Toward a Decolonial Reading of Early Muslim Feminism in Egypt, India, and Indonesia

This paper examines how early Muslim feminists in Egypt, India and Indonesia engaged Islam in their struggle against gender oppression in the early twentieth century. While histories of early feminism often focus on the circulation of feminist ideas between colony and metropole, this paper will bring early Muslim feminist texts into conversation to highlight similarities in their reinterpretation of Islamic precepts and their attempts to engage Islam as a framework for women’s liberation. It will simultaneously analyze the role that the colonial experience played in shaping feminist engagement with Islam across these three regions. Building on Maria Lugones’ work on the coloniality of gender, I will show how the activism of early Muslim feminists can be understood as a response to the modern colonial gender system rather than a response to patriarchy.