Colonialism damaged Muslim women’s rights, at least with respect to the law
Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.
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European colonial officials arrived in Muslim lands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and began criticizing the treatment of Muslim women there. Many of these officials had decried feminism in their own countries, actively opposing women’s suffrage; some, in fact, claimed that the smaller circumference of women’s skulls proved their intellectual inferiority.
That didn’t stop colonialists from virtuously wielding women’s rights as a weapon in Muslim lands.
Yet, colonialism damaged Muslim women’s rights, at least with respect to the law. Here’s how Noah Feldman describes it:
When the British applied their law to Muslims in place of shariah, as they did in some colonies, the result was to strip married women of the property that Islamic law had always granted them — hardly progress toward equality of the sexes.
English common law denied wives not only their own property but also their very legal personhood, something that Muslim women had had since the seventh century.
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In England, a woman had virtually no right to divorce until the mid-nineteenth century. Yet, by the time the British colonized Muslim lands, Muslim women had had the right to divorce for a thousand years. They had open access to courts under the Ottoman Empire, and divorce was never considered the absolute right of the husband. A man could certainly divorce his wife more easily than a wife could divorce her husband — also the case in England until the twentieth century — but Muslim wife-initiated divorces were not rare.
Records show instances of women in the eighteenth century granting themselves divorces, sometimes simply by leaving the marital home, in front of witnesses, while announcing that they were no longer married to their spouses. Or, sometimes, women would claim to the court, with two witnesses, that their husbands had divorced them while drunk and simply didn’t remember! These cases were upheld by the qadis, who confirmed the divorces.
But under colonialism, wife-initiated divorce became much harder to achieve in Muslim lands. European rule limited access to the courts. Women complaining to the court of domestic violence or rape — complaints that had been commonly heard in Ottoman courts — found they suddenly had fewer rights under their Western colonizers. After all, under eighteenth-century British law, a man could legally beat his wife with impunity, including with whips and clubs, as long as he didn’t endanger her life.
None of this European sexism prevented colonialists from deriding, as evidence of oppression, Muslim women’s head coverings. Before colonialism, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Jews in Islamic lands had all dressed pretty much the same way within any given region; differences in dress related to regional differences rather than religious differences. Arab Christian and Jewish women wore head coverings, as did Hindu women in India. Even today, pictures of older Greek women frequently show them wearing headscarves.
But the colonial Europeans pointed to the headscarves and veils of Muslim women and said, “Look at you, with your backward religion, oppressing your women by making them cover their heads.” As a result, some non-Muslim women began removing their head coverings, and some Muslim women began donning them in defiance. In Egypt, not until the early twentieth century did veiling become associated uniquely with Islam, after colonialism framed it that way.
“White men saving brown women from brown men,” in the famous words of Gayatri Spivak, was and still is one of the great justifications for colonizing or invading Muslim countries. But when white men set out to save brown women from brown men, what happens? A catch-22. Colonialists informed Muslim women that becoming modern (or civilized or free or whatever) necessitated discarding their head coverings, thus leaving them with two choices: they could agree with the white men and become “traitors” to their own culture and religion, or they could disagree with the white men and be dismissed as oppressed and “brainwashed.”
These tropes still plague us. Recently, a psychologist acquaintance argued to me that even unpressured Muslim women who freely chose to wear head coverings had been “brainwashed” into doing so. I responded that she herself chose to wear jeans because she had been brainwashed into approving of them as acceptable clothing. (Jeans would have been immodest a hundred years ago.) What does immodesty have to do with freedom, or modesty with its lack?
Leila Ahmed, a professor of women’s studies and Islam at Harvard University, writes that the “Western legacy of androcentrism and misogyny” was no better than in any other culture, and yet no one told Western women that their only recourse for equal rights was the wholesale adoption of some other completely foreign culture. They would have been offended at the very notion, just as Muslim women were. Western feminists didn’t abandon their religion and culture; they engaged with it.
But Muslim women could not similarly engage with their religion and culture to increase their rights, because both were already being attacked as backward, both by colonizers and by the secular modernists the colonizers left behind. Any attempts to change religion and culture to increase women’s rights were seen as caving to Western denigration.
Once Muslim lands were free of colonization, however, Muslim women should have been able to get on with equal rights, correct?
Before answering this question, let’s note that it presumes that Muslim women didn’t have rights and still don’t. Let’s also note that — despite the relentless framing of Islam as misogynist — as of 2017, the United States had fewer women in its legislature than the following Muslim-majority countries: Senegal, Tunisia, Sudan, Albania, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Iraq, Mauritania, Turkmenistan, Somalia, United Arab Emirates, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Pakistan, Morocco, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia. That’s in addition to the thirteen Muslim women who have been prime ministers or presidents in recent decades.
It’s true that some Muslim women in the world lack the same opportunities as men, but why assume the reason is Islam? Plenty of non-Muslim Asian, African, and Latin American women struggle for equal opportunities, as well, but their struggles are rarely characterized as problems of religion. The examples of oppressed Muslim women usually presented to us by our media are often neither representative of Muslim women nor even religious examples — rather, they stem from other factors, including poverty (which leads to, among other things, lack of educational opportunities); sexist culture (such as prohibitions on driving); cultural interpretations of religion (such as prohibiting a woman to lead a mixed-gender prayer); and the same kinds of sexism that permeate all countries but especially developing countries and traditional societies (whether they are Muslim or not).
It’s easy to forget that Western feminist attitudes are of recent origin. American women lacked the right to vote until 1920; Swiss women didn’t get the equal right to vote until 1971. The age of consent for girls in the U.S. was mostly ten or twelve (in Delaware it was seven) until 1920. Children fifteen and younger can still marry in some U.S. states. Western women throughout the twentieth century struggled for their rights and even today often do not receive equal pay for equal work.
But let’s get back to the question I posed above: why couldn’t Muslim women’s rights movements easily progress after colonialism? As always, the reasons are myriad. First, Muslim feminists continued to be perceived as “caving in” to the West. European powers might have left Muslim lands, but Muslims were smarting from centuries of vilification. They still are: even today, Islamic scholars who issue fatwas on women’s issues are vulnerable to criticisms of being “too feminist,” because some Muslims see any feminist result — even one mandated by Islam! — as betraying traditional culture and aping the West.
Second, Muslim women’s rights movements were impeded by traditional interpretations of fiqh (Editor’s note: fiqh is the body of interpretive literature relating to the Qur’an and Sunna). Yes, I’ve argued that the Qur’an and the spirit of Islam are both feminist; much of fiqh, too, was feminist when developed. But fiqh rules that were feminist for premodern times — and even for much later Victorian times — would not necessarily be considered feminist today.
But fiqh can evolve, right? Why could Islamic scholars not simply reinterpret fiqh rules in light of modern circumstances, as they always had? The answer is the third reason early twentieth-century Muslim women’s movements were stonewalled: they collided with the colonized minds of Muslims. Because so many Muslims had accepted the colonial rhetoric that Islam was sexist, they defended the sexism. Or they believed fiqh was rigid and unchangeable. In the early twentieth century, these attitudes unfairly and unnecessarily cornered Muslim women into either rejecting Islam if they wanted equal rights or rejecting equal rights if they wanted Islam.
Some Muslims have forgotten that Muhammad and the Qur’an aimed to raise the status of women and that the Qur’an treats men and women equally in numerous verses (in, essentially, the ones not tied to historical contexts). Historically, in Muslim civilization, women were not hidden. They argued with the Prophet, they were scholars and judges and rulers and queens, they led armies, and — under shariah — they had legal rights. Given that Islam was so concerned with raising the status of women fourteen centuries ago, when women’s rights were an incomprehensible concept, using Islam today to impose sexism is a perversion.
But these days, Muslims feel besieged by ubiquitous attacks on the very foundations of Islam, and so we cling to traditional interpretations with greater tenacity, and a challenge to any detail feels like a threat to our entire religion. When threatened, we — like all people — tend toward conservatism, doubling back to the attitudes of bygone days when we felt secure and unthreatened. We become unwilling to entertain innovative ways of thinking. Unfortunately, this reaction often disproportionately affects women, and it hampered early Muslim women’s rights movements.
These factors, though troublesome, did not completely obstruct feminists, though it hampered them. In the 1970s, however, Muslim feminists found a particularly effective way to barrel past these obstacles. The vehicle for change? The Islamist movement.
Sometimes, the Islamists strove toward the same goals as feminist movements, such as when the Islamists encouraged girls’ education as a religious duty. But sometimes, Islamists unwittingly helped feminist movements — such as when they tried to take away women’s rights. For example, before Ayatollah Khomeini, feminists in Iran had been condemned as imitating the West, but when Khomeini began eliminating women’s rights, women challenged him: “How dare you curtail my rights!” they said. “Islam gives me rights!”
Iranian women framed their discussions of women’s rights as responses to Khomeini’s policies, rather than as imitations of Western culture. This opened a new window of discourse, eliminating colonizers from the equation entirely. Eventually, Khomeini had to quietly reinstate many of the rights he had initially eliminated.
Once the discourse shifted in this way, Muslims in Iran and elsewhere began contesting the idea that Islam restricted women’s rights. It wasn’t God’s law that limited women’s rights, they argued, but the centuries-old male interpretation of God’s law. Increasingly, women began to reread and reinterpret the Islamic sacred texts. And they began to promote women’s rights from an Islamic perspective.
Many Muslim women fighting for rights don’t necessarily want to be called “feminists” or “reformers,” because those terms originated outside their cultures and come laden with condescending colonial baggage. Some Muslim women’s movements are faith-based movements, and some are secular. I myself belong to an organization that promotes women’s rights from an Islamic perspective.
My parents came from India, and I practice Islam the way my parents practice it and the way my grandmothers practiced it. I’m just as much a representative of Islam as any other Muslim woman.
Yet, all my life, those around me have assumed that I have broken the chains of Islam to become a corporate lawyer — even though what my parents always wanted most for me was financial independence above all else. I was raised on stories of the Prophet’s strong female contemporaries and took for granted that Islam gave me equal rights. When my non-Muslim American peers assumed that the restrictions on my social life — not drinking, not dating — were imposed on me because I was a girl, I thought, surprised, “How sexist.”
*This excerpt was edited for length, and footnotes were removed.
About the author
Sumbul Ali-Karamali is an award-winning author and speaker whose books, articles, blogs and speaking events are her way of promoting intercultural understanding in the world. Sumbul grew up in Southern California, answering questions about Islam and Muslims. With her degree in English from Stanford University, her law degree from the University of California at Davis, and her additional law degree in Islamic law from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, she left the world of corporate law to start writing books to answer those very questions. When not writing, Sumbul is a fiction and nonfiction judge, a board member of nonprofits dedicated to multicultural education, and a member of the steering committee of Women in Islamic Spirituality and Equality (WISE) and the Muslim Women’s Global Shura Council, both of which aim to promote women’s rights and human rights from an Islamic perspective. And when she’s not doing any of that, either, she’s listening to opera or watching Star Trek reruns with her family. For more information, please visit sumbulalikaramali.com.
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