Then there are Islamic feminists — believers who are fighting for women’s rights within the fold of Islam. They get little or no press, either in the West or in Muslim lands, even though they are growing in influence and may hold the key to eventual progress. Asma Barlas draws the distinction between Islamic feminists and secular Muslim feminists this way: Most secular Muslim feminists “don’t believe in a God, nor do they find it meaningful to engage the Qur’an or even to read it.”29 They are generally distrusted by the believers.

Islamic feminists argue that gender inequity does not emanate from Islam. They, like their Christian and Jewish counterparts, are rereading their scriptures “to demonstrate that the original texts are less misogynistic than they appear, and that alternative feminist readings have equal validity,” writes British author Malise Ruthven.30

Islamic feminists — hijabis and non-hijabis alike — want to reinstate for women the central role they played during the Prophetic period and in the years immediately following. This is not to say that women want to go back 1,400 years, but rather that they want their liberation within the framework of Islam. The sentiment was captured in the famous slogan of Afghan women directed at the Americans after the toppling of the Taliban: “Bring us your democracy, not your bikinis.”

The same thought has been expressed by American human rights advocate Amy Gutmann of Princeton University, who has said: “Oppressed women typically want their rights as individuals to be secured within their own culture, not at the expense of exile from their culture or the destruction of what they and others take to be valuable about their culture.”31

Some feminists may use the religious framework as a matter of tactics. The best way — sometimes the only way — to make headway with most Muslims is to speak the lingua franca of Islam. But “for most Muslim women, rejecting religion is not an option,” writes Zainah Anwar of the Malaysian group Sisters in Islam. “We are believers, and as believers we want to find liberation, truth and justice from within our faith.”32 When her group condemned the Malaysian moral police squads for raiding nightclubs and private homes, it invoked the Qur’anic command against invading people’s privacy: Enter not houses other than your own, until you have asked permission and saluted those in them (24:27).

Similarly, Indonesian Islamic feminist Musdah Mulia, director of research at the federal ministry of religious affairs, takes on the conservatives on their own religious turf. In a 2005 interview with me, calling for a ban on polygamy, she invoked the Qur’anic principle that men might be incapable of “justice between wives.” Another Indonesian feminist, Lily Munir, author of The Koranic Spirit of Gender Equity, argues that it is not the scripture but social conventions that have dictated the mistreatment of women. This line of reasoning started in the 1980s and gained momentum in the 1990s, especially in Iran and Saudi Arabia.