Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 34:3 (Summer 2020)
Article: Christian And Islamic Feminists In Dialogue
Author: Mimi Haddad

PP 34:3 (Summer 2020) p. 3

Christian And Islamic Feminists In Dialogue

Mimi Haddad

The face of abuse, hunger, disease, illiteracy, and poverty is nearly always female. Robert Seiple, former president of World Vision, wrote, “From birth to the grave, throughout much of our allegedly ‘modern’ world, violence marks the lives of those born girls.”1 According to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women,2 Arab women often encounter the steepest climb to shared leadership and authority worldwide. However, as the power differential balances between males and females, the more girls and women, boys and men flourish.3 Islamic feminists have been denied formal positions of leadership, and their strategies for overcoming male dominance thus represent opportunities for dialogue for feminists worldwide.

This article will consider strategies shared by Islamic and Christian feminists in exposing and upending biased historical and exegetical methodologies that further attitudes, laws, and social practices that marginalize and oppress women. Denied empathy, shared authority, accountability, and access to roles traditionally held by men, Islamic and Christian feminists address their efforts at the four horse riders of abusive systems identified by psychologist John Pryor:4

• Power, dominance, and authoritarianism
• Enforcing gender roles
• Lack of empathy
• Environments that foster impunity

We will consider each of these in what follows.

Power, Dominance, And Authoritarianism

Feminists, both Christian and Islamic, resist male authority and dominance through two key objectives: 1. Recovering women’s achievements and leadership throughout history and, 2. Preserving the Creator-creature divide theologically.

Recovering Women’s Contributions Throughout History

George Orwell observed, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”5 First-wave Christian feminists prioritized historical research on women leaders of the faith. Julia Kavanagh (1824–1877) published Women of Christianity in 1852; A. J. Gordon (1836–1895) published The Ministry of Women in 1894, and Katharine Bushnell (1855–1946) published God’s Word to Women in 1921. Islamic feminists revived the history of women’s leadership in “pre-modern Muslim societies.”6 Women’s lost history is now part of a “wider scholarly movement.”