Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This article investigates how and why Saudi women utilize digitalized Islamic feminism and Sharia-based interpretations to advocate for legal reform within an authoritarian, technologically mediated political system. Drawing on digital Islamic feminist hermeneutics, the study examines how young Saudi women employ Qur’anic reasoning, Hadith, feminist tafsīr (interpretation), and Sharia-based argumentation to legitimize challenges to entrenched patriarchal norms. Using digital ethnography, platform-based content analysis, and twenty-three semi-structured interviews conducted between April and October 2025, the article traces how personal testimonies of domestic violence, guardianship abuse, mobility restrictions, and workplace discrimination are transformed into collective mobilization. The findings reveal that Saudi women strategically navigate state-regulated digital infrastructures shaped by surveillance, platform governance, and the Saudi digital-authoritarian ecosystem, producing a technologically mediated Islamic feminist counterpublic that contests state-controlled gender narratives and conservative and Wahhabist interpretative heritage as well. Activists pressure political leadership to reform guardianship and personal-status laws, leverage state-promoted digital modernization, and resist its coercive dimensions. Islamic framing functions as both “legitimacy capital” and “risk mitigation” and that this duality explains the partial policy uptake. By demonstrating how Sharia-based feminist discourse serves as a central tool for negotiating, resisting, and reshaping legal and political possibilities, this article contributes to scholarship on Islamic feminism, digital activism under authoritarianism, and gendered technopolitics.
Source: Research Square
Author: Jihan Zakarriya
Institution: University of Copenhagen
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7131065747