Idolizing religious figures crushes dissent

Lailatul Fitriyah
Ph.D student in theology at University of Notre Dame

PREMIUM

Indiana / Fri, March 17, 2017 / 08:57 am

Idolizing religious figures crushes dissent

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)

Despite 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 s...