Constructions of an “Islamic Tradition” and Islamic Feminism in the Western Muslim Diaspora
Islamic feminism has gained immense attention within academia, but it continues to be otherized, if ignored, largely within the mainstream Muslim American community. Possible reasons of the popular unwillingness to engage feminist interpretations of Islam have highlighted Muslim feminists’ tendency to depart from the Islamic tradition. However, this claim makes assumptions about the meanings and constructions of the Islamic tradition as well as about the roles of religion—and of evolutions in religious thought—in popular, mainstream communities; it also diverts from a necessary focus on the problems with approaching the Islamic tradition as a static, unalterable, and complete truth instead of the malleable, adaptable, and continual construct that it actually is. I question the usefulness of the juxtaposition of Islamic feminism and the Islamic tradition against each other as though the two are incompatible, as though Islamic feminism has nothing to contribute to the on-going construction of the Islamic tradition, and/or as though Muslims must choose between one or the other.
Strengthening the relationship between the Islamic tradition and Islamic feminism, in this presentation, I argue that, given the vastness of the Islamic tradition—generally and simply referring to Islam’s textual and legal tradition with emphasis on tafsir—diasporic Muslims, and Muslims in the West particularly, cannot afford to restrict the “Islamic tradition” in ways that deny room for feminist and other alternative approaches to Islam. This argument acknowledges the fluidity, nuance, and history of the construction of Islamic tradition in a way that includes feminist hermeneutical methods of interpreting Islam as legitimate. It also shifts the careless tendency to place on Muslim feminists themselves the responsibility of their “invalidity” in the mainstream Muslim American community; instead, it considers the roles of simplistic understandings of an imagined Islamic tradition, and of Islamic feminism, in the unwillingness to engage with Islamic feminist thought.