Women’s Rights in Muslim Thought: Pushing the Boundaries of Human Rights Advocacy and International Relations (IR) Scholarship

Abstract

The charge of Western-centrism haunting International Relations as a discipline is mirrored in real-world global politics where the power differentials and the imposition of normative concepts created by the ‘West’ are often lamented by the ‘rest’. This claim figures prominently in relation to secularly grounded international women’s rights, whose validity has repeatedly been disputed, for example, in relation to ‘Muslim’ contexts. At the same time, a growing number of Islamic women’s rights advocates call into question a number of dichotomies that pervade such controversies in both real-world global politics and IR scholarship by grounding their quest for gender equality and women’s rights in Islamic discourse. Inspired by their work, the chapter looks more closely into the way gender equality and women’s rights are established in Islamic feminist thought. More precisely, it deals with a particular type of conceptual thought located at the intersection of two sorts of literature which are usually sidelined in the discipline of IR: feminist and religious thought. As will be made evident throughout the chapter, the appreciation of this type of thought holds the double potential of contributing to critically interrogating the discipline of IR and fostering the cause of women’s rights in world affairs.