Religious women have in the past faced challenges not only from patriarchal traditions within their own religions but also from a dismissal of their religions by secular feminists. Religious feminists may be challenged to interpret religious law into language more conducive to a recognition of women's rights. As a result, a disciplinary ‘disconnect’ has developed between so-called secular feminist work and religious feminism.Footnote 2 Feminist legal scholars have, until recently, mostly avoided the study of the lives of religious women, perhaps both because of a perception that religious women's lives clash with contemporary values and because of secular feminism's neglect of or indifference to women's religious experiences. For their part, women involved in feminist religious studies have frequently been reserved about secular feminism and slow to become involved in it.Footnote 3 Both sides are thus hindered from engagement in meaningful dialogue, which would contribute to valuable gender analysis. Even those ‘secularists’ open to dialogue considering the sacred and religious lives of women may treat religion in a way which is not conducive to a constructive exchange.
However, public events emphasise the significance of how secular and religious discourses may interact.Footnote 4 The majority of women globally are engaged in religious and spiritual practice and tradition, and this exciting anthology, in three parts with 12 chapters, provides a rich resource for tracing relationships between law, feminism and religion. It arose from a year's collaboration between SOAS, University of London, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law) and Brandeis University, exploring the role of religion in the struggle for women's equality around the world, and the book breaks new ground in conversing and exchanging with other religious fields of feminist enquiry.
The editors of this ground-breaking monograph point out that various religious discourses have taken hold in many societies and permeate public discourse and behaviour. This process has taken place regardless of the states’ relationship to religion and irrespective of whether religion is relegated to the private sphere or is evident in national laws. While gender has largely disappeared in secular law as a result of equality laws and human rights, it remains prevalent in societies dominated by religious law. The intersection of gender, religion and human rights jurisprudence has frequently created seemingly irreconcilable societal clashes. This volume examines empirically grounded studies of religious law from various communities around the world from this standpoint. Depicting the realities of women's lives, it illuminates the reshaping of religious principles to meet the challenges facing societies in Africa, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the Middle East.
A balanced study of gender requires a study of masculinities as well as femininities. This work recognises the more fluid range of gender identities in the twenty-first century, moving beyond a binary male–female definition. It achieves this by defining gender in terms of socially constructed identities, attributes and roles for women and men and giving social meaning to these differences. This leads to a wide-ranging view of gender-discriminatory laws, as those that favour one gender while disadvantaging the other. Thus, Fareda Banda examines insights of masculinity studies, especially in the context of Rastafarian men (who believe that their dreadlocks are a central tenet of their religion), illustrating how denying such men the right to work effectively emasculates them because of the gendered effect of stereotyping men as the breadwinners.
The first part of this anthology describes how human rights have come into conflict with a number of religiously justified practices in the three Abrahamic faiths. Illustrating how religion and gender may be embedded in each of these faiths, Frances Raday's discussion in Chapter 1 successfully challenges the notion of a fundamental inconsistency between a commitment to gender equality and respecting women's religious faith, pointing out that, although the development of the human rights regime arose in a secular context, it was based on agreement between persons from many different religious and secular traditions. International human rights norms established by Conventions such as the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) have attempted to entrench equality – formal, substantive and transformative – for women in all sectors of their lives. Issues over gender have largely fallen away in jurisdictions governed by human rights norms, but in religious societies gender distinctions are ever more prevalent. Raday warns against over-accommodating religious or cultural issues to the detriment of women's rights.
Following in this vein, John Eekelaar's chapter illustrates anomalies in the English (and Welsh) law which require marriages recognised by the state to be performed in registered buildings. The secular legal system of marriage is thus unable to assist English or Welsh Muslim women who marry under Islamic law outside registered premises and whose marriages are therefore invalid or void in terms of the secular law.
In the African continent, Banda skilfully examines how colonialism led to changes in gender and religious relations, illustrating how frequently the practice of law enforcement, rather than the content or origin of the laws, results in discrimination against women. Thus, both Christianity and Islam prohibit practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM), slavery and witchcraft. However, FGM remains prevalent largely because many men desire to control the sexuality of young girls, resulting in a failure to enforce either legal or religious bans against the practice. Religious or community leaders may wrongly assert that the practice is required by their religion or custom. Despite the problems of lack of enforcement, Banda is relatively positive overall, perceiving possibilities for attitudinal change in many sectors of African society, which could ultimately lead to transformative equality from within the society itself.
Mary Ann Case discusses clashes over the meaning of gender between religious leaders led by the Holy See and more secular-minded delegates at the women's conference held in Beijing in 1995. She traces the transformation in Catholic understanding of the nature of gender towards ‘complementarity’, but suggests that there has been a twentieth-century reaction against progressive claims relating to issues such as women's ordination, acceptance of contraception and homosexuality. She concludes that the attitude of the current Pope, Francis, suggests that the Holy See is unlikely to change its essentially reactionary attitude to questions of gender. Case also criticises the alliance between the Holy See and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), comprising 57 states that incorporate a religious view of gender within a human rights frame, basing the Cairo Declaration on Rights in Islam on sharia law and making religion the focus for the interpration of human rights, often with negative results for women.
Part Two of this anthology shifts to case studies on Islamic law and Judaism, examining religious law and factors shaping the resolution of disputes over women's rights. Sarah Eltantawi illustrates how, in northern Nigeria, women's rights advocates have managed to use international human rights norms to integrate sharia law with progressive changes in equality law. Continuing this theme, Celene Ibrahim describes how identifying the egalitarian principles which underpin some Islamic laws has led to progress in some family law reform. ‘Higher order principles’ in Islamic law have ultimately legitimised progressive laws and rendered them ‘halal’ in the perceptions of religious persons, enabling reforms such as the use of pre-marital contracts to opt out of the discriminatory norms in Islamic marriage law.
Judicial proceedings have also assisted women's access to public space in Israel. In this context, Pnina Lahav discusses the background to legal conflict over the right of women to pray as they wish at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, culminating in the judicial decision that the Rabbinate could not exclude women from the right to read from the Torah and pray at the Western Wall while wearing tallit. Sima Zalcberg Block continues this theme, describing the vandalism, verbal abuse and severe physical violence used against women by local groups of radical ultra-Orthodox Jewish hooligans and how those seeking gender equality have rallied against these perpetrators and the secular governments that have allowed them to behave in this way.
The final part of the book turns to religious divorce in civil courts in the United States and Canada. Lisa Fishbayn Joffe describes how a fear of possible enforcement of inegalitarian sharia laws led many of the United States’ jurisdictions to ban enforcement of foreign or religious law contracts. Aryeh Klapper, an Orthodox rabbi and judge in the Beit Din of Greater Boston, reflects on the challenges of navigating between commitment to the integrity of Jewish law and the Jewish legal process, on the one hand, and, on the other, improvement of the gender inequality and disadvantage for women inherent in the Jewish system of divorce. He describes how Jewish family law has become involved with civil family law to protect women denied the Get or subjected to extortion to leave a Jewish marriage. Yael Machtinger based her findings on interviews with women seeking divorce before the Orthodox rabbinical court in Toronto, demonstrating that many rabbinical courts appear reluctant to develop the tools that they have at their disposal on behalf of women. Machtinger concludes that more venues should be created where women may narrate their tales of disadvantage so as to put pressure on the Jewish authorities to improve their position. In the final chapter, Anne Saris discusses the results of her examination into the role played by imams in family disputes in Montreal. She identifies methods by which many Muslim couples try to bind together civil and religious law to resolve family law matters using informal dispute resolution processes such as those conducted by religious authorities. The imams involved in this process frequently act as counsellors and advisers rather than in a judicial capacity, often playing an educative and protective role and assisting women to interpret Islamic pre-nuptial or marriage contracts.
The three carefully crafted parts of this anthology illustrate in graphic detail how, in practice, many of those trying to re-interpret religious law are frequently not secular persons but religious persons working within the religious system, often attempting to use progressive methods of interpretation provided by civil law to enable their religion to move towards equality. This progressive movement has allowed such women to remain both connected to their religious communities and simultaneously able to exercise their freedom of religion.
The volume is rich in empirical research, indicating how pitting gender equality against religion fails to perceive the complex entanglement of religious, feminist and legal norms. Religion can frequently operate as a powerful critique of other factors that impoverish women's lives. Many of the contributors to this volume, experts in their comparative fields, discuss the use of progressive methods of interpretation provided by civil law to enable the various religions to move towards increased equality. Religious feminists thus generally appear to be requesting not only the right to practise their religion and remain part of their religious communities but also to further their right to gender equality. This book is a fitting tribute to their efforts and represents a stimulating and innovative examination of this complex interrelationship, skilfully deconstructing the notion of a ‘disconnect’ between secular and religious feminism.
