Fighting Hislam: Women, Faith and Sexism

Product Description
The Muslim community that is portrayed to the West is a misogynist's playground; within the Muslim community, feminism is often regarded with sneering hostility.\nYet between those two views there is a group of Muslim women many do not believe exists: a diverse bunch who fight sexism from within, as committed to the fight as they are to their faith. Hemmed in by Islamophobia and sexism, they fight against sexism with their minds, words and bodies. Often, their biggest weapon is their religion.\nHere, Carland talks with Muslim women about how they are making a stand for their sex, while holding fast to their faith.\nAt a time when the media trumpets scandalous revelations about life for women from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, Muslim women are always spoken about and over, never with. In
Fighting Hislam, that ends.
About the Author
Susan Carland is a lecturer and researcher at Monash University's National Centre for Australian Studies. She has been listed as one of the 500 Most Influential Muslims in the World, and as a 'Muslim Leader of Tomorrow' by the UN Alliance of Civilizations. She is a regular newspaper reviewer on ABC
News Breakfast and an agony aunt on Radio National's
Life Matters.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Fighting Hislam
Women, Faith and Sexism\nBy Susan Carland
Melbourne University Publishing Limited\nCopyright © 2017 Susan Carland
All rights reserved.\nISBN: 978-0-522-87035-0\nContents\nDangerous Waters,
One Beyond the Harem,
Two Witnesses to their Faith,
Three Journey to the Fight,
Four Encouragement, Hostility, Apathy,
Five The Double Bind,
Six The Third Way: Faith and Feminism,
Changing the Narrative,
Acknowledgements,
Glossary,
Notes and Sources,
Bibliography,
Index,\nCHAPTER 1
BEYOND THE HAREM
Even my secular understanding of what feminism is, there's not a competition with what Islam says, and women's role in it. To me, there's a correlation, and not a conflict.
— Umaymah\nMuslim women have a mixed history of engaging with sexism. It is built upon resistance, victimisation, endurance and complicity, and must be understood as emerging from a long series of interactions: of Muslim women being (both the real and imagined) victims of sexism, as well as the respondents to sexism. This history has led to the current situation and informs the landscape in which all Muslim women, including the women I spoke to, operate. Like women everywhere who encounter sexism, sometimes we quietly accept it because we see responding as futile or even aggravating, sometimes we angrily fight back, demanding our rights and our dignity, and sometimes we quietly work in the background, delicately negotiating the obstacle course of ego and cultural tradition. I have done all these things, both within and outside of the Muslim community, and will probably do so until the day I die.
The grim reality of living in a patriarchal world means your gender is always a ghost that hovers over every situation. Women learn early on, as little girls, that being female is never irrelevant — it always has its consequences. In order to understand this in the context of the Muslim community, it is useful to have at least a brief overview of the history of Western views of Muslim women, the history of Muslim women fighting sexism with the resources and perspectives available to them within Islam, and a history of the issues with the term 'feminism' in some Muslim communities.
Classical Islamic law affords women the same right and obligation to an education as it does to a male, the right to financial independence (in both earning and spending, including owning property, entering contractual agreements and initiating enterprise), the right to keep her name after marriage, the right to sexual satisfaction from her spouse, the option to use contraception if she desires, the right to divorce, the right to initiate and refuse marriage, the right to be a religious authority equ