Free A Quiet Revolution by Leila Ahmed Page A

“bovine”) make clear, she too evidently feels a distinct antipathy toward Islamists.
    And indeed a dislike for and even a fear of Islamists and a strong sense that they loathed “us” certainly described my own feelings about Islamists when I began the research whose findings I present in these pages. As I described, Aisha and I had no doubt that “they” hated us and all that we and other feminists, liberals and progressives, stood for. Nor
    was this perception mistaken. As we saw earlier, feminism along with communism and Zionism was ranked among the most hated enemies of Islamism through the 1970 s and onward, and feminists were defined as people who were “un-Islamic and culturally westernized.” This no doubt continues to be a view that flourishes among some Islamists. Quite likely, too, some level of anti-feminism and even of deep-seated opposi- tion to the idea of justice as extending fully and equally to women is still alive and well among many ordinary Islamists in Muslim-majority coun- tries. And as regards non-Islamist Muslims generally, as we saw, Islamists typically viewed such Muslims as, at best, suitable targets for da‘wa and conversion to their own uniquely “true” form of Islam.
    But these may be the traits mainly of an older home-country Is- lamism and of the Islamism, in this country, of an older and generally immigrant generation. Already there are significant changes under way as another and rising generation of American-born and/or American- raised Muslims shaped to some degree by Islamism begins to emerge into the foreground of Islamic activism and to take over the reins of power. Obviously, for example, these old Islamist traits of hostility to the idea of equal justice for women are not characteristic of that segment of the American Muslim and Islamist-influenced population committed to women’s rights and activism that I was observing—the group, making up a segment of the broader Islamist population, who are at the fore- front of this study because of their concern and activism in relation to issues of women and gender.
    This means, too, as it is important to acknowledge and underscore here, that these positive elements regarding issues of women and gender that are emerging today in America are elements that are characteristic only of a particular segment of the Islamist-influenced American Mus- lim population—specifically of the most liberal and progressive segment. Certainly one cannot assume that such views and attitudes are typical of the entire Islamist-influenced American Muslim population. Similarly, this means that had I focused not on activism in relation to women and gender but on observing and following out other forms of activism and views on other themes and concerns in circulation among the American Islamist population—had I set out to study, for example, the prevalence among them of ideas as to a God-given gender hierarchy and God-given
    male prerogative—I would no doubt have accumulated quite different kinds of evidence and found myself writing a very different kind of book, and one in which I might well have arrived at a far bleaker and more dis- heartening conclusion.
    It is important, therefore, to underscore that these positive traits and views related to issues of women and gender emerging among the Is- lamist-influenced American Muslim population represent the traits and views of those making up the distinctly liberal end of American Islamist- influenced thought. Moreover, this liberal end of Islamist thought is it- self constituted of a spectrum of positions ranging from the conservative pro-feminist views emerging among ISNA and MSA women, to those making up the more radical and progressive ends of the spectrum. And just as was the case with the American feminist movement, such views obviously are by no means necessarily generalizable to the broader pop- ulation of which they are part.
    While it is American Islamists and the children of Islamists today