Available online at: http://journal.uinsgd.ac.id/index.php/ijik IJIK, Vol. 12 No. 2: 114-124 DOI: 10.15575/ijik.v12i2.17510 * Copyright (c) 2022 Ibrahim Olatunde Uthman This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Received: March 27, 2022; Revised: May 19, 2022; Accepted: June 4, 2022 The Sharīʿah and the Muslim Feminists’ Public Display of the Female Body Ibrahim Olatunde Uthman Dept. of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Ibadan, Nigeria Corresponding Author E-mail: ibrahimuthman17@gmail.com Abstract Muslim feminists in Muslim societies have become increasingly independent and visible professionals in the modern world. They are visible in the public space, especially in the entertainment industry, as they use global information technology to Protect themselves and their bodies. This raises the question of how Muslim women negotiate Islamic teachings over the visibility of their bodies. Few studies have interrogated this question in the light of Islamic teachings; hence, the need for this study. This paper aims at a detailed examination of the public visibility of Muslim feminists in light of Sharīʿah rulings on the public visibility of male and female bodies. Laura Mulvey’s Hollywood Theory on entertainment spectatorship, as used in her “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” is adopted as the theoretical framework to engage the notions of the lustful male gaze and women’s erotic power of fitnah as prevalent in Islamic discourse. In addition, secondary data drawn from extant literature, interviews, and internet sources are used to interrogate the discourse of five purposefully selected Muslim feminists in the context of Sharīʿah rulings on the erotic power of women and their public visibility. The paper concludes that while Islamic teachings discourage the culture of public nudity by both males and females, the inequitable treatment of Muslim feminists regarding their public appearance is at variance with the above Sharīʿah rulings. Keywords: Muslim feminists, Muslim women’s visibility, Khulwah, ‘awrah, Ḥijāb INTRODUCTION The conditions of Muslim feminists in Muslim societies are changing fast as they become increasingly independent, visible, and economically powerful (Inglehart, 2017). The entertainment industry, in particular, has made them more independent, powerful, and prominent as they gain control of the public sphere. In discussing the dramatic entrance of Muslim women into the public entertainment space, this paper focuses on Muslim feminists, not Islamic feminists. Islamic feminists differ from Muslim feminists in their engagement with Islamic teachings. Though many scholars, including Cooke, employs the term “Islamic feminists” among others to describe all those who “are doing something about” the threat posed by the “official preoccupation with women’s bodies,” doing so “sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously” and who “offers a critique of some aspects of” Islamic teachings (Cooke, 2001), there is still the danger of lumping them together as Islamic feminists, two separate categories of feminists because they all work to defend women from “Islamic patriarchy,” misogynistic traditions and oppressive practices. The simple reason is that some feminists base their feminist discourse on the Islamic matrix. While they do not question the sanctity of the authentic Al-Qur'an and Sunnah (words and deeds) of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), which are the basis of Sharīʿah (Islamic law), other feminist discourses are based on a Western and secular matrix that challenges the absolute sources of Islam. It is, therefore, necessary to distinguish between the two feminist categories. Therefore, it has been argued that the former consists of Islamic feminists while the latter are Muslim feminists (Uthman, 2013). Hence, the latter's feminist activism involves the display of women's bodies in public and the negotiation of Sharia law over their public appearance and performance in Muslim societies. Where