Amina Wadud's "Inside the Gender Jihad"

Wadud, Amina. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2008.

Amina Wadud, a convert to Islam, received her B.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, her MA. in Near Eastern Studies, and her PhD. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Michigan in 1988. During graduate school, she studied advanced Arabic in Egypt at the American University in Cairo, along with Quranic studies and tafsir (exegesis) at Cairo University; she also took a Philosophy course at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. She received full professorship of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and is currently (2010) a visiting professor at the Center for Religious and Cross Cultural Studies at Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia. 

An earnest condemnation of patriarchy within Islam, the book wages jihad (war) against gender prejudices that are rooted in patriarchal interpretations of the Quran. Wadud includes in her book her personal struggle with the consequences of the mixed-gender prayer she led in 2005, concluding that the insults and imprecations she continues receiving are a result of the male hegemony and privilege that have dominated intellectual discourses in Islam; the fact that women have been the objects, not discussants, in discourses on shariah, Islamic law,says a lot, she asserts. It is precisely for this reason that she impugns the literalist, narrow, and static interpretations of Islam. She reminds her Muslim readers that Islam came in order to establish justice, which she believes is defined differently by each individual, contending that it is men who bestow full justice to men who limit it on women. The author notes that the term “Islam” is attached to arguments by Muslims so that the interlocutors may gain legitimacy and authority and to prohibit others from dissenting. Wadud’s book is an attempt to contribute to the future development of Islam as a system of social justice that acts in accordance with the Islam that is just and not bound by any unjust interpretations that deny women their Islamic rights, which include direct involvement in dialogues held about the readings of Islamic scriptures in order to establish the shariah.