Islam, Irigaray, and the Retrieval of Gender Islam, Irigaray,and the Retrieval of GenderBy: Abdal HakimMurad The Prophet said that women totally dominate men of intellect and possessors of hearts. But ignorant men dominate women, for they are shackled by an animal ferocity. They have no kindness, gentleness or love, since animality dominates their nature. Love and kindness are human attributes; anger and sensuality belong to the animals. She is the radiance of God, she is not your beloved. She is a creator - you could say that she is not created. - - Jalal al-Din Rumi The 1969 female eunuch was nothing but womb. The 1997 female eunuch has no womb. - Germaine GreerCan men any longer write about women? Will ourdiscourse always fallaciously subjectivise the male, as the Lacanian digit to the femininezero? Andrea Dworkin and many others are insistent here. And yet the theologian mustoppose such a closure no less stridently. No-one should claim a monological right toinstruct the other sex concerning moral thought and conduct. Moreover, and no lessseriously, we must object to that anti-dialogical aspect of the prevailing academicfeminism which, supported by biometric footnotes, proposes that men have nothing to sayhere because truly 'female thought' is on every level categorically different from thethought of males. On this view, sexual difference not only creates a predisposition to beinterested in certain kinds of issues, but fundamentally affects every way in which wehandle concepts. Knowledges are sexualised, we are told; 'the very way in which we decidewhat is true and false is a function of sexual difference.'One reaction against this view is voiced in detailby Jean Curthoys in her new book Feminist Amnesia. She applies a kind ofFriedanite fundamentalism, lamenting the recent decline of 60s and 70s radical feministtheory which was grounded in assurances of identity between the sexes rather than mereequality. Conventional academic feminism today, she avers, draws on recent biology toposit a total epistemic discontinuity between male and female, so that all scholarship,and all conclusions about reality, are bifurcated accordingly, excluding all possibilityof dialogue across the gender abyss. This aporetic cessation, she insists, is intolerable.Clearly there is force to her complaint. But equally clearly, both she and her antagonistsgo too far. Biologists and philosophers now converge on a median position which suggeststhat men and women do indeed think differently, but not so differently that they can formno judgement on each other's conclusions. It is not just the practical implications whichmake this inference inescapable (could we tolerate, for instance, separate encyclopediasfor each sex?). More seriously, the claim to aporia is to be rejected as forming part of arecent feminist turn away from rationality itself as an oppressive product and tool of'male linearity'. On this view, women's discourse, sceptical about attempts to deduce anyintrinsically true facts about reality, is hence pre-eminently responsive to the projectof postmodernism, while men languish amid the rationalising games of late modernity. Thisthesis of male backwardness is intriguing and has appealed to many; yet remains withoutpersuasive proof. As the Maturidis insist, rationality and morality are observed by themind, not merely constructed by it. Is this scruple a 'linear male objectification'?Surely it is just objectification: to claim that women have a categorically more indirect,empathetic, spontaneous approach to reality may be tantamount to affirming that they areless capable of sustained argument based on fact. Such a conclusion is far from universalamong feminists, converging as it does with a certain masculine stereotype. Of course, itis almost certainly true, as Professor Carol Gilligan has argued, that ethical responsesdiffer markedly between the sexes. For her, women 'make moral decisions in a framework ofrelationships more than in a framework of rights'. Women's 'moral processing iscontextually oriented'. This is uncontroversial. But value judgements amid the hurly-burlyof lived reality are one thing; large generalisations about the nature of the world arequite another. And in the latter field, neither revelation nor reason persuade us that thetwo styles of argument, the male and female, cannot overlap. What follows, therefore, is not an androcentric apologia, although a deliberate or evenunwilled male discourse is inescapable and is not inherently improper. It claims to befactual, not a self-authenticating view from within a particular 'gendered' language-game.A second preliminary point raises the entire problem of gendered approaches tospirituality. The British religious philosopher John Hick, in a recent moment offeministic reflection, proposed that 'because of the effects upon them of patriarchalcultures, many women have 'weak' egos, suffer from an ingrained inferiority complex, andare tempted to diffusion and triviality.' He thus suggests that women experience greaterdifficulties in becoming saints because the spiritual struggle can only be undertaken by acoherent, confident personality. On this view, women must pass through two stages inachieving sainthood, while men require only one. A little reflection will reveal that this position suffers from two sharp problems. For astart, it deploys an unexamined stereotype of traditional women as shallow and easilydistracted; whereas any observation of women's attendence at, say, salat, or aTurkish mevlud, suggests that women's devotional behaviour tends to be notpalpably less sober, or focussed or directed than that of men. Often it is women ratherthen men who retain a more serious faith under secularising conditions; although this mayflower in the privacy of the home, rather than under public scrutiny in the mosque.Secondly, it implies that spiritual growth is a primarily mechanical, discursive procedurewhereby the will overcomes passion, leading to the detachment from the world which is theprecondition for sainthood. This begs some fundamental questions about the spiritual life;Hick's image may hold good for some forms of Christianity and Hinduism, but cannot beapplied to many other varieties of religious development, where the conscious, calculatingwill is deliberately pushed into the background. Specifically, what is characteristicallymale about love-based mysticism? The insistence that the mind is a prison, and thatemotion and spontaneous love of God, triggered by relatively informal practices of thedhikr type, is a commonplace even of 'male' spirituality. Here, for instance, is a poem byRumi: 'In the screaming gale of Love, the intellect is a gnat. How can intellects find space to wander there?'And again: 'Do not remain a man of intellect among the lovers, especially if you love that sweet-faced Beloved. May the men of intellect stay far from the lovers, may the smell of dung stay far from the east wind! If a man of intellect should enter, tell him the way is blocked, but if a lover should come, extend him a hundred welcomes! By the time intellect has deliberated and reflected, love has flown to the seventh heaven. By the time intellect has found a camel for the hajj, love has circled the Ka'ba. Love has come and covered my mouth. It says: 'Throw away your poetry, and come to the stars!''Perhaps a modern Protestant theologian will haveproblems with this; but most traditional religions assume that the way to God is throughthe heart, not the mind. So Hick's idea that 'patriarchy' slams the door to God in theface of traditional women simply because they are (supposedly) less cerebral than men,seems distinctly unpersuasive. He is simply a victim of his own cultural anddenominational limitations.With these preliminary points in mind, let us nowmove on to the core issue. Modern women writers on religion, such as Rosemary Ruether,insist that all talk of gender in religions has to start in the beginning, with thearchetypes. What do images of God tell us about the place of men and women in the world? In her book Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether objects to ways in which Christianmetaphors about God's maleness are taken literally. For her, the Decalogue's prohibitionof idolatry 'must be extended to verbal pictures. When the word Father is taken literallyto mean that God is male and not female, represented by males and not females, then thisword becomes idolatrous.' She acknowledges that Christian doctrine affirms that alllanguage about God is analogous. Nonetheless the use of male terms for the UltimateReality, and the characteristically Christian emphasis on the personhood of God, hasregularly resulted in this kind of idolatry. Her solution is to urge the use of inclusivelanguage, so that God is referred to from time to time as the 'Goddess', or as 'She'.Ruether even objects to the idea of God as parent, suggesting, no doubt absurdly, thatthis encourages what she calls a virtue of spiritual infantilism which makes 'autonomy andassertion of free will a sin.' Despite her promethean confidence in her ability to revise tradition, Ruether has beenfamously outstripped by Mary Daly, a former Catholic theologian who now, like severalinfluential feminists, describes herself as a 'witch'. Her book Beyond God the Fatherrejects even the metaphorical possibilities of traditional language. To call God Father,she insists, is to call fathers God. The Trinity is thus revealed as 'an eternal malehomosexual orgy'. As the engendering matrix of the world, God is, in fact,paradigmatically female. And the world itself, as mirror of heaven, 'bears fruit', and ishence female also. The male principle is the alien force, the nexus of disruption,aggression, and sin. Daly seems to approach the almost dualistic notion that God isfemale, while the 'horned' devil is male. This gendered Manicheanism may seem a bizarreinversion of Augustine's androcentrism, but her books are hugely influential, selling inhundreds of thousands of copies. Not every figuring of the divine is androcentric, of course. Luce Irigaray observes thatit is in the West that 'the gender of God, the guardian of every subject and discourse, isalways paternal and masculine'. Even Orthodoxy is more aporetic in its metaphoricalgendering of the sacred. The paintings of El Greco, as they reflect his trajectory fromthe timeless icon-painting of his native Crete, through his studies in Venice underTintoretto, to the Toledo of the muscular Counter-Reformation, reveal a process ofincreasing concretisation, with growing attention to perspective, expression, andsharpness of form. His Christ, in his late, 'Catholic' paintings, is more human thandivine; and hence more humanly and authentically male. In this respect, perhaps more than in any other way, ours is not a Western tradition. Islamic theology confronts us with the spectacular absence of a gendered Godhead. Atheology which reveals the divine through incarnation in a body also locates it in agender, and inescapably passes judgement on the other sex. A theology which locates it ina book makes no judgement about gender; since books are unsexed. The divine remainsdivine, that is, genderless, even when expressed in a fully saving way on earth. The source of this teaching is unproblematic for believers. Secular historians might seeit differently, as confirmation that early Islam was not covenantally-defined.Andromorphic views of the divine were necessary to Judaism, which was communallyconstituted in opposition to neighbouring goddess-worship, whence the imagery of Israel as'God's bride'. This continued in the Christian church, the 'New Israel', the 'bride ofChrist', as the Church Fathers waged war on the goddess cults of late antiquity, and also,increasingly, on 'woman' herself as the paradigm of responsibility for the Fall. ButIslam's community of believers never saw itself as a feminine entity, despite theinteresting matronal resonances of the term umma. The Islamic understanding ofsalvation history did not require that Allah should be constructed as male. From a theologian's standpoint it might be said that Islam averts the difficultyidentified by Ruether through its emphasis on the divine transcendence (tanzih).The same 'desertlike' abstract difference of the Muslim God which draws reproach fromChristian commentators also allows a gender-neutral image of the divine. Allah is notneuter or androgynous, but is simply above gender. Even Judaism, which generally has fewerproblems in this area than has Christianity, does not go this far. In the EighteenBenedictions said by pious Jews every morning and evening, we find the words: 'Cause us toreturn, O our Father, to thy Law,' while in Deuteronomy 8.6, we read: 'As a mandisciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you.' Such references to God as Father are less common in the Old Testament than the New, butthey are still abundant, and are thorns in the path of gender-sensitive liberaltheologians. When we turn to the Qur'an, we find an image of Godhead apophatically stripped ofmetaphor. God is simply Allah, the God; never Father. The divine is referred to by themasculine pronoun: Allah is He (huwa); but the grammarians and exegetes concurthat this is not even allegoric: Arabic has no neuter, and the use of the masculine isnormal in Arabic for genderless nouns. No male preponderance is implied, any more thanfeminity is implied by the grammatically female gender of neuter plurals. The modern Jordanian theologian Hasan al-Saqqaf emphasises the point that Muslim theologyhas consistently made down the ages: God is not gendered, really or metaphorically. TheQur'an continues Biblical assumptions on many levels, but here there is a strikingdiscontinuity. The imaging of God has been shifted into a new and bipolar register, thatof the Ninety-Nine Names. Muslim women who have reflected on the gender issue have seized, I think with good reason,on this striking point. For instance, one Muslim woman writer, Sartaz Aziz, writes: I am deeply grateful that my first ideas of God were formed by Islam because I was able to think of the Highest Power as one completely without sex or race, and thus completely unpatriarchal . . . We begin with the idea of a deity who is completely above sexual identity, and thus completely outside the value system created by patriarchy.This passage is cited by the modern Catholic writerMaura O'Neill, who writes on women's issues in dialogue, and who rightly concludes:'Muslims do not use a masculine God as either a conscious or unconscious tool in theconstruction of gender roles.'This does not mean that gender is absent from Muslimmetaphysics. The kalam scholars, as good transcendentalists, banished it from thenon-physical world. But the mystics, as immanentists, read it into almost everything. Wemight say that while in Christianity, relationality is in the triune Godhead, and isexplicitly male, in Islam, relationality is absent from the Godhead but exuberantly existsin the Names. To use Kant's terms, the noumenal God is neutral, whereas the phenomenal Godis manifested in not one but two genders. The two leading modern scholars of thistradition in Islamic thought are Izutsu and Murata, who have both noted the parallelsbetween Sufism's dynamic cosmology and the Taoist world view: each sees existence as adynamic interplay of opposites, which ultimately resolve to the One. The Sufi metaphysicians were drawing on a longstanding distinction between the DivineNames that were called Names of Majesty (jalal), and the Names of Beauty (jamal).The Names of Majesty included Allah as Powerful (al-Qawi), Overwhelming (al-Jabbar),Judge (al-Hakam); and these were seen as pre-eminently masculine. Names of Beautyincluded the All-Compassionate (al-Rahman), the Mild (al-Halim), theLoving-kind (al-Wadud), and so on: seen as archetypally feminine. The crux isthat neither set could be seen as pre-eminent, for all were equally Names of God. In fact,by far the most conspicuous of the Divine Names in the Qur'an is al-Rahman, theAll-Compassionate. And the explictly feminine resonances of this name were remarked uponby the Prophet (s.A.w.) himself, who taught that rahma, loving compassion, is anattribute derived from the word rahim, meaning a womb. (Bukhari, Adab, 13)The cosmic matrix from which differentiated being is fashioned is thus, as in allprimordial systems, explicitly feminine; although Allah 'an sich' remains outsidequalification by gender or by any other property. Further confirmation for this is supplied in a famous hadith, preserved for us byal-Bukhari, which describes how during the Muslim conquest of Mecca a woman was runningabout in the hot sun, searching for her child. She found him, and clutched him to herbreast, saying, 'My son, my son!' The Prophet's Companions saw this, and wept. The Prophetwas delighted to see their rahma, and said, 'Do you wonder at thiswoman's rahma for her child? By Him in Whose hand is my soul, on the Day ofJudgement, God shall show more rahma towards His believing servant than thiswoman has shown to her son.' (Bukhari, Adab, 18) And again: 'On the day that He created the heavens and the earth, God created ahundred rahmas, each of which is as great as the space which lies between heavenand earth. And He sent one rahma down to earth, by which a mother has rahmafor her child.' (Muslim, Tawba, 21) Drawing on this explicit identification of rahma with the 'maternal' aspect ofthe phenomenal divine, the developed tradition of Sufism habitually identifies God'sentire creative aspect as 'feminine', and as merciful. Creation itself is the nafasal-Rahman, the Breath of the All-Compassionate. Here the Ash'arite occasionalismwhich insists on preserving the divine omnipotence by denying secondary causation isshifted into a mystical, matronal register, where the world of emanation is gendered bythe sheer fact of its engendering. 'We have created everything in pairs,'says the Qur'an. This 'female' aspect of God allowed most of the great mystical poets to refer to God as Layla- the celestial beloved - the Arabic name Layla actually means 'night'. Laylais the veiled, darkly-unknown God who brings forth life, and whose beauty once revealeddazzles the lover. In one branch of this tradition, the poets use frankly erotic languageto convey the rapture of the spiritual wayfarer as he lifts the veil - a metaphor fordistraction and sin - to be annihilated in his Beloved. One thinks here of Christian bridal mysticism, but in reverse. St Teresa of Avila appearsto use sensual images to convey her union with Christ. But again, Christ, as God the Son,is male. In Islamic mysticism, the divine beloved is 'female'. The kalam hence abolishes gender; spirituality deploys it exuberantly asmetaphor, thereby displaying an aspect of the distinction between 'iman' and 'ihsan'.The third component of the ternary laid down by the Hadith of Gabriel, 'islam', comprisingthe outward forms of religion, also recognises and affirms gender as a fundamental qualityof existence, and this finds expression in many provisions of Islamic law and the norms ofMuslim life. The pattern of life decreed by Islam, which is the retrieval of the Great Covenant (mithaq),is primordial, and hence biophiliac and affirmative of the hormonal and genetic dimensionsof humanity. Body, mind and spirit are aspects of the same created phenomenon, and are allgendered through their interrelation. To the extent that the human creature lives inwholeness, that creature's spiritual essence is possessed of gender, whence themagnificent celebration of the genius of each sex which is so characteristic of Islam. TheProphet (s.A.w.) himself can only be fully understood in this light: his virilityindicates his wholeness and hence his holiness. His archetypal celebration of womanhood,his multiple wives, recalls the virility of Solomon or other Hebrew patriarchs, or even ofKrishna. Living life to the full, he embraced and utterly sacralised thedivinely-appointed rite of procreation. His khasa'is, the rules which theLawgiver fashioned for him alone, and which are listed by Suyuti in his al-Khasa'isal-Kubra, generally imposed upon him rigours from which his followers were exempt.The tahajjud prayer was obligatory for him, but only optional for other Muslims.He was entitled to fast for twenty-four hours, or for much longer periods (the so-calledContinuous Fast - sawm al-wisal); although ordinary believers were required tofast from dawn to dusk only. His khasa'is are for the most part austerities; andyet among them we find the inclusion of an expansive polygamy. Several of his wives wereelderly, it is true (Sawda, Umm Habiba, Maymuna), and their marriages may have beenstraightforward matters of compassion and political wisdom; but other wives were young. Byhis triumphant polygamy, the Blessed Prophet was indicating the end of the Christian waragainst the body, and rhetorically re-affirmed the sacramental value of sexuality that theHebrew prophets had proclaimed. Inseparable from this was his valour on the field of battle. His style of spiritualself-naughting linked to heroism has no European equivalent: it was not that of thecelibate Templars, or the Knights of Calatrava, but resonates instead with the warriorholiness of Krishna, or the bushido of medieval Japan. The samurai ethic combinesmeditative stillness, military excellence, and love for women in equal measure; it is aspectacular expression of maleness which is illuminative of this, to many Europeans, mostremote and ungraspable dimension of the Sunna. And this leads us towards a further question. Feminists point out that early Christiancelibacy was driven by a horror of the flesh, so that women were, in Tertullian's words,'the devil's gateway'. This could have no deep purchase in Islamic culture, with thehadith insisting that 'Marriage is my sunna, and whoever departs from my sunnais not of me;' a valorization of marriage which implicitly valorized functionalwomanhood in a way that the Church Fathers, with their preference for virginal perfection,had found problematic. It is true that a celibate advocacy developed among some second andthird generation Muslim ascetics also, with Abu Sulayman al-Darani declaring, 'Whoevermarries has inclined towards the world'. However, this kind of sentiment tended to beexpressed in the very early ascetical milieu, where the drive for celibacy, as Tor Andraehas shown, was the result of Christian monastic influence, and was later swept away by thetide of normative Sufism. In high medieval Islam the conjunction of holiness and celibacywas unimaginable, and few who aspired to God were unmarried: Ibn Taymiya was the rarest ofexceptions. This evolution of values again parallels the situation in early Christianity. Abitterly-fought scholarly argument debates whether the appearance of the first Christiansimproved or degraded the status of women, with Peter Brown and many feminists arguing thelatter view. Ben Witherington observes that it is the later New Testament material (Luke, Acts)that advocates an improved role for women and a departure from the rabbinical (and hencepost-prophetic) norms which shaped the attitudes of the first Christians. However, asJesus was a Jewish prophet, loyal to revelation, and in particular to its interpretationwithin a compassionate template, it is reasonable to assume that there existed genuinelypro-female possibilities in the early Jesus community that capsized under the weight ofpre-existent Hellenic misogyny which some authors of the Pauline epistles imported fromthe mystery religions, in the way that Foucault has shown in the second volume of his Historyof Sexuality. It may be said that an analogous corrosion befell Islamic social history. Critically,however, this happened to a much lesser extent, for a set of reasons which demand carefulattention. Firstly, the above-noted refusal of the scriptures to attribute male gender to the Godheaddeprived the tradition of an unarguable gynophobic foundation. The doctrine of the Namesas archetypes for all bipolarities in creation ruled out any possibly consequent idea thathumanity's retrieval of theomorphism must entail a shedding of gender in favour ofandrogyny. On the contrary, the retrieval of theomorphism is the retrieval of gender,fully understood. Secondly, the very word 'woman' had been for many Church Fathers a metonym forconcupiscence; and patristic Christianity's consistent preference for celibacy as acalling higher than marriage had entailed a particular attitude towards women. The modelwas, of course, Christ himself, as later figured and interpreted by the Church'simagination. Islam, by stark contrast, maintained a version of the primordial, and alsoSolomonic, polygamous, heroic model of Semitic prophethood. As Geoffrey Parrinder hasshown, sex-positive religions tend also to accord a higher status to the female principle;and Islam from its inception stressed that the presence of women's bodies and spirits wasin no way injurious to the spiritual life. The Prophet (s.A.w.) worshipped in his tinyroom for much of the night, and when he was descending into prostration he would nudgeaside the legs of his young wife Aisha, to make room. A far cry from the devotions of theSyrian monk, alone in his desert cell. Also built into the archetypal patterns of Islam is a characteristic amendation toexisting purity laws. Feminists have often identified these as a major sign andstrengthener of misogyny. They exist in branches of Christianity, as is shown by RussianOrthodox hesitations about the reception of the Eucharist by menstruating women. InJudaism they are very elaborate, so that the menstruating woman is only sexually availablefor half of every month. Special bathhouses are required for her purification. This reflects and responds to a very ancient, and very widely-observed taboo. In someprimitive societies, women are banished from their husband's house during this time; theGalla tribes of Ethiopia allocate special huts for menstruating women. Even today, thesignificant disruption to women's behavioural patterns is acknowledged in somelegislation: modern French law, for instance, even classifies extreme premenstrual tensionas a form of temporary insanity. Islam has preserved the memory of this ancient, and also Semitic hesitation, but in aninterestingly attenuated and non-judgemental form. So in sura 2 verse 220 we read: 'They will question you concerning the monthly course: Say, it is a hurt. So go apart from women during the monthly course and do not approach them until they are clean.'What this means is clarified in the sunna.A hadith reports that: 'A'isha was sleeping under one coverlet with God's Messenger, when suddenly she jumped up and left his side. The Messenger said to her, 'What is the matter? Are you losing blood?' She said, 'Yes.' He said: 'Wrap your waist-wrapper tightly about you, and come back to your sleeping-place.''There are echoes here of this primordial humanunease, but they are very reduced. The naturalism of Islam constantly insists thatholiness does not emerge from the suppression of human instincts, but from theiraffirmation through regulation, so that the natural rhythms of the body and the awe withwhich we regard them are not to be ignored, but need commemoration in religious ritual.Hence a woman is granted a suspension of formal prayer and fasting for several days inevery month. Some feminists see this as a diminution of female spirituality; Muslim femaletheologians regard it as a reverent acknowledgement; others, such as Ruqaiyyah Maqsoodinterpret it as a relief from religious duties at a difficult time. The dispensation iseasily deconstructed by either suspicious or benign hermeneutics, and resists totalinterpretation.What Muslims do stress is that Islam valorises womenby making the basic duties of the faith equally incumbent upon both sexes: the suspensionfor a few days each month is seen as a pragmatic and generous dispensation which does notvitiate this basic principle. The Five Pillars are hence gender-neutral. Similarly, Islamdoes not establish sacred spaces inaccessible to women. Women can and do enter the HolyKa'ba. The Inner Court of the Temple in Jerusalem before its demolition by the Romans wasout of bounds to women, who faced the death penalty if they penetrated it. Under Muslimauspices, it was thrown open to both sexes. Hence the Dome of the Rock, the goldenstructure which still symbolises the Celestial City, and which marks the terrestrial pointof the Mi'raj, is allocated on Fridays exclusively to women, so that men pray inthe nearby al-Aqsa mosque hall. Here, as elsewhere, the sexes are segregated duringcongregational prayers, and the reason given for this is again the pragmatic andunanswerable one that a conmingling of men and women during a form of worship whichentails a good deal of physical contact would readily lead to distraction. Women may penetrate the sacratum; but what of the ambivalent privilege of leadership? Whois the broker of God's saving word? If in Judaism, women could not approach the Torah,while in Christianity they found themselves excluded from administering the Eucharist,does the new dispensation of Islam restrain them analogously? Here Islam extends its feminizing of sacred spaces to its own epiphany of the Word whichresonates within them. For the Shari'a, the word made Book is open to female touch andcantillation. Symbolically, the custodianship of the first Qur'anic text was entrusted tothe Prophet's wife Hafsa, not to a man. Regarding collective celebration of the divine word, it is clear that there can be noIslamic equivalent to the debate over women's ordination, for the straightforward reasonthat Islam does not ordain anyone, whether male or female. Our recollection of theprimordial Alast and our affirmation of the Great Covenant have already conferred holyorders upon us all. They are valid to the extent of our recollection. The imam does not mediate; but the spiritual director may do so, by praying forthe disciple and offering techniques of dhikr. It is a manifestation of theinescapably anti-feminine harshness of modern pseudosalafite activism that the Sufi shaykhis for such activists a figure not to be revered, but to be abolished. Sufism, and severalother forms of Islamic initiatic spirituality, have frequently accommodated women in wayswhich purely exoteric forms of the religion have not: the Sufi shaykh, who exercises suchinfluence on the formation and guidance of the disciple, and is often a more significantpresence for the individual and for society than the person of the mosque imam, may be ofeither gender. The modern Lebanese saint Fatima al-Yashrutiyya is a conspicuous and deeplymoving example; but there are many others. Frequently in those Muslim societies where themosque has become a primarily male space, the tomb of a prophet or a saint supplies asacred place for women, responding to their affective spirituality which flourishes, asIrigaray would have it, in the embrace of closed circles rather than in straight lines.The importance of some of the tombs of the Prophets for Palestinian women has often beennoted in this regard. Pseudosalafism, with its nervousness about any public visibility forwomen, seeks to suppress such contexts, with the exception only of the tomb at Madina,which it construes not as paradigm but as exception. Nonetheless, the issue of a possible female imamate has been raised in several communitiesin recent years, although the evidence suggests that very few women aspire to thisambivalent position. The imam of a mosque can claim none of the mediatingauthority of a priest: he does not stand in loco divinis; but is mainly presentto mark time, to ensure that the worshippers' movements are co-ordinated, and to representthe unity of the community. While in some cultures he may have the added function of apastoral counsellor, this is not a canonical requirement. All four madhhabs ofSunni Islam affirm that the imam must be male if there are males in thecongregation. If there are only females, then many classical scholars permit the imamshipof females, and this is generally accepted nowadays. But women cannot lead men in prayer.There are in fact no Qur'anic or Hadith texts that explicitly lay this down: it is aproduct of the medieval consensus. Although those who reject the Four Schools, and attemptto derive the shari'a directly from the revelation, sometimes repudiate this consensus,only a few, such as Farid Esack, have proposed it seriously. In practice, women activistsin the Muslim world appear to have little concern for this, again, because of the absenceof inherent prestige and authority in the imamate. One can be a religious leader withoutbeing imam of a mosque, the example of prominent theologians such as Bintal-Shati' in modern Egypt, and a host of medieval predecessors such as Umm Hani, A'ishaal-Ba'uniyya, and Karima al-Marwaziyya, affording sufficient proof of this. The discussion so far has moved downwards through districts of metaphysics to touch onissues of shari'a. Theologically, as we have seen, Islam tends to assert the equality ofthe male and female principles, while in its practical social structures it establishes adistinction. To understand this paradox is to understand the essence of the Islamicphilosophy of gender, which constructs roles from below, not from above. Women's functions vary widely in the Muslim world and in Muslim history. In peasantcommunities, women work out of doors; in the desert, and among urban elites, womanhood ismore frequently celebrated in the home. Recurrently, however, the public space isrigorously desexualised, and this is represented by the quasi-monastic garb of men andwomen, where frequently the colour white is the colour of the male, while black,significantly the sign of interiority, of the Ka'ba and hence the celestial Layla,denotes femininity. In the private space of the home these signs are cast aside, and thehome becomes as colourful as the public space is austere and polarised. Modernity,refusing to recognise gender as sacred sign, and delighting in random erotic signalling,renders the public space 'domestic' by colouring it, and makes war on all remnants ofgender separation, crudely construed as judgemental. For Muslims, a significant development in the new feminism is the renewed desire forapartness. Contemplating the crisis of egalitarian social contracts, where the burden ofdivorce invariably bears most heavily upon women, Daly and many others advocate an almostinsurrectionist refusal of contact with the male, and the creation of 'women's spaces' ascitadels for the cultivation of a true sisterhood. This cannot be immediately useful toMuslims. Hermeneutics of suspicion directed against either sex are irreligious from theQur'anic perspective. God, as a sign, 'has created spouses for you, from your ownkind, that you may find peace in them; and He has set between you love and mercy.'(30:21) Nonetheless, the feminist demand for apartness should not be cast aside; it mayeven converge significantly with Islam's provision of it. In her Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray denounces the technologicalworkplace created by men, which 'brings about a sexuate levelling at a certain level,[and] neutralizes sexual differences'. To compete, women must assume the 'tunnel vision'of the achievement-oriented male, and hence relinquish aspects of their hormonally-codedessence for the sake of a public mercantile space which is biocidal, profiteering,anti-feminine, and now anti-gender. She also observes that 'the sexual liberations ofrecent times have not established a new ethics of sexuality', and that women have been theprime sufferers. But an insurrectionist feminist response 'often destroys the possibilityof constituting a shelter or a territory of one's own. How are we to construct this femaleshelter, this territory in difference?' The question is shared with Islam; but herresponse is disappointing, and surely futile. Like Levinas, she demands a revolution inlove, a 'fertility in social and cultural difference' rooted in reconciliation, a newlanguage of gesture, and valorization of the separate nature of femaleness by males. Given her pessimism about the mutability of the male temper, apparently reinforced by newmolecular genetic studies on gender difference, this looks like wishful thinking, andcannot provide more than part of the agenda for an authentic and affirming mutuality.However in her diagnosis we may locate the clue to the more moral and more spiritualsolution for which she clearly yearns. 'Our societies,' she notes, 'are built uponmen-among-themselves (l'entre-hommes). According to this order, women remaindispersed and exiled atoms.' But there is a rival cultural economy which cries out to beconsidered. Traditionally, the Islamic public space is constructed and subjectivised primarily by 'l'entre-hommes',the men in white. The women in black signal a kind of absence even when they are present,by assuming a respected guest status. But Islamic society, rooted in primordial andspecifically Shari'atic kinship patterns, emphatically refuses to reduce them to thestatus of 'dispersed and exiled atoms'. There is a parallel space of the entre-femmes, arealm of alternative meaning and fulfilment, where men are the guests, which intersects informal ways with the entre-hommes but which creates a sociality between women, aspace for the appreciation of nos semblables which is largely lacking amid the conditionsof modernity or postmodernity, and which is more profoundly human and feminine than theacademicised utopia of which Irigaray dreams. Irigaray commends the new institution of affidamento, current among some Italianfeminists, which seeks a withdrawal from the irreducibly male and abrasive public spaceinto nuclei of relaxed female sorority. For her, this is 'the token of another culturewhich preserves for us a possible and inhabitable future, a culture whose historical faceis as yet unknown to us'. She acknowledges that the power-struggles and generally negativeexperience of women's groups suggests that affidamento cells may not be able to merge tocreate a larger and stable women's solidarity apart from men. But the random intrusion ofwomen into the public space, and the consequent patterns of conflict, marginalisation, theneglect of children, and spiralling divorce, suggest that some form of localised, informalsorority may provide women with the matrix of identity which a fragmenting modernitydenies them. The Islamic entre-femmes has been explored by several anthropologists. ChantalLobato, in her studies of Afghan refugee women, angrily rejects Western stereotypes,praising the warmth and sisterly richness of these women's lives. As she records, suchwomen's spaces, with systems of meaning, tradition, and narrative constructed largely bywomen themselves, intersect with the male narrative through institutions such as marriage.We would add that intersection, critically, is not determined by either sex. Irigarayholds that all discourses are gendered; but Islam would say that this is not true: thereare in fact three discourses: male, female, and divine. Tawhid, as we have seen, refusesto gender God or God's word; and the Qur'anic text is hence a neutral document. It is readby men and by women, and hence imported and internalised in gender-specific ways. As suchit supplies a barzakh between the two worlds of meaning, equally possessed byeach. It is the missing link in Irigaray's theoretical model which enables an authenticand stable inter-sexual sociality. What this theology, and the anthropology which is emerging to support it, propose, is thatnormative Islamic society is concurrently patriarchal and matriarchal. The public space isprimarily that of men, who may valorise it over the private; but the latter space isvalorised by women, who may regard the public space as morally and spirituallyquestionable. Hence a feature of Muslim folkways is a kind of reflexive amusement. Menfrequently construct a trivialising discourse on women; but women, as any eavesdropper ona Muslim female conversation will know, dismiss men and their concerns with an even moreamused disregard. They are right to say, 'Men, what do they know?' And the malepatriarchal dismissal is, from the male viewpoint, no less correct. Aspects of the hadithdiscourse which appear to diminish women can be affirmed, and also relativised, byadopting this perspective. A final aspect of the concurrent patriarchy and matriarchy of Muslim cultures concerns thestatus of the mother. A weakness of Irigaray's work is her worrying indifference to theaged; like many feminists, she appears to be concerned only with her semblables. While sheaccepts the reproductive and nurturing telos of the female body, she signally fails toconsider its other natural trajectory, which is towards senescence. The veneration of aged mothers is a recurrent feature of the Prophetic vision, in whichkindness and loyalty to the mother, a rahma to reciprocate the rahma theythemselves dispensed, is seen as an almost sacramental act. Ibn Umar narrates that 'a mancame to God's Messenger (s.A.w.) and said: "I have committed a great sin. Is thereanything I can do to repent?" He asked, "Do you have a mother?" The mansaid that he did not, and he asked again, "Then do you have a maternal aunt?"The man replied that he did, and the Prophet (s.w.s.) told him: "Then be kindand devoted to her".' (Tirmidhi) Other hadiths are legion: 'Whoeverkisses his mother between the eyes receives a protection from the fire'(Bayhaqi); 'Verily God has forbidden disobedience to your mother'(Bukhari and Muslim). Anthropologists working in Islamic cultures hence consistently report a dual hierarchywhich requires wives to be dutiful to husbands, while husbands must be dutiful to mothers.Modernity loosens both these ties, the former vehemently, and the latter absentmindedly;and the consequence has been a lopsided, frankly ageist new hierarchy which prioritisesyouth over age, and imposes ruthless forms of discrimination against those who were onceconsidered the community's pride and the repository of its memory. As medical advancesprolong average longevity without substantially eroding the differential which separatesmale and female mortality, modern societies relegate increasing numbers of women toinvoluntary eremeticism in regimented but prayerless convents. In 1998 the ChicagoTribune recorded that sixty percent of inhabitants of American old people's homesnever receive a visitor. Given the gender ratio normal in such establishments, thepercentage among women must be higher still. Hence the irony that young and middle-agedwomen in the West have broader horizons than hitherto (excluding, for the moment, thereligious horizon), but must all fear a decade of solitary confinement at the end, staringinto television screens, recycling memories, and fingering months-old greetings cards fromrelatives who rarely if ever appear. Even in the most Westernised of Muslim societies, theconfinement of the old to what are in effect comfortable concentration camps, is regardedwith the disgust that it merits. Other aspects of Shari'a discourse also call for elucidation. It cannot be our task hereto review the detailed provisions of Islamic law, and to explain, in each individualinstance, the Islamic case that gender equality, even where the concept is meaningful, canbe undermined rather than established by enforced parity of role and rights. Such aproject would require a separate volume of the type attempted recently by Haifa Jawad; andwe must content ourselves with surveying a few representative issues. Perhaps the most immediately conspicuous feature of Muslim communities is the dress codetraditional for women. It is often forgotten that the Shari'a and the Muslim sense ofhuman dignity require a dress code for men as well: in fully traditional Muslim societies,men always cover their hair in public, and wear long flowing garments exposing only thehands and feet. In Muslim law, however, their awra is more loosely defined: menhave to cover themselves from the navel to the knees as a minimum. But women, on the basisof a hadith, must cover everything except the face, hands and feet. Again, the feminine dress code, known as hijab, forms a largely passive textavailable for a range of readings. For some Western feminist missionaries to Muslim lands,it is a symbol of patriarchy and of woman's demure submission. For Muslim women, itproclaims their identity: many very secular women who demonstrated against the Shah in the1970s wore it for this reason, as an almost aggressive flag of defiance. Franz Fanonreflected on a similar phenomenon among Algerian women protesting against French rule inthe 1950s. For still other women, however, such as the Egyptian thinker Safinaz Kazim, thehijab is to be reconstrued as a quasi-feminist statement. A woman who exposes hercharms in public is vulnerable to what might be described as 'visual theft', so that menunknown to her can enjoy her visually without her consent. By covering herself, sheregains her ability to present herself as a physical being only to her family andsorority. This view of hijab, as a kind of moral raincoat particularly usefulunder the inclement climate of modernity, allows a vision of Islamic woman as liberated,not from tradition and meaning, but from ostentation and from subjection to random visualrape by men. The feminist objection to the patriarchal adornment or denuding of women,namely that it reduces them to the status of vulnerable, passive objects of the maleregard, makes no headway against the hijab, responsibly understood. A further controversy in the Shari'a's nurturing of gender roles centres around theinstitution of plural marriage. This clearly is a primordial institution whose biologicalrationale is unanswerable: as Dawkins and others have observed, it is in the geneticinterest of males to have a maximal number of females; while the reverse is never thecase. Stephen Pinker notes somewhat obviously in his book How the Mind Works:'The reproductive success of males depends on how many females they mate with, but thereproductive success of females does not depend on how many males they mate with.' Islam's naturalism, its insistence on the fitra and our authentic belongingnessto the natural order, has ensured the conservation of this creational norm within themoral context of the Shari'a. Polygamy, in the Islamic case, appears as a recognisablySemitic institution, traceable back to an Old Testament tribal society frequently at warand unequipped with a social security system that might protect and assimilate widows intosociety. However it is more universal: classical Hinduism permits a man four wives, andthere are many Christian voices, not only Mormons, who are today calling for therestoration of polygamy as part of an authentically Biblical lifestyle. (See, for example,http://www.familyman.u-net.com/polygamy.html)Faced with the failure of normative Western marriage and relationship codes, a growingnumber of contemporary thinkers are turning to this primordial institution for possibleguidance. Phillip Kilbride, professor of anthropology at Bryn Mawr, aroused much interestwith his recent book Plural Marriage for Our Times: A Reinvented Option. AudreyChapman has written a more popular study entitled Man-Sharing: Dilemma or Choice,while in 1996, the women's rights activist Adriana Blake published her Women Can Winthe Marriage Lottery: Share Your Man with Another Wife. These studies, from their different perspectives, present three major ethical argumentsfor polygamy. Firstly, the institution can, as its origins suggest, allow thereintegration into a post-war society of bereaved women, of whom a tragically large numbernow exist around the globe. Secondly, it can work to the advantage of women: an extendedfamily is created which allows one woman to go to work, while the other cares for thechildren. The juggling of work and children which is a besetting hazard of modernrelationships is thus neatly averted: showing polygamy as a frankly liberative option forwomen. Its advantages for children, also, have been amply documented by the recentresearch of Carmon Hardy, who shows the strong degree of family bonding and much lowerincidence of crime among offspring of Mormon polygamists at the turn of the presentcentury. Thirdly, polygamy is realistic; and from the Muslim perspective, we wouldidentify this as a principal argument given the Shari'a's general realism. Muslims pointout that modern Western societies are in practice far more polygamous than Muslim ones,the difference being that in the West the second relationship exists outside any legalframework. The present heir to the British throne, for instance, has been polygamous, andto traditional Muslims nothing seemed more absurd than that Diana needed to be divorced,and a constitutional crisis provoked. True monotheism, as always, entails realism. Men are biologically designed to desire aplurality of women, and, unless we can carry out some radical genetic engineering work,they will always do so. And when a man has two simultaneously, the law may either depriveone of the two women of legal rights and social status, as in the modern West. Or it canrecognise both as legitimate spouses, as in the Shari'a. Muslims regard as an absurditythe present arrangement in the West where consensual relationships of all kinds areallowed and even militantly defended: homosexual, lesbian, and so on; whereas a consensualménage a trois is still regarded as immoral. The last hangover of Victorianmorality? In fact, a menage a trois is perfectly acceptable in modern Westernlaw, as long as the parties to it live 'in sin' and do not attempt to marry. The absurdityof this position requires no comment. There are other aspects of the Shari'a which deserve mention as illustrations of ourtheme, not least those which have been largely forgotten by Muslim societies. Theintersections between the two gender universes are sometimes designed by the Lawgiver asrights of women, and sometimes as rights of men; and the former category is morefrequently omitted from actualised Muslim communities. Frequently the jurists' exegesis ofthe texts is plurivocal. Domestic chores, for instance, appear as an aspect of interiorsociality, but this is not identified with purely female space, since they are regarded bysome madhhabs, including the Shafi'i, as the responsibility of the man ratherthan the wife. A'isha was asked, after the Blessed Prophet's death, what he used to do athome when he was not at prayer; and she replied: 'He served his family: he used tosweep the floor, and sew clothes.' (Bukhari, Adhan, 44.) On this basis,Shafi'i jurists defend the woman's right not to perform housework. For instance, thefourteenth century Syrian jurist Ibn al-Naqib insists: 'A woman is not obliged to serveher husband by baking, grinding flour, cooking, washing, or any other kind of service,because the marriage contract entails, for her part, only that she let him enjoy hersexually, and she is not obliged to do other than that.' In the Hanafi madhhab, by contrast, these acts are regarded as the wife'sobligations. Another sufficient reminder of the difficulty of generalising about Islamiclaw, which remains a diverse body of rules and approaches. (Another important area, whichcannot be detailed here, is the law for custody of children: the Hanafis prefer boys toleave the divorced mother at the age of 7, to live with the father; girls remain with heruntil the menarch. For the Malikis, the boy stays with the mother until sexual maturity (ihtilam),and the girl until her marriage is consummated.) Islam's theology of gender thus contends with a maze, a web of connections which demandfamiliarity with a diverse legal code, regional heterogeneity, and with the metaphysicalno less than with the physical. This complexity should warn us against offering facilegeneralisations about Islam's attitude to women. Journalists, feminists and cultivatedpeople generally in the West have harboured deeply negative verdicts here. Often theseverdicts are arrived at through the observation of actual Muslim societies; and it wouldbe both futile and immoral to suggest that the modern Islamic world is always to beadmired for its treatment of women. Women in countries such as Saudi Arabia, where theyare not even permitted to drive cars, are objectively the victims of an oppression whichis not the product of a divinely-willed sheltering of a sex, but of ego, of the nafsof the male. In this way, types of 'Islamization' being launched in several countriestoday by individuals driven by resentment and committed to an anthropomorphised and henceandromorphic God, appear to bear no relation either to traditional fiqh discourseor to the revelatory insistence on justice. This imbalance will continue unless actualisedreligion learns to reincorporate the dimension of ihsan, which valorises thefeminine principle, and also obstructs and ultimately annihilates the ego which underpinsgender chauvinism. We need to distinguish, as many Muslim women thinkers are doing,between the expectations of the religion's ethos (as legible in scripture, classicalexegesis, and spirituality), and the actual asymmetric structures of post-classical Muslimsocieties, which, like Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Chinese cultures, contain much that isin real need of reform. By now it should have become clear that we are not vaunting the revelation as either a'macho' chauvinism or as a miraculous prefigurement of late twentieth-century feminism.Feminism, in any case, has no orthodoxy, as Fiorenza reminds us; and certain of its formsare repellent to us, and are clearly damaging to women and society, while others maydemonstrate striking convergences with the Shari'a and our gendered cosmologies. Weadvocate a nuanced understanding which tries to bypass the sexism-versus-feminismdialectic by proposing a theology in which the Divine is truly gender-neutral, but giftshumanity with a legal code and family norms which are rooted in the understanding that, asIrigaray insists, the sexes 'are not equal but different', and will naturally gravitatetowards divergent roles which affirm rather than suppress their respective genius. Biology should be destiny, but a destiny that allows for multiple possibilities. Women'sdiscourse valorizes the home; but Muslim women have for long periods of Islam's historyleft their homes to become scholars. A hundred years ago the orientalist Ignaz Goldzihershowed that perhaps fifteen percent of medieval hadith scholars were women, teaching inthe mosques and universally admired for their integrity. Colleges such as the SaqlatuniyaMadrasa in Cairo were funded and staffed entirely by women. The most recent study ofMuslim female academicians, by Ruth Roded, charts an extraordinary dilemma for theresearcher: 'If U.S. and European historians feel a need to reconstruct women's history because women are invisible in the traditional sources, Islamic scholars are faced with a plethora of source material that has only begun to be studied. [ . . . ] In reading the biographies of thousands of Muslim women scholars, one is amazed at the evidence that contradicts the view of Muslim women as marginal, secluded, and restricted.'Stereotypes come under almost intolerable strainwhen Roded documents the fact that the proportion of female lecturers in many classicalIslamic colleges was higher than in modern Western universities. A'isha, Mother ofBelievers, who taught hadith in the ur-mosque of Islam, is as always the indispensableparadigm: lively, intelligent, devout, and humbling to all subsequent memory.But until past ideals are reclaimed, a polarisationin Muslim societies is likely. The Westernised classes will reject traditional idiomssimply because those styles are not Western and fail to satisfy the élite's self-image.The pseudosalafi literalists will continue to reject Sufism's high regard for women, andits demand for the destruction of the ego. The same constituency will defy legitimatecalls for a due ijtihad-based transformation of aspects of Islamic law, notbecause of any profound moral understanding of that law, but because of a hamfistedexegesis of usul and because those calls are associated with Western influence anddemands. Whether the conscientious middle ground, inspired by the genius of tradition, canseize the initiative, and allow an ego-free and generous Muslim definition of the Sunnato shape the agenda in our rapidly polarising societies, remains to be seen. No doubt, theSufi insight that there is no justice or compassion on earth without an emptying of theself will be the final yardstick among the wise. But it is clear that the Islamictradition offers the possibility of a truly radical solution, offering not only to itselfbut to the West the transcendence of a debate which continues to perplex many responsibleminds, contemplating an emergent society where the absence of roles presides over anincreasingly damaging absence of rules. Abdal Hakim MuradApril 1999.-----------------------------[Currently, he is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He studied at theuniversities of Cambridge and al-Azhar, Egypt, and has also translated a number of Islamicworks including Imam al-Bayhaqi's The Seventy Seven Branches of Faith (QuilliamPress, 1992).]     |
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