Modern reinterpretation of the misogyny of Islam
TR
by Reza Afshari
Since the advent of modernity, successive generations of
Muslim intellectuals, driven by a sense of political urgency and
an identity crisis, have felt compelled to write a new version of
Islam's history. No longer just the vocation of a few Muslim
scholars, today the task is engaging ever expanding circles of
ideologues, political activists, government officials, and
academics across the intellectual spectrum. Throughout this
century many progressive writers have hoped to modernize
Islam, and in recent years Muslim conservatives have
rediscovered an Islamic essentialism that purports to "Islamize
modernity." Grafting contemporary concepts (rationalism,
liberalism, nationalism, socialism and feminism) onto the
pre-modern Islamic paradigm, these efforts have often reflected
the global ideological trends of the day.
It is to be expected that the rise of Islamist movements should
revitalize historical debate and controversy among Muslims. But
a new obsession with Islam seems to dominate intellectuals'
discussions of the Middle East : a kind of Islamistmania that
seems to be the observe of the Westoxication (the
Iranian-coined gharbzadegi) of the 1960s. The Islamists equate
modernist discourse and its secular critique of the
male-dominated Islamic culture with a Western imperialist
attack on Islamic authenticity, cultural norms and way of life.
Retreating in the face of such charges of cultural treason, today's
Middle Eastern intellectuals seem to be more ideologically and
politically defensive than their modernist forerunners early in
this century.
The main underlying ideological premise of this articles is that
through these efforts, modernity and its intellectually secular
preconceptions is subsumed under an emotionally-charged and
metaphysically-attuned discourse that remains focused on Islam.
Instead of making an epistemological and emotional break,
intellectuals have tried to redefine Islam. This is not to say that a
grand paradigmatic discourse could have had a substantive
impact on sociopolitical realities. Middle Eastern realities, in
their messiness and fluidity, do not lend themselves to any
intellectual attempt at a systemic societal reordering.
Nevertheless, a persistent orientation toward the past, a
normative reference to the sacred text of a pre-modern
paradigm, and a compulsion to engage in dialogue with
ancestors long dead have contributed to the preservation of an
intellectual climate in which a genuinely secular and modern
ideology could survive only under the obscurantic clouds of a
sacred discourse. Thus, the epistemological attachment to the
Islamic conception of social order is largely preserved.
I also believe that historicism is still useful, for normative and
analytical purposes, in understanding societies that continue to
produce Imams an pseudo-Imams on a mass scale and, in the
case of Iran, make them supreme rulers in the late twentieth
century. To speak of "post-modernity" in regard to such a
climate would add to the prevailing intellectual obscurantism.
To use the post-modern discourse of the Western intellectual
elite in order to deconstruct a modernity that is obstructed by an
obdurate pre-modern patriarchy, and then to recommend Islam
as an alternative, is an exercise in intellectual alchemy that
creates not an elixir but an ideological snake oil. The result is
theoretical confusion. Problems of modernity will not dissipate
by a recourse to the ancient mind-set.
Mai Ghoussoub observed in 1987 : "Some of the most
outstanding contemporary feminists, daunted by the scale of the
tasks before them and the isolation in which they stand, have
changed their tone recently" (1987 : 17). Critical feminism
seeks refuge in the holy text. This trend can be called
neo-feminism. The explicit feminist terminology is still
apparent, but the sharp edge of iconoclasm is blunted. This
neo-feminism, like earlier Islamic reformism, contends that
traditions are layers of societal experiences accumulated under
specific circumstances obscuring the true meaning and spirit of
Islam. The argument is based on an ideological assumption that
there are two different Islams : the good Islam, as reflected in
the lay Muslim's understanding of ethical and egalitarian
messages of the Quran, and the bad Islam of shari'a as
interpreted by the ulema. That ideological assumption is itself a
result of refurbishing a pre-modern paradigm with the trappings
of modernity. Thus, the noe-feminist discourse converges with
the Islamic reformists' attempt to construct a new Islam outside
its historical framework and free from its traditional confines of
shari'a. This insertion of feminist consciousness into the
mind-set of a revealed religion has further embellished and
mystified the past. The most potentially iconoclastic discourse,
secular feminism, is harnessed to the worn-down wheels of
Islamic reformism.
In her influential book, Beyond the Veil, the Moroccan
sociologist Fatima Mernissi has added clarity to the paradigm of
patriarchy already advanced by Egyptian feminist Nawal
El-Saadawi : discriminating gender relations have been
sanctified by Islamic laws and norms. Mernissi's goal was not
to recast Islam in a modernist mold and rediscover a new
meaning for it, but to expose the ideological links between the
Islamic normative system and the practices of patriarchy.
Moreover, the book is effective in showing that historical Islam
has deeply ingrained the fear of female sexuality in the male
consciousness. As Hisham Sharabi observes, Saadawi and
Mernissi in their earlier writings radically departed from the
Islamic reformist discourse and dealt with the constraints
imposed by the logic of a shari'a-bound reformism that still
seeks a "renewal" of Islam. Islamic reformism is not capable of
exposing the ancient roots of the patriarchal values and
practices enshrined in the sacred text. It even carries the risk of
adding a veneer of modern respectability to the discourse of the
holy text and religious thought.
A genuinely secular and feminist discourse would assert that
valuable cultural attributes of the past can be preserved and
made to nurture the development of a progressive national
character only if the cultural icons are subjected to a kind of
iconoclasm that purges the culture of its inherent patriarchy.
Commenting on the liberating impact of feminist ideas
(something totally licking in reformism), Sharabi testifies to its
significant potential for "the Arab Muslim male" (1988a :
32-33). The effect would be the same for any Muslim male
seeking liberation from traditional shackles.
The close causal links that Saadawi and Mernissi, among others,
have established between patriarchy and Islamic ideological
influences has been criticized by Nikki Kiddie and Judith E.
Tucker as idealistic and insufficiently attentive to the political
economy of women's oppression in different eras and in diverse
Muslim societies. This is a valid criticism of Beyond the Veil
only if one considers the book to be merely a sociological study.
Its value is in its iconoclasm ; it had to remain focused on the
suffocating weight of the religion and its pre-modern
misogynistic norms. Kiddie and Tucker themselves recognize
the importance of ideological factors in regulating patriarchy
(Kiddie 1979 : 332). Tucker writes that equal attention should
be given to three non-religious determinants : property relations,
family "as an institution which both reflects and structures
material production and social life," and women's participation
in the public domain (Tucker 1983 : 325).
Such critiques have not deterred Professor Mernissi. To the
contrary, she seems to have adopted an Islamic reformist
paradigm. This shift is apparent in her 1991 book The Veil and
the Male Elite ; A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights
in Islam, in which her primary intellectual aim is to locate,
through a rigorous search of historical documents, roots in
pre-modern Islamic traditions that could support feminist beliefs
and women's rights. It is true that her previous writings
contained references to egalitarianism and democracy as "the
kernel of the Muslim message," or the assertion that Islam
"affirms the potential equality between sexes" (Mernissi 1987 :
19). The focus of her earlier feminist discourse was not,
however, to substantiate such remarks ; nor was it to draw a
distinction between an egalitarian Islam and a misogynist
Islamic tradition. In fact, Beyond the Veil (its first publication in
the U.S. was in 1975) is a searing attack on Muslim patriarchy
an Islam as a "system." Mernissi wanted to show :
Sexual equality violates Islam's premise, actualized
in its laws, that heterosexual love is dangerous to
Allah's order. Muslim marriage is based on male
dominance. The desegregation of the sexes violates
Islam's ideology on women's position in the social
order : that women should be under the authority of
fathers, brothers, or husbands. Since women are
considered by Allah to be a destructive element, they
are to be spatially confined and excluded from matters
other than those of the family. Female access to
non-domestic space is put under the control of males.
(Mernissi 1987 : 19)
Although Mernissi still states her case for women rights with
characteristic passion and conviction, and in particular
advances arguments against the veil, her recent writings attempt
to show that gender discrimination began despite Allah's words
and Muhammad's intentions. In order to rescue monotheism,
compromise was necessary with the patriarchal tradition to the
Meccan elite, especially after Muhammad's death, when this
same male elite, i.e., Muhammad's compassions, began to
"fabricate" misogynistic hadith (sayings and practices attributed
to Muhammad) to their own befit (Mernissi 1991 : 45-46).
Mernissi maintains that the Prophet's efforts were aimed at
renouncing the "phobic attitude" then prevailing toward women
and that the Islamic message introduced hopes of sexual equality
in the treatment of women (Mernissi 1991 : 81). Muhammad
emerges as the first Muslim feminist. Despite Muhammad's
efforts, "very quickly the mysognistic trend reasserted itself"
(Mernissi 1991 : 75).
There are highly restrictive verses in the Quran, and Mernissi
tries to explain them away by attributing them to socio-military
conditions specific to the time. One example is her
interpretation of the Verse 53 of Surah 33, which is the first
verse in the Quran to burden women with the hijab. The Verse
enjoins Muhammad's male companions to approach the
Prophet's wives "from behind a curtain [hijab] : that makes for
greater purity for your hearts and for theirs." The occasion that
induced the revelation was the night Muhammad's wedding to a
new wife, which Mernissi explains took place during "an epoch
of doubts and military defeats that undermined the morale of the
inhabitants of Medina" (Mernissi 1991 : 92).
A careful rereading of this verse reveals to us that
Allah's concerns in this verse are about tact. He
wanted to intimate to the Companions certain niceties
that they seemed to lack, like not entering a dwelling
without asking permission. (Mernissi 1991 : 92)
Mernissi goes on to assure the reader that the hijab was actually
meant "to separate the space between two men." In this rather
tedious rendition of "the descent of the hijab," Mernissi does not
fully explain what bearing the "time of severe military crisis"
had on Muhammad's desire to get rid of the wedding guests so
that he could start enjoying his new bride.
Mernissi interprets the Verse of Curtain as a mere explanation
for etiquette. A secular reading of the text, one note inhibited by
a lingering reverence toward the sacred, will compare it with
other Quranic verses that are protective of women's virtues as
defined by men. All of them recognize and reinforce the norms
that held women as men's possessions, the objects of men's
desires. Why shouldn't we treat the Verse of Curtain as
Mernissi herself used to treat other verses relating to women ?
In Women in Muslim Unconscious, published by Mernissi
under a pseudonym in 1982, she subjected other verses to her
then truly iconoclastic critique, showing how all verses that
speak of women could be deconsecrated (Sabbah 44). Without
any reference to egalitarian Islam that supposedly treated man
and woman as spiritually equal, she asserted in 1982 that in
Islam "[T]he connection between the divine being and the human
being varies according to sex." She concluded :
The relationship of the Muslim God to man is not only
different from the one he maintains with women, but
her relationship to man is only understandable through
an analysis of the triangular relationship between
God, the male believer, and the female believer.
Sabbah 1984 : 66)
It is from this type of analysis that Mernissi's discourse departs
in The Veil and the Male Elite, signifying a shift from
iconoclastic feminism to Islamic reformism and losing much of
its liberating impact. Her criticism no longer stresses that the
image of an ideal woman in the Quran and the hadith was one of
submission and passivity. Mernissi's language becomes almost
reverential toward Allah and his Prophet ; iconoclasm stops at
the doorsteps of Muhammad's household.
Many of the Islamic traditions which are being reevaluated
today arose after Muhammad's death. The neo-feminists
distinguish between the historical formation of Islam under then
prevailing conditions, which led to discriminatory practices,
and its ethical teachings, abstract vision and concepts. The latter
are deemed capable of infinite expansion to meet the
socio-political and spiritual needs of every age. From the Right,
cultural conservative Islamists like Sayyid Qutb have also tried,
in Yousef Chourei's words, to purify Islam's "history in the
purgatory of abstractness" (1990 : 98). All these attempts at
reinterpretation have one other thing in common ; In order to
legitimize their own particular narrative, they have tried to
invalidate, as Iran's Shari'ati did, "the traditionally maintained
view of this faith in all its diversities" (Dabashi 112. Leila
Ahmed repeats the favorite question of all Islamic reformists :
"Was the import of the Islamic moment a specific set of
ordinances or that it initiated an impulse toward a juster and
more charitable society ?" (1992 :95). Only within a frustrated
modernity does such a question become possible. The two
visions of Islam clashed :
From the beginning there were those who emphasized
the ethical and spiritual messages as the fundamental
message of Islam and argued that the regulations
Muhammad put into effect, even his own practices,
were merely the ephemeral aspect of the religion,
relating only to that particular society at that historical
moment. Thus, they were never intended to be
normative or permanently binding for the Muslim
community. Among the groups that to some degree or
other took this position were the Sufis, the Kharijis,
and the Qarmations (Qaramita)... implicit to all of
them was the idea that the laws applicable to the first
Muslim society were not necessarily applicable to or
binding upon later ones... (Ahmed 1992 : 66-67)
Despite different readings of the texts, all reformist and
neo-feminist discourse articulate these two visions of Islam.
They may, however, disagree as to which groups other than the
Sufis, on whom they mostly agree, can be considered as the true
transmitters of the spiritual and humanist Islam. What the
neo-feminists read in the Quran are mainly ethical precepts
which they think are general, "rather than specific legalistic
formulations" (Ahmed 1992 : 88).
The neo-feminist discourse is highly critical of these traditions,
and in this respect it departs from the older approach of Islamic
reformists. For Mernissi, as for Leila Ahmed, the gate-keepers
of the hadith and the chroniclers of Islamic history enshrined
androcentrism in the Islamic traditions and presented them as
religious-historical truth. Thus the neo-feminists have tried to
give the "true spirit of Islam" a much broader socio-historical
scope, taking the discourse into marginal texts traditionally
considered heretical by Muslim jurists. They offer more than a
mere reinterpretation of shari'a rules in accordance with the
expediencies of the time ; they try to remold a highly selective
historical knowledge into a new perspective.
According to Mernissi, the great flourishing of Arab-Islamic
civilization took place in the middle of the eighth century
(Umayyid dynasty ruled until 750), mainly as the result of the
integration of the Greek humanistic literature and the influence
of Persian and Indian thought translated into Arabic. Like many
liberal Islamic reformists, Mernissi believes that the Mutazilite
school presented the true rationalist spirit of Islam. Soon after,
however, the Islam of the jurists recovered. As a result, "the
Mu'tazila became pariahs and... the Muslim world rolled
toward the precipice of mediocrity" (Mernissi 1992 : 33-34). "It
is that Islam of the palaces, bereft of its rationalist dimension,
that has been forced on our consciousness as the Muslim
heritage today" (Mernissi 1992 : 37). She also believes that the
Sufis presented the true egalitarian spirit of Islam. Thus for
Mernissi, Hallaj, preeminent among the Sufis who rejected "the
idea of blind submission," stands as a light illuminating the path
of the good Islamic heritage. Hallaj was executed in Baghdad by
the custodians of shari'a in 922.
Two different sets of concepts articulate the mental constructs of
the two Islams, and Mernissi's book is rich in explaining them,
not so much in their original historical contexts but in what she
wishes them to mean today in the struggle between modernity
and religious anachronism. The official Islam was articulated by
"key words" like religion, belief and obedience. The egalitarian
Islam was conceived in terms of personal opinion, innovation,
and creation. "The conflict lies in the fact that this second pole
has for centuries been condemned as negative, subversive..."
(Mernissi 1992 : 40).
It is not clear where and when Mernissi locates the origin of the
corruption : in Arabia at the time of Muhammad's companions
or in Baghdad of the Abbasids after the defeat of the rationalist
school ? Azizah Al-Hibri Leila Ahmed, among other Muslim
neo-feminists, share in the ideological assumption that there are
two kinds of Islamic traditions. They are, however, agreed in
pushing the genesis of the corrupting influences far back to the
time of the emergence of the Islamic order in Medina, even to
the time when the prophet was still alive. They assert that in
Medina, under specific historical conditions not intrinsic to
Islam, pragmatism prevailed and the idealistic spirit of the new
religion was compromised.
By 1982, Azizah Al-Hibri had already adopted the reformist
paradigm, hoping to construct "feminism" within the ideological
bounds of Islam. She asserted : "Patriarchy co-opted Islam after
the death of the prophet." In the "hostile milieu" then prevailing
in Arabia, the message " could not have survived without an
infinite amount of flexibility and adaptability. Thus the prophet
had to resort to a variety of compromises and tactics to achieve
his end" (1982 :213). She contended that under the influence of
feminism, Muslim women are "reexamining these old
patriarchal interpretations and shaking them at the root." She
added that "if patriarchy itself was able to justify within its
ideological bounds the existence five different schools of
thought, the feminists can surely justify the addition of at least
one more" (1982 : viii and iv). This is said without a
discernible sense of irony. In whose company would Mernissi
place her own discourse ?
Leila Ahmed expresses a similar, but more nuanced, view in
Women and Gender in Islam : Historical Roots of a Modern
Debate (1992). Ahmed presents another interesting case of
those feminists who "changed their own tone recently." The
factor that helped to bring about a shift of emphasis (from
critical feminism to Islamic reformism) in Ahmed's writing
was, she explained, her realization of the depth of anti-Arab
racism in the United States. She thus felt compelled to defend
her own culture and its practices, especially against the
Orientalist misrepresentation of Islam. In a 1982 article, she
offered a positive explanation for the harem (1982 : 521-34). In
this article Ahmed showed that Western men had portrayed the
harems as synonyms for "degradation, licentiousness, and
corruption," allowing their wildest imaginations to carry them
away. This provoked a defensive and equally extreme positive
depiction of the harem by the Muslim analyst who asserted :
The very word "harem" is a variant of the word
"haram" which means "forbidden" (and also "holy"),
which suggests to me that it was women who were
doing the forbidding, excluding men from their
society, and that it was therefore women who
developed the model of strict segregation in the first
place [ !]. (1982 : 529)
This defensive posture continues in her book (1992), where
Leila Ahmed devotes considerable space to a debunking of
Orientalism. A perspective of extraneity informs this kind of
approach. What an Orientalist says about a Muslim society
becomes, in the logic of Counter-Orientalism, an integral part of
that society, as if the internal dynamics of the society under
study were shaped by external racist prejudices directed against
it. Ahmed observes that the Victorian men opposed the feminist
views of their own society. She goes on to assert that the same
Western men, as colonizers, attempted to empty Middle Eastern
culture of its most resilient content, Islam. Thus, they called for
the unveiling of women. The Islamist rulers of Iran argue the
same point in justifying their violent reimposition of the veil on
women.
In my view, what Orientalism has said about Islam does not
change the reality of historical Islam ; Muslims still have to
come to terms with the reality of their modern existence without
being reactive and defensive. In today's political climate
long-dead colonialists like Lord Cromer are relevant only as a
psychological burden. One outcome of this preoccupation with
the West's view of Islam is that it directs criticism towards
"westernized" intellectuals who, in their "alienated"
socio-cultural existence, demanded (and still demand)
socio-cultural policies that seem to be in line with what the
Orientalists advocated. A corollary is that Ahmed's argument
seem to grant a degree of authenticity, if not justification, to the
Islamic cultural conservatives (from early in this century to
now) in their political use of "cultural symbols" (e.g., the veil)
as emblems of struggle against cultural imperialism. It does so
by shifting the focus away from internal and repressive cultural
patterns to the extraneous Orientalist's depiction of the veil as a
sign of backwardness. Thus, such remarkable women as the
Egyptian Huda Sha'rawi are depicted as bourgeois creatures
alien to their own culture.
In rereading Islam's history, Leila Ahmed reconstructs a
gender-equal Islam which is largely based on the assumption
that its "spiritually egalitarian voice" is heard through "the
Quranic verses addressing women and unambiguously declaring
the spiritual equality of men and women." This neo-feminist use
of the Quran as a heuristic device enables her to construct
("feminist") abstract principles of the faith. This reductionist
interpretation gives prominence to the "egalitarian voice" of
Islam and dismisses its legal "voice" as derived from un-Islamic
(foreign) patriarchal influences. Ahmed, like Mernissi of today,
argues that this other "voice" sanctified the subordinate position
of women in the social-legal edifice of Islam.
Ahmed argues that in the years immediately after the death of
Muhammad, women played a key role in transmitting hadith and
were among the "authors" of the verbal texts of Islam.
This fact is remarkable. After all, how many of the
world's major living religions incorporate women's
accounts into their central texts or allow a woman's
testimony as to the correct reading of a single word of
a sacred text to influence decisions (1992 : 64,73)
If I understand this passage correctly, Ahmed seems to attribute,
with a discreet sense of pride, this "fact" to Islam. In such
instances, the neo-feminist discourse becomes almost identical
with Islamic reformism. It is interesting to note that in 1986 the
same author attributed the same fact not to Islam but to a
pre-Islamic (Jahilia) tradition not yet totally suppressed by
Islam. Then Ahmed wrote :
This in itself is an indication that the first generation
of Muslims (the generation that stood closest to the
Jahilia days and Jahilia attitudes toward women), and
their immediate heirs, had no difficulty in accepting
women as authorities. (1996 :671)
The ethical voice was largely silenced, Ahmed now
emphasizes, under the suffocating influences of "the various
patriarchal cultures" of the conquered lands where the Muslim
Arabs were assimilated and adopted the mores and attitudes of
the dominant classes. Here, too, I see a shift in emphasis with
regard to those negative influences that supposedly undermined
Islam's egalitarianism. The burden is now placed on the
patriarchal culture of Byzantines and Persians. Again, the
neo-feminist writers have difficulty in determining the specific
eras and the sources of corrupting influences which subverted
the original message of Islam. In a 1986 article on the same
subject, Leila Ahmed did not elaborate on these foreign
influences. Commenting on the view of some scholars who
maintain that "Islamic polygyny - virilocal polygyny - was an
innovation of Mohamad's," Ahmed wrote :
Whether or not, it was deeply consonant in its
attendant consequences and implications... with the
type of marriage that Islam was instituting as
normative... The granting of males, further,
unconditional rights to offspring... and the retaining
for males only the right enjoyed by jahilia women and
men of divorcing apparently at will, seem distinctly to
connote that in addition of absolute privileging of
male right, father right, was also one of Mohamad's
distinct objectives. When one adds to these the
licensing of polygyny and of unrestricted male sexual
access to women..., it becomes difficult not to
conclude that the absolute empowerment of men in
relation to women in all matters relating to sexuality
and offspring and the disempowerment of women (and
thus the complete transformation of his society's
mores in the erea of the relation between the sexes)
was also itself one of Mohamad's prime objectives...
(1986 : 678)
In light of this critical narrative, the adoption of the hijab
becomes little more than a technical matter. In the same article
Ahmed wrote that :
It is well known that the area in which Islam
introduced the greatest reform was that of marriage
and sexual relations, a large proportion - perhaps 80
percent - of Koranic rulings being devoted to
regulating marital relations and the conduct of women.
That is, the establishment of Islam was marked by the
institution of new sociosexual norms to at least the
same extent as by the institution of a new religion and
polity. (1986 : 667)
If women's position was to such an extent fixed in permanent
subservience to men by "the institution of new sociosexual
norms" during Muhammad's time, then what was left of the
original message to be subverted by the conquered peoples ?
What does it say about the reality (or rather the myth) of a
spiritually egalitarian message of a pre-modern paradigm ?
In fact, in the passage quoted above, Ahmed, quoting Mernissi
with approval, seemed to suggest that "Islam's own vision of the
ideal society - namely, a society based on equity and justice for
all members without distinction" was subverted by the Prophet
of Islam !
Nevertheless, the type of marriage Islam was setting
up as the norm for that early society evidently was one
in which women were disempowered. Fatima
Mernissi has implied... that the rulings giving the right
to divorce exclusively to men, like all Islamic rulings
on women, [emphases added] stemmed from and
reflected, not some larger concern [like the wishes of
Allah ?], but only Mohamad's purely subjective
response to his personal experiences, in this case
being irked because a number of women... divorced
him (before their marriages' consummation). (Ahmed
1986 : 678)
It seems to me that in her previous writing, Professor Ahmed
was trying to rescue Islam not from "Islamic clerics," as she
now states her goal, but from the messenger of Allah. However,
in her latest writings, the burden of corrupting influences is
lifted from Muhammad's "personal experiences."
Whereas Mernissi recognizes the positive contribution of older
civilizations then prevailing in the region, Ahmed puts
responsibility for stifling the practices of the Iranian nobility
(Ahmed 1992 : 67). Through an investigation of the hadith
narratives, she wishes to show that women's participation in
warfare, their freedom to engage publicly in the religious affairs
of the community, and their rights in marriage were gradually
curtailed. The "forthrightness" of Arab women of Medina was
replaced by the "new ethos" of the empire, and "women were
reduced to resorting to manipulation, poison, and falsehood -
the means of the powerless" (Ahmed 1992 : 84). Ultimately, in
the interest of men in power, the "spiritually egalitarian voice"
of Islam was transposed into "the textual edifice of Islam." This
is how Ahmed refers to shari'a, without using the emotionally
charges term. It is puzzling to me why she consistently chooses
not to use the term shari'a in places in her book where she
critically discusses it.
Ahmed's entire argument is based on the views of those
historians of Islamic law, e.g., Noel J. Coulson and Joseph
Schacht, who have argued that the hadith corpus developed as
the result of the interpretation of the legists and as such reflected
the heterogeneous conditions of the empire more than the
Quranic teachings and Muhammad's conduct, or his elaborations
of these teachings. Thus, "the Quranic elements within it [legal
corpus] were largely submerged" (Ahmed 1992 : 89). Ahmed
presents shari'a as a legal system overlaid by spurious
traditions "which took shape over several centuries" under the
influence of foreign customs the prevailing in conquered
territories. No reference is made to scholars who are equally
convinced of a contrary view : that shari'a is, in its entirety, a
body of laws, in the words of one Muslim scholar, "organically
related" to the Quran and to Muhammad's " attitude and
orientation" (Ansari 1992 : 166). One possible implication of
Ahmed's argument is that contemporary neo-feminists are in a
better position to understand the true spirit of Islam than either
Muhammad himself or the early generations of the faithful who
were closest to the source.
Overall, it seems to me that the iconclasm that at first so
liberatingly characterized the feminist discourse has been
blunted by the new search for Islamic spirituality and
egalitarianism. Moreover, neo-feminism, in its approach and
sensitivity, has come to resemble the Islamic reformism which
has never gone beyond relegitimizing Islam in modernity. The
neo-feminist discourse is highly critical of Arab-Islamic
heritage but remains reverential toward Islamic spirituality,
Allah, the Quran and the Prophet. The "ethical" and "spiritual"
dimensions of Islam are being reinterpreted to serve the
progressive interests of the present. It seems as if the otherwise
secular feminists are also in pursuit of a godly vision of society.
Have they become the renewers (mujaddidun) of Islam in this
late twentieth century ? it also appears as though they have
turned away from secularism as an explicit tenet in the
intellectual discourse, and are no longer spearheading the kind
of cultural iconoclasm capable of a total epistemological and
emotional rupture with the pre-modern past.
Mernissi's new approach is constrained by Islamicness, offering
yet another, and admittedly more radical, modernist
interpretation of Islam. Is such a retreat a sign of political
expediency restraining a rigorous iconoclastic discourse or is it
a manifestation of the powerful grip which metaphysical Islam
still exercises over the imagination of intellectuals ?
One indication of the decline of iconclasm in recent arguments
is the kind of response and debate that have been generated. In a
review of Mernissi's book, Marlene Kanawati has observed
that her new discourse faces a "dilemma." This dilemma, one
might add, is familiar to Islamic reformism : the attempt to
create modernist consensus on the proper nature of "true" Islam
leads to asking Muslims not to obey Quranic verses that impose
patriarchal limitations on women. "Though she [Mernissi]
attacks many habits as being misreported, which is acceptable in
Islam, Qur'anic verses are God's own words and cannot be
doubted.." (Kanawati 1993 : 502).
In another review, Sherifa Zuhur writes :
Mernissi begins her book by noting a hadith that
people who vest power in a woman will never know
prosperity. Readers may realize that it might be
heretical but more appropriate to question
Muhammad's motives for making the comment
concerning the daughter of the king of Iran who
claimed her father's throne when he dies. Instead she
spends much time questioning the paternity, social
status, and motives of Abu Bakra, a companion of
Muhammad. Certain omitted details are troubling -
Mernissi claims Abu Bakra is unsuitable as a source
of hadith for he was punished for false witness,
although in the case in question another witness said
he was uncertain "of having seen everything." That
was Ziyad whose view of the fornication in question
was obstructed by a curtain. The punishment for
slander may have been impose, but one cannot say a
"misogynistic" saying of the Prophet himself. (1993 :
351)
This is similar to arguments that are often generated in response
to Islamic reformists. I find it ironic that the more mainstream
academics are criticizing Mernissi for advancing arguments in
defense of Muhammad.
It is a measure of Middle Eastern civilizational crises that no
one is happy with Islam as it actually was in history, with its
complex historical characteristics and its sacred
self-understanding. Both Mernissi and Ahmed are saying that
pernicious historical forces succeeded, in the former's words,
"in gutting one of the most promising religions in human history
of its substance" (Mernissi 1992 : 34). I wonder if "history"
would hesitate to do the same thing if today's Sufis, Mu'tazilis,
and Qarmatians succeed in reestablishing the lost spirituality of
the religion in sociopolitical domains.
Middle Eastern intellectuals should be happy if the
neo-feminists succeed in lifting the dead weight of
shari'a-bound tradition from their consciousness. However,
they should hesitate to embrace new interpretations supportive
of their "needs" at any cost to truth. Leila Ahmed writes : "Had
the ethical voice of Islam been heard, I here suggest, it would
have significantly tempered the extreme androcentric bias of the
law, and we might today have a far more humane and egalitarian
law regarding women" (1992 : 88). But the "extreme
androcentric bias of the law" can hardly be considered as an
exogeneous addition to Islam. The neo-feminist argument does
not adequately explain the pre-modern context of the
power-struggles within which the alternative discourses used
doctrinal disputes to create religio-political legitimacy. Given
the socio-political milieu of the time, if partisans of the
"ethical-spiritual" dimension had overthrown the established
order, it is inconceivable that an empire with radically different
mores, in harmony with modern feminism, would have ensued. It
is not clear to me that a fundamentally different Islam would
have been created for women if, say, the kharijis had prevailed
over the orthodoxy. Were they not Islam's first fundamentalists ?
The authoritative canonical version that they might have created
would have equally served the interests of the male dominant
classes, notwithstanding the spiritual pretensions so
characteristic of a political and religious dissent when it is
confined to the political wilderness. Given the pre-modern
mind-set and the socioeconomic conditions of the time, the
alternative to the Umayyid or Abbasid caliphate was not the
"egalitarianism" of the Kharijites, the "rationalism" of the
Mu'tazilis, or the "humanism" of the Sufis. It was anarchy.
Even some Marxist feminists have been influenced by the rise of
Islamization. They also engaged in the discovery of a
"revolutionary" and "egalitarian" Islam and have tried to
identify progressive Islamic movements in the past and the
present. For example, Reza Hammami and Martina Rieker have
strongly criticized the "bourgeois" feminism of Mai Ghoussoub,
a feminist author with an uncompromising secular perspective.
They have correctly observed that the feminist discourse is
mired in textually-based debates between those who maintain
that "Islam is good for women" and those who reject such a
notion (Hammami and Rieker 1988 : 93). However, they have
criticized Ghoussoub for her unwillingness to recognize "a
variety of counter-hegemonic ideologies that have taken on
state-authorized Islamic discourse" and for her willingness to
grant to Islam too much influence in determining the normative
orientations of Muslim countries (1988 : 95). The Sufi
movements are examples of such "counter-hegemonic" historical
movements that one must rediscover in order to construct o truly
radical, anti-imperialist feminism in the Middle East.
Hammami and Rieker inaccurately assert that Ghoussoub
believes in the existence of a historically monolithic Islam with
"an unchanging doctrine." The following paragraph states both
their objection and their case :
Even classical Orientalist scholarship... grudgingly
concedes that there have always been varying
movements within a changing Islamic tradition, as
well as in Islamic counter-traditions such as Sufism.
Radical critiques of hierarchy, exploitation and
gender oppression have often been at the center of
Sufi movements such as Baktashi in Turkey, the
Sanusi in Libya and the Bayyumiya in Egypt.. Even
within the textual tradition itself, there have been,
throughout history, a variety of theological stands
which have sought the basis of a socially just world
within Islamic philosophy. (1988 : 94-95)
How can one, for example, substantiate the assertion that
Baktashis, to choose the best known of these Sufi groups, were
"radical critiques of gender oppression ?" The authors refers us
to "a sympathetic treatment" of the Batashi Sufi movement in
Marshal Hodgson's The Venture of Islam. This is a good
example of the historiography of contemporary authors who
insert modern sensitivities and concepts into pre-modern
history. Hodgson limits his discussion to the intellectual
possibilities and mental framework of the sixteenth century
Islamic world and does not read modern values into the
consciousness of pre-modern men. The most relevant statement
in The Venture of Islam is Hodgson's reference to "the popular
latitudinarianism of the Baktashis among the country people -
and among the Janissaries" (1974 : 122). Can anyone
extrapolate from this remark the notion that opposition to
"exploitation and gender oppression have been at the center of"
the Baktashi movement ? There is a difference between what
Hodgson writes and what the feminist authors infer.
Hodgson's carefully worded analysis remains faithful to the
social, political, and religious ambiance lived by men of the
sixteenth century : the ghazi spirit, the janissary's zeal, Islamic
communalism as posed against the infidel, opposition the
shari'a-mindedness, and Sufi lititudinarianism as understood in
the context of that age (Hodgson 1974 : 107, 122-123).
Latitudinarianism cannot be equated with pluralism (a late
twentieth-century concept), as some Islamists have tired to do. It
is ahistorical to implant into sixteenth century discourse
concepts such as oppression (with our post-feminist
understanding of gender).
Another troublesome aspect of such historiography, one that is
also apparent in Ahmed's, is the following underlying
assumption ; ideas and movements that opposed the established
order were (and today are) "progressive." By extension, they
should receive our moral and political support without
reference to their mentality or their political content. This
essentially populist view (mixed with 1950s vintage Marxism)
was also held by many Iranian nationalist authors until the
deluge of Islamic revolution awakened them from intellectual
stupor. This view maintains that any bourgeois-dominated state
is in its totality regressive ; any force that opposes such a state
is, by the logic of its counter-hegemonic nature, progressive.
Within this totalizing view of the contemporary bourgeois state,
one is asked to distinguish "between state deployment of Islamic
signs and jural forms and the variety of counter-hegemonic
movements working within radical Islamic frameworks"
(Hammami and Rieker 1988 : 95). Thus, one is forced to choose
between the menace of those in power and the potentially more
menacing aspirants to power seeking counterlegitimacy in their
version o f Islam. Hammani and Rieker implore the reader to
side with those "theological stands which have sought the basis
of a socially just world within Islamic philosophy." They also
name some of the Islamist proponents of "a socially just world"
in this century, including Sayyid Qutb and Muhammad
al-Ghazzali in Egypt. (Why not Khomeini and Rafsanjani of Iran,
Mawdudi of India and Hasan Turabi of Sudan ?) These men are
praised as anti-imperialists who "have criticized capitalism on
its own terms" (Hammami and Rieker 1988 : 95). What if one
refuses to support the Islamist "counter-hegemonic movements,"
as the secular feminist Ghoussoub has done ? Hammami and
Rieker write :
Ghoussoub's analysis actually takes the opposing
stand and claims that these movements... actually
reverse some of the gains for women made by state
legislation. Only in the study of the Middle East, with
this elaboration of a profoundly backward spector of
Islamic sentiment waiting to rear its head, is the claim
made that state are more progressive than the popular
movements which oppose them. (1988 : 95-96)
Again, the logic of this view leads to disparagement of
"bourgeois" women. The experience of Iran has made this type
of Orientalist-bashing anachronistic and unattractive. Reactive
traditionalism is at least as poisonous to development as
neo-imperialism. In rejecting imperialism, why should one
necessarily tolerate underdevelopment and backwardness ?
Nikki Keddie has made a pertinent observation :
So we get a complex picture whereby upper and
upper middle class groups closely tied to the West
materially and ideologically have taken important
steps to improve the status of women..., whereas less
well off anti-imperialist groups, whose material and
cultural interests are often hurt by Western incursions,
may become defensive about traditional ways, and
seek security in a return to tradition and preservation
of male domination. (1979 : 234)
If one has to choose between the two, the Pahlavi state policies,
for example, were more progressive towards women than have
been those of the "counter-hegemonic" Islamists presently ruling
Iran. Under Islamist pressure, the reversal of gains made under
the secular state of 1950s and 1960s Egypt points to the same
conclusion.
Above all, the neo-feminist approach runs the risk of
anachronism by attributing contemporary political meanings to
antecedents far removed in time. Egalitarianism, gender equally,
freedom of the individual and similar concepts are today''
terms, derived from secular ideologies in response to capitalist
market economy and the emergence of the modern state. In any
imaginative reading of historical texts, one may find earlier
"equivalents" for these concepts. It is hard to imagine, however,
that these modern terms are similar in meaning or
emotive-political charge to the "equivalents" from in the far-off
events in Islamic history. This search for equivalents fails to
recognize the epistemological break between the (revealed)
religious paradigm and that of post- enlightenment modernity. It
commits itself to an historical continuity that is more imagined
than historical. It places the ninth-century jurists and the late
twentieth-century feminists on the same epistemological
continuum. It sanctifies the present with tradition and masks the
power it induces. It also privileges the present vantage point of
Muslim reformists from which the pre-modern past can be
"correctly" understood. The history of Islam is thus driven by
the assumptions and sensitivities of our age, serving the
political-intellectual needs (power) of the day. History is
ransacked to support contemporary needs. This "updating" of
Islam is a political task that is best left to the Islamist
ideologues. This "updating" of Islam is a political task that is
best left to the Islamist ideologues. They are in abundance these
days. Academic scholars and secularist thinkers should hesitate
before lending credibility to those whose primary goal is to
reach to the most undeveloped common denominator in the
public for immediate political gain through manipulations of
religious symbols.
Any secularist attempt at a validation of the past in Islamic term,
I am afraid, may paradoxically result in a reinvigoration of the
emotive charge of a shari'a-based discourse. A similar task
was performed by Dr. Shari'ati and the radical Islamist
Mojahidin organization in Iran, from which the traditionalist
clerics politically benefited. My fear is that the discourse of an
Islamic reinterpretation, like the state's anti-imperialist rhetoric,
may result in the reinforcement of the traditional patterns of
authority that is profoundly anti-democratic and
unrepresentative.
I am always puzzled by those intellectuals on the Left who feel
compelled to reconcile their modern convictions and
progressive ideas of liberty and human rights with pre-modern
faith and "heritage." These modern ideas did not exist in any
pre-modern culture, including the West's. Is not iconoclasm
supposed to free us from the weighty burdens of the past ? The
quest for collective self-esteem and cultural identity can, I
assume, be satisfied on a psychological level by reengaging the
past, but the sociopolitical outcome may not be what the
practitioners of historical rewriting expect, especially when
done through purposeful selectivity and wilful reading of the
present concerns into the past - at the expense of historical
clarity. I doubt if we can escape the weight of tradition by
validating a traditionalist mandate, invoking a purified imagery
of Islam, in order to purge the tradition of its undesirable
practices and norms.
The neo-feminist reading of the "message of Islam" is achieve
by projecting a late twentieth century consciousness back to
pre-modern Arabia. This "feminist interpretation of the Quran"
continues to ascribe to the "revealed Islam" a suprahistorical
existence, a text "above any wordily ideology" and free of any
normative orientation from the era of its birth. This is above all
a testimony to the extraordinary grasp that the "holy text" still
has on the imagination of Muslim intellectuals, even the
neo-feminists. The most enduring quality of Middle Eastern
intellectual discourse since the coming of European modernism
is its persistent adherence to the divinity of the Islamic
metaphysical text, correctly perceived. True iconoclasm,
without which no modern ideology could develop, is the most
valuable intellectual commodity in Muslim countries. In Beyond
the Veil, the young and brilliant Moroccan sociologist observed
a painful fact : "The absence of a genuine modern ideology
strengthened the hold of Islam as the only coherent ideology that
masses and rulers could refer to" (Mernissi 1987 : 23-24). That
book was a positive step toward creating such a modern
ideology ; Mernissi's new "feminist interpretation of women's
rights in Islam" is, I am afraid, a step backward from that
intended goal. I also doubt that the road to a modern ideology
passes through the stage of reinvigoration of a pre-modern
Islamic message.
Early this century, the generations of the Iranian Mujtahib
Muhammad Hussein Na'ini and the Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad
'Abduh, who attempted to revitalize Islam by divesting it from
fatalism and traditional practices, may not have been aware of
the fact that they were conflating indigenous Islamic elements
with Western notions. Having become self-conscious about their
actions, today's intellectuals can no longer pretend to be
engaged in a self-engendered Islamic discourse based on its
own philosophical substratum. One cannot assert cultural
authenticity by engaging in intellectual self-deception. One
thereby runs the risk of self-delusion now or the deception of the
future generations of intellectuals ; neither promises healthy
historical development in the long run.
Hamid Dabashi's apt observation on Ali Shari'ati, an architect
of a revolutionary Islamic ideology in Iran, should be
considered an invitation to all scholars to move beyond the
current clichés on Muslims' religiosity and authenticity, secular
Westernization, and anti-colonialism :
He did manage to give his revolutionary ideology a
"progressive" aura. This "progressive" feature,
however, had to be balanced carefully with a
demonstrated anti-"Western" attitude. He was quite
successful in presenting his deepest forms of radical
secularism in an anticolonial and anti-"Western"
language... Shari'ati, in his diligent attempt to
transform the historical complexity and doctrinal
diversity of Islam into a unified political ideology
best suited for the modernity of this revolutionary
agenda, was, in effect, an avant-garde figure in
cultural recolonization. Deeply alienated from, and in
a disguised way resentful of, the received and
operative core of the Islamic character and culture,
while at the same time fascinated by the efficiency of
"Western" political ideologies..., he sought to
revolutionize Islam to make it best suitable for
competition in an age of conflicting ideologies.
(Dabashi 1993 : 115)
Feminist writers should continue to provide historical
explanations by using secular, straight-forward sociopolitical
analyses, without any desire to validate the sacred text or to
place the burden of blame for Islamic androcentrism on other
pre-modern (the Byzantine and Persian) traditions. Above all,
they should not sacrifice intellectual clarity for the short-sighted
political expediency of linking up with a populism that feeds on
the prevailing ignorance.
In conclusion, these neo-feminist attempts have tried to empty
Islam of its real historical content. The "new" Islam is then
endowed with new interpretative frontiers in search of an innate
truth beyond the confines of shari'a-bound traditions. Islamic
reformist opinions abound on any single issue and any item of
historical reinterpretation. It seems to me that the search for a
modernist reinterpretation of a pre-modern, paradigm is more a
symptom of an intellectual crisis than a positive contribution to
resolution of the crisis. It may, deceptively, seem easier and
more expedient to achieve modernity and secularism by trying to
locate Islamic cultural foundations for them rather than to build
further on present practical norms and habits which have been
permeated by a secular praxis and to bring them into a closer
harmony with the universal ethos of the contemporary world.
Hisham Sharabi has defined the current struggle as "primarily a
cultural struggle, with decisive social and political
consequences, between the forces of religious conservatism and
the forces of secular critical modernity." He continues : "The
movement of enlightenment and secularism spearheaded by a
significant segment of the rising generation seems irreversible
and will in the years ahead have a profound, transformative
effect on the structure of neopatriarchal society" (1988b : 6-7).
With its secular moral vision, feminism is a forward-looking
social project, demanding radical transformation of the entire
texture of gender relations.
Feminism is incomprehensible without secularism, which
distinguishes it from other religious-ethical systems. Conceived
by autonomous human beings as a response to modern
conditions, feminism drives its strength from the modern notion
of human rights based on inalienable rights to equality and
dignity of individuals. Religiously-based moral systems, with
their pre-modern notions of duties and rights, do generally
preoccupy themselves with higher entities such as a godly
society or a righteous community. As a subset of human rights,
feminism must remain focused on the rights of the individual
woman. It cannot be grounded in any consequentialist doctrine
such as nationalism, Marxism, or Islamism.
In the 1960s, threat to feminism came from the Marxism
movement that tried to subjugate it to a higher cause of the
proletarian revolution. Today, feminist women must remain
uncompromisingly secularist, advocate the modern ideal of an
equal and autonomous woman, and oppose all
religiously-oriented and communally-based notions of social
justice. These notions often call for a new resubmergence of the
individual (woman) to the community. In the Middle East, male
domination has put on a new face of communal solidarity against
all the real and imagined enemies. A new enshrining of a sense
of community as an overriding social objective in societies in
the grips of neo-patriarchy is inimical to women and their rights.
Communitarian agenda runs counter to personal autonomy by
enforcing a substantive model of belief and behaviour and by
demanding role-fulfilment and performance of predefined roles.
The feminists are going against a very strong torrent of Islamic
communitarianism ; they must resist the temptation of grafting
onto their secular discourse notions and concepts developed by
the Islamists (reformist or fundamentalist) who are pursuing an
agenda "higher" than human rights of the (female) individual.
Women's exercise of personal autonomy and civil and political
rights would undermine that agenda.
As exemplified by Mernissi's earlier writings, the secular
discourse is iconoclastic, reflecting a profoundly disillusioned
detachment from the past, a piercing self-criticism that
demystifies the culture, breaks barriers, and violates taboos.
This stands in sharp contrast to the still divine-bound discourse
of Islamic reformism. It is unfortunate that Mernissi's discourse
reverts from its pioneering iconoclasm to Islamic reformism.
Pace University
Pleasantville, New York
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Altway 2
>Egalitarian Islam and Misogynist Islamic Tradition :
> by Reza Afshari
Comment:-
This is just one opinion.
There are a great number of diverse opinions about this and other subjects
in Islam as there have been in Christianity and every other tradition.
So what!
H.S.Aziz