ISLAMIC AND ARAB FEMINISM AS AN ELEMENT OF WOMEN’S IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

Keeping the Gates Open

This paper engages interAsian digitalities through a west Asian and Arab feminist lens, which I refer to using the Arabic term Nazrah Arabyya, meaning an Arab feminist perspective. It conceptualizes interAsian digitalities as rooted in the history and connections of feminist movements across Asia and the third world, including the Arab feminist movement. I explore the question: how can we use Arab feminist media praxis as a method in researching and creating interAsian digitalities? I argue that this feminist knowledge and history can help us expand our strategic thinking about the present and future of interAsian digitalities. First, the paper offers translations from Arabic feminist scholarship on the topic of media as a means to connect and extend the scope of Asian feminist media studies and interAsian digitalities more broadly. Second, it examines how the Eastern Women’s Congress for the Defense of Palestine (1938) engaged with the topic of media to articulate political demands and mandates. I argue that reflecting on Arab feminist knowledge on the topic of media deepens our questions and creative visions for building anti-colonial and justice-centered interAsian digital systems.

Feminist movements are one of the most controversial movements, and these movements would not have been around had it not been for philosophical support. In general, their philosophy is based on postmodern philosophies, which are considered general knowledge of the overall pan of what is raised in feminist criticism. The importance of knowing these Western philosophical foundations of feminism comes to light when unveiling them from the joints of Arab feminist thought where it becomes clear to the critic that Arab feminist thought is only an echo of Western feminist thought.

Islam is a religion that upholds the values of justice and equal rights between men and women, but the understanding of the Indonesian Muslim community is still wrong with the teachings of Islam. One of the reasons includes misunderstanding of misogynistic hadiths, namely hadiths that editorially seem to demean women. This study aims to explore Islamic feminists’ rejection of the textual understanding of misogynistic hadiths to uphold gender justice. This Islamic feminist stance needs to receive support so that gender justice is in line with Islamic law. This research uses empirical qualitative methods by analyzing the theory of understanding hadith and gender theory. The study obtained data from interviews and a literature review. The respondents interviewed were academics, NGO activists, and community leaders, while the literature included journal articles, books, and Islamic textbooks on Islamic law. The study took place in Makassar City, Indonesia from September 2022 to March 2023. Findings reveal that Islamic feminists in Makassar City criticize the textual interpretations of misogynistic hadiths as they demean women’s dignity and are not in accordance with the values of Islamic teachings. If analyzed from a gender perspective, Islamic feminists have played an important role in fighting for gender equality in a religious context. Meanwhile, in the context of hadith understanding theory, a contextual approach is needed to provide a comprehensive understanding of society so that gender justice is realized. The contribution of this study is that the Islamic feminist perspective that reviews misogynistic hadith through a contextual approach helps provide inspiration and direction for other efforts to encourage social change and gender justice.

The corpus of miriam cooke’s writing defines new frontiers in scholarship on women’s writings on war and violence, Islamic feminism, and the dissident politics of art and literature. cooke engages with double critique that writes against Orientalism and Islamophobia as well as indigenous forms of repression and injustice. Her emphasis is on the intersections of power and poetics, highlighting the aesthetics of political critique. Her work identifies the persistent agency of women writers and artist-activists in times of hopelessness and turbulence. Her scholarship, deeply grounded in several countries in the Arab world, generates questions about gender, politics, and everyday experiences in Turkey, where I have been conducting research since the 1990s. Women have been at the forefront of contestations over the terms of inclusion and exclusion in Turkey. They challenge prevailing hegemonies, provoked partly by the targeting of women’s bodies, dress, and subject positions by differently situated ideological groups, secular or Islamist, attempting to reconfigure the public sphere according to their vision.Women Claim Islam, which focuses on the rise of Islamic feminism in the Arab world, helps us understand how secular and religious women in contemporary Turkey respond to prevalent power structures and political ideologies. cooke (2001, viii) argues that dominant narratives of history, war, emigration, and exile have excluded women’s stories, leading Arab women writers to demand “to be heard and seen.” These writers have formulated complex identifications based on their multiple positionalities, criticizing global and national feminisms and Islamic power and knowledge systems that marginalize them (155).Much of the research I conduct in Turkey focuses especially on women who self-identify as devout Muslims. For much of the 1990s through 2010, the headscarf symbolized shifting ideological fault lines in Turkey (Secor 2005). During this period the state banned the wearing of this article of clothing in many government and public spaces. In other spaces, secularists maligned and marginalized women who wore it. From 1996 to 2013 I heard many accounts of how women’s practice of wearing the headscarf had initiated encounters and experiences that made them aware of the dominance of secular ideology not only on the streets but also in scholarship, in feminist activism, and with respect to their own bodies and family lives. All devised tactics to navigate the everyday geographies of secularism and several became actively involved in resisting this hegemony by producing alternative realities.In Women Claim Islam cooke (2001, ix) usefully defines feminism as “above all an epistemology”: “it is an attitude, a frame of mind that highlights the role of gender in understanding the organization of society.” Whether or not a woman self-identifies as a feminist, cooke argues that feminism “seeks justice wherever it can find it. Feminism involves political and intellectual awareness of gender discrimination, a rejection of behaviors furthering such discrimination, and the advocacy of activist projects to end discrimination and to open opportunities for women to participate in public life” (x). This emphasis on feminism as awareness, rejection, and activism is productive for thinking about how headscarf-wearing women have responded to opposing parties politicizing and instrumentalizing women’s dress and bodies in struggles for power and dominance. Pious women have strategically claimed identities as Muslim women while refusing to be depicted as the singular Muslimwoman—a term that cooke (2007) coined to criticize the erasure of differences among Muslim women and the emergence of an ascribed singular category where gender and religion become one. Turkish women, most of whom wore the headscarf, participated in demonstrations at the gates of universities and in city squares to criticize the headscarf ban from the mid-1980s. Realizing that most women’s rights organizations were aligned with secular state-sponsored feminism and did not consider the headscarf ban a violation of women’s rights, devout Muslim women either established new Islamic feminist organizations (Diner and Toktaş 2010, 42) or started working in human rights organizations. Several sued the Turkish state at the European Court of Human Rights, to no avail (Gökarıksel and Mitchell 2005).Focusing on the symbolism of the headscarf reduces this article of clothing to a representation of something else and erases the experiences of women and even the woman herself. Instead, the stories of women in my research illustrate how veiling is an embodied spatial practice that makes the body and shapes the experiences of women across the spaces they traverse (Gökarıksel 2007, 2009, 2012). In all cases, women’s stories reveal the intimate, embodied, and everyday workings of political power and the potential of women’s actions to expose and reconfigure that power. Indeed, women’s embodied practices, such as wearing the headscarf and identifying as devout Muslims, became crucial to their awareness of gender injustices. Their experiences helped many see and feel these injustices as products of secular nationalist political ideologies. This kind of awareness remains a critical element of their ability to challenge the reign of the Islamically oriented populist nationalism of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) regime as well.Women’s encounters with the state and broader cultural hegemony in public spaces produced a certain kind of feminist consciousness. For example, after deciding to wear a headscarf in college, Neriman found herself no longer able to pursue her university degree, disowned by her family, and rapidly losing her hair. Becoming pious and adopting a new style of dress and bodily conduct underscored for her an intimately felt sense of gendered injustice and initiated a critical approach to the making of bodies, everyday spaces, and the state (Gökarıksel 2009). Similarly, many Turkish women who wear the headscarf recount stories of feeling out of place in shopping malls (Gökarıksel 2007). Fellow citizens verbally and even physically assaulted such women at parks and on the streets because of their dress (Gökarıksel and Secor 2016).Pious Turkish women insistently claim their rights and seek belonging in the city and nation. Today headscarf-wearing women are increasingly and more comfortably visible in the media and on the street in Turkey. However, new lines of exclusion and unfreedom have emerged. For example, during a focus-group discussion with self-identifying devout women in 2013 in Istanbul, when one woman praised the AKP government for taking steps to address discriminatory acts against headscarf-wearing women, another questioned her claim of new freedoms, citing the crackdown on the Gezi protesters as an example (Gökarıksel and Secor 2016). This conversation underlines that while Islamic feminists have certainly developed deep criticisms of state secularism and associated feminist movements, they still can do more to criticize the masculinist, Islamic populist politics of the AKP regime as well as to stand up for the freedom of all women and other oppressed groups.A sea change occurred in Turkey at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A neoliberal, procapitalist, and increasingly authoritarian Islamically oriented government led by Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP and a newly enfranchised Sunni Muslim middle class challenged secular hegemony over politics, economics, and public life. To an important degree, these Islamic political and economic elites have become the new hegemons. Their values, lifestyles, and ideologies have replaced the spaces, institutions, and cultural norms previously defined by secular elites. These drastic changes are especially visible in the cosmopolitan city of Istanbul, where the new elites constantly and sometimes violently contest the city’s pluralism. The 2013 Gezi mass protests were a significant flash point in the struggle over who has a right to the city and whose norms and values will govern it.Since the rise of Islamic government, pious and secular Turkish women have also had to develop tactics to live with and challenge the hegemony of Muslim nationalism (White 2013). Since the AKP lifted the ban against the veil, wearing the headscarf has ironically become almost an obligation in many places. Studies today find that women feel that they must cover their heads and publicly present themselves as observant Muslims to ensure access to jobs and for family social mobility and economic success (Toprak et al. 2009). Women who wore tank tops or short skirts reported being harassed on the street even during demonstrations to counter the military coup attempt on July 15, 2016 (Tahaoğlu 2016, cited in Korkman 2017, 182, and Başdaş 2017, 187).Islamic feminism developed a crucial voice against oppressive secular republican ideology and secular state feminism. Today Islamic feminists are uniquely positioned to oppose the new forms of Islamic masculinist hegemony of government that professes to represent the victimized devout Muslim majority. The AKP consolidated its power over a decade in government, moving it in a more religiously and socially conservative direction, especially after 2007. In late May 2013 a mass movement emerged to resist a government plan to demolish a central Istanbul park and its centuries-old trees, but it quickly spiraled into a widespread protest against the AKP government, its neoliberal policies and practices, its intensified imposition of an Islamic lifestyle, and its increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Similar protest sites developed in other cities throughout the country.In Istanbul many groups came together at Taksim Gezi Park, and some joined an encampment that lasted more than two weeks. Among them were anticapitalist and revolutionary Muslims, including women who joined the protests to reject Erdoğan’s efforts to present himself as representative of all pious Muslims. Photographs of such women circulated widely. In one, a headscarf-wearing woman carried a banner that ridiculed the Erdoğan government’s legislation restricting the sale of alcohol: “It’s impossible to stand you when sober” (Ayık kafayla çekilmiyorsun AKP). The poster held by the woman standing next to her (also wearing a headscarf) read: “Standing together against fascism” (Faşizme karşı omuz omuza) (festigan.blogspot.com/2013/06/direnis-degil-uyanis.html).The presence at the demonstrations of headscarf-wearing women whose Islamic orientation was visibly marked was significant because Erdoğan consistently tried to present the protests as a return to the “tyranny” of the secular establishment. To illustrate this narrative, he and progovernment media circulated apocryphal stories of headscarf-wearing women being abused in Istanbul during the Gezi protests. The presence of visibly pious Muslim protesters at Gezi complicated such representations. On June 7, 2013, about fifty headscarf-wearing women marched to protest the harassment of headscarf-wearing women on the street and expanded their concerns to include forms of violence that target all women. This march ended at Taksim Gezi Park, where the marchers noted a lack of harassment. They asserted ownership of urban spaces with banners that read, “Taksim is ours, Çarşı is ours, the street is ours.” They enacted “a politics that refused the alignment of the headscarf with unconditional support for the AKP government, and call[ed] for a broad feminist alliance to fight violence against all women” (Gökarıksel 2016, 236–37).Following Gezi and the corruption scandal that threatened Erdoğan’s close circle in the winter of 2014, the AKP government continued to amass power and suppress critics. The unsuccessful coup attempt of July 15, 2016, fueled a widespread government crackdown on its opposition facilitated by the declaration of a state of emergency. The government arrested and detained thousands of people and canceled the passports of many more. Most of these people were associated in some way with Fethullah Gülen’s Hizmet Movement, which the government accuses of orchestrating the coup. However, among the detained are also critics of the AKP, pro-Kurdish activists, academics who signed a peace petition, and members of parliament from the People’s Democratic Party (HDP). For years Erdoğan voiced ambitions to change the parliamentary system into a presidential system that gives the leader more executive power. After the coup the parliament proposed a referendum on this issue for April 16, 2017. The results are widely contested, although Erdoğan declared victory.Women’s voices, Turkish and Kurdish, were crucial leading up to the referendum. They challenged what they aptly called “one-man rule” and urged everyone to vote no. Among these were devout Muslim women who wore a headscarf and even the çarşaf. Their voices questioned ethnic and religious divisions that extend the ruling party’s power. They challenged the narrative that the AKP is ruling on behalf of all devout Muslims. They expressed a clear message that being religious does not mean supporting Erdoğan unconditionally and pointed to ongoing and expanding injustices. These women voiced their opposition despite strong measures to silence any dissent.cooke’s work on Islamic feminism opens up productive avenues for understanding women’s awareness, positioning, and activism. The work draws attention to the ways in which women who may not necessarily identify as feminist are indeed feminists—and may be uniquely positioned to expose and subvert masculinist narratives and ideologies. They do so even, or perhaps especially, in repressive environments where their bodies, dress, and everyday practices become targets of political ideologies and when cultural and political hegemony is manifest through their bodies. In Turkey such women have challenged secular ideology and encouraged moving away from authorized state feminism toward more plural feminisms. Today their voices are crucial for questioning the encroaching authoritarianism of an Islamically justified ideology.cooke (2007, 140) notes how central Muslim women have become to political discourses and cultural production about the Middle East and Islam:In the twenty-first century, Muslim fundamentalists, neo-Orientalists, Western feminists and Muslim and non-Muslim states are all arguing about what is right and wrong for the newly visible Muslim women. More and more Muslim women are joining the fray. Recognizing their centrality to their society’s self-conception, they are looking for ways to affirm themselves. Many are embracing and performing a singular religious and gender identity even if their lives are as varied as the innumerable cultures they inhabit.The increased visibility of Muslim women, cooke argues, generates a primary identity in which gender and religion become inseparable and gain ascendance over other identity categories. Such reductive labels serve conservative right-wing politics at home and abroad: “The Muslimwoman erases for non-Muslims the diversity among Muslim women and, indeed, among all Muslims. This erasure of diversity is mirrored within Muslim societies . . . where the Muslimwoman becomes the emblem of the purity of her community” (cooke 2007, 142).These dynamics continue to structure how others see and represent Muslim women as well as how they see and represent themselves. Identifying a diverse “Islamic culture industry” that includes fashion, literature, and products for Muslim women (Gökarıksel and McLarney 2010), cooke, Ellen McLarney, and I collaborated on the “Marketing Muslim Women” project, which examined the production, circulation, and consumption of images, commodities, and narratives concerning Muslim women in the early twenty-first century. The related JMEWS-sponsored conference led to the publication of a special issue of the journal that I guest-edited with McLarney. The essays focus on the negotiation and redefinition of what it means to be a Muslim woman “through or in reaction to the images, narratives, and knowledges about Muslim womanhood constructed in the marketplace.” We argue, “As Muslim women stake out their own positions, they actively engage with given Islamic practice and knowledge as well as with modalities of capitalism” (2). The political implications of this engagement continue to be crucial.cooke (2007, 153) encourages us to examine how women form and negotiate their gender and religious identities in complex times. Such a project remains important as the image of the Muslimwoman continues to circulate, even wrapped in the US flag in an iconic response to Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric and policies. cooke’s research provides us with the critical tools we need to perform double critique that questions given categories, develops grounded understandings of agency, and recognizes the aesthetics of politics.

Discussions on men and women in Islam involve three major schools of thought: classical Muslim scholars, secular feminists, and Muslim feminists. While all aim to uphold women’s dignity, they diverge in their interpretations. Classical Muslim scholars emphasize justice but do not necessarily advocate absolute equality between men and women, whereas secular and Muslim feminists argue for full equality in rights and responsibilities as a form of just treatment. In particular, Muslim feminists engage in Quranic reinterpretation to uncover gender justice rooted in equality. This paper examines how Muslim feminists construct their arguments in Quranic reinterpretation, critiques the logic underlying their exegetical approach, and explores a Quranic perspective on gender justice that is both “meaningful” and contextually relevant to contemporary society. To achieve this, the study employs a critical-appreciative approach, integrating critical discourse analysis and maqasidic interpretation to analyze these three aspects. The findings highlight three key points: first, the efforts of Muslim feminists in advocating for women’s fundamental rights deserve recognition; second, their exegetical reasoning requires scrutiny, as it tends to shift from social analysis to ideological assertion; and third, the Quran presents a concept of gender justice that is dynamic and adaptable to diverse contemporary contexts. Justice in Islam does not always equate to equality; rather, it can manifest as proportional rights and responsibilities that maintain social balance and harmony. Thus, gender justice can be achieved through differentiation, provided it upholds fairness within the given context. This study bridges feminist and traditional Islamic scholarship by critically assessing Muslim feminist exegesis and proposing a contextualized framework for Quranic gender justice.

Pam Alldred and Sarah Dennison argue that the first wave of feminism represented the 'struggle for equality and integration,' the second wave criticised 'dominant values and sometimes inverted value-hierarchies to revalue qualities associated with the feminine,' while feminism in its third wave transgresses boundaries through 'deconstructing the presumption of a gender binary or the conventional ways of doing politics' (126). Does third wave feminism provide a space for Muslim feminism? Certainly, the pluralities embraced under third wave feminism offer a more welcoming space than previous feminisms. Patricia McFadden, referring to African feminist consciousness, refutes the claim that the notions of gender, feminism and woman are necessarily Western, arguing that the problem with this theoretical model is that it regards ' "women" as a construct [as] also western When gender and women disappear from the conceptual landscape, then feminist resistance politics is also displaced, leaving us without a political means of responding to patriarchal exclusion' (61; emphasis added). This has allowed an oppositional strategy to emerge, pitting West against East, one feminism against another. Susan Muaddi Darraj sums up the apparent tensions for the West in the terms 'Arab' and 'feminist': Indeed, it comes as a surprise to many Western women and Western feminists to learn that there is, and has been, a strong Arab feminist movement in the Middle East at least since the beginning of the twentieth century. Whenever I use the terms "Arab feminism," it generally elicits such comments from American feminists as "That sounds like an oxymoron!" and questions such as "Can you be a feminist if you're still veiled?" and "How can a Muslim woman be a feminist if she shares her husband with three other wives?" (190)

This paper focuses on the activism and feminism of the Egyptian Islamist, Zaynab al-GhazzAlA« al-JubaylA« (1918 to 2009) in order to examine how she has thought about Muslim women’s roles in both the political and Islamist struggles of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The existing literature while attesting to Zaynab al-GhazzAlA«’s eminent position in both contemporary Islamic circles and feminist discourses, have failed to show how her feminist activities intersect with that of the Muslim brotherhood. As against the secular gender and feminist postulations of Muslim women like Fatima Mernissi, Ahmed Leila, Assia Djebar and Nawal Sadawi, this paper examines how Zaynab’s feminist activism and the organization of the Muslim Brotherhood intersect in their Da‘wah approaches and contributions to the revivalism of ‘authentic” Islamic feminism in contemporary society. This paper will ground itself upon Zaynab’s autobiographical work, AyyAm min â•“ayAtA« to show how Zaynab and her sisters, using the Muslim brotherhood’s struggles, were able to employ the Islamist female agency even under the unfavourable brutal regime of the then Egyptian President, JamAl ‘Abd al-NAsir (1375 to 1390/1956 to 1970). Key words: Zaynab al- GhazzAlA«, authentic islamic feminism, Egypt, Muslim brotherhood, female agency.

In the academic novel of the 1980s, which Elaine Showalter dubs the feminist towers, women characters are not limited to beautiful and seductive students or faculty wives, whose husbands’ academic career appears to be also their own goal. Although the very presence of women in academia is often interpreted as a threat to the male reign over the ‘small world,’ female scholars are determined to expose and fight against gender inequity and inequality in order to be perceived and valued as fully-fledged scholars. Paradoxically, even if women are considered serious candidates for different university positions, they cannot indulge in the same intense pleasures of academic life as their male counterparts due to the overpowering feeling of being the other. An analysis of female scholar characters and their diverse attitudes towards feminism is based on two academic mystery novels written in the 1980s, Death in a Tenured Position by Amanda Cross and Graves in Academe by Susan Kenney. It is followed by an investigation of the reasons making academics feel nostalgia for the university of the 1980’s, i.e. the milieu before the emergence of the protective power of the Me Too movement and reports on sexual harassment of women in academia published by the NASEM.

This thesis focuses on Muslim literature, a diverse literature that includes literary works produced in English by Muslim authors of different ethnicities and cultural heritages. Uniquely, it approaches this literature from a religious perspective and concentrates on the religious domain, which has been usually avoided by postcolonial studies examining Muslim literature. Muslim literature is usually analysed from a secular perspective that focuses on highlighting cultural diversity among Muslim authors but sheds limited light on their religious diversity. This secular approach dominates partly because of the limitation of postcolonial theory in relation to Islam, and partly because of the conflict created between Islam and literature by Muslim critics, both secular and religious. In focusing on the religious rather than the cultural domain, I limit the scope of my examination to include only contemporary Muslim writers who have the same ethnicity and similar cultural backgrounds. To be precisely, I concentrate on contemporary British Arab Muslim writers, specifically, Fadia Faqir (1956–, of Jordanian origin) and Leila Aboulela (1964–, of Sudanese and Egyptian origin). I also select Islamic feminism itself as a site of religious diversity. My main objective is to compare and contrast Islamic feminist consciousness as revealed by Aboulela and Faqir, whether explicitly or implicitly, in their fiction that they produced from the 1990s to the 2010s. My aim in comparing and contrasting the Islamic feminism of Aboulela and Faqir is to illustrate my argument that their Islamic feminism varies enormously from a religious perspective. Faqir focuses on giving her female Muslim protagonists a voice and power in order to withstand patriarchal Arab cultural and social traditions and an inherited legal system and doctrinal rules that subvert Muslim women, whereas Aboulela makes the Islamic faith a source of spiritual emancipation that strengthens her female Muslim protagonists internally. This thesis is important because it contributes to expanding existing literary criticism in relation to Muslim literature, which is achieved by exploring the feminist consciousness of Aboulela and Faqir, two contemporary British Arab Muslim authors who emphasise the centrality of Islam in their postcolonial feminist fiction. It is also achieved by using Islamic feminism as a key methodology that provides a better understanding of how Aboulela and Faqir use Islam as a framework for their feminism, what challenges they face in doing so and how they manage to overcome these challenges.

En el presente articulo se efectua un analisis de las diversas etapas por las que ha transitado el feminismo arabe desde su aparicion, a finales del siglo XIX, hasta hoy. La lucha por el derecho a la educacion de las mujeres, al trabajo y a la igualdad juridica se articulo, durante una primera fase, en un discurso nacionalista y laico que defendia tanto la independencia nacional -en unos anos en los que el mundo arabe vivia aun bajo dominio colonial europeo- como la consecucion de una deseada modernidad social y politica. En la cuestion del velo -que mas alla de una obsesion occidental cierta, fue tambien un asunto muy debatido entre las propias mujeres-, la opcion preferente fue la de su eliminacion. Los innegables logros obtenidos no impidieron la continuacion de sus demandas de derechos politicos y de derogacion del derecho familiar basado en la sharia. Un sesgo significativo se produjo a partir de los anos 70 del siglo XX con el proceso de reislamizacion de las sociedades arabes. El asi llamado “feminismo islamico” emergio entonces como un discurso potente y muy visible, incluso en nuestro mundo occidental, que no ha logrado, sin embargo, eliminar el feminismo laico y combativo de ya larga historia.

In the wider context of dialogue among cultures, the analysis of women’s conditions in Muslim cultures -or in those European milieus affected by immigration from Maghreb- proves to be a difficult task, marked as it is by an ambiguity which is inherent to those power relations defined by economic and political balances between states at a global level. The debate on the veil is an exemplifying issue of the terms in which the dialogue is conducted between European nations and Islamist movements, and it sets the limits by which -given a certain power structure- women’s freedom is lost in the name of a culture presenting itself as promoting the value of differences. Within the European debate, Islamic feminism represents the main interlocutor of international institutions which -unable to solve those more radical questions giving origin to conflicts between peoples- exclude from their analysis other forms of social critique, in this way favoring culturalist and differentialist approaches. All considered, though, Islamic feminism does not limit itself to represent the positions expressed by those Maghreb and Arab feminists that -in reaction to a cultural model continuing to propose the image of a society based on the absolute control of women- keep struggling to reaffirm their right to freedom and equality: they instead carry on the deconstruction work that originally gave birth to world women’s movements.

Part 1 Progressive Muslims and contemporary Islam: the ugly modern and the modern ugly - reclaiming the beautiful in Islam, Khaled Abou El Fadl in search of a progressive Islamic response to 9/11, Farid Esack Islam - a civilisational project in progress, Ahmet Karamustafa the debts and burdens of critical Islam, Ebrahim Moosa on being a scholar of Islam - risks and responsibilities, Tazim R. Kassam. Part 2 Progressive Muslims and gender justice: transforming feminisms - Islam, women and gender justice, Sa'diyya Shaikh progressive Muslims and Islamic jurisprudence - the necessity for critical engagement with marriage and divorce laws, Kecia Ali sexuality, diversity and ethics in the agenda of progressive Muslims, Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle are we up to the challenge? the need for a radical re-ordering of the Islamic discourse on women, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons. Part 3 Progressive Muslims and pluralism: Muslims, pluralism and inter-faith dialogue, Amir Hussein Islam, democracy and pluralism, Ahmad S. Moussalli American Muslim identity - race and ethnicity in progressive Islam, Amina Wadud how to put the genie back in the bottle? Identity, Islam and Muslim youth cultures in america, Marcia Hermansen what is the victory of Islam? towards a different understanding of the Ummah and political success in the contemporary world, Farish A. Noor.

Writing is a weapon women writers used throughout history to change reality, shatter stereotypes and give women voice. Arab women writers understand how writing is a political act that disrupts devaluating and oppressive systems. This paper sheds light on how literature can be used to resist. Joumana Haddad turns her anger into writing in order to resist reality, shatter stereotypes and enhance change. Haddad speaks for every Arab woman who feels like her and believes in similar choices and dogmas. Her novella I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman is a book for Arab women that encompasses interrogation of Western assumptions about women of the Middle East, and demonstrates the necessity of internal criticism of culture. Haddad is aiming at collective Arab women empowerment. Haddad reflects on what it means to be an Arab woman and specifically an Arab woman writer in the current time, and shows a different picture of Arab women of that prevalent in the West. The aim of this paper is to shed light on contemporary Arab feminist resistance literature. The selected text is examined for the presence of voices of feminist resistance the writer employs to shatter stereotypes, enlighten the Western and Arab readers and give Arab women writers voice

The aim of this research is to reveal the status and image of Arab women and feminist movement in Israel, as it discusses the reality of citizens of Israel and the extent to which they have access to and enjoy their civil, economic, social and political rights. On the one hand, it also analyses women’s rights from the perspective of a society governed by customs and traditions. This is represented by the authority of the male over the female, because the Arab society is a biased society between males and females to some extent, and on the other hand it demonstrates a comparative view with the international law, agreements and treaties that provided for ensuring the protection of women’s rights. Through this study, the researcher believes that Arab women bear the burdens of submitting themselves to nationalism and the Arab minority on the one hand and the burdens of racial discrimination against Arabs in general and against women in particular. In addition, the local authority responsible for Arab regions and cities bears part of the violations of women’s rights in employment that affect their role in the labor market. This is because it does not carry out its responsibility towards the Arab minority as required, and specifically with regard to securing suitable job opportunities for women, securing public transportation, and suitable places for women with children.