Problematizing Islamic feminisms

Abstract

Islamic feminisms argue that the message of the Qur’anic revelation is a guarantor of women’s rights. This paper aims to discuss Islamic feminisms as a double resistance: to colonial structures and to patriarchal discourses constructed in the name of Islam. The production of Islamic feminisms can be situated in two lines of reflection: the Western tradition and the Islamic tradition. As for the orientalist assumptions of the West, the dominance of hegemonic feminism strategies as the only valid form of emancipation is denounced. Regarding the Islamic patriarchal structures, all the jurisprudence elaborated from a masculine point of view is called into question. Lamrabet (2017) considers that the original message of Islam has been distorted due to the monopoly of religious knowledge by men, who have made a patriarchal interpretation that has marginalized the role of women. According to Grosfoguel (2014) and Adlbi (2017), there has been a colonial distortion of the Muslim tradition that has modified aspects of Islamic theology itself. In the case of the hijab, colonial empires have assumed a discourse of salvation. At the same time, some Islamic contemporary notions of the hijab reduce the entire global ethics of the Qur’an to the concept of the hijab. What spaces should Islamic feminisms occupy? Not all of its proposals are decolonial. It has often failed to analyse liberation in their own terms, resulting in the reproduction of the narratives defined by the hegemonic norms of Western societies. The analysis of the proposals of Islamic feminisms contributes to examine how they can move beyond the realm of discourse and response to the expression of their aspirations in self-defined terms, reinterpreting the meaning of the sacred sources of Islam from a gender perspective with the goal of finding the emancipatory spirit of the spiritual message of Islam.

KEY WORDS: Islamic feminisms; hijab; intersectionality; decoloniality; patriarchy.