The title of the March seminar (28th, 2000) was “Women in Contemporary Islamic and Christian Discourse: a Primary Comparative Approach”, by Dr. Vivian Fu’ad (Director of the Coptic Center of Social Studies) and Nadia Rif’at (Assistant Director of Fustat Center for Studies and Counseling). It is a joint study by the two researchers, which aims at analyzing the official discourses of both the Islamic and Christian/Coptic religious institutions concerning the representation of women and their role in the family, the religious community, and the society. The study does not discuss the fundamentals of the two faiths, the principles, or basic sources of either the Muslim or Christian doctrines. It rather offers a comparative analysis of the two methodologies followed by religious scholars on both sides to form a recognizable discourse on the character and role of women. The two researchers wanted to demonstrate the similar strategies used within the Islamic and the Orthodox Coptic lines of argument.

The study consists of two parts. The first presents those common strategies, such as quoting from the source texts specific verses that establish the initial human and spiritual equality between men and women; then acknowledging the active role of women during the early formative periods of both Christianity and Islam; then reaching a common belief in the ‘innate difference’ between the nature of men and that of women, and the rigid division of roles between the private and public domains; and finally concluding that this different ‘nature’ of women – based on their unique biological functions of pregnancy and birth – is intended to qualify them to the basic role of domestic service and child rearing! This latter argument naturally leads to a justification of man’s supremacy inside the family and in the public sphere. In other words, the same steps are followed beginning from acknowledging equality in the source texts to reaching the same selfcontradictory conclusion of rigidly defining traditional roles with the claim that they are only functional and complementary. This final conclusion is also supported by the source texts with no effort to produce new judgments or applications in accordance with the overarching values of equality and justice that are basic to the two religious systems.

The second part of the study analyzes the historical, political, and social factors which influenced the formation of these discourses in the modern period. An example is the adoption of a defensive attitude to resist the ‘Western other’ as well as the ‘religious other’ in protection of identity, hence the tendency to preserve the statusquo and resist change even if it is within the basic framework of the doctrine itself. The study ends with a call for creating a religious discourse that puts women’s perspectives and rights into consideration, a discourse that does not renounce faith, but rather from within it activates the values of equality, justice, and human dignity to apply them to women’s lives.