Feminism In Islam And Feminism

Introduction Islam and feminism are often related together in most of discussion as there are some people blame Islam for not giving freedom to women and some other people used to establish human’s right according to Islam especially for feminist properties. Feminism is defined as both a political view and a theory where the subject of analysis centres on gender and provided a platform for women to claim equality, rights and justice. Feminism in basis concerned on four foremost, which are to clarify the origins and reasons of gender inequality, describe the operation and ingenuity of this situation, portrays effective approaches to either beget full equality between genders or possibly improve the impacts of continuous inequality and envision

As stated by Margot Badran (2013), Islamic feminism is defined as “a feminist discourse and practice articulated within an Islamic paradigm. Islamic feminism, which derives its understanding and mandate from the Qur’an, seeks rights and justice for women, and for men, in the totality of their experience”. Islamic feminism does not just fight for women's rights, equality between the sexes and social justice, it also defends patriarchal family laws that are illusively immortalized and falsely innovated by some ecclesiastics (Zidan, 2016). In regards to our introductory issue, a feminist text of Shelina Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf is being reviewed and analyzed on how the author used ideas in Islam to argue for woman’s right.

Issues

There are many issues on feminism arise in Shelina Janmohamed‟s literary debut Love in a Headscarf. The memoir introduces the readers with a new picture of Muslim women living in Britain and West at large as the author found that many books available in bookstores failed to portray the true images of Muslim women.

In this book, Shelina once argued with an auntie when she decided to climb a very big mountain named Kilimanjaro which located inside the border of Tanzania, her own hometown. In the auntie’s view, climbing mountain is not nice for girls as it is not a kind of thing that a girl should do and people will talk bad about it. That argument which centred on culture and personal development then broke by Shelina based on Islamic perspective. We should travel around the world and see His creations and this has been mentioned few times in the Qur’an itself. She even narrated to the auntie about the story of Prophet Muhammad p.b.u.h. meditated in the Cave of Hira, at the top of a small mountain before the first revelation came down. During his stay and meditation time there, Prophet’s wife, Khadijah would climb the mountain every day to visit the Prophet even though it was not easy for her to climb that very steep mountain. Shelina concluded that she also can do the same as the wife of the Prophet climbed a mountain too. As a Muslim, we should emulate Shelina in term of faith and belief. She has no regret to practice Islam as she choose to believe and live with the truth. In the end, a woman experience of mount climbing proved that she can achieved anything that in