494 32.1 Introduction In early 2011, in the concluding paragraph of an essay entitled “Muslim Feminist Birthdays”, Aysha Hidayatullah wrote the following in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion: Advancing gracefully will require that we face end points and forge new directions in our work without reinventing the wheel, failing to give each other credit, or falling prey to the divisive commercialism of the U.S. academy that exoticizes Muslim women and turns them into collectors’ items of competing value. Our survival as Muslim feminist subjects will depend on our ability to remain accountable to our greater communities, foster a spirit of critical engagement, and maintain the momentum of a collective movement that continues to nourish new life. (Hidayatullah 2011: 122) Hidayatullah, a scholar of Islamic studies, not only introduces us to the complexity of (American) Muslim feminist theology (her terminology), she also writes in response to Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, a leading Catholic feminist theologian, and as part of a group of religious feminists who ponder the past, present and future of religious feminist thought and practice. Her observation about this complexity as well as her charge for the future of Muslim feminist thought provide a suitable framework for this chapter on the roles of gen- der, feminism and critique in American Muslim thought. We focus our presentation and analysis on American Muslim women scholars at the intersection of the American academy and American Muslim communities. We argue that their commitments as public intellectuals focus on meaningful change in their societies and communities which hinges on the possibil- ity of multiple, nuanced and intergenerational critiques and their corresponding dynamics of power, authority and interpretation. In other words, we can only critically and meaningfully analyze the works of American Muslim women scholars if we recognize them as working within specific social and political conjunctures, that is, as products of historical circumstances, individual as well as collective agency and as part of the ongoing negotiation of Muslim reli- gious tradition.This chapter does not constitute a critique of such critique but rather a careful 32 Gender, feminism and critique in American Muslim thought Juliane Hammer and Micah A. Hughes DOI: 10.4324/9780429265860-42