Kamala Viswesaran on Islam

UT Anthropology Professor, Kamala Viswesaran, has a nice overview of the variety of reformist trends in Islam here. She talks about a couple of important examples for our purposes: Rokheya Hossein's Bangla short story, "Sultana's Dream," and of course Ashraf Ali Thanawi's Bihishti Zewar:

I cannot emphasize enough the presence of literary debate and theological discussion around women's rights in the Islamic world. In 1905 Rokheya Hossein published a gentle satire called "Sultana's Dream" in which men were kept in purdah, and women inhabited public space. There are also long traditions of Islamic reform, from the publication of Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi's Bihishti Zewar in India at the turn of the century, to the publication of Qasim Amin's "Liberation of Women" in Egypt at the same time. The idea that Islam holds women to be intrinsically inferior is a pernicious stereotype that must be refuted. For example, in Maulana Thanawi's Bihishti Zewar, men and women are fundamentally the same, possessed of equal faculties, and held equally responsible for their behavior. Men and women are similarly positioned in the struggle between intelligence (aql) and undisciplined impulses (nafs). For Thanawi, women and men had different social roles, but were otherwise identically endowed as conscient beings. Thanawi made no argument that women, by nature, were morally inferior to men.