ONE OF the most visible markers of Muslim identity in the modern world is the veil. In Europe, many see the veil as a sign that Islam is not compatible with liberal European values, and in specific countries, most noticeably France, some regard the veil as an infringement on secular society and consider it a risk to the traditional separation of church and state. In 2004, for instance, the French government banned head coverings and other overt symbols of religious faith from schools. On the other side of the debate, some Muslims argue that legislation against veiling is a form of religious discrimination and an attempt to discredit Islam and impose secular values on Muslims.
In Muslim countries, especially ones that have been more secular either traditionally or politically (e.g., Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon), the veil has increasingly become more widespread, and some see this change as a gauge of the influence and popularity of Islamism. It would seem, then, that the various types of head coverings are not simply about women and Islam’s perceived treatment of them but have become a symbol of particular Muslim identities. As we should come to expect, there is no simple “Muslim perspective” on the veil and veiling; there are as many different perspectives on it as there are types of modern Islam (as indicated in the typology outlined in
chapter 10).
Regardless of country—whether in Europe, America, the Middle East, or Africa—women’s bodies are increasingly the site where Muslim identities, both male and female, are played out and contested. This situation is probably not surprising given the fact that from the earliest centuries those doing the most to think about women, women’s bodies, and the place of women in society have been men, especially male scholars. Discussions of women in Islam often say as much about men as they do about women. Any discussion of gender in Islam, therefore, must be aware of the fact that until the modern period men have been the ones responsible for defining the “correct” place for women within the family and society. But recent years have witnessed the rise of Muslim or Islamic feminists who seek to address the changing role of women in Muslim society.
Any attempt to write about anything that occurred during Muhammad’s lifetime returns us to the conundrum that arose in the first three chapters of this book: we know virtually nothing about the earliest centuries of Islam because all the materials that claim knowledge of this period are from much later periods. This problem, however, has not stopped various interested parties from attempting to portray the lives of women during the time of Muhammad. They usually do so for apologetic purposes, to show that the earliest period was marked by a type of gender equality preached by Muhammad, which later eroded when male elites began to corrupt his message by increasingly circumscribing women’s role and place in Muslim society.
1As for so many other issues, the time of Muhammad served as a canvas on which later sources painted their own visions and agendas regarding women and Islam. The case is not much different today. For some, the advent of Islam empowered women, giving them a set of rights unheard of until relatively recently in the West.
2 Such interpreters contrast the message of Islam, as we saw in
chapter 1, with the
jahiliyya (period of ignorance), when it is said the Arabs practiced female infanticide and gave women no rights. Others, however, find sources that demonstrate the opposite: women enjoyed power and prestige in the pre-Islamic period, and the Quran initially reflected this status but was subsequently misinterpreted to deprive women of their rights. On this reading, Islam—at least according to its subsequent theological elaboration—is a large part of the problem of subjugating women. Both of these interpretations still possess much currency in the modern period.
MUHAMMAD AS FEMINIST
As we saw in
chapter 2, many modern treatments of Muhammad seek to portray or define him in the light of contemporary and anachronistic categories. The modern Muslim commentator Tariq Ramadan, for instance, seeks to show “the spiritual and contemporary teachings in the life of the last prophet.” In his desire to accomplish this task, he provides an imaginative account of Muhammad’s treatment of women and, by extension, Islam’s high regard for women. He writes, for instance:
Inside the mosque, the women would line up behind the men’s ranks, as the postures of prayer, in its various stages, require an arrangement that preserves modesty, decency, and respect. Women prayed, studied, and expressed themselves in that space. Moreover, they found in the Prophet’s attitude the epitome of courtesy and regard: he demanded that men remain seated in order to let women leave first and without inconvenience, there was always gentleness and dignity in his behavior toward women, whom he listened to, and whose right to express themselves and set forth their opinions and arguments he acknowledged, protected, and promoted.
*Such a reading is virtually impossible to verify let alone support given the paucity of sources available to us. As such, it is important to regard Ramadan’s account here as a theological and necessarily apologetic treatment of Muhammad.
*Tariq Ramadan,
In the Footsteps of Muhammad: Lessons from the Life of Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 148.
The fact of the matter, however, is that these interpretations, at least from the historian’s perspective, are absolutely impossible to verify. Attempts to show women in power in the pre-Islamic world are not made to raise the status of women, for example, but to lend credence to an ethos that gives women power over men—an ethos that Islam was perceived to correct. Those who wish to point to the positive treatment of women in early Islam, on the contrary, are usually drawn to a number of key females associated with Muhammad: Khadija (his first wife), Aisha (his last wife), and Fatima (his daughter). The goal of the analysis here is to show how these individuals function in the construction of modern Muslim, in particular female Muslim, identity.
KHADIJA
According to the biography of Muhammad (
sira), Khadija bint (daughter of) Khuwaylid (ca. 555–619), a wealthy trader, was Muhammad’s first wife. Some sources depict her as a widow; yet others, owing to the problems that this status might pose (i.e., that Muhammad’s first wife had been with another man), deny this characterization. Again according to the later biography, Khadija proposed marriage to Muhammad; she was the first convert to Islam; she provided great moral and emotional support to Muhammad; and while she was alive, Muhammad took no other wives. In his fourteenth-century commentary on the Quran, Isma
ʿil Ibn Kathir (1301–1373) writes: “Once Aisha asked him if Khadija had been the only woman worthy of his love. The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) replied: ‘She believed in me when no one else did; she accepted Islam when people rejected me; and she helped and comforted me when there was no one else to lend me a helping hand.’”
3Muhammad and Khadija had two sons, Qasim and Abd-Allah (both of whom died very young), and four daughters: Zaynab, Ruqayya, Umm Kulthum, and Fatima. However, most Shiʿis debate the paternity of the first three, arguing that they were the products of previous marriages and claiming—as a way to protect the sanctity of the ahl al-bayt and the lineage of the Imams—that only Fatima is the true daughter of the union between Muhammad and Khadija.
AISHA
Aisha bint Abu Bakr (d. ca. 678) was one of Muhammad’s first wives after the death of Khadija and was, as her name suggests, the daughter of the first successor to Muhammad, Abu Bakr (see
chapter 4). She is quoted as a source for many hadiths, especially those concerning aspects of Muhammad’s personal life. Many later Muslims regard Aisha, given her role in the transmission of hadith, as a learned woman who tirelessly recounted stories from the life of Muhammad and who explained the earliest history and traditions to a new generation of the followers of Muhammad’s message. As the most prominent of Muhammad’s wives, she is revered as a role model by millions of Muslim women.
Although certain details of Aisha’s situation do not bother some Muslims, they do raise issues, perhaps of more contemporary concern, that nevertheless must be addressed. According to sources, Aisha was betrothed to Muhammad when she was six or seven years old, and the marriage was consummated when she was nine. Although child marriages were and still are relatively common in Bedouin societies, many modern critics of Islam use Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha as evidence to discredit him as a pedophile, especially those who for a variety of reasons are critical of Islam to begin with (e.g., Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali Dutch former Muslim politician who now lives in the United States). Denise Spellberg offers perhaps the most interesting and plausible defense of Muhammad, arguing that Aisha’s young age might have been a later construction or interpolation to assure everyone that Muhammad’s “favorite wife” was a virgin at marriage.
4Another problem is that some of Muhammad’s enemies accused Aisha of committing adultery. When she was traveling with Muhammad and some of his followers on one occasion, she left camp in the morning to search for a lost necklace and, upon returning, found that the men had dismantled the camp and left without her. A man named Safwan eventually rescued her, which led to speculation that she and Safwan had committed adultery. Shortly after this incident, Muhammad announced that he had received a revelation from God confirming Aisha’s innocence and directing that charges of adultery thereafter be supported by four eyewitness (Quran 24:4).
5Because of her young age at the time of marriage, Aisha lived for a significantly long period after Muhammad died. As
chapter 4 notes, she was involved in an early and unsuccessful uprising against Ali in the Battle of the Camel. Some Muslim feminists have thus argued that Aisha provided a role model for women’s political participation in Islamic communities and that women became marginalized in Islamic polity following her defeat at this battle.
6FATIMA
Fatima (ca. 605–632) was one of Muhammad’s daughters—for Shi
ʿis, the only daughter—from his first wife, Khadija. She remained at her father’s side through the years of persecution that he suffered at the hands of the Quraysh in Mecca. After the
hijra to Medina, she married Ali ibn Abi Talib, who became the fourth caliph and the first Imam. Regarded as “the mother of the Imams,” Fatima plays a special role in Shi
ʿi piety. She has a unique status as Muhammad’s only surviving child; the wife of Ali, the first Imam; and the mother of Hasan and Husayn. She is believed to have been immaculate and sinless—a role model for Muslim women. Although said to have led a life of poverty, she shared whatever she had with others, according to Shi
ʿis.
Because of her marriage to Ali, Fatima is often imagined in later Shi
ʿi sources as a critic of the Abu Bakr and Umar caliphates. After the death of Muhammad, for instance, she opposed the election of Abu Bakr and supported Ali’s claims. It is said that in the ensuing years she had many grievances with both Abu Bakr and Umar concerning a host of issues from the political and the genealogical to the financial. Later Shi
ʿi historians tell of how Umar called for Ali and his men to come out and swear allegiance to Abu Bakr. When they did not, Umar broke into their house, with the result that Fatima’s ribs were broken when she was pressed between the door and the wall; this injury caused her to miscarry and led to her eventual death. She also laid claim to her father’s property rights and challenged Abu Bakr’s refusal to cede them. Such stories about Fatima, including the ones recounted earlier concerning her refusal to submit to the first caliph’s will and the violence directed toward her, undoubtedly contributed to the pathos of later Shi
ʿism. In this regard, Fatima became an important symbol in the evolution of Shi
ʿi identity, functioning as a feminine image to sanctify the Prophet’s family, on the one hand, and to reinforce the domestic role of Shi
ʿi women within a patriarchal system, on the other.
7Many modern commentators who are interested in reconciling Islam and women’s rights frequently point to Sufism, wherein it is said that “women enjoy full equal rights.”
8 Such comments, however, are difficult to sustain given the fact that, as witnessed in
chapter 7, male scholars have largely been responsible for creating the various stories about female Sufi saints bequeathed to us. These male scholars, writing centuries after the fact, have constructed female mystical identities as a way to show that although these figures are women, they are unlike most women who desire marriage, children, and various accoutrements. In fact, the sources render these female mystics, if they in fact existed, as the ideal from male Sufis’ perspective: lowly individuals, acutely aware of their inferiority, who were marginalized from the rest of society, thereby enabling them to contemplate God in relative isolation. In reference to the female mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya, Sufi hagiographer Farid al-Din Attar states, “When a woman becomes a man in the path of God, she is a man and one cannot any more call her a woman.”
9 Although such anecdotes might initially strike us as gender bending, they in fact reinforce the male as the ideal.
As noted at the beginning of this chapter, one of the most visible and contested symbols in Islam is the veil. In order to get a better sense of its manifold meanings, it is important to put this symbol in historical context so that we may see how it has been deployed, used, and understood over the centuries.
The term hijab—which can refer specifically to a veil (head scarf) or more generally to the concept of modesty—initially appears in the Quran. It is used in particular in the context of instructing male believers to talk to Muhammad’s wives behind a “hijab” (33:53). Some have accordingly argued that the hijab referred to here was not the personal veil of later centuries, but a large curtain used to ensure the sanctity of Muhammad’s wives. Other Quranic verses that are used to support veiling include the following:
And say to the believing women, that they cast down their eyes and guard their private parts; and reveal not their adornment save such is outward; and let them cast their veils over their bosoms, and reveal not their adornment save to their husbands, or their fathers, or their husbands fathers, or their sons, or their husband’s sons, or their brothers, or their brothers’ sons, or their sisters’ sons, or their women, or what their right hands own, or such men as attend them, not having sexual desire, or children who have not yet attained knowledge of women’s private parts; nor let them stamp their feet, so that their hidden ornament may be known. And turn all together to God, O you believers; happily so you will prosper. (24:31)
Children of Adam! We have sent down on you a garment to cover your shameful parts, and feathers; and the garments of the godfearing—that is better; that is one of God’s signs; haply they will remember. (7:26)
O Prophet, say to your wives and daughters and the believing women, that they draw their veils close to them (when they go abroad). That will be better, so it is likelier that they will be known, and not hurt. God is All-forgiving, All-compassionate. (33:59)
All these verses, however, are extremely vague; none specifically refers to practice of women veiling, and they all can seemingly be interpreted in any number of ways. Regardless of the actual contents of such verses, however, they were subsequently generalized in the later legal tradition to establish the often rigid segregation of Muslim men and women. With these aforementioned vague verses in the background, all four major Sunni legal schools (Hanafi, Shafi
ʿi, Maliki, and Hanbali) today hold that a woman’s entire body, frequently but not always with the exception of her face and hands, is considered part of her
awrah, that part of the body that must be covered in public settings.
Some commentators in the modern period argue that there is nothing specifically Islamic about such covering because the practice already existed in pre-Islamic Arabia. Leila Ahmed, for example, contends that because of this preexistence, veiling is not or should not be mandatory in Islam.
10John Esposito, a scholar of Islam, argues that Muhammad’s wives were the only ones to wear veils as a symbol of their status and that only later did Muslim women more generally take up the practice. At this later period, he asserts, Muslims were influenced by upper- and middle-class Persian and Byzantine women, who wore the veil as a sign of their rank to separate themselves not from men, but from the lower classes.
11There is obviously some debate as to the origins of the veil in Islam. This debate typically revolves around whether the veil is a cultural or a religious symbol. However, the line separating the religious from the cultural in seventh-century Arabia (or even in today’s world) is anything but clear.
In recent years, the debate about veiling has shifted from a question about its origins to a question regarding the status of women in Islam. Owing to its visibility, veiling has become one of the few practices involving Muslim women that Westerners are aware of. Many point to it as a sign of the seclusion and oppression of women in Muslim societies and, when coupled with news that women are forbidden to drive in Saudi Arabia, as further proof of their complete marginalization. It is important to be aware of the various sides of the debate here. There are not simply two sides: Muslims who support the veil and non-Muslims who regard it as a symbol of misogyny. The fact of the matter is that many Muslims are opposed to the veil and contend that issues of modesty should be contingent on the society in which particular Muslims happen to find themselves.
Those who see the veil in a more favorable light argue that rather than regard it as a sign of female oppression, we need to see it as a sign of their freedom. An anonymous author on a fundamentalist Web site, for example, argues that, “contrary to popular belief, the covering of the Muslim woman is not oppression but a liberation from the shackles of male scrutiny and the standards of attractiveness. In Islam, a woman is free to be who she is inside, and immune from being portrayed as sex symbol and lusted after. Islam exalts the status of a woman by commanding that she enjoys equal rights to those of man in everything, she stands on an equal footing with man, and both [men and women] share mutual rights and obligations in all aspects of life.”
12 Although this example may well offer an extreme view, it does show what is at stake for those who support the veiling of women. For them, the veil is not a cultural symbol, but a religious one that is required—morally, legally, and socially—for all Muslim women.
Rather than enter into the debate as to whether veiling is good or bad, religious or cultural, it is perhaps better to regard the veil in all its many manifestations as a contested symbol around which all sorts of actors skirmish in their desire to define what is authentically “Muslim.” How, for example, can the veil be a symbol of a woman’s freedom when in certain Muslim countries (most notably Saudi Arabia and Iran) women are not only forced to wear them, but forced to do so by men? Yet surely we need not regard every woman who wears the veil as a victim of male oppression. In many countries, such as the United States, some Muslim women freely and willingly wear the hijab as a sign of their Muslim identity and an expression of their choice of Islam over Western secularism. Just as we should not assume that every women in Iran wears the veil against her will, however, we should not assume that there are no cases in places such as America in which women are forced to veil, whether by husbands, brothers, or fathers.
It is also important to be aware that at stake in much of the public discourses concerning the veil is the perceived role and place of Islam in the West today. It is perhaps unfortunate that political discourse in Europe over banning the veil presents a stark binary—Muslims can choose to be “modern and European” or “backward and Oriental”—and, as such, a “with us or against us” mentality. All these debates, of course, transcend the veil and instead revolve around the perceived integration (or not) of Islam into America and Europe.
Islam, like most religions, is patriarchal. As such, women have been excluded from many areas of public life and ritual activity. Menstruation, for example, puts women in a state of ritual impurity that prevents them from becoming full participants in Muslim ritual, especially prayer. This practice is sometimes presented apologetically, as it is also in Orthodox Judaism, with the argument that women might prove a distraction for men at prayer, thereby preventing both genders from achieving their proper intentions and goals during this important activity. It is also contended that women occupy a different sphere than men and, as such, have different sets of responsibilities that take place largely within the context of the home (e.g., looking after children).
In many places in the Islamic world, women have naturally gravitated to more “popular” forms of religious devotion, such as saint worship and the practices associated with the tombs of such saints. This type of devotion, as some scholars have shown, has provided women with a different form of ritual life and in certain instances given them a sense of solidarity and independence from men.
13 Conservative Muslim groups—whose members, as a subset of religious fundamentalists, have been signified as male given the terms and concepts they use—have labeled such practices, perhaps not surprisingly, as “un-Islamic.”
14These traditional patterns are predicated on the notion of
purdah, a Persian concept that denotes the sharp separation between men and women. In Arabic, the word
hijab denotes this concept in that it can refer both to the actual veil, the physical segregation of the sexes, and to the requirement that women cover their bodies and conceal their form. Women in total seclusion, even though they are granted little or no restrictions within the house, must be escorted in public by a close male relative, be covered so that men may not see them, and must not mix with men who are not related to them unless they need to.
It is important to nuance the concept of purdah with several caveats. First, not all Muslim women exist in such a state of seclusion. Its practice often depends on geographic location in the Muslim world (for example, it is practiced in ultraconservative Saudi Arabia but not in more liberal countries such as Indonesia), on social status, and on other such factors. And as Islam finds a place for itself in the modern world, especially in the multicultural and multiethnic West, Muslim families are often caught between cultures and generations, with traditional parents trying to enforce their religious and cultural values on children brought up in an environment with a different ethos. These intrafamilial and intercultural tensions can usually be negotiated, but they occasionally cannot, and in such case we sometimes hear of violence committed against women in which a male relative (usually a father or brother) harms a woman who refuses to obey him and in this way is perceived to threaten the family’s good name. This violence is usually directed against women for being immodest according to conservative tenets—desiring to break off an arranged marriage, seeking a divorce, committing adultery, or even being sexually assaulted. Although such crimes against women—in their most extreme form they are called “honor killings”—tend to be more common in the Islamic world, they do happen in places not in the Islamic world, such as America, as well. The United Nations Population Fund estimates the annual worldwide total of honor-killing victims at five thousand (although it is probably much higher).
15Another aspect of the debate regarding seclusion is whether it is Islamic or cultural in origin. One commentator aptly concludes,
As is frequently the case, this is as much a matter of definitions of words as anything else. The total veiling of women—taken as a way of implementing a “moveable seclusion”—is not stated as a requirement in the Quran and, on that basis, is often suggested to be simply a cultural trait and not part of Islam. Such is true only, however, if attention is paid to the outer form clothing alone. Veiling is, in fact, the logical (although, strictly speaking, perhaps not necessary) outgrowth of various Quranic statements taken to their limits.
16
Finally, it must be remembered that women’s status is currently in flux. As economic, demographic, and sociological conditions change, it is often no longer viable to have only males working outside the home and women, indeed sometimes very well-educated women, confined to the house. Such changes will inevitably have repercussions on the traditional status of women as homemakers and mothers as they increasingly enter the workforce.
By Islamic law, women occupy a lesser position than men. The testimony of two women, for example, is equivalent to that of one man (Quran 2:282), and the inheritance that a woman can receive is less than what men can receive (4:11). Whereas a man can divorce his wife for any reason, a woman can instigate divorce only for specific reasons. And whereas men can remarry immediately after divorce or a spouse’s death, a woman must wait a prescribed period to see if she is pregnant, thereby establishing the child’s biological lineage. A Muslim man can in theory marry a woman from another monotheistic religion; a Muslim woman, however, can marry only another Muslim (5:6).
17 Whereas a Muslim man, again in theory, can have up to four wives at the same time, a Muslim woman can have only one husband. Finally, sexual relations are at the man’s command: “Go apart from women during the monthly course, and do not approach them until they are clean. When they have cleansed themselves, then come unto them as God has commanded you. Truly God loves those who repent, and He loves those who cleanse themselves. Your women are a tillage for you; so come unto your tillage as you wish, and forward for your souls; and fear God, and know that you shall meet Him. Give thou good tidings to the believers” (2:223–224).
Fundamentalist constructions of women—whether of the Muslim or non-Muslim variety—are based on the notion that men and women are equal, but that they need to occupy different spheres. Men, according to this model, support the family financially, and women, as mothers and wives, provide emotional well-being. Support for such a position is usually marshaled from the religious scriptures, which are appealed to as a reflection of the natural order—even though, as pointed out earlier, they were written by men most likely in order to legitimate their social, religious, and legal superiority—and as a way to separate further the sexes from each other. This separation often translates into a dynamic wherein women are considered both powerful and weak, to be feared and to be dominated at one and the same time.
The experience of Muslim women in fundamentalist or Islamist states is certainly not monolithic. At the most extreme end was Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, in which women were forced to wear the
burka in public, were forbidden from working and being educated after the age of eight, and were faced with public flogging and execution for violations of Taliban laws.
18 At another spot much farther along the continuum is Iran, where there are female legislators in the Parliament and roughly 60 percent of university students are women, but where they are still forced to wear the veil.
Saudi Arabia, as noted in
chapter 10, is the epicenter of the conservative Wahhabi (Salafi) movement. Women there, regardless of age, are required to have a male guardian in public. They can neither vote nor be elected to high positions in the government. Moreover, it is the only country in the world that prohibits women from driving. In 2011, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report ranked Saudi Arabia 131st out of 135 countries for gender parity, and it was the only country to score a zero in the category of political empowerment for women.
19It is important to be aware that patriarchy is certainly not confined solely to Islam. Western feminists, largely secular, have traditionally been interested in trying to show that men in all places throughout history have sought to control and oppress women, often using religion to legitimate their ambitions and power. Such feminists seek the liberation of women from the oppressive practices of religion and are often highly critical of all religious practices and beliefs. Mary Daly, one of the pioneers of feminist critiques of religion in general, was extremely critical of the Hindu practice of suttee, in which a widow immolates herself on her dead spouse’s funeral pyre, but was criticized for projecting “Western” feminist ideas onto a practice and a culture about which, it was claimed, she knew relatively little.
A more recent generation of feminists, in a backlash against work like Daly’s, are increasingly critical of what they perceive to be an imperialist mind-set that assumes superiority over non-Westerners or non-Europeans or “people of color.” Using the rhetoric of postcolonial criticism, they point to the hubris of Western academics who are critical of religious and cultural practices of which they are largely ignorant, thereby further replicating colonialist critiques. Joan Wallach Scott, for example, argues that European attempts to ban the veil are racist, discriminatory, and intolerant of Muslim immigrants primarily from North Africa and thus are part of Europe’s inability to integrate its former colonial subjects.
20 Other feminist scholars, such as Uma Narayan, have argued, however, that this new form of political correctness is based on the fear of being labeled a colonialist but in the end further silences criticism of misogynist cultural and religious practices.
21Largely in response to the secular tendencies of feminism, various religions have produced their own feminist theologies. One of the past issues with feminist critiques of religion was that the patriarchal structure of religion was presented as so monolithic that women’s rights and their practice of religion became incompatible with each other. Feminist theologians, by contrast, seek to work within their religious systems to exact change in terms of creating new traditions, practices, interpretation of scriptures, and theologies. The goals of feminist theology include increasing the role of women among the clergy and religious authorities, reinterpreting male-dominated imagery and language about the deity or deities, determining women’s place in relation to career and motherhood, and studying images of women in the religion’s sacred texts. Within this context, Islamic feminism is concerned largely with the role of women in Islam and seeks the full equality of all Muslims, regardless of gender, in public and private life. Islamic feminists advocate both women’s rights and a gender equality that they perceive to be grounded within an Islamic framework, but they recognize that they have been influenced by secular and Western feminist discourses and understand the role of Islamic feminism as part of an integrated global feminist movement. This position frequently leads conservative critics to label such movements as “Western” or “un-Islamic,” thereby easily condemning and dismissing them.
Islamic feminists often highlight what they see as deeply rooted teachings of equality in the Quran and seek to question the patriarchal interpretation of later Islamic teaching by returning to the Quran and the hadith in order to create a more equal and just society. Many of these feminists are opposed to the veil and are frequently supportive of initiatives to ban the veil (for example, in France and Tunisia). Many are also in favor of reforming aspects of sharia dealing with personal and family law, especially as concerns polygyny, divorce, custody of children, maintenance, and marital property.
In places where Muslims form minorities (e.g., Europe, United States, Canada), many Islamic feminists argue that the sharia should not just be reformed to take the rights of women into consideration, but rejected completely.
22 Muslim women, they argue, should instead seek redress from the secular laws and courts of the countries concerned.
RIFFAT HASSAN
Riffat Hassan (b. 1943) was born in Lahore, Pakistan. She went on to receive a doctorate in philosophy in 1968 from Durham University in Great Britain with a dissertation on the thought of Muhammad Iqbal. After returning to Pakistan to teach, she immigrated to the United States in 1972. She is currently professor emerita in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
For Hassan, employing a trope that we have seen frequently in this chapter, the oppression of women in Muslim societies is not a religious issue, but a cultural one. If and when the Quran is properly understood, it becomes clear that it and the religion that flows from it sanctions freedom, not oppression:
Given the centrality of the Quran to the lives of the majority of the more than one billion Muslims of the world, the critical question is: What, if anything, does the Quran say about human rights? I believe that the Qur’an is the
Magna Carta of human rights and that a large part of its concern is to free human beings from the bondage of traditionalism, authoritarianism (religious, political, economic, or any other), tribalism, racism, sexism, slavery or anything else that prohibits or inhibits human beings from actualizing the Quranic vision of human destiny embodied in the classic proclamation: “
Towards Allah is thy limit.”
23
Hassan contends that the Quran, instead of being rejected as the product of male elites, ought to be interpreted openly and pluralistically. It is a document that cannot be co-opted to sanction violations of human rights or other injustices because it is the word of God and as such (as the Mutazilites argued [
chapter 7]) cannot be unjust.
In 1999, Hassan founded the International Network for the Rights of Female Victims of Violence in Pakistan,
24 a foundation that seeks to address the problem of honor killings. She argues that such killings are a distortion of Islam and that, in terms of theology, women should be seen as the equal of men because, as the Quran says, Adam and Eve and therefore men and women were created at the same time.
SHIRIN EBADI
Shirin Ebadi (b. 1947) was born in Hamadan, Iran, but shortly after birth her family moved to Tehran. In 1965, she entered the faculty of law at the University of Tehran and in 1969 passed the qualification exams to become a judge. In 1975, she became the first woman in Iran to preside over a legislative court. Following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, conservative elements decided that Islam did not allow women to become judges, so Ebadi was demoted to a secretarial position at the court where she had previously presided. She and other female judges protested and were assigned to the slightly higher position of “legal experts.”
After taking early retirement, Ebadi began to write of the human rights struggle in Iran and in 1990 returned to public life as a human rights lawyer, defending political dissidents and women and children in physical abuse cases. She has been instrumental in the foundation of numerous organizations in Iran defending human rights, most notably the Center for the Defense of Human Rights. She writes in her memoir, for example, that “in the last 23 years, from the day I was stripped of my judgeship to the years of doing battle in the revolutionary courts of Tehran, I had repeated one refrain: an interpretation of Islam that is in harmony with equality and democracy is an authentic expression of faith. It is not religion that binds women, but the selective dictates of those who wish them cloistered. That belief, along with the conviction that change in Iran must come peacefully and from within, has underpinned my work.”
25In 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for her efforts for democracy and human rights. She has focused especially on the struggle for the rights of women and children.”
26 She was the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to receive the prize. The Iranian authorities allegedly confiscated her award, but the government has denied the charge, although it did criticize her for not wearing a veil when she accepted the award and in public communications inside Iran denigrated the award as little more than a political gesture by a pro-Western institution.
In recent years, Ebadi has lived in exile owing to the persecution of Iranian citizens who are critical of the government.
AMINA WADUD
Amina Wadud (b. 1952) is an African American convert to Islam. Born Mary Teasley in Bethesda, Maryland, Wadud was until recently a professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Although Wadud has written much on the role of gender in Islam, she is perhaps most famous for an event that took place on March 18, 2005. On that day, she took on the role of imam and led a Friday prayer that included more than one hundred male and female Muslims. The event was sponsored by the now largely defunct Progressive Muslim Union and was heavily covered by international media. It also took place at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, the seat of the Episcopal bishop of New York, because three mosques had refused to host the service, and another venue withdrew its acceptance of the event after a bomb threat.
At issue was a woman functioning as an imam, something that broke with the tradition of having only male imams. Her detractors accused her of shirk (associating herself with God), thus of being un-Islamic. Her supporters argued that she did not go against Islamic legal teaching, only cultural custom. Although Wadud received death threats for her actions, she has subsequently functioned as a prayer leader at other congregational prayers and speaks internationally on issues related to Islam and gender.
This chapter has presented something of the complex intersection between Islam, women, and gender roles. It is perhaps not surprising that the three individuals examined at the end of this chapter now live outside the Islamic world. In the Islamic feminist desire to reform the religion, we witness the appeal to a perceived pristine Islam in evidence at the time of Muhammad and enshrined in a pure Quran untampered with by subsequent male interpretations that sought to exclude women. Whether this vision is accurate or not is impossible to determine. However, what is certain is that the appeals to an egalitarian Islam that promotes gender equality and human rights is an important part of constructing what some consider to be an authentic Muslim identity in the modern world.
NOTES
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
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