Four Muslim Women’s Voices on Faith, Feminism and Hijab

What do Muslim women actually say about faith, equality and hijab when they have room to tell their own stories? The answers become more interesting when we move from a general argument to a particular life: a childhood remembered, a book written, a religious commitment reconsidered or a group of women gathering to ask difficult questions.

Leila Ahmed, amina wadud, Asma Barlas and Zainah Anwar offer four such starting points. Their accounts are presented here through their own writing, dated interviews and documented projects. They do not stand for every Muslim woman or share a single position. Read together, their work shows how much a conversation can gain by paying attention to the person behind an argument.

For the broader discussion of agency, religious obligation and differing feminist approaches, read our guide to hijab and feminism. The portraits below follow the experiences and arguments of four particular women.

Leila Ahmed: following a question about the veil

In a 2022 Harvard conversation, Leila Ahmed explained how questions about veiling led her into research. She recalled growing up in an Egyptian urban setting where women she knew to be religious did not veil. Later encounters with women adopting head coverings challenged the assumptions she had formed in that environment.

Discussing A Quiet Revolution, she described a question that occupied years of work: why had veiling been uncommon in the Cairo she remembered in the 1950s, while she was encountering it among women in America in the late 1990s? Place and period were central to the enquiry.

Her comparison unsettles a simple story in which women inevitably leave covering behind as time passes. The practice may change direction, and its significance needs to be understood within the society where it occurs. In Ahmed’s account, the question began with a contrast between her own memories and what she was seeing.

In a 2011 interview with Harvard Magazine, Ahmed described initially associating headscarves she saw in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a troubling political development. Research led her to reconsider that response.

She discussed women who had adopted Islamic dress against their parents’ wishes, complicating the assumption that covering always means following family expectations. In some of the social settings she examined, being recognised as observant had also made it more acceptable for women to study or work alongside men.

Another woman Ahmed encountered in America hoped her headscarf would encourage reflection on gender bias and the importance attached to appearance. These examples show different relationships between clothing and public participation. Ahmed also distinguished voluntary covering from compulsion. Her research brought her initial reaction into contact with explanations she had not anticipated.

The women’s gatherings behind her memories

Ahmed’s conversation with Krista Tippett, first broadcast in 2005, turns towards another part of her experience: the extended family gatherings she remembered in Cairo and Alexandria. Discussing the chapter called “Harem” in her memoir, she described being among aunts, her grandmother and children, with the comfort and conversation of a familiar women’s community.

She also recalled a revealing response from American readers. Some recognised the atmosphere from their own childhood kitchens and family gatherings. A word that had suggested an unfamiliar, distant world to them could describe something whose emotional texture they understood.

Ahmed compared those conversations with the women’s consciousness-raising groups she heard about after moving to America. She questioned why women talking together might be recognised as valuable in one setting yet viewed suspiciously in another. The comparison belongs to her recollection and argument.

Writing a life required returning to history

In the publisher’s interview about A Border Passage, Ahmed described becoming unable to continue writing while struggling with questions about Arab identity. A vivid memory involving an Arabic teacher eventually helped her see that understanding her own feelings required investigating the history through which she had lived.

She had begun with memories, without intending a sustained account of politics. The writing changed as she realised that the personal experiences could not be explained in isolation. She recalled working on the memoir over six or seven years, often during breaks from teaching.

Ahmed also explained that she had not asked relatives to reconstruct events together. Her purpose was to describe the experience of a particular life, recognising that siblings can remember the same household differently. That distinction gives the memoir its character: the reader encounters a consciousness shaped by events, with all the complications of memory.

amina wadud: belief, interpretation and a visible Muslim identity

In her essay My Conversion, amina wadud traces her religious life through experiences that began before she became Muslim. She recalls a loving Christian upbringing and a Methodist minister father whose conduct made his faith tangible to her.

One childhood memory concerns her fear of thunderstorms. Her father comforted her with the story of Noah and the rainbow, an experience she describes in terms of serenity and a sense of the divine. The detail matters because her account of faith begins with a relationship and a feeling of trust.

She also describes encountering several religious traditions during her youth and practising Buddhism at an ashram while at university. She locates her declaration of the Muslim faith in Washington, DC, on Thanksgiving Day in 1972. Her account retains affection for what Christianity and Buddhism had given her. She connects the name Wadud with divine love, presenting her arrival at Islam within a continuing spiritual journey rather than as the erasure of every earlier experience.

A woman’s perspective in Qur’anic interpretation

Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, published in its Oxford University Press edition in 1999, sets out wadud’s approach to reading scripture with attention to women’s inclusion. The publisher’s description identifies her examination of language and context, including interpretations used to restrict women’s roles.

The project treats the relationship between the text and its interpreters as a question requiring sustained study. Its subject is not simply whether women are mentioned, but how their experiences and perspectives enter the process of understanding what is read.

This helps locate the book within her work. Wadud’s religious commitment and her criticism of inherited interpretations are connected: the latter is undertaken through engagement with the scripture she values.

In Martina Sabra’s interview for Qantara, wadud described the relationship between a reader and a sacred text as active. Her concern was that a restrictive interpretation could become so familiar within a culture that people ceased to recognise it as an interpretation at all.

Asked about the limits of rereading, she did not describe her own historical position as unlimited. She acknowledged that contemporary readers approach the text through their circumstances, just as earlier readers did. Their perspective can contribute something without predicting the needs of every future generation.

The interview also records her explanation of leading mixed congregational prayer. She described worship as an intimate religious act and said she sometimes declined public invitations because of the difficulty of keeping that purpose separate from publicity. These are her explanations of contested positions and practices. They reveal concerns with method, historical limits and the character of worship that a headline about controversy alone would leave out. Her own account therefore supplies detail about what she believed she was doing and why.

What she has said about wearing hijab

In Hera Diani’s interview, published in 2020, wadud described wearing hijab for public work because of its association with Muslim identity, while not wearing it in some other settings. She said that she did not consider the headscarf a religious requirement and defended women’s ability to choose wearing or removing it.

She also discussed the different weight that visibility carried for her. Recalling additional airport screening after 9/11, she explained her wish to remain visibly connected with Muslims facing prejudice. In Indonesia, she described enjoying occasions when she did not feel the same burden to represent Islam through her clothing.

This is a specific account of faith, public identity and changing circumstances. A photograph of her with or without a scarf would reveal only one moment within it. Her explanation gives that moment a context.

Her interpretation differs from traditional rulings such as Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta’s account of hijab as obligatory for Muslim women who have reached religious accountability, with covering requirements understood in relation to the relevant social and family settings. Reporting wadud’s personal position does not make it a consensus or a ruling for the reader. The difference is part of understanding her place within a religious debate.

In a separate 2018 interview with Elizabeth Arif-Fear, wadud discussed Muslim women’s lived realities across race, class, gender, disability and other aspects of experience. She described the pain of exclusion from some African-American Muslim community settings and the connection she found among Muslim women of colour internationally.

Belonging in that account is complicated. Religious connection does not remove the hurt of difficult community relationships, while exclusion in one setting does not exhaust the possibilities for companionship elsewhere. Her account places intellectual work alongside emotional experiences of acceptance and rejection.

She also distinguished the wider struggle against inequality from a requirement to adopt a feminist label. The particular concerns women brought to the work mattered to her.

Asma Barlas: belief and the problem of authority

In her own account of her career and scholarship, Asma Barlas describes a route through diplomacy, journalism and academic life. She entered Pakistan’s Foreign Service in 1976 and says she was dismissed six years later after criticising General Zia ul-Haq. She subsequently worked in journalism, moved to the United States in 1983 and received political asylum.

Those experiences sit alongside scholarly concerns with colonial power, gender and the politics of knowledge. Barlas also describes her approach to Qur’anic interpretation through a theology that does not assign gender to God.

The combination helps explain the breadth of the questions in her work. Authority is present in political institutions, in the production of knowledge and in claims about how a sacred text should be understood. Her account gives readers a way into that intellectual history without reducing it to a position on clothing.

The argument developed in Believing Women in Islam

The University of Texas Press description of Barlas’s book, subtitled Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an, presents a sustained examination of how scripture has been read. The revised 2019 edition develops her argument that the Qur’an can be understood in ways that oppose male domination.

Barlas considers how readings favourable to male authority became established and how they related to social and political structures. The enquiry connects a method of interpretation with its consequences: which assumptions become authoritative, who can question them and what relationships they support.

The title captures the direction of her project. She is challenging readings she considers patriarchal while remaining committed to the Qur’an itself. That distinction is central to understanding what she is arguing.

Why her own description of her work matters

In an interview by Novriantoni and Ramy El-Dardiry, republished in 2007, Barlas explained her preference for identifying as a believer. She acknowledged a debt to feminist thought while questioning assumptions about religion within some feminist arguments.

Her position resists a convenient classification. Work concerned with women’s equality may enter conversations about feminism even when its author declines that label. Barlas wanted the religious basis of her work to remain visible. Including her alongside writers and organisers who use feminist language brings this difference into view; it does not establish a shared identity.

In the Wheeler Centre’s 2012 account of her views, Barlas stressed women’s role in defining their own problems and finding responses suited to their societies. It also records her defence of Muslims reading the Qur’an themselves and her criticism of advocacy that treats scripture as inherently oppressive. These are positions within a debate, rather than an agreement among all scholars or feminists.

Zainah Anwar: turning questions about equality into collective work

In her 2016 Raja Aziz Addruse Memorial Lecture, Zainah Anwar recalled being asked why she pursued equality through engagement with Islam. She described objections from people who doubted that religion could support the work, alongside her own commitment to faith.

Anwar explained that turning away from God was not an option she wished to take. She recalled the beginnings of Sisters in Islam in 1987: women reading the Qur’an together and examining passages about moral and spiritual equality. Their questions concerned the distance between that ethical vision and women’s treatment in practice.

The account makes the motivation for her organising explicit. The religious enquiry arose from a commitment she wanted to retain and from problems she wanted to address. For Anwar, faith was part of the reason to undertake the work. Her lecture describes the beginning of a collective response to questions that had become difficult to leave at the level of individual frustration.

A movement could include women whose appearances differed

In Noah Buchan’s 2011 interview with Anwar, she recalled parents who maintained their daily prayers and her own years of religious schooling. Returning to the Qur’an as an adult was, in her account, connected to the religious life in which she had been raised.

Asked about the movement’s appeal beyond educated urban women, she described a younger generation within Sisters in Islam that included women from small towns and Islamic universities who wore hijab. She said these women sought rights also pursued by women characterised as more Westernised.

That was her account of the organisation at the time, rather than a description of its present membership. Its significance for a discussion of hijab lies in the relationships she described: differences in appearance and educational background did not automatically imply different commitments to equality. Anwar’s answer offers an example of how collaboration can cross the categories observers use to separate women. The shared work becomes visible through what participants sought, alongside the different lives they brought to it.

What she considered progress, and what remained difficult

In a 2015 interview published by the Asian Development Bank, Anwar distinguished having rights written into law from being able to use them. She discussed the importance of a justice system capable of delivering those rights, including the training and sensitivity of the people working within it.

Asked about progress, she emphasised the creation of a public conversation about women’s rights and Muslim family law. Changing discriminatory laws, she said, remained difficult. She described some procedural changes as more achievable than amendments to legislation.

This measured account gives substance to the organising behind a broad commitment to equality. Public education, the ability to debate religious interpretation and attention to how institutions functioned were all part of the work she described. Her answer also separates an achievement from an unfinished ambition. It is a dated reflection on strategy and obstacles, not an assurance that the problems were resolved or a statement of the law today.

From local questions to an international conversation

Musawah’s account of its beginnings connects the movement with Sisters in Islam and records its launch in Kuala Lumpur in 2009. It describes activists, scholars, lawyers and others gathering from 47 countries to consider equality and justice in Muslim families.

The framework brought Islamic teachings into conversation with human-rights principles, constitutional guarantees and women’s and men’s lived realities. The organisation explains that it did not begin by prescribing one model family law for every country. Its purpose was to provide ideas and arguments that groups could use in their own settings.

That history places Anwar’s organising within a collective project. Questions arising in one setting could be discussed with people working elsewhere, while local institutions and circumstances still required attention. The international connection did not depend on pretending that all families or legal systems were alike.

A later project shows how personal accounts entered that wider work. Musawah’s 2016 report, Women’s Stories, Women’s Lives, drew on 55 Muslim women’s life stories across nine countries. Its stated subject was women’s experience of qiwamah and wilayah, concepts examined in discussions of authority within Muslim families.

The research settings included Bangladesh, Canada, Egypt, Gambia, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria and the United Kingdom. The project therefore approached family authority through lives in several different social environments. These stories belong to the women who contributed them; they are not extensions of a single organiser’s personal experience.

For someone interested in the lives behind debates about equality, the report offers a further route into the subject. It identifies the questions and settings that shaped its collection of accounts, giving readers something more substantial to explore than a general claim about what Muslim women want.

Four accounts, with room for differences

These portraits do not settle every question about feminism, religious interpretation or hijab. Their value lies in the detail that becomes available when women’s explanations are taken seriously: the memories behind a research question, the experiences within a religious journey, the reasoning behind a book and the work behind an organisation.

Readers can follow the interviews and writing that interest them, including arguments they may wish to challenge. Agreement is not required for attentive reading. What matters is responding to the positions these women actually describe, while leaving room for the differences among them.