ABSTRACT
Islam and feminism converge as an ethical framework. Islamic feminist ethics aims at promoting gender equality and addressing oppressive practices through the proliferation of scholarship and activism. The convergence between Islam and feminism in the early 1990s in Indonesia was not only shaped by the inclusion of feminism in Islamic scholarship and gender activism but also mediated through the confluence of Muslim women’s appropriation of Western feminist theology – by addressing the barriers to and exclusion of women’s equal roles in Islam – and the literary tradition of third-world feminism within Asian contexts. The intersection between Islam and feminism led to the rediscovery of the Islamic theological argument for the spiritual equality between men and women. The argument for spiritual equality resignifies women’s inherent status as inviolable human beings endowed with moral agency. It also addresses oppressive “Islamic orthodoxy” through critiques of the masculine performance of ijtihād – the legal process of obtaining juristic opinion (ffatwā) by individual jurists on issues that are not necessarily addressed in the Qur’an and the prophetic tradition – that produce gendered cultures in which women are valued as secondary, sexual, and domestic beings. In abandoning the masculine performance of ijtihād, Islamic feminism calls for nonjuristic use of ijtihād in which women are valued as ethical agents and as components of the inclusive humanity on the basis of tawḥī (the Oneness of God). Islamic feminism can therefore serve as a framework to foster the spiritual equality of men and women, as both are moral agents with the same responsibilities to promote justice and address injustice. The discursive patterns of Islamic feminism and its effects on Muslim women’s pursuit of spiritual equality make up the proliferation era.
