When it comes to Muslim women, everyone’s a feminist, even if that aspiration for Muslim women’s equality comes at the expense of, well … a Muslim woman.

It is difficult to fully comprehend the terrible crime that Yassmin Abdel-Magied appears to have committed, and yet her argument with senator Jacqui Lambie about Islam on Q&A has provoked a frenzy of self-righteousness and indignation in some conservative commentators. One right wing group has started a petition calling for her sacking.



No young person, in seeking to defend their right to their identity, should have to face the venom and barely veiled prejudice as Adbel-Magied has had.

I know Abdel-Magied and she does not walk through life blindfolded nor is she misogynistic or homophobic. I’m not writing this piece to defend her, as she is capable of defending herself, but because a submission I co-wrote to the royal commission into family violence in 2015 has been used by the Australian to undermine and attack her.

I don’t want my voice added to the war being waged against a young woman who did nothing other than defend her religion and try to reflect something of herself while under attack.

Abdel-Magied did not say or do anything wrong on Q&A. Nor did she say anything incorrect. Nor, given the mental straight jacket that the west wears in relation to Islam and how difficult it is for those like Jacqui Lambie to hear anything any Muslim says above the white noise of their own prejudice, could she have responded better or chosen better words. Given the situation she was in, and the depth of feeling she clearly holds for her faith, she communicated a great deal.

Abdel-Magied was asserting that Islam is the most feminist of religions – she was speaking of Islam as a faith and not denying the homophobic and misogynistic of Islamic cultural practices.

It is impossible to feel anything other than helplessness and despair in the face of critics of Islam and sharia. Those like Lambie seem uninterested in learning anything about the religion they want to judge, they are far more captivated by an uncomplicated idea of the wholesale abuse of women and other minorities by sharia.

To find the truth of Islam is to seek the specificities of time, place, culture and politics. There are no truths to be found in broad generalisations that omit far more than they reveal.

To describe Islam is to try to describe over 1,400 years of history in which thousands of societies have risen and fallen under its name and, numerous cultures and religions have been transformed by Islam and indeed, have transformed Islam.

Numerous sects and seemingly an infinite wealth of interpretations of sacred text has produced doctrines and traditions that vary so starkly that one struggles to understand how the centre can hold.

The complexity of Islam and sharia, what they are and how they are to be understood and practiced varies widely among Muslims. The vast majority of what is often understood as sharia by Muslims and non-Muslims is actually legal jurisprudence, that has been defined as Islamic because it was developed in a Muslim context (empire or nation-state).

Muslim states developing laws does not make them Islamic. As to how much of Muslim jurisprudence is actually sharia is a source of much debate and little consensus among Muslims today. Some scholars suggest that only 10% of what we understand to be sharia is actual sharia, suggesting the rest are state sanctioned laws, which have no sacred status.

Sharia is not a legal code, although many Muslims will argue as such, but rather a set of guiding principles. This makes it all the more difficult to define and all the more easy to label any law, tradition or custom as being sharia.

The additional difficulty of defining Islam and sharia is that, who we are, strongly defines how we understand what we read and how we interpret our faith and its perceived doctrines. Our cultural context further limits us.

Like all monotheistic religions, middle aged men controlled how Islam was to be understood and consequently a tradition was produced that favoured the worldview, interests and needs of men.

So when Abdel-Magied states that Islam is the most feminist of religions, she is right: consent in marriage, freedom to work and control over economic livelihood, freedom from violence were all indeed unheard of among the monotheists religions at that time.

In fact these rights would not arrive to the rest of the world till much later. But as soon as those rights were established men mobilised to undermine those rights and corrode the gains made by women, even though these rights are arguably sharia and therefore sacred.

Within a century of its birth, misogynist cultural practices completely redefined what was considered Muslim and sacred to fit the cultural milieu of the time. This is why we keep hearing such vastly different accounts of Islam’s position on women; this is why it is possible to say that Islam respects women while we also see their diminishment in society and community. I have seen the same verse of the Qu’ran used to argue for women’s equality and to damn them to inequality.

The fall of the last Muslim Empire and the fragmentation of Muslim collective identity into varying nation states further cemented culture’s hold over what was considered faith, and the reformist spirit so inherent in Islam’s early years was finally and completely vanquished.

Throwing gay men off buildings, enslavement of women and children, early and forced marriage and female genital cutting are not sharia. The fact that some Muslims do these things, does not make them Islamic, and it most certainly does not make them sharia.

Abdel-Magied was trying to make these points, but Lambie appeared far more enamoured with her prejudice and self-righteousness. But that is always the desire with anti-Muslim activists, not to engage but to silence, not to elucidate but to obscure, not to reach an understanding but to polarise.