ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a broader contextualisation of the analysis regarding relationship between the academic study of gender and religion. It provides a brief overview of feminism as it relates to the study of gender and religion. The chapter explains the historical tensions that exist between the study of religion and gender in general. It examines the question of whether the culturally organising function of gender is to be inevitably linked to the formation and perpetuation of patriarchal religion in general, and Islam in particular, or whether religion, including Islam, can be a source of non-patriarchal values and ethics. Duality is a concept that has dominated human thinking throughout most of our history: day and night, body and soul, woman and man, our people and their people, nature and culture etc. From the 1960s until the end of 1980s, second wave feminism was configured in a turbulent context of many radical, social, civil-rights, anti-Vietnam War, sexual and gay liberation movement.
