EXC 2060 C3-5 The Ambiguity of Islamic-Emancipatory Discourses in Past and Present

Keywords
Religion; Politics; Ambiguity; Islam; Feminism; History; Present; Past; Qur'an; Feminist exegesis
Period
Status
Finished
Funding Source
DFG - Cluster of Excellence
Project Number
EXC 2060/1

  • Description

    The public discourse on the question of women's images and women's spaces in Islam is being conducted primarily on a populist level, especially in the current European context. At the same time, the Islamic-emancipatory discourses of the 20th and 21st centuries, which since their early beginnings have always been formulated with reference to religious parameters, based primarily on the Koran, remain largely ignored or marginalized. At the same time, there is a lack of a systematic recording and compilation of a typology of the developments of these discourses, which in their entirety reveals the emancipatory approaches of the last century to the present day and thus can contribute to a more differentiated picture of these discourses. In this project, therefore, the developments of the Islamic-emancipatory discourses in the 20th and 21st centuries in Anglo-American, European, North African and Iran will be analyzed and their argumentation structure, methodology and thematic priorities will be worked out. These discourses are by no means homogeneous, and although they have developed in Islamic culture and religious parameters always play a role, theological arguments do not enter into the same intensity in all these discourses. For example, some of the Islamic-emancipatory discourses are politically motivated. Therefore, there are several Islamic emancipatory discourses in which both, political and theological arguments, play a role; These range from secular to highly conservative. The positions resulting from this range should be captured within the project on the basis of a typology to be developed using different criteria. The interaction between the theological and political justifications should also be analyzed in order to reveal the ambiguity of the discourses and to contribute to a differentiated picture on the subject of women's images and women's spaces in Islam. In this context, the question should be asked as to how far these discourses can be summarized under the term "Islamic feminism".

  • Persons