components: a consciousness that women are op-
pressed in many ways, and actual attempts to rec-
tify or deal with this reality (Karam 1998). This
working definition is inspired by the extensive
research carried out by Arab women researchers
such as Leila Ahmed, Mervat Hatem, Evelyne Accad,
Souad Dajani, Fatima Mernissi, Suad Joseph, Lila
Abu-Lughod, Soraya Altorki, Yvonne Haddad,
and Nadje Al-Ali – to mention but a few. Arab
women are probably amongst the most written and
researched about women in the world, and several
non-Arab women researchers have also presented
landmark and seminal studies over the years such
as Judith Tucker, Beth Baron, Elizabeth Fernea,
Nikkie Keddie, Sondra Hale, Barbara Stowasser,
Susan S. Davis, Cynthia Nelson, Margot Badran,
and many others. Together, these works continue to
inform and transform feminist consciousness and
practice in the Arab world.
With the above definition, it is possible to iden-
tify three main feminist streams in the Arab world
that fall firmly within a continuum: secular (herein
understood as non-religious discourse); religious
(largely, but not only, couched in Islamic terms);
and Islamist (framed within and advocating for
political Islam). None of these streams is by any
means homogeneous or generic; each category is
full of diversity (and ambiguity) and often the bar-
riers delineating one form of discourse from
another are tenuous, hence the importance of imag-
ining a continuum of discursive practice.
Secular feminists on the whole tend to shun faith-
based discourse. This does not mean that they dis-
respect religion or are themselves non-religious. On
the contrary, some of them can be devout (and are
keen to describe themselves as such) in their per-
sonal lives. When it comes to framing their dis-
course on women’s rights publicly, many secular
feminists will skirt around religious issues or argue
that to bring in religion is to risk endangering
women’s rights – either because of the dominance
of conservative religious establishments, or because
they fear creating a rift amongst their own ranks
(since they will not all share the same faith tradi-
tion). Secular feminists are generally comfortable
with the term “feminist” and many have strong
connections with their feminist sisters from other
countries, working for the implementation of all
international legal human rights instruments and
against all forms of discrimination, such as CEDAW
(Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women), the Beijing Plat-
form for Action, and others.
Some secular feminists can be openly antagonis-
tic about and toward religion, maintaining that584 political-social movements: feminist
religion itself is the cause of much of the oppression
women suffer, and are thus unwilling to engage
with their more religious sisters, seeing them as
laboring under a false consciousness. The more reli-
gious the message of the social or political activists,
the more suspicious the secular feminists tend to
be – often for good reason. Rarely in the Arab
world is there any praise from religious circles for
those who promote women’s rights outside reli-
gious frameworks. Similarly, wherever there is an
active Islamist movement (for example, in Algeria,
Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, and Lebanon) some of the
strongest opposition will be from secular feminists,
believing that women’s rights will be the first casu-
alty of any Islamist regime, and citing Afghanistan,
Iran, and Saudi Arabia as examples.
On the opposite side of the continuum, Islamist
feminists – to many, a contradiction in terms – have
an important role to play. In the same way that not
all secular women are feminists, not all women
members of Islamist movements (which themselves
exist right across the Arab world) are feminists by
any means. On the contrary, some of the most
vociferous critiques of feminists and feminism
emanates from Islamist circles – men and women.
So who are Islamist feminists? These are the
activists within the movement who advocate polit-
ical Islam and who subscribe to the working defini-
tion of feminism used above. In other words, these
are the women who acknowledge that women are
oppressed and see the Islamist reality as an option
to bring about a better world for both men and
women.
For Islamist feminists, broadly speaking, the rea-
sons for women’s oppression are often explained in
terms of society’s lack of adherence to Islam (or to
God) and the adjuncts of that faith in general. It is
because Arabs are not following God’s laws (which
can only be just), runs the argument, that we con-
front the social, political, and structural problems
we have today. A society dominated by (an enlight-
ened interpretation) of the Sharì≠a, or Islamic law, is
one that, in these women’s opinion, will guarantee
justice for women and thus improve Muslim
women’s condition. Islamism, seen as favoring a
more just society, is also perceived as the means to
achieve this end. Islamist feminists share one thing
in common with their secular counterparts: a sense
of unease, or even outright suspicion vis-à-vis each
other. They argue that international legal instru-
ments are at best redundant, and at worst, prob-
lematic and foreign, since all Muslims need are the
Qur±àn, the sunna, and the ™adìth.
Religious feminists fall somewhere in the middle
of the continuum. They are to be distinguished