Muslim feminists have increasingly become agents of change and gender equality over the past two centuries and are engaging in political, social, and cultural life in the traditionally male-dominated public sphere.  At the same time however, women are being pulled back by patriarchal ideology in the rise of Islamism and opposition to supposed “foreign Western ideas” believed to be inapplicable in Muslim nations.  What unites all types of feminism is the commitment and belief to human dignity, freedom of choice, access to knowledge, and the further empowerment of women rather than any ideological or religious standpoint.  We must unconditionally prioritize justice, equality, and women’s rights as human rights outside of political and patriarchal agendas; it is for this reason that religious states do not have the capability to empower women, and nor will they ever, in any context.  Muslim feminists are imperative components of the long delayed and long denied justice and are the ones who will inevitably bring progress for women.  These feminists know, through painful and suppressed experiences, that “justice long delayed is justice denied.”

Among opponents to feminism, and certainly critics of Muslim feminism, there is the mindset that feminists are “outside Western) agitators” and are simply stirring up problems and issues where they don’t exist.  Islamists alike justify their oppressive and discriminatory laws in religious states such as Iran or Bangladesh on the testimony of countless women who are silent or “content” with their separate and unequal role in society.  This mind frame assumes that such women have access to and understand the “Islamic justification” for these laws; male interpretation has for so long been viewed as immutable truth that the line between truth and fabrication has been blurred.  The result is the most common theme throughout history, but most prevalent where Islam is the ruling influence: the systematic subjugation and relegation of women’s human rights to a male-dominated agenda.  This agenda has widely ended up relegating women to the status of things, of property, of sub-human beings.  We see this trend through a variety of issues and Islamic practices such as inheritance, veiling, polygamy, marriage, citizenship, and domestic violence to highlight a few.  How are these practices allowed to stagnate, languish, and remain unchallenged?  The answer lies in the fact that the male Islamic authority creates unjust laws with the appearance of “protecting and safeguarding women,” “preventing the exploitation of women’s bodies,” and biological differences between men and women have become the justification for as a difference in treatment; women are inferior beings by these measurements, on all accounts and across all boundaries.  As with all human rights struggles, I believe that “it is not about the intent; it is about the impact.”

Let us consider more concrete examples of just and unjust laws in Muslim-majority nations today.  First it is necessary to define an unjust versus a just law.  An unjust law is “a code that a numerical of power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself.”  This is presumed difference, made legal.  In the case of Egypt the revival of Islamism in the 1970s coincided with the forming of a new constitution.  In the 1971 Constitution women’s public and private roles were distinguished and the foundation of state law on Islamic Shari’a was openly stated (Badran 1991:222-223).  In Turkey veiling is prohibited in state-run schools and universities while still considering itself a modern, secular democracy.  We must also distinguish laws on the basis of practice; a law may be just at face-value and unjust in its application.  For instance, although in many Muslim nations such as Morocco and Turkey where women have often been given the same legal rights as men, they experience these rights very differently.  Women are regarded as the “symbol” and “indication” of a country’s Islamist presence and modernity with Western examples as the reference point.  Veiling has long been the typical avenue through which male authority regulates and restricts modes of female expression and citizenship.  Because Iranian women are legally obligated to wear the veil, the state is violating women’s rights to decide about her body, identity, and humanity according to secular feminists.  The Islamist principle of obligatory veiling is based on the belief that the division between men and women is both natural and mandated by God.

It is also essential to demonstrate the value of women in an Islamic mindset; women are not only the center of the family, the most valuable unit of society, but are also the sole indicators and upholders of familial honor and consequently the honor of a nation.  From this perspective it is understandable that many women view “true” Islam as the path towards progress and equality for women.  The highly influential Islamic scholar Al-Ghazali, an advocate of an Islamic state himself, called on women to denounce secular solutions and establish an “Islamic-wise” women’s movement along Islamic grounds.  In addition, the first stages of family law reform in Morocco were based on an implementation of so-called “alien” civil laws that did not recognize the strong sense of Islamic pride; opposition was so strong against the reforms that large numbers of women were mobilized against it.  As a result feminism in Morocco first became equated with alien Western forces.  This “default to cultural beliefs” is widespread in other Muslim nations such as Indonesia and Iraq where the implementation of unreliable, weak hadith and literal interpretation of the Qur’an undermined women’s rights.  Women in Bangladesh are experiencing similar problems where they were given legal equality in 1972 but there still exists a contradiction between values and practice.

Because Islam and patriarchy share many ideological links, we have the tendency to continually construct Muslim women as victims that need to be saved rather than viewing them as humans with their own agency.  Muslim nations must learn to accommodate difference and re-interpretation of the Qur’an and hadith from a women’s perspective; civil disobedience is sometimes necessary to bring inequality to the surface where it can be addressed.  From my perspective I see the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s as the epitome of the power of nonviolent, collective, inspired action to dramatize a human rights situation, which includes women’s rights.  With both the women’s movement and the civil rights movement, we see the emergence of opposing status quo groups that condemn human rights movements because they precipitate violence and unrest of the current social order.  This is not a logical assertion.  The Islamic justification for women’s position in society is like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery.  We must come to see that, as political Islam has affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease her efforts to gain her basic human rights because her quest may precipitate violence and unrest.  Society must always protect the robbed and punish the robber.  I refuse to ascribe to the belief that women must be held acc and thus accountable for men’s crimes: marital rape, honor killings, and obligatory veiling are all constructed by men who are the perpetrators of the crimes these practices attempt to “fix.”  It is therefore absolutely necessary for there to be harsher punishments and restrictions on men’s actions; no longer can we repeatedly punish women and confine them to a life of misery for the crimes and faults of male action and biased interpretation.  It is a historical fact that the privileged group rarely gives up its privileges voluntarily, and equality must be demanded and fought for.  We must regard systematic crimes and discrimination against women as not simply “the way things are,” or the responsibility of a few, selective people in a far-off land.  Women have sacrificed and presented their very bodies as a means of laying their case before the conscience of the world but still the response has been slow, and we have endured postponement time and time again.  Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging sense of inadequacy we encounter every day in the public arena, never felt the unconscious bitterness toward all forms of male privilege, never lived constantly with the fear of being sexually assaulted or killed for treading on a man’s ever-present sexual desire, never quite knowing what to expect next, never having been plagued with inner fears and outer resentments and the sense of being “forever inferior.”  Invisible privilege makes it easier to overlook women’s legitimate and unavoidable impatience for equality; we cannot accept complacency any longer and we demand our own self-respect now.  This is why it is important that women’s demonstrations for their human rights must not be seen as extreme, ethnocentric, unnecessary, unnatural, abnormal, foreign, or un-Islamic.  This is my firm perspective coming from someone with empathy and simply the privilege of knowledge that so many lack.  I prefer to think of it not as a uniquely Western standpoint limited in scope and application, but rather that I address universal standards of human treatment and the responsibility of all of us to care, to be courageous, to regard every life with dignity, and to act according to the principle that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”