Islamic knowledge production has admittedly evolved into a male-dominant field since its early days. However, calls for women’s empowerment through Islam, or Islamic feminism, has been gradually contesting this male hegemony and fighting for equal rights for men and women.
Islamic feminism is flourishing in the Arabian Peninsula (AP). It boasts plural understandings of the status of women in Islam. In my paper, I argue for a diverse set of Islamic feminisms in the AP that is mindful of shifting gender relations. I examine case studies from the seemingly most conservative AP state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Saudi feminists have held their ground, despite the overriding patriarchy and many restrictions facing women in KSA. I further argue that the highlighted Islamic feminists express and fight for this common aspiration through different methodologies, making the project all the more interesting as each activist presents a unique paradigm for Islamic feminism. Islamic feminism is arguably the clearest religious reform output to come out of the AP. It is focused thanks to a clear objective, well-researched arguments, and diverse methods that provide manifold ways to arrive at the goal of equality between men and women in Islam as a fulfillment of divine intent.
I adopt Deniz Kandiyoti’s patriarchal bargain model. Kandiyoti demonstrates women’s rights as negotiated rights: women make choices and succumb to patriarchy in certain areas to gain traction in others. This bargain can take different forms based on the local culture and context. Women’s rights in the AP, including religious rights, are better understood through this paradigm. I tweak this bargaining model to analyze the dialectic between the thoughts and actions of the feminists.
My source base includes multiple in-depth interviews with the surveyed feminists. I supplement these personal communications with their largely untapped works. The feminists share a passion for advancing religious reform through the focused prism of women’s rights in Islam. Through these case studies, I demonstrate how the silenced feminists fight for their agency. I also fill a gap in both the Islamic reform and gender literatures that do not readily acknowledge the Arabian Peninsula as a hotbed of a gender-conscious, Islamic feminist intellectual discourse and activity that aims at countering an otherwise prevailing patriarchy.
Religious Studies/Theology