Equality is a long march for Muslim women as for others. Muslim women along with women of other religions have historically fought side by side for gender equality starting in the early 20th century in different societies in Africa and Asia. Today the family is last frontier in Muslims’ quest for equality which now extends to the West as well. Two months ago the Musawah global movement for equality in the family was launched at a massive conference in Kuala Lumpur from February 14-17. Two hundred and fifty scholars and activists, mostly but not only Muslims, from forty-seven countries attended. Many global and local initiatives over the past quarter of a century have, with longer histories of activism behind them, fed into what the Muslim women organizing the conference call the Musawah Movement. They chose the Arabic “musawah,” a term found in the Qur’an for a movement whose global language is English and which is anchored in Islamic sources, international human rights discourse, constitutional frameworks, and the lived realities of women and men. The symbolism and substance of musawah, suggesting the imbrication of the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular,’ is potent in the final stretch of the long journey to equality in that intimate domain where it has remained most illusive.

Historically women as feminists in the old Muslim societies of Africa and Asia marshaled both secular and religious arguments in their equality struggles. In the early decades of the 20th century Muslim women together with women of other religious affiliations elaborated what has been called “secular feminism” consisting of a bundled discourse of secular nationalist, Islamic modernist, and humanitarian strands. In the final decades of the 20th century, Muslim women from various locations around the world articulated a discourse of gender equality and social justice grounded in their own re-readings of the Qur’an and other religious sources. This discourse was called “Islamic feminism” by Muslim women who observed this articulation of an egalitarian Islam.

Over the course of a century, as the result of feminist struggle, women in most older Muslim societies gained considerable equality in the secular public sphere (but not in the religious public sphere, the domain of ecclesiastical professions and ritual). In the private or family sphere Muslim women–and women married to Muslims–living under state-codified Muslim family laws (also called personal status laws) in Muslim majority countries faced an uphill battle to effect the slightest change. Even though early secular feminists used Islamic modernist arguments simply to reduce legal inequities while not fundamentally challenging patriarchal model of the family, they met with scant success as did the second generation of secular feminists whose demands were bolder.

From the last decade of the 20th century and into the present century secular feminists collaborated with Islamic feminists (who may but often do not claim this identity) deploying a compelling set of arguments to demand legal changes based on an egalitarian model of the family. As a result of this combined effort, and favorable political circumstances, a major breakthrough occurred in 2004 when the Moroccan Family Law, the Mudawwana, based in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) was fundamentally overhauled, declaring wife and husband equal heads of family. Two years earlier secular feminists in Turkey, after long struggle, had also achieved success when the Turkish Civil Code was amended, likewise enshrining wife and husband as equal heads of family. Turkish Civil Code, which is a secular code, has been characterized from within the ranks of the ulemah in Turkey as in keeping with the spirit of the shar ‘iah.

Both secular feminists and Islamic feminists oppose instituting Muslim family laws in countries where they do not already exist, mainly in Muslim minority societies, whether in the older communities in Africa and Asia or the newer Muslims communities in the West. Indeed activists in the West, as seen for example in Canada recently, have militantly opposed the merest hint of any codification of Muslim family law. In the context of highly changing societies virtually everywhere women and men experience high levels of equality and interaction in their education and in their work lives. Imbalances between egalitarian ideals, laws, and practices in the public arena and inequalities in the family, sustained in the name of religion, are becoming increasingly intolerable and increasingly understood as violating Qur’anic principles.

Over the past two decades or so Muslim women, together with other concerned women, as feminist activists, human rights activists, and democracy activists, formed global networks, forums, and associations which, along with local initiatives, have struggled to achieve legal and functional equality in the family. Women Living under Muslim Laws (WLUML), a global network, initially based in France, formed in the mid-1980s as did Sisters in Islam (SIS), which although a Malaysian organization from the outset had global outreach. Women from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia formed the Collective 95 Maghreb-Egalité in a joint effort to overhaul Muslim family laws and practices in their respective countries.

The transnational project called Rights at Home: An Approach to the Internationalization of Human Rights in Family Relations in Islamic Communities was active in several Muslim majority countries between 2001 and 1005 in trying to eradicate women’s human rights violations in home and society. The Women’s Learning Partnership (WLP) which was created in 2000 has, along with other groups, used the Morocco success as a powerful example, given strong support to the Million Signatures campaign to reform the family law in Iran, which alas is presently under siege at home. The Women’s Initiative in Spirituality and Equality (WISE), a global network affiliated with the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA) in New York promotes equality within the family. Recognizing the complex nature of modern families which more and more are religiously mixed, WISE is sensitive to issues of inclusivity. Modern information technologies, instantaneous interconnectedness through the Internet, websites, training manuals, books, articles, and pamphlets are vehicles for the spread of equality ideas and practices in the family among Muslims and between Muslims and others, reaching women across the spectrum from elites to ordinary women both urban and rural, trying to place options before people.

The newly launched Musawah movement constitutes the confluence of initiatives and a blending and expanding of networks and projects to effect fast-forward motion in winning equality in the family. Musawah movement documents distributed in Kuala Lumpur, and available on the Musawah website, speak both of “the Muslim family” and “the family.” With so many Muslims and persons of other religions forming families together, especially but not only in the West, there is a need to be attentive to these new realities. Everyone has a stake in the equality quest: wife and husband must be equal in the family and partners of different religion must be equal. Spouses of different religions can tap the richness of their variant well-springs to create and nourish equality in the family—a family that need not be religiously labeled, thus privileging one religious designation over the other.

Welcoming women of other religious affiliations who have relevant knowledge and common activist experience, and indeed, shared personal and professional lives, to work together with Muslims at the center of the Musawah movement in a world where Muslims and others live side by side would be beneficial to the equality quest. Feedback received during and after the Kuala Lumpur conference indicates that a number of people see this is a desired move. Such collaboration would be responsive to the complexities of 21st century lived realities. Building from within a single religious tradition–taking into account a plethora of differences, including different approaches to ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’– while also working across religious traditions in pursuit of equality in the family sacrifices neither specificity nor inclusivity. What it does is to bring more to the table.

Margot Badran who attended the Musawah conference in Kuala Lumpur meeting from Feb. 14-17 reflects on past, present, and future. She is a Senior Fellow at the Prince Alwaleed ibn Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University and currently a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars is gender studies specialist and a historian focusing on Islam and Muslim societies. Her most recent book is “Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences.”