fahmina institute Cirebon

Harga
Rp.

Gender equality is one of the most contentious issues debated among Muslims. The roots of the debate are entangled in the history of relations between of Islam and the West, and in the anti-colonial and nationalist discourses of the first half of the twentieth century. With the rise of political Islam in the second half of the century, the debate acquired a different edge, and a new phase in the politics of gender in Islam began. Islamists, with their political slogan of “Return to Shari‘a”, attempted to translate into policy the outmoded tribal and patriarchal notions of gender formulated by pre-modern Muslim jurists and to implement them through the machinery of a modern state, and thereby provoked critiques of these notions and spurred women to increased activism. By the end of the century, the issue of gender equality had become part of the larger intellectual and political struggle among Muslims between two understandings of their religion, two ways of reading and relating to its sacred texts. One is an absolutist, dogmatic and patriarchal Islam that makes little concession to contemporary realities and Muslim aspirations. The other is a democratic, pluralist and rights-based Islam that is making room for these realities and aspirations.

This rights-based Islam, with its concomitant notion of gender equality, is nowhere more developed and widespread in the Muslim world than in Indonesia, as this book testifies. It is important to remember that Indonesia not only is the largest Muslim nation-state but also has the most women scholars and religious leaders. Arising from the vast networks of the two mass religious organizations (Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama) that have defined and shaped Indonesian Islam since the early twentieth century, these women are now not only taking an active part in the production of religious knowledge but also talking back to the advocates of absolutist and patriarchal Islam. These two facts, which have little parallel elsewhere in the Muslim world, account to a large extent for the refreshing absence in the Indonesian women’s movement of the dichotomy between Islam and feminism that continues to divide women’s rights activists in many other Muslim contexts, in particular in the Middle East.

The book makes two major contributions. First, it makes available for the first time in English the training manual  developed by the Fahmina Institute -an Indonesian pesantren based NGO that supports women empowerment through Islamic teaching. This manual is targeted towards women activists who have no Islamic educational background, with a view to providing them with both theoretical and practical guidance on how to argue for gender equality within Islamic legal thought. Secondly, the book details the core elements of the rights-based Islam, which can bring about the much needed paradigm shift in Islamic law and to go beyond old jurisprudential dogmas in search of new questions and new answers. It does this by historicizing and contextualizing the discriminatory rulings on women that have become part of Islamic law, showing that they are neither manifestations of the divine will nor immutable, but rather that they are juristic constructs that are shaped by, reflect, and can change with time and place.

This book is a powerful training tool for all those who are struggling to give voice to an ethical and egalitarian vision of Islam, which can only be achieved by severing the Islamic ideals and the sacred texts from the patriarchal biases and rulings that have hitherto distorted them. It is only then that Muslims can be freed from taking apologetic and defensive positions.