|
| |
Women and the Islamic State
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
David Waines |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The traditional interpretation of Islamic religious law (the shari'ah) holds that men are to be in charge and women are to be obedient. But, for some Muslims, women and men are equal but different, and women are certainly not inferior. In this extract from his Introduction to Islam, David Waines assesses feminist thought in contemporary Islam. |
 hange at the best of times is an uneven and bumpy road. As a result, the application of Muslim family law today varies enormously throughout the Islamic world. Turkey, for example, abolished the shari'ah and replaced the religious courts and family law with secular European equivalents. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has retained both the religious courts and the law. Pakistan, ostensibly created as an Islamic state, has until now gone some way along the secular path, away from strictly traditional religious norms. |
The family and women's role in it have not only been affected in recent decades by changes in laws of personal status. Broader structural changes affecting all Muslim societies have played a major part. Industrialization, technological development, and rapid urbanization in societies which until recently were, and in many places still are, rural and agriculturally based are but a few of the interrelated variables in the disruptive transformation all Third World countries have experienced since the end of the Second World War. Modernization, however, is a double-edged sword. Development schemes can produce unforeseen and contradictory results, affecting women's position for good and ill. State-introduced health programs, for example, lowered the rates of maternal and infant mortality and extended life expectancy. These trends, however, contributed to marked population growth, which increased the burden of childrearing, notably among women of the poorer rural or urban classes, where the use of contraception is badly understood or deemed socially unacceptable. State-promoted mass-education programs have addressed the problem of widespread illiteracy among both men and women; women, however, have yet to benefit from a basic education to the same degree as men. Education among a minority of females from the more privileged classes has presented them with a greater range of alternatives in their lives and an altered perception of their roles. Particularly in urban areas, women tend to seek higher levels of education; they therefore marry at a later age and have fewer children; they may also seek employment outside the home giving them a degree of financial independence and hence greater freedom, ultimately, in making decisions in the home. |
Against patriarchy
Over time, changes in society positively affecting the position of women have slowly begun to undermine the structures of classical patriarchal society. Historically, a belt of classical patriarchal societies extended from North Africa through the Middle East to India and China, thus embracing the religious cultures of Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islam. In these societies descent, property, and residence are governed through the male line, which has resulted in various traditional systems of control and subordination of women. This is most evident in urban settings, where women were secluded in the private sphere of the home whereas men dominated the public sphere of the market and government. In rural and nomadic settings, the separation of the private and public domains was less important, although male control of women was exercised in other ways. In the post-independence era of Muslim states, as women have become more visible by their participation in most facets of the public life of cities, the traditional mechanisms of male domination can be assumed to be endangered by the pressures of change in modern society. |
It is nonetheless true that elsewhere patriarchal structures and values have been modernized in "neopatriarchal" forms, and male domination of the family and state remains firmly entrenched. The neopatriarchal state, using Islam as an ideology, has reintroduced restrictions by enforcing aspects of Muslim family law. Such measures have already taken place in the 1970s and 1980s, for example in the Sudan, Algeria, and Egypt. These moves to "Islamize" family law have been partly in response to pressure and criticism from conservative and radical quarters, and partly out of a search for renewed legitimacy by the regimes concerned. |
From the experience of transformation of Muslim societies in the modern world, an apparently contradictory phenomenon can be detected where women's strategies for coping with change are concerned. On the one hand there are secular, liberal feminists who consistently support greater opportunities for women. They reject the call of radical groups to mold society according to the norms of the shari'ah. Religious laws, they argue, run against the spirit and the letter of the United Nations Convention, which supports the elimination of discrimination against women in whatever form it may take. For them, polygyny, seclusion in the home, the husband's privileged right of divorce, and so on are all examples of discrimination to be done away with for good. |
On the other hand, women play an important role in the same radical Muslim movements which secular feminists condemn. For these groups and their female activists, the question of women's rights is irrelevant, for Islam established such rights centuries before they were achieved in Western societies. Women have rights equal to those of men, and, although the details vary from one group to another, the basis of the argument lies in the traditional interpretation of scripture, Men are in charge of women, because Allah has endowed the one with more, and because they spend of their property for their support. Therefore the righteous women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah has guarded (4:34). According to many, women have the right to education, to religious instruction, to honor and respect, to the vote, and to employment. There are, however, restrictions sanctioned by the religious law for the welfare and stability of society as a whole. A woman can be neither a political leader nor a judge; she must only appear in public modestly dressed, and her natural and sacred task is to keep the household smoothly functioning and to raise and instruct her children to be good Muslims. Men, for their part, must shoulder the burden of providing for the family in material ways. Liberation for a woman does not mean being like a male, or taking up male tasks, but rather being herself and fulfilling the destiny Allah created for her. |
Muslim feminism
To the Muslim "feminist," the secular "feminist" has betrayed her culture and religion and sold out to an alien West; the secularized woman represents a threat to the stability of the traditional order within the family. From the Muslim feminist perspective, therefore, far from being inferior to men, women are equal but different physiologically and psychologically. Men and women thus perform different but necessarily complementary roles. Radicals, however, do justify certain inequalities such as polygyny on dubious scriptural grounds (as Muslim reformers had already recognized), whereas in fact such a practice properly belongs to the value system of the classical patriarchies as a means of controlling women. The radical Muslim feminist accepts patriarchal norms as genuinely religious because of the sense of honor and security she derives from her role within the family. She shares with the majority of women in her own society what is seen as a long-term benefit of her early subordination to the control of a father or brother. A concise description of a woman's place in this context is given by Kandiyoti, who says, |
The cyclical nature of women's power and their anticipation of inheriting the authority of senior women encourages a thorough internalization of this form of patriarchy by the women themselves. Subordination to men is offset by the control older women have over younger women. Women have access to the only type of labour power they can control, and to old-age security, however, through their married sons. Since sons are a woman's most critical resource, ensuring their lifelong loyalty is an enduring preoccupation. (Deniz Kandiyoti, "Islam and patriarchy: a comparative perspective," in N. Keddie and B. Baron (eds), Women in Middle Eastern History, 1991, pp. 32-33.) |
Confronted with the threat of Western institutions and values and the unpredictable consequences of secular change, the radical opts to counter uncertainty by seeking security in the familiar, made the more valuable when it is believed to be sanctioned by a sacred source. |
Another strategy of contemporary women is to work for change within Islam by engaging in the reinterpretation of the Qur'an and prophetic sunnah, or by creating an Islamic women's history. Theirs is an exercise in demystification of the Islamic tradition to rescue it from the exclusively male enterprise it has been over the centuries. This strategy utterly rejects the misogynous notions about women such as those expressed by the popular Egyptian writer 'Abbas Mahmud al-'Aqqad, who, in Woman in the Qur'an (1959), said, "Men are the sole source of every accepted definition of good conduct whether for men or women. Woman has never been a true source of anything to do with ethics or good character even though she brings up the children. The guidelines are provided by the male" (cited in Y. Y. Haddad, Contemporary Islam and the Challenge of History, 1982, p. 63). Even a true radical Muslim feminist would reject such a crude estimate of her worth. The best-known champion of this approach is possibly the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi, who, in her study Women and Islam, observed that when completing the work she had come to understand that |
if women's rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the Koran nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite. The elite faction is trying to convince us that their egoistic, highly subjective and mediocre view of culture and society has a sacred basis ... Islam was not sent from heaven to foster egoism and mediocrity. (Fatima Mernissi, Women and Islam, 1991, p. ix.) |
Taken together, the female secular, radical, and scholarly groups (and, indeed, their male counterparts) do not comprise a majority of their own gender in Muslim societies, although each may claim to address the interests of the whole. Doubtless all will contribute to the future shape of their societies. For the moment, secularists have the upper hand, since they hold the reins of power in the state. Radicals, however, appear to articulate the concerns of the masses more directly. The fate of scholars, as always, will be determined by the degree of freedom they have to express their views. Given the long transition upon which the ummah has embarked over the past two centuries, the future configuration of any given society on a spectrum of modern-secular to modern-Muslim cannot be foretold. |
|
| |
