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.

—Professor John Esposito, Georgetown University1

Every Muslim must do jihad (struggle). Most do. In the literal meaning of that word, they strive in the path of God by observing the five essentials of Islam and trying to be good human beings.

The Prophet Muhammad, upon returning from one war, said, “We have come from the smaller jihad to the greater jihad.” Asked what he meant, he replied, “The jihad against oneself.”

The word jihad strikes fear in the West, where it is understood solely in terms of war, but it is a more benign word for most Muslims. To them, the first jihad is the struggle against the ego. Then there’s the jihad against the devil. There’s also the jihad of the tongue to spread the word of Islam. There’s the jihad of charity. There’s the jihad of the pen to spread knowledge. These are all individual jihads.

Muslims are also sometimes urged to undertake similarly peaceful but collective jihads for the most mundane matters, such as the jihad for cleanliness, once declared by the Egyptian government; the jihad for literacy, initiated by the Tunisian government; the jihad against corruption in government, periodically proclaimed in Pakistan with little or no success; the jihad for water conservation, routinely called for in tropical countries, and so on.