Muslim feminist Riffat Hassan discussed women's rights in the Islamic world and said commonly used religious reasons for Muslim gender inequality are unfounded in a speech last night in 105 Dartmouth Hall titled "Muslim Women's Rights in the Context of Religious Pluralism."
The University of Louisville religion professor retraced her history as an advocate of Islamic women's rights and said how she is attempting to change established Muslim viewpoints on gender before the audience of approximately 30 students.
Hassan said this role began in 1974 when she was teaching at the Oklahoma State University, and was the faculty advisor for a Muslim student group.
She said the group was "very patriarchal" and did not allow female members, but Hassan was the only Muslim faculty member and was the group's only advisor option. "They were sort of stuck with me," she said.
Hassan said she was asked to give a talk on Muslim women at the group's annual all-male fall conference because the group felt she was not qualified to talk about anything else.
"I accepted the invitation ... perhaps it was time for a woman to reflect on this question," Hassan said.
What Hassan said she discovered during her research for the conference was that many Muslims, even Muslim women, think men's dominance over women is religiously inspired.
"When I got into this study, I started to feel very, very angry."
Hassan said she felt her research into Koranic teaching on gender was necessary not only for the conference but also for herself. "I needed to do this research to make sense of my own life as a Muslim woman."
Hassan said she discovered the prevailing thoughts on the subject came from texts Muslims consider subordinate to the Koran.
She said many Muslims believe in male superiority because of the Biblical teachings of creation, where the female is created out of Adam's rib. She said this story also appears in non-Koranic Muslim written tradition.
This perceived religious basis has made it difficult, Hassan said, to combat the rising forces of Islamic law in the Muslim world, which attempt to keep women out of public spaces and prohibit women from performing legal functions.
She said she realized it would be impossible to use her Koranic knowledge against supporters of this "Islamization" because of the large number of both Koranic and non-Koranic passages traditionally interpreted as against gender equality.
Hassan said she feels the best ways to oppose the patriarchal views are to use Muslim women's basic sense of God's goodness to show the injustice of the current situation, and eventually to have more educated women interpret the Koran themselves.
In a question and answer period following the speech Hassan said she has had the most success in converting lower-class Muslim women's mindsets, saying middle-class Muslims are even more "shackled" by suppression than others.
Hassan's speech was sponsored by the College Chaplaincy of the Tucker Foundation.
