Sheeba Aslam Fehmi On Islamic Feminism
By Yoginder Sikand
Sheeba Aslam Fehmi is one of India’s only Islamic feminist writers and one of the few Indian Muslim women scholars who writes on Islam (among other issues). She has written extensively on gender-just understandings of Islam, articulating equality for Muslim women using Quranic arguments. Since February 2009, she has a regular column, tellingly titled ‘Gender Jihad’, in the monthly Hans, one of India’s most respectable Hindi literary magazines.
In this interview with Yoginder Sikand, she talks about her activism and scholarship.
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But, to get back to what I was saying. When I read the Quran—of course in translation—for myself, I was shocked to discover how different it is from what the mullahs write and preach in the name of Islam. The Quran teaches, I discovered, the equality and dignity of women, while the mullahs teach precisely the opposite and pass that off as ‘Islam’. The mullahs claim, despite there being nothing of the sort in the Quran, that ‘a woman must slave for her husband, no matter if he is a tyrant and that if she willingly submits to him she can enter heaven through any door she chooses’! Who are the mullahs to announce who can enter into heaven or not? How do they know who will go to heaven and who to hell? After all, only God knows this, and for a mere human being to claim that he knows these divine secrets is what is called shirk in the Quran!
These and other such questions began swirling in my mind after I read the Quran myself, realizing how terribly the mullahs had distorted the true message of the Quran with the help of Hadith and fiqh texts.
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One does not need the Hadith to understand the Quran. Of course, the mullahs will vehemently disagree, and one reason for this is that it is from the corpus of Hadith, including from what they themselves recognize as weak and even concocted hadith narratives, that they draw their inspiration for all sorts of patriarchal rules which they wish to impose on women. I challenge not just the mullahs but also the texts from which they draw their patriarchal and dehumanizing ideas and which they use to legitimise their authority—be they concocted hadith reports or their commentaries on the Quran or fiqh compendia.
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complete interview, ©www.countercurrents.org
