Contemporary Issues in Islam by Asma Afsaruddin

Author:Asma Afsaruddin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Feminist hermeneutics and socio-legal change: a case study

This new feminist hermeneutics is not of mere academic interest; it is being increasingly deployed by scholars and activists in a number of different social and academic contexts. As a case study of this kind of Muslim feminist hermeneutics in action and its potentially transformative consequences in the lives of real women, we will now turn our attention to one of the foremost, if not the foremost of modern women’s organisations today to openly challenge traditional male interpretations of the Qur’an and their legal formulations. This organisation is Sisters in Islam, a Malaysian feminist organisation led by the redoubtable feminist activist Zainah Anwar.

Zainah Anwar, born into a prominent family in Johor Bahru in Malaysia, served as a journalist for the well-known Malaysian newspaper the New Straits Times and earned a degree in International Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University in 1986. In 1988, she helped found Sisters in Islam along with a group of women lawyers, activists, academics and journalists. This organisation was launched to investigate the problems encountered by Muslim women in Sharia courts in Malaysia and to challenge laws and policies that claim to be founded on Islamic legal principles but are clearly discriminatory towards women. Its members have sponsored public debates and instituted education programmes which tackle controversial topics, such as equal rights for women, issues of dress and modesty, right to hold public office, including judgeships, and the right to guardianship, among others. They have also expanded to deal with larger issues of democracy, human rights and constitutionalism. Not surprisingly, Sisters in Islam has provoked criticism from conservative religious scholars in Malaysia because the women leaders are not traditionally trained scholars. However, some of the more liberal religious clergy have responded positively to overtures from Sisters in Islam and participated in seminars with them.79

Anwar has forcefully argued that patriarchal interpretations of Islam are to blame for current social injustices against women, and that a broader conversation about progressive interpretations and the role of Islam in daily life must be initiated.80 In an article that Zainah Anwar co-authored with Jana S. Rumminger, she identified some key challenges to legal reform in Muslim-majority societies which women’s activist groups need to tackle and proactively engage with in order to undermine them. Primary among these challenges are: (1) the popular but inaccurate belief in many mainstream Muslim societies that Muslim family law is God’s law and is, therefore, infallible and unchangeable, so that any effort at reform is regarded as un-Islamic and contrary to the well-being of Muslims; and (2) the general belief that men and women do not have equal rights in Islam, so that demands for equal rights to divorce, guardianship and inheritance, for example, are portrayed as going against the Sharia.81

Anwar set up the Sisters in Islam in order to address these concerns and offer leadership and guidance to women who were increasingly questioning the non-egalitarian interpretations offered by traditional religious leaders. To this

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