Love as Theory: Expanding Religious Feminist Agency


Nuzhat Khurshid, York University

Academic work on religious agency highlights the unique aspects of women’s religious agency that can push back against liberal feminist assumptions of countering tradition. Authors such as Mahmood (2005) argue that pious agency need not always be feminist, in the sense of opposing patriarchy, and that this kind of performative agency is as valid as other kinds of more typical feminist agency in the West. While Mahmood’s foundational work highlights a primarily negative view of religious agency that challenges liberal assumptions of agency, it misses the important positive characteristics of religious agency. In this presentation, I argue that there are also important commonalities between Islamic feminism and Western feminism, and both can work towards common goals. Through an examination of the work of Avicenna, Jalaluddin Rumi, and Ibn Arabi, all eminent Islamic thinkers and philosophers, I highlight elements of love, beauty and sexuality that are portrayed from within Islamic literature. This is important because academic binaries created by ideologies such as liberalism and secularism, emerge out of trajectories of Western knowledge production, and serve to ostracize and exclude. Said (1978) showcases the impact of Orientalist discourse as a hegemonic system of political, economic and epistemological domination. While there is much research on the inherent oppression of Muslim women, or their unique kinds of performative agency, I want to focus on foundational aspects of love that are part of both Islamic and Western understandings of women and humanism. By highlighting Muslim works that speak to universal concerns such as love and feminism, we can push back against current literature that addresses Muslim women’s pious agency as submissive and passive. A glance through Islamic thought, from the early Islamic era to modern times, highlights how modern epistemological constructions and academic discourse can circumvent broader understandings and historical applications of religion. Sekyi-Otu presents a strong argument for the use of universalist ideas as a tool in the hands of non-Western cultures to bring out organic and generative theoretical ideals that lead to progressive social and political change (2019). Universalism has (rightfully) been deemed suspect in projects of Western cultural and political domination. However, Sekyi-Otu points out that condemning universalism as an imposition ultimately prevents non-Westerners peoples from reclaiming parts of their tradition that overlap with Western values. Sekyi-Otu presents the question of the human as the basis for a transcendental understanding of universal values. This has radical implications for progressive political and ethical projects that are situated in non-Western traditions. I believe this work of finding commonalities across religious divides is a rigorous way to build solidarities against Islamophobia, as well as inter-community harm. Jamal (2015) and Zia (2017) present examples of how the current literature on religious agency can ignore the multifaceted and complex dynamics of Muslim women’s lives and, through reifying the secular bias in society, can indirectly harm them. Jamal describes the notions of piety that aligns Muslim women’s agency with religious virtue. Analyses of victims of honour-related violence also contain implicit references to religious ideas of piety, thus constituting it as the norm. Jamal notes how modern constructions of secularism can create an artificial binary between individualism/freedom and communitarianism/religion, thus inadvertently blaming victims of honour-based violence for their perceived transgressions against Islam. Afiya Zia agrees that simplistic understandings of religious agency can be detrimental to women’s rights. In her view, essentialized notions of piety fail to take into account other layers of religious agency which can be oppositional. She is concerned that the current popularity of the concept of performative religious piety has created an intellectual atmosphere where different expressions of religion, such as socialist and feminist strands, are automatically aligned with liberal colonial legacies and are delegitimized. As Zia works with Muslim women in Pakistan in an activist role, she is wary of academic discourse that can take away from the struggles of Muslim women for their rights in patriarchal, authoritarian political environments. An examination of love and women from within the Islamic tradition can push back against literature that portrays Muslim women as always oppositional or always submissive. Emphasizing the humanity of these women can align then with other women in their common struggle against patriarchy and Islamophobia.

This paper will be presented at the following session: