ملخص الجهاز:
A first step, for Islamists, toward addressing gender relations must be the shifting of the frame of reference from one that considers secularism the norm and Islamic reconstruction an aberration to one that looks to Islamic sources for ways of acknowledging Muslim women's oppression and developing alternatives.
Against the traditionalism that makes up much of their backdrop in Middle Eastern societies, Islamists emerged as the bearers of reformative agendas regarding women: for example, their belief in the importance of education for women and their attack on the customary attitude of dismay at the birth of a girl.
This preoccupation drove Islamists into a reactionary phase, in which they campaigned against some of the advances that women had made, as if these advances were un-Islamic, Rachid al Ghanouchi, a leading Tunisian Islarnist, describes how, during the 1970s, Islamists in his country betrayed their poverty of vision by objecting to women working outside the home and to coeducation, defending polygamy as if it were some sort of religious duty instead of an exceptional remedy, encouraging women to satisfy themselves with a minimal education, and opposing every relationship between men and women that was not one of marriage or kinship.
Another breakthrough in the reformist shift in Islamist gender positions was the 1990 fatwa of the Egyptian scholar Yusuf al Qaradawi, one of the most respected leaders of moderate Islamists, in which he said that women could seek parliamentary offices, be judges, and issue fatwas with the same authority as men.