Introduction

Introduction Ruth Roded The similar sociologies of Islam and Judaism have given rise to two comparable religious feminist movements since the 1970s.1 They deal with the textual foundations as well as the religious practices of their faith communities. Despite the similarities between Islamic and Jewish religious feminism, there are significant differences between the two movements, such as their global and Middle Eastern manifestations. "Islamic feminism" has been defined as "a feminist discourse and practice articulated within an Islamic paradigm."2 A concise definition, based on the shahada Islamic profession of faith, is "an attempt to reconcile belief in Allah and His Prophet with feminism."3 By analogy, Jewish religious feminism may be defined as "an effort to combine belief in the God of Israel, 'the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob' with feminism."4 These minimalist definitions of Muslim and Jewish beliefs allow us to enlarge the tents of both religions to encompass women of faith with a wide variety of understandings and practices of their religions, without judging who is more authentic than whom. Jewish women who are affiliated with Orthodox Judaism and with the Conservative (called Masorti in Israel, the UK and Europe), Reform (Progressive), Liberal (in France5 and the UK) and Reconstructionist movements are included, as well as believing Muslim and Jewish women who cover their hair and those who choose not to do so. The advent of Jewish religious feminism may be dated to a number of articles published in English in the United States in the early 1970s by women affiliated with different Jewish religious movements,6 mostly of Ashkenazi (central and east European Jewish) descent7—the dominant group in American Judaism at the time. In Israel, the first Orthodox Jewish religious feminists who tried to work with the rabbinic establishment in the 1970s were "Anglo-Saxons," Israelis who had immigrated from English-speaking countries.8 In France, much later, the controversy that followed the first public Torah reading by women in an Orthodox synagogue prompted the founding of a Facebook group, Judaïsme et Féminisme, in 2012. Among the purposes of this group of over 2000 members was the dissemination in French of the latest debates in American and Israeli modern Orthodoxy.9 Islamic feminism seems also to have originated in the 1970s in the United States, where Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi, Lebanese professor of [End Page 7] philosophy and law Azizah Y. al-Hibri, Pakistani immigrant Riffat Hassan, African-American Muslim convert Amina Wadud and Malaysian journalist Zainah Anwar studied or taught. All of these Muslim women came in contact with the secular feminist movement in the United States, and with Christian and Jewish American women who were struggling to reconcile their faith and their feminism. The variegated character of the American Muslim community—consisting of immigrants, students from all over the Muslim world, and Muslims born in the USA10—contributed to the perception that Islam had many faces, not least in matters pertaining to women. The degree of continued contact with their home countries among Muslim women and men in the United States varied as well. The comparative study of Islamic and Jewish religious feminisms faces several challenges. It may require knowledge of the original source languages, Hebrew and Arabic, of the English lingua franca of the religious feminist movements, and of the native languages of the Jewish and Muslim women studied. It necessitates familiarity with varied ethnic and cultural venues, in the United States, Israel, Morocco, France, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Egypt, Canada and other settings in the far-flung Muslim world. Serious study of Islamic and Jewish religious feminisms requires overcoming stereotypes as well as dealing with extremely sensitive political issues. Nevertheless, some researchers have tackled this daunting task with promising results. The articles in this volume are important contributions to the development of this area of comparative study. Moria Ran and Nahed Ashqar Sharary bring their expertise together to compare feminist religious scholarship among Jewish and Muslim women in Israel. Based on independent but parallel interviews with members of the Jewish Orthodox feminist organization Kolech: The Religious Women's Forum and the Islamic feminist organization Women and Horizons, they reveal insights into internal issues...

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