Men in some Muslim societies cite the Islamic faith in defending “honor killings” of women and marriage for child brides. In the West, many commentators proclaim Islam inherently sexist, and some governments ban the veils traditionally worn by many Muslim women. Amid this turmoil, growing numbers of female Islamic scholars cite the Quran to argue that Muslim women are marginalized not by the true tenets of their faith but by patriarchal cultural practices. 

Muslim woman reading Koran

The religion of the Prophet Muhammad, they contend, gave women roles as leaders, scholars, and even military advisers. Women owned property independently and had a voice and vote in political affairs centuries before the spread of women’s rights in the West.

To upend traditions that have grown to disadvantage many Muslim women, these activists seek to show that Islam’s foundational texts have been misinterpreted.

Our greatest asset is Islam,” Aisha Rahman, lawyer and executive director of women’s rights group Karamah.

“Our greatest asset is Islam,” said Aisha Rahman, a lawyer and the executive director of Karamah, an organization that educates Muslim women about Islamic principles of justice and gender equality. “If you are teaching about the Quran you already have the support you need,” Rahman said in a discussion of “Islam, Culture and Sexism” at the U.S. Institute of Peace on October 13.

The program highlighted the work of Dr. Azizah al-Hibri, a longtime University of Richmond law professor and Islamic scholar who in 1993 founded Karamah, naming it with the Arabic word for “dignity.” Al-Hibri’s idea was to provide Muslim women with a solid grounding in religious law, thus letting them challenge male domination on the basis of an accepted belief system. The organization conducts workshops and programs in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, as well as research on women’s rights and Islamic jurisprudence. 

“The issue of Islam and women is one of the more contentious areas of misperception and misunderstanding about Islam,” said Lynn Kunkle, grants director of the Washington-based el-Hibri Charitable Foundation, which supports Karamah. “It’s important first to separate Islam from Muslims. Islam is a set of values, beliefs, goals and ideals. Muslims struggle, as all religions do, to implement those ideals.”

Karamah taps into those principles by focusing on “authentic sources” within the faith, Rahman added.

Women from Egypt, Afghanistan and Libya are meeting in Dubai this week to collaborate in protecting women’s rights via Islamic constitutions. Legal advocates, religious scholars and political activists from those countries are working at a USIP-hosted conference to strengthen region-wide efforts to enact and enforce women’s constitutional rights. The conference grew out of a 2013 paper by USIP staff members.

The Karamah model has proven effective in USIP’s own work, said Manal Omar, who leads the Institute’s Center for the Middle East and Africa.

Omar also described how the approach helped a project she worked on years ago in Yemen. Women were trying to win support from religious authorities for a law to raise the legal age of marriage for girls. The proposal ran into a roadblock over its reference to “early” marriage. Interpretation of the word “early” would require numerous rulings by religious courts, the campaigners were told. Drawing on advice from Yemeni religious scholars—and on their own knowledge of Islamic precepts, which bar practices that harm the community—the women replaced “early” with the word “safe,” a standard supported by reams of research on the effects of too-early childbirth. The marriage age for females was raised to 16.

“What does the text actually say?” Omar said. “This is the most useful thing on the ground.”

Religious scholarship that challenges patriarchy also has a place in resisting violent extremism, Omar said.

“The Muslim community across the globe is being called on to wear a critical hat and hold accountable those using the name of Islam to engage in violent action,” she said.

In her own youth, Omar said, she accepted and defended “some pretty silly things about women in Islam, just [parroting] what I had been taught” about traditional roles for women within the faith. Then, she said, Al-Hibri and other Muslim friends “pulled me aside and said, look, it’s okay to be critical,” because much of Muslim cultural tradition about women “doesn’t belong to Islam.” It was the beginning of a critical education that today continues with a scholar who tells her that his job is to make her less vulnerable to the local imam, she said.

Religious education that helps women defend their own authority as community leaders is critical to peacebuilding and responding to violent conflict, said Susan Hayward, USIP’s director of religion and inclusive societies. Women are consistently shown to be more religious than men in belief, devotion and attendance to public rituals, she said. Consequently, they’re important interpreters and transmitters, and potentially transformers, of their societies’ traditions.  

“Our approach can be gentle but it must be firm,” Rahman said of Karamah’s work. “We’re not asking for anything. To be included is our God-given right.”

Related Publications

The Latest @ USIP: How Civil Society is Addressing Haiti’s Crisis

The Latest @ USIP: How Civil Society is Addressing Haiti’s Crisis

Monday, March 25, 2024

By: Dr. Marie-Marcelle Deschamps

In the past few years, life in Haiti has been dominated by gangs’ growing control over huge swathes of the capital, Port-au-Prince. For Haitian families, this crisis has meant extreme violence, pervasive unemployment, lack of education for children and reduced access to health care. 2023 Women Building Peace Award finalist Dr. Marie-Marcelle Deschamps serves as the deputy executive director, the head of the women's health program and the manager of the clinical research unit of GHESKIO Centers in Port-au-Prince. She spoke to USIP about how her work helps women and their families, and what the global community can do to help Haitian civil society address this devastating humanitarian crisis.

Type: Blog

Conflict Analysis & PreventionGender

Addressing Gendered Violence in Papua New Guinea: Opportunities and Options

Addressing Gendered Violence in Papua New Guinea: Opportunities and Options

Thursday, March 7, 2024

By: Negar Ashtari Abay, Ph.D.;  Kathleen Kuehnast, Ph.D.;  Gordon Peake, Ph.D.;  Melissa Demian, Ph.D.

Each year, more than 1.5 million women and girls in Papua New Guinea experience gender-based violence tied to intercommunal conflict, political intimidation, domestic abuse, and other causes. It is, according to a 2023 Human Rights Watch report, “one of the most dangerous places to be a woman or girl.” Bleak as this may seem, it is not hopeless. USIP’s new report identifies several promising approaches for peacebuilding programming to reduce gender-based violence and effect meaningful and lasting change in Papua New Guinea.

Type: Special Report

Gender

The Challenges Facing Afghans with Disabilities

The Challenges Facing Afghans with Disabilities

Thursday, February 29, 2024

By: Belquis Ahmadi

In Afghanistan, obtaining accurate data on the number of persons with disabilities — including gender-disaggregated information — has always been a challenging endeavor. But based on the data we do have, it’s clear that more than four decades of violent conflict have left a considerable portion of the Afghan population grappling with various forms of disabilities, both war-related and otherwise. And the pervasive lack of protective mechanisms, social awareness and empathy surrounding disability continue to pose formidable challenges for individuals with disabilities, with women being disproportionately affected.

Type: Analysis

GenderHuman Rights

The Latest @ USIP: Children Born of War

The Latest @ USIP: Children Born of War

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

By: Eunice Otuko Apio

Unfortunately, children born as a result of conflict-related sexual violence have been overlooked in the international community’s peacebuilding agenda for a long time. Eunice Otuko Apio, a member of Uganda's Parliament and a finalist for USIP’s 2022 Women Building Peace Award, discusses why children born of war have historically been marginalized in peace processes, how resources can be used to support them and their families more effectively, and how women can contribute to peacebuilding more broadly.

Type: Blog

GenderHuman Rights

View All Publications