The International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and Law co-sponsored "Jewish and Muslim Women Reclaim their Rights," an event exploring the role of faith in religious feminists' quest for gender equality, in the Women's Studies Research Center last Thursday.

The event featured Dr. Jan Feldman, associate professor of political science at the University of Vermont, and Dr. Zainab Alwani, assistant professor of Islamic studies at the Howard University School of Divinity.

At the event, Feldman discussed the main arguments of her book—Citizenship, Faith and Feminism: Jewish and Muslim Women Reclaim their Rights, published by Brandeis University Press—and read selected excerpts. Alwani, an Islamic law specialist, responded to Feldman's presentation.

In Citizenship, Faith and Feminism, Feldman examines how religious Jewish and Muslim women balance their faith with feminism, emphasizing the strategies that women of both religions have in common, she said.

She wrote the book in response to the assumption that "a religious feminist or a faithful feminist is an oxymoron," she said. God, Feldman said, does not "dislike women" and "cannot be unjust." Suffering, therefore, stems from humans' misinterpretation of religious texts, she continued.

A priority for Muslim and Jewish women, Feldman said, is to reclaim the interpretation of these divine texts and to advocate civic equality and women's rights in a religious context.

According to Feldman, Jewish and Muslim feminists "don't want to jump ship [from their respective religions], nor do they see themselves as renegades." These women aim to "disentangle" religious texts such as the Torah and the Quran from the "patriarchal society that has claimed them" and to recover the texts' original meaning, she continued.

The book looks at case studies of Jewish women in Israel, Muslim women in Kuwait and women of both faiths in the United States. In Kuwait, Feldman said, Muslim women understood that they could not call for law outside of Islam, so women then became scholars so that they could enact reform based upon the Quran.

Citing her research in the U.S., Feldman said that the U.S. government's "hands-off approach" to religion and other lifestyle choices is one of its challenges in gender equality, as this tactic may result in issues such as domestic abusestemming from misinterpretation of religious texts being overlooked.

Feldman addressed Muslim and Jewish feminists' "shared agenda" in attaining women's rights. Among these agenda items are the recognition that gender justice must be included in the definition of social justice, the emphasis of the differences between culture and religion, and the acknowledgement that, in light of religious texts' multiple legitimate interpretations, the accepted interpretation must be one that serves the welfare of the community.

Alwani responded to Feldman's talk by further emphasizing the distinction between religion and culture and the importance of returning to religious texts for reinterpretation. Women, Alwani said, must seek to criticize what already exists and generate new ideas. She stressed the importance of female religious scholars and greater female presence in mosques.

Feldman's book, Citizenship, Faith and Feminism, was the first book published in the HBI Gender, Culture, Religion and Law series from the Brandeis University Press. According to the Brandeis University Press website, the series "focuses on the conflict between women's claims to gender equality, on the one hand, and legal norms justified in terms of religious and cultural traditions, on the other."

In an interview with the Justice, Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, director of the HBI Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law and an editor of the book series, said that the event "demonstrate[d] everything that we want to do with this series, which is to highlight the very exciting work being done by scholars and activists who, rather than throwing up their hands at the difficult challenges of reconciling women's rights and religious law, are engaging in very creative and innovative scholarship to identify ways of resolving those kinds of conflicts."