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This chapter places Muslim women in the U.S. legal landscape, and discusses tensions between women's rights and secular notions of neoliberalism. How does a state committed to egalitarian principles accommodate a religious legal system widely believed to be patriarchal and oppressive of women? Here is a good example of where the clash-of-civilizations thesis purports that the values of a secular society are at odds with Islamic beliefs. The chapter examines the problem of anti-Muslim discrimination as it affects women, and then considers instances of divorce and child custody in which Islamic provisions have been evaluated in U.S. courts of law. Finally, it discusses the development of an Islamic feminism in relation to cultural testimony offered at trial in a California court of law. Notions of reworking the feminist subject outside of the terms of an “epistemological given” are taken up by Islamic feminists who call for a certain kind of Qur'anic hermeneutics.

This chapter explores the way hegemonic othering, patriarchy, and androcentrism impact Islamic feminist approaches to the Islamic tradition and to interreligious feminist engagement. To provide a concrete illustration, it surveys prominent positions adopted in the debate over the validity and referent of “Islamic feminism” and connects this to the main interpretative strategies Muslim women scholars in the United States use to negotiate and assert authority. Building on more recent critiques of the, the chapter then argues for the necessity of a new model of interreligious feminist engagement that goes beyond the story of “poisoned wells,” a new model that can address obstacles in interreligious feminist engagement; grapple with hegemony, patriarchy, and androcentrism; and respond to Islamic feminist calls for new approaches. The chapter concludes with an overview of the remaining parts of the book.

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.

This concluding chapter outlines some of the central differences between the interpretation of Ibn Άrabī's work presented in this book and other contemporary interpretations of his work. It begins with an examination of Seyyed Hossein Nasr's approach to gender and Sachiko Murata's complex view of Sufi gender constructs. The chapter then emphasizes how Ibn Άrabī's central teachings offer unique ways to engage with Islamic feminism. It ends with some reflections on how Sufism in general and Ibn Άrabī's teachings in particular shift the foundations of the debates in relation to Islamic and secular feminism, offering enriching ways to rethink gender and its articulations.

The central claim of this chapter is that worldviews that embrace traditional dictates, and even ones that take certain traditional dictates to be beyond question, can be genuinely feminist. Feminism is opposition to sexist oppression, and since this form of oppressiveness is a function of the effects of practices rather than their inheritedness, it is possible to oppose sexist oppression on traditionalist grounds. This is good news for anti-imperialist feminist projects, since wanton destruction of the traditions of “others” has often been understood as required for feminist change. The forms of freedom, autonomy, and the secular to which Western feminists appeal when justifying cultural damage is neither necessary for feminism nor central to its status as a normative doctrine. The chapter includes a discussion of the moral epistemologies of Islamic feminisms and a criticism of the normative conclusions of Saba Mahmood’s work.

This chapter turns to anglophone Middle Eastern literary production as an increasingly important site for the discursive and representational worlding of the region. I focus on the anglophone Iranian novel, and orient my discussion around questions of gender after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. After an overview of diasporic Iranian literary production in the context of geopolitical tensions with the West, I then delve more deeply into representations of gender. I argue that the massive popular and critical acclaim by which Azar Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books was met was based on its conformity to and reproduction of the “rogue state” idea of Iran, and its related disavowal of any form of feminism – especially Islamic feminism – other than the secular-liberal or universal. Yasmine Crowther’s and Marjane Satrapi’s (graphic) novels The Saffron Kitchen and Persepolis work against the cosmopolitan literary and political ideals to which Nafisi’s text subscribes, and instead plot trajectories of feminist agency in Iran rooted in and taking their contours from a sense of multiple belonging in nation, religion, family, and profession. They thus bring important Iranian perspectives to bear on the contemporary discussion of Islamic feminism in literature and culture.

An influential female figure of the Egyptian revolution, Asmaa Mahfouz was the twenty-eight-year-old who mobilized the April 6th movement and a prominent member of Egypt's Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution. By analyzing the feminist discourse of Asmaa Mahfouz, Samaa Gamie explores the role of Islamic and secular feminism in the emergence of her feminist ethos. She further examines the challenges posed to her ethos in virtual discourses, shedding light on Islamist mechanisms of silencing the female other and discrediting the feminist ethos.

Chapter 6 documents vibrant critiques of Maududi’s Janus-like neopatriarchate. It shows how people connected to the Jamaat criticized Maududi’s position on such issues as veiling, women’s participation in the public domain (including work and cinema), questions of eligibility to become head of state, studying in co-educational institutions, and issues of gender and knowledge. It also accounts for the factors enabling Maududi’s critique. It concludes by discussing what such critiques of Maududi’s neopatriarchate mean. Is it theoretically productive to describe such critiques as inaugurating an Islamic feminist discourse? Here, as elsewhere, the chapter reflects on the author’s earlier understanding to signal a reassessment. The key contention here is that the diverse critiques of Maududi’s position on women makes it clear that Islam, contra assertions by many feminists, can also be a critical language for empowering women.

The conclusion summarizes the key findings and argument of the book: India’s pluralist model of secularism that valorized religious community, coupled with a long history of patronage, encouraged redistributive claims and stronger cross-class attachments among Muslims based on paternalism; France’s militant secularism and elevation of a universal conception of citizenship hindered organizing along religious lines so that eventually, those in the working-class banlieues were left without ties to middle-class Muslims, and the immigrant rights movement they built in previous years weakened and fractured. In discussing implications of the four types of movements for deep democracy, feminist struggle, and the War on Terror, the chapter extends political and feminist theory. It discusses Arendt’s vision of political community and the notion of feminism as a practice of community.