Islamists in Jordan: Promoters of or Obstacles to Female Empowerment and Gender Equality?

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Sofie Roald

AbstractThis study deals with the Muslim Brotherhood's reception of CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discriminations against Women) in Jordan. In view of the Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) and interviews with several political actors in Jordanian society it is possible to evaluate Islamist ideas on women's rights. The main aim is to investigate whether Jordanian Islamists are promoters of or obstacles to female empowerment and gender equality. By analyzing various political stands it became apparent that Islamists, on the one hand, reject CEDAW, gender empowerment, and gender equality, and on the other promote issues which in the long run may empower women in Jordanian society. There is thus an unintentional trend towards female empowerment in the organization of the Muslim Brotherhood despite its opposition to such female politics.

2020 ◽  
pp. 37-78
Author(s):  
Ioana Emy Matesan

This chapter revisits the early history of the Muslim Brotherhood to understand why an organization that started out as a nonviolent religious movement came to be associated with violence. Many blame this on the harsh repression under President Gamal Abdel Nasser. However, the analysis shows that the drift toward violence started much earlier. Reconstructing the sequence of events between 1936 and 1948, the chapter reveals that what initially politicized the Brotherhood was the presence of British troops in Egypt and Palestine. The formation of an armed wing led to competition over authority within the group, which incentivized violent escalation. The chapter then focuses on the period between 1954 and 1970 and shows that repression had a dual effect. On the one hand, it inspired new jihadi interpretations, which were particularly appealing to younger members. On the other hand, the prisons were also the backdrop against which the Brotherhood became convinced that violence was futile.


2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liv Tønnessen

AbstractThe fundamental argument put forward by Islamists, who have ruled Sudan since 1989, for not signing the convention is based on cultural relativism; different cultures provide indigenous and local solutions to their women’s problems. Islam is the solution, not Western feminism. But the Islamists’ failure to ratify CEDAW should not be regarded as a complete rejection of Western feminism, however defined. Through a review of the debate on CEDAW and Islam, this article explores the entanglements of ‘Islamic’ and ‘Western’ normative legal orders. It argues that although Islamist feminists’ discourse deems Western tenets of feminism and gender equality to be unessential to Islamic societies and falsely universalising in its premises, it simultaneously draws upon them in order to demonstrate their ‘alternative’ feminism. By analysing a range of Islamist women’s positions, it becomes apparent that on the one hand they reject CEDAW and gender equality, and on the other promote issues which empower women in the Sudanese state and society. But there are important points of criticism to be made regarding Islamic solutions in a multi-religious and class-divided Sudanese society. Sudanese Islamist women’s claims on behalf of Islamic solutions for Sudanese women can paradoxically be critiqued being as universalising in its premises as so-called Western feminism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-314
Author(s):  
Muhammad Ishaq ◽  
Muhammad Adil ◽  
Owais Anwer

The slogan of gender equality and gender equality is constantly being used today and unfortunately it raises more objections to Islamic injunctions than to women's rights. Although Islam is a compete code of conduct for human life and its rules have taken care of human nature, so in the rules that apply to both men and women, the natural characteristics of both have been taken into consideration. Because of the development of various forms of media today, objections to Islamic injunctions in the name of gender equality are gaining strength. This article seeks to ascertain the validity of these objections and compares the specific provisions of Islamic criminal law regarding women with the existing laws of Pakistan. As a result of this comparison, it has come to light that on the one hand, in some cases, women have been given less rights than men, such as not accepting their testimony in the cases clearly defined by ALLAH (in Qur’an called as حدود الله) and the Diyat  (دیت)of a woman is equal to half of the Diyat (دیت) of a man etc. On the other hand, in most of the rulings, women are given precedence over men, such as in case of fighting in a war along with men, the renouncement of Qisas or any other charges from women, respite in stoning due to pregnancy, the renouncement of Qisas or any other charges in case of forced compulsion by someone else, renouncement of Diyat (دیت) in Qisamat and the condition of being with a Mehram (محرم) in exile etc., and even  where their rights are apparently less evident, there is a clear consideration of their nature in implementing of those laws..


Author(s):  
Patricia Crone

In terms of political thought, as in so many other respects, Muslims today could be said to be bilingual. On the one hand, they speak the global political language of Western derivation marked by key concepts such as democracy, freedom, human rights, and gender equality. On the other hand, they still have their traditional political idiom, formed over 1,400 years of Islamic history and marked by concepts such as prophecy, imamate, and commanding right and forbidding wrong. The Islamic tradition is alien to most Western readers. This chapter attempts to familiarize them with it to make it easier for them to follow the other entries in this volume. The single most important difference between contemporary Western political thinking and the Islamic tradition is that contemporary thought focuses on freedom and rights whereas the Islamic tradition focuses on authority and duties. This separates contemporary political thought from that of all premodern societies, not just that of the Islamic world.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingólfur V. Gíslason ◽  
Sunna Símonardóttir

Iceland enjoys a reputation as one of the most gender equal countries in the world. It has also received much attention for an innovative approach to parental leave where fathers have three months of non-transferable leave, thereby encouraging active involvement of fathers in the caretaking of their children. This article focuses on the discrepancy between on the one hand the goals of the state of drawing men, particularly fathers, into traditional female dominated areas such as caregiving of infants and young children and on the other hand a discourse that equates motherhood with parenthood and promotes the ideology of intensive mothering.


Author(s):  
Chiara Saraceno

The social investment approach (SIA) with regard to gendered family arrangements might be defined as a dual defamilization: of women and children. This dual defamilization, however, presents risks, particularly for women, in so far it strongly delegitimizes family/mother’s caring as a valuable activity, with the additional risks of, on the one hand, undermining the trend towards more male caring and, on the other hand, of presenting low-educated mothers’ caring as a liability for their children. In order to be effective, the SIA should address in a systematic way both the issue of social inequality and that of non-paid work and activities as meaningful ones, deserving themselves time and social investment. It should also address the risk of creating a new dichotomy between people deserving (e.g. children, the young) and undeserving (e.g. the old, the severely disabled, the ‘inactivable’) of social investment.


1997 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-26
Author(s):  
Mohammad Mumtaz Ali

One of the main characteristics of contemporary Islamic thought,especially within the traditions of Islamic revival movements and theIslamization of knowledge movement, is its critical attitude toward boththe Islamic heritage and western ideas, concepts, and theories. Thinkersand scholars of these movements have neither rejected entirely the westerncontributions toward knowledge, unlike the rejectionists, nor havethey accepted it blindly, like the adoptationists. Most thinkers in thesemovements do not accept western ideas and concepts without a criticalevaluation from an Islamic perspective. Khurshid Ahmad aptly remarks:The Islamic movement clearly differentiates between developmentand modernization on the one hand and westernization andsecularization on the other. It says “yes” to modernization but“no” to blind westernization.’Such a stance on modernization may not be attributed only to suchIslamic movements as the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt,2 established byHasan a1 Banna,’ and the Jama‘at-e-Islami of the Indian s~bcontinent,~founded by Abul A‘la Mawdudi,’ but also to the Islamization of knowledgemovement.6 The type of modernization welcomed by scholars ofthese movements is not the same as that conceived by the West; rather,it is an Islamic modernization based on an Islamic epistemology ...


Labyrinth ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
Philippe Lauria

Woman's Destiny according Edith SteinThe following essay aims to show that Edith Stein's conception of women was a feminist and a traditionalist one. This could be interpreted by some philosophers as a sort of contradiction. Thus the author presents the different arguments detecting such a conflict between feminism and traditionalism. These arguments are based in fact on the opposition between nature or essence, on the one hand, and freedom, on the other hand. The thesis of the author is that there is not necessarily a conflict between essence and freedom, and that essence is not a fiction but an ontological reality which, interpreted in the way of Edith Stein, makes it possible to conceive sexual difference in a perfect synthesis between the Christian tradition and gender equality.


Author(s):  
Patrick Colm Hogan

The introduction first sets out some preliminary definitions of sex, sexuality, and gender. It then turns from the sexual part of Sexual Identities to the identity part. A great deal of confusion results from failing to distinguish between identity in the sense of a category with which one identifies (categorial identity) and identity in the sense of a set of patterns that characterize one’s cognition, emotion, and behavior (practical identity). The second section gives a brief summary of this difference. The third and fourth sections sketch the relation of the book to social constructionism and queer theory, on the one hand, and evolutionary-cognitive approaches to sex, sexuality, and gender, on the other. The fifth section outlines the value of literature in not only illustrating, but advancing a research program in sex, sexuality, and gender identity. Finally, the introduction provides an overview of the chapters in this volume.


Author(s):  
Nimer Sultany

This chapter analyzes concrete Egyptian and Tunisian cases that showcase the interplay between continuity and rupture. These cases illustrate the lack of a systemic relation between law and revolution. On the one hand, the judiciary that interprets and applies the law is part of the very social and political conflicts it is supposed to resolve. On the other hand, the law is incoherent and there are often resources within the legal materials to play it both ways. Thus, the different forces at work use both continuity and rupture to advance their positions. Furthermore, legitimacy discourse mediates the contradictions between law and revolution in the experience of different legal and political actors. This mediation serves an ideological role because it presupposes a binary dichotomy between continuity and rupture, papers over law’s incoherence by reducing it to a singular voice, and reduces revolution to an event rather than a process.


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