Muslim #MeToo: Towards a Decolonial Islamic Liberation Theology

The preferential option and justice for the marginalized, are the primary impulses that move Islamic Liberation Theology (ILT). Moreover, ILT recognizes that margins shift, thus there must be an awareness and willingness to identify new or changing margins. The #MeToo Movement has been the locus of one such margin: the sexually abused. Of interest is the development of #MeToo amongst Muslim societies in the Global North, or countries that identify with it culturally, which have identified spiritual abuse as a particular iteration of sexual abuse.

This paper recognizes the need and the attempt of #MeToo to address the legacy of traditional rape law on the U.S. legal system and that consequently a need for informal or extra-legal recourse developed. However, this paper seeks to begin a conversation on two limitations, namely, the sidestepping of Islamic Law (fiqh) and inattentiveness to decolonial concerns. Instead of dismissing Islamic Law as irrational or irredeemably patriarchal, I argue that engaging its indigenous interpretive methodology (ʾuṣūl al-fiqh) addresses the decolonial concerns of external co-option and epistemic delinking, while providing an avenue for the ILT component of praxis inspired reinterpretation.

Like ILT, Muslim #MeToo responses are committed to the Islamic tradition (FACE, 2017a; HEART, 2023; HURMA Project, 2019; In Shaykh’s Clothing, 2017), of which Islamic Law is an intrinsic part–notwithstanding various approaches to and definitions of it (Kats, 2022, p.12; Hallaq, 2009). A survey of ILT shows that it overwhelmingly draws upon the Qur’an, with Hadith coming a distant second (Abul Kodir, 2022) and hardly any appearance of Islamic Law. Similarly, Muslim #MeToo hasn’t developed a framework for dealing with Islamic Law that accounts for its inner unity. While Muslim MeToo invokes the qur’anic notion of justice, its approach to Islamic Law is rather atomistic, i.e., selective citations of isolated rulings (aḥkām) or isolated historical incidents occurring in the Prophet’s era in an attempt at constructing a “politically correct” view (Esack, 2006, p.60). Kecia Ali and Marion Kats reiterate this concern of expediently citing rulings without engaging the patriarchal juristic argumentation on which they are premised (Ali, 2006, p.3; Kats, 2022, p.5). This is representative of a larger pattern within Islamic Feminism which lacks substantive engagement with Islamic Law, though the landscape is beginning to change (ibid.).

Additionally, the larger #MeToo movement has been critiqued for being delimited by a post-feminist sensibility that “is not disruptive and is capitalism, neoliberalism and patriarchy friendly” (Gill, 2018, p.1320). This is captured in how #MeToo’s focus on sexual violence of actresses was separated from a structural critique of the film industry which normalizes violence against women. More critically, Angela Davis is cognizant of operating within a neoliberal capitalist paradigm where corporate responses to #MeToo have included incorporating women into positions of power, which she argues, does not guarantee gender equality but rather recruits the previously marginalized to produce a more efficient operation of oppressive systems (2021, p.28). Muslim #MeToo responses diverge from the larger movement in focusing on the intersection of sexual abuse and religious authority, and in being acutely aware of Islamophobia (Awaad & Riaz, 2020; Qasim, 2018). Caught in a double bind, Muslim #MeToo attempts to navigate between the Islamophobic attempt to weaponize Muslim women’s trauma on the one hand, and continued internal community patriarchal practices on the other (Fatima, 2020; Kagal et al., 2019). However, analysis of the neoliberal discourse underlying the general #MeToo Movement and how it has informed #Muslim MeToo responses (such as the focus on individual perpetrators) is missing.

The recent decolonial turn in ILT speaks to this limitation and is concerned with the possibility of external co-option and epistemic delinking from Western hegemonic discourses in reading primary texts (Kunnummal, 2018). I propose that ʾuṣūl al-fiqh as a rigorous non-modern indigenous methodology can safeguard against these decolonial concerns. Epistemic delinking is achieved by privileging ʾuṣūl al-fiqh as a viable epistemic tradition, resisting the Eurocentric pretension of the Western canon of thought as universal. Additionally, the procedure of Islamic Law with its internal system of checks and balances frustrates imperialism and protects against external co-option (Mahmood, 2006). This is not to suggest that decoloniality merely entails a turn to third-world fundamentalism (Islamic tradition as universal), as that would entail a turn from one fundamentalism (Eurocentrism) to another (Grosfoguel and Mielants, 2006). Nor does a decolonial turn preclude the possibility of border thinking. Rather, I am interested in formulating an internal critique in an uncolonized epistemic space. The breadth of Islamic Law is accounted for by what has been described as jurists’ strategic negotiation of multiple normative discourses (Hammer, 2012, p.77; Kats, 2022, p.14). The latitude afforded in this negotiation, while anchored by interpretive devices, is the key to the interpretive possibilities and the liberative potential of ʾuṣūl al-fiqh. Moreover, within the locus of Muslim #MeToo, the normative perspective on approaching sexual abuse (non-consensual) through the framework of zinā (consensual) has been a source of harm rooted in Islamic Law (Azam, 2015). Accordingly, substantive engagement with Islamic Law would serve as a systemic critique of the textual authority normalizing patriarchal practices.

Key to this project is the differentiation between sharīʿah as the divine ideal and Islamic Law as the human attempt to understand and apply that ideal; a discursive process that is never complete (Abou El Fadl, 2014). Islamic Law as such is consistent with Dabashi’s portrayal of ILT as an unending revolution as well as Esack’s requirement of constant re-evaluation of theology (Dabashi, 2008, p.20; Esack, n.d., p.3). In sum, this paper draws attention to the necessity of engaging with Islamic Law through its ʾuṣul methodology in order to address both ILT and decolonial concerns by 1. providing an avenue for systemic internal critique 2. ensuring epistemic delinking by privileging an Islamic epistemology and consequently the Muslim gaze and 3. safeguarding against external co-option.