Gender Justice and Gender Jihad: Possibilities and Limits of Qur’anic Interpretation for Women’s Liberation

Abstract

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a wave of awakening and revival movements began in the Islamic world. Part of this swell of enthusiasm were Muslim women,² conscious of their isolated and largely marginalized position in the family and society, increasingly demanding the right (again) to exercise their own ijtihäd.³ Muslim women have begun to generate and bring into play ideas about feminism and Islam⁴ through literature, everyday activism, and participation in organized movements, particularly extensively and cooperatively in the last twenty years. Some of these motivations for confronting the sources of Islamic tradition, in anticipation of a critical