ABSTRACT
Scholars of gender and religion have drawn attention to how European and American governments and elites use arguments of gender equality to pursue their project of domesticating Islam, especially the emancipation of Muslim women, while at the same time ignoring the structural discrimination of women in their own societies. The possibility of engaging both feminism and Islam discursively and politically is explored in this chapter in relation to the work of prominent gender studies scholar and psychologist, Birgit Rommelsbacher. The author puts Rommelsbacher in conversation with other prominent scholars of feminism and Islam to explore her argument that any struggle for the improvement of the situation of Muslim women, in Germany and elsewhere in the world, has to be examined critically in relation to strategies for establishing or preserving local and global power structures, in order to avoid furthering the oppression of Muslim women.
