Feminism and Islam

In their works titled “Women in the Muslim Unconscious” and “Quran and the Woman” Fatna Sabbah and Amina Wadud respectively present contrasting opinions on the roles and depiction of women in Islam. They use the key source of information, the Quran, to validate their arguments. Sabbah suggests that women become ‘objects of religious discourse’ as the bulk of Quranic scripture is addressed to men, forming a power structure in which men regulate and enforce divine law over women. This results from an essential discrepancy between the sacred and the biological analysis of events, and as each occurrence is predetermined by God, women’s natural capacity to give birth and thus be responsible for the expansion of the human race, is undermined. Wadud conversely proposes that the Quran, except on a few occasions, addresses both men and women. According to her, the traditional interpretations of the Quran are shaped by the social/cultural notions of gender, which are separate from the actual content of the religious text. Moreover, the Quran is meant for all mankind and has a “natural adaptive nature of interpretation” meaning that no single explanation is ‘definitive’.

Sabbah suggests that Islam is based on a hierarchal structure of relationships where God has exclusive control over mankind and the male being takes precedence over the female being. Her principal argument relies on the fact that the scripture portrays women to be objects of gratification for men. ‘The existence of God is rooted in the very existence of man’ – the sacred discourse implies that God is omnipotent, attributing the creation of man solely to God’s will and therefore eradicating the woman’s importance in the process of procreation. In fact, Sabbah notes that as per the Islamic rendition of the Adam and Eve story, woman was ‘created from’ man, reinforcing her position as the ‘other’ in Islamic society.

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