Because A Devil Would Not Come Close To A Woman

Abstract

This article is a comparative study on two feminists’ thought about feminism in Muslim world. The sources of discussion are based on Mohja Kahf’s "Braiding the Stories: Women's Eloquence in the Early Islamic Era” and Gisela Webb’s “May Muslim Women Speak for Themselves, Please?" in Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America. This book is edited by Gisela Webb and published by Syracuse University Press (2000). According to the author, the importance of the link that Mohja Kahf attempted to forge is more than a better understanding of the past events but programmatically is to find an Islamic answer to the modern Muslimah problems; while at the same time “escaping” from the charm of “Western feminism discourse.” Kahf opens an ijtihad from different venue, i.e. by historical investigation of the taciturn memory insinuated in the male-centered text of early Islam. Her work is meant to knock down the cultural imagination induced by American media that Muslim women are “an oppressed or mute victim,” as Gisela Webb put it, and to “initiate a critique of androcentric attitudes toward religion”. At this point, her achievement is more than the whole volume of Windows of Faith demand, which is to give Muslim women voices of their own. If it comes to its maturity, this study is a significant step to refine the standard version of Islamic history, or else an alternative of it.