Discussing Women's Empowerment - Sida

SAADALLAH • GENDER AND POWER IN MUSLIM SOCIETIES 115
tured, efficient developmental policy.
Some of the most basic questions that we may raise at this point are:
What role does Islam actually play in defining the role and status of
women in Muslim societies? Is it the religion, or a variant of male, patriarchal-based
interpretations that affects women’s place in society? What
other related factors affect and reinforce this status? How do we deal with
the prerogatives for change and social development aiming at a genderjust
society, within the delineated context?
Religion and the Dialectics of Interpretation:
Gender and Power in Islam
Islam as a religion has laid the foundations of the relationship between the
sexes in the Koran, the Sunna 1 , and the body of Islamic Jurisprudence or
Fiqh, built up over the centuries. When we explore the dynamics of gender
in Islam as a religion, we have to do it at two levels:
– the level of ‘Text’ comprising the Koran and
the Hadiths 2 .
– the level of interpretation, comprising the influx of historical/cultural
influences that are external to Islam.
Considering the first level, as Bodman (1998, p. 5) reiterates “the
Koran makes it unmistakably clear that in the eyes of God women are the
equal of men”. This equality, however, is limited to the relationship of
men and women to God, and the carrying out of religious duties and rituals.
There are also certain exceptions in certain circumstantial situations
(ibid., 1998, p. 5). Stowasser (1984, p. 21) further confirms that “both men
and women have their full humanity and bear the burden of equal moral
responsibility”.
Within human relationships the picture becomes even more complex.
A specification of roles is delineated where women are portrayed as being
under the protection of males, be they husbands or next of kin. The hierarchical
role 3 of men is mentioned in Surah 4 (Women, verse 34): “Men
1. Sunna is the traditions and sayings (also known as Hadiths) of the Prophet.
2. The Hadiths were recorded across different epochs of Islamic history. They have numbered in
the thousands. Some have been discovered to be forgeries, whereby they were used as a tool to
legitimize certain matters of issue across Islamic empires, in trying to consolidate the position of
Muslim rulers, and patriarchal tendencies and traits that were assimilated cross culturally from
conquered territories.
3. Here I stress the use of the subjective ’role’ rather than status in the light of a more liberal interpretation
of the verses, where hierarchy stems from the nature of responsibilities accrued upon
men, and hence from a specific form of division of labor and role-assignations.