Muslema Purmul – The Concept of Feminism And Islam

We need to start by asking some basic questions, who's Islam?

Who's feminism? Who is speaking for Islam and who is speaking for

feminism? These questions remain unaddressed in most debates,

whether in academia, media or activist forums,

who are we talking about now, as far as who's feminism, just doing

a basic search, and this is not, you know, I'm not a gender studies

major, but just doing some basic research on it, there's, I found

at least 29 different forms. There's Amazon feminism, anarcho

feminism, cultural feminism, difference feminism, eco feminism,

equality feminism, essentialist feminism, feminism, feminism and

women of color, first feminism, fourth feminism, French feminism,

lesbian feminism, liberal feminism, Marxist, socialist

feminism, material feminism, moderate feminism, pop feminism,

post colonial feminism, and there are more so

when we say, like, What do you mean by feminism? There's, they

literally have no ijma about every about anything. There's no

consensus. There's no like, this is what we're about, that all of

them will say, Yeah, that's what we're about. Because there's,

there's a difference of agreement within that movement, and that's

there and they acknowledge it. One of my teachers used to say, beware

of plastic words. And a plastic word is a word that means a

different thing to every person who uses it, not that it evokes

different emotions, but it actually like denotes something

different according to the person who uses it. As an example

different when people are talking about, oh, this would be progress.

Even though progress is a general word, it can often be a plastic

word, because it means it denotes, in that context, something

different for the person who's using it. So it's good to actually

spell out what it is a person is advocating specifically. Right

with feminism, it's become like that. It's become a word that you

actually cannot define definitively,

and there are many definitions of them. One of the things that the

author, the researcher in the Forbes magazine, mentioned was

that faith based communities have a problem with the word equal now

we as Muslims believe that spiritually, we're all created

equal. We recognize that as on a spiritual level, we were created

equal, but it might be a little taboo to say this, but we also

believe that Allah has privileged both genders.

There is male privilege and there's also female privilege. We

do have patriarchy, but we also have matriarchy. There's a Fadl,

right? There's a Fadl that's given to men in certain regards, and

there's a Fadl that's given to women in certain regards. And

then, even in the Quran, I can't consciously advocate for quote,

unquote, equal on a social level, especially when we have the verse,

Walesa, untha, right, and the male is not like the female. Just side

comment here. The interesting thing about this verse, it doesn't

say that the female is not like the male. It says that the male is

not like the female, kind of linguistically, it puts the female

as the standard just saying

this so. So there's a we have. There are, there are ways that

Allah has privileged women and mothers, the female in general,

over other, over the over over men. And there are ways that Allah

has privileged men over women, and he has made that as a compliment,

if we as women acknowledge our own privilege, and if we as women

honor the god given privilege and actually advocate for those

privileges, honestly, it would heal the whole society.

I'm not going to ask just for my rights. I'm actually going to ask

for my divine privileges.