The paper seeks to contextualize Islamic feminism in Benazir Bhutto’s Daughter of the East: An Autobiography. The theoretical position has been propounded by Fatima Seedat for the equality work by female Muslim researchers (Asma Barlas, Amina Wadud, and Fatima Mernissi). Islamic feminism employs western feminist methods to construe the Muslim women’s equality struggle and subsumes their religious, cultural and social heterogeneities. It emerges from the convergence of Islam and feminism, yet it does not seem to adequately address the issue of sex equality in Islam. Bhutto draws the Muslim model of female struggle in the early history of Islam and espouses Hazrat Khadija (R.A), Hazrat Umm-e-Umara (R.A), Hazrat Ayesha (R.A), and Hazrat Zainab (R.A) as the archetypes of female struggle in Islam. Nevertheless, Bhutto denigrates the Sharia limitations of political participation, purdah (veiling), co-gatherings, dress code, and seclusion of Muslim women as patriarchal and anti-women. Her demand for the reinterpretation of the Holy Quran aligns her thoughts with liberal feminism. The narrative of the (mis)convergence of Islam and feminism reveals the repulsive alterity between the two intellectual paradigms. Thus, the paper questions Bhutto’s discursive shift on Muslim women’s rights from the propagation of the Muslim mode of female struggle to western feminism.

Index Terms

Islamic feminism, convergence, western feminism, reinterpretation, alterity