Foreign Policy Blogs

Bahraini women use Islam to advocate for their rights

not really a new thing, but I guess when you work for a newspaper calling something “new” is the only way to justify publishing it.

In Bahrain, women are employing the Quran to combat patriarchal rule. This sort of Islamic feminism, so called, could be accurately described as a call to uphold the spirit of the law rather than its letter: inheritance laws, for example, wherein women are allotted less than are their male family members, were not designed to diminish women’s importance but to ensure that family members had the resources to provide for them adequately. It was based on a family model wherein all women lived in a household with men and would be cared for by them. Since this is no longer the case universally, adjustments can be made to practices that will uphold religious requirements and give women their due. This sort of synthesis of Islam and secular-liberal ideas like women’s rights yields different sorts of results – interpreters vary in their degrees of allegiance to religious doctrine as opposed to, for example, human rights – but regardless it’s a fascinating process to observe.