This past week, Whitman College received the visit of Dr. Amina Wadud, a Qur’anic  scholar and leader in Islamic feminism. Dr. Wadud visited classes, lectured and led a workshop on exploring Islamic texts with a gender focus. Wadud’s main message was this: In order to create justice in gender in Islam, there is no need to stray from Islam. Rather, there needs to be a reevaluation of what Islam is, and a realization that unfair gender practices come from culture and world events, not what the Islamic religion actually entails.

In her lecture on Wednesday, Wadud outlined the woman’s movement in Islam and her work aiding these efforts. Beginning with a traditional Dua’a that serves to remember the presence of Allah in all actions, Wadud proceeded to briefly describe her life before becoming the scholar that she is today.

Wadud was born to Christian parents. She and her family were active in the Civil Rights Movement, and referenced her experience marching in D.C. with Martin Luther King. Later in her young adult life, she became a practicing Buddhist. From this eclectic background prefacing her conversion to Islam, Wadud said she took away the important notion that God and spirituality is manifested in many diverse ways. She also warned of the miscommunications in discussion of religion––different people saying the same words can mean very different things. Wadud provided her definition of Islam: “God is one.”  All creation is harmonious, regardless of gender.

Wadud then began to discuss the tenets of feminism in Islam. There are, of course, many things that are key to this movement that people don’t see on the surface. She underlined the importance of understanding the multiple areas and perspectives that broad topic includes––one must distinguish between Muslim culture, Islamic texts, and Islamic law; there is also a difference between Muslim secular feminism, Islamism, and Islamic feminism, which she deemed the three categories of the women’s movement in Islam.

She also spoke about the generally misguided understanding of Islam, even within the Muslim community itself. What people think of normally when they conceptualize Islam is conservative Islam: a strict and rigid idea of the Islamic religion that doesn’t have much room to change. Wadud emphasizes that people need to leave this idea of Islam behind to unhinge themselves from these static notions and allow for change in Islam––not in the raw religion, but of what has come to be considered Islam. This underlines the need to distinguish between evolved culture and what Islam itself originally entailed in its texts and laws.

This is where her work as a Qur’anic scholar and her dedication to feminism in Islam overlap. Wadud argues that within Islamic text are the tools to break definitions and confinements of Islam, and work towards progress in the women’s movement.

Wadud explained that within Islamic texts, women are certainly not second to men. Directly from the text, Wadud showed that woman are defined as the moral agents of Allah––they have a direct relation to God. In the Qur’an’s ultimate objective, she explained, women and men were both (equally) addressed. In her evaluation of Tawhid, a tenet of Islam that embodies the whole realm of living, Wadud finds gender equality, and the inherent right to reform, something that allows the deviation from conservative Islam that she says has been holding the progression of Islam back.

So if gender inequality didn’t originate from Islam itself, where did it begin? Wadud explains that this is largely due to the absence of women in the rise of Islam and in the creation of the Islamic canon. This began the subdued role of women in all of Islamic culture. Then, when colonialism breached Islamic nations, women didn’t receive the same concessions as men. This inequality from an outside force served as a rude awakening, triggering Islam’s women’s movement. The global awareness that emerged in this period of history showed realities other than their own, underlining the inequalities women were suffering from, and how their position in society could be better. It also provided people with a pluralism that allowed the capacity to understand people different from themselves, which entails an ability to evaluate one’s own ideas as well, and realize their flaws. This self-reflection and new understanding of possibilities in other parts of the world caused women in Islamic society to begin standing up for change.

Now the women’s movement faces the challenge of getting people to break from the constricting idea of Islam that people share. Wadud argues, then, for a “Gender Jihad”––a fresh, reevaluated look at gender within Islam, and a reformation of what Islam is in itself. Islamic feminists are now working on acquiring their own feminism––breaking from the term’s possession by the West––and people everywhere are interrogating what it means to be a Muslim. Wadud’s work enables Muslims to begin to distinguish between constructed Islamic culture and Islam as an entity in itself, as people begin to reform what Islam really means for women.