New book by Muslim reformer aims to feminize Islam.

Shireen Qudosi’s Bold Reform Project: Altering Islam into an Essentially Feminine Religion

Shireen Qudosi is a longtime Muslim reformer, writer, and speaker on faith, identity, and belonging whose new book shows she has decided on a very bold reform project indeed: altering Islam into an essentially feminine religion.

The Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam

The subtitle of Qudosi’s “The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam” contains what appears at first as a contradiction: a dawn of the dark. This is a contradiction in the Hegelian sense, not evidence of an error in logic but of a challenge that has to be transcended to attain a higher level of understanding.

Readers will find many of these challenges, such as being invited to “ascend” into “the depths,” as Qudosi brings Islam under the lens of a host of narrative modes of interpretation, from Jungian psychology to magic mushrooms. Yet the basic project is itself a contradiction of this sort: how to find the sacred feminine in Islam, that heroic, epic religion whose most famous advocates have always been males and warriors.

The Virtue of Courage

This is a work that is essentially different from any similar work by a Christian thinker because it is impossible to produce it without a demonstrable virtue: the virtue of courage. Qudosi is courting death by name.

For example, early on in the book Qudosi explains that she has since childhood felt called to be a witch, and she explores Islamic theological resistance to the magic of feminine power as a kind of curse upon humankind. Embracing witchcraft by itself is the sort of thing that fundamentalists might punish with death. While that is true in Christianity and Judaism’s scripture as well — Exodus 22:18 holds that you “shall not suffer a witch to live” — there are even existing states like Iran that would carry out such a punishment in the Islamic world, and terrorist groups that might go abroad doing so.

Vulnerability as a Source of Power

Courage is also on display by many of the women she invokes and plainly considers allies in the struggle, especially those women protesting against the Islamic Republic of Iran. In a sequence on scissors as a symbol of feminine power, Qudosi describes the way in which women in Iran were posing with scissors and their recently shorn hair. The book speaks for them, for their rage, and for their vulnerability. Though the latter is often considered a negative, Qudosi describes vulnerability as a source of great strength for those who are willing to embrace it.

Areas for Exploration

Another area of potential development might be the areas of the divine feminine beyond the dark feminine, as a dark feminine implies a light side as well. Many of these qualities could be positives that Islamic culture could also usefully find ways to explore, endorse, or embrace. Perhaps that has to wait until the rage Qudosi speaks of — for example, among the women of Iran suffering from many wrongs — has been quelled by change. A flowering, perhaps, after the storm.

There is also room to explore whether Qudosi’s model is a religious or a psychological one. Qudosi intends much of her talk of things like “the Shadow,” a darker part of the personality, to be understood in a Jungian psychological sense, but she is sometimes speaking of religion rather than psychology.

The difference is again a matter of the metaphysical stature of her ideas: Are we to understand that these three pagan goddesses mentioned by Muhammad are actual beings in their own right, or perhaps ideas in the mind of God (as Platonists sometimes put it, but as has also been attractive to monotheistic thinkers from all three of the Abrahamic faiths)? Or are they simply psychological concepts that many people have in common, and thus a function of the human mind similarly experienced by different persons simply because our brain structure is basically similar?

Some of these areas of additional exploration may supervene upon the difference in methodology between her approach and other approaches. Her approach is more like Sufi Islam than it is like the analytic philosophical tradition of Islam. It may likewise be difficult for analytic philosophers in the contemporary feminist tradition to find a methodology that would support a common inquiry into these questions. If she is successful in finding such relationships, the conversation would be of benefit to both groups.

It will be more difficult for Qudosi to have a useful conversation with orthodox thinkers in the Islamic tradition. She has set up a position that is a defiant challenge to many of their most basic and cherished ideas. It may be hard for them to meet her halfway, let alone to come within the shelter of her tent.

It is to be hoped she is successful in finding outlying figures who may be willing to speak with her, but insofar as the orthodox acknowledge her at all, the response is unlikely to be kind.

Brad Patty is a strategist and philosopher who has been published in The Federalist, Human Events, The Jerusalem Post, Conservative Review, and National Review.