A Social Psychological Critique on Islamic Feminism

Abstract

Islamic feminism, as a discourse within feminism, aims to re-read the Qur’an from a modern egalitarian perspective, which is outside the traditional and patriarchal interpretation of Islam. Islamic feminists reclaim an ethical vision of the Qur’an by presenting a reinterpretation, especially regarding verses that deprive women from having equal rights in the family, as well as in society. However, while Islamic feminism presents a gender equal interpretation of the Qur’an and raises new discourses and debates on gender relations in an Islamic context, a critical insight of Islamic feminism can provide a new gender and religious consciousness that, in turn, develops further perspectives on gender equality in a religious context. This paper aims to provide a critique of Islamic feminism from a social psychological perspective of gender using the theory of Abdulkarim Soroush. His theory considers revelation as the prophet’s word resulting from his religious experience. Soroush defines revelation as an inspiration; in this way, revelation or Qur’an is not directly God’s word, but Muhammad’s word resulting from a divine experience. Accordingly, this paper deals with a social psychological perspective of the lived experience of the prophet as a man in a certain epoch of history, in which the lived experiences of women were not represented, and the revelation or the Qur’an is based on a male lived experience. It begins with an overview of Islamic feminists as well as the more general current of Islamic reformists and their efforts to view the revelation as the word of the prophet in order to avoid attributing the non-scientific content of the Qur’an to the direct word of God. This is followed by a critique of Islamic feminism based on Abdulkarim Soroush’s theory of the recognition of the revelation as the word of the prophet, as well as gender theories from the field of social psychology.