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Idolizing religious figures crushes dissent
This fear results in tons of hoaxes on irrational themes, such as the “resuscitated Indonesian Communist Party,” a hit list of hundreds of Muslim male religious leaders and the threat of non-Muslim leaders.
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Religious protest – Thousands of people led by the National Movement to Safeguard the Indonesian Council of Ulema's Fatwa (GNPF MUI) stage a massive rally in protest against Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama’s alleged blasphemous remarks in Jakarta on Nov. 4. (Antara/Akbar Nugroho Gumay)
D
espite their many differences, Islamic and Christian feminist theologies are both natural consequences of the diverse experiences of women around the world.
They converge in the crucial awareness of the dominant depiction of God in male imagery that has been the source of “divine” legitimacy for the oppression of women.
Since then, it has become a model of other violent structures, in which a group of humans is divinely elevated against other groups based on their sex, gender, skin color and sexual orientation.
Islamic feminism traces the divination of men to a non-contextualized and ahistorical reading of the Quran, in which some seemingly men-friendly verses are constantly emphasized, while verses that talk about the single source of creation of human beings, such as in the Surah An Nisa, are set aside and mostly forgotten.
In Christian feminist theology, the same divination of men is traced to the repression of crucial female roles in the events of Christ and, more importantly, in the emphasis on Jesus Christ’s maleness, which is simplified to God as a male being.
Thus, both perspectives agree on a crucial problem — the idolatry of men in the way we depict symbols of God and the way we express our religiosity.
However, male idolatry has metastasized on other aspects of our lives as well. It reflects in the way we interpret the “awakening of Islam” by following cults led by male “religious” leaders, whose only claim to fame is their purported identity as “heirs of the Prophet.”
