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

sources, but also because the conception of the public domain of an Islamic paradigm still focuses upon a fixed center in public space as predominantly defined and inhabited by men. The origins of today’s Muslim women’s movements for greater empowerment and inclusion were heavily influenced by Western theoretical
    developments on women’s rights and social justice. 10 Despite this larger
    global connection, this book will point to many ruptures between this Western origin and the need for an indigenous Muslim theoretical and practical reconstruction in the human rights discourse more appropriate to our own Islamic theoretical origins.
    The benefits of this pro-Western basis lost critical ground in the frenzied accelerated reassertion of patriarchal-based interpretations of the sources, which were intertwined with authoritative abuses and random selectivity. 11
    Muslim women and men began to reappropriate the primary source texts as evidence in support of their ideas and objectives to create indigenous Islamic reforms. Women were still the last ones to use textual reappro- priation as a fundamental strategy of empowerment. Now we have come to address the primary sources directly and pushed for greater interpretive inclusion, not only as an act of equality against a history of near-exclusive male authority over texts, but also as a means for better self-understanding of those sources to fortify both our identity in Islam and the Islamic authen- ticity of our claims for reform.
    At the more personal level, the following edited quote 12 gives witness to
    my personal identity within the context of developing Islamic thought as it led toward the struggle for gender justice:
    Each of us can decide to follow the holy quest in a manner which makes our lives meaningful and which allows us the persistence and stamina to see it through the hard times.

    8 inside the gender jihad

    My door into Islam was accidental. During my freshman and sophomore years in college, I began to change my lifestyle. I wore only long clothes, cut my already natural hair very short, and eventually kept it covered (in mostly African styles and wraps). I also became more conscientious about my diet, with no meat and more wholesome foods. These things I began in celebration of the honor of my being. Life is a gift that we must live with honor – not by random standards imposed on us by an exploitative environment.
    Once I visited a mosque around the corner from my mother’s house in a Washington, D.C. neighborhood. I think the brothers assumed from my modest attire that I “understood” all about Islam. They were anxious to increase the number of females within the ranks. They offered little infor- mation, but just said that if I believed that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad was the Prophet, I should take shahadah , the witness or decla- ration to faith and first pillar of Islam.
    I pronounced my shahadah on Thanksgiving Day, 1972. A few months after the declaration of my Islam, another accident occurred which proved important: a non-Muslim woman from my old neighborhood, near the mosque where I took shahadah , gave me a copy of the Qur’an (given to her by local Muslim brothers searching out female converts). In reading the Qur’an, I relived my childhood sense of worlds of meaning through words. Sometimes, very simple statements moved me to tears and awe.
    Sometimes the complexities quenched my thirst for deeper under- standing. I come away from the Qur’an – to which I have dedicated all of my professional energies up to the Ph.D. in learning to interpret – with the sense that all the questions I have asked can be clarified therein. Not literally “answered,” as some would say, implying that the Qur’an has the (only) Truth, or that all Truth is in it. Rather, the Qur’an establishes a true vision of the world and beyond, with meanings and possibilities of self that lead to certainty and peace.
    I owe my full embrace of Islam to the