About our guest:
Ziba Mir-Hosseini is a legal anthropologist, specializing in Islamic law, gender and development. She is a founding member of Musawah Global Movement for Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family.
About the book:
If justice is an essential value in Islam, why have women been treated as second-class citizens in Islamic legal tradition?
In her book Journeys Toward Gender Equality in Islam, Ziba Mir-Hosseini explores how democratic gender laws might be constructed from within the Islamic legal framework. She explains how her journey, and the journeys of six influential Muslim intellectuals, has created the framework for further exploration of gender equality in Islam.
Transcript of the interview
Below, please read selected parts of our conversation that’s been edited for reading eyes.
Why women were not included in gender equality in Islam?
All these understandings [of the Islamic law] until very recently have been done by men. Women were there, but by the time that this fiqh or jurisprudential schools [of Islamic law] emerged 150 years after the death of the prophet, women were marginalized; their voices were silenced and they were put aside from the public space.
Does Fiqh or understanding of Islamic law leave any room for individual reasoning?
Yes they do. Especially in Shiah law, reason or intellect is the source of law and it can be on the same level as the revelation. Because our reason, our faculty of reason never goes against revelation, and if it goes against revelation, that means that we didn’t understand it well.
Why female Islamic scholars don’t attribute feminism studies in their studies?
I think it’s so difficult to generalize. You know, all over the world including in the Islamic context feminists have a bad name and the bad name is given to them by their opponents. Why? Because they [feminists] challenge patriarchy and we live in a world that the [world] order is patriarchal.
If you work within an Islamic context and Islamic studies the moment that you say I’m a feminist you lose legitimacy. For that reason many women who work in Islamic context they don’t want to call themselves [feminist] because of feminism seen as an alien concept that came from the West. It was imposed by the West. It can be true because at the time of colonializing, feminism was used as a way to dehumanize and demeaning Muslims.
I think it is important for us to have Islamic feminism not only as an identity, because being Muslim is an identity, but also as part of producing knowledge of theology and understanding it. Theology is very important and I see our problem in the Muslim context for women to be as much as theological as it is political, and you cannot separate them in the Western context, because of the role of religion both in public life and private life.
In the Muslim context, the role of religion is there in the public life as well as in the private life. Therefore, if you are working for equality and justice, which is what feminism is about, you include men, poor, and others.
Q: In this book, you are talking about you’re a journey. Where do we land at the end of this journey?
A better world. A world in which women and men are equal human beings. For me, feminism is about women’s humanity. We say that women are human beings, so claiming the humanity of women is very important. And the journey a struggling for justice and I think this struggle is important. And also speaking out when we see injustice.
This is what we do in Musawah. In 2009, we launched Musawah, we brought a group of Muslim women activists and scholars together to argue for equality and justice both within the human rights framework and Islamic legal tradition.
I don’t say Islam [in general] because Islam is about justice. But the legal tradition is a different matter and Muslim are not treated as equal human beings in the legal tradition. It needs to be changed and when we say equality we must realize that it is gender equality, especially in a modern concept that did not existed before.
I don’t see religion as an obstacle. I see it as a resource and it gives you a lot of power to claim your faith. Whereas, this is different than feminists who are absolutely secular, with secularist approach. They are also some Muslim women who don’t want to call themselves feminists, they don’t want to be identified with Western feminism. The book is optimistic about finding solutions in this journey.
What solutions are you offering?
I think women’s right is very much tied with democracy. At the same time, knowledge is important so the solution for me is to bring [Islamic religious] knowledge together with activism. Because you can have the best interpretation of the Quran, or understanding of Islamic jurisprudence, in line with the modern values, with the modern way of living, but if it does not become the dominant discourse, it’s not going to [produce] change. Therefore for me it is important to have movements to have activism.
One of the problems is the false dichotomy between those who work within a human rights framework, especially if they are women feminist, and those who only work within Islamic [scholarship], and I think this is a false dichotomy to stay only within the one particular discourse [without involving the other.]
Please listen to entire conversation here.
The Raw Footage of the Interview with Ziba Mir-Hosseini
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