The City of the Prophet 73was a symbol of the “degradation of women” and definitive proof that
“Islam as a social system has been a complete failure.” Never mind
that Cromer was the founder of the Men’s League for Opposing
Women’s Suffrage in England. As the quintessential colonialist,
Cromer had no interest in the plight of Muslim women; the veil was,
for him, an icon of the “backwardness of Islam,” and the most visible
justification for Europe’s “civilizing mission” in the Middle East.
For liberal Muslim reformists such as the distinguished Iranian
political philosopher Ali Shariati (1933–77), the veil was the symbol of
female chastity, piety, and, most of all, empowered defiance against
the Western image of womanhood. In his celebrated book Fatima Is
Fatima, Shariati held up the Prophet Muhammad’s virtuous daughter
as an example for Muslim women to “reach towards the glory and
beauty of humanity and to put aside [the] old and new feelings of infe-
riority, humility and baseness.” Yet, enlightened as his approach may
have been, it was still tragically flawed by the fact that, like Cromer,
Shariati was describing something of which he had no experience.
The fact is that the traditional colonial image of the veiled Mus-
lim woman as the sheltered, docile sexual property of her husband is
just as misleading and simpleminded as the postmodernist image of
the veil as the emblem of female freedom and empowerment from
Western cultural hegemony. The veil may be neither or both of these
things, but that is up to Muslim women to decide for themselves. This
they are finally doing by taking part in something that has been denied
them for centuries: their own Quranic exegesis.
Today, throughout the Muslim world, a whole new generation of
contemporary female textual scholars is reengaging the Quran from a
perspective that has been sorely lacking in Islamic scholarship. Begin-
ning with the notion that it is not the moral teachings of Islam but
the social conditions of seventh-century Arabia and the rampant
misogyny of male Quranic exegetes that has been responsible for
their inferior status in Muslim society, these women are approaching
the Quran free from the confines of traditional gender boundaries.
Amina Wadud’s instructive book Quran and Woman: Rereading the
Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective provides the template for this
movement, though Wadud is by no means alone in her endeavor.
Muslim feminists throughout the world have been laboring toward a