"In Quest for Equal Rights, Muslim Women’s Meeting Turns to Islam’s Tenets " (NYT)

Article

Highlights:

It was frustrations like those that drew several hundred Muslim women to a conference in this Muslim-majority country [Malaysia] over the weekend. Their mission was to come up with ways to demand equal rights for women. And their tools, however unlikely, were the tenets of Islam itself.

The advocates came from 47 countries to participate in the project, called Musawah, the Arabic word for equality. They spent the weekend brainstorming and learning the best Islamic arguments to take back to their own societies as defenses against clerics who insist that women’s lives are dictated by men’s strict interpretations of Islam.

She referred to the work of Muslim intellectuals, like Nasr Abu Zayd of Egypt and Abdolkarim Soroush of Iran, reformers who argue that the Koran must be read in a historical context, and that laws derived from it can change with the times. Their ideas are controversial, and both are in exile in the West.

Ms. Mir-Hosseini argues that Muslim societies are trapped in a battle between two visions of Islam: one legalistic and absolutist that emphasizes the past; the other pluralistic and more inclined toward democracy.

Some scholars argued that the effort sounded unrealistic and would have no impact, mainly because it appeared to ignore more than a thousand years of Islamic legal scholarship and practice. Religious authorities are the only ones with the power to interpret laws, and circumventing that well-entrenched system would require replacing it altogether.

“This kind of argument is being made at the margins of the Islamic world,” said Bernard Haykel, an expert on Islamic law at Princeton University. “It has shape and form, but no substantive content. There’s no real way of actually bringing about these changes.”

Ms. Mir-Hosseini said she believed that change was coming, and that it was just a matter of when.

“There’s so much tension and energy there now,” she said. “It will be a flood.”

Hm. I'm intrigued. Generally/stereotypically speaking, those who have argued that they need to go back to explore original texts (and, especially, those who wish to put such authority into the hands of the layperson) usually end up with some... extremely controversial viewpoints. And they tend to fizzle and die. I want the real deal. I still struggle with thoughts that the system's broke, but have been thus far unconvinced with many of the moves to fix it.

Hm.