The feminist movement in Islam

WON THE POLYGAMY STRUGGLE: Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi and other Iranian feminists recently managed to block a law that would have made it easier for men to take several wives.

Text. Hilde Kvalvaag

The most prominent feminist in Lebanon is a male ayatollah. In Sudan’s capital Khartoum, female Islamists see themselves as liberated. Women’s rights and feminism are high up on the Muslim agenda, claim research fellows Marianne Bøe and Liv Tønnessen, both of whom are researching women’s status and women’s movements within Islam, Marianne Bøe in Iran and Liv Tønnessen in Sudan and Lebanon. Liv Tønnessen has recently returned from Beirut, where she was supposed to collect data for comparison with women’s movements in Sudan – a task that turned out to be a complicated affair.

Progressive ayatollah

Liv Tønnessen: ‘Hizbollah has imposed a total media blackout on all issues relating to women's rights, so this time I did not manage to meet the people I wanted to talk to in Hizbollah. I did however manage to get an interview with the leading Shia Muslim Ayatollah Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah. He is very active in the area of women and Islam and appears on TV, the radio and in newspapers. He has his own website, organises fundraisers and speaks in mosques. Fadlallah has a lot of progressive views. For example, he encourages men to do more around the house and women to take courses in self-defence and to participate in society and politics. He has openly criticised Hizbollah for not including more female candidates on their electoral lists. Fadlallah is often associated with Hizbollah and the dividing line between them is sometimes vague. He is often proclaimed to be Hizbollah’s ideological leader, something Fadlallah himself denies. The Ayatollah Khomeini is seen as the supreme religious authority and ideological inspiration for Hizbollah. Fadlallah, who grew up and was educated in Iraq, is critical of both Iran and the Ayatollah at times.’

Women reinterpreting the Koran

We recently learned that conservative politicians are forcing Iranian feminists underground. It was after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005 that the government shifted from a pro-reform to a more conservative line. There was a time when Ayatollah Khomeini encouraged women to participate in political life, and he introduced a national women's organisation following the revolution in Iran. There were relatively few women in Khomeini’s first government. Women activists gradually became better organised and put women’s issues on the agenda in the Islamic republic. Now the women are facing opposition, but there is nevertheless a large women's movement in Iran, where almost 70% of students are female and many do not marry until they are 30. Marianne Bøe has been conducting research on the current debate on family law, taking the endeavours of various women activists as her starting point.

Marianne Bøe: ‘I am looking at activists in Teheran, and there is a big distinction between the rural districts and the cities. But the situation in Iran is completely different from that in Afghanistan, for example, where women’s access to education is limited. Iranian women are currently opposing a proposed new family law in which the parliament has proposed abolishing the consent of the first wife in the case of polygamous marriages. Iranian women experienced the government’s attempt to introduce laws that would make it easier for men to have several wives as a backlash. With Shirin Ebadi at the forefront, women activists in Teheran marched on parliament in protest and managed to stop ratification of the legislation. This process shows that there is a lot of scope for interpretation in Islam. Most women activists wish to see laws that involve the codification of Muslim scriptures, primarily the Koran and the hadiths. They point out that there is nothing in Islam to suggest that the practice of polygamy should be maintained. Islam is dynamic. To understand women’s rights under Sharia law, you must distinguish between actual laws and Islamic feminists’ strategy for change,’ says Liv Tønnessen. Equal rights for women are sometimes absent in the laws of the Middle East and North Africa today.’

Liv Tønnessen: ‘In Sudan, polygamy is stigmatising, even though it is permitted there by law. Many different interpretations are heard in the debate on polygamy. Interpreting Islam is an incredibly dynamic project. Islam is not an enemy of the people that has a life of its own. All the same, there is no set answer to what is the right or wrong interpretation. Interpretation is therefore an elastic and sometimes selective exercise that makes Islam mutable. Whether an interpretation tends towards an extremely liberal or extremely conservative stance depends, quite simply, on who is doing the interpreting. We have the same thing in Christianity. Bishop Kvarme asserts that, according to the bible, homosexuality is a sin. Many Norwegian Christians reject this out of hand and point to other Christian values when arguing the homosexuals’ case. The question of whether there is a path to women’s liberation inside Islam is an issue on which Muslim women (and men) disagree. It is the same for female imams as for women priests; their existence depends on who interprets the holy scriptures. At present, we are seeing expressions of this selective and elastic reinterpretation of Islam in the form of Islamic feminists seeking to reinterpret the Koran from the perspective of gender equality. This is both an eye-opening and important development.’

Marianne Bøe: ‘The scope for negotiation for these women lies within Islam. They may be secular feminists in private, but laws must be based on a strategy that works, which means that they must operate within the Islamic framework. It says in the Koran that polygamy is permitted, but in the second part of the verse it says that a man must treat all his wives equally. This, say women activists, is impossible, and they therefore interpret it to mean that polygamy should not be permitted.’

A wife for an hour

Marianne Bøe: ‘Feminism in Iran has an elitist element to it. Most of them come from the upper middle class and from the cities. Nevertheless, more and more students are coming from the rural districts and from other social classes. They organise petitions, take part in meetings and are involved in what they call “basic” activism. There is a lot of internal conflict within these loosely organised women’s movements. One of the issues they disagree on is what kind of rights they are fighting for. There are secular groups in Teheran that want international conventions and that fight against polygamy. But you also find religious women in government bodies who consider polygamy to be good for women and a means of protecting the family. The reason given for this is that it protects against infidelity and divorce. But polygamy is not common, mostly because it is so expensive. The man is required to provide an additional family with housing and the means of subsistence, and it is therefore something that not many men can afford. To have two wives living in the same house is not a desirable situation. Both polygamy and temporary marriages are now being encouraged in Iran. It is said that marriage can last from one second to 99 years. Men can take a wife for one hour, and many believe that this is a way of disguising prostitution; yet there are women activists who are in favour of this arrangement because it protects a woman's honour. There are many single people in Iran today, and every life choice is being postponed. To be an unmarried woman over 30 years of age is considered extremely un-Islamic.’

Islam versus Western feminism

Liv Tønnessen: ‘So far, Islamic feminists agree with Western, secular feminists. But Islamic feminists regard the laws as the product of a conservative and patriarchal interpretation of Islam made by and for men. Moreover, they claim that the path to liberation is not secular, but Islamic. Feminists in Sudan and other places are fighting the battle on two fronts: against patriarchal men and against Western feminists who say that they need to be saved from Islam. The Western package is seen as a straitjacket. And many regard Western feminists as arrogant. Their interpretation is that Western feminists insist that women in Muslim countries are oppressed, yet the Muslim women themselves do not consider this to be the case. You don't lose your voice just because you wear a hijab. The women I interviewed in Sudan are strong and politically active. They have never struck me as being oppressed. We do not need to save them from Islam.’

Marianne Bøe: ‘It’s not that they have anything against Western feminists. Women who fight for women’s rights in Iran read both The Second Sex and the Koran, but they are also concerned that Western feminism does not fit in in Iran. Many of them are irritated by the insistence that they need to be secularised, and they see Western women as irreligious.’

Educated in the West

Liv Tønnessen: ‘One criticism of Islamic feminism is that the debate is being conducted by upper middle-class women who were educated in the West. This is something I see very clearly in Sudan, and we can question whether these women can represent Muslim women’s lives. As for the village women, they cannot easily take part in a more or less academic “discourse” in Khartoum, Teheran or elsewhere. I also think that Islamic feminists who work in multi-religious contexts, such as in Sudan and Lebanon, often forget to include women from minority groups in their struggle for equality. This is a paradox when you think of how Muslims in Europe are extremely concerned about their rights as a minority group.’

Liv Tønnessen: ‘Islamic feminists are not that different from feminists in the USA. Both these feminist groups are seeking reforms within dominant ideologies, whether they be capitalist or Islamic. You could say that Islamic feminism is a kind of negotiation between the women and the government. In any case, there are a lot of similarities with Western feminism: women in Sudan and Lebanon believe that all women should participate in politics, that they should work and that there should be equal pay for equal work.’

Marianne Bøe: ‘Attempts have been made to create a united international Muslim women’s movement, though they have proved unsuccessful. The Sisters of Islam from Malaysia is one organisation that operates in an international arena with considerable success, however. For example, since 2005 they have been working on developing family legislation that they believe is in line with both Islam and principles such as fairness and equality. Their goal is that the proposed legislation can be used as a tool for promoting reforms in Muslim countries. Efforts like this can prove to be more viable than solutions that are imported from outside.’

The article is published in Hubro 2/2009

THE HIJAB IS NOT THE PROBLEM: ‘You don't lose your voice just because you wear a hijab,’ says religious studies scholar Marianne Bøe, who is also affiliated to the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) and political scientist Liv Tønnessen, a researcher at the Christian Michelsen Institute (CMI). Foto: Thor Brødreskift