Abstract
Ijtihad—interpretation. In the many years I’ve been conducting research on women’s rights in Pakistan and in other parts of the Muslim world, this one term seems to rise to the top whenever I question how someone has reached the conclusion that they hold about women’s rights, especially in modern times. Despite formal laws or policies, divergent viewpoints exist as individuals or groups conduct ijtihad, integrating understood Islamic norms, mores, and values with perceptions on society. Aside from how this terminology is used in the formal classical sense, discussed below, it has become an everyday concept in popular discourse, and it is this conception that is being interrogated here.
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Notes
Khalid Mas’ud (2009) offers a comprehensive review of the concept of ijtihad historically. See especially pp. 14–33. For an argument on why ijtihad, in the more formal sense, needs to be revived in the contemporary world to address the challenges of modernity and promote justice and progress within the Muslim world, see USIP, Ijtihad: Reinterpreting Islamic Principles for the Twenty-first Century. Special Report No. 125, August 2004.
Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Lahore: Institute of Islamic Culture, 1986: 78) as cited in Khalid Mas’ud 2009: 81.
The Koran translated with notes by N. J. Dawood. Penguin Books, 2006, p. 64.
“Political and Public Life,” General Recommendation No. 23 of CEDAW Committee, 16th Session, 1997, based on Article 7, as noted in Henry J. Steiner and Philip Alston, International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics, Morals, Oxford University Press, 2000: 196.
Commission of Inquiry for Women, Government of Pakistan. 1997. Report of the Commission of Inquiry for Women in Pakistan, Islamabad. August.
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© 2014 Anita M. Weiss
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Weiss, A.M. (2014). Introduction: Women’s Rights and Islamic Concerns with Ijtihad over those Rights. In: Interpreting Islam, Modernity, and Women’s Rights in Pakistan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137389008_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137389008_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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