- Rafia Zakaria
- Feb 6
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 9
Feminist Fatwas, A Quran of Their Own
Rafia Zakaria
6 February 2025
The following essay is part of Zararia's new Everyday Analysis pamphlet, Feminist Fatwas - which you can order here.
In 1999 Aysha Hidayatullah was elected the first female President of Emory University’s Muslim Student Association. A child of immigrants from Pakistan, Hidayatullah had learned the basics of her faith at home, attending Sunday School and learning to recite the Quran. It was in the discussions and dialogues in the University’s classrooms, where she was learning Arabic and majoring in Women’s Studies, that she had begun to consider the complexities of her identity: what it meant to be feminist and Muslim, empowered and believing.
Pious as she was, Hidayatullah was heartbroken. She could not figure out how to reconcile the meaning of the verse, its seeming justification of male dominance, with the gender equality she had believed was sanctioned, even prescribed, by the Quran. It was then, in the midst of that intellectual and existential confusion, that she encountered the work of Muslim feminists, the words of women like Asma Barlas, Azizah Al Hibri and Riffat Hassan. The Pakistani-American Barlas’s essay “Muslim Women and Sexual Oppression; Reading Liberation from the Quran” would be published in 2001. Also among them was Amina Wadud, an African-American Muslim scholar whose book “Quran and Women: Re-reading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective” had been published by Oxford University Press seven years earlier. For Hidayatullah, Wadud’s book was a “godsend that delivered the relief that had been so elusive.” “The dominant meaning of 4:34 was wrong and flawed,” she now told herself, and a better translation and exegesis was possible. For the moment at least, her world was restored, a route made available for her to reconcile her faith and her feminism, construct hope for a gender equal Islam bolstered by Wadud’s arguments.
Hidayatullah graduated college in 2001 with a degree in Women’s Studies, mere months before the 9/11 attacks. She went on to get a Masters and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California in Santa Barbara, immersing herself in the complex details of Quranic exegesis and interpretive methodology, representations of masculinity and femininity in Islamic tradition and early Islamic history. Titled Feminist Edges of the Quran Hidayatullah’s Ph.D. dissertation tackled the question of whether Muslim feminism could successfully be located in the text of the Quran. With her scholarly hackles now sharpened by years of training, Hidayatullah turned to the same feminist interpretations of the Quran that had provided her sustenance and succor as an undergraduate. What she found in them now, over a decade later, was very different.
The question of what Islam is, or more accurately, who defines Islam, has become the major civilizational question of our age. Contemporary wars, from internecine conflicts between various sects of Islam to continental ones between secular imperial powers and predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, all seem to pivot on the question of whether Islam can be reconciled with modernity and the Enlightenment values on which much of Western society and institutions have been constructed. At the beating center of this question are ideas of justice, particularly justice as it pertains to women. It is, in turn, the answer to that which is considered determinative to whether civilizational co-existence is possible, what form it must take and finally who and what must change to realize it.
It is precisely owing to this central position of the Islam-and-modernity question in our contemporary moment, and the pivotal co-ordinates of Muslim women within that question, that every debate involving the latter receives a disproportionate degree of attention and dissection. Crimes such as spousal abuse and domestic violence, whose incidence is universal, are deemed proof of a decisive incompatibility with modernity, an inherent, religiously sanctioned and barbarous misogyny when they occur in Muslim countries and communities. It is no surprise, then, that the question of whether gender equality, a value the same West imagines as having first invented and long-ago realized, can be authentically situated within Islamic texts becomes one of tremendous importance, not simply for Muslim women but the world at large.
Crucial and complex, the relationship between gender equality and empowerment, textual integrity and sanctity, methodology and context, all play roles in the inquiry of whether Islam and feminism can be reconciled. Can the sexism of male Quranic interpreters of yore be undone by the female and feminist interpreters of now? Are Muslim feminists too influenced by the interpretive fads and political pressures of now? Does a divine text revealed in a human language inevitably reconcile itself to imperfection? And, finally, is something essential and crucial lost when we alter the words of the past to fit the present? All Muslims believe that the Quran is the divine word of God, but how they understand the relationship between revelation and human beings results in varying methodologies and consequently exegesis.
There are global stakes in this contest between purist traditionalists and feminist “re-interpreters,” who point to the larger egalitarian hermeneutics of the Quran as precluding meanings that institute a hierarchy of gender, of male over female.
To learn more about how Muslim feminists are using exegesis as a means of developing a Quranic basis for women’s liberation, see the full pamphlet here.
Rafia Zakaria is a Pakistani-American attorney, feminist, journalist, and author. She has written for The Nation, Guardian Books, The New Republic, The Baffler, Boston Review, and Al Jazeera. In 2021, she published Against White Feminism, in which she critiques the emphasis that conventional feminist thought places on the experiences of white women while excluding women of color.
