There have also been complaints about the religious and cultural conservatism of the imams and the leaders of many mosques and Muslim organizations in Canada and the United States. Much of this, however, is largely an immigrant phenomenon not confined to Muslims. North America, with its rich history of immigration, has seen over the past 200 years that the first generation of immigrants, regardless of their origins, tended to turn to religion to keep their identity. They became more religious than they were “back home,” and those most active in the churches tended to be more conservative. Immigrants often had no choice but to import priests from the “old country” — priests who generally did not speak English well, could not offer appropriate religious guidance to suit the changing social and cultural milieu, and who ended up alienating the younger parishioners. It took the next generation to produce local priests and a new leadership to reshape the church and its institutions to their more liberal and ecumenical liking. This has been the experience of virtually every immigrant community — the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Italians and others. It is an evolutionary process.

Islamic feminism is clearly “a global phenomenon,” says Margot Badran of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. “It is not the product of the East or the West. It transcends both. Who’s afraid of Islamic feminism? Quite a few people. They include non-Muslims who fear Islam, and Muslims who fear feminism. They make strange bedfellows.”36

Echoing the growing feminist sentiment, Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi of Iran told me in 2005, “God created us all as equals. By fighting for equal status, we are doing what God wants us to do.” Indonesian Islamic feminist Musdah Mulia framed the thought this way in her conversation with me: “Most Islamic laws affecting women are man-made. They didn’t come as a fax from heaven.”

Islamic feminism represents the dawn of a new era. It presents, for the first time in recent memory, a comprehensive and coherent basis for the emancipation of Muslim women. In doing so, it offers an alternative to Western secular feminism, which never did find too many converts among Muslims.

Muslims must acknowledge that “women are the targets of the most serious violations of human rights in Muslim societies,” notes Riffat Hassan, professor of religious studies and humanities at the University of Louisville, Kentucky.37 For their part, Western democracies should know that they cannot dictate the terms of the debate about the liberation of Muslim women. In fact, the harder the West — the US in particular — tries to control it, by continuing the current hostile discourse against Muslims and by embracing Muslim thinkers in its own image, the more skepticism and anger it will face, thereby adding to the already dangerous level of mutual hostility.

Chapter 5

Jihad and Terrorism

Does the Qur’an condone terrorism? This is the kind of question no one asks of his or her own religion; we save it for others.