scholarly journals Does Malala Need Saving? Understanding Western Idea of Rescue and Importance of Islamic Feminism in Malala Yousafzai’s Autobiography

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 301-307
Author(s):  
Shabnur Parveen
Keyword(s):  
Islamic Feminism ◽  
Western Idea

What's Divine about Divine Law?

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Dissonance ◽  
Second Temple ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Philo Of Alexandria ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Western Idea ◽  
Jewish Writers ◽  
Divine Law

In the thousand years before the rise of Islam, two radically diverse conceptions of what it means to say that a law is divine confronted one another with a force that reverberates to the present. This book untangles the classical and biblical roots of the Western idea of divine law and shows how early adherents to biblical tradition—Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Philo, the community at Qumran, Paul, and the talmudic rabbis—struggled to make sense of this conflicting legacy. This book shows that for the ancient Greeks, divine law was divine by virtue of its inherent qualities of intrinsic rationality, truth, universality, and immutability, while for the biblical authors, divine law was divine because it was grounded in revelation with no presumption of rationality, conformity to truth, universality, or immutability. The book describes the collision of these opposing conceptions in the Hellenistic period, and details competing attempts to resolve the resulting cognitive dissonance. It shows how Second Temple and Hellenistic Jewish writers, from the author of 1 Enoch to Philo of Alexandria, were engaged in a common project of bridging the gulf between classical and biblical notions of divine law, while Paul, in his letters to the early Christian church, sought to widen it. The book then delves into the literature of classical rabbinic Judaism to reveal how the talmudic rabbis took a third and scandalous path, insisting on a construction of divine law intentionally at odds with the Greco-Roman and Pauline conceptions that would come to dominate the Christianized West. This book sheds critical light on an ancient debate that would shape foundational Western thought, and that continues to inform contemporary views about the nature and purpose of law and the nature and authority of Scripture.

Islamic Feminism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Schröter
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Islamic Feminism ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Democratic Reform ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Islamic Historiography ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Transformation Processes

The aims of Islamic feminism are at once theological and socially reformist. Its proponents are often activists, as well as authors and scholars. It is linked to democratic reform movements within the Islamic world as well as to civil rights movements in Europe and the USA, and is supported by actors who resist the advances of patriarchal religious positions as well as Western secular definitions of modernity. Unlike secular feminists, proponents of Islamic feminism see the justification for their fight for women’s rights and gender equality in their own interpretation of Islam’s sacred text, the statements attributed to the Prophet, and his supposed life circumstances. In addition, they draw on approaches taken from new Islamic historiography. This chapter deals with the foundations of Islamic feminism and its transnational political dimension, and asks in what national and local transformation processes its proponents were able to have an impact.

On Selective Consumerism: Egyptian Women and Ethnographic Representations

2001 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-123
Author(s):  
Nadia Wassef
Keyword(s):  
Arab World ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Research Subjects ◽  
Islamic Feminism ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Egyptian Women ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact

In the light of postmodern debates in anthropology, ethnography offers anthropologists new ways of representing their objects of study. The politics involved in the production and consumption by feminist scholars and activists of women's representations in the Arab world, and Egypt specifically, provides the starting point of this article. Using an ethnographic text examining manifestations of ‘Islamic Feminism’ in Egypt, I explore problems in addressing the subject of veiling – a continuous favourite among researchers. Grappling with stereotypes, assumptions and pre-interpretations based on what we read before going to the field and the questions we formulate in our minds, I look towards strategies of engagement with research subjects where anthropologists can express their commitments to them. Research ethics and reflexivity offer no formulaic guarantees of better representations, but pave the way towards understanding one's motivations and urges ethnographers to examine the impact of their work, both on the immediate community, and with regard to larger power politics. Given the fluid nature of identities and the relative fixedness of representations, solutions do not appear in abundance. Working outside of unnecessary dichotomies and searching for incongruities presents interesting possibilities for future ethnographic research.

scholarly journals Divorce, kinship, and errant wives: Islamic feminism in India, and the everyday life of divorce and maintenance

Ethnicities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146879682199990
Author(s):  
Sagnik Dutta
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Islamic Feminism ◽  
Escape Route ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Movement Building ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Feminist Movements

This article is an ethnographic exploration of a women’s sharia court in Mumbai, a part of a network of such courts run by women qazi (Islamic judges) established across India by members of an Islamic feminist movement called the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (Indian Muslim Women’s Movement). Building upon observations of adjudication, counselling, and mediation offered in cases of divorce and maintenance by the woman qazi (judge), and the claims made by women litigants on the court, this article explores the imaginaries of the heterosexual family and gendered kinship roles that constitute the everyday social life of Islamic feminism. I show how the heterosexual family is conceptualised as a fragile and violent institution, and divorce is considered an escape route from the same. I also trace how gendered kinship roles in the heterosexual conjugal family are overturned as men fail in their conventional roles as providers and women become breadwinners in the family. In tracing the range of negotiations around the gendered family, I argue that the social life of Islamic feminism eludes the discourses and categories of statist legal reform. I contribute to existing scholarship on Islamic feminism by exploring the tension between the institutionalist and everyday aspects of Islamic feminist movements, and by exploring the range of kinship negotiations around the gendered family that take place in the shadow of the rhetoric of ‘law reform’ for Muslim communities in India.

Why History Should be Perceived Transnationally

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Klos
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Politics ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
German History ◽  
Media Industry ◽  
German Army ◽  
Western Idea ◽  
Foreign Politics ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
French National Identity ◽  
The Impact

Even though the concept of nationhood is a fairly recent and Western idea, it has left its mark not only on history itself, but on the way we are able to think, understand, and teach history. I have chosen a specific topic in German history, the stab-in-the-back legend of the First World War, which traditionally has always been conceptualized as a mere German discourse. Through an analysis of French newspapers, however, I was able to show that the myth of a never militarily defeated German army had meaning and consequences not only for German domestic politics, but transgressed national borders. It was a provocation well noted abroad, a journalistic tool to criticize French foreign politics, and an increasingly important influence of the war memorial in interwar France. This study revealed transnational aspects of history that are commonly overlooked when working within national frameworks. While history textbooks one hundred years later emphasize the great impact of the stab-in-the-back legend for German mentalities, we limit our views to national boundaries, and fail to acknowledge the impact of a globalized media industry. Not only was the German legend familiar to large parts of the French public, it also served as a historical site where the French national identity was formed against the backdrop the German “other.” The legend’s discourse thus perpetuated war images that legitimized French war efforts and losses. Hence, a transnational perspective of history does not negate the concept of nation, but transcends it.

scholarly journals Islamic Feminism: transnational and national reflections

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mulki Al-Sharmani
Keyword(s):  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Gender Justice ◽  
Islamic Feminism ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Alternative Description ◽  
Women Scholars ◽  
Alternative Gender ◽  
New Religion

This article focuses on contemporary interpretive knowledge projects that engage critically with Islamic religious sciences, and which are driven by the question of gender justice. These projects, which have been loosely termed as Islamic Feminism, are undertaken by Muslim women scholars from different countries who are committed to their religious faith and who are working towards the production of alternative, gender-sensitive religious knowledge. The paper has three aims: 1) to review the contestations about the definition, categorization, goals, and significance of what has been termed Islamic feminism, 2) to provide an alternative description of these knowledge projects and identify some hermeneutical characteristics that link them and which perhaps could be the basis for delineating them as a new field of knowledge, 3) to map out the trajectory of building new religion-based feminist knowledge in Egypt, shedding light on light on current knowledge projects that can be labelled as Islamic feminism.

scholarly journals Ubuntu feminism: Tentative reflections

2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Drucilla Cornell ◽  
Karin Van Marle
Keyword(s):  
Ethic Of Care ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Cape ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
Western Idea ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Social Belonging ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Intervention

The starting-point for the article is to provide a brief background on the Ubuntu Project that Prof. Drucilla Cornell convened in 2003; most notably the interviews conducted in Khayamandi, the support of a sewing collective, and the continued search to launch an Ubuntu Women�s Centre. The article will reflect on some of the philosophical underpinnings of ubuntu, whereafter debates in Western feminism will be revisited. Ubuntu feminism is suggested as a possible response to these types of feminisms. The authors support an understanding of ubuntu as critique and ubuntu feminism accordingly as a critical intervention that recalls a politics of refusal. The article ends by raising the importance of thinking about spatiality through ubuntu, and vice versa. It may seem strange to title an article Ubuntu feminism when feminism itself has often been identified as a European or Western idea. But, this article will argue that ubuntu offers conceptions of transindividuality and ways of social belonging that could respond in a meaningful way to some of European feminism�s own dilemmas and contradictions. Famously, one of the most intense debates in feminism was between those who defended an ethic of care in a relational view of the self, on one side, and those feminists who held on to more traditional conceptions of justice, placing an emphasis on individuality and autonomy, on the other side. The authors will suggest that ubuntu could address this tension in feminism. Thus, in this article the focus will not simply be on ubuntu, in order to recognise that there are other intellectual heritages worthy of consideration, other than those in Europe and the United States. It will also take a next step in arguing that ubuntu may be a better standpoint entirely from which to continue thinking about what it means to be a human being, as well as how to conceive of the integral interconnection human beings all have with one another. This connection through ubuntu is always sought ethically, and for the authors it underscores what we have both endorsed as ethical feminism. In this essay it is considered how ubuntu feminism could refuse the demands of patriarchy, as well as the confines of liberal feminism. The authors are interested in thinking about ubuntu in general as critique, as a critical response to the pervasiveness of a liberal legal order. Their aim is also to explore tentatively ubuntu and spatiality � how could one understand ubuntu in spatial terms, and more pertinently, how could ubuntu and ubuntu feminism relate to spatial justice? Before turning to the theoretical discussion, some of the on-the-ground history of the Ubuntu Project will be reviewed, including the Project�s attempt to build an Ubuntu Women�s Centre in Khayamandi in the Western Cape, South Africa.

scholarly journals BEGINNING OF ISLAMIC FEMINISM

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svitlana Hladchenko ◽  
Nataliia Makohonchuk ◽  
Nataliia Goliardyk
Keyword(s):  
Islamic Feminism
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