Essential Concerns of Muslim should be : Gender Justice

The Muslim community as a whole cannot achieve justice unless justice is guaranteed for Muslim women. In short, there can be no progressive interpretation of Islam without gender justice.

Let us be clear that by “gender” we are not just talking about women. Far too often Muslims forget that gender injustice is not just something that oppresses women; it also debases and dehumanizes the Muslim males who participate in the system.

Let us be clear that by “gender” we don’t mean to focus exclusively on the hijab (head covering worn by some Muslim women). The hijab is, no doubt, one important marker of identity for many Muslim women who choose either to wear or not to wear it. It is also an important marker of social regulations when many Muslim women are forced to wear it. But it is futile to engage in conversations about gender that reduce all of women’s religiosity and existence to the hijab. There are many more fundamental issues at stake in the social constructions that affect the lives of both men and women, and we aim here to engage many of them.

The human and religious rights of Muslim women cannot be “granted,” “given back,” or “restored” because they were never ours to give – or take – in the first place. Muslim women own their God-given rights by the simple virtue of being human.

Gender justice is crucial, indispensable, and essential. In the long run, any Muslim interpretation will be judged by the amount of change in gender equality it is able to produce in small and large communities. Gender equality is a measuring stick of the broader concerns for social justice and pluralism.

No doubt this heavy emphasis on issues of gender – issues that far too many Muslims would rather shove under the rug, or at least deal with in the happy and unhappy confines of their own communities – will strike some as unbalanced.

We are mindful of the ways in which conversations about gender are at the center of group dynamics and politics in Muslim communities. But it is way past the time to be squeamish. We should strive to the level of activism, for what should be legitimately recognized as Islamic feminism. If that strikes some people as an oxymoron, we should unapologetically suggest that it is their patriarchal definition of Islam that needs rethinking, not our linkage of Islam and feminism.