The Foreign Service Journal, April 2011

A P R I L 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 29 importantly, by religious leaders, who can lend their authority to the difficult changes at hand. To put it another way, Islamic feminism strives to work within the values of Islam, not against them. It offers direct social and economic benefits to families through improved opportunities for daughters, sisters, wives and mothers. Many Islamic feminists are strong proponents of ijtihad, the process of arriving at new interpretations of Islamic law through critical reasoning, rather than blindly following the views of past scholars. In the early centuries of Islam, this process was an important contributor to the shaping of Islamic law. Whenever the Quran and Sunnah (the tra- ditions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) did not explicitly address an issue, or when conflicting statements were attributed to Muhammad, a qualified legal scholar could use independent reasoning to come up with a solution. This legal ruling, expressed as a fatwa, could then be accepted or re- jected by the followers of the scholar as they wished. Ijtihad was a vibrant legal process until the end of the 10th century, by which point many doctrines were settled by jurists representing the various schools of law. Around this time, influential orthodox Sunni ulama (Muslim clergy with several years of training) began to argue against the process of independent reasoning, claiming that it could distort Islam. They instead advo- cated a literal reading of religious texts. Reformers resisted, warning that a rigid interpretation of sharia can be profoundly unhelpful in answering con- F O C U S Local activists recognize the risks and trade-offs of foreign support, and understand local conditions well enough to decide whether such aid helps their cause more than it hurts it.