mulki al-sharmani Islamic Feminism

and national reflections This article focuses on contemporary interpretive knowledge projects that engage critically with Islamic religious sciences, and which are driven by the question of gender justice. These projects, which have been loosely termed as Islamic Feminism, are undertaken by Muslim women scholars from different countries who are committed to their religious faith and who are working towards the production of alter-native, gender-sensitive religious knowledge. The paper has three aims: 1) to review the contestations about the definition, categorization, goals, and significance of what has been termed Islamic feminism, 2) to provide an alternative description of these knowledge projects and identify some hermeneutical characteristics that link them and which perhaps could be the basis for de-lineating them as a new field of knowledge, 3) to map out the trajectory of building new religion-based femi-nist knowledge in Egypt, shedding light on light on cur-rent knowledge projects that can be labelled as Islamic feminism. Over the last three and a half decades there has appeared a new area of scholarship that engages with Islamic sacred texts (the Qur’an and Sunnah) and its interpretive tradition (i.e. exegesis, jurispru-dence, Hadith compilations, etc.), driven primarily by the question of gender justice and methodological reform.1 This scholarship consists of studies that crit-ically revisit and unpack dominant religious inter-pretations that are patriarchal and discriminatory against women, and aim to produce new knowledge that makes the case for gender equality and justice from within an Islamic paradigm. These studies are 1 The author wishes to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments. being produced predominantly by Muslim female scholars (and some male Muslim scholars) from dif-ferent disciplines and countries. The new scholarship has been called Islamic feminism. Some of the scholars who have been studying or engaging in Islamic feminism see a great epistemic and political value in it, not only for Muslim women but also for the reform of religious tradition (Abou