Thoughts on Islam, Gender, and the Hizmet Movement

What is the position of women in Islam?" s a Muslim woman educated in the United States, I have been exposed to this question in numerous occassions, especially in the "introduction to Islam" talks I gave at several churches and seminaries.I am aware that this question is being constantly asked in different parts of the world, and Muslims and non-Muslims alike are attempting to answer this question based on their own understanding and knowledge.My answer to this question is, however, that this is a wrong question to ask, because each of the words comprising this question must be specifically handled in order to be able to find a viable answer.What we mean by "position," "women," and "Islam" must be clarified, for none of these terms exist in a vacuum, i.e. without a relational context.The position of women, for example, can be opened up as the ontological, social, economic, and political positions of women in the Islamic societies throughout history.Or, it can be thought as the position of women in relation to men, or in relation to God.The idea of womanhood, on the other hand, is itself a product of a particular historical moment, when the entire concept of "human" was being redefined in the aftermath of the "death of God" in Europe.The ontological hierarchical status bestowed upon the male and female sexes by God was no longer held valid as they could not be utilized for the idea of citizenship, equal rights, and democracy -which the modern state needed for its legitimacy.When the western colonizers and orientalists criticized Muslim societies for oppressing women starting with the eighteenth century, their conception of womanhood was based on the modern idea of the subject, which was visible, rational, and autonomous.Finally, the meaning of Islam might seem quite straightforward, as you think of the Qur'an and the Sunnah as synonymous with Islam.These are the sacred sources of the religion of Islam: yet they do not lead to a mass production of Muslims identical to each other.Although the Qur'an and the Sunnah are the reference sources for Islamic doctrines, they do not constitute the Islamic tradition in and of themselves.Islam, as Talal Asad argues, 1 is a living discursive tradition -a living organism, so to speak -that finds life in complex set of relationships in various Muslim societies.In the thirteenth century, the Muslim traveler Ibn Batutah expresses his astonishment at the level of diversity he witnesses in the Muslim societies from Arabia to Indonesia.His accounts are a sign of the diverse ways of engagement with the sacred sources in each of these societies, which are shaped by their physical, social, cultural and economic structures.In that sense, what is written in the sacred texts does not give a full picture of any given reality.So "what is the position of women in Islam?," is a wrong question; and yet there are numerous answers to this question, given by both the critics and the defenders of Islam.Both attempts to assign a universal, ahistorical, fixed position for women in a similarly

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