Journeys Towards Gender Equality in Islam

Overview

What you will study

Gender equality is a modern idea that, in Islam – as in other religious traditions – was not a subject of discussion until the twentieth century, along with the expansion of feminist and human rights discourses. Since then, it has been the subject of an impassioned debate – a debate that has been entangled in the polemics between Islam and the West and the anti-colonial and nationalist movements of the first part of the twentieth century.

With the rise of political Islam in the second half of the century, and the Islamist slogan of ‘Return to Shari‘a’, the debate became part of a larger intellectual and political struggle among Muslims, between two broad understandings of their religion and two ways of approaching its sacred texts.

One is an absolutist, dogmatic and patriarchal Islam that makes little concession to contemporary realities, such as the changed status of women in society. The other is a democratic, pluralist and rights-based Islam. By the end of the century, this struggle gave birth to a new gender discourse that began to challenge patriarchal interpretations of the Shari‘a from within, and came to be known as Islamic feminism.

These developments will be unpacked in the Journeys Towards Gender Equality in Islam course offered by University of Oxford , with a focus on variant conceptions of gender and rights in contemporary Islamic discourses. We shall also examine the activities of Musawah, a movement of scholars and activists launched in 2009.