Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam Read Online Free

thirty years as an active single parent with little or no support. My prayer is that one day they will come to understand the struggles of my life which made loving and caring for them even more difficult because I sometimes had work for Allah outside the home that did not allow me enough time to do the work for Allah that they might have wanted me to do for them inside the house; for that is the foundation of my gender jihad .
    January 2006

    Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction
Inside the Gender Jihad : Reform in Islam

    The scarcity of works that challenge the underlying paradigmatic basis of Islamic thought for the absence of gender, as a principle category of Islamic thought and as an aspect of analysis in the articulation of Islamic ideals, could not be more glaring. 1

    In the last decade, when humankind entered into the twenty-first century, Muslim women and men were already fervently engaged in discourses, activities, and developments in a struggle for greater justice in Islam and Islamic thought. The terms of this “greater justice” imply a belief that Islam, as an historical movement starting over fourteen centuries ago, was intended to establish and sustain a just social order. At different times throughout its past, it was successful in meeting that intention in many ways. It also met some failures. From both its successes and failures we learn that neither justice nor Islam is static.
    Consistently, the Islamic justice tradition refers to two predetermined sources, the Qur’an, as revelation from God, and the sunnah , normative practices of the Prophet Muhammad who received that revelation. These have been the foundation for continued debate, interpretation, reinter- pretation, contestation, and implementation. Their continuity as references does not keep even these sources static. To continue with successful advancement and progress toward competing ideas that have developed about justice through this complex time in human history also requires thorough and ongoing re-examination of ideas of justice and their manifest

    Introduction 1

    forms as understood by engaging meaningfully with the Islamic intellectual tradition. This must be done in concert with ongoing interpretation of the two predetermined sources along with modern global discourse and civili- zational movements. Gender justice is but one, albeit significant, aspect of that re-examination. Some would assert that the very idea of gender justice, as first conceived and exerted as crucial to society, along with particular practices of gender inclusiveness and mainstreaming, as well as the essential integration of gender as a category of thought, are Western ideals in juxta- position to certain central ideas and practices throughout Islamic history. Others have rushed to conclude that gender justice is impossible in Islam itself, on the grounds that feminism originates in the West and is therefore incongruent with Islam. Meanwhile many think all strategies and methods of reform must stem from outside the religious framework. Yet many other thinking believers in Islam have engaged in a struggle to demonstrate a correlation between Islamic ideas of justice and more recent global develop- ments about the potential of women as full human beings in light of more gender-explicit analysis. One of my objectives here is to demonstrate part of how to transform Islam through its own egalitarian tendencies, principles, articulations, and implications into a dynamic system with practices that fulfill its goals of justice, by first admitting that concepts of Islam and concepts of justice have always been relative to actual historical and cultural situations. Our current global communalism requires more rigorous examinations and analyses into the basic sources of our tradition, then requires strategies to apply critical analysis to reform movements congruent with the Islamic core even – or especially – when occasionally it appears starkly different from some