International Journal of Gender & Women's Studies

Islamic Feminist Discourse in the Eyes of Egyptian Women: A Fieldwork Study
Hana'a El-Marsafy

Abstract
This paper discusses the Egyptian Islamic feminist discourse (2012-2014) as viewed by Egyptian professors and students whether they are Muslims or Christians, Activists or non-activists, Islamists secular or Islamic feminists or conservatives/ as Salafis and Muslim Brotherhood. Anthropological method is applied with its main tools: in-depth interviews and focus group. The reaction to contemporary Egyptian Islamic feminist discourse varies in the eyes of this diverting spectrum according to various Islamic feminist issues. This Egyptian discourse has molded some new Islamic terminology with secular feminist ones to give it new justification through what they called Gender Jihad. Most of the issues dealt with in this discourse such as, gender equality, patriarchal dominance, women submission to men, women as God’s Caliphate, Domesticity and women’s private space, veiling and freedom of the body, progressive mandate legislations, and woman imamah in congregational prayers, are discussed in this paper. The focus group was chosen to affirm or refute the Islamic feminist discourse as a kind of evaluation to the data derived from the in-depth interviews. When this Islamic feminist discourse was analyzed, the researcher discovers that Egyptian women have developed the global discourse and created a local one that is a mixture of Islamic and secular feminist discourse. The aim of this study is to teach students of the last year Anthropology how to analyze universal issues as those of Islamic feminism and render it problematically.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijgws.v2n4a2