Ziba mir hosseini biography of williams

I am a free-lance academic, passionately involved in debates on gender equality in law. As a feminist, I expose and criticize the injustices that these laws continue to inflict on women in some Muslim contexts. My aim is to bring Islamic and human rights frameworks together in order to lay the basis for an egalitarian Muslim family law. Both Muslims and non-Muslims see women in most Muslim communities as suffering from social, economic and political discrimination, treated by law and in society as second-class citizens subject to male authority.

This crucial distinction was widely recognized in the past, when no faqih or Muslim jurist of note would ever claim that his fiqh position was absolute and final. Today, however, this practice is rare and so you have people who, completely lacking this humility, would insist that their own opinion is absolute truth, the sole or the correct shariah opinion on any matter.

In this regard I think it is crucial to always foreground the fact that what we understand of Islam — or any religion for that matter — is always just that — simply one understanding out of many, which is heavily influenced by our own personal and social location. Q: A number of NGOs working with Muslim women, including some prominent ones that are engaged in articulating what could be called an Islamic feminist discourse, rely heavily on Western funding.

So, what other option do they have? The fact of the matter is that many Muslim women live in undemocratic contexts that lack strong civil society institutions that can support the sort of work they are engaged in. After all, the oil-rich Saudi Wahhabis are certainly not going to fund NGOs working for justice and equality for Muslim women, even if these are articulated in an Islamic paradigm.

Q: Islam has often been critiqued for allegedly denying women their rights. There is undoubtedly an element of apologetics involved here, and Islamic feminism is certainly reacting to critiques and circulating discourses about Islam.

Ziba mir hosseini biography of williams

It is crucial to examine the forces which the emerging Islamic feminism is facing and reacting to. What is common to all these different sets of discourses to which Islamic feminism is reacting is a very essentialised, non-historical understanding of Islam, one that refuses to recognize the diverse, alternative understandings of Islam that have always existed.

Islamic feminism is thus reacting to these discourses all at the same time. So, in a sense, it is an apologetic or reactive discourse, directed against those who claim that Islam does not countenance gender justice and equality. Q: For some Islamic feminists, their use of Islamic arguments for gender equality may indeed be a serious expression of closely-held religious convictions.

However, one gets the feeling, although this is just speculation, that for some others employing Islamic arguments for gender justice might simply be an instrumental use of alternate understandings of Islam in order to counter Islamists and traditionalists on their own turf or simply because operating in a Muslim context necessarily demands the use of Islamic arguments in order to gain a hearing.

Do you agree? It is impossible to generalize, of course, but I think there is an element of both — of sincere faith as well as, in some cases, a tactical use of Islamic arguments to reach the same conclusions and make the same demands as secular feminists would in a non-Muslim context. Since a whole range of regressive laws, as far as women are concerned, are sought to be imposed in the name of Islam, these activists, irrespective of their own personal religious beliefs, have been compelled to seek to articulate alternative Islamic interpretations to counter them.

Q: With just a few notable exceptions, the key articulators of Islamic feminist discourse are all non-Arab Muslims. Interestingly, much of this publishing work is happening not in Arabic, but in languages such as English, Persian and Bahasa Indonesia. I think political conditions in the Arab world are simply not conducive for such discourses to be publicly articulated.

Doing this could well cost you your life. You could easily be branded as an apostate and killed. Do you think these institutions could help galvanise and popularize Islamic feminist tendencies while empowering their graduates to become women religious authorities in their own right? Frankly, I do not think so. Retrieved 8 October External links [ edit ].

Authority control databases. Hidden categories: CS1 maint: location missing publisher Articles with short description Short description is different from Wikidata EngvarB from February Use dmy dates from February Articles containing Persian-language text. Toggle the table of contents. Ziba Mir-Hosseini. They want love, they want happiness, they want to be able to work, to be out in the world.

And what's happening is, as more of these women are educating themselves, the sheer groundswell of it coming from below is forcing a change. So it's not a question of the government making concessions to these women — it's women forcing concessions from below. My most sustained period of teaching was at the Law School, New York University, where I was a Global Visiting Professor for a semester every other year between anddesigning and teaching three different courses.

Link to the lecture. Skip to content. BA Honours. First Class, University of Tehran Major: Social and Developmental Planning.