Feminism and faith
Re-examining Muslim theology shapes woman’s career, life
During her senior year of college, Asma Uddin had a crisis of faith.
Up to that point, the University of Miami student had been a devout Sunni Muslim involved with interfaith efforts in her Florida hometown. Her Pakistan-born parents had even helped build and fund mosques and Islamic schools in south Florida.
But as a collegian, she struggled to reconcile her belief in equality between men and women and the distinct lack of equality prevalent in texts written by some Muslim scholars and within her own extended family.
It didn’t help that politicians still trying to find their footing in a post-Sept. 11 landscape were talking about liberating Muslim women as American troops entered Afghanistan.
For someone with Uddin’s background, this growing crisis of faith “was a big deal,” Uddin, now 37, said. But out of that crisis, her beliefs strengthened and Uddin’s reexamination of Muslim theology led the young woman to believe there was a place for feminism within her faith.
The revelation would shape her career, and her life.
Uddin’s faith journey, particularly her feminist perspective on Islam, has earned her an invitation as the final speaker in the first year of the Rothko Chapel’s Concept of the Divine series.
The series is not about high-level, academic discussions, said David Leslie executive director of the Rothko Chapel. Instead, its purpose is to bring in people who will talk about their personal spiritual journeys.
The premise of the series is that spirituality — whether expressed through organized religion, art or activism — is prevalent in today’s United States, and it merits discussion.
“Religion and politics are not something you bring up in polite company,” Leslie said. “And yet, I think religion and politics are two areas of life people do talk about. And they may not have the space to talk about it in their own family or their work.”
Like previous speakers in the series, Uddin’s faith — and, at pivotal points, lack thereof — wound up shaping her career. She came out of her crisis of faith primarily because of the Muslim belief of the original disposition of humans. Unlike Christians,
who believe in original sin, Muslims believe humans are born a blank slate. That led Uddin to conclude that, in Islam, men and women were equals, from the very beginning.
It was a view she later found prevalent among other Muslim feminists and spurred her in 2009 to create a web magazine called altMuslimah. Writers for the online publication question issues of gender and faith that Muslim women previously had grappled with privately.
Articles address inequities between men and women in mosques — such as the differences in spaces they had to pray and the limited opportunities women had to gain leadership roles in the community.
Other stories on the site question Islamic laws, like one that allows men to marry non-Muslims but doesn’t afford the same liberties to women, an issue that has lead to a dwindling pool of potential partners in Muslim-minority countries, Uddin said.
And another describes what it was like for women who decide to stop wearing a headscarf — something with which Uddin had personal experience.
Seven years later, altMuslimah is still online, but now Uddin’s full-time job is in religious liberty law.
She worked as an attorney at the highprofile, nonprofit Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, serving as counsel on Supreme Court cases. The most notable came when her firm represented Hobby Lobby in a controversial case that ultimately gave the corporation the right not to fully cover contraception for female employees after passage of the Affordable Care Act. She also worked on the Becket Fund’s representation of a Muslim inmate who was forbidden by prison rules from growing a beard in keeping with his faith.
For Uddin, religious liberty has made it possible to question Islam and bring her feminist perspective to it. So, a year ago, she co-founded the Center for Islam and Religious Freedom. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit advocates for the rights of Muslims in countries where they are a religious minority and, on the flip side, the rights of religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries.
“It’s all part of this question to find God, and please God as you understand it,” Uddin said. “You have to be able to do it without coercion from the state.”
Uddin’s talk Thursday will focus on feminism in Islam, harkening back to the days before she founded altMuslimah, when her most meaningful discussions were with a group of other Muslim women, chatting in each other’s homes about the most recent book or compilation of essays addressing the topic.
“A lot of people have very uninformed, undereducated, misguided views about Islam,” Leslie said. “This is somebody who is very committed to feminist perspectives in Islam, which is something I just don’t think we hear very much about.”
That’s Uddin’s goal — to change attendees’ preconceptions about feminism in Islam. In Islam, issues of feminism and faith are not black as white, Uddin said.
“I want to muddy that up for people,” Uddin said. “And show them that it is complicated and nuanced, just as it is in every other religious community.” margaret.kadifa@chron.com twitter.com/margaretkadifa