Five pedagogical strategies to address challenges in teaching “Women in Islam”

ABSTRACT

This article is a reflection of the author’s experiences teaching a course titled ‘Women In Islam’ [WIS] in an English Department at a medium, public, Masters granting, Liberal Arts university in the Midwestern United States. This paper argues for the importance of teaching WIS through a multi-genre, interdisciplinary, and global approach. The article refers to the following five teaching strategies: Thinking through History, The Lived Realities Lens, The Multi-Genre Approach, Fiction through a Global Lens, and Using VALUE rubrics as an Evaluation Tool

Keywords:

• Teaching Islam
• women
• literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I use the word ‘West’ here conventionally primarily to refer to Europe and US.

2. See Bernadette Andrea’s ‘Islam, Women, and Western Responses.’ Anglo-American feminists like Virginian Woolf, for example, are guilty of portraying false images about Muslim women.

3. I have chosen not to use the phrase Islamic Feminism as an analytical paradigm as it is quite problematic. As Seedat writes: ‘Islamic feminism is an inadequate construct when framed in opposition to a history and continuity of Muslim struggles for sex equality. It aligns Muslim equality work with a Western intellectual paradigm: a history of reason that leads us to the history of Western liberal feminism rather than the history of Muslim thought’ (40).

4. On 27 January 2017: ‘President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that banned foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from visiting the country for 90 days, suspended entry to the country of all Syrian refugees indefinitely, and prohibited any other refugees from coming into the country for 120 days’ (ACLU.org).

5. I created the course in my third year at the university. While I am grateful for the opportunity, getting students to take the class has been a challenge for a number of reasons – stigma surrounding the topic, the course does not count for any major English requirements, and so on. Thus, the classes were never full.

6. In the introduction to the book, Wadud asks a very pertinent question: ‘since every term in Arabic – whether referring to inanimate or animate things, physical or metaphysical realms or dimensions – is expressed in gendered terms, some ideas continue to include gender markers and others ignore them. How can ideas that transcend gender be expressed in a gendered language? To lead the reader to ungendered spheres of reality is complicated by the limitations of language’ (xii).

7. I use the word non-west here to refer to Asia, Africa, Middle East, and the Caribbean.

8. We meet thrice a week; each class is fifty minutes.

9. On 24 June 2018, the ban on women driving in Saudi women was officially lifted.

10. It is important to remind them that the terms East and West are very nuanced.

11. For example, and as Fay concludes, ‘even though the Qur’an empowered women in certain ways, Islam did not overturn the gender system’ (2010, 139).

12. Wadud writes: ‘It cannot be overlooked, however, that verse 4:34 does state the third suggestion using the word daraba, “to strike”. According to Lisan al-‘Arab and Lanes’s Lexicon, daraba does not necessarily indicate force or violence. It is used in the Qur’an, for example, in the phrase “daraba Allah mathalan…” (“Allah gives or sets as an example…”). It is also used when someone leaves, or “strikes out” on a journey. It is, however, strongly contrasted to the second form, the intensive, of this verb – darraba: to strike repeatedly or intensely. In the light of the excessive violence towards women indicated in the biographies of the Companions and by practices condemned in the Qur’an (like female infanticide), this verse should be taken as prohibiting unchecked violence against females. Thus, this is not permission, but a severe restriction of existing practices’ (76).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sukanya Gupta

Dr. Sukanya Gupta is Associate Professor of English and the Director of Global Studies at University of Southern Indiana. Her research and teaching interests include Post-Colonial Studies, World Literature, South Asian Diaspora Studies, and Bollywood. She has published articles in books like Negotiating: Gender and Sexual Identity in Contemporary Turkey and in journals such as South Asian Popular Culture, South Asian Diaspora, South Asian Review, and Diaspora Studies.