Pseudo Islamic Feminism: Feminism and the Madrasah

It behooves the Muslim theologian to occupy himself with precisely, and almost solely, that which plagues the hearts and minds of those around him. Too intensely do our current madrasahs focus on ancient disputes over khalq al-Qurʾān, questions of qadr, and the early developments of sects. No doubt, these all have their place, but I argue that this place ought not to be at the front and centre of the modern madrasah’s ʿaqīdah studies curriculum. I do not wish for their study to be eradicated entirely, of course, as the threats posed by the perversions discussed therein remain real. What I do wish and advocate for is that they are relegated to a second tier behind the more threatening philosophies of our day, namely: secularism, liberalism, and feminism.

For the purposes of this essay, it is that last one and the pseudo-Islamic façade in which it all-too-often presents itself that I will be discussing. And like a true theologian, I will begin by attempting to define the term before arguing that the term remains both undefined and strictly undefinable.

Etymologically, the word feminism arose to mean femininity,^[1] before going on to be used medically for the secondary sexual characteristics of females,^[2] and then, finally, in its more modern iteration as the:

“Advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex; the movement associated with this.”^[3]

This latter definition is taken directly from the Oxford English Dictionary. Yet this definition is hardly stable. Many etic authors would dispute that feminism is truly concerned with equality, arguing that they are completely at comfort with inequality against men in dangerous jobs, historical conscription, racial hierarchies, and so on. Conversely, emic writers such as Bell Hooks argue that this definition is limited, does not account for sexual fluidity, and does not reach the true heart of the feminist movement, namely, its anti-oppression nature. Audre Lorde argued that this definition completely ignores intersectionality in a damaging way. Catharine MacKinnon, meanwhile, averred that the entire ‘equality’ framework was rigged, using a male standard for women to be judged against.

There are many more examples, but these should suffice for now to demonstrate that no single definition of feminism is agreed upon, although the one quoted from the OED is perhaps the one that most people are familiar with due to the lingering effects of the second wave of feminism they grew up with. This lack of a coherence means that there will always be exceptions to any definitions and broad-strokes arguments made either for or against feminism. To quote Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay:

“In all fairness, feminism has never presented a unified front. This may be because feminism, in its most basic definition, means ‘belief in gender equality,’ and, in these terms, the majority of the population is now feminist. Feminist scholarship and activism, however, have always been much more ideological and theoretical, and the dominant ideologies and theories have changed dramatically over time—accompanied by much factional infighting. Feminism, in the political and philosophical sense, has therefore come to include a dizzying array of camps: radical cultural feminists, radical lesbian feminists, radical libertarian feminists, separatists, French psychoanalytical feminists, womanists, liberal feminists, neoliberal feminists, Marxist feminists, socialist/materialist feminists, Islamic feminists, Christian feminists, Jewish feminists, choice feminists, equity feminists, postfeminists, and intersectional feminists. All these groups are interested in women’s rights, roles, and experiences in society, but they differ widely on how they understand these.”^[4]

Such factionalism and disunity are significant, and they do away with the conceited inevitability with which feminist opponents of Islam present themselves. Remember the words (translated/interpreted) of Allāh, when he told the early Muslims of their opponents, “Ye deem them united, while their hearts are divided. That is because they are a folk who have no sense.”^[5] If the feminists themselves do not agree on their self-definitions, then what right do they have of forcing any definition upon the rest of us?

Regardless, most definitions agree that feminism is working towards either the equality of women or the expansion of their rights or the elimination of supposed sex-based hierarchies, despite any fluidity in the nature of the concept of sex in the first place. It is this broad idea, along with their defining features, that we shall take to define feminism in this study.

Types of Feminism

Feminism may be divided across time, across waves, or across sects. A temporal division would trace the increasing presence of women in workforce, politics, and non-domestic settings over time, with an understanding that these changes mark the ‘progression’ of women’s rights and, thus, a move towards feminist ideals.

A wave-based assessment of feminism divides the movements according to the prevailing currents which most defined each wave. First wave were relatively limited in their outlook, being predominantly preoccupied with female representation in politics; second wave feminists wished to expand of the role of women in the workplace, family, legal discourse, and sexual relations; and third wave feminists shifted away from a single, universal ‘female’ experience, focusing instead on diversity, identity, lived experiences, and intersectionality. Each new wave of feminists sought to disabuse their legions of what they deemed problematic about the previous wave, and any and all women who did not join the new wave were, thus, definitionally considered to be enablers of oppression, anti-feminist.

A sectarian division of feminism would differentiate between the competing ideological strands that have arisen over the past 234 years since Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 book, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’. Among these strands are liberal feminism, radical feminism, materialist feminism, intersectionalist feminism, and post-structuralist feminism. Pluckrose and Lindsay wrote:

“Liberal feminism worked incrementally to extend all the rights and freedoms of a liberal society to women. It was popular with broader liberal society ‘on the ground’ and successfully reshaped the landscape of society, particularly in the workplace. The other two feminisms were also present in activism and dominant in feminist scholarship. Materialist feminists were concerned with how patriarchy and capitalism act together to constrain women, especially within environments like the workplace and the home. Thus, their theories drew on to varying degrees Marxism and socialism more broadly. Radical feminists foregrounded patriarchy and viewed women and men as oppressed and oppressor classes.

…

Most important to understand is that the liberal feminist approach enjoyed the most support from society, but radical and materialist (effectively socialist) feminism dominated the academy, especially from the 1970s onwards.”[6]

A sectarian categorisation of feminism is most useful for the theologian or philosopher, as it concerns itself less with the historical development of a movement, which—if we ignore any calls to Divine decree, determinism, or a Hegelian historical geist itching towards freedom—is entirely incidental, and focuses instead on the core principles of each sect of feminism.

Such focus proves a useful endeavour. When one strives to deconstruct these feminist ideologies, they see how the ideologies quickly break apart and show themselves as being contradictory. Most self-proclaimed feminists follow blindly a liberal feminist train that is quite unpopular in many feminist academies, for example, and they are completely unaware of why this is so. Were they to delve further, they would have to untangle so many of their own presuppositions.

For example, Marxist feminists take the kernel of their beliefs from Georg Hegel, whose famous master-slave dialectic revealed a paradox in which the slave, forced into the discipline of service and the formative activity of work, reshaped the world, and through his appreciation of the fruits of his labour, discovered his own consciousness. Karl Marx took Hegel’s architecture and broke his resolution, arguing that there can be no happy ending in a capitalist society for the worker, as the object said worker has endeavoured to produce never returns to him. Rather, it is confiscated by the owners of capital, and so the worker is estranged not only from the product, but from the act of production itself. Marxist feminists then asked whose alienation Marx himself failed to see? If the worker is estranged from his labour in the factory, then what of the woman whose labour in the home is not even recognised as labour in a capitalist, secular, atheistic society?

Yet such framing is patently at odds with liberal feminists who deny outright that capitalism is irredeemably exploitative and that the entire liberal order (rights, legal equality, political participation, etc) are just the master’s tools (to anachronistically quote Audre Lorde’s later-used phrase) being put to work in defence of a self-preserving, patriarchal, capitalist system. Further, Maxine Molyneux insightfully notes that socialist societies failed to realise the feminist ideals they claimed to advocate for, and that much of the blame may be laid at the ideologies underlining the laws of socialist states in the first place. Is it really a move towards freedom if we argue that women have a duty to work towards the needs of the state, and that any failure to complete such work should suitably be penalised? When Hegel spoke of freedom, he famously did not speak of ultimate liberalism. Rather, he spoke of each person doing their duty knowingly, rationally, and with complete acceptance that doing anything else is falling short. It is no surprise, then, that both Stalin and Hitler ate of Hegel’s intellectual fruits, directly or indirectly, abusing them in their own ways.

And when early liberal feminists argued against black men having been given the right to vote before them, they were surely not accepting of the arguments of modern intersectionalist feminists. Elizabeth Stanton, a leader of the suffragette movement, notoriously wrote:

“If American women find it hard to bear the oppressions of their own Saxon fathers, the best orders of manhood, what may they not be called to endure when all the lower orders of foreigners now crowding our shores legislate for them and their daughters. Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling-book, making laws for Lucretia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose, and Anna E. Dickinson.”^[7]

Intersectionalist feminism itself inescapably (philosophically) morphs into post-structuralist feminism, for why stop at race, sex, and class (cf. height, nationality, religion, etc) when we speak of privilege and oppression other than out of arbitrariness and legal pragmatism? Although the founder of intersectional feminism, Kimberlé Crenshaw, argued that legal pragmatism was a necessary tool to achieve her desired goals, she could not defend intersectionalism philosophically without the logical conclusions of her arguments leading to post-structuralism. Crenshaw may reply that her categories track legally cognisable classes with documented histories of institutional exclusion, but this is a pragmatic boundary, not a principled one, and pragmatic boundaries invite exactly the expansions they claim to resist. Thus, her ideology remained philosophically unsatisfying, and the subsequent ideological move to post-structuralism did not take long historically, despite Martha Nussbaum’s ‘The Professor of Parody’ and the Butler-Benhabib exchange making clear that post-structuralism is thought of as politically unviable even to many sympathetic academics.^[8],[9]

When post-structuralist feminists are challenged on the ultimately Pyrrhonian nature of their postmodernism, they quickly collapse. At most, their arguments can be said to be self-refuting, and at worst, nonsensical, as the end-point of post-structuralist feminism is infinite individualism, and individualism is diametrically opposed to group politics. One cannot eat their anti-essentialist cake and still hold on to it.

Once an individual has crossed that philosophical bridge, they realise that even modern liberal feminists, who make up the bulk of non-academic feminists in our times, do not ascribe to the claims of the post-structuralist feminists. Womanhood, binaries, dichotomies, and all univariate or oligo-variate spectrums which do not account for the entirety of the human experience are seen as oppressively insufficient by post-structural feminists. Yet these are all things that most liberal feminists take for granted and base their ideologies on.^[10] All this makes clear just how confused and self-refuting the modern feminist movement is. Far from being a self-evident truth, feminism, like any socioeconomic philosophy, is based on presuppositions and ideologies that have logical entailments across myriad other fields.

Patriarchy and Preference

Among the central pillars of various strands of feminism is the idea of ‘patriarchy’ as a tool of oppression. Destroying the patriarchy has long been considered a central aim of feminist movements worldwide, and the destabilisation that this is thought to bring about is typically welcomed and celebrated. Knowing this, we must ask ourselves: is such antagonism even warranted in the first place?

Patriarchy is perhaps best defined as any system of societal organisation which leads to a ’disproportionate’ level of authority and power given to males over females. When a feminist argues that an imbalance in authority is unjust in-and-of-itself, they are making the assumption that all power imbalances are inherently unethical. Thus, to argue as they do is to argue not only that any male-dominated hierarchy is unethical, but that hierarchies in-and-of-themselves are unethical. If one wishes to add the caveat that some hierarchies are more meritocratic than others, then they are faced with the quagmire of biological gender differences which they must pussyfoot around. And even then, patriarchies cannot be said to be inherently harmful. At most, it can be said that they are vulnerable to exploitation, but then so, too, are all social hierarchies, even those deemed meritocratic. Thus, the reality is that, in-and-of-themselves, hierarchies, including patriarchies, remain, at worst, ethically neutral, and at best, pragmatic tools for social organisation.

Note that this is a philosophical argument, not a realist one. We will discuss the realist argument of abusive hierarchies in due course. Philosophically, there is no compulsion to argue that power asymmetries equate to oppression. In fact, most human civilisations have operated with structured hierarchies that their participants understood as natural, or even Divinely ordained. To assume that equality is the default state, and that hierarchies are an unnecessary perversion of that state, is to make a post-Enlightenment, liberal error. It is Locke’s state of nature, Rousseau’s social contract, and Mill’s ‘Subjection of Women’ that establish equality as a baseline from which all hierarchy must justify itself, not any universal moral law.

Further, arguments against patriarchy tend to undervalue the agency of women both historically and in our times, ironically, viewing them as predominantly passive subjects who did not know what was in their own best interests. Catherine Hakim’s book, ‘Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21^st Century’, argued persuasively that most differences between men and women in work, family, and outcomes are driven more by women’s preferences than by patriarchy or discrimination. And that is the case in modernity, with all the pressure put on women to get out of the house and work for a living. Imagine the case historically, without all the pressure modern feminism places on women—there would be a clear and overwhelming desire to fulfil traditionally feminine roles. To argue that these women had a constrained choice is to impose a modern idea of agency and constraint on women who would likely have disagreed with both. After all, inferring false consciousness from structural constraints is, at once, unfalsifiable, circular, and, itself, a form of paternalism. To argue that women would have chosen to do otherwise is to argue blindly and, as Hakim showed, to argue erroneously. It is no surprise, then, that Simone De Beauvoir, one of the most influential feminist thinkers of the twentieth century, is recorded as having said:

“No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”^[11]

Traditional societies have long-recognised and emphasised the protective roles of patriarchies, as well as their conformity to human nature. In Islam, we are told that men are the qawwāmūn[guardians] of women. Classrooms of Islamic jurisprudence have long been arguing that the legalities of marriage serve to protect women from abuse and from their objectification in society. Interestingly, many of these arguments are now being made by non-Muslim reactionaries to feminist developments in modernity, including from feminists themselves.

In ‘The Case Against the Sexual Revolution’, Louise Perry argues that the sexual revolution benefitted high-status men while harming women overall, especially the young and the more vulnerable among them.^[12] Sex being detached from commitment has meant that exploitation has increased, not freedom, and that the effects of biological asymmetries (e.g. pregnancy, sexual desire, risk of harm) are now underestimated.

If commitment is now optional whilst the physical and reputational risks of sex remain asymmetric for women, then ’sexual liberation’ equates to sexual access without obligations, disproportionately benefitting men in positions of power. There have been efforts to mitigate the physical asymmetry, for example, by declaring a foetus as mere material, soulless entities and, thus, permitting their termination and giving women the primary decision over that. Yet this has proven insufficient and the asymmetries linger—men and women are distinct biological entities—and now the guilt of terminating unborn foetuses can be added to the feminist rap sheet.

High-status men benefit from the unshackling of traditional, patriarchal safeguards for women, and they find themselves with a much higher share of sexually available women than underprivileged men. The structures of organisation, stripped of their patriarchal safeguards, are proving dysfunctional in unexpected ways.

In ‘The Myth of Male Power’, Warren Farrell argued that men are tasked with fulfilling the most dangerous, disposable, and sacrificial roles in societies.^[13] He challenged the idea that men hold a disproportionate amount of power. When 100,000 people need conscripting to run head-first into enemy fire, it is not the women people look to, and those men being conscripted can hardly be said to hold more ‘power’ and ‘rights’ at that moment than their female counterparts. Male privilege, Farrell argues, is obligation without choice. He argues that feminists mistake these responsibilities with power.

And while high-status men benefit from the feminist movement which provides them with a massively increased supply of labour and sex, lower-status men suffer. Farrell also co-authored ‘The Boy Crisis’ with John Gray, in which the pair documented the systemic failure of boys in education, mental health, crime, and family life.^[14] They found convincing links between paternal absences and poor male outcomes and argued that modern institutions are developmentally mismatched to the requirements of boys. To dismiss these awkward truths is to turn a blind eye to the reality of what feminism sows.

Perhaps the single most awkward and undeniable truth, however, is the paradox of female happiness itself. As societies become increasingly feminist in their social structures, the women within them become less and less happy. In a landmark study, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers noted that over the past 35 years (from when they were writing in 2009) in the United States, the subjective wellbeing of women had been declining both in absolute terms and relative to men.^[15] For the first time in recorded history, men were more happy than women, as a whole, and this change was mostly attributable to a steep decline in female happiness. Thus, not only does feminism actively serve powerful men, it disserves women.

‘Islamic Feminism’

It is against the backdrop of all that we have discussed thus far that I begin the discussion on those who claim to be both Muslim and feminist. Thinking deeply about the topic, I realised that these feminists can be divided into three broad groups, groups I will henceforth refer to as: apostatic feminists, malignant feminists, and cultural feminists.

Apostatic feminists refer to those individuals (and they may be either women or men) who have clearly and unambiguously left the fold of Islam through their feminism. Epitomising this group are people like Amina Wadud, who stated explicitly that she conscientiously objected to an āyah of the Qurʾān, with that being only one example of her many crimes. In these instances, even a layperson may declare such a feminist an unbeliever. No one who explicitly attempts to judge the Qurʾān and not accept it as ultimate judge over them remains a Muslim. Allāh’s Word is uppermost, and He tells us in no uncertain terms, “Whoso judgeth not by that which Allāh hath revealed: such are the disbelievers.”^[16]

Any marriage with such a person is invalid, and any close ties with such a person are detrimental to one’s salvation. In our times, the best way to deal with such people on an interpersonal level is to leave them to their rebelliousness and let them dwell in the home they make for themselves. Either Allāh will bring them back to their senses, or they will spiral downwards in their arrogance until they meet him in a dreadful meeting at a later date.

Apostatic feminists, thus, are easily identified and easily dismissed. They are unbelievers. Their contributions may be viewed as the contributions of any non-Muslim feminist is, but their words are not to be considered emic, and their eisegesis is never to be mistaken for exegesis.

Malignant feminists present more of a challenge to most Muslims. They include all those who have not unambiguously and explicitly left the fold of Islam but seek to destabilise and reconstruct aspects of it to suit their feminist ideals. These individuals may or may not be unbelievers, but they are all harmful, and they should be argued against by the people of knowledge and insight, for they seek to cause doubts in the minds of other Muslims and spread their beliefs without ever justifying them, as we shall soon explain.

Malignant feminists seek to delegitimise the structures of classical Islamic scholarship, often using the argument that such scholarship was male-dominated and, thus, necessarily biased and unrepresentative of a truer, more feminist version of Islam. When inconvenient, classical rulings are seen as reflections of historical realities and not universal laws. Malignant feminists fall short of explicitly rejecting direct āyāt from the Qurʾān, but among them are those who reject individual ḥadīthand seek to delegitimise the conveyors of these ḥadīth from the time of the Companions onwards.

Such antagonism does not arise natively from the Islamic tradition or their confessional commitments but from a continuation of the Hegel-Marxist axis we noted earlier, this time in the guise of critical theorists from the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (also known simply as the ’Frankfurt School’). The Frankfurt School sought to expand Marx’s economic theories to our understanding of culture, knowledge, sociology, and psychology. Max Horkheimer, director of the Frankfurt School from 1930s onwards, penned his 1937 essay, ’Traditional and Critical Theory’, which gave their ideology its name and served as the school’s unofficial manifesto.^[17] In that essay, he drew a distinction between traditional theory, which describes the world as it is in a search for objective truths, and critical theory, which asks instead whose interests such a description serves. Marx’s asked who owns the means of production and Horkheimer asked who owned the means of knowledge.

Feminist epistemologists then incorporated this framework into their own thought. Sandra Harding and Nancy Fraser argued that female exclusion from scholarship had led to incomplete and biased knowledge, meaning that male-dominated traditions—effectively, all traditions—were not just unfair but epistemically flawed. It is precisely this logic that the malignant feminist imports into her reading of Islamic history. Her argument is as follows: (1) the scholars were men; therefore, (2) the scholarship is compromised; therefore, (3) the source texts must be re-interpreted. But what if the source texts do not support her feminist ideals? In those cases, she argues that these sources themselves were preserved by men, and so their reliability is compromised. She proceeds in this vein until she stops just shy of the boundary that the apostatic feminists had crossed.

The premises adhered to by the malignant feminist are undoubtedly incompatible with Islamic epistemology at a fundamental level. The Qurʾān and ḥadīth are unequivocal about the need to submit to them as ultimate authority in all matters. Revelation is true independent of any social power.

Following the arguments of malignant feminism to its logical conclusions, we realise that since the vast majority of transmitters were men, and since consensus emerged from male scholarly networks, their arguments necessarily imply that the wider isnad-based system is structurally compromised and that ijmāʿ is structurally illegitimate. There is no principled way to isolate ‘gendered rulings’ from the rest of the canon without destroying the entire apparatus of transmission and authentication. The malignant feminist is thus forced into a dilemma from which there is no escape: either accept isnādand ijmāʿ as generally reliable, in which case the gatekeeping claim fails, or treat all scholarly authority as power, in which case the malignant feminist loses all confessional and academic recourse to them.

And all of this suspicion is based on very shaky grounds. The claim that men have gatekept knowledge for all these years and influenced discourse in a distinctly anti-female manner is at odds with the methods of ḥadīth gathering that took place. Reports, even those fabricated reports which were offensive to the muḥaddiththūn, were collected for documentation, and chains were cross-references by thousands of men and women across scores of cities and states.

The fact that women were among those collecting and preserving the reports, verdicts, and incidents of their times is no ignorable matter, either. Contrary to the malignant feminist’s claims, women were very active in the preservation and propagation of Islamic knowledge. Female involvement in scholarship and education was a distinct feature of early and classical Islam. ʿĀʾishah, the wife of the Prophet ﷺ, is recorded to have said, “Blessed are the women of the Anṣār; their shyness does not prevent them from learning the religion.”[18] It was male scholars who took from ʿĀʾishah and ensured that this ḥadīth was preserved.

Similarly, Muslim men worked to preserve the words of many other female scholars. My own teacher Muhammad Akram Nadwi authored a book, ‘al-Muḥaddithāt’, in which he identified over 8,000 classical female ḥadīth scholars. They taught men, transmitted major canonical works, and issued ijāzāt. They were integral to the preservation of this religion. Dismissing their works is doing a greater disservice to the output of women than any Islamic classicist has done.

In fact, Islam is somewhat unique among classical traditions in the sheer volume of female scholars it produced. Remember, these 8,000 names in al- Muḥaddithāt all came from ḥadīth scholarship alone. There were undoubtedly female scholars in other sciences, and these women were not considered insignificant by the men of their day. Karīmah al-Marwaziyyah was considered among the most reliable transmitters of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī. Many male scholars preferred her isnād over that of her male contemporaries, and this decision was not controversial in her time. Zaynab bint al-Kamāl granted ijāzāt in all major ḥadīth collections to hundreds of male scholars from across the jurisprudential schools. ʿĀʾishah bint ʿAbd al-Hādī was perhaps the foremost authority on Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī in her era, with her students including senior judges and jurists. Amat al-Wāḥid was a recognised muftī in the Ḥanbalī school, and her fatāwā were cited by many male jurists. Umm al-Dardāʾ al-Ṣughrā was from the generation of the Followers, and she taught fiqh to male judges, governors, and even caliphs. And the list goes on.

It is not just a numbers game. These women were valued and respected. One of the most, if not the most, influential figures in Islamic jurisprudence was undoubtedly Imām al-Shāfiʿī. If ever a man represented Islamic fiqh as it became known in most of the classical Muslim world, it would have to be al-Shāfiʿī. What, then, is the malignant feminist’s response to al-Shāfiʿī’s genuine care and concern for the input of his female teacher Sayyidah Nafīsah? It is known that he studied a great deal of ḥadīthfrom her and considered her a great ascetic. So intense was his respect for her that, before his passing, he asked for his funeral procession to be taken past her house so that she may pray for him. This is not how a marginalised woman is treated.

Further clear evidence against the malignant feminist is found in the very structure of Islamic scholarship itself. It is decentralised, competitive, non-coercive, trans-regional, and free. Ever since the resistance of Imām Aḥmad in the formative period of the schools of fiqh, it has been clear that Islam accepts no inquisitions, and from then until the modern era, we have done well as an ummah to keep it that way. Thus, treating ‘men’ as a collective group working to marginalise the interests and inputs of women is disingenuous. Moreover, it is a form of essentialist, which goes against the very critical theory it is based off.

The contradictions continue when you realise that the critical theorist’s argument that knowledge is socially constructed power is itself a form of socially constructed power. Thus, critical theory itself is just as suspect as any other theory, religious or otherwise, under its own premises. If motive-reduction is applied consistently, and all arguments are reduced to interests and all methods to ideology, then no claim, including the claim of any feminist, survives.

At this point, one may ask why a malignant feminist adheres so strongly to these doctrines when they are based on such demonstrably false foundations. Two frameworks here are illuminating: one modern, one classical.

The modern framework is presented by Christina Hoff Sommers in her book, ‘Who Stole Feminism?’^[19] She identifies a shift within the development of feminism from equity feminism, which was rights-based, reformist, and at least somewhat evidence-driven, to victim feminism, which is identity-based and grievance-driven. Sommers notes that victim feminism relies on a sense of righteous indignation to propel itself. Moral outrage provides emotional certainty and moral elevation even in the absence of evidentiary rigour. Suddenly, the feminist no longer needs to prove her case; she needs only to feel it, and to ensure that others feel it, too.

The classical framework was delineated by Imām al-Ghazālī, who documented poignantly in his ‘Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn’ that ḥasad (envy), and ghayẓ (smouldering anger) were diseases of the heart that masquerade as justice, allowing one to distort their judgements while feeling morally justified in doing so.^[20]

The parallels between al-Ghazālī and Sommers here is striking:

• resentment converts injury into a moral narrative;
  • Sommers calls this grievance culture;
  • al-Ghazālī calls it the self-deception of envy;
• outrage becomes an epistemic shortcut;
  • indignation substitutes for proof in Sommers’ analysis;
  • anger blinds the intellect and makes suspicion feel like insight in al-Ghazālī’s understanding;
• authority is targeted, not texts;
  • Sommers shows that institutions become villains to sustain indignation;
  • al-Ghazālī shows that the heart attacks the rank and distinction it secretly resents;
• suspicion becomes a virtue;
  • Sommers notes that scepticism signals moral adulthood;
  • al-Ghazālī warns that arrogance reframes submission as humiliation;
• status without discipline;
  • Sommers holds that moral grandstanding takes places through critique and not demonstrated competence;
  • al-Ghazāli explains that the love of rank corrupts one’s intention before they put forward any of their arguments;
• indirect rejections;
  • Sommers mentions that authority is often blamed to preserve one’s self-image rather than for a genuine concern;
  • al-Ghazāli states that talbīs allows one to deny rejecting the truth while undermining it;
• critique becomes perpetual;
  • Sommers argues that grievance sustains identity and resolution threatens status; and
  • al-Ghazālī avers that the loss of trust produces endless reinterpretations.

Through these frameworks, which are corroborated by modern cognitive science, we may understand the malignant feminist’s mindset. Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance shows that when deeply held beliefs conflict with internalised values, people reinterpret authority rather than abandon belief.^[21] Dan Kahan’s work on identity-protective cognition demonstrates that when beliefs are identity-laden, reasoning becomes defensive, not truth-seeking.^[22] “The scholars were patriarchal” feels psychologically safer than “my moral intuitions may be contingent or mistaken”, even if the latter is logically more likely.

Ultimately, the problem of the malignant feminist is a problem of īmān. In the orthodox understanding, īmān entails more than just submission; it includes taslīm (submission), thiqah (trust in Divine wisdom), and riḍā (wholehearted acceptance). The malignant feminist does not hold a valid intellectual argument against the tradition. What she holds is an emotional one which is the result of a deficiency of thiqah. She does not trust that Allāh’s legislation is wise and sufficient, even when it clashes with what her culture has taught her to feel. And so she reinterprets the text endlessly, not to understand it but to reconcile it with a prior commitment that she cannot bear to question. That is the state of the malignant feminist.

The final group of ‘Islamic feminists’ are cultural feminists. These individuals do not seek to be malicious. They are usually well-meaning and ignorant of their presuppositions and the logical entailments of their statements. They do not read feminist works or argue belligerently for no reason, but they have unwittingly picked up feminist quirks from the society around them. Whilst gentle, they have the capacity to veer in either direction, and so they ought to be given soft daʿwah and spoken to with kindness by all those who know what to say in any given moment. Their future is often dependent on their humility, or lack thereof, as arrogance breeds ignorance, and not the teachable kind of ignorance either.

Examples of cultural feminism include the internalisation and use of words and phrases like: patriarchy, internalised misogyny, and toxic masculinity. It also includes the emphasising of the harms and vulnerabilities women deal with while downplaying or relativising male authority, responsibilities, and rights. Islam is often portrayed by cultural feminists as gender-neutral in outcomes. Importantly, however, these cultural feminists do not reject any āyāt from the Qurʾān; they do not explicitly deny any classically agreed-upon rulings; and they do not claim the entire tradition of Islamic scholarship is compromised.

The cultural feminist is the Muslim woman who feels a pang of embarrassment when she reads that men are the qawwāmūn of women. She does not deny the āyah, but she rushes to qualify it, to contextualise it, to soften it, to assure her non-Muslim colleagues that Islam is ’not really like that’. She is the one who, when asked about polygyny, immediately says ’but it’s almost impossible to fulfil the conditions’, not because she has studied the fiqh in any depth, but because the answer makes her less uncomfortable at the dinner table. She is the Muslim parent who tells her daughter that she can be anything she wants to be without ever telling her that motherhood is not merely one option among many, but a station that Allāh has honoured above most others.

The cultural feminist accepts the āyāt and the aḥādīth, but she judges them. She may not reject them outright, but she places them in the dock and asks them to justify themselves before the court of modern sensibility. When the Qurʾān speaks of men having a degree over women, she does not ask what Allāh means by it and how best to submit to it.^[23] She asks whether it is fair. And in doing so, she has, without realising it, placed her own moral intuition, an intuition shaped by decades of feminist cultural conditioning, above the Word of Allāh.

This is the subtlest and most pervasive form of the disease. The apostatic feminist has left the building; the malignant feminist is a visible tumour that trained eyes can detect; but the cultural feminist is an atmospheric condition. She is the background noise of a civilisation that has so thoroughly absorbed liberal feminist premises that they no longer feel like premises at all—they feel like common sense, like basic decency, like the way things obviously are.

James Tooley, in ‘The Miseducation of Women’, demonstrated how Western education systems operate not as neutral instruction but as social engineering, training women for status conformity rather than independence, and how elite education often undermines family formation and realism.^[24] It is precisely these mechanisms, among many others, that have conditioned the cultural feminist into behaving the way she does. Far from subverting the instruments of power, she has unwittingly given herself over to them.

Conclusion

An important caveat ought to be made before we conclude this essay. Namely, that not every expression of emotion, frustration, or resistance regarding women’s rights is an act of feminism. It goes without saying that Islam values women with perfect fairness. In no unclear terms, Allāh tells us:

“O mankind! Lo! We have created you male and female, and have made you nations and tribes that ye may know one another. Lo! The noblest of you—in the sight of Allāh—is the best in conduct. Lo! Allāh is Knower, Aware.”^[25]

Islam encourages natural expressions of femininity. It honours them. It understands that people are imperfect. We feel emotions, become overwhelmed, and show our frustration at the world at times. This is normal. We know from the aḥādith that ʿĀʾishah once broke a plate sent by another wife of the Prophet ﷺ out of jealousy. We know that she spoke more harshly to him in these moments of jealousy. We know that Umm Salamah asked why women were not mentioned in the Qurʾān as much as men, and that Revelation followed, addressing men and women explicitly, reassuring her that women were included fully in the general statements of the Book. We know that Khawlah bint Thaʿlabah disputed with the Prophet ﷺ before Revelation descended in support of her grievance, and that ʿUmar later made it a point to never ignore a word Khawlah had to say. After all, if Allāh has said explicitly in the Book, “Allāh hath heard the saying of her that disputeth with thee concerning her husband”^[26], then who are we to ignore her? Islam never sought to marginalise these women but to use them as example of the entire human spectrum.

Many other women, from the orator Asmāʾ bint Yazīd (who is claimed by some to have asked the Prophet ﷺ about the domestic roles of women vis-a-vis the public roles of men) to the headstrong Barīrah (who refused to remain married to a man despite the Prophet ﷺ himself encouraging reconciliation) to the warrior Nusaybah bint Kaʿb (who took up a sword and shield and fought alongside the men, defending the Prophet ﷺ at Uḥud) are admired as used as examples in madrasahs the world over.

Nusaybah was definitely not a marginalised woman! The books of ḥadīth, those same books the malignant feminists sought to malign, authentically report that, during the heat of battle, whenever he looked left and right, the Prophet ﷺ saw only Nusaybah bint Kaʿab protecting him. She shot arrows, picked downed Companions up off the floor, and helped the injured. She pulled them up and encouraged them back into battle. One of her sons came to her badly injured and bleeding. She bandaged his wound and ordered him to stand, fight, and protect the Prophet ﷺ, who was alone on the battlefield. When someone rushed to attack the Prophet ﷺ, it was Nusaybah who saw him and blocked the strike with her body. Her shoulder was injured, yet she picked up a sword and struck the horse of the man and then killed him with her own hands. Was she marginalised or her achievements downplayed when the Prophet ﷺ proclaimed to his Lord, “O Allāh! I ask you that she and her two sons be in my company in Paradise”?^[27]

And this was not the last of Nusaybah’s heroics, nor was she the only woman of her kind. We cherish these stories, and the scholarly men of yesteryear cherished them likewise. They documented them, shared them, and told them around campfires. These women were not alien to the Islamic project; they were integral to it. Islam never sought to suppress women but to give each soul its time and place to shine, and to teach us all that what ultimately matters is not the colour of our skin, the strength of our biceps, or the gender in which we were born. Rather, it is our piety that distinguishes us before Allāh.

None of this is feminist revisionism of the religion, it inheres within it. The truth of Islam is unchanging and unflinching. It is uncompromising, as a compromised truth is nothing but. Meanwhile, feminism, as we have seen, cannot even define itself. Its sects contradict one another on foundational premises. Its practical consequences, such as the sexual revolution’s exploitation of women, the systemic failure of boys, and the paradox of declining female happiness, undermine the very liberation it promises. And when it clothes itself in Islamic garb, it ranges from the openly apostatic, to the insidiously corrosive, to the quietly atmospheric, with the most dangerous forms often being the most hidden.

The strands of feminism that became dominant were, as we demonstrated, those compatible with elite male, state, and market incentives, especially where sexual norms and labour participation are concerned. The female happiness literature provides the empirical prompt that ought to give every honest interlocutor pause: if liberation was unambiguously pro-woman, why do we observe sustained and deepening declines in reported female wellbeing?

The responsibility then falls upon the Muslim theologian, the Muslim educator, and the Muslim institution not to ignore feminism, and not to merely to condemn it, but to understand it deeply, precisely, and on its own terms, and then to present the Islamic alternative with the confidence that comes from knowing that it is not our system that needs defending, but theirs. Allāh tells us, “Falter not nor grieve, for ye are uppermost if ye are believers.”^[28]

* * *

References

 

[1] Feminism, the qualities of females. In: Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language. Revised ed. App. 963/1.

[2] “These attributes M. Lorrain designates by the terms infantilism and feminism.” Medical Times & Gazette. 24 Jul:105/1.

[3] Feminism [Internet]. Oxford English Dictionary. Available from: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/feminism_n?tab=meaning_and_use#4611048

[4] Pluckrose H, Lindsay JA. Cynical theories. Durham: Pitchstone Publishing; 2020.

[5] Qur’ān 59:14.

[6] Pluckrose H, Lindsay JA. Cynical theories. Durham: Pitchstone Publishing; 2020.

[7] Debate over the 15th Amendment divides abolitionists [Internet]. Teaching Social Studies; 2021. Available from: https://teachingsocialstudies.org/2021/08/27/debate-over-the-15th-amendment-divides-abolitionists/

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[10] Available from: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gwao.12760

[11] De Beauvoir S. Interview with Friedan B. Saturday Review. 1975.

[12] Perry L. The case against the sexual revolution. Cambridge: Polity Press; 2022.

[13] Farrell W. The myth of male power. New York: Simon & Schuster; 1993.

[14] Farrell W, Gray J. The boy crisis. Dallas: BenBella Books; 2018.

[15] Stevenson B, Wolfers J. The paradox of declining female happiness. Am Econ J Econ Policy. 2009;1(2):190–225.

[16] Qur’ān 5:44.

[17] Horkheimer M. Traditional and critical theory [Internet]. 1937. Available from: https://criticaltheoryworkshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/horkheimer_traditional-and-critical-theory.pdf

[18] Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 332c

[19] Sommers CH. Who stole feminism? New York: Simon & Schuster; 1994.

[20] al-Ghazālī. Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn.

[21] Festinger L. A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press; 1957.

[22] Kahan D. Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection. Judgm Decis Mak. 2013;8(4):407–24. See also: Haidt J. The righteous mind. New York: Vintage; 2012.

[23] Qur’ān 2:228.

[24] Tooley J. The miseducation of women. London: Continuum; 2002.

[25] Qur’ān 49:13.

[26] Qur’ān 58:1.

[27] al-Wāqidī. Kitāb al-Maghāzī.

[28] Qur’ān 3:139.