As a “Muslim feminist scholar,” Williams College Assistant Professor of Religion Saadia Yacoob has a “very complicated relationship” with her Islamic faith, as her Duke University dissertation explains. This research, the basis for an April 3 presentation at Georgetown University’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), reveals the chasm between her “progressivism” and historic Islamic orthodoxy.
The leftist Jewish publication The Forward wrote over 15 years ago that Yacoob is a founder of the Progressive Muslims Network, whose members “appear to be working toward a new Islam.” She was a “heterosexual ally of Al-Fatiha,” a now defunct “national organization of gay Muslims.” Recently she has helped found the Feminist Islamic Troublemakers of North America (FITNA).
These biographical facts reflect the personal faith conflicts of Yacoob, a Pakistani-born woman who grew up in America, as noted in her dissertation:
As a Muslim woman raised in a devout and religious family that cultivated in me the love for my religious heritage as well as independence and confidence as a woman, I found certain aspects of that tradition oppressive as a woman, creating a sense of alienation.
Yacoob described the clash of worldviews between her questionable modern gender mantras and traditional Islamic gender distinctions while studying in Egypt and Jordan. She argued there to her teachers that “there is no essential characteristic of men and women, but rather cultural norms that construct individuals into particular gender identities.” By contrast, many “legal scholars refused to teach women out of fear of temptation” while others teaching courses “only allowed women to attend from behind some form of barrier.”
Yacoob seeks to resolve these conflicts with a “critical traditionalism,” an approach that entails radical departures from received Islamic doctrines. As she wrote in an online Festschrift (“webschrift”) for her mentor Amina Wadud, Yacoob wants to “conceive of Islamic law and ethics beyond the classical fiqh tradition.” In particular, she rejects standard Islamic teaching that the Quran is God’s perfect revelation; rather the “language of the text itself is finite and fallible, incapable of encompassing the entirety of the Divine message.”
Yacoob’s doctoral study of the Hanafi Islamic jurisprudence school, focused on the 11th century scholar Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Sarakhsī, clearly indicates the stark challenges facing her feminist theories. Gender “is the most crucial distinction between individuals in Islamic law,” she wrote, for this difference is immutable in contrast to other legal statuses. “Other impediments to full legal subjecthood are factors such as enslavement and insanity, both of which can change.”
For example, Yacoob observed at Georgetown that the “normative condition of femaleness is one of concealment” under the Islamic doctrine of ‘awra, or body parts that should remain covered. “From her head to her feet, a woman is ‘awra,” she cited al-Sarakhsī in her dissertation, although a “man may look upon and touch the body of a slave woman, he argues, as she must often emerge in public to serve the needs of her owner.” “Slave women are not allowed to cover in ways that resemble free women,” she additionally wrote and noted at Georgetown that clothes and bodily exposure marked status. As this author noted in an audience question, this teaching has disturbing implications for modern Muslim sexual assaults upon uncovered women, Muslim or non-Muslim, a concern dismissed by her as a “racialized argument.”
Yacoob’s Georgetown remarks on Islam’s female slaves had an especially troubling nature in the presence of her moderator, ACMCU director Jonathan Brown. He has previously made scandalous assertions that slavery, including sex slavery, is not a priori immoral, for Islam’s prophet Muhammad, considered a perfect moral example in Islamic doctrine, condoned such practices. As she noted in her lecture, free Muslim men traditionally had a right to “unrestricted concubines if they have the financial means.”
Yacoob analyzed in her dissertation that Islamic sharia law’s understanding of marriage, in which Muslim men may practice polygamy with up to four wives, is no bed of roses for women. Quoting the canonical traditions of Muhammad or hadith, al-Sarakhsī had argued that “marriage for women is a humiliation in that they enter into a form of slavery.” “In Islamic law, the wife’s right to financial maintenance is tied to her sexual availability to her husband” and therefore there is “no legal conception of sexual coercion” in marriage or concubinage, she wrote. This denial of rape reflected that sharia “marriage is a contract of sale in which the man acquires ownership over his wife’s vulva and the sexual enjoyment of her body.”
Yacoob’s dissertation further examined how only Muslim men had an independent ability to negotiate such marital “contracts of sale.” “Of the four Sunni legal schools, only the Ḥanafīs allow a virgin woman to contract her own marriage,” she wrote. “However, the father of a virgin woman retains the right to contest the marriage if he finds the match incompatible.”
Even the terms of possible marriage contract dissolution favored the husband, Yacoob analyzed. He could renounce a marriage by merely repeating “ṭalāq” three times; the “marriage contract thus gave the man sole ownership of the contract, granting only him the unilateral right to divorce.” Contrastingly, women could only divorce subject to the husband’s consent through a khul‘, in which a woman offered financial compensation such as returning the dower amount.
Yacoob’s dissertation also examined how sharia’s prosecution of illicit sex outside the bounds of marriage or sex slavery concubines imposed severe disadvantages upon women. “The evidence for proving illicit sexual intercourse is quite stringent, requiring four male witnesses to see the act of penetration. This puts victims of rape at a significant disadvantage,” she wrote. Yet “pregnancy can also be presented as evidence under Ḥanafī law, which can unduly punish women who become pregnant through rape” as adulterers.
Yacoob observed in her dissertation on sharia that it is no mere academic discussion. “The pre-modern Islamic legal tradition continues to have a life in the contemporary period, informing Muslim ethics on gender and sexuality.” For example, in the Wadud Festschrift, Yacoob noted the orthodox understanding of Quran 4:34 as giving husbands the authority to discipline wives physically. Accordingly the “public discourse against domestic violence is still very precarious in Muslim communities.”
Yacoob in her dissertation introduction highlighted her previous study of “child marriage in Islamic law,” something today “pathologized as pedophilia and considered rape.” With analysis shockingly suggestive of cultural relativism, she wrote of being “particularly intrigued by how Islamic law makes ethical sense of sexual intercourse between adult men and minor girls.” Hanafi ethical concerns ominously included the “ability of the female child to bear penetration without harm,” an issue of enormous modern relevance to, among others, Nigerian girls grievously damaged by their Muslim “husbands.”
As with domestic violence, Yacoob noted that Islamic child marriage derives from the canonical example of Muhammad’s seventh-century child marriage to a nine-year old Aisha. Contrary to Quran 33:21, “to make moral or ethical claims against child marriage would run against this precedent and Muhammad as an exemplar.” Therefore efforts in Muslim-majority societies to end child marriage face “often a significant backlash.”
Sharia treatment of issues like child marriage starkly contrasts with Yacoob’s embrace of modern individualistic sexual and gender mores. If traditional Islamic tenets hinder the abolition of child marriage horrors, the Muslim backlash against her LGBT advocacy for historic novelties like same-sex “marriage” will probably be even worse. Islamic canons like the Quran condemn homosexual behavior, often brutally so, and even the Ivory Tower academic Brown in his understanding of Islam takes critical positions towards LGBT agendas.
Thus it is questionable how authoritative Yacoob’s example will be to other Muslims, particularly given a scholarly gaffe in her dissertation. She listed 1126, the year of Andalusian Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd’s (Averroes) birth, as his death year, which was actually in 1198. This novice mixup, coming from a Pakistani-American who has mastered Islamic disciplines like Arabic only after extensive study, will hardly impress her teachers in Islam’s Arabic lands of origin.
Yacoob has a truly difficult ideological balancing act. In 21st-century America she wants to live out a personal piety in the Islamic faith of her fathers while consigning to a medieval ash-heap any submission to Islam’s historically all-encompassing political framework. To what extent her visions will become real or remain a “fantasy Islam” remains to be seen.
CRUSADER says
Multi-interviewing with FITNA feminist founder
Hind Makki of Side Entrance and Saadia Yacoob, co-founder of FITNA:
Feminist Islamic Troublemakers of North America, to discuss all things feminism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKwbl5Vnch0
gravenimage says
Thanks for that link.
Andrew Harrod says
I link to this interview in the article.
gravenimage says
Thank you, Mr. Harrod–I saw that. Not everyone follows the links in the article (although I almost always do).
I often thank anyone who provides a useful link or more information, even if that information is available in links in the main article. My thought is that whatever gets more information out there to Jihad Watch readers is a good thing. This is why I thanked FYI here.
CRUSADER says
We all should link arms !
😉
Ashley says
This “woman” is so deeply confused and troubled…
She couldn’t land a job bagging groceries or sexing baby chicks so it is only fitting that she found her niche as a “Muslim feminist scholar” at Williams College.
gravenimage says
True, Ashley–notice that she is at an Infidel college–certainly, nowhere in the Muslim world.
James Lincoln says
Yacoob is one confused individual. It must be painful.
The epitome of cognitive dissonance – she would feel much better if she became an apostate.
Emilie Green says
Listening to Muslim women explain that Islam is compatible, agreeable even, with Western thought on the equality of women is akin to listening to someone trying to square a circle.
Anjuli Pandavar says
I think that if she could’ve apostatised, she would’ve done so already. None of her exertions have anything to do about making the case for Islam. They are about making her feel better about her own helplessness. Not only do we not believe what she’s saying about Islam, *she* doesn’t believe what she’s saying about Islam. As long as no one calls her out, she doesn’t have to call herself out. To challenge what she says is to challenge *her*, and she’s forced to get to work again to make the lie even more elaborate. All Muslima apologists and propagandists have this problem. They’re not stupid enough to be duped by Islam, but they’re not clever enough to avoid duping themselves. It’s sometimes comical to watch, but most of the time it’s just sad. Amina Wadud is perhaps the saddest of them all.
James Lincoln says
Anjuli Pandavar,
Superb analysis – my compliments!
alex reid says
Islamic Feminist is an oxymoron. Make it simpler…… just a moron!!
Ashley says
Good one, Alex!
I can just picture Williams College’s Human Resources upon hiring this mutant…”we need someone confused about own gender identity, conflicted with Islamic doctrine, conflicted about the meaning of feminism, conflicted with own sexuality, conflicted with the concept of child marriage/rape, etc…”
And the college scored…big time.
abad says
+1
gravenimage says
Sharia truth and the “Progressive Muslim” Feminist
As a “Muslim feminist scholar,” Williams College Assistant Professor of Religion Saadia Yacoob has a “very complicated relationship” with her Islamic faith…
……………………
In other words, she and her concerns are completely rejected by all orthodox Muslims. And “Fitna” is not just a cute acronym for them, but seen as a threat to Islam.
More:
The leftist Jewish publication The Forward wrote over 15 years ago that Yacoob is a founder of the Progressive Muslims Network, whose members “appear to be working toward a new Islam.” She was a “heterosexual ally of Al-Fatiha,” a now defunct “national organization of gay Muslims.”
……………………
And what happened to Al-Fatiha? Just saying it is “defunct” makes it sound as though members just lost interest or drifted apart. Nothing could be further from the truth.
They were under constant threat from mainstream Muslims.
This, from Tim Herbert, “Queer chronicles”, Weekend Australian, October 7, 2006:
“In 2001, Al-Muhajiroun, an international organization seeking the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate, issued a fatwa declaring that all members of Al-Fatiha were murtadd, or apostates, and condemning them to death. Because of the threat and coming from conservative societies, many members of the foundation’s site still prefer to be anonymous so as to protect their identity while continuing a tradition of secrecy…”
Ashley says
Graven…it would take you some two years and four months devoting full time to parse this lunatic’s dissertation from Duke…and you’re a pro. She’s effing all over the map. The fact that she’s on the faculty of Williams College is quite telling…
The motto of liberal art colleges across the land these days is simple: “Give us your mentally ill candidates, and we’ll guarantee them tenure on the condition they are head-fuc*ed enough to be on our faculty.”
mortimer says
So, Ashley, if an aspiring college teacher has mastered the academic procedures of writing down and documenting their claims with politically correct lingo and Chicago style, they can promote absolute, contradictory balderdash and cheat students out of their good money.
It seems that she is promoting feminism when in actual fact, she has already admitted that the case for feminism in Islam IS CLOSED … the consensus of Islam is NOT GOING TO BE CHANGED and the text CANNOT be changed.
Quote … Gender “is the most crucial distinction between individuals in Islamic law,” she wrote.
So much for feminism, then. She has admitted Islam is systemically discriminatory towards women and that this part cannot be reformed. So why does she remain in Islam? Discrimination against women in Islam is CARVED IN STONE and in the ETERNAL KORAN THAT IS CO-ETERNAL with Allah.
KWJ says
I watched a video put out by Al Jazerra of Irshad Manji, a Syrian Canadian debating the snakey British Muslim Mehdi Hasan. She is a reformist who attempts to use ijtihad as a thrust of her arguments. She’s interesting to listen to, says she’s a Muslim and worships Allah, but based on her arguments I thought why does she bother being a Muslim. She too gets threats, something the media doesn’t chastise Muslims for enough.
https://youtu.be/f1eI7itIaJU
You can’t really reform Islam, you can only ignore what you don’t like as is the case with Christianity. Only two Islamic countries force the hijab on women, they don’t all chop off arms for stealing and soon. In Pakistan a politician was assassinated for wanting to give more women’s rights. Well-funded imams, ulemas and mosque clerics aren’t changing anytime soon and now clerics are shouting for sharia law in Sudan with the new military government; same with Iraq.
As with Tarek Fatah, many Muslims don’t even consider him a Muslim so is her mo effective? It could give a false impression of “moderate” Muslims. I’m not sure if a large number of apostates would make a difference especially with mainstream media being bought and paid for, but if she wants these rights then she ought to be warning of Islam and what to do to keep these rights. Islam is winning.
Like Gravenimage said, the name of the group FITNA was not smart and just raises the hackles of the meaning of it and how it applies to the ummah.
Richard says
Mortimer: Not only is the subject of feminism in Islam closed, Everything in the Qur’an and perhaps the hadiths are closed because Islam claims to be a “revealed religion”, and therefore, having been ‘reveled by God’ (or “the other guy”), it has to be considered absolutely true and unquestionable, and therefore unchangeable; to be followed to perfection, or the whole religion collapses like a house of cards. That is Islam’s strength. I would like to say it is also its weakness, except that its members are slaughtering and rapeing everyone in sight who do not believe as they do and there seems to be no force willing or able to stop them.
gravenimage says
Grimly true, Ashley. Liberal arts colleges used to be bastions of learning, now so often they are all about bs.
LR says
“The motto of liberal art colleges across the land these days is simple: “Give us your mentally ill candidates, and we’ll guarantee them tenure on the condition they are head-fuc*ed enough to be on our faculty.”
Oh god, that is funny…Sums it up pretty good…
ntesdorf says
Saadia Yacoob has noticed that in Islam “certain aspects of that tradition oppressive as a woman, creating a sense of alienation.” Given some more time Saadia Yacoob might well discover a great deal more worrying in the Qur’an, Haddith, and Sunna of Mohammed.
CRUSADER says
Williams, Amherst….
These colleges have lost their credibility.
Here is Dinesh D’souza speaking at Amherst for instance,
putting a leftie in his seat, and asking him to leave his seat as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN9bu6CP318
Andrew Harrod says
I went to Amherst College. This is Stern Hall, where I have been numerous times.
gravenimage says
Thanks.
abad says
The phrase “Feminist Moslem”(TM Pending) is an Oxymoron.
Wellington says
Muslim feminist scholar?
Not much more needs be said. Sometimes, you know, just a few words convey all that is necessary to know. For instance, here.
Ashley says
🙂
I needed a good chuckle…you delivered.
Thanks.
Robert is going to be okay, right Wellington?
Wellington says
I sure hope so, Ashley.
gravenimage says
I hope so, too.
Westman says
This unusual stance by Saadia Yacoob certainly puts her on the “cutting edge” of Islam – pun intended.
Fitna is more than an acronym, it is a word having multiple meanings and appears about 60 times in the Quran. One of the meanings is tribulation; another is sedition(revolt) from the official doctrines of Islam.
Let’s hope Williams College is providing security for her from some “brothers” who will consider her to be an apostate. She is putting a challenge in the face of the orthodox believers(Muslim men), by claiming both equality of women(and gender variations) and prohibited sexual advocacy. Intellectual discussion is not their greatest utility when responding.
mortimer says
Many thanks to Andrew Harrod for this finely written article. Yakoob is a perfect example of the COGNITIVE DISSONANCE of Muslims in the 21st century and he describes it beautifully:
“Yacoob has a truly difficult ideological balancing act. In 21st-century America she wants to live out a personal piety in the Islamic faith of her fathers while consigning to a medieval ash-heap any submission to Islam’s historically all-encompassing political framework.”
Indeed, Islam is a MEDIEVAL POLITICAL IDEOLOGY that denies HUMAN RIGHTS and CIVIL LIBERTIES to women and ‘others’.
How does a feminist with any consistency promote an ideology that denies human rights and civil liberties to women? She doesn’t.
Muslim feminist is like saying Nazi Zionist.
Terry Gain says
My guess is that Yakoob is in it for the money. I feel the same way about Irshad Manji who tried to tell us that houris were raisins. Yes, raisins with wide eyes and swelling breasts. Islam is bullshit and they know it.
CRUSADER says
Irshad Manji now doesn’t want you to label her…..
Terry Gain says
I saw this video several months ago and I wondered whether it was true that Blacks were denied access to GI benefits because of their race. This seemed to me to be improbable. Does anyone know if this youngster’s claim is true?
gravenimage says
Terry, this is one of those things that is equivocal.
Few African Americans were directly denied GI benefits, but thanks to Jim Crow and other forms of discrimination it was more difficult for some Blacks to take full advantage of these benefits.
The Wikipedia article on the subject is pretty accurate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_and_the_G.I._Bill
Overall, the GI Bill was still a great boon to many Blacks.
Terry Gain says
Thanks GI. It seems the young man’s virtue did not extend to telling the whole truth.
gravenimage says
Thank you, Terry.
CRUSADER says
Denied access to GI (GravenImage) benefits?
Oh….government issue…..
gravenimage says
🙂
Jason says
I predict “Fantasy Islam”.
The problem with reform movements like this, is that you can’t just go up to a religion and say “God got it wrong, we need to change it”. Divine mandates are just that, divine. They are not subject to human approval, and humans are not free to simply change them if they don’t like them. If it became known that doctrine can be changed by humans whenever the political wind changed, it would destroy the credibility of the religion. Pious, learned believers will not accept such.
A reformist would need to convince believers that they themselves are acting under a divine mandate, but it is pretty obvious that people like Saadia are simply trying to inject western values into Islam. I admit, that would be nice, but we have to be realistic. Most pious Muslims will reject this as bogus.
She will most likely gain a few followers, and then join the ranks of other reformers: marginalized, outcast, vilified, and under death fatwas.
CRUSADER says
What about Baha’i ?
Apparently it’s the last word in religions, and included Islam as well….
Westman says
As Jason wrote: “A reformist would need to convince believers that they themselves are acting under a divine mandate..”
That’s (Iranian) Baha’i founder, Bahá’u’lláh, in 1863, after declaring himself a prophet. Baha’i followers pray toward his grave in Haifa, Israel. instead of Mecca. As expected, both Shia and Sunni flavors of Islam reject Baha’i as an apostate corruption and the religion is actively persecuted in Iran.
If Baha’i could become the new Islam, we should be hearing of mass conversions in Europe instead of crickets.
As a new religion, it is a success. As a reformation of Islam, it’s in the state of early Christianity, and will never be accepted or adopted by mainstream Islam. If you’re ever in Chicago, visit the Baha’i temple for a nice experience and the realization that this is not really the Islam of Muhammad.
I remember when Seals & Crofts were touring they would invite audience members to meet with them afterwards to hear about their new religion – Baha’i.
Saadia Yacoob has no chance of reforming Islam – particulary in sexual revolution. The only real way out of Islam is to leave it and those who won’t accept your freedom, in the rear-view mirror.
gravenimage says
There is a reason that Baha’i is headquartered in Israel, even though it originated in Iran–Muslims hate and persecute Baha’is, even though they revere Islam and the “Prophet” so much.
elee says
This woman’s no Muslim, hey, where’s that fatwah?
kuriakose says
Why does she cling on so desperately to islam? I find this to be the strangest paradox with these seemingly educated muhamedddans still hanging on and making the most irrational rationalising of islam. For heaven’s sake, consign it to the dustbin!
mortimer says
35% of Muslims have quietly left Islam, but pretend to be Muslims so as not to upset their relatives.
There’s now a game going on among Muslims: pretend to Muslim, keep your mouth shut about your apostasy, don’t advertise you left Islam, don’t point out the errors in Islam, and you won’t be honor-killed.
Outspoken lesbian feminist Irshad Manji lives with her body guards at a secret location.
Manji has finally discovered freedom of expression, because Muslim countries have deplatformed her so many times.
Now she wants to keep diversity of opinions. Her ability to reinterpret Islam when the primary source texts contract most of her libertarian views … is breath-taking.
Mohammed was not a feminist in the hadiths or Sira. Yakoob and Manji are fabricating their own “FANTASY ISLAM”.
Why are they in such denial about it?
JOHN says
A “Progressive Moslem Feminist”? Isn’t the an oxymoron? It’s like “Liberal Genius”, the two don’t go together….
BlueYonder says
From her dissertation, we are to know that free woman under Islam have an obligation to cover up; slave women do not have that privilege.
There are no jokes in Islam, and irony is utterly beyond them.
Don Ameche says
This is why JihadWatch is so vital ! Most of middle America knows nothing of all this . Even Conservative sites like BB are censoring conservative commenters now.
gravenimage says
Spot on, Don.
KWJ says
Great article with links. The American Thinker article “Islam and Rape: Joined at the Hip” has good information. I’m wondering what you think of Irshad Manji and her reformist views of Islam incorporating the concept of Ijtihad. The interview on Al Jazeera’s Head to Head show on YT with Mehdi Hasan is of a similar nature to Saadia Yacoob’s except she wants to focus on the idea of thinking for yourself and whatever Qur’an verses back up her ideas. Hasan gets on her case about her books and “generalizations.”
I also read an article by Islamic scholar Andrew G. Bostom regarding Wafa Sultan’s appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show in 2011 though updated in 2012 on myislam.dk titled “The ‘Rape Factor’ in Islam” which originally appeared in American Thinker. myislam.dk looks like a pretty good site. I think bringing forward the issues of women in Islam and in Islamic culture, as well as the repressed sexuality of Muslim men, to be a pertinent subject especially in light of Leftist women’s hypocrisy and shamefully ignoring what is happening in Europe and Islamic countries and what we’re importing. Less off-the-wall liberals should be made aware because it’s a threat to women’s rights, autonomy, and Islam is rife with misogyny – true misogyny not what here in the US should be referred to as male chauvinism.
Thanks again!
gravenimage says
Irshad Manji may be sincere–but she spends more time whitewashing Islam to the Infidels than she does advocating reform to her coreligionists.
And yes–good article from the American Thinker.
na says
Sri Lankan terrorist got support from Pakistan and Punjab. She might have helped them.
na says
Sri Lankan terrorist got help from Pakistan and Punjab. She might have helped them.
gravenimage says
Do you have any reason to actually suspect this? Citations, please.
It is one thing to reasonably criticize someone, but this sounds specious.
Craig Vandertie says
islam is solidly anchored in evil, no such thing as a moderate/progressive muslim, yes women who adhere to and embrace the principles of which islam is based desire women to receive far more rights than they now currently have practicing their ideology but they still wish death to all who do not adhere to and embrace the principles of which islam is based.
Confused as to why Jihad Watch would print an article conveying the viewpoints of any muslim woman or man.
gravenimage says
Craig, this article is pointing out how ironic a Muslim feminist is. There are no equal rights of women in Islam. Someone like Saadia Yacoob could only exist in the West–not in Dar-al-Islam.
James says
I wonder just what there is in Islam that woul appeal to a woman? Perhaps they can gain pleasure from identifying with the success of the Muslim men in defeating and exploiting non-muslims.
Kathy says
It seems to me that Islam appeals only to the sadists and the masochists among us, therefore I suspect that these women would probably – but not necessarily exclusively – fall under the latter definition.
LR says
Well, I’ll take the confused, Muslims, any day – as long a they are busy being confused with their heads in the books…Beats the hard core Islamists…The west should be supporting the confused ‘feminist’ Muslims if they are already born here…Keep them busy…Better than the other kind…