PERSPECTIVE ON WOMEN : Feminism Comes of Age in Islam : Young activists assert their place in society and religion, challenging some traditions, empowered by others.

It is difficult to demonstrate the existence of a discourse, a movement, a consciousness such as Islamic feminism in a climate that assumes a universal supremacy of Western feminism. It is even more difficult to argue for the combination of Islam and feminism in such a climate, which assumes a natural incompatibility between the two.

Western feminism is, of course, grounded in Western thought, ideology and values, which are in some fundamental ways different from those of Islam or Arab tradition. Thus resistance to feminism in the Islamic or Arab world might in essence be a resistance, conscious or not, to cultural conversion. If we are to understand and appreciate alternative feminist forms, we will have to release Western women’s claim on feminism--or, to put it differently, to free feminism from a Western hold on it.

Non-Western feminist struggles around the world have tended to be grounded in larger movements, mostly nationalistic and anti-colonialist, which function to strengthen and empower women rather than overshadow their feminist goals. In Egypt and parts of the Arab East movements against foreign domination have provided an ideological framework that sustains the struggle for women’s issues and allows women to participate in a process of liberating the system within which they are seeking complementary space with men. This is now happening among the Palestinians under occupation.

The early 1970s saw an Islamic reawakening throughout the Arab and Islamic East, with a strong women’s activist presence. The women assertively identifying with the movement tend to come from urban middle and even upper classes, young, college-educated and career-oriented, in professional fields requiring certification by national examinations in which both sexes compete. In other words, there has been a concentration of Islamic activism among the highest achievers. This belies the superficial image of the Islamic movement as necessarily conservative and its activists as essentially regressive. While many educated women are choosing the modesty of Islamic dress, their visibility is increasing in the work force and in public life, including the mosques.

After the early days of Islam--in 7th-Century Arabia, when women did have a central role in the birth and spread of the faith--Muslim women gradually turned inward, giving up their right and obligation to have an active public role in religious life. Distanced from scriptural information and first-hand knowledge of Islam, they became dependent on men for guidance on spiritual and practical issues of immediate concern in their lives.

As part of the 1970s movement, women began acquiring literacy in Islamic matters, which fostered their interest in Islam’s original sources and the interpretive process. For many women, this became an avenue of legitimate access to the force previously inaccessible to them, an opportunity for the first time in a millennium to have a dynamic role in the Islamic process. These women, in their knowledge of and adherence to Islamic principles, released men from the role of authority over them in Islamic matters.

The young activists posed a challenge to traditional structures at the beginning of the movement, especially in Egypt. Mothers were alarmed and objected to their daughters’ taking the veil of the new modesty. Today, those same mothers have themselves acquired a secularized version of modesty. In fact, gradually a general mood of conservatism has stabilized in Egypt outside the Islamic movement.

The activists also posed a challenge to the Islamic Establishment. Change is expected to move from authority downward, not the other way around. By adopting Islamic modesty, college women put on the defensive Al-Azhar, the male-dominated seat of Islamic teaching, interpretation and legislation. When Al-Azhar remained silent in the ‘70s on Islamic dress for women in secular coeducational universities, it was accepting the young activists’ initiative. When Al-Azhar enforced the Islamic dress of the movement in the ‘80s in identical form (style, fabric, colors) in its own women’s college, it was legitimizing the activists’ pioneering role in determining the public image of Muslim women.

By choice, the young college women initiated a movement and defined its premises and its symbols. By presenting themselves publicly in a modest way, they asserted their place in society’s traditional structures. They were, simultaneously, living models of Islamic morality and progressive participants in education, employment and the professions. They evolved a hierarchy separate from the men’s, in which they became leaders in the university and in the mosque. Ideologues emerged among them who published on Muslim women’s issues and widely lectured in the Islamic East.

This is a legitimate participation in the tradition that is most vital for Muslim women’s concerns. It is a feminism true to its society’s traditions; these are women who chose to define their identity in Islamic terms and developed a consciousness that is Islamic in character. Their Islamic dress, so mystifying and misunderstood in the West, is in fact an anti-consumerist claim for their right to modesty, to control of their own bodies, to sexual space and moral privacy.

This Islamic reawakening is in its third decade. It has witnessed the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the ascent of a Muslim woman to high political office in Pakistan, a merging with nationalism in the Palestinian territories, and a liberation from the secular Communist hold on Islamic republics in the former Soviet Union. It has tasted political victory for Islamic “parties” within the democratic process, such as in Egypt (as a coalition with another party) in Jordan and most strongly in Algeria (where it is now suffering anti-democratic political repression).

The Islamic East once again felt the force of foreign dominance in its most violent form in the Gulf War. It was a lesson, perhaps, for keeping feminism, democracy and nationalism embedded in the larger Islamic movement so that women and men both are empowered as their nations are liberated.

Until the West chooses a non-confrontational, nondivisive path in its Middle East policy, one based on respect for the people and their tradition, I can only foresee the intensity of the Islamic awakening becoming increasingly defiant to the West.