By: Asma Lamrabet
“The question of women in Islam has long been seen from within the framework of one of two extreme viewpoints: the one bound by a strict conservative Islamic approach, the other by ethnocentric and Islamophobic Western conceptions. These two perceptions are, of course, in conflict, but they both end up at the same intellectual dead-end. It is almost impossible to conceive of a debate, or even the hint of one, that could clarify these different viewpoints, so much have the advocates on either side become blinded by their respective convictions.”