Ijtihad, Umma e feminismos islâmicos: uma cartografia conceitual islâmica para as relações internacionais

Abstract

Muslim women intellectuals have been claiming the role of reinterpreting sacred scriptures in order to occupy a place in the Islamic intellectual tradition that has been forbidden to women for centuries. This points us in an important direction: Islam is plural, based on sacred texts, and the way Muslim countries and the Islamic law function is based on different interpretations of these texts. The central argument that structures and motivates this dissertation takes as its starting point that the academic works of various authors engaged in the discussion of gender and Islam make important contributions to the field of International Relations (IR). By recovering the tools for interpreting sacred texts for Islam, these works offer a double contribution: they challenge the secular metanarrative of that field and make the feminist debate in International Relations advance. Thus, this work aims to bring into discussion the work of Muslim intellectuals and the debate on Islamic perspectives of International Relations. The question it poses is the following: how do Islamic feminisms contribute to questioning the secular metanarrative present in the production of knowledge in International Relations? The thesis explores the complexities of global dynamics involving Muslim women thinkers and, at the same time, reflects on their relevance for the construction of perspectives on International Relations from a non-Western viewpoint. With this purpose, we explore how the ideas of some of these thinkers can inform and enrich the use of Islamic precepts in the understanding of international politics. Through a bibliographical review with a theoretical-conceptual focus, the research is divided into three parts: the first analyzes the relationship between Islam and certain processes of reading its sacred texts; the second seeks to identify the foundations of Islamic perspectives on International Relations; and the third consists of an analysis of the works of four Muslim women intellectuals – Amina Wadud, Fatima Mernissi, Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Lila Abu-Lughod – discussing their contributions to the debate on the relationship between Islam and International Relations. Two concepts are central and connect the three chapters of the dissertation: umma (Islamic community) and ijtihad (individual effort in the applied use of reason). The umma is the factor that allows complementarity between the works of the selected authors and encompasses the perspectives of Muslim women in different contexts. They build anti-patriarchal productions from Islam through the application of ijtihad. It is from this conceptual crossing that we believe Islamic women thinkers make valuable contributions to International Relations. Finally, we conclude that it is possible to think about the umma as an analytical category in International Relations and, through the Islamic feminist perspective, to understand it as a space of dispute for gender equality.