatima Mernissi, the
Egyptian American writer Leila Ahmed, the American scholar of Islam Amina Wadud, the
Pakistani American scholar Asma Barlas, the Algerian feminist novelist Assia Djebbar and
many more Islamic feminists hold the conviction that the prophet Mohammed (PBUH) was an
inspired revolutionary, a man who rejected all forms of violence and tribal conflicts prevalent
in the pre-Islamic era (jahiliya) and sought to establish a community that is strengthened and
unified by the spiritual bond of Islam. In this community, Fatima Mernissi stresses, “women
had their place as unquestioned partners in a revolution that made the mosque an open place
and the household a temple of debate.”14Islamic feminists believe that the divine text of the
Qur’an is the pure word of God which is bereft of any misogynistic verses and it came to
address both men and women in a just way that does not favor one sex over another. They cite
Chapter 33 (The Clans), verse 35 which says:

8
Margot Badran, “Between Secular and Islamic Feminisms: Reflections on the Middle East and
Beyond,” in Journal of Middle East Women Studie, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter 2005), p. 6.
9
Ibid., p. 10.
10
Ibid.
11
Quoted in: Asma Barlas, Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the
Qur’an (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. 5.
12
Amina Wadud, Qur’an and women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 2.
13
Ibid.
14
Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam,
Trans., Mary Jo Lakeland (USA: Perseus Books Publishing, 1992) P. 11.

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 Lo! men who surrender unto Allah, and women who surrender, and men who believe
and women who believe, and men who obey and women who obey, and men who speak
the truth and women who speak the truth, and men who persevere (in righteousness) and
women who persevere, and men who are humble and women who are humble, and men
who give alms and women who give alms, and men who fast and -women who fast, and
men who guard their modesty and women who guard (their modesty), and men who
remember Allah much and women who remember -Allah hath prepared for them
forgiveness and a vast reward.15

Such a Qur’anic verse, and many more other ones, Isla mic feminists believe, attests to the full
equality between men and women before God and clears up all notions of women as subhuman or
inferior to men. How does patriarchy, then, function and where does it find its roots if not in the
teachings of Islam and its core text, which is the Qur’an? Islamic feminists believe that during the
stages of Islamic history and starting from the death of the prophet Mohammed, false interpretations -
some of them unintentional (ijtihad) and others deliberate - surfaced on the scene, usually done by
male Islamic scholars and from a male perspective. Thus, the androcentric and misogynistic version of
Islam is but a construction based on the orthodox interpretation of Islam that has nothing to do with
the essence of the religion. Amina Wadud affirms in relation to this point that

The importance of the Qur’anic text is its transcendence of time and its expression of
eternal values. As such, the context of Muslim communities has not yet risen to the level
of the text. It was not the text which restricted women, but the interpretations of that text
which have come to be held in greater importance than the text itself.16

The controversial Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi has always been daring in her
deconstruction of the discourse of exclusion based on authoritarian readings of Islam to the extent that
most critics avoid describing her as an Islamic feminist. In her autobiography Daughter of Isis she tells
us how, ever since her childhood, her male teachers made Islam repulsive to her; they took pleasure in
“choosing meanings that one’s reason refused, explanations that made things more confused, in
proferring threats of hellfire, or hopes of a paradise where there was nothing to do except loll on sofas,
or sleep, or eat.”17 El Saadawi believes that such male intrusions do not harm only women but the
religion of Islam altogether. Therefore, Islamic feminists engage in the study and investigation of the
Qur’an and other religious texts to debunk the orthodox patriarchal exegeses (tafasir) of the texts and
demonstrate how it is not the text that allowed misogynistic traditions to persist but its male
interpretations. The Moroccan Fatima Mernissi published The Veil and Male Elite: A Feminist
Interpretation of Islam (1991) where she uncovers the multiple distortions of the Prophet’s traditions
(hadith) and produces a gender-sensitive reading of Islam. Amina Wadud published Qur’an and
Women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (1999) delineating the egalitarian
principles that are ample in the Qur’an. Asma Barlas published Believing Women in Islam: Unreading
Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (2002) where, in turn, she “did not only want to challenge
oppressive readings of the Qur’an but also to offer a reading that confirms that Muslim women can
struggle for equality from within the frameworks of the Qur’an’s teachings.”18 However, this should
not be understood as if Islamic feminists were akin to Islamist women. Islamist women who promote
political Islam reproduce the same patriarchal discourse. Thus, Margot Badran warns us that “we must

15
Quoted in: Freda Hussain: Muslim Women (Sydney: Taylor & Francis, 1984), p. 21.
16
Amina Wadud, Qur’an and women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. xxi-xxii.
17
Quoted in: Miriam Cooke, Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature: Women Claim Islam
(Routledge: New York, 2001) p. 79.
18
Asma Barlas, Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an
(Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. xi.

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be wary of Islamist women’s specious renditions of feminism which […] Islamists are typically wont
to deprecate.”19

To conclude, the feminisms generated by Mulism women in the Muslim world came as
reactions to specific historical, social, cultural and political contexts. Secular feminisms were generally
articulated within the national context of a secular nation-state while Islamic feminisms were
organized around religion and saw it as a necessary ingredient to their modernity. Secular feminists are
generally action-oriented since they focus more on social and political action but Islamic feminists
assert that the liberation of women will only be achieved through a rereading and a reconstruction of
the past.

19
Margot Badran, Feminism in islam: Secular and Religious Convergences (Oxford: Oneworld
Publications, 2009), p. 6.