by Brian Griffith.
In most countries or cultures around the world, women show more interest in religion than men. Women are more likely to follow a spiritual path, pray every day, or visit churches, mosques, and shrines. We may assume they are blindly following the directions of male religious leaders, but more likely they have goals and values of their own. I want to tell about one of the many Muslims who have promoted women’s values in Islam, namely Parvin Paidar, who died in 2005.
Paidar was a pioneering scholar who explored pro-feminist interpretations of Islamic teaching. After growing up in Tehran, she went to Britain in 1973, took a B.Sc. in sociology, and then a Ph.D. in political sociology. Shortly after the Iranian revolution she collaborated with Afsaneh Najmabadi to write The Shadow of Islam (1982), where she examined the views of female Muslim activists for human rights. In that period of war and violent resistance to the Iranian regime, anyone who expressed critical views toward the government risked imprisonment or assassination. Paidar and Najmabadi therefore decided to publish their research using pseudonyms (namely Parvin Yeganeh and Azar of Tabari). In the more peaceful 1990s, Paidar felt able to use her real name in publishing her influential work, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran.
Paidar saw the need for working across the secular/religious divide. She hoped to affirm both religious and secular women in their shared concerns for women’s welfare. At a time when secular women grew hostile toward all traditional religion, and religious women increasingly viewed hatred for religion as high treason, Paidar produced scholarly work on the humanitarian traditions that had always been most popular among women. At a time when hardline fundamentalist men claimed to define Islam, she defined a popular Islam of women, which had always put compassion before legalism and authority. She treated feminism, not as a Western ideology for the rejection of Iran’s religious heritage, but as an affirmation of Iranian women’s concerns and dreams. In negotiating for mutual respect between women of different backgrounds, she displayed remarkable patience, willingness to listen, and ability to challenge preconceptions without appearing self-righteous.
In addition to her academic research, Paidar took on work with the British Refugee Council and the World University Service. From 2000 to 2002 she served as a program director for Save the Children in Central Asia, and then as program director for Voluntary Services Overseas in Pakistan. She also worked as an inter-agency coordinator for the Bosnia Programme, and as a director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women in Afghanistan. In the last years of her life she developed stage 4 cancer, and was informed that her case was hopeless. Giving up on treatment, she went on a dream holiday to Hawaii. In her last days, she told her friends that “I don’t know what I have done to deserve feeling so trouble-free when my life is under threat, but am extremely thankful for it” (Afshar).
Paidar was just one among many Muslim women who envision a “post-patriarchal” Islam, much as Christian scholars have done for Christianity (i.e., Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Sexism and God-Talk), Buddhist women have done for Buddhism (Buddhism After Patriarchy, by Rita Gross), or Jewish women have done for Judaism (On Being a Jewish Feminist, by Susannah Heschel). In a similar way, Fatima Mernissi wrote The Veil and the Male Elite (1991), Asma Barlas wrote “Believing Women” in Islam: Un-reading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (2002), and Amina Wadud wrote Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (2006). Wadud argued that “patriarchy is a kind of shirk [or idolatry] … stemming from the Satanic notion of istikbar (thinking of oneself as better than another) …” (p. 102).
Over the past several decades, organizations of pro-feminist Muslim women such as Sisters in Islam, Musawah, the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality, or Women Living Under Muslim Laws have formed and spread across the world. In Morocco, female religious leaders organized a nationwide campaign that collected a million signatures calling for the legal equality of men and women. The campaign resulted in a new family law code, which in 2004 officially recognized “dual headship” of the family. Turkey enacted a similar reform in 2001. Tunisia abolished polygamy and equalized the legal rights of men and women in divorce and child custody. By 2007, Margot Badran felt she could report,
“The past twenty years—the life-span of Islamic feminism—has seen a significant dent in the patriarchal narrative of ‘Islam,’ as the egalitarian version of Islam steadily takes wider hold. At the core of Islamic feminism … is a stringent Qur’an-backed doctrine of gender equality … across the public-private spectrum … [an equality] of all insan or humankind transcending tribe, class, ethnicity, and race.” (2008, 32–33)
Sources
Afshar, Haleh (2005) “Iranian Writer and Campaigner Intent on Combining Feminism with Islam.” The Guardian, Obituaries, October 27.
Badran, Margot (2008) “Engaging Islamic Feminism.” In Kynsilehto, Anitta (ed.). Islamic Feminism: Current Perspectives. Tampere Peace Institute, University of Tempere, Finland.
Wadud, Amina (2009) “Islam Beyond Patriarchy Through Gender Inclusive Qur’anic Analysis.” In Anwar, Zainah (ed.), Wanted: Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family. Musawah, Selangor, Malaysia.
From the upcoming book Mother Persia: Praise for Great Iranian Women, by Brian Griffith (Exterminating Angel Press, Fall/Winter 2020)