ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the discursive pattern of what constitutes Islamic feminism and its emergence in the early 1990s in the form of Islamic feminist scholarship. It focuses on how the contextual debates over gender hierarchy as a system and efforts to pursue gender egalitarianism underlie the emergence of Islamic feminist scholarship in Indonesia. The chapter also discusses the Islamic feminist discursive narratives of what constitutes gender bias that challenges progress toward equality. The term "feminist theology" enters Islamic feminist scholarship through the dissemination of feminism in Islam. The feminist analysis of women's rights as human rights shows that all women have to survive the masculine domain. The rhetoric of male financial support and female obedience is constructed within a patriarchal model of a community where women are domestic beings. Islamic feminism emphasizes women as moral agents and their roles in inclusive humanity and promotes the nonjudicial use of ijtihad.
